The Khoi Khoi on Table Mountain
CNN’s Inside Africa profiled the inhabitants of Table Mountain in South Africa who are Khoi descendants. Table Mountain overlooks Cape Town and is a major tourist attraction. About 2000 years ago the Khoikhoi migrated towards the Cape Peninsula from the north, displacing the San and bringing with them their herds of cattle and sheep. It was the Khoikhoi who were the dominant local tribe when the Europeans first sailed into Table Bay.
Table Mountain National Park is recognised globally for its extraordinarily rich, diverse and unique fauna and flora – with rugged cliffs, steep slopes and sandy flats – is a truly remarkable natural, scenic, historical, cultural and recreational asset both locally and internationally. Nowhere else in the world does an area of such spectacular beauty and such rich bio-diversity exist almost entirely within a metropolitan area – the thriving and cosmopolitan city of Cape Town.
Traces of early stone age tools give evidence that early hunter gatherers lived on the Cape Peninsula around 600 000 years ago. Later inhabitants – the San (hunter-gatherers) – harvested food from the seashore and evidence of their presence are the middens (prehistoric refuse heaps) that are found in a number of caves in the park and reveal a great deal about their lifestyle.
About 2000 years ago the Khoi Khoi migrated from the north, displacing the San, bringing with them their herds of cattle and sheep. It was the KhoiKhoi who were the dominant tribe when the Europeans sailed into Table Bay.
