Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Typical Agricultural Worker Transport Resulting in Many Accidents
In South Africa the situation is more complex. In the case of the Province of Natal, the early
British settlers in 1824, led by Dr. Henry Fynn and Francis Farewell, struck a deal with a
Shaka to settle Port Natal and farm south of the Tugela River. There was a proper transfer of
title that occurred for this farming deal; thus, in a sense the farms were not taken from the local
habitants. The reason for this was Shaka was particularly grateful to Fynn for him having saved
him after an attempted assassination attempt on his life. Fynn had saved Shaka's life after stab
injuries to Shaka's chest. Shaka was also interested in European goods and knowledge and in
return traded ivory, rhino horns, ostrich feathers and cattle hides. As a result by 1872 most
elephants had disappeared in Zululand, due to both Zulu warriors hunting under Cetshwayo (he
did this to try and keep his impis mobilized) and white hunters. By 1917 they were locally
extinct apart from in the Maputaland area where the Tembe Game Reserve is located. Further
north, the area referred to by the Zulus as the area of the Amatonga, namely up to Delagoa Bay,
present day Maputo, elephants still occurred on the plains east of the Lebombo mountains.
Furthermore, south of the Kei River the Xhosa and Pondo and other Nguni tribes, also called
Bantu, could not settle partly because of their carbohydrate staple but also because of conflict
with whites and remaining Khoi Khoi descendants. They did not move further south than the
Kei River because the millet that they brought with them for their staple diet could not grow in
the so-called Mediterranean climate of the Cape where rain occurred during the winter and not
the summer. Millet required heavy rains in the summer to grow. The Nguni tribes brought cattle
with them as they moved south, having started in east Africa and moved across to the Nigeria
area and Congo before moving south east, skirting the central African pygmy tribes of the rain
forests. The Nguni cattle are more tick disease resistant, tougher, and highly fertile, heat
tolerant and sweat less, but smaller than Angus or Charlois types. The humped Nguni cattle get
tsetse fly infections (Nagana) but the unique hump less N'Dama cattle of West Africa are
disease resistant. These cattle were domesticated some 8,000 years ago, are less fertile,
wilder, and produce less milk and meat. These cattle do not mount as strong an autoimmune
response based on two different genes and tolerate the infection better like wild ungulates do.
Nagana costs about $4 to $5 billion a year in losses in Africa and hence the USA is working
together with African farmers to cross breed the N'Dama with other breeds that may produce
more meat per head. In southern Africa the area was largely uninhabited except for bushmen
known as Koi San, scattered small nomadic clans of some 25 per clan of hunter-gathers,
generally divided into the Khoi Khoi early pastoralists that the Dutch met (there were about
100,000 in 1652) or the San bushmen who are the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari.
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