Xhosa people

The Xhosa, Nguni clans of the southeast who displaced the Khoisan, have held their country since the 7th century by archaeology's reckoning: ten million speakers and more, South Africa's second nation, centred on the Eastern Cape of Transkei and Ciskei. They speak isiXhosa, the click language of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, and live by cattle, maize and the ancestral shades: circumcision lodges make men, lobola cattle buy wives, and diviners read the shades' will. Nine frontier wars with the Cape Colony bled a century; the cattle-killing of 1856 starved the nation on a prophet's word. Apartheid's bantustans are provinces now; Xhosa premiers, headline musicians and initiation schools keep the red-blanket people renewing the oldest Bantu statehood of the south. Transkei and Ciskei became the Eastern Cape in 1994. Nineteen million Xhosa speakers fill the Eastern Cape. Gauteng, Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal hold a million Xhosa each. Xhosa is taught in every Eastern Cape school.