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Authors: Justine van der Leun
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interior of the country, alternately employing, warring against, and trading with those whose paths they crossed. They sold butter, sheep, cattle, elephant ivory, and animal hides. They bought tobacco, coffee, and sugar.
Their most valued possessions were their guns and packets of gunpowder. Remote groups of indigenous people still lived within the Karoo, usually near water holes, and so to gain access to that water, trekboers often killed adult members of the Khoikhoi and San (a tribe of bushmen scattered throughout Southern Africa). They spared their children, whom they sold, traded, or raised as slaves. The trekboers also interacted with the Xhosa people who lived in the eastern Cape: tight-knit clans of farmers who kept livestock, tilled subsistence crops, and organized themselves loosely around local chiefs.
The Xhosa people, as the first settlers noted, were a healthy, friendly group. They were not averse to fighting to defend what was theirs, but they weren’t warriors. They preferred to farm their fields of tobacco, grain, and produce, and to graze their livestock. They slaughtered animals for frequent ceremonies, drank rich homemade beer, and smoked pipes and cigarettes. Above all, the Xhosa people nurtured their families. An early Dutch explorer noted, in 1689, the strength of the Xhosa bonds: “It would be impossible to buy slaves there, for they would not part with their children, or any of their connections for anything in the world, loving one another with a most remarkable strength of affection.”
In the 1790s, as Europe was plunged into crisis by the French Revolution, the British temporarily turned the nearly bankrupt Dutch trading outpost into a naval base. The British hoped to protect the Cape colony, their valuable midway point on the Europe–Asia trade route, from being overtaken by the French. While the Cape held no grand financial promise in and of itself (it exported a little wool, some animal hides, and elephant tusks), the British soon found another use for the growing outpost: as a source of job creation for Brits struggling in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. British citizens, mostly those of the desperate lower classes, could be resettled on Xhosa farmland, thereby quelling potential social unrest in England.
The British knew that for the Xhosa, cattle had been, from time immemorial, the main marker of wealth. According to a Dutch colonial employee, cattle were, to the Xhosa patriarch, “practically the only subject of his care and occupation, in the possession of which he finds complete happiness.”
British Parliament therefore sent over orders for their people to execute homicidal commando raids of “kaffir” villages (“kaffir” was initially used to refer to non-Christians, but eventually became a derogatory term for a black person), during which women and children were slaughtered and cattle stolen. Desperate Xhosa guerrillas nearly won a battle to reclaim land, but were ultimately dispossessed of even more territory and lost 23,000 cattle. After leading conquests in 1811 and 1812, the Cape’s governor, Sir John Cradock, cheerily reported back to London on the success of these attacks: “I am happy to add that in the course of this service, there has not been shed more Kaffir blood than would seem necessary to impress on the minds of these savages a proper degree of terror and respect.”
In 1820, four thousand British citizens—poor artisans, mostly, unaware of the battles being fought in South Africa and hoping for their own property allotment—were shipped over and handed one hundred acres each of the rough and wild eastern Cape. These inexperienced farmers found themselves out of luck: they were stranded in the middle of a simmering series of frontier wars, about which they had not been informed when they applied to go to Africa. To add insult to injury, the grasslands were difficult to cultivate without the generational wisdom the Xhosas possessed. Within a few
Their most valued possessions were their guns and packets of gunpowder. Remote groups of indigenous people still lived within the Karoo, usually near water holes, and so to gain access to that water, trekboers often killed adult members of the Khoikhoi and San (a tribe of bushmen scattered throughout Southern Africa). They spared their children, whom they sold, traded, or raised as slaves. The trekboers also interacted with the Xhosa people who lived in the eastern Cape: tight-knit clans of farmers who kept livestock, tilled subsistence crops, and organized themselves loosely around local chiefs.
The Xhosa people, as the first settlers noted, were a healthy, friendly group. They were not averse to fighting to defend what was theirs, but they weren’t warriors. They preferred to farm their fields of tobacco, grain, and produce, and to graze their livestock. They slaughtered animals for frequent ceremonies, drank rich homemade beer, and smoked pipes and cigarettes. Above all, the Xhosa people nurtured their families. An early Dutch explorer noted, in 1689, the strength of the Xhosa bonds: “It would be impossible to buy slaves there, for they would not part with their children, or any of their connections for anything in the world, loving one another with a most remarkable strength of affection.”
In the 1790s, as Europe was plunged into crisis by the French Revolution, the British temporarily turned the nearly bankrupt Dutch trading outpost into a naval base. The British hoped to protect the Cape colony, their valuable midway point on the Europe–Asia trade route, from being overtaken by the French. While the Cape held no grand financial promise in and of itself (it exported a little wool, some animal hides, and elephant tusks), the British soon found another use for the growing outpost: as a source of job creation for Brits struggling in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. British citizens, mostly those of the desperate lower classes, could be resettled on Xhosa farmland, thereby quelling potential social unrest in England.
The British knew that for the Xhosa, cattle had been, from time immemorial, the main marker of wealth. According to a Dutch colonial employee, cattle were, to the Xhosa patriarch, “practically the only subject of his care and occupation, in the possession of which he finds complete happiness.”
British Parliament therefore sent over orders for their people to execute homicidal commando raids of “kaffir” villages (“kaffir” was initially used to refer to non-Christians, but eventually became a derogatory term for a black person), during which women and children were slaughtered and cattle stolen. Desperate Xhosa guerrillas nearly won a battle to reclaim land, but were ultimately dispossessed of even more territory and lost 23,000 cattle. After leading conquests in 1811 and 1812, the Cape’s governor, Sir John Cradock, cheerily reported back to London on the success of these attacks: “I am happy to add that in the course of this service, there has not been shed more Kaffir blood than would seem necessary to impress on the minds of these savages a proper degree of terror and respect.”
In 1820, four thousand British citizens—poor artisans, mostly, unaware of the battles being fought in South Africa and hoping for their own property allotment—were shipped over and handed one hundred acres each of the rough and wild eastern Cape. These inexperienced farmers found themselves out of luck: they were stranded in the middle of a simmering series of frontier wars, about which they had not been informed when they applied to go to Africa. To add insult to injury, the grasslands were difficult to cultivate without the generational wisdom the Xhosas possessed. Within a few
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