Crossing the Buffalo Read online

  Archaeologists and historians still tend to regard today’s black African people, the Bantu, as relatively recent incomers to southern Africa, while evidence from sites in KwaZulu Natal suggest that Khoikhoi and San communities were already established in the region by 300 AD. The main Bantu migration did not reach this far south for another 1,000 years but the eventual arrival of this cattle-owning society had an inevitably destructive impact on the indigenous populations; the pastoral Khoikhoi avoided conflict by moving further south while the hunter-gathering San were gradually forced to abandon their fertile grasslands in favour of the more marginal environments of the Qahlamba mountains, later named ‘Drakensberg’ by the Boers. Large numbers of the San crossed the Qahlamba to seek sanctuary in the inhospitable and arid Kalahari desert.

  Over several thousand years the native Bantu people had spread laterally across central Africa from the equatorial West Coast and slowly progressed south and east around the wastes of the Kalahari desert. One Bantu tribe, the Nguni, settled the area known today as Natal, probably between 1500 and 1700. The remaining Bantu, the Xhosa tribe, continued south and eventually reached the Great Fish river, the limit of Boer scouting, in 1769; they were now only 500 miles from the Cape, which unbeknown to them was already in the process of being colonized by the Dutch.

  These Bantu people were recognizably similar to the main cultural and linguistic groups who inhabit the area today: the Xhosa to the south, the Sotho and Tswana in the interior, and the Nguni on the eastern coastal strip adjoining the Indian Ocean. This pattern of human settlement was already well established by 1486, though only the Khoikhoi and San groups shared possession of the most southern reaches of the African continent. It was at this crucial point in time that the first Europeans, led by the Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Diaz, landed at the Cape while searching for a southerly route to the East Indies.

  For the emerging European empires of Holland, Spain and Portugal, the newly discovered Americas and the East Indies were the lands of opportunity and commercial development. Following Diaz’s discovery of the Cape, southern Africa was of little interest to the Europeans; it appeared to have nothing to offer beyond its geographical location. In the name of King John of Portugal, Diaz and his men erected a marble cross at the site of their landfall, today known as Angra Pequena; that cross lay neglected for hundreds of years but today it stands in the Lisbon Maritime Museum, a treasured memory of Portugal’s contribution to Africa’s history. It was King John’s expectation that the Cape might open a passage from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, thence to the Portuguese-controlled East Indies. Ten years later Vasco da Gama landed at the Cape, but only to replenish his water supplies. Curious Khoikhoi gathered to stare in awe at their first white men, only to have one of their number shot dead by a sailor’s crossbow bolt. The Khoikhoi fled and the die was cast for future mistrust between the races. Vasco da Gama then sailed further north along the lush coastline, far beyond the point previously reached by Diaz, and on Christmas Day he named the spray-swept coast Terra Natalis before sailing on to cross the Indian Ocean. Due to the dangerous currents and treacherous ocean breakers that pounded the African shoreline, the green hills of the interior were to remain unexplored until the mid seventeenth century; before then the only landings made were accidental, usually involving shipwrecks; few survived the surf. In the years that followed, isolated Portuguese stations were established in modern-day Mozambique and it was to these stations that the handful of surviving shipwrecked sailors rendered the first known accounts of the fearsome Bantu people. The stations were usually established on the sites of thriving Arab slave and trading posts. As a consequence, the Portuguese adopted the Arab word for these black people; the word used was kaffir, which meant ‘unbeliever’, and at that time lacked the derogatory connotations of modern times.

  While the lucrative East India trade remained the prerogative of the Portuguese the Cape was of little importance; after Spain seized Portugal, Dutch vessels were banned from Lisbon, their main storage and watering station. In 1595 the next eastbound Dutch fleet investigated the Cape and discovered sound moorings and plentiful water supplies. The only other ships known to have entered the Cape bay in this period of time were commanded by Captain Lancaster, who was later to command the first English East India fleet. Using his knowledge, his company ships also used the Cape as a convenient staging post. Meanwhile, ships of the English East India Company regularly used the victualling facilities of Table Bay. Aware of growing foreign interest in the Cape, the dominant seagoing nation of the time, the Dutch, actively discouraged other ships from visiting the area, alleging the dangers of its treacherous shore. Nevertheless, Francis Drake had fully charted the Cape coast in 1580 and the British knew it to be a relatively safe haven; Drake had written:

  We found the report of the Portuguese to be most false. They affirm that it is the most dangerous cape in the world, never without intolerable storms and present dangers to travellers who come near the same. This cape is the most stately thing, and the fairest cape we have seen in the whole circumference of the earth.1

  As the years went by, the number of trading ships rounding the Cape greatly increased; its natural harbour was ideally suited as a watering point on the long haul around Africa to the Indies, but little more. By 1650 it was common practice for Dutch ships outbound for the Indies to deposit mail at the Cape under a prominent rock where it remained until collected by a homebound vessel, but apart from this strange role as a forwarding post office the Cape saw no immediate further activity.

  Then in 1651 the Generale Vereenigde Nederlantsche Geoctroyeerde Oostindische Compagnie, better known as the Dutch East India Company, established the first permanent white settlement in southern Africa. They built a small fortified enclave intended to provide fresh food and water to their ships rounding the Cape en route to their distant destinations. The company was controlled by a powerful council of seventeen members based in Amsterdam and with important commercial interests in Japan, Malaysia, the East Indies and Formosa. As the company’s Far Eastern trade increased, a more permanent victualling station at the Cape became essential and a tenacious former ship’s surgeon of the company and previous visitor to the Cape, Jan Van Riebeeck, was chosen as the founder leader to develop the Cape settlement. In 1652 Van Riebeeck’s growing band of settlers constructed a fortified camp. They duly expanded by trading their European goods with the Hottentots for cattle and sheep and Van Riebeeck’s settlement quickly prospered, marred only by attacks from the numerous lion and leopard living on the Cape peninsula. In 1662 the Dutch settlers secured vast tracts of additional land from the Hottentots in exchange for goods worth only £10, and the whole location became known as ‘The Cape of Good Hope’ after the vessel Good Hope that sank in the bay. The first company employees and settlers began arriving from Holland shortly afterwards.

  Many of the Freiburgers, the familiar term for those pioneer farmers who had worked out their contracts for the Dutch East Indies Company, chose to make their homes around the company settlement of ‘Good Hope’ rather than return to the uncertainties of life in Holland. Over the years that followed, limited settlement took place and as sovereignty of the Cape changed hands, the vast majority of those displaced by change stayed on as farmers and began to progress further inland. Here there was unlimited land for the taking, blessed not only with better grazing but also with absolute freedom from petty administrators. These people, together with an increasing immigration of French, German and Dutch settlers, created a tough new race; they co-operated with each other and collectively adopted the name ‘Boer’ to describe their predominantly agricultural way of life. Their farms were vast by European standards as land was free and relatively unpopulated; they had merely to register their property with the supervising chartered company, a process that was nothing more than a simple formality. In due course this influx had grown into a community of over 10,000 settler and refugee families that stretched for 600 miles inland from Cape Town; nume
rous inter-Boer political disputes followed concerning farmers’ land rights and in 1795 matters deteriorated to the extent that the two frontier districts of Swellen-dam and Graaff-Reinet threatened insurrection. It was to avoid such political restrictions and disputes that the isolationist Boers continued to migrate away from the developing administrative complexity of life at the Cape.

  As the Boers moved progressively towards the open lands to the north and east they provided for themselves and obtained those items that they needed, such as lead and powder for their guns, from a growing number of passing traders. These hardy European farmers unwillingly shared the land with the scattered local natives, the San and Khoikhoi, though it was to be another century and a half before they were to come into physical contact with the black-skinned Bantu people living further to the north-east. Limited European contact had been made with the San but due to the latter’s wildness and bewildering language of clicks and glottal sounds, trade with them was non-existent; even when captured as children they made impossible servants. Equally disagreeable to the Europeans was the San’s nakedness and unusual genitalia, the semi-erect penis and the pronounced female labia; likewise, their propensity not to wash led to the Boer belief that the San were little better than the animals they hunted.

  In 1712 the Europeans inadvertently brought smallpox to the Cape, which reduced the white population by a quarter and virtually wiped out the Cape Khoikhoi; it then spread through the San tribes. Yet the few San survivors of the disease were still feared, partly because of their use of poisoned arrow tips for hunting or when defending themselves, and they continued to suffer persecution by black and white alike. By the 1840s the San were so reduced in numbers due to the ‘blind eye’ policy of open slaughter that they faced extermination; Sunday afternoon ‘Bushman shoots’ were still a feature of European farming life and only those who fled towards the desolate Kalahari were to survive. It was not until the early twentieth century that Europeans became aware that these primitive people had an appreciation of music and art; fine examples of their delicately coloured wall paintings can still be seen today on numerous rocky outcrops across South Africa, including the eastern face of the Oskarsberg at Rorke’s Drift. As the famous African explorer Sir Laurens van der Post wrote of the San, ‘they were dealt a rotten hand’.2

  In 1688 over 200 Protestant French Huguenots arrived. The Huguenots were forced to flee France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes made Protestant worship unlawful there. The majority fled to Britain, some 50,000 souls in all; others went as far afield as Germany, Scandinavia and Canada to escape savage persecution and torture in their home country. Many smuggled themselves and their children across the border into Holland by adopting disguises or hiding in wine barrels. Those caught by French officials were severely treated: most were imprisoned and the women detained in convents where they were punished with hard labour as well as being roundly abused. Although kindly treated by the Dutch population these religious refugees were not encouraged to remain in Holland but earnestly urged to emigrate to the Cape, and most complied. Within a generation of their arrival at the Cape they had ceased to speak French, yet from those original 200 immigrants, their number multiplied until by the 1970s one million white South Africans could trace their descendants back to the original Huguenots.

  The Khoikhoi had lived in the area for over 1,000 years and differed from the San by being taller, and in their appearance were more like the Bantu people but with a distinct coppery brown tinge to their colouring. They lived in family and small clan groupings with an established leadership hierarchy. They kept cattle and although they knew of the bow and arrow, they preferred to use the spear, which enabled them to maintain their dominance over the diminutive San. The Khoikhoi lived predominantly in two distinct groups, the strandlopers or beach dwellers who lived by fishing, and those who lived off the land as nomadic farmers and hunters. It has been estimated that before the smallpox epidemic of 1712, the five known Khoikhoi tribes in the Cape area amounted to no more than 15,000 people, including women and children.3 Shipborne smallpox returned to the Cape in 1755 with even more serious consequences; in the month of July alone more than 1,100 people died.

  As the surviving Khoikhoi gradually displaced the San, so they in turn were displaced by the steady expansion of the Boers. The Khoikhoi were more amenable to change and to trading with the Europeans and, in time, they accepted the role of menial workers; later a few became soldiers, some serving the British and some the Boer cause. Boer men were not averse to associating with Khoikhoi and other slave women, and a significant number of mixed-race children resulted from these liaisons; these offspring were destined for a difficult life of rejection by all other races and in time were collectively known as the ‘Bastaards’.

  The Boers’ appetite for both domestic servants and slaves steadily increased and these had to be imported from the north-eastern coast of Africa and from the Dutch East Indies.4 Harmony between the Boers and other races was never achieved and in 1739 the Boers undertook a ‘Bushman War’ with disastrous consequences for both the San and Hottentot peoples; further such wars soon followed. It was not until 1769 that the Cape whites made their first contact with the dark-skinned natives of the eastern Cape area, known today as the Bantu nation; this contact also resulted in tumult and conflict.

  The origins of the Bantu are uncertain but archaeological discoveries indicate that they entered central Africa, perhaps from the Middle East, as long ago as 8,000 BC. As their lives had always been based upon cattle they were well suited to a nomadic life and in due course spread south and then west across central Africa, eventually reaching the area known today as the Congo. Their slow thousand-year migration continued south-east around the wastes of the Kalahari desert where they occupied the verdant coastline of the Indian Ocean before expanding further south towards the Cape. It is ironic that a migration of such magnitude and over such a long span of time should have failed to reach the Cape and that Europeans should fill that vacuum at exactly the same point in time. To the Boers’ surprise, their own large migration to the north-east came unexpectedly face to face with the foremost Nguni group, the amaXhosa, moving in even greater numbers southwards, the two sides meeting on opposing banks of the Great Fish river in 1769.

  Neither side had much experience of the other though the Boers quickly discovered that this new race were far more defiant than the San and Khoikhoi. The amaXhosa fiercely contested attempts by the Boers to cross and settle on their side of the river and ferocious raids and vicious attacks by both sides regularly occurred. The two opposing migrations were competing for the same natural resources and the disputed boundary area created a pattern of conflict between the black and white races that was to shape the future of southern Africa into modern times. The first of these frontier conflicts took place in 1780 when the Boers attempted to drive the local Xhosa tribes from the immediate area. The Boer leader, Van Jaarsveld, adopted a novel approach to the problem: one of his riders would enter the chosen village and throw tobacco onto the ground, and in the ensuing mêlée Jaarsveld and his men approached the scrabbling mass and opened fire, killing over 200 on one occasion. The war ended during July with over 5,000 cattle seized and an unknown number of Xhosa killed. There followed an uneasy peace that deteriorated into the second Frontier War of 1793 when a sizeable horde of Xhosa crossed the river border, murdering settlers and seizing their cattle; severe destruction, brutal retribution and reprisals thereafter caused much suffering on both sides.

  In 1794 the Dutch formally assumed administrative control of the Cape but in the same year they were defeated by the French in the Napoleonic Wars, which opened the Cape to French warships. This caused considerable concern to the British Admiralty and Britain promptly responded by seizing the Cape in order to protect her own prosperous sea routes to India.

  In 1799 began the third Frontier War which was to be waged for over two years. This particular war saw the surviving Khoikhoi join with the Xhosa against white
settlers but again their predictable defeat ultimately favoured the Boer trekkers.

  Meanwhile, and several hundred miles north-east beyond the Great Fish river frontier, one Bantu tribe, the Nguni, settled along several coastal rivers that led into the Indian Ocean. This left the main migration, now consisting of the predominantly Xhosa tribe, still steadily moving south. Little more than a generation after the first conflict occurred near the Cape between black and white, the Zulus began to emerge as a new tribe among the northern Nguni. The Zulu kingdom became Zululand, now known as KwaZulu Natal, and consisted of the landmass from the eastern side of the Drakensberg mountains to the Indian Ocean. Before the emergence of the Zulu nation the area was originally populated by a patchwork of independent but minor chiefdoms whose people spoke broadly the same language and followed the same cultural practices.

  Along the Great Fish river border the most southerly Xhosa people and the Boers lived uneasily as neighbours; the Xhosa prized Boer cattle and the Boers coveted Xhosa lands. During one Xhosa raid the Boers were forced to abandon more than a hundred farms. Limited Boer retaliation was undertaken, but to little effect; each side remained wary of the other. The struggle for domination of the Great Fish river area finally erupted in the fourth Frontier War of 1811, which resulted in over 20,000 Xhosa being forcibly relocated beyond the far bank of the river.