Notes
1Statistics South Africa, Mid-year population estimates 2014, Statistical release P0302, http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0302/P03022014.pdf; Regional economic growth, http://www.statssa.gov.za/economic_growth/16%20Regional%20estimates.pdf, accessed 15/10/2015.
2See M. Legassick, ‘The northern frontier to c.1840: the rise and decline of the Griqua people’, in R. Elphick and H. Giliomee (eds), The shaping of South African society (Cape Town: Maskew Miller, 1979), p. 358.
3J.H. Scott to Secretary for Native Affairs (SNA), 13/5/1880, Cape Parliamentary Papers (henceforth CPP) A30-1880, Papers connected with affairs on the northern border of the Cape of Good Hope, p. 133.
4Western Cape Archives and Records Service (henceforth CA) HA80-104, Sir W. Currie to R. Southey, 4/7/1869, quoted in R. Ross, ‘!Kora wars on the Orange River, 1830–1880’, Journal of African History 16, 4, 1975, p. 575. See also on the islands T. Strauss, War along the Orange (Centre for African Studies, UCT, Communications 1/1979), pp. 20–1; R. Moffat, CPP G1-1858, Report of a survey of a portion of the Orange river, eastward of Little Namaqualand, pp. 4–5; Scott, ‘Report of the Special Magistrate, Northern Border, CPP G20-1881, Blue Book on Native Affairs, pp. 84–5.
5Ethnic terminology is a nightmare in South Africa, with little consensus on what is ‘correct’. In this book, which is partly about ethnic identity, I generally refer to the Khoisan peoples who were previously resident in the northern Cape region – including the Korana (Kora), Nama, Bushmen and others – and their descendants as ‘brown’ people, and the descendants of Bantu peoples – including the Sotho, Tswana and Xhosa – as ‘black’. The term ‘Khoisan’ is an umbrella name sometimes used to refer to peoples belonging to Khoi and Bushman groups; it references the term ‘San’ which was coined by academics in the 1950s to replace ‘Bushman’, but was never widely recognised by the people themselves: see W.F. Ellis, ‘“Ons is Boesmans” (We are Bushmen): commentary on subject terminology from the southern Kalahari’ (Anthropology and Sociology Department seminar, UWC, 20/8/2014). See also note 7 below.
6M. Legassick, ‘Reflections on practising applied history in South Africa, 1994–2002: from skeletons to schools’, in H.E. Stolten (ed.), History making and present day politics: the meaning of collective memory in South Africa (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrika Institutet, 2006).
7I have used the term ‘Bushman’ in this book to emphasise the ‘othering’ and the dehumanisation that was involved in the period of which I am writing. ‘[The] terms “Bushman” and “forager” lump together more than a dozen living southern African peoples – plus several others who have disappeared under colonial pressures and introduced disease – who have distinct languages and traditions and whose economies cover the entire spectrum of indigenous forms from extensive foraging to intensive agropastoralism. They are imposed category terms that mark persons as belonging to social entities that nowhere exist... the term, and category, “Bushman”... [is a] colonial construct... created to control subjugated peoples in manageable, depoliticised, arbitrarily bounded enclaves of homogeneity in a previously flourishing landscape of political-social diversity’: E. Wilmsen, ‘Decolonising the mind: steps towards cleansing the Bushman stain from Southern African history’, in P. Skotnes (ed.), Miscast: negotiating the presence of the Bushmen (Cape Town: UCT Press, 1996), p. 188.
8F.C. Metrowich, Scotty Smith: South Africa’s Robin Hood (Cape Town: Books of Africa, 1962).
9M. Legassick and C. Rassool, Skeletons in the cupboard: South African museums and the trade in human remains (Cape Town: South African Museum and Kimberley: McGregor Museum, 2000).
10See ‘Speech by President Jacob Zuma on the occasion of the reburial of Mr and Mrs Klaas and Trooi Pienaar at Kuruman, Northern Cape Province’, 12/8/2012,
http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/pebble.asp?relid=6588, accessed October 2015.
11J. Strauss, ‘Die veldslag van Naroegas’, Kronos, 21, 1994, pp. 16–31.
12D. Reitz, Commando: a Boer journal of the Boer War (London: Faber & Faber, 1929).
13N. Alexander, ‘Jakob Marengo and Namibian history’, Social Dynamics, 7, 1, 1981, pp. 1–7.
14See N. Penn, ‘The Orange River frontier zone’, in A.B. Smith (ed.), Einiqualand: studies of the Orange River frontier (Cape Town: UCT Press, 1995), pp. 38–42; N. Penn, The forgotten frontier: colonist and Khoisan on the Cape’s northern frontier in the 18th century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), pp. 160–164.
CHAPTER 1
THE PREHISTORY OF GORDONIA
The Orange River valley must have acted as a magnet, drawing people to its banks from the earliest times. Its first occupants were hunter-gatherers (presumably ancestors of the Bushmen), who were supplemented from about 500 AD by (Khoi) pastoralists who dispersed east and west along the Orange River – from where many migrated to what are now the Western and Eastern Cape provinces some five hundred years later.1 Those pastoralists that remained along the Orange included those becoming Nama (on the lower reaches towards the coast – where the Great Nama eventually turned north and the Little Nama south) and those becoming Einiqua (on the middle reaches around the later settlement of Upington). In the late 18th century, at least, 100 kilometres of river upstream from the later settlement of Pella, land inhabited only by Bushmen, separated Nama from Einiqua. To the north-east of these middle reaches, towards the better watered Highveld, could be found Sotho-Tswana peoples. Southernmost among them was the Barolong kingdom which grew strong after 1600, trading as far as Delagoa Bay.2 Skeletal remains of graves on the Orange River show ‘evidence of gene flows between local Khoesan and the neighbouring black African peoples… a dynamic population trading and mixing generally with the Tswana peoples beyond the Orange River’.3
Around the 1690s some of the Khoi who had gone to the western Cape region (the ‘Great Korana’), now called the Gorachoqua, returned to the Orange as the Left-Hand Korana, and, it is said, destroyed the cordiality which had existed between the Orange River Khoi and the Bushmen. In a series of wars they established themselves eastward up to the surrounds of the present-day Kimberley.4 Fifty years later other Gorachoqua, who became known as the Right-Hand Korana or Kora, led by the Taaibosch chiefdom, also returned to the Orange (via an intermediate period of settlement in the Sneeuwberg) and settled at the later Griquatown, provoking the wrath of the Barolong king Tau. They brought with them trade links with the western Cape.5
With the return of these Korana from the western Cape, some of the Orange River Khoi of the eastern and the middle river became intermingled with or renamed themselves ‘Korana’, also known as ‘Little Korana’. Around the same time, towards the end of the 18th century, the ‘Batlhaping’ – the name was originally a term of Barolong disparagement applied indiscriminately to fish-eaters – acquired a common identity under the unifying rule of a member of a Barolong sub-dynasty, Molehabangwe, who married a Korana woman.6 In defence against the Barolong, a close alliance developed between the Tlhaping and the Right-Hand (Taaibosch) Korana. Tau, the Barolong king, was killed in battle and the combined Korana and Tlhaping settled at Nokaneng, at the south end of the Langeberg.7
This took place at about the time of the first European visits to the middle Orange that provided written accounts, by H.H. Wikar in 1778–9 and Robert Gordon in 1779. They were guided by brown people. According to Wikar and Gordon, the most westerly of the sub-divisions of the ‘Einaqua’ were the ‘Namnykoa’, divided into three homesteads, living just above the Aughrabies Falls, with 40 huts. Higher up were the Kaukoa (also known as Kauk Eijs, Cutting Kraal, or Snijersvolk) on the