Khoe

Khoe is the largest of the non-Bantu language families native to southern Africa, marked by click consonants. Its two branches are Khoekhoe and Tshu–Khwe.

Speakers of ancestral Khoe–Kwadi entered what is now Botswana from the north-east about two thousand years ago, keeping sheep and cattle; the south-western branch that retained pastoralism became the Khoekhoe, while groups left in the drying Kalahari turned to hunting and gathering. The Nama spread through Namibia from the sixteenth century, absorbing client peoples such as the Damara.

Portuguese crews met Khoekhoe clans at the Cape, and in 1510 the !Uriǁ'aekua defeated a Portuguese landing party at the Salt River and killed the viceroy Francisco de Almeida. After Dutch settlement, Cape Khoe lost ground to Afrikaans, while in the 1770s clans such as the Orlam Afrikaners began trekking north into Namibia, carrying Nama beyond the Orange River.