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Concept
Nama people
Summary
Nama (in older sources also called Namaqua) are an African ethnic group of South Africa, Namibia and Botswana. They traditionally speak the Nama language of the Khoe-Kwadi language family, although many Nama also speak Afrikaans. The Nama People (or Nama-Khoe people) are the largest group of the Khoikhoi people, most of whom have disappeared as a group, except for the Namas. Many of the Nama clans live in Central Namibia and the other smaller groups live in Namaqualand, which today straddles the Namibian border with South Africa.
For thousands of years, the Khoisan peoples of South Africa and southern Namibia maintained a nomadic life, the Khoikhoi as pastoralists and the San people as hunter-gatherers. The Nama are a Khoikhoi group. The Nama originally lived around the Orange River in southern Namibia and northern South Africa. The early colonialists referred to them as Hottentots. Their alternative historical name, "Namaqua", stems from the addition of the Khoekhoe language suffix "-qua/kwa", meaning "place of" (found in the names of other Southern African nations like the Griqua), to the language name.
In April 1652, Jan van Riebeeck, an official of the Dutch East India Company, arrived at the Cape of Good Hope with 90 people to start initial Dutch settlement at the request of the company. They found the indigenous settlers called the Khoikhoi there, who had settled in the Cape region at least a thousand years before the Dutch arrived.
The Khoikhoi at the Cape practiced pastoral farming; they were the first pastoralists in Southern Africa. They lived beside the San people, who were hunter-gathers. The Khoikhoi had a lot of Nguni cattle and small livestock which they grazed around the Cape. The region was well suited to their lives as pastoralists because it provided enough water for them and their livestock.
Initially, when the Dutch made a stop at the Cape on the way to the Indonesian archipelago, they were concerned with getting fresh produce and water for their people.
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