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een any reports and evidence of “disease” and “persecution” of the San
which might have led to their “extinction”.
The general extinction theory of the San is opposed in the work of P. V.
Tobias (1978):
… it came as a surprise to many people when in 1956
I published an estimate of 55 531 surviving San at
that date. Most of them were living in Botswana and
South West Africa; there were a sizeable number in
Angola, and very small numbers in Zambia, Rhodesia
and South Africa 158 .
Contrary to the notion of the extinction of the San, this work also provide the
statistics in which it is stated that there are about 55 000 to 60 000 San alive
“today”, of whom about half are in Botswana and about half in Namibia:
(Botswana: 24 652 – 29 600; Namibia: 26 000; Angola: 4 000; Zambia: 200;
South Africa: 25) 159 . To further support the viewpoint of the continued
existence of the San, this work groups the existing San people into five
categories: 160
1. Those born in the veld, who had remained “wild” …;
158 P. V. Tobias (ed), The Bushmen: San hunters and herders of Southern Africa, p. 10.
159 Ibid, p. 13.
160 P. V. Tobias (ed), The Bushmen…, p. 14.
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