Abstract
The San and the Griqua have captured the imaginations of many in South Africa for a long time, if for very different reasons. Both labels are deeply problematic for they elide the complexities of ethnogenesis, the dynamics of inter-community politics, and the function of colonial discourse, as will probably become clearer throughout this book.1 Yet in the absence of any alternatives, ‘San’ and ‘Griqua’ are applied here as they are by others now and in the recent past: the former to the oldest cultural group in the African sub-continent, the latter reserved for those comprised of many strands, who experienced ethnogenesis much later and expanded across the Transorangia region as they did.
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Notes
Paul S. Landau has perhaps most convincingly argued this point to date, in Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
The apartheid era has overshadowed other aspects of the South African past. Analysts of genocide who have considered South Africa tend to hold — with some subtle differences between them — that twentiethcentury attempts to preserve and exploit the colonised proletariat stand in contrast to attempts elsewhere to extinguish ‘the natives’ wholesale.
See, for example, Colin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 107–21;
A. Dirk Moses, ‘Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the “Racial Century”: Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust’, Patterns of Prejudice 36, 4 (2002), p. 27; see also the discussion on Patrick Wolfe, at pages 15–16 in this book. Although these observations are restricted to the period sandwiched between the two case studies presented in this book, it is important to acknowledge again some of the interpretative problems discussed at the outset of the book, which have pervaded into reductionist discussions of the violent treatment of ‘native’ populations in southern Africa. Conflating ‘black labourer’ and ‘native’ into meaning one and the same thing is potentially misleading. One need only imagine how the small remnants of the Northern Cape San might have felt during the Kimberley diamond rush of the late-nineteenth century, which saw swells of migrant labour sucked from the north into a region that was once called ‘the Bushman country’ for a very long time. It seems to me, on the contrary, that many labour-hungry regimes in recent centuries have been associated with — and beneficiaries of — genocidal processes. It might even be argued, in fact, that without the widespread destruction and upheaval that came before (and with) South Africa’s racist labour-controlling policy repertoire, there would probably never have been an apartheid in the first place. A deeper consideration of southern Africa’s genocidal past is therefore required.
Mohamed Adhikari, The Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2010).
See also Miklos Szalay, The San and the Colonization of the Cape, 1770–1879: Conflict, Incorporation, Acculturation (Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 1995);
Nigel Penn, The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist & Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the Eighteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005).
For the early Griquatown state, see Martin Legassick, The Politics o f a South African Frontier: The Griqua, the Sotho-Tswana and the Missionaries, 17801840 (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2010 [1969]), Chapters 4, 6, 8, 10–12.
For Philippolis, see Robert Ross, Adam Kok’s Griquas: A Study in the Development of Stratification in South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), Chapters 3–6.
A solid understanding of the establishment of Philippolis may be gleaned from the documents in Karel Schoeman (ed.), The Griqua Mission at Philippolis, 1822–1837 (Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2005), otherwise abbreviated throughout as GM.
Kent McNeil, Common Law Aboriginal Title (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 202–4.
Edwin N. Wilmsen, ‘Those Who Have Each Other: San Relations to Land’, in Edwin N. Wilmsen (ed.), We Are Here: Politics of Aboriginal Land Tenure (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 43–67.
These dates are inexact, since archaeologists are still reluctant to offer precise dates for these interactions. It remains unclear, for instance, exactly when in the Stone Age early humans became ‘San’ cultural groups, whether the Khoekhoe and San were physically or otherwise distinct from each other apart from their economies, how the two groups interacted over the longue durée, and whether anthropological data can be projected onto the pre-historic and proto-historic record with any confidence. A useful introduction to the archaeological literature remains R. R. Inskeep, ‘The Archaeological Background’, in Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson (eds), The Oxford History of South Africa: Vol. I, South Africa to 1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 1–39.
See also H. J. Deacon and J. Deacon, Human Beginnings in South Africa: Uncovering the Secrets of the Stone Age (David Philip: Cape Town, 1999).
For the emergence of pastoralism specifically, see Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, ’Animal Disease Challenges to the Emergence of Pastoralism in Sub-Saharan Africa’, African Archaeological Review 17, 3(2000), pp. 96, 104–5;
see also Karim Sadr, ‘Invisible Herders? The Archaeology of Khoekhoe Pastoralists’, Southern African Humanities 20 (2008), pp. 179–203.
The argument is somewhat more nuanced than this. Suffice here to say that scholars are persuaded by evidence of syncretism beyond the frontier; for them, the existing data affirm that the distinction between pastoralism and hunter-gathering remained important, but little else. See, in particular, Richard Elphick, ‘The Cape Khoi and the First Phase of South African Race Relations’, PhD Thesis (Yale University, 1972); see also Monica Wilson, ‘The Hunters and Herders’, in Wilson and Thompson (eds), Oxford History of South Africa, pp. 40–74;
Shula Marks, ‘Khoisan Resistance to the Dutch in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Journal ofAfrican History 13, 1 (1972), pp. 55–80;
Richard Elphick, Kraal and Castle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). When I use ‘KhoeSan’ in this book, I do so not necessarily to endorse this argument, but to condense the group where convenience permits their similar experiences to be seen singularly.
Nosipho Majeke [a.k.a. Dora Taylor], The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest (Johannesburg: Society of Young Africa in Alexandra, 1952);
John and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume One: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991);
Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume Two: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997);
Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002).
Karel Schoeman, ‘Die Londense Sendinggenootskap en die San: Die Stasies Toornberg en Hepzibah, 1814–1818’, South African Historical Journal 28, 1 (1993), 221–34;
Karel Schoeman, ‘Die Londense Sendinggenootskap en die San: Die Stasies Ramah, Konnah en Philippolis, 1816–1828’, South African Historical Journal 29, 1 (1993), 132–52.
CWMA, London Missionary Society Incoming Correspondence (South Africa), 18B/4/a, John Philip to George Napier (25 August 1842), Appendix B: ‘The Tenure by which the Griqua hold the Lands of Philippolis’. My thanks to Jared McDonald for sourcing me a copy of this document in its entirety, and also for his assistance with my other LMS queries. For similar sentiments, see also CWMA Africa Odds 623, quoted in Karel Schoeman, The Griqua Captaincy of Philippolis, 1826–1861 (Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2002), p. 43.
P. J. van der Merwe, Die Noordwaartse Beweging van die Boere voor die Groot Trek, 1770–1842 (Den Haag: W.P. van Stockum & Zoon, 1937), p. 262. Although quite dated, van der Merwe’s book remains a key text for this and other aspects of pre-Trek history.
Andries Stockenström, The Autobiography of the Late Sir Andries Stockenström, Sometime Lieutenant-Governor of the Eastern Province of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1964 [1887]), vol. 1, 213–4.
For over a century, historians have presented the Griqua people as a bloodthirsty group of murderers, the most savage community on the South African frontier. Despite the findings presented in this chapter, this kind of appraisal is unfair and outdated. It must be remembered that the Griqua were not the only guilty participants in the genocide of the San. ‘Bantu, Boer and Briton’ all actively participated in violent campaigns against the San, or were otherwise indirectly responsible for the appropriation of their land and the destruction of their resource bases. George Stow first made this point in his groundbreaking ethnographic research of the late nineteenth century, but historians have subsequently downplayed the fact in historical scholarship until recent years. See George W. Stow, The Native Races of South Africa: A History of the Intrusion of the Hottentots and Bantu into the Hunting Grounds of the Bushmen, the Aborigines of the Country (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1905).
For the Griqua people in South African historical tradition, see Edward Cavanagh, The Griqua Past and the Limits o f South African History, 1902–1994 (Oxford/Bern/New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2011).
CA, HA89. Evidence of Jan Pienaar, in Evidence Taken at Bloemhof before the Commission appointed to investigate the Claims of the South African Republic, Captain N. Waterboer, Chief of West Griqualand, and certain other Native Chiefs, to portions of the Territory on the Vaal River, now known as the Diamond-fields, p. 20. Also reproduced in David Arnot and Francis H. S. Orpen, The Land Question of Griqualand West: An Inquiry into the Various Claims to Land in that Territory; Together with a Brief History of the Griqua Nation (Cape Town: Saul Solomon & Co., 1875), p. 191.
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© 2013 Edward Cavanagh
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Cavanagh, E. (2013). The Erasure of Past Interests in Land at Philippolis. In: Settler Colonialism and Land Rights in South Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305770_2
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