A Xhosa presence around the fringes of Bushmanland-Pramberg, the Zak River, and the Kareebergen was well established by the first decade of the 19th century, where they became interspersed with Baster and Boer graziers using these summer rainfall areas as trekveld. Some Xhosa were also settled on the Orange, around the later Prieska.54 Danster remained a key figure. We read of him exchanging ivory and cattle for firearms and ammunition between Boers and rebels at Griquatown, no doubt by means of the ‘Hartebeest-Zak’ passage across Bushmanland. He was also assisting Basters to flee the Colony to the banks of the Orange. The Xhosa, besides trading and raiding north of the Orange, were in conflict with the Bushmen and with colonists. The activities of these Xhosa were among the main causes of the establishment of the Beaufort district in 1818 and the extension of the border northward in 1824. The colonial authorities were sufficiently strengthened to disperse the most ‘unruly’ of the Zak River Xhosa. While these Xhosa were dispersed, Pramberg continued as a key trade entrepôt with trans-Orange settlements. It had some 400 residents between 1824 and 1855. Meanwhile Danster moved north-east to the valley of the Caledon where, by 1835, he had ‘about 200 or 300 Caffers under him and lives as an independent chief upon the territory of Moschush [Moshweshwe]’.55
In 1830 there was a new departure. Colonial officials decided to ‘give’ the land around the spring at Schietfontein – beyond the colonial border and on the southern fringe of Bushmanland – to those Xhosa dispersed around the colonial borders ‘as a permanent Residency with a view that as the Kaffers being then placed between the Bushmen and the Colonists they might be a check upon the conduct of the former and ultimately put a stop to their depredations upon the colony’.56 A captain, the aforementioned Claas Hendrick, was appointed subject to government control. The model, as Anderson suggests, was the Khoisan-based Kat River Settlement ‘buffer’ against the Xhosa on the eastern frontier. Once established, the settlement expanded rapidly: there were 620 inhabitants by 1847. Here also the Xhosa intermarried not only with Bushmen but with Basters. By about 1850 Pramberg and Schietfontein between them were occupied by 900 people, with 200 horses, 5 000 cattle, and 50 000 sheep and goats.57
From the 1840s, however, there were continuously intensified pressures towards dispossession of these two settlements. The ‘live and let live’ of the ‘Treaty system’ period of the colonial government was replaced, as on the eastern frontier, by intensified aggression. As on the eastern frontier, the driving force behind this in the north, as Anderson vividly documents, was the expansion of wool-farming. This displaced an economy in which – whether among Boers, Basters, or Xhosa – pastoralism was merely a subsistence base for sustaining the main activities of trading/hunting/raiding: the exchange of guns, ammunition, alcohol, and horses for cattle and ivory.58
Mid-century social relations
In 1847 Sir Harry Smith extended the colonial boundary to the Orange River, adding about 805 000 square kilometres to the Colony. Initially, the Clanwilliam and Beaufort districts were extended northward, and Bushmanland was included in the Colony – which brought the Xhosa at Pramberg and Prieska, Xhosa/ Basters at Schietfontein and the Basters at Zak River (Amandelboom) under colonial rule. In 1855 new magistracies of Calvinia, Fraserburg and Victoria (West) were established, with respective populations of 1 256 coloured and 1 173 white; 1 250 coloured and 1 250 white; 1 530 coloured and 1 470 white (Figure 1.1).59
Later (in 1880) a colonial official described the northern parts of this area,
from Prieska in the east to Pella in the west, a distance of about 250 miles. This tract is inhabited by Dutch farmers, Kafirs, Bastards and Bushmen… Until quite recently… large tracts have lain vacant as waste Crown lands thus being available for squatters of all nationalities. The Dutch farmers, as a rule, are nomadic there is hardly a house in the district. Wagons and tents easily moved about are used as residences… The climate is hot. Open permanent waters are very few. Wells of from twenty to fifty feet deep are numerous… After rain water lies for some time in vlies [sic] and kolks, and to these open waters the inhabitants flock to escape the intolerable irksomeness of having to draw daily from wells the water necessary for their stock…60
Figure 1.1: The Cape Colony with 1798, 1824 and 1848 boundaries.
The whole of the territory annexed by Smith became Crown Land, which could be disposed of by sale in freehold at public auction. The maximum permitted landholding was however only 6 000 acres (about 2 400 hectares) – in conditions where a viable pastoral farm required 20 000 acres (8 000 hectares) minimum. Manipulation of the law, and control of local government and of credit thenceforth allowed whites to get the upper hand in land acquisition, at the expense of poorer whites as well as Xhosa and Basters.61 As the special magistrate to the northern border put it later, ‘In this District they [Bastards] have always been the pioneers. Almost all the water places were discovered and opened up by them, but they have been pushed out and onwards by the advance of Dutch farmers until now there are not many farming on their own account, except quite near to the Orange River.’62
Rhenish missionaries settled at Amandelboom in 1845 and at Schietfontein in 1847, among Basters and Xhosa.63 In 1849, also, a Rhenish missionary established himself at Pella on the Orange.64 In 1855 700–1 100 Basters ‘scattered over a wide area’ were attending services at Amandelboom and Schietfontein. There were some 439 residents at Amandelboom and 500 Basters and some 810 Xhosa at Schietfontein.65 In addition a ‘ticket of occupation’ was granted by the colonial government to Basters at Loeriesfontein in 1860, where 58 Baster families were living on 10 000 morgen66 – though probably 14 years earlier Basters led by Dirk Vilander (‘Philander’, Figure 1.2) had departed from the area to north of the Orange River (discussed later in this chapter).
Pressures on Xhosa land intensified, particularly during the 1846–7 and post-1850 eastern Cape frontier war period, leading to a drift of Schietfontein Xhosa away to the Prieska area at the same time that Basters from Amandelboom, under pressure from white colonists, were moving to Schietfontein. Emergent wool farmers – prominent among them J.C. Molteno (who would become the first Cape Prime Minister in 1872) – secured new positions of power in consequence of representative government in 1853. Their pressures on poorer stock farmers led in turn to fiercer pressures on the Xhosa.67 In the 1850s the Pramberg Xhosa were evicted to Schietfontein (which was enlarged) on the decision of J.B. Auret, clerk to the chief commissioner of Beaufort (West). A thicket of competing land claims in Amandelboom was also adjudged by him and Basters lost out substantially. In 1874 the Rhenish mission abandoned the station, which contributed to its further decline.68
With the demise of Amandelboom, pressures began to intensify on Schietfontein. Baster land claims there – originally ‘ceded’ by the colonial authorities to the Xhosa – were ignored.69 In 1860 Schietfontein was renamed Harmsfontein and then, in 1874, Carnarvon (becoming the centre of the northernmost magistracy in the Cape Colony). The result, argues Anderson, was that within ten years the centre had become ‘a predominantly white village’.70 Increasingly stark choices were posed for the Xhosa and Baster inhabitants. Dispossession intensified pressures of proletarianisation: an urban ‘location’, for example, was established in Victoria West in 1857/1861.71
Between the censuses of 1856 and 1865 the white population of Clanwilliam, Namaqualand and Calvinia