Hidden Histories of Gordonia. Martin Legassick

nearly quadrupled.⁷² By the late 1850s coloureds from Amandelboom and Schietfontein were moving north to Pella and De Tuin, and Xhosa were moving to the Prieska area.⁷³ Xhosa and Baster could also choose to occupy Bushmanland. In the Victoria West district alone, there were two million morgen of Crown land as yet unsurveyed. Moreover, as (now) ‘colonial citizens’‚ Xhosa had formally as much ‘equal rights’ as Baster or Boer to ‘squat’ on this land.⁷⁴ The result was an intensified and more bloody struggle for occupation, directed against the Bushmen in the first instance – but also between Basters, Xhosa, Boers moving northward and Korana and others in the Orange River valley claiming land to the south.⁷⁵ Moreover, behind this, the real claims to the land were also being fought out ‘in law’ to the benefit of wool farmers. Increasingly, as a petition of co1oureds expressed it in 1862, the lands of Victoria West were ‘simply sheep runs for the benefit of the few’.⁷⁶

      Some information on habitation of the area between these mission stations in the Kareebergen and the Orange River was obtained by Robert Moffat Jr, government surveyor, who in 1854–5 was the first white to travel from Colesberg to Steinkopf along a route about 30 kilometres north of the old colonial boundary. This westward route, he reported, was ‘so as to keep the line of the outermost squatters’.⁷⁷ In 1856 he returned from Gams to Kuruman along the Orange River – thus skirting the centre regions of ‘Bushmanland’ because of the dangers of attack by Bushmen.⁷⁸ At Jackal Water he found ‘five or six [Baster] huts and as many waggons. One of the Bastards seemed comparatively wealthy and the rest hungry relatives and attendants.’ At Jonker Water, a saltpan, he reported, ‘[two] Bastards appear to be doing their best to cultivate the place and seemed anxious for information regarding the future disposal of Crown lands, as they had fears of the Boers claiming this or applying for it’. The nearest white farm was 48 kilometres to the south-east. At Vries Kol, some 64 kilometres north of Schietfontein, a Baster named Witboy was living. At Ganna Pan, north of the ‘outer Dutch farms’ there was shallow water where there were a few Basters and a Swede named Petersen.⁷⁹ At Krom Vley was a Boer named Steenkamp with a Baster wife, living in a semi-spherical hut. Moffat was told of 20 or more Europeans in similar circumstances along the border. At Visters Kloof were some Basters with 2 000–3 000 sheep or goats, also living in such huts. At Zout Rivier, 72 kilometres north-north-east of Amandelboom, Basters had dug a watercourse and hoped to purchase the ground from the government. ‘Many lay places and corn farms of groups of Bastards’ existed between here and Amandelboom.⁸⁰ At Twee Rivier, the junction of the Fish and Zak Rivers, Moffat ‘found several Bastards in charge of numerous flocks and herds, and troops of horses belonging to Boers of the Roggeveld’. Melkboschfontein was the home of a Dutch farmer named Jous, with a Baster wife, whom he believed ‘has been here some years’. Some 56 kilometres north of the Hantam he found some Boers with wagons and semi-spherical huts. At Kaptyn’s Kraal there were a few Basters from Loeriesfontein, cultivating gardens. Lospers Plaats was ‘a considerable lay place of the Bastards’ with a fountain, from where a road led to Pella and the Kamiesberg. Alwyn Fontein and Gamiep were further lay places for Boers and Basters. A Hollander named Hollenbach had been at Gams for 15 years, and a Baster named Losper for 18 years (that is, since 1836). Finally, at Pella Moffat encountered the missionary the Reverend Schroeder, together with a Frenchman named Gabriel, and Basters.⁸¹

      The genocidal extermination which took place in Bushmanland in the 1850s and 1860s after the extension of the colonial boundary to the Orange River was first exposed by Louis Anthing, resident magistrate of the recently created magistracy of Namaqualand. In 1862 he reported to government that ‘the systematic destruction of a race of men’ was taking place ‘as if it were a necessary transaction in the business of colonial life’. The initial evidence pointed to Baster culpability, but it emerged that the main perpetrators were white farmers from the Bokkeveld, Hantam, and Roggeveld areas.⁸² There was strong resistance from the Bushmen, with the theft of colonists’ cattle because their means of subsistence were being destroyed. Though Anthing brought Bushmen to Cape Town to report on the situation, the government did nothing. Indeed the press dismissed Anthing’s mission as a ‘wild goose chase’. Anthing was transferred to Cradock and resigned from colonial service in 1866.⁸³ (For the subsequent fate of Bushmen in Gordonia and Bushmanland see chapter 4.)

      The population of the Orange River valley was being augmented at this time by the return of Korana from the Orange Free State. Thus in 1859–62 the Springbokke were driven downstream from the Orange Free State.⁸⁴ Equally white farmers, with resistance well-nigh eliminated, were arriving from the south. In 1859 ‘trekboers began to advance on the Hartebeest, but only in times of drought, after which time they returned to Calvinia and Hantam. By 1863 there were a fair number of Khoi/Coloureds, Xhosa and San residing in that [Hartebeest] area and by 1866 there were more than two hundred families living there’.⁸⁵ By 1862 white colonists, it was said, ‘were congregating on the banks of the Orange in considerable numbers’.⁸⁶ Yet in 1869 it was reported that ‘[the] northern frontier or boundary of the disturbed districts, taken from Prieska to Pella is in extent, if not quite, 400 miles, and the belt of country adjoining it for a 150 miles southward… is entirely uninhabited except by a few wandering half-starved Bushmen, and occasionally by Korana squatters and a few traders’.⁸⁷ By ten years later the land within the district of Calvinia ‘on and about’ the colonial boundary ‘extending from Onseep to Rhenosterkop’ had been surveyed into farms, with all of them along the river bank, and there were plans to survey other parts of the area, then leased to both whites and Basters.⁸⁸

      As a missionary put it, ‘[the] Boers followed the Bastards into Bushmanland’. They ‘drove their cattle into the free grazing land in order to spare the grass on the lands they had leased, sat down at the springs which the Bastards had opened up, brought their sick cattle among those of the Bastards, followed them with their immense herds whithersoever they might retreat, in short pestered them in every conceivable manner in order to drive them forth from the neighbourhood’.⁸⁹ As the later special magistrate on the northern border put it, ‘[there] is no doubt that some of the Dutch farmers, who as a class cannot bear to see a coloured man in any other capacity than that of a servant, tried by every means in their power to get the law so applied as to oust these people [the Basters] and thus to obtain individual enjoyment of the pasturage which the coloured people’s wells had made available’.⁹⁰

      At this time De Tuin (in Bushmanland), 290 kilometres north-east of Loeriesfontein and some 100 kilometres south of the Orange River, was permanently occupied by Basters, together with Xhosa, Korana and Bushmen. A missionary had arrived in 1863. In 1866 200 families (1 200–1 500 people) lived there – 50–70 families on the station itself with 50 000 sheep and goats and 2 000 head of cattle. A wealthy six families had as many as 60 head of cattle and 1 200 sheep. But most had only 10–20 sheep. Most were poor, living ‘[by] hunting and then they have some cows and goats milk; they have plenty of springboks there’. There were about 50 families ‘of European blood’, some also poor. By 1866, however, white colonists had begun seriously to encroach on these grazing lands. The inhabitants asked government for a tract of about 10 250 square kilometres for which they were prepared to pay £200 a year. Their missionary reported that they couldn’t get work among the Boers, who preferred cheaper Bushmen and objected to feeding large families of Basters. The government refused, upon which 90 heads of families, mainly Basters‚ left for north of the Orange River where they eventually settled in Rehoboth in present-day Namibia.⁹¹

       The Korana wars of 1868–9 and 1879–80

      In the 1860s Olyvenhout’s Drift (to become Upington) – the principal crossing-point of the middle Orange) – was the headquarters of the Katse Korana, whose chief was Klaas Lucas (or ‘Kouriep’). He was the only Korana chief to give protection to white colonists settled within his jurisdiction. Immediately down-river from him were a number of other Korana groupings, extending to that led by Cupido Pofadder at Kakamas, who was, like Lucas, considered an ‘ally’ of the colonial government. The pressures here were intensifying. White encroachment, pushing brown and black northward, added to overpopulation of the middle Orange and heightened Korana sensibilities