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Grade 10: Transformations in southern Africa after 1750: These constitute additional notes to supplement those in your textbook.

  • Note there will be an essay question during the May/June 2015, exam based upon the material below and that in your textbook

Topic:

Late Eighteenth/early Nineteenth Century Cape Colony: The waning of Dutch control; British colonial administration over Boer, Khoi/San and Xhosa; the British influence and the political development of the colony

The “Frontier Theory”

Understandthe frontier theory - of it being “Open” or “Closed” – according to whether official and comprehensive colonial/settler control was established or not in the area under consideration: The Cape.Under the Dutchthis was a huge area for a colony with a vast frontier they were attempting to ‘close’; exceedingly difficult particularly as it contained both arid country and well watered grasslands where colonists could easily be a law unto themselves and Khoisan and Xhosa could exist within their own cultural milieu (cultural settings). But for colonial officialdom there were extremely limited communications dependent upon pre-industrial modes of transport such as horses/ox-wagons transport.

The Terms ‘Boers’ or ‘Afrikaners’

You need to understand who the ‘Afrikaners’ or ‘Boers’ were – the descendants of Dutch, German and French groupings of seventeenth/eighteenth century colonists whose lingo franca (common language) developed into a local variety of Dutch – much later identified as Afrikaans. The term ‘Afrikaners’ was seldom used by whites during Dutch and early British rule; although the word and identity’sgenesis lay in some of the Boers’several small frontier uprisings against Dutch and British control, distinguishing themselves as ‘African’ – Christian, but not loyal to Holland let alone Britain. An example well used in Afrikaner nationalist historiography (historical writings) was the Slagtersnek Rebellion (google). The “Afrikaner” Trekboers were small scale farmers who had been moving (trekking) across the colony since early Dutch rule. Graaff-Reinet was the site of the first magistrate established outside of Cape Town during Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) rule– an attempt to ‘close’ the frontier by policing outlying colonists.

The arrival and beginning of the second and century long British involvement in the Cape and southern Africa

After their defeat of the Dutch colonists in the western Cape at the 1806battle of Blouberg,(on the site of today’s Melkbostrand), the new British administrators/military/colonists who had arrived specifically to secure Cape Town for strategic reasons during the Napoleonic wars, tried to enforce a more efficient colonial administration over the entire colony,than that very ineffective control achieved by the VOC. The British administration and particularly early Governor Lord Charles Somersetattempted to exert additional control and ‘close’of the colony’s frontier; the most difficult section of which was the eastern Cape (Eastern Frontier) where Boers and the vastly more numerous Xhosa had already long clashed over land – both groupings being cattle farmers. Unlike the Khoi, the Xhosa had demography (population) and physical robustness on their side and the former counted even more so with the white colonists/settlers. Although the Xhosa did not form any politically centralised grouping they existed within several large chiefdoms which sometimes combined in times of war but also clashed with one another and even on occasion, allied with colonist/settler forces.

Xhosa, Khoi, San and Slaves

The Xhosa “Cattle-killing” of the early nineteenth century: There are many theories on why this occurred; most of which are closely related to Xhosa belief-systems of the time and their despair (so some historians explain) at the seemingly unending and unwinnable battles against the white colonists. But whatever the causes and complexities in explaining the “Cattle-killings”; the results for the Xhosa were catastrophic and hastened the political disintegration of their society.

The Khoi tribes started already breaking down during earlier eighteenth century Dutch rule; mainly due to a smallpox epidemic in the western Cape, but also to enslavement for some and the scattering of the rest into the interior. But by the mid-nineteenth century, Khoi and Khoisan tribal structures were effectively finished. The remnant Khoisan peoples in time were physically and biologically integrated with some colonists and thenumerous slaves brought by slave traders during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from Africa (Madagascar, Angola particularly) and Dutch Indonesia. These imported slaves had been sold to both Boer and British colonists in Cape Town and to farms within the western, northern and eastern Cape.

Some Khoi tribes had also integrated into the Xhosa chiefdoms. The San suffered a similar fate of cultural disintegration though for some it was delayed for their hunter lifestyle enabled these to live in the mountain ranges from where they were ultimately hunted out or enslaved by colonists,assisted by their Khoi slaves/servants. The San fled even deeper until the last surviving San groupings remained north of the Orange River. Two good novels worth reading to give some impression of the Dutch and British eighteenth and early nineteenth colonisation in the Cape and how it affected these peoples: Andre P. Brink’s: Chain of Voices, and An Instant in the Wind.

British colonial continual closing of the frontier: The Eastern Cape/Eastern Frontier – the British impact

The placing by British officials of limitations upon the Boers backed by law, reinforced by regular British Army soldiers and far more courts, was resented by many of the Boers, particularly those less successful in farming. The British determination to ‘close’ the frontier was feared by the Xhosa who during the early nineteenth century Frontier Wars came to realise that the British had significant military resources and when black/white fighting broke out, almost always combined with the Boers against the Xhosa. Several vain attempts were made by British administrators to separate black and white usage of grazing land by establishing “frontiers” or “borders”marked by rivers or “no man’s land” concepts. In the end these were a failure and the Xhosa chiefdoms were pushed further back towards the Kei River.

Supposedly agreed boundaries were inevitably ignored during trading, hunting and particularly cattle raids or attempts to regain stock. The land disputes and lack of resolution thereforeadded to already existent suspicions and negative perceptions of respective cultures which existed between white and black and between the white communities too. The Boers viewed British administration of the frontier as unsympathetic to their lifestyles and needs – particularly British lack of legal grounding or sympathy for an explicitslavery culture. The Boers blamed the British authority and missionary work for the instability of the Eastern Frontier. But arriving British settlers also found themselves in the midst of the frontier wars; Grahamstown originally founded in 1812 as a British military outpost, later became a beleaguered garrison town where 1820 settlers who had failed with farming, moved to establish themselves in more secure trades. A glance across maps of the historical Eastern Cape indicates the extent to which British influence permeated through place names. But the impact was also commercial besides private and state education, law, culture and resolute administration with the resources of a then growing and vast empire.

Cape Society’s increasing inclination towards ‘race’ as a determinant of status, yet still with a “British liberal touch”.

Mission stations were set up by amongst other church groupings, the London Missionary Society,which took particularly a more Christ-centred interpretation of Christianity rather than the heavily judgemental Old Testament teachings which the Boers understood through their Reformed Church theology. The mission stations were intended to try and both convert the Khoi and Xhosa and also supposedly teach them the understanding of a Christianity-approved work ethic. But missionaries like John Phillip and Johan Van der Kemp were also appalled at the very harsh slave owner/slave relations in the colony and were very unpopular with the Boers who viewed them as naïve and accused them of usurping “proper black-white relations”.

By 1838 slaves were emancipated (freed) throughout the British Empire, although many remained servants under slave-like circumstances. But the most conservative and resentful of Boer society by now had rejected both this liberal approach and the British administration of the colony. Hence parties of Boers from this year “immigrating” north to move away from both British control and Xhosa attacks – the so-called “Great Trek” which became a core part of Afrikaner nationalist historical explanations following a ‘heroic’ theme of a ‘people’ moving to establish their own self-determination from oppressors and violent indigenous groupings.

The Cape Colonyearly to mid- nineteenth centurysociety was stratified along racial lines in terms of property and ownership. Nevertheless there were still many “mixed-marriages” with the husband usually white and some “coloured” families prospered to an extent. Increasingly towards the middle of the centurymany coloured and Malay communities believed in and valued British Imperial “citizenship”particularly amongst those in Cape Town. But race relations between master and servants could still be exceptionally harsh, a situation which by and large the law still supported. But the colony’s administration being British meant that it viewed the Cape colonial role through British interests first, not least concerns of paying for the frontier wars.

The 1820 British Settlers and deepening British colonial administration

One of Somerset policieswas trying to create a ‘buffer zone’ between colonists and Xhosausing new British settlers – those of 1820; some 3000 strong, to farm in the Albany (Grahamstown) district. Note that the Cape at this stage was still a backwater colony; far more British and Irish settlers went to America and Australia; the formerby 1820was already the United States. The Cape was certainly nowhere near industrialised – this only really started in the late-nineteenth, early twentieth centuries along with the diamond/gold discoveries and associated European immigration. But these1820 British settlers and the trickle of British immigrants which followed did bring some farming improvements – merino sheep for example, besides other important cultural contributions. Cape Town and Simon’s Town remained important strategic harbours; Port Elizabeth grew, but British settlement outside of the Eastern Cape’s brief concentrated influx of 1820 was still comparatively small compared to say the Canadian, Australian and even New Zealand colonies.

Some of most important cultural features which the British brought to the Cape during the early part of the nineteenth century were the beginnings of formal education. SACS was the first formal state school – 1829; intended to get British and Dutch settlers sons to know each other along ‘British cultural lines’; some English businessmen like Charles Adderley became prominent in Cape Town; British settlers Thomas Pringle and John Fairbairn fought Governor Somerset through the colony’s law courts to insist on a free press for the colony. By the 1840s the Church of England felt there was enough of a British presence to send out Bishop Robert Gray to establish a separate province of the Anglican Church in the Cape; as we know, Gray not only did that but also established several church schools including Bishops. Very importantly, the British brought the first framework of liberal democratic government on a qualified voting franchise to the Cape; by 1872 the first Cape Parliament existed on this non-racial qualified vote.

Afrikaner immigration from the Cape Colony and the changing southern African political patterns of Boer, British and Black

The Eastern Cape frontier wars went on until the end of the nineteenth century and were exceedingly bitter on both sides; the ramifications of which live with us today. These were effectively wars over land which the colonists - British and Afrikaner; ultimately won comprehensively; “subduing” the Xhosa. The British by then were trying to govern the Cape along with the British settlers over the growing “Cape coloured” population, the still vastly numerous Xhosa and the many remaining Afrikaners, some of whom had become prosperous and an influential few even anglicised. British colonial administrators feared further regional instability would negatively impact upon the ape Colony. Their main concern was with the long-departed “Great Trek” Afrikaners now within the two Boer Republics in the north, the Orange Free State and Transvaaland their continuing land wars with their black African neighbours. The tribal groupings formed by the Mfecane resisted the new immigrants from the south as the Eastern Frontier conflict was “exported” north and east.

Moves towards British Federation of southern Africa from the middle of the nineteenth century

For British Cape colonial administrators there were alarming reports of the massive and supposedly warlike Zulu north of the new tiny British colony of Natal, who had clashed with Boer parties that had trekked into this region. By the 1850s the British were considering pressing for political federation under the Union Jack including all British southern African colonies, the Boer Republics and remaining independent black African Kingdoms in Zululand, Pondoland (far east coast) the Transvaal and elsewhere, besidesindependent coloured groupings like the Griqua. Attempts to achieve this were extenuated by diamond discoveries in the northern Cape by the 1860s.

The British influence in southern Africa would become unprecedented and historically extremely influential by the end of the nineteenth century; leading to the Anglo-Zulu and Anglo-Boer Wars; sections we will still be studying. These contributed both to the further modernisation and Union of South Africa, but also the rise of a particularly powerful Afrikaner nationalism which came to dominate twentieth century SA history alongside a slower growing but ultimately very influential African nationalism. (studied in grade 11). British colonisation brought mixed fortunes to the future South Africa – an issue still highly contested during the present day and not only in South Africa.

Epilogue

Some of historian Niall Ferguson’s theories (his “Six Killer Applications”) fit fairly well into the Cape’s nineteenth century history. Most particularly that the British were more effective than the Dutch in “closing the frontier”: Establishing and enforcing European law on the colony; not least property rights and then ultimately linking these on a non-racial basis (although still predominantly European) for voting towards a legislature (parliament). The language of the law and its structure/culture would be both British and Dutch – Roman Dutch and English Common Law. But it meant that within the slowly modernising colony,black and ‘coloured’ subjects were now being subordinated to this new ‘western’ culture and its slowly growing capitalist economy. Later black elites during the early twentieth century would express their aspirations through the religious, political and language culture of the British Empire: The South African Native National Congress of 1912, forerunner to the present day ANC where those of Xhosa origin were to play a leading role: Mandela and Mbeki being the best known.

See maps on the intranet at link entitled: British/Dutch colonisation at the Cape: late 18th/early 19th centuries. (Maps)

The above notes are also in the intranet (link below the above).