PREFACE
This book is a series of essays on the 19th- and 20th-century history of what was at the time called Gordonia (now essentially the Z.W. Mgcawu district of the Northern Cape Province, together with parts of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park). The region surrounding Gordonia – the northern part of this province – though a large land area, is marginal in South Africa. Some reports on this region estimate it as containing only 2.2 per cent of South Africa’s population in 2014, and the lowest growth rate in the country of 2.2 per cent in 2011.1
Gordonia is a part of central Transorangia, which may be defined as ‘the region to the north of the middle Orange River mainly comprising Griqualand West and what was once called British Bechuanaland’. Gordonia proper lies north of the Orange, between Groblershoop and the Aughrabies Falls. To its west is Namaqualand – ‘the mountainous and rugged granite terrain along the escarpment south of the lower Orange… [comprising] Little Namaqualand; the area extending from the Orange River to Rehoboth in the north and from the great escarpment to the Kalahari sands… [comprising] Great Namaqualand’.2 To the south of Gordonia is Bushmanland, which lies to the east of Little Namaqualand and shades away to the west into the Great Karoo. The Orange River cuts its way between the arid semi-desert of Gordonia to the north and Bushmanland to the south. The river valley is an elongated fertile oasis, the only historical source of permanent water and excellent grazing pasture, with rainfall progressively lessening to the river’s mouth. Between Upington and the Aughrabies Falls the valley widens out (variably between one and 11 kilometres wide) into an 80-kilometre long chain of islands, big and small.
From late October until May, when summer rains fall, the Orange River is generally in flood, though for the remainder of the year its bed is dry. When the river is in flood, the islands are ‘intersected by innumerable streams, almost all unfordable, and many of them swift as mill races’.3 Leading a military expedition against the Kora on the islands in 1869, Sir Walter Currie commented that he ‘used to think the Fish River bush [on the eastern Cape frontier] a stronghold, but it stands nowhere in comparison with this water jungle’.4 But from areas of indigenous resistance against the expansion of colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries, the islands became the fertile beneficiaries of irrigation, which became the lifeblood of Upington and of Gordonia for the whole of the 20th century.
As the present name of the district indicates, there is a substantial Xhosa-speaking presence in Gordonia, and Xhosa have been present in the area since the late 18th century. However the distinctive feature of the area was its colonisation by Basters in the late 19th century. The present brown population comprises descendants of these, together with other previously resident Khoisan peoples – including the Korana, Nama, San and others.5
Driving from Johannesburg to Cape Town in the early 1990s, soon after my return to South Africa from exile, I passed through Upington. I was giving a lift to a friend from Khayelitsha who lived in Paballelo, the ‘Xhosa location’ in the town. Up to the time of my visit, I had known of Upington only in connection with the ‘Upington 26’, the people collectively charged with the killing of a municipal policeman in Paballelo in 1985. Now I became intrigued with this area, with the fertile irrigated lands along the Orange River surrounded by semi-desert to the south and north. When I returned to Cape Town I did a library search on what was written about the area, and discovered virtually nothing – and what there was was about the whites.
In July 1993 I made the first of a number of field trips to the area. These essays are the product of those field trips in which I conducted (with assistance from colleagues mentioned in the notes) many oral interviews, and of collateral archival research. They present aspects of a relatively unknown ‘brown’ and ‘black’ history of the area, and are intended to emphasise the lives of ordinary people.
Originally I had intended to write a full local history of Gordonia from the time of its settlement by Basters in the 1870s up to the present. This has proved too much to accomplish. Instead I have used a variety of methodologies to approach the various topics – methodologies influenced by my post-modern and post-colonial erstwhile colleagues in the University of the Western Cape (UWC) History Department as well as by their concern with public history and heritage. I am grateful for their inspiration. Though this was not originally intended, these essays have also turned out to be in part an exercise in ‘applied history’, that is to say, historical writing with a direct application to people’s lives in the present.6 Applied history looks for transformation in the present on the basis of evidence from the past. In outlining the essays below, I draw attention to their applied effects. Yet still much remains to be done to overcome the injustices of the past.
The first two chapters provide a background to the colonial occupation of Gordonia, tracing the indigenous history of the area as well as the northward movement of Basters and whites from the western Cape through Bushmanland to the Orange River, the establishment of the Baster settlement in Gordonia in 1880 and its subsequent decline.
The third chapter focuses in on Abraham and Elizabeth September, a true ‘pioneering’ Baster family in Gordonia. Abraham, formerly a slave, was a member of the Baster settlement. He was the first person to lead out water from the Orange River for irrigation purposes. This was the start of the Upington canal, which