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The first farmers

The first farmers: crops, livestock, iron, villages, surplus and trade. Read one part at a time and tap “I know this”. Then test yourself in the quiz.

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The farming village

  • Villages near rivers for water and grazing; a permanent village is a settlement.
  • Huts of poles, mud and grass. Grain was ground into flour with two grindstones; clay pots held water.
  • Cattle were a sign of wealth: food, hides and status. Iron was smelted in a furnace.
  • Drawback: firewood nearby got used up.
The first farmers kept cattle and planted sorghum.
The first farmers kept cattle and planted sorghum.
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How we know

Archaeologists dig up villages and find pottery and iron tools. Trade began when groups exchanged what they had.

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When they came, and how they worked together

  • The first farmers, who spoke Bantu languages, arrived in southern Africa about 2 000 to 1 700 years ago.
  • Where and why: they settled mostly in the wetter eastern half of the country (today’s Limpopo, Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape), because summer rain, fertile soil, grazing, water and wood made farming possible. The dry west was left to hunter-gatherers and herders.
  • Attitude to land: land belonged to the whole community and could not be bought or sold (communal ownership of land). The chief gave each family land to live on and farm.
  • They lived alongside the Khoisan. The click sounds in Nguni languages such as isiXhosa and isiZulu come from the Khoisan languages.
  • Good leaders accepted strangers and took them into the community.
  • A culture of co-operation: neighbours worked together in work parties to dig and hoe each other’s fields with iron hoes in the ploughing (planting) season, and a new family could borrow a calf or two to start a herd.
  • A chief and his people formed a chiefdom (do not call it a ‘tribe’): a group of homesteads under one chief. Chiefdoms were flexible: if people were unhappy they could move to another chief, so chiefdoms grew, split up and changed over time.
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Remember this and test yourself

Remember this: your summary
  • The biggest change: people could stay in one place.
  • Livestock: cattle, sheep and goats; crops: sorghum and millet (maize came much later from the Americas).
  • They learnt to use iron: an iron hoe is stronger and lasts longer than stone. This was the Iron Age.
  • A surplus is extra food; it was stored and traded (iron and salt).
  • Specialisation: people do different kinds of work, like potters and smiths.

Write these points in your book. Read them again the night before the test.

Memory trick

Farmers have a pantry: stored surplus, so they could stay. Hunters have a path.

Flash cards · Tap to turn over

Important words

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Test yourself · Part 2

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