GENEALOGY OF THE GERICKE FAMILY IN SOUTH AFRICA
	The peoples of South Africa.

When the first Europeans appeared in southern Africa there were already three groups of indigenous peoples, the Bushmen, the Hottentots and the Bantu. There is ample archeological evidence to prove that other, presently unknown, people preceded these groups.

The Bushmen were small of stature and lived by hunting. They did not recognise any grouping bigger than a family. Their language was mainly made up of click sounds. Although there are clear traces of Bushman occupation down to the most southerly areas, by the fifteenth century they were displaced to the north by the Hottentots. The Bushmen, or San as they are now known, have largely died out and the largest number remaining live in the Namibian desert.

The Hottentots were, like the Bushmen, a light brown people but more pastoral by nature. They grouped into tribes and kept cattle and sheep. As they occupied the coastal areas at the time all the early contacts with the Europeans were with the Koi, as they are now known. Except for two tribes, the Griquas and the Korannas, the Hottentots are now largely extinct. Their numbers were reduced by battle with the colonists and the other indigenous peoples, but the most important factor was Smallpox, a disease to which they had very little resistance.

The word Bantu is a generic term used to describe the Black (Negroid) people of South Africa. Although there are a number of tribes it is again clear that they all came from the north and by the 17th century they had reached the eastern part of the southern coast, perhaps as far as the Fish River. The Bantu also kept large herds of cattle. The most westerly tribe is the Xhosa. Their language contains more clicks than any other Bantu language, evidencing longer contact with the Koi and the San.

The inevitable struggle between the colonists and the Bantu, at the most simplistic level, was based on three factors. Firstly the competition for grazing for their cattle. As there is very little if any early Bantu literature the oral history of the Bantu shows that they lived by the principle that "Might is Right". Disagreements were settled by battle and negotiation was seen as weakness. There was no point to declarations of war and unannounced predawn attacks were the norm. Large areas of the country were virtually depopulated by tribal conflicts. The third factor was the Bantu belief that land could only be acquired by conquest, the idea that land could be bartered was simply unacceptable. While the two sides in the potential conflict held such drastically different ideas bloodshed was truly inevitable.