The fourth chapter is a reminder of some of the previous inhabitants of the area, the so-called ‘Bushmen’.7 Together with Korana, they were the main inhabitants of Gordonia prior to its settlement by Basters. From genocidal extermination, policy towards the Bushmen from the mid-19th century shifted to their ‘preservation’ – sometimes, as will be seen, by the most inhuman means. The essay deals with representations of them – opinions and consequent behaviour towards and treatment of them – between 1880 and 1900 in Gordonia. At the start of this period the local magistrate ( John Scott, not to be confused with the notorious Upington inhabitant ‘Scotty’ Smith8) sent some, guilty of cattle theft, to Robben Island in the hope that they would be studied by the German linguist William Bleek. By the middle of the period they were being dispatched to Europe to be exhibited in public. The subsequent fate of some is described in the fifth chapter. The idea of the ‘representation’ of Bushmen emphasises that the image of these people was created by colonialism.
The fifth chapter concerns the results of research by myself and Ciraj Rassool on the illegal trade in Bushmen soon after the turn of the 20th century, published by the South African and McGregor Museums in 2000 as Skeletons in the cupboard: South African museums and the trade in human remains.9 Recently buried bodies of Bushmen were dug up and the flesh boiled off the bones, so that their skeletons could be displayed in local and overseas museums as a ‘disappearing race’, and their skulls measured for purposes of racial research. One consequence of our research has been the repatriation of the remains of Trooi and Klaas Pienaar from the Natural History Museum in Vienna and their reburial, presided over by President Jacob Zuma, in Kuruman in August 2012 – a striking example of applied history.10
The sixth and eighth chapters take as their centre point the area of Riemvasmaak on the South African-Namibian border and trace the history of its occupation from the late 1700s. The first main protagonists are the (brown) Afrikaner family, rebels from further south, a branch of which built a state which dominated central South West Africa in the mid-19th century. Later in the century the family rebelled again, on two occasions, against the Cape Colony. The second main protagonist is Jacob Marengo, a mixed Nama-Herero leader of the revolt against German rule in South West Africa in 1903–7. He was captured in Riemvasmaak by the British in 1906 and imprisoned in Tokai, Cape Town. When he was released in 1907 he once again made for Riemvasmaak, before being killed by a combined German and British patrol in the middle of the Gordonia desert.
The seventh chapter concerns the battle of Naroegas during the South African War of 1899–1902, when a patrol of Northern Border Scouts, largely Baster in composition, inflicted a major defeat on a Boer commando at a spot just off the present road between Keimoes (on the Orange) and Kenhardt (in Bushmanland). The rediscovery of this battle by means of oral history was the work of a local historian, Jesse Strauss. My own work on this subject supplemented his article published in Kronos.11 These three chapters as yet have acquired no applied effects!
The ninth chapter is concerned with the (rural) racial segregation of Gordonia by the South African government in the course of the 1920s, when as a result of a petition by descendants of the original Baster inhabitants demanding the restitution of their land, two small pieces of Gordonia were turned into ‘reserves’ for ‘coloureds’. One of these was a group of islands on the Orange River, which became known as Ecksteenskuil. The second was territory in northern Gordonia around a Rhenish mission station at Rietfontein, known as Mier. In roughly the same period Riemvasmaak also became a ‘native reserve’. I believe this essay, as ‘applied history’, has assisted land claimants in Gordonia.
The tenth chapter is a complementary study of the (urban) racial segregation of the town of Upington. The origins of Keidebees and Blikkies ‘locations’ in the town lie in the late 19th century. From the start they were inhabited by ‘mixed’ populations, including Korana, Basters and Xhosa. There was a history of attempts at removal of them right through the 20th century. The segregated ‘native location’ of Paballelo was envisaged from the 1940s, and actually established at the end of the 1950s. From the mid-1960s the area which was Keidebees location has been barren land (like District Six in Cape Town) as people were removed from it, ‘natives’ to Paballelo and ‘coloureds’ to Blikkies. Blikkies was also turned into a ‘pure coloured’ area by the removal from it of ‘natives’. The ‘applied’ aspect of this essay consists in the fact that it was produced to verify claims for restitution of those evicted from the locations, which resulted in substantial financial compensation.
The final chapter is the autobiography of an old-time black resident of Upington, Alfred Gubula, as related to me and tape-recorded in the course of several interviews. He arrived there from the eastern Cape in the 1950s and lived in Paballelo from the time of its establishment. He has a continuous history of political activity from the 1950s. His son and two nephews were among the Upington 26, and he was prominent in organising the defence of the 26. He was president of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in the northern Cape from 1989 to 1991.
The essays in this collection are united by the themes of dispossession of land (from colonial times to the imposition of the Group Areas Act) and resistance to it, whether in the form of the stock-thieving resistance of the Bushmen, the wars of the brown Afrikaners, Marengo and the Border Scouts during the South African War, the resistance through official channels of the Basters, or the modern protest of the Upington 26. Another theme which emerged is ‘hidden history’. This is perhaps most extreme in the case of the battle of Naroegas, where bringing the story to the surface was an emotional experience, bringing tears in some cases. Apart from Deneys Reitz’s partial account, the scope of the war in the northern Cape is not well known and chapter 7 brings the facts to the surface.12
There are other examples. The Pienaars (chapter 5) had disappeared into unnamed remains. The contribution of Abraham September (and Klaas Bok) to the initiation of irrigation from the Orange River was suppressed (chapters 2 and 3). And the dispossession of Baster land by fraud was disguised as loss through debt and drink (chapter 2). Even, as Neville Alexander has pointed out, the role of Jacob Marengo in the 1903–6 Herero-Bondelswarts revolt was relatively neglected (chapter 8).13 Much remains to be done in recovering