Reply #33: Looks like Diamond got southern Africa wrong -- I'll take a look [View All]

I suppose that's a risk when a generalist tries to incorporate a lot of regional history into a grand thesis. One can't really say that the Afrikaners and Africans grew different crops after the early 1800s, because the Afrikaners in general, preferred to be landlords and cattle ranchers, not crop farmers. Where ever there were African communities, the Afrikaners could thrive by imposing themselves on them, levying rents and tribute. And in fact, the Afrikaners did take lots of land from the Zulus and establish themselves there once Zulu military power was crushed.

The Nedebele story is complicated. The founder, Mzilikazi, was a general in the Zulu army. He was sent into what became Mozambique on a raid, and decided not to return. He migrated west into what became the Transvaal and established himself as king of the Transvaal Ndebele, a somewhat mysterious group because they appear to be of ancient Nguni origins but west of the Drakensburg (all other Nguni groups, such as the Xhosa and Zulu were east of the Drakensburg). That's when Mzilikazi's kingdom began to be called Ndebele. Mzilikazi conquered several Tswana groups in what is now the western Transvaal and set up a kingdom that lasted a decade and incorporated many young Tswana warriors. Mzilikazi was defeated and pushed out of the Transvaal by a coalition force of Afrikaners and Tswana chiefs, and it was at that point that he headed north to Zimbabwe. By this point, because there were relatively few "Zulus" as a proportion constituting the Ndebele, and because the Zulu was a definite, centralized kingdom based elsewhere, it is not correct to say the Zulu conquered Mashonaland.

During the 19th and early 20th century, Africans were pushed into reserves that became "homelands." In the Transvaal, the main criteria was that the reserve areas had lower rainfall and were areas where the tsetse fly was prevalent which killed horses and cattle. The colonial governments would routinely justify this by saying that Africans preferred those areas. Of course they didn't. I can understand that if Diamond read government reports or popular white South African histories he might believe that Africans' agriculture were particularly adapted to certain areas, but among specialists on South African history, this is not considered to be true. The fact that the BaSotho were fantastically successful farmers in what became the Free State, and that the Xhosa out farmed whites in the eastern Cape, both growing maize, the same thing that Europeans were growing, shows that all racial groups were extremely adaptable when it came to choosing and growing crops.

As for the "Hottentots" they weren't particularly advanced or peaceful compared to other communities. Actually they were the Khoikhoi (Hottentot was a derogatory European label), and they were exclusively cattle herders, not farmers like the Bantu-speaking Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, Tswana, Pedi, and Shangaan, and they were concentrated around the western Cape which did become the grain and wheat growing region. While the Bantu-speakers mastered mining and metallurgy, the Khoikhoi did not. I think the main explanation for the collapse of the Khoikhoi is disease: Bantu-speakers had much resistance to European diseases than the Khoikhoi, and several small pox epidemics in the western Cape destroyed the Khoi.

When the Boers moved out of Cape Town, they focused first on pure cattle ranching (in the Karoo), and by the time of the Great Trek, whites and blacks outside of the western Cape were overwhelmingly focused on maize (American corn) as the main crop.

Btw, the "veld" is not a dessert. I think you are referring to the Karoo, an arid area that surrounds the western Cape, and that prevented the southern most Bantu-speakers, the Xhosa, from moving into the western Cape. "Veld" simply refers to various types of terrain. By the late 1800s, in the interior, whites preferred "high veld" (something like Iowa prarie) and pushed blacks into the "low veld" or savannah.

I don't think that Diamond understands the history of the region. It did not take winter wheat for Africans to support large populations. As I mentioned, the Tswana created many large towns and villages based on their own crops and later maize. In other words, he is assuming a counter factual -- that there was not a bread basket in the interior supporting large populations.