A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  There were no schools in the trekboer areas, and the first clergyman did not arrive at Zwartland (Malmesbury), forty miles north of Cape Town, until 1745, nor at Graaff-Reinet until 1792. As far as literacy was maintained—and in many cases it was not—it was transmitted within the family. Former company employees made a living as traveling teachers, attaching themselves to trekboer families for several months at a time; but most were so incompetent that the word Meester (teacher) acquired a derogatory meaning.

  Trekboers were more egalitarian among themselves than the burghers in Cape Town and the arable southwest. Even so, some people used the perquisites of the offices of heemraad and veldkornet: to acquire more property than their fellows, and at the other extreme there were people who lacked the capital, the ability, or the will to farm independently. A few moved beyond the settled white community and lived as hunters and traders in indigenous societies. Others became bijwoners—tenant farmers, caring for their employers’ stock in return for a share. Some bijwoners remained in an underclass; others eventually accumulated sufficient livestock to set up on their own as landowners.

  This expansion involved a variety of relationships with the indigenous hunters and herders. Advancing burgher families often made use of a spring and its adjacent pastures without overt opposition and then gradually acquired exclusive control, reducing the indigenous pastoralists to various types of tenancy and clientage. An elderly Khoikhoi told Anders Sparrman, a visiting Swedish doctor and entomologist, in 1775 that “he could not forbear (though with some degree of caution and in gentle terms) making complaints of the Dutch, as unjust invaders of the Hottentot territories. For want of strength and powers, (he said) these latter were now no longer in a condition to withstand their encroachments; almost every day some Hottentot or other being obliged to remove with his cattle, whenever the pasture he was in possession of, happened to suit a colonist.”30 For their part, indigenous hunter-gatherers often raided the cattle and sheep, and sometimes the homes, of the incoming farmers. In response to that resistance, the farmers formed their one cooperative institution, the commando.

  The company had initially used its own military personnel in its military operations. By the end of the seventeenth century, it had added a smattering of free burghers. From 1715 onward, commandos consisted exclusively of civilians. They were dependent on the company for their guns and ammunition and, in theory, subject to company control. In practice, they behaved independently. The main resistance came from indigenous hunter gatherers (San) and from indigenous pastoralists (Khoikhoi) who had lost their livestock. During the 1770s, indigenous bands attacked burgher property over a wide front from bases in the Sneeuwberg Mountains north of Graaff-Reinet. Large commandos, including subjected indigenous pastoralists as well as burghers, retaliated, treating their prey as vermin. In 1774,a commando of 300 men claimed to have killed 503 people; between 1786 and 1795, 2,430 were reported killed. By the end of the century, the indigenous hunting and herding peoples of the western part of South Africa had ceased to offer large-scale resistance.

  With their roots in the society of Cape Town and the arable southwest, the trekboers were never a self-sufficient society. They were accustomed to using coerced slave and indigenous labor. Many continued to own slaves—in 1773,over halftne burghers in Swellendam owned at least one slave. But as they moved deeper and deeper into the interior and edged more and more of the indigenous herders out of control of the land, they drew many of them into their service. The subjected pastoralists had precisely the skills that the trekboers required. For the right to continue to live on the land and to pasture a few livestock of their own, they herded the invaders’ cattle and sheep, they drove their ox wagons, and they did their domestic chores. Trekboers also made use of people from the indigenous hunting and gathering communities. Commandos exterminated adult hunter-gatherers but made a point of capturing children, and before they disbanded they distributed the children as well as the cattle booty among themselves.

  Beyond the trekboers north and northeast from the Cape lived people of diverse origins: displaced indigenous pastoralists and hunter-gatherers, escaped African and Asian slaves, burghers of white parentage who had committed crimes, and men and women of mixed ethnic descent. Like many trekboers, these people lived by hunting as much as stock farming. Like the trekboers, too, they were loosely linked with the Cape by trade, bartering sheep, cattle, and ivory in return for arms, ammunition, and other imported commodities. Forming fluid communities, they were penetrating and destabilizing the indigenous pastoral and mixed farming societies beyond the Orange River. By the end of the eighteenth century, some were becoming organized as chiefdoms. At first they called themselves Bastaards, but, under missionary influence, they were becoming known as Griquas.31

  In the east the situation was still more complex. By the 1770s, the foremost eastern trekboers had reached the vicinities of Algoa Bay and Graaff-Reinet, where there were valleys with good soils and sufficient rain for extensive agriculture as well as stock farming. This desirable land was already part of the long-disputed frontier zone between indigenous pastoralists and Bantu-speaking mixed farmers, described in chapter 1. A period of intense competition for control ensued, marked by shifting alliances, cattle raids, and wars. None of the ethnic communities—Khoikhoi, Xhosa, or White—was able to establish hegemony, and the colonial government in distant Cape Town was also incapable of doing so.

  People were not actuated exclusively by ethnic bonds. They had divergent identifications and conflicting concerns. Trekboers in the northern part of the district of Graaff-Reinet had a major interest in concentrating colonial resources against the aboriginal hunter-gatherers who were attacking them from their bases in the Sneeuwberg, while those in the southern part of the district were primarily concerned to secure the land they were appropriating against Xhosa attack. Xhosa chiefs were pursuing their own rivalries with one another as well as trying to cope with the intrusion of the colonists. Khoikhoi were torn between obeying their trekboer patrons and deserting them to join up with the Xhosa, which was an attractive alternative, since, as we have seen, the nearest Xhosa chiefdoms had already incorporated numerous Khoikhoi. Thus, during the first two spells of warfare in the frontier zone between the colony and the territory of the Xhosa in 1779 and 1793, people were killed, property was destroyed, sheep and cattle changed hands, but the results were indecisive.32

  These events strained the relationship between the frontier trekboers and the colonial government, which was not seen to be offering sufficient support. Early in 1795, prominent trekboers from the southern part of the district of Graaff-Reinet drove out the landdrost and assumed control. The government soon brought them to heel, however, by cutting off their ammunition supply, demonstrating that they were dependent on their links with the Cape Town regime and the European economy.33

  When the British captured the Cape from the Dutch later in 1795, they took over responsibility for a thinly populated, loose-knit territory. Cape Town was still the only port of entry into the region. With fifteen thousand inhabitants (including ten thousand slaves), 1,145 private houses, and such public buildings as the castle, the slave lodge, and the principal Dutch Reformed church, it was also the only real town in the colony. Stellenbosch had a mere 70 houses, Swellendam 30, and Graaff-Reinet “about a dozen mud-houses covered with thatch.”34 In the European perspective, the colony’s function was still little more than the stepping-stone to Asia that it had been in the time of van Riebeeck; it yielded nothing else of significance to the metropolitan economy.

  The crucial facet of the social structure of the colony was the utter dependence of the white colonists on the labor of slaves and indigenous people. In Europe, where the settler community had originated, ethnic chauvinism was already deeply embedded in the popular psyche. At the Cape, where the colonists were subject to a commercial government that practiced slavery and the slave trade, they were conditioned to life as privileged people, distinguished from their slaves and s
erfs by physical and cultural as well as legal and economic criteria. They were also growing apart from society in northwestern Europe, where social and economic conditions differed profoundly.

  The white colonists were themselves a diverse lot. Capetonians (traders, innkeepers, and artisans), arable farmers, and remote trekboers had conflicting interests and varied cultural levels. Nevertheless, in spite of the unconventional behavior of some individuals and the fairly widespread condoning of male promiscuity with women from the subordinated classes, the colonists perceived themselves as constituting a distinct community. They often identified themselves by the label “Christian.” Anders Sparrman recorded that in the 1770s all “Christians” were called “baas.”35 The distinction was essentially racial. Christianity had limited influence in ^outh Africa during the eighteenth century. The handful of Calvinist ministers appointed by the government certainly did not challenge the norms and values that corresponded with material conditions that placed people of European descent above others.36

  For the subordinated peoples, life in the colony was nasty, brutish, and short. The Cape slaves experienced a form of subjection that was in many respects harsher than slavery as practiced in the Americas. Extracted from diverse native cultures and dispersed in small, mixed lots among many owners, most managed to create some space for human dignity while accommodating to their lot, and a considerable minority bolted for freedom, risking starvation, capture, and fierce retribution. The indigenous pastoralists fared no better. Deprived of their means of independent subsistence, they were incorporated into a society where their masters adopted methods of control they were accustomed to applying to slaves.

  This stratified and violent society was a linguistic Babel. Some colonists were holding to the Dutch of the Netherlands, the official language of the colony. Some indigenous people were still speaking their native languages. A few slaves were able to use their languages of origin, whereas Portuguese Creole had become a common means of communication among the Asian slaves. A simplified form of Dutch, which dropped certain inflections and vocabulary items, modified the vowel sounds, and incorporated loan words from the other languages, however, was becoming the dominant lingua franca. This dialect, which originated as a medium of oral communication between burghers and slaves, would become a distinct language—Afrikaans—which, with English and nine African languages, would be recognized as official languages in postapartheid South Africa.37

  The British Cape Colony, 1795—1870

  During the European turmoil sparked off by the French Revolution, Great Britain became the dominant sea power and occupied the Cape peninsula to prevent it from falling into the hands of the French. A British expedition easily forced the capitulation of Dutch officials in 1795, and although the Dutch—then constituted as the Batavian Republic—regained the Cape under the terms of the Treaty of Amiens in 1803, they were ousted again in January 1806. British sovereignty over the colony was confirmed in the eyes of Europe, but, of course, without any consultation with black or white South Africans, in the peace settlement of 1814.

  In the British perspective of that era, South Africa was still significant for the single reason that had previously concerned the Dutch. The Cape peninsula was a stepping-stone to Asia, where the English East India Company was conducting a highly profitable trade, primarily in India. Like the Dutch before them, the British had no vital material interest in South Africa beyond the peninsula. But appended to that strategic prize was a complex, violent, and largely anarchic society scattered over a vast hinterland.38

  Down to the late 1860s, when South Africa’s vast mineral wealth began to be revealed, the region produced little of significance to the British economy. Its exports included wine, which was produced in the southwestern part of the colony and did well on the British market between 1811 and 1826, when it was benefiting from a preferential tariff, but declined after Britain reduced the preference. Wool became the mainstay of pastoral farmers in the central and eastern part of the colony by the 1840s. Elephant ivory and animal hides were acquired by hunters and traders in the interior. Total exports, however, were a fraction of Britain’s external trade.39

  Consequently, only a tiny proportion of the emigrants who left the British Isles before 1870 settled in Southern Africa; only a minute proportion of British overseas investment was placed there; and the British government provided the colony with a minimal administrative establishment and repeatedly ordered it to restrict expenditure. The contrast with economic growth in North America in that period is remarkable. By 1870, the United States had a population of over 32 million people of European descent and nearly 53,000 miles of railroad, but in all of Southern Africa there were no more than 70 miles of rail and 250,000 white people.

  Possession of the colony nevertheless evoked demands that the British government could not ignore. Some form of law and order was needed in the anarchic eastern frontier zone. There, during the first British occupation of the Cape, Xhosa farming people overran the country far to the west of the official boundary line at the Fish River; trekboers, accustomed to taking the law into their own hands, staged short-lived rebellions; groups of Khoikhoi were trying to maintain some degree of autonomy; and two newly arrived radical white missionaries of the London Missionary Society (an interdenominational Protestant organization) were espousing the cause of the Khoikhoi and the Xhosa.40 In Britain, military, commercial, and evangelical interests interpreted these events in different ways and brought conflicting pressures to bear on the bureaucrats and politicians responsible.41

  Until the 1850s, when steam began to replace sail, ships took about three months each way between England and Cape Town, and the Cape was not connected with London by submarine cable until 1870.42 Thus, although the British government could set general lines of policy, dismiss obstructive officials, and impose overriding laws, the colonial authorities inexorably had a wide latitude of action. They could, for example, refrain from effectively enforcing London’s dictates.

  Until the first elected legislative body was created in 1853, senior officials responsible to the British government dominated the government of the Cape Colony. Indeed, until 1825 the governor himself possessed autocratic powers. The governors of this period were military officers drawn from the landed aristocracy. Lieutenant-General Sir John Cradock (181114) was the younger son of the Earl of Cadogan. His successor, Lieutenant-General Lord Charles Somerset (1814-26), second son of the Duke of Beaufort, drew an annual salary of £10,000 and spent £28,000 of public money on his country residence at Newlands, thereby consuming an inordinate proportion of the local revenue. Both men were deeply conservative Tories. Unlike their Dutch predecessors, they identified with the substantial local landowners—the wine and grain farmers of the southwestern part of the colony—and accepted with little question the structure of society that they inherited from the Dutch.43

  When they first occupied the Cape Colony, the British regarded themselves as temporary custodians and had no intention of tampering with the status quo. The Batavian Republic regime, also, was too short-lived to have enduring effects.44 After 1806, however, the British made several changes. First, they tried to establish British control in the turbulent eastern frontier zone. In 1809, Colonel Richard Collins was appointed as a commissioner to examine the situation in that area. After a three-month tour, Collins produced a blueprint for the handling of relations between the colony and the Xhosa. The two societies should be kept absolutely separate from one another until the Whites were powerful enough to dominate the region. “All intercourse between the settlers and the Caffres should be scrupulously prevented, until the former shall have increased considerably in numbers, and are also much more advanced in arts and industry.” A military force, meanwhile, should clear the Xhosa out of the land west of the colonial boundary at the Fish River, and beyond that to the Keiskamma. Finally, up to six thousand people should be imported from Europe to form a close settlement on small agricultural farms along the right bank of the Fish; t
he colony was to be “fully protected by this formidable barrier.”45

  Step by step, the government tried to carry out this blueprint. In 1811 and 1812, in a campaign that set the precedent for the piecemeal conquest of all the black farming people of Southern Africa, British regular troops, assisted by colonial commandos and Khoikhoi units, ruthlessly expelled the Xhosa inhabitants from the land through to the Fish River, burning crops and villages and making off with thousands of head of cattle. Concluding his report on these achievements to his superiors in London, Governor Cradock said, “I am happy to add that in the course of this service there has not been shed more Kaffir blood than would seem to be necessary to impress on the minds of these savages a proper degree of terror and respect.”46 The government then forbade further contacts between colonists and Xhosa across the Fish River. In 1819, the Xhosa made a desperate attempt to regain their land, but British forces and their colonial allies drove them back beyond the Keiskamma in another brutal campaign.47