There is much debate among nationalists of various different stripes in South Africa, over who got to the Cape second.

We all agree on who was here first – some combination of Khoi and San groups. But still today there is some dispute over whether black people or white people arrived first at the Cape.

Six years ago, a hucksterish Xhosa nobleman called Mpendulo Zwelonke Sigcawu made a land claim to the entire Cape, including Cape Town itself. His claim was backed by failed presidential candidate Matthews Phosa.

We also get the occasional wewuzkangz type claiming that the Cape was already Bantu by the time Vasco da Gama landed, because the translators he hired before he discovered the Cape included an interpreter who spoke a few Bantu dialects.

Another argument comes from genetics, pointing out that both the Coloured population and the Bantu population have significant Khoi admixture.

This is not surprising though – the Bantu expansion, which started in the Niger-Congo river delta 3000 years ago, did not just expunge rival groups, it practiced bride kidnapping, called ukuthwalwa, still practiced to some extent today, though it is a crime.

The clicks in the Nguni languages are an interesting testament to this – in other Bantu languages in which click consonants are found, the words in which they appear are all loanwords from Khoi, Nama or other non-Bantu languages (strictly speaking, “Khoisan” is too broad; many of these languages are unrelated, and the cultures were highly diverse).

But among the Nguni, there is a practice known as ukuhlonipha. Today, this means little more than the etiquette of respect, but until releatively recently, historically speaking, it included a taboo on pronouncing the syllables in the family names of the bride’s in-laws.

This created a pattern of euphemism and substitution that new brides had to abide by. But for the Khoi, this was worked around by inserting click phonemes into ordinary Nguni words, whose etymology is quite clearly Bantu.

It is from their mothers that children learn to speak, and these altered forms were passed down the generations, a testament to the nature of African conquest.

The period of contact and cultural exchange was long – Bantu groups are said to have been in what is now South Africa from between 2000 to 1000 years ago, though the oldest oral tradition, the Hlubi, puts their arrival at about 1300 years ago.

So the question arises, where did the Bantu sphere of influence stop?

About a year ago, somebody prodded me about a passage from a history book on the Xhosa called the House of Palo. It was an impressive work, though having not finished reading it, I did not get to the passage in question.

In it, the author Peires alleges that “Chobona” (Xhosa) influence extended to the very Cape peninsula. He had one citation for this, which was Jan van Riebeeck’s diary.

So I did a little digging, as I was sure this would have been picked up on by other historians before.

Turns out it was - Riebeeck's account is a third-hand, embellished legend from Eva Krotoa, about a people with whom the Khoi traded. These people were a Bantu people, who were named for their form of greeting, “sakubona”, an archaic version of the greeting still used in Zulu today, sawubona.

Krotoa’s account claimed they were a darker-skinned people ruled by a king called “Monomatopa”. This sprung out at me, because that is a name for a place in Zimbabwe. Mwenemutapa or Munhumutapa is derived from a combination of two words Mwene or Munhu meaning Man, and Mutapa meaning conquerer.

That is to say, either that they were ruled by a great conqueror of some generic nature, or by Nyatsimba Mutota (Son of King Nyanhewe Matope), who established an expansion of Great Zimbabwe in around 1430.

I went and looked for mentions of the Chobona in the literature, and found this interesting little article; “The Cabonas” by M. D. W. Jeffreys, in the 1968 edition of the African Studies journal.

In it, the author goes over the mentions of the group and other groups like the “Quena” (baKwena of the people referred to today as the baSotho), who were trading partners of the Cape peoples, from whom they acquired beads and copper.

The Cape burgher Schryver set out in 1689 to make contact, and recorded in his diary that:

"a party of 22 men nigh on 500 miles into Hottentot territory, come within five days' march of the shadowy Kabona—to be known, when later they collided with the Colonists, as Kaffirs—and returned with all safe and sound and a thousand head of cattle. [They] lie at the distance of five days journey on the coast, they live in houses made of clay"

The Khoi peoples did not build their houses of clay, hence the significance of the remark.

So I plotted out a coastal route of 500m (804km) on Google Maps as best I could, and ended up near Jeffrey's Bay.

And then, a healthy horse can ride at least 25km a day, which puts us just on the other side of the Sundays River.

Looking briefly at a linguistic map of South Africa from 2011, and the ethnic boundaries roughly coincide with the estimates I made based on the account of the expedition (Sundays River estuary marked with an X):

This really rather dilutes black land claims in the province. Of course, forced removals occurred under 20^th century apartheid, and those are more live claims, but the generic claim to a collective right to the province as a whole, is based on ignorance at best.