$Unique_ID{COW03193} $Pretitle{293} $Title{South Africa Chapter 1A. Historical Setting} $Subtitle{} $Author{James L. McLaughlin} $Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army} $Subject{dutch khoi british south boers xhosa cape first land africa} $Date{1980} $Log{Ox Wagon*0319301.scf Figure 2.*0319302.scf } Country: South Africa Book: South Africa, A Country Study Author: James L. McLaughlin Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army Date: 1980 Chapter 1A. Historical Setting [See Ox Wagon: Ox wagon, symbol of Boers' Great Trek] Modern social, political, and economic institutions in South Africa are direct consequences of clearly discernible historical developments over a period of more than three centuries. The social institutions are the outcome of a series of conflicts that began with the first contacts between the country's disparate peoples. These conflicts have always been framed in racial terms, and the basic issues have been the questions of control of the land, and later, of labor to work the land. White colonists of European origin and their descendants, with their superior technology and more developed political organizations, strov from the beginning to dominate the country's numerically superior Black Africans. By the mid-eighteenth century, after 100 years in South Africa, most Whites were so convinced of their culture's superiority that nothing could challenge their view that Blacks were destined by God to be permanently relegated to positions inferior to the Whites. Most of the history of South Africa in the twentieth century has been marked by the efforts of the White community to ensure continued supremacy of its interests over those of other groups-Blacks, Coloureds (of mixed race), and Asians (chiefly Indians)-in a rapidly developing industrial economy despite the rapid emergence of independent Black African states and generally hostile world opinion. These efforts to maintain White supremacy have led to the imposition of social and legal restraints under which the non-White majority has chafed in the decades since World War II. Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century White settlers were chiefly farmers (or pastoralists) and merchants competing for land against a variety of Black groups engaged in subsistence cultivation and herding. The discovery of diamonds and gold in the last decades of the century marked the beginning of a change that was to lead to industrialization and the urbanization of most Whites, Coloureds, and Asians and substantial numbers of Blacks. These changes and the resultant economic interdependence among the races were to pose the crucial questions of social and political relations between Whites and non-Whites that persisted into the fourth quarter of the twentieth century. In general the basic pattern was one of White economic, political, and social domination, but there was a good deal of controversy among Whites over the most effective ways of dealing with Blacks, Coloureds, and Asians in order to maintain that domination. The introduction of mining and the subsequent growth of industry and urban life also exacerbated the historically strained relations between the two major White groups, the Afrikaners (more commonly called Boers in the nineteenth century, the descendants of the Dutch colonists), and the British settlers. The conflict flared up in the second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) in which the British were victorious. They eventually granted self-government to the conquered Boer republics, which culminated in the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910. This was the first step in a long and complex struggle for power over the entire territory between the two White groups. That struggle was broadly framed in ethnic terms, but it was marked by a number of crosscurrents reflecting in part the economic differences between the bulk of Afrikaners and most English speakers. After World War II the National Party came to power. Based on that very large portion of the Afrikaner population still economically inferior to English-speaking Whites and subject to actual or potential competition in the labor market from non-Whites, the party espoused the ideology of apartheid (literally, separateness). Its implementation was to shore up Afrikaner identity vis-a-vis other Whites and guarantee the economic, social, and political status of Whites-particularly Afrikaners-with respect to Blacks, Coloureds, and Asians. The institution of apartheid, seen by some Afrikaners as a long-range solution to the racial situation, engendered a number of problems. The growth of the economy in the years after World War II increased the significance of the non-White labor force. The perspectives of Afrikaners (and other Whites) were not accepted by Blacks, Coloureds, and Asians. Government actions to suppress movements intended to change the social and political order, although effective, did not end them and served to focus the disapprobation of the international community on the South African system. The Pre-European Period Man and the manlike creatures who may have been his ancestors have inhabited the southern African plateau for millennia. The remains of the predecessors of modern man have been found at several South African sites, including the hominid australopithecine (man-ape), who inhabited southern and eastern Africa in the early Pleistocene well over 1 million years ago. Fragmentary remains suggest the emergence of an intermediate hominid, not quite Homo sapiens, about 500,000 years ago. Much of the research on early man, his products, and his environment has been done by South African specialists. By the end of the Pleistocene-roughly 10,000 to 20,000 years ago-and probably earlier, all forms were fully Homo sapiens, hunters and gatherers using stone tools. Some lived in the interior and hunted game; others gathered shellfish and other marine products along the coast. Their precise relationship to modern man in South Africa was still not settled in the late 1970s, but there is some evidence that hunters and gatherers of the late Pleistocene and early recent periods were the ancestors of the Khoi (called Hottentots by the White settlers) and the San (known as Bushmen to the Whites). Archaeological discoveries show that people resembling the present-day Khoi and San inhabited southern Africa for thousands of years. In the first century A.D. the Khoi may have had goats and sheep; by the eleventh century they had acquired herds of cattle. At the time the Europeans first encountered them, the Khoi and San possibly numbered between 100,000 and 200,000. The ancestors of the Bantu (see Glossary) speakers, moving southward from the Congo region, entered the area around the Zambezi River at the beginning of the Christian Era and, as early as A.D. 400, probably established the beginning of the sociopolitical system that gave rise to ancient Zimbabwe in the modern state of the same name. These people carried a knowledge of agriculture and iron-making. At some point before they crossed the Limpopo River (the northeastern boundary of modern South Africa), many of them had also acquired cattle, and it is likely that their search for new pastures led them to move south. They crossed the Limpopo sometime before 500, settling first in the eastern Transvaal (see fig. 2). No specific link has been established between the earliest Bantu speakers and modern peoples, but it is fairly clear that the ancestors of those Black Africans called Nguni, i.e., Zulu, Xhosa, and Swazi, crossed the Limpopo about 1300 and drove some of the earlier inhabitants south and west while absorbing others. The Nguni occupied all of South Africa south of the Limpopo to the Great Kei River and between the Drakensberg Mountains and the Indian Ocean, apparently driving the Khoi before them. The forward elements of the Nguni reached the Great Fish River by 1500. The journals of Portuguese sailors cast away on the Natal coast as early as 1552 testify to the already dense Bantu-speaking population in Natal at that time. The advance of the Nguni halted between the Great Kei and Great Fish rivers until the mid-eighteenth century. While the Nguni were settling the eastern Cape and Natal, the Sotho people were spreading west and southwest from the eastern Transvaal. Arrival of the Europeans and Development of Boer Values The first European contacts with the South African coast resulted from the efforts to find an ocean route to the Indies at the end of the fifteenth century. In 1488 a Portuguese expedition under Bartholomew Diaz rounded the southern tip of Africa for the first time. Diaz' voyage ended near present-day Port Elizabeth before turning back to Europe. It was only on the return voyage that the voyagers discovered the Cape of Good Hope. Nine years later a second expedition, under Vasco da Gama, made the first voyage from Europe to India, landing at Mosselbaai to trade with the Khoi for meat to stock the ships for the long voyage. Because of the value of the spice trade between Europe and the East, significant numbers of Portuguese ships began to use the route almost immediately. To ease their supply problem, the Portuguese established reprovisioning stations at convenient points but ignored South Africa in favor of the more hospitable coasts of Angola and Mozambique. During the sixteenth century a number of Portuguese ships were wrecked along the South African coast, and their survivors, some of whom walked to the Portuguese settlement at Lourenco Marques, provided the earliest account of the lands and peoples of the interior of the territory. [See Figure 2.: Population Movements from Prehistory to 1700 Source: Adapted from David Birmingham and Shula Marks, "Southern Africa," in Roland Oliver (ed.), The Cambridge History of Africa, III (from c. 1050 to c. 1600), Cambridge, 1977; John Cope, South Africa, New York, 1967; and Roland Oliver and Brian Fagan, "The Emergence of Bantu Africa," in J.D. Fage (ed.), The Cambridge History of Africa, II (from c. 500 B.C. to A.D. 1050), Cambridge, 1978.] By the end of the sixteenth century Portugal's power had begun to decline, and English and Dutch ships vied to replace the Portuguese on the profitable spice trade route. The English began to call sporadically at the Cape in search of provisions after 1601, but they continued to prefer Ascension Island in the South Atlantic as their calling station. Serious Dutch interest in the Cape was awakened after 1647, when a captain of the Dutch East India Company and his crew were shipwrecked there for several months. On their return to the Netherlands they reported favorably on the Cape's potential as a station for supplying company ships at the midpoint of their long voyage to the East. In 1651 the company's directors dispatched an expedition under Jan van Riebeeck to establish such a refreshment station. His party of some 100 men and four women landed at Table Bay on April 6, 1652, and it was from this nucleus that South Africa's settlement grew. Van Riebeeck established friendly relations with the nearest Khoi tribe, whose chief had learned some English from trading with passing ships. The total Khoi and San population then living in the area first touched by Europeans has been estimated at only 25,000, but the great bulk of the Khoi inhabited the richer lands around the Cape of Good Hope and lived as far east as the Transkei and along the Orange River. The White settlers laid out farms and traded for cattle and sheep to provision company ships. As the Khoi began to realize the permanent nature of European settlement, they observed that the more cattle they traded to Europeans the more grazing land the Europeans demanded. Khoi interest in cattle trading therefore began to decline. Partially motivated by the continual theft of stock by the Khoi and San hunters, who considered cattle as wild game, the Dutch in 1659 declared war on the Khoi, whom they quickly defeated. The Dutch then took control of desirable grazing lands beyond the Cape Peninsula as their reward for victory. Theft of cattle was to be a recurrent cause (or excuse) for warfare against Black Africans and for seizure of their lands by the settlers throughout South Africa's history. The Dutch East India Company had not intended its Cape settlement to develop into a colony. The early settlers were all company employees and were expected to produce by their own labor the foodstuffs required to provision passing company ships. The Europeans, however, proved to be insufficient as a labor force. Attempts to recruit Khoi labor did not succeed, and therefore slaves were imported-at first from the western African slave markets including Angola and later from eastern Africa and the Dutch East Indies. Despite the importation of slaves, the production of foodstuffs remained inadequate, evidently because of the company employees' lack of motivation. For this reason in 1679 the company's directors in the Netherlands became convinced of the need to give land to permanent settlers, who would be motivated by personal profit to raise crops and cattle for sale to the company. A small number of company employees had been allowed to hold land at the Cape beginning in 1657; after 1679 German and Dutch settlers started to come from Europe, lured by offers of free farms of their own. The number of free farmers increased particularly after 1688, when French Huguenots who had fled into the Netherlands from religious persecution in France accepted offers from the company of free passage to Cape Town. The Huguenots were for the most part skilled farmers and winegrowers whose Calvinist religion was similar to that of the Dutch, and they quickly assimilated the Dutch language and customs. Many of South Africa's Dutch- speaking leaders during the next three centuries were to bear French names. This increase in population was accompanied by a second war against the Khoi to provide the required farmland. In 1713 an epidemic of smallpox, brought on a company ship from India, devastated the Khoi. In some areas along the colony's borders whole tribes disappeared, and Khoi resistance to the Dutch advance, feeble from the first, was no longer of any serious consequence. A portion of the remaining Khoi fled from contact with the Europeans and into the less fertile hinterlands. The majority, however, were simply engulfed by the more advanced society that descended upon them and were absorbed into it to become a large part of the ancestry of the Coloured population. Although organized opposition by the Khoi ceased after that time, the Dutch settlers were to remain in conflict with Black Africans along the edge of the frontiers for another century and a half. These battles between Whites and Blacks were nearly all fought on a very small scale. As early as 1715 the Dutch developed a kind of commando group that was to bear the brunt of such wars on the European side. The commandos, irregular groups of lightly armed frontiersmen, saw their first service in campaigns to exterminate the San and were effective in this kind of warfare. The units were composed of White and sometimes Coloured civilians called out as a military posse on the authority of an appointed local leader. Because the frontier farmers were accustomed to a hard life and were generally expert marksmen, these irregular mounted rifle units were able to serve the Dutch and their Afrikaner descendants effectively against both the Black Africans and the British (see History of the Military Tradition, ch. 5). The San retaliated against the Dutch encroachment on their hunting grounds by raiding Dutch herds of cattle and sheep. They fought effectively with poisoned arrows and were able to take a considerable toll among the Dutch, who pursued them into their mountain retreats. The San often killed or maimed stock they had stolen rather than let it be recovered by the settlers. Dutch hatred of the San reached the point where they were considered nonhuman and frequently were slaughtered outright. Those who were not killed or did not flee to the north were put to work as serfs on Dutch farms and were absorbed into the developing Coloured population, which sprang from unions among the Dutch, the Khoi, and Black and Asian slaves. The original free farmers had been given grants of land with the understanding that they would function as virtual vassals of the Dutch East India Company. They were forbidden to trade with the Khoi and were required to sell to the company at fixed prices all the produce that they did not consume. The ban against trade was aimed at ensuring that the company, through its monopoly, would get the best bargain in purchasing cattle for resale to the ships. As the herds grew and the population increased, more and more land was needed. Beyond the narrow rings of mountains that fringe the Cape area, the high plateau (veld) was found to be extremely arid-particularly the Great Karoo region, into which the earliest cattle farmers had expanded. Much land was required to support the cattle, and farms over 2,000 hectares were common. Because the company did not sell land to the frontiersmen but rather leased it in return for an annual rental fee, there was little encouragement to expend money and energy on building a permanent homestead. As the grass or the water on farms was depleted or as the herds or families increased in number, the hardy pioneers piled their belongings into their wagons and trekked to a new site with greener or broader pastures. Thus they came to be called Trekboers, or wandering farmers, a term that came to be accepted-particularly in its shortened form, Boer-as a title of honor by all the frontiersmen and by others who came after them. The Trekboers adopted an attitude of hostility toward external control. For them the only important community was the extended family under the leadership of the senior married male. At the core of the extended family were the man's wife, his unmarried brothers and sisters, his own sons and daughters and, if his sons were married, their wives and children. Closely associated with the family in the community were its Black African slaves, few in number, and its Khoi servants and their immediate families. The head of the group was its patriarch, a ruler dispensing law and order to its members and particularly to its slaves and other servants. The Trekboers compared their way of life to that of the Hebrew patriarchs of the Old Testament. A Boer patriarch saw himself-like Abraham-leading his family, followers, and herds through the wilderness to a better land under the guidance of God. The Trekboers carried the Biblical analogy further and equated the forces of evil and darkness with the dark-skinned people who often surrounded and always opposed their advance to greener pastures. The Boer's attitude toward relations with Black Africans that developed during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was to carry over to later generations of Afrikaners. Europeans made their first contacts with non-Whites who were either slaves or the servile remnants of the Cape Khoi. This initial experience, combined with the Europeans' higher level of technical civilization, their dominant economic and legal position, and the tenets of Afrikaner religion left them with a feeling of superiority to dark-skinned people (see Religious Life, ch. 2). At the same time, however, they developed a fear of the Blacks. As the Boers made contact with the Bantu speakers, they projected their earlier feelings about dark-skinned races onto the new enemy. In this case the fear was heightened by the real military threat posed by the large numbers and the organization of the Blacks, who were direct competitors with the Boers on the frontier for land and cattle. In fact the advance guard of the Boers lived a life very similar to that of their Black African neighbors. Both depended upon large tracts of land to support the herds upon which their economies were in large part based. Thus were developed the attitudes that were to dominate South Africa's history. Both sides demanded access to large tracts of land, Whites felt superior to and yet somewhat afraid of the numerically stronger Blacks, and Whites needed to keep Blacks in an inferior position in order to retain the land and the sense of superiority. The European-Xhosa Clash The first major Bantu-speaking people met by the Dutch were the Xhosa, the southernmost Nguni. After the founding of the colony at Cape Town it was not unusual for slaves and Europeans accused of crimes to join the Xhosa to escape from slavery or from the harsh penal laws. Xhosa trade with Cape Colony began in the earliest years of the eighteenth century with irregular traffic in cattle and ivory. The Dutch farmers soon found that cheap trade goods could be exchanged for large amounts of ivory. By 1770 a regular wagon trail had been formed from the Cape to the Great Fish River, an area generally assumed to be the southern frontier of Nguni territory. In addition to ivory the Europeans were also interested in trading for Xhosa cattle, which could be obtained in exchange for a handful of glass beads and iron nails. The cattle brought high prices from ships reprovisioning at the Cape and, although the cattle trade was supposed to be a monopoly of the Cape government, the farmers apparently found ways to evade the restrictions. Cattle, not the ivory trade, were to be of historical importance because the economies of both the rural Boers and the Xhosa societies relied heavily on cattle herding. Until the second half of the eighteenth century the two groups remained separated by the extensive region between the Gamtoos and Great Fish rivers, except for the Boer trading parties and the limited advance of small Nguni elements. After 1750, however, both groups began to move into the region between the two rivers in search of pastures for the herds of their expanding populations. Initially the area was the scene of confused conflict between variously allied combinations of Boers, Khoi, San, and Xhosa. By the third quarter of the century, however, the continuing conflict began to take shape as the Boers and the Xhosa struggled for control of the land. Throughout the eighteenth century the company tried to limit the eastward expansion of the Boers. Such expansion increased the chances of conflict with the Blacks and meant higher military expenditures. Moreover the Boers' allegiance to the colonial government seemed to decrease as their distance from the centers of administration increased. Despite the company's efforts, some Boer families had already trekked beyond the Great Fish River into Nguni country by 1770, and eight years later significant numbers of them were settled along the river's western banks. In 1778 the company's Cape Colony governor concluded the first treaty with two minor Xhosa chiefs. The treaty delimited the frontiers between the colony and Xhosa territory, but the Black Africans did not understand that the treaty was intended to limit westward expansion. Within a year the first serious conflict (the First Kaffir War) was sparked by Dutch efforts to expel Xhosa tribes from the area west of the Great Fish River. The conflict was limited largely to attacks by Boer commandos on Xhosa settlements and Xhosa raids on Boer farms. Both parties sought cattle. Although the battles were often bloody, assault on unarmed parties or the killing of women and children was the exception in the Kaffir wars. The second and third of these confrontations, in 1789 and 1799, were similar to the first one. In each case the authorities tried to turn back the flow of Xhosa who, in search of new pastures, had crossed a border established by colonial authorities without meaningful Xhosa agreement. In the fourth war, fought in 1812, the government for the first time made extensive use of regular military forces and established permanent military posts just inside the frontier. After the fifth war, in 1819, a neutral zone was established between the Great Fish and Keiskamma rivers. In order to strengthen the frontier, 4,000 British settlers were given farms along the west bank of the Great Fish River in 1820. Unions between Whites and Coloureds and between Whites and Xhosa occurred along the frontier, and a Cape Coloured settlement was established in the Kat River valley over the opposition of the Boers, who feared that the Coloureds might support the Xhosa. Missionaries had first entered Xhosa territory in 1799. By 1845 there were at least seven permanent stations of the London Missionary Society and the Scottish Presbyterian Church. The missionaries devised a Xhosa alphabet for translating the Scriptures and opened village schools. In 1841 a seminary was established at Lovedale, and Europeans and Black Africans were trained as teachers for the mission schools. The missionaries brought the Protestant work ethic to the territory. Even Lovedale's seminary students were required to perform daily manual labor in order to learn to stimulate the spread of modern agricultural techniques and to break down the Xhosa tradition that only women cultivated while men hunted, herded, or fought. The missionaries also created a market for modern goods that could be obtained only through the cultivation of cash crops or employment by Whites for cash wages. By 1828 the demand for laborers on Boer farms was strong enough to force the colonial government to lower the barrier to Xhosa entry into the colony under a system of labor passes. Entry of the British Concerned that their independent way of life might be restricted, the Boers began to demand a voice in the colony's government in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Annoyed at the government's failure to take vigorous action against the Bantu-speaking peoples blocking their expansion and seeking to ensure the availability of new land and cheap labor, the Boers established two short-lived republics (at Swellendam and Graaff-Reinet) in 1795, writing clauses into their constitutions allowing the virtual enslavement of all Khoi. Before the company could take action against the rebels, the government of the Prince of Orange in the Netherlands was replaced by a French-imposed republic that sided with France in the war against Britain. With the assent of the deposed prince, British forces occupied Dutch colonial possessions. From 1795 to 1803 the British assumed control of Cape Colony, ending 143 years of rule by the Dutch East India Company. After a brief return to Dutch control, the Cape passed again into British hands in 1806. Although the British quickly suppressed the newly proclaimed Boer republics, they took steps to conciliate the rebels by lifting the restrictions on trade, guaranteeing property rights, and allowing the Roman-Dutch legal system to continue in force. The Dutch colonists had few objections to the imposition of British control in any case. Their ties to the Netherlands had been weakened by their dislike for the Dutch East India Company, and a good portion of the colony's population was by origin French or German rather than Dutch. New colonial legislation, the Coloured Labour Ordinance of 1809, required that all Coloureds have a fixed place of residence, carry proof of employment, and obtain permits to change residence and jobs or to travel from one district to another. Although intended in part to end vagrancy and to prevent exploitation by requiring registered work contracts, this act heralded South Africa's pass laws that were later to become the most hated burden of the non-White populations. The Boers' friendship with the British was short-lived. In 1807 the importation of slaves into any part of the British Empire was forbidden, cutting off the supply to South Africa. Growing agitation for the elimination of slavery throughout the empire had been led by the abolitionist movements in Britain. The demand had been aimed primarily at the large slaveholdings in the British West Indies, but the Boers were aware that the British missionary societies in South Africa were siding with the Black Africans and were leading the demands for the improvement of the position of both slaves and other non-White workers. The Boers were particularly resentful of the new British magistrates' efforts to assure that employers give just treatment to Blacks and became wary of all other moves that they interpreted as equating non-Whites with Whites before the law. The "Black Court" circuit of 1813 heard charges brought by servants and slaves against their masters and, although most charges were not sustained by the court, Boers were offended by the fact that a servant's word was accepted in court at all. A crucial point in the deterioration of relations was reached in 1815. A Boer farmer, accused of mistreating a Khoi servant, refused to appear in court. A British officer with Khoi troops, who were sent to compel the farmer's attendance, were fired upon, and in the ensuing fight the Boer was killed. A number of his neighbors rose in revolt, and after their arrest five were hanged publicly at Slachter's Nek. The hanging of Whites and the shooting of a White by Khoi police-all over the issue of a Blacks charges-became a permanent irritant, and the story became a symbol of British oppression of the Boers. The Boers continued to be antagonized by the actions of the English-speaking missionaries. Partially as a result of agitation in London by the missionaries' supporters, the Coloured Labour Ordinance of 1809 was repealed by Ordinance 50 of 1828. The new ordinance clarified the right of the Coloureds to own land within the colony and granted them the right to move freely within the colony without the need for passes. The clauses of the vagrancy law that had allowed the Dutch to force Coloureds to work on their farms or else go to jail were also abolished. The abrogation of these clauses was a blow not only to Boer sensitivities but also to their economic position, as it ended the legal guarantees for the continued availability of cheap Coloured labor. The labor market was such, however, that many Coloured families continued to work for White masters under much the same terms. The emancipation of all slaves in the British Empire, which was proclaimed by Parliament in 1833, came as a great blow to the Boers. The last of the slaves were freed by December 1838, and their freedom before the law was assured by the Master and Servant Ordinance of 1841, which provided equal treatment for all servants without regard to color. The law, however, permitted a number of criminal penalties that were often strictly enforced against Blacks. The abolition of slavery brought financial ruin to a number of Cape farmers since most received only a small portion of their slaves' assessed value, but the great majority of Boers had not depended on slaves for their labor. Instead other British actions during the 1830s directly affected them. The Sixth Kaffir War erupted in 1834, and British forces assisted by Khoi troops had forced the Xhosa back across the Great Kei River for the first time. The British governor annexed all the land between the Great Fish and Great Kei rivers, opening a sizable portion of territory to farming by the expanding Boer population (see fig. 3). The British missionaries, however, protested to London against this seizure of Xhosa land, and the British cabinet forced the governor, Sir Benjamin D'Urban, to restore the land to the Black Africans. The blow to Boer hopes for new lands for their sons came when they were beginning to feel seriously the cultural and legal impact of British rule. English had become the medium of instruction in the free schools and the language of the courts. British criminal procedure had been superimposed on the earlier Roman-Dutch system, leaving the Boers at a disadvantage in the courts. English and Scottish influences were even beginning to be felt in the most central element of their life: the Dutch Reformed churches. Whatever the attitudes of the missionaries and British officials, however, English-speaking settlers on the frontier often had the same views as the Boers and gave them moral support in their complaints.