One of the salient characteristics of South Africa is its cultural pluralism. The country has become the meeting point of three broad cultural currents and many more specific cultures. The imported European culture of the conquerors, both in its Dutch and in its English variants, has, like in other parts of the colonial world, steadily gained ground at the expense of the indigenous cultures. Of the latter, the Hottentot culture has been entirely stamped out, and the Bushmen subsist only in small groups outside the boundaries of South Africa proper. The cultures of the Bantu-speaking peoples have, nevertheless, survived up to the present, however much they have been influenced by Western technology. The other imported cultural strain, the Asian one, came, as we shall see, in two waves: first from the Dutch East Indies, and since 1860 from India.