A later (and fuller) version reads: ‘At about this period [1863] there was a considerable migration of Bastards northward across the Orange River... At Loeriesfontein, Amandelboom and De Tuin there were large and prosperous Bastard settlements, with their missionaries.’ With encroachment by European farmers the Basters
were content to seek fresh fields and so crossed the Orange River. With the permission of the Hottentots they settled down in the South-East portion of Great Namaqualand, in the territory of the ‘Afrikander’ Hottentots... The Vilander family appears to have been an influential one, for its head, Dirk, became a sort of ‘under Captain’ to Afrikander, presumably to represent the new element. Vilander’s father was a white man and his mother a slave and the farm Loeriesfontein, in the Calvinia district, is said to have been granted him by the Colonial Government. In the course of their stay at Blydeverwacht, the Bastards hunted northwards to this [Mier, or Rietfontein] and, finding the game plentiful and the country adapted for stock-raising, they settled down here about the year 1865.118 Only about a dozen families formed the first settlement here, but in small numbers it constantly received additions. A few years after Vilander had arrived here he received an urgent appeal from Afrikander to come to his assistance, as the Bondelzwarts Hottentots were meditating an attack on him. Vilander, however, sent wagons to fetch Afrikander and his followers and they too settled down here [i.e. at Rietfontein/Mier – or Haas, as the account by Upington has it]. Jacobus Africander still considered himself the Captain, but he had a feeling that his influence was waning as the prosperity of the Bastards increased and that he was being patronised. Rivalries and jealousies in the hunting veldt soon led to an open breach between himself and Vilander, whom he accused of plotting to supplant him.
Vilander was ordered to leave, and the next morning the Basters surprised and routed Afrikaner’s people.
Vilander, suspecting that Afrikander would seek for reinforcements from Namaqualand, with his people trekked east to the Bechuana chief Bareke, and settled down for a year at Heunings Vlei. Later he returned to Rietfontein. They found Afrikander and a few Hottentots living hereabouts, but no notice was taken of them... Afrikander... subsequently settled down at Narougas... Steps were taken on the return from Heuning Vlei to form some sort of Government, and a Raad or Council was nominated by the Captain to assist him.119
They implemented what they remembered of colonial law; burghers were expected to pay tribute according to their means; ‘true socialistic principles’ were followed; they sunk wells; European traders began to come, at first from Kuruman.
In 1874 Vilander asked for a missionary to be sent here, and the following year the Rev Mr Weber came to visit him... He found 50 souls at this place, and mentions visiting Vilander at Mier [i.e. Rietfontein] and other people at Schepkolk, but did not record the number he found there... it was not till 1885 that a missionary, Mr Pabst, of the Rhenish Mission Society was appointed. Divine service was, however, always conducted by the Captain or one of the older men.120
By 1885, Vilander’s territory ‘extended South as far as the farm Abeam, thence to the Bak River... from there North as far as the Nosop River and Eastwards as far as the Molopo River’.121
Supportive evidence that Vilander came from Loeriesfontein, and in the late 1840s, is found in evidence given in 1892 to an enquiry into the history of land rights there. Several witnesses stated that Loeriesfontein was originally a kraal of the Khoi tribal leader Ruyter Vilander, whose son was Dirk Vilander. Ruyter, it is said, gave over his rights to other Khoi and Basters intermarried with them when he and his following left for the Orange River.122
Another variant of the origin of the Vilanders (in an anonymous pamphlet in the UCT African Studies Library) states that
[under] the leadership of kaptyn Frederick Bok a group of followers left the Cape Peninsula in 1830 because they were unhappy with the Cape regime. Frederick Bok died on the road at Bak River, between Loeriesfontein and Kenhardt and leadership was assumed by Dirk Vilander. Dirk Vilander – part Malayan and part British – was born in Stellenbosch in 1807… They trekked slowly through Bushmanland and reached Kakamas… Further and further they travelled and reached the Molopo river… It went without saying that they looked for a place to settle that was full of wild game like the Nossop [river]. The area to the west of Twee Panne was decided on. That was in the year 1865.123
In 1840 – probably before Vilander could have left Loeriesfontein – the missionary Tindall visited the Afrikaners at Jerusalem and found Basters there. In 1853 he reported that ‘several families of Bastards, who had left the Afrikaners some years ago, had now again taken up their abode with them’.124 The Afrikaners, according to Tindall in 1855, ‘number about four hundred, including a number of Colonial Bastards or half castes, who have joined them’.125 So Vilander was not the first of the Basters to settle north of the Orange River, but the first to establish an autonomous state.
Notes
1N. Parsons, ‘Notes on the history of the Korana and their relationship with the Batlhaping’, in S. Swanepoel (ed.), Resistance in the northern Cape in the nineteenth century: history and commemoration (Kimberley: McGregor Museum, 2012), pp. 45–6.
2See generally, M. Legassick, ‘The Sotho-Tswana before 1800 AD’, in L. Thompson (ed.), African societies in Southern Africa (London: Heinemann, 1969); M. Legassick, The politics of a South African frontier: the Griqua, the Sotho-Tswana and the missionaries, 1780–1840 (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2010), ch. 1.
3A. Morris, Missing and murdered: a personal adventure in forensic anthropology (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2011), pp. 180–1. See also A. Morris, ‘The Einiqua: an analysis of the Kakamas skeletons’, in A.B. Smith (ed.), Einiqualand: studies of the Orange River frontier (Cape Town: UCT Press, 1995).
4Parsons, ‘Notes on the history’, p. 48. On Korana origins see also R. Moffat, CPP G1-1858 p. 6.
5Parsons, ‘Notes on the history’, pp. 48–51.
6Ibid., pp. 48, 50.
7Ibid., pp. 50–2.
8Parsons, ‘Notes on the history’, p. 49; Penn, ‘Orange River frontier zone’, pp. 38–42; Penn, Forgotten frontier, pp. 160–4.
9See also V. Allen, S. Mngqolo and S. Swanepoel, The struggle for liberation and freedom in the northern Cape (Kimberley: McGregor Museum, 2012), p. 17.
10Penn, Forgotten frontier, p. 81.
11Ibid., p. 3.
12Penn, ‘Orange River frontier zone’, pp. 29–31; Penn, Forgotten frontier, p. 85.
13Legassick, Politics of a South African frontier, p. 104.
14Penn, ‘Orange River frontier zone’, pp. 33, 46–7, 110.
15Legassick, Politics of a South African frontier, p. 47.
16R. Elphick and H. Giliomee (eds), The shaping of South African society, 1652–1820 (Cape Town: Longman, 1989), pp. 159–60, 202–3, 457–9.
17See Penn, The forgotten frontier, pp. 167–8; Legassick, Politics of a South African frontier, pp. 52–7.
18P.E. Raper and M. Boucher (eds), Robert Jacob Gordon: Cape travels, 1777–1786 ( Johannesburg: Brenthurst Press, 1988), Vol. 2, p. 295.
19Quoted in Legassick, Politics of a South African frontier, p. 47.
20C. Schroeder in CPP A8-1866, Report of the Select Committee appointed to consider and report on a