The San peoples (also Saan), or Bushmen, are the members of the indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures of southern Africa, and the oldest surviving cultures of the region. Their ancestral territories span Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and South Africa. They speak, or their ancestors spoke, languages of the Khoe, Tuu and Kxʼa language families, and are only a 'people' in contrast to pastoralists such as the Khoekhoe and descendants of more recent waves of immigration such as the Bantu, Europeans and Asians.
In 2017, Botswana was home to approximately 63,500 San, making it the country with the highest proportion of San people at 2.8%.
Definition
In Khoekhoegowab, the term "San" has a long vowel and is spelled Sān. It is an exonym with the meaning of "foragers" and is used in a derogatory manner to describe nomadic foraging people. Based on observation of lifestyle, this term has been applied to speakers of three distinct language families living between the Okavango River in Botswana and Etosha National Park in northwestern Namibia, extending up into southern Angola; central peoples of most of Namibia and Botswana, extending into Zambia and Zimbabwe; and the southern people in the central Kalahari towards the Molopo River, who are the last remnant of the previously extensive indigenous peoples of southern Africa.
Names
The designations "Bushmen" and "San" are both exonyms. The San have no collective word for themselves in their own languages. "San" is a derogatory word originally used by the pastoralist Khoekhoe.
The San refer to themselves as their individual nations, such as ǃKung (also spelled ǃXuun, including the Juǀʼhoansi), ǀXam, Nǁnǂe (part of the ǂKhomani), Kxoe (Khwe and ǁAni), Haiǁom, Ncoakhoe, Tshuwau, Gǁana and Gǀui (ǀGwi), etc.. Representatives of San peoples in 2003 stated their preference for the use of such individual group names where possible over the use of the collective term San.
"Bushmen" is the older cover term, but "San" had been widely adopted in the West by the late 1990s. "San" is a pejorative Khoekhoe appellation for foragers without cattle or other wealth, from a root saa "picking up from the ground" + plural -n in the Haiǁom dialect. The term Bushmen, from 17th-century Dutch , is still widely used by others and to self-identify, but in some instances the term has also been described as pejorative.
Adoption of the Khoekhoe term San in Western anthropology dates to the 1970s, and this remains the standard term in English-language ethnographic literature, although some authors later switched back to using the name Bushmen. The compound Khoisan, used to refer to the pastoralist Khoi. The foraging San collectively was coined by Leonhard Schulze in the 1920s and popularised by Isaac Schapera in 1930. Anthropological use of San was detached from the compound Khoisan, as it has been reported that the exonym San is perceived as a pejorative in parts of the central Kalahari. By the late 1990s, the term San was in general use by the people themselves. The adoption of the term was preceded by a number of meetings held in the 1990s where delegates debated on the adoption of a collective term. These meetings included the Common Access to Development Conference organised by the Government of Botswana held in Gaborone in 1993, the 1996 inaugural Annual General Meeting of the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA) held in Namibia, and a 1997 conference in Cape Town on "Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage" organised by the University of the Western Cape. The term San is now standard in South African, and used officially in the blazon of the national coat-of-arms. The "South African San Council" representing San communities in South Africa was established as part of WIMSA in 2001. "Bushmen" is now considered derogatory by many South Africans, to the point where, in 2008, use of boesman (the modern Afrikaans equivalent of "Bushman") in the Die Burger newspaper was brought before the Equality Court, which however ruled that the mere use of the term cannot be taken as derogatory, after the San Council had testified that it had no objection to its use in a positive context.
The term Basarwa (singular Mosarwa) is used for the San collectively in Botswana. The term is a Bantu (Tswana) word meaning "those who do not rear cattle", that is, equivalent to Khoekhoe Saan. The mo-/ba- noun class prefixes are used for people; the older variant Masarwa, with the le-/ma- prefixes used for disreputable people and animals, is offensive and was changed at independence.