Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
total population for southern Africa estimated as less than 300 000 at the time of
European settlement (Hoffmann
1997
).
The first pastoralists appeared in the region 2000 yrs ago (Hoffmann
1997
).
They were initially sheep herders acquiring cattle about 1300 yrs BP. These
Kho-Khoi pastoralists displaced hunter-gatherers to the mountains and more
arid regions of the interior, which may have led to more pronounced human
impacts on mountain fynbos fire regimes in the last two millennia. The pastoralists
utilized the coastal forelands in the west and south with extensive transhumance
patterns of herd movement. The Kho-Khoi population in the southwestern Cape
region was estimated at 50 000 in the mid seventeenth century with stock ratios of
5-10 cattle and 20 sheep per individual, indicating thousands of livestock in the
region. This was in addition to large herds of African ungulates. The implication is
that extensive grazing lands occurred in the region. Most of these must have
occurred in renosterveld, or on the floodplain fringes of estuaries. Since more
than 90% of lowland renosterveld has been converted to crops in the western and
southwestern Cape, it is very difficult to reconstruct the nature of the vegetation
that supported these vast herds of grazers. The clear implication is that grass was
present in abundance in contrast to the dominance of shrubs in contemporary
renosterveld. Presumably the shrubs such as the common renosterbos,
Elytropap-
pus rhinocerotis
, were kept at bay with frequent fires, as is still the case (Kraaij
2010
). Fynbos makes very poor forage, even when frequently burned, so that
extensive areas of lowland and montane fynbos may have been relatively little
affected by fires set by Kho-Khoi pastoralists.
The first crop farmers reached South Africa by
300 AD bringing with them
the use of iron. These Iron Age farmers were also pastoralists. Their crops
originated from West Africa and included C
4
cereals (sorghum, millet, finger
millet) with maize first being planted in the eighteenth century (Hoffmann
1997
). The winter rainfall climate of the Cape region was not suitable for the
cultivation of the African cereals and may explain why Iron Age people did not
settle in the region and therefore had little impact on vegetation and fire regimes.
However, it is interesting to note that Scott (
2002
) was unable to find changes in a
long charcoal record in the savanna regions following Iron Age settlement,
suggesting negligible effects of these farmers on fire frequency, at least at his site.
Europeans settled in the Cape region in the mid 1600s. By 1806, the human
population in the southwestern Cape was still only 75 000 people with half of those
in Cape Town and its vicinity (Deacon
1992
). The effects of European settlement
were, and remain, greatest on the coastal forelands, which had soils suitable for
cultivating temperate crops. Wildfires threatened people and property and were,
at least in theory, suppressed by the colonial authority. In practice, farmers
burned pasture, learning their management techniques from the Kho-Khoi. Since
fynbos occurs on nutrient-poor soils, unsuitable for agriculture or pastoralism,
extensive areas may have been relatively lightly impacted by the intensified land
use. Rapid extirpation of the African megafauna in the Cape would also have had
relatively little impact on fynbos vegetation because of the poor forage quality for
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