The Bushman or San people of Southern Africa are some of the oldest indigenous groups of people who occupied some of these regions over the past 120 000 years. The word “San” means Hunter Gathers. The term always used is “Koi-San”. The Koi-Koi were another group of people who came down the west coast some 2 500 years ago. They brought with them short tailed sheep and practised farming techniques. The term Koi-San was derived from the amalgamation between some of the groups. Not much was known about the Bushmen. The people were classified as wild animals - wild animals who had no place in modern society and should rather be eradicated to make place for a higher race, being the colonists at the time. It was a case of the gun being mightier than the bow.

In 1870 a German linguist by the name of Wilhelm Bleek arrived in the Cape. He was on his way to Natal to work with the Zulu people of the region. He heard about the Bushmen and was rather intrigued by who they were. He got permission to obtain three Bushmen from the Breakwater Prison in Cape Town. They stayed with him in his house in Mowbray for a period of ten years. He got together about ten to fifteen thousand pages of verbatim transcripts. This information is still used today to help us get a better understanding of who the people were and also give some insight into their paintings.