The Possession and Dispossession of the Kat River Settlement

Abstract

Indigeneity in South Africa is a complicated question. While it is clear that those of European descent, or to be more precise, those who under the apartheid system were classified as whites, are not thought of as indigenous, in practice the label has been restricted to those who can make a plausible claim to at least partial descent from the Khoesan populations even if, as is now generally the case, the only languages they speak are Germanic in origin, as well perhaps as isiXhosa. But even this is problematic. The way of life, and in all probability the language, that was observed by the first European visitors to the Cape, and is now known as Khoekhoe, was at that stage, in the sixteenth century, a relatively recent introduction into what is now South Africa. Just as around the beginning of the Common Era there were, to all extents and purposes, no Bantu-speakers or proponents of the agro-pastoralist lifestyle associated with them, so there were no Khoekhoe pastoralists in the region. The space which was to become South Africa was still exclusively populated by hunter-gatherers, presumably speaking one or more of the non-Khoe Khoesan languages.² In various parts of the country, groups following a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and speaking a San language, survived till late in the nineteenth century. Much more generally, though, the pre-Bantu and pre-Khoekhoe population of South Africa was absorbed into the society of their agricultural and pastoralist successors.

In general this article derives from R. Ross (2014), The Borders of Race in Colonial South Africa: The Kat River Settlement, 1829–1856 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).