Say the name out loud. AmaQithi. That Q — tongue pressed against the hard palate, then released — does not belong to any Bantu language. It belongs to the Khoisan family: the San and Khoe peoples who were in southern Africa for tens of thousands of years before any Nguni migration came through.
The colonial clerks could hear it was different. They tried to write around it: Kiti, Xiti, Chiti, Giti. Each spelling is a different guess at a sound their alphabet could not hold. The name survived all of them. The click is still there.
AbaThembu as a nation were built on a San-Nguni fusion — this is not in dispute. It is in their izibongo (praise names), in the colonial record, in ingqithi itself. The word Tambookie, the name the British used for the Thembu, is an anglicisation of Tam'bou'ci — the Khoisan name for these creolised people. The Thembu did not just meet the San. They became something with them.
What the name is carrying
Qithi, Mqithi, Qwabi — every core name in this clan has that click. Names this old are not accidents. They are the things a community kept even when everything else was lost or taken or renamed.
You cannot say AmaQithi correctly without making a San sound. That is, as far as I can tell, the oldest record we have of who we are. Older than the written sources. Older than the colonial maps. It is in the mouth before the mind catches up.
The DNA project is trying to find the biological parallel — L0 and L1 haplogroups carried by San women. If you are an AmaQithi woman and want to be part of that search, the details are on the genealogy page.