Near Kheis (opposite the present Groblershoop) were the Kouringeis (Little Korana, Hoogstanders or Proud People). They had three homesteads, one of them with some 49 huts. Like the Gyzikoa, some were of part-Tswana descent. The first of the Korana proper lived higher on the river: the Hoeking Eis (Scorpion Kraal), a branch of the Great Korana, at present-day Koegasbrug below Prieska, with about 20 huts. Above them were the Nokukeis. Most were trading with Tswana peoples. Further Korana groups, Wikar and Gordon were told, lived to the east, both north and south of the Orange, perhaps as far as the Zeekoei River. This included the Taaibosch chiefdom, together with Tlhaping, at Nokaneng, and the Left-Hand Korana near present-day Pniel and Barkly West.8
Over the ensuing decades, there was a dramatic transformation in the lifestyles and occupancy of this area. As a result of pressures from the south, the relative peace and stability were replaced by an era of violent insecurity.
Oorlams, Basters and whites
Nigel Penn’s book, The forgotten frontier: colonist and Khoisan on the Cape’s northern frontier in the 18th century, tells the story of colonial expansion northward through the 18th century, which reduced most of the indigenous population to serfs for white landowners when they were not simply exterminated.9 From after 1739, he shows, colonial frontierspeople moved northward and eastward to encompass ten times the area by 1770.10 The expansion continued thereafter. The colonial boundaries declared in 1798, 1805 and 1824 dipped sharply from the coast to the middle Roggeveld, reflecting, if imperfectly, the limits of colonial settlement at these points in time. In 1808 the northern part of Stellenbosch district was declared the new magistracy of Tulbagh, and in 1822 the seat of the magistracy was moved to Worcester; in 1837 Clanwilliam was split off as a separate magistracy. In 1818 the magistracy of Beaufort (later Beaufort West) was declared to the east of the Tulbagh/Worcester/Clanwilliam area. The territory east of Namaqualand and north-east of the 1798/1824 boundaries – from the Hantam, Roggeveld and Nieuweveld in the south, up to the Orange River in the north – became known as ‘Bushmanland’.
There were some of the indigenous population who escaped the fate of enserfdom or extermination. Moreover in the north the initially predominant independent frontierspeople were brown – identifying themselves as Basters or Oorlams (or, later, Griqua). In comparison, white colonisation of the north was sparse. For example, the white population of Stellenbosch district, stretching northward from the western Cape, was 7 256 in 1798, most of them concentrated around the town itself.11 White occupancy of Namaqualand started from the 1740s though the first loan farms were only registered from 1750 – by which time most white settlement had been diverted eastward.12 White occupation of the Hantam (around present-day Calvinia) took place first in 1750 and by the early 1780s some of the richest agricultural families in the Cape had loan farms in this area.13 By 1777 farms were registered to white owners north of the Koperberge and by 1776 on the Orange River around the later Pella.14
Though Basters, the progeny of colonist-Khoi intercourse, had their origin in the 17th century the term only appears to have become common in the mid-18th century.15 Eighteenth-century Cape society, based on enslavement of blacks, was not a society of equals but of gradations of status along lines of wealth, gender, links with Europe, religion and ethnicity/colour.16 A ‘Baster’ was different from a ‘Dutchman’ and the distinction became more pronounced through the century. The best life-chance for Basters, of course, was to become regarded as colonists themselves, registered landowners, members of the Christian church – to ‘pass as white’ in the words of more recent times. Many succeeded in this – a better fate than most people of colour were enduring.
By the mid-18th century Basters were well established in the Hantam and in Namaqualand, with families moving to these areas from further south.17 In Namaqualand in the 1770s Gordon remarked how the majority of white farmers settled along the Groene River ‘have a Hottentot woman or two to whom, so I have heard, they are married in their fashion’.18 The offspring of such marriages were likely, at the least, to become trusted servants and overseers, and also aspire to stock-farming in their own right. As Lichtenstein wrote, ‘At the death of one of these heads of [colonist] families, his servant [in whose veins Christian blood often flowed] would often assume his name and not infrequently sought himself to some little spot, to which he retired with all belonging to him, and gained a subsistence for himself and his family by the breeding of cattle.’19 However the term Baster became increasingly fluid. In 1866, of the inhabitants of De Tuin (in the middle of Bushmanland) it was said that ‘the common name given to them is Bastards, although they may be Hottentots… the Hottentots and Kafirs are all called Bastards there’. Even Bushmen ‘themselves become Bastards in a few years’.20 In 1880 the Basters were described as
a separate class, intermarrying among themselves. They vary from the thoroughly respectable, slightly coloured farmer, hardly distinguishable in anything from the Dutch Boer down to the poor shiftless, almost Hottentot, living principally on game, and hardly understanding Dutch. The great majority, however, are fairly civilised, can read and write a little, and are professing Christians. They possess generally a wagon, a tent, and sufficient stock to live on, eating principally meat and milk.21
Among early Baster areas of settlement on the frontier were Loeriesfontein (just inside the colonial boundary of 1798),22 the Hantam area,23 the Zak River (at what in 1845 was to become Amandelboom),24 and Namaqualand. As it was put later, ‘[the] Bastards in Gordonia came originally from the Roggeveld and Nieuwveldt’.25 De Tuin, to become a settlement site in Bushmanland in the 1860s, was claimed to have been occupied by Basters as trekveld ‘from time immemorial’. There was ‘not constant occupation of one spot, but within the limits of that tract where they have always moved about… they have always lived in the grass veld at Bushmanland but they have sometimes gone nearer to the direction of Hantam and Bokkeveld’.26
The discourse of the day recognised other categories of brown people. ‘Bastard-Hottentots’ were strictly the progeny of slave-Khoi intercourse – though there was some blurring with the term ‘Bastard’. ‘Oorlams’, a term originating with the colonised, were ‘Hottentots who come from the upper country and are born and bred with the farmers, most of whom understand and speak the low Dutch language’.27 In other words, Oorlams were Khoi who while in service with colonial masters acquired not merely Dutch but Western clothes, and skills in firearms, horse-riding, etc. – and who were now seeking an existence outside colonial society. Penn locates the origin of Oorlams (proto-Oorlams, or Creole people as he puts it) in the Drakenstein mountains in the early 18th century.28
The pressures on brown frontierspeople were twofold. On the one hand, there was the aspiration to upward mobility and acceptance by colonial society. On the other hand, as the reality of colour differentiation increased, including legislative measures, there was a quest for independence which pushed them into closer relations with less acculturated indigenous resisters. As a missionary put it in 1866, when asked why Basters lived in the dry lands of the interior, ‘[they] would not know where to go to: they have always lived on the frontier of the [white] farmers’.29
The Oorlam and Griqua revolutions, 1780–1840
From the latter part of the 18th century the area north and south of the Orange River along almost its whole length became a frontier zone – a zone of mutual acculturation in which there was no single source of legitimate authority.30 While these conditions may have prevailed also in earlier times, the distinctive feature of this frontier zone was that it was generated by colonisation. In this context ‘acculturation’ involved the commoditisation of social relations, as trade with Europeans supplemented subsistence existence. It also involved, from 1800, the arrival of European missionaries, who established themselves with communities in an attempt to convert them to ‘civilised’ values and modes of existence,