Bapedi
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| 5,174,000 | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
 South Africa
|
4,972,000 |
 Zimbabwe
|
188,000 |
 Botswana
|
14,000 |
| Languages | |
| Northern Sotho | |
| Religion | |
| Christianity, African traditional religion, Islam. | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Sotho, Tswana | |
| Pedi | |
|---|---|
| Person | Mopedi |
| People | Bapedi |
| Language | Sepedi |
Pedi (also known as Bapedi, Bamaroteng, Marota, Basotho, Northern Sotho) – in its broadest sense – is a cultural/linguistic term. Northern Sotho was previously used to describe the entire set of people speaking various dialects of the Sotho language who live in the Limpopo Province of South Africa, but more recently the term "Northern Sotho" has replaced "Pedi " to characterise this loose collectivity of groups.
The Northern Sotho have been subdivided into the high-veld Sotho, which are comparatively recent immigrants mostly from the west and southwest, and the low-veld Sotho, who combine immigrants from the north with inhabitants of longer standing. The high-veld Sotho include the Pedi (in the narrower sense), Tau, Kone, Roka, Ntwane, Mphahlele, Tšhwene, Mathabathe, Kone (Ga-Matlala), Dikgale, Batlokwa, Gananwa (Ga-Mmalebogo), Mmamabolo, and Moletši. The low-veld Sotho include the Lobedu, Narene, Phalaborwa, Mogoboya, Kone, Kgakga, Pulana, Pai, and Kutswe. Groups are named by using the names of totemic animals and, sometimes, by alternating or combining these with the names of famous chiefs.
Pedi in the narrowest sense, refers more to a political unit than to a cultural or linguistic one: the Pedi polity included the people living within the area over which the Maroteng dynasty established dominance during the 18th and 19th centuries. Even this narrower usage should not be understood in a rigid sense because many fluctuations occurred in the extent of this polity's domination during the 18th and 19th centuries, and relocation and labour migration resulted in the widespread scattering of its former subjects.
The present-day Pedi area, Sekhukhuneland, is situated between the Olifants River (Lepelle) and its tributary the Steelpoort River (Tubatse); bordered on the east by the Drakensberg range, and crossed by the Leolo mountains. But at the height of its power the Pedi polity under Thulare (about 1790–1820) included an area stretching from the site of present-day Rustenburg in the west to the lowveld in the east, and ranging as far south as the Vaal river.
The area under Pedi control was severely limited when the polity was defeated by British troops in 1879. Reserves were created for this and for other northern Sotho groups by the Transvaal Republic's Native Location Commission. Over the next hundred years or so, these reserves were then variously combined and separated by a succession of government planners. By 1972 this planning had culminated in the creation of an allegedly independent national unit or "homeland" named Lebowa. In terms of the government's plans to accommodate ethnic groups separately from each other, this was designed to act as a place of residence for all northern Sotho speakers. But many Pedi had never resided here: since the polity's defeat, they had become involved in a series of labour-tenancy or sharecropping arrangements with white farmers, lived as tenants on crown land, or purchased farms communally as freeholders, or moved to live in the townships adjoining Pretoria and Johannesburg on a permanent or semi-permanent basis. In total, however, the population of the Lebowa homeland increased rapidly after the mid 1950s, due to the forced relocations from rural areas and cities in common South Africa undertaken by apartheid's planners, and to voluntary relocations by which former labour tenants sought independence from the restrictive and deprived conditions under which they had lived on the white farms.
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Wikipedia