Several threatening black arrows thrust east and north from the Zulu kingdom. Others, even more menacing, which push south-west from the highveld are countered by a single grey counterthrust of Voortrekker movement. Cobbing and Wright ask us to reverse the direction of most of the arrows. A new map drawn to their specifications would show the Great Trek as only the latest in a series of invasive forces.
A second obvious step is to challenge the enduring view of the trekkers as pre-capitalist, eighteenth-century white nomads in flight from modernising British rule. Five decades have passed since the work of P. J. van der Merwe exposed the fallacy of identifying the trekboer with the Voortrekker, but still the stereotype lives on.36
Building on Van der Merwe's work, Timothy Keegan has, in a few short but suggestive paragraphs at the beginning of a recent article, taken an important step toward resituating the Voortrekkers in the capitalist economy of the eastern Cape.37
Neumark may have been wrong to single out wool production as the contribution of the Voortrekker in carrying commodity production into the interior. But why should the opposite therefore be assumed to be true – that the trekkers had no intentions other than to establish themselves as self-sufficient, precapitalist agriculturists?
More needs to be done to relate the Voortrekkers to the frontiersmen who went ahead of them – not just pioneers in trans-Orangia, but also the Griqua. Legassick and Robert Ross, in complementary studies, have shown how the Griqua shifted among different kinds of economic activities and how their willingness to consider land as a commodity gradually undermined their position in Griqualand West.38
In Cobbing's version of the mfecane, the Griqua are just one of several fearsome advance guards of the world economy. We should perhaps take Hendrik Potgieter precisely at his word when he tells Adam Kok, 'We are emigrants together with you . . . who together with you dwell in the same strange land and we desire to be regarded as neither more nor less than your fellow-emigrants, inhabitants of the country, enjoying the same privileges with you.'39
Taken literally, this envisaged a life in which hunting for game, cattle and people would be regular events.
To what extent slaving as well as slave-holding were on the agenda of individual Voortrekkers is hard to tell. We have the testimony of J.N. Boshof in 1838 that 'it was the intention at first to proceed far into the interior, with the view to settle in the vicinity of Delagoa Bay, for the purpose of carrying on a trade with the inhabitants of that settlement' .40
The harrowing journey of the Tregardt party revealed the hazards of that enterprise, but why were the allegedly pre-capitalist Voortrekkers making for a Portuguese port? The project sometimes attributed to them of securing access to the sea for Paul Kruger' s future republic is ridiculously anachronistic and contradicts the idea that they only wanted to be alone in their wilderness. If participation in the east African slave and slaving economy was on their agenda, they had, of course, to shut up about it. Nothing would be more likely to send the furies of Exeter Hall chasing after them. Naturally all such intentions are denied in Piet Retief's celebrated manifesto which has so often been scoured for meaning. However, scholars who have recently looked at what was done in the Zoutpansberg after the Trek have had little trouble in confirming that hunting for game and children went hand in hand.41
Retief's apologia has been too often taken at face value. As Du Toit and Giliomee point out, it needs to be read against the grain.42 Retief notoriously led the trekkers from behind, joining up in 1837. He had the benefit of judging the reaction of public opinion in Britain and at the Cape when he took up his pen to write to the Graham's Town Journal. The text was taken with more than a grain of salt by the Commercial Advertiser, who smiled at the idea that the 'Farmers have been induced to withdraw from under a settled Christian Government, to seek a "quiet life" among the gentle kings of central Africa.'43
In view of Retief's own background, however, activities other than slaving were likely to have been foremost in his mind. Like Louis Tregardt and other Voortrekker leaders, he was anything but a self-sufficient trekboer. He was a businessman, a government contractor of dubious integrity and a land speculator.44
His experience with the 1820 settlers had shown him all the myriad ways in which money could be made out of pioneering. From the time Graham cleared the Zuurveld, the acquisition and transfer of land in marketable parcels had been a regular feature of frontier life – a fact obscured by the legend of trekboers living on vaguely defined tracts out of sight of their neighbours' chimneys. No account of the Trek has ever ignored land hunger as a cause of the emigration, but the kind of emphasis Giliomee puts on the 'poor, landless and desperate' rebels who followed behind a few well-off leaders has, no doubt, discouraged historians from considering that the Trek had anything to do with land speculation. In the settlement of nineteenth-century colonies in 'new lands' around the globe, the speculative hopes of a few were more often than not grounded on the prospects they could hold out to landless migrants. Before the Homestead Act in the United States and selection acts in Canada and Australia regularised the process of land grants to poor farmers, the work of laying out new settlements was generally carried on by private contractors who hoped to profit from resales, particularly of town acres. Could Retief have so left his past behind him as to be blind to such prospects in 1837?
The best evidence about the trekkers' intentions is to be found in the way they handled land in the republics which they founded. The fact that a man found among the trekkers with surveying tools was almost killed as a government spy is not an indication that they were against surveying.45 It shows not only their objection to the British land regulations, but also their intention that nothing should interfere in any way with their reaping the full benefit of whatever annexations they should succeed in making. Retief in a sense dies for the cause of land speculation, leaving behind him in his knapsack the deed of cession from Dingane that would protect Voortrekkers in Natal from other claimants, especially the British traders at Port Natal. (Retief had already assured the latter of special consideration in the matter of land grants.46)
Much of the work of the Natal Volksraad was taken up with land business. Boshof supplied the expertise in law-making that was lost through the death of Retief, and the new state speedily demonstrated its intention of raising most of its revenue through the sale of land. As Walker noticed, Boshof 'worked hard to regularise the land laws and to push on with systematic and genuine settlement, the closer the better'.47
There was nothing like a vague marking out of vast tracts by riding horses to the four points of the compass. Town acres in Pietermaritzburg were dispensed on the same system that applied in Adelaide (contemporary capital of the thoroughly modern, 'systematic colony' of South Australia), through the drawing of lots.48 At Port Natal, town plots were sold outright.
Land claimants showed far more sophistication than legend ascribes to them. Far from being satisfied with one 6 000-acre farm per family, 'men went on staking claims right down to the Umzimvubu and far beyond the Tugela, in the lands claimed by Panda and Faku. Soon 1 800 farms had been staked out, two or three for each family and the rest by unattached men . . .'.49 Similar scenes were enacted on the highveld. Potchefstroom had for a time not one registrar of land titles, but two, competing against one another.50
The keeping of records may have been haphazard, the resources of administration inadequate, and the officials inept, but, in all the new republics, dealing in land as a commodity was fundamental to the enterprise of settlement. It would, of course, be decades before speculative profits were reaped in most parts of the interior. It would also be some time before the staples of production were identified through experiment and market-place demands. But to deny that commodity production was prominent on the agenda of the trekkers – especially the leaders – misunderstands the way new lands were brought into production by Europeans