the khoi san

it is a matter of history that approximately 700,000 years ago, humans began migrrating southwards from central Africa. In evidence, stone tools and the painted rock shelters of these nomadic peoiple as well as artifacts dating ffrom the Middle Stone Age 1125,000 to 300,000 years ago, still exist to prove that those early humans were already making fires in their shelters and that they had tools at their disposal for hunting and for food preparation, and for carrying both food and water.

About 30000 years ago, a particularly long and dry period isolated the inhabitants of the West Coast, the Khoi-San people, from the central Negroid tribes to the north, which led to the evolution of their distinctive physical characteristics. Shell middens of these first west coast dwellers are dotted along the Atlantic coast at frequent intervals and their rock paintings decorate many natural shelters and caves in the Cedarberg Mountains and vicinity.

2000 years ago, these Khoi began herding sheep and with the arrival of the Dutch settlers in the seventeenth century, when their herds were needed to feed the Dutch, there were as many as 17000 - 18000 Khoi herders at the present day Velddrif, between Cape Town and the Berg River.

Vasco da Gama. the Portuguese navigator who landed here on 7th November 1497 near the mouth of the Berg River, gave the sheltered bay he found there the imposing name ‘Bay of St Helena’ after the mother of Emperor Constantine the Great. In 1969 the Portuguese government erected a monument to this event on the shores of the St Helena Bay, between Sandy Point and Stompneus Bay.

Da Gama’s arrival was an event of great importance to Christianity as the first Pater Noster (Our Father) in Southern Africa was said on the beach now known as Paternoster, which later became a small fishing community.