Introduction
The date of the first Xhosa settlement west of the iNxuba (Fish) River has been hotly debated in South African history. In 1775, the Dutch governor, Baron Joachim van Plettenberg, held a Council of Policy in Cape Town whereby he established a new eastern boundary for the Kaapkolonie (Cape Colony). It drew a line from the iNxuba (Fish) River up to its confluence with the Little Fish, past the present-day towns of Cradock and Somerset East, forming a triangle towards the Qhorha (Bushman’s) River in the south, to the sea. In the previous year (1774), the governor had granted settlement rights in the vicinity of Bruintjieshoogte (later known as Somerset East) to the Sneeuberg Boers, like the Prinsloo family, whose patriarchal leader, William Prinsloo, was a lawless reprobate. This created a volatile situation in the region, which the governor solved by agreeing with imiGwali under Nkosi Khoba, the son of Titi, and amaGqunukhwebe under Nkosi Chungwa. The treaty, signed close to the little present-day town of Cookhouse, was eventually known as the Van Plettenberg Agreement of 1778. Further complications came with the fact that these were minor tribes among those who dwelt in the area, which included the amaNtinde, the amaMbalu, the imiDange and the greater Rharhabe nation. To these other tribes, the treaty meant nothing. There were also KhoiSan remnants, most of whom had mixed with amaXhosa to form the nation of amaGqunukhwebe.
Therefore, there is no doubt that, in a strict sense, amaGqunukhwebe and imiGwali were resident west of the iQhorha way before the so-called Van Plettenberg Agreement of 1778. In this treaty, they too were prohibited from settling west of the iNxuba. Professor Jeff Peires1 has written extensively disputing this treaty between the amaXhosa and the Dutch governor.
After assuming power to rule the Cape Colony, the British followed this false boundary claim by the Dutch. When the dispute of his settlement in the Zuurveld (roughly between the iNqweba (Sundays) and iNxuba Rivers) arose, Nkosi Chungwa of the amaGqunukhwebe frequently claimed that his father, Tshaka, had purchased the land from Ruiter, the Hoengiqua Khoi king. In his compendious book, The land wars, John Laband summarises thus:
In the mid-1600s the amaXhosa, still living in the vicinity of the Mbashe River, went through a process of major segmentation when several chiefdoms hived off from the paramountcy. By the early eighteenth century these offshoots, the amaNtinde, amaGwali, amaMbalu, imiDange and amaGqunukhwebe, were located between the Kei and Keiskamma Rivers. During this period of rapid westward expansion, previous peaceful contact with the Khoikhoin was overlaid by conquest and incorporation. The Khoikhoi Gonaqua chiefdom between the Kei and Keiskamma Rivers was incorporated in the early 1700s into the westernmost of the Xhosa chiefdoms, the amaGqunukhwebe and, to a lesser extent, the amaNtinde. The remnants of the Gonaqua clans regrouped themselves west of the Keiskamma. Perhaps because of the number of Khoikhoin it had incorporated – and who retained their own culture, not adopting the Xhosa practice of circumcision at initiation and continuing to employ the traditional Khoi bow and arrow (weapons never used by the Xhosa) – the amaGqunukhwebe were thereafter considered distinct from the other chiefdoms by the amaXhosa, and probably as inferior too, because its chief was not of royal Xhosa lineage. The amaGqunukhwebe continued their westwards drift, and by the 1760s had reached the domain of the Khoikhoi Hoengeyqua chiefdom between the Great Fish and Sundays Rivers. In return for cattle, the Hoengeyqua granted the amaGqunukhwebe territory between the Great Fish and Bushman’s Rivers.2 (28)
In about 1775, tiring from warring with his brother, Rharhabe crossed the iNciba (Kei) River and went westward in the direction of the iNxuba. This was done in spasmodic movement, while encountering KhoiSan kingdoms which he conquered or persuaded to join his nation, acquiring great wealth and prestige in the process. Most amaXhosa tribes (imiDange, amaNtinde, imiGwali and amaMbalu) had been crossing the iNciba for a century, like when Tshawe defeated his older brother Cirha and usurped the Xhosa kingship from him. Fleeing his reign, they went west. These west-of-iNciba-Xhosas refused to bow to Rharhabe, recognising only Gcaleka across the iNciba as their paramount. Earlier in the 18th century, when Phalo had assumed the Xhosa paramountcy, a similar migration had occurred. In his book, The lie of 1652: A decolonised history of land, Patric Tariq Mellet surmises:
By this time, after 1701, the Inqua (also known as Humcumqua), the only Khoe federal state based far away, in the triangle of present-day Aberdeen, Richmond and Cradock, had ceased to exist as an independent entity. Peires explains how the Inqua under (Kubaha/Gaob/Bi’a) Ka Bi’a Hinsati were made up of three clans: the Sukwini, Gqwashu and Nkarwane clans. Hinsati voluntarily became embroiled in Xhosa affairs by joining forces with King Gwali of the Xhosa. When Mdange and Phalo dethroned Gwali, Kai Bi’a Hinsati allied with Gwali and rebelled. The rebellion resulted in the defeat of Gwali as well as that of his Inqua allies. Phalo became the new head of the Xhosa state (kingdom) and incorporated the clans of the Inqua Khoe into his people. Peires tells us that not all Khoe willingly accepted that and led by a woman, Bi’a Hoho in the Amatole valley, the Khoe continued a struggle to remain independent until about 1750, when full incorporation was completed.”3 (129)
Rharhabe came into conflict with the defeated Khoikhoi chief’s (Hinsati’s) widow, Hoho, who continued to fiercely resist his encroachment into her land west of the iNciba. Rharhabe eventually made peace with Queen Hoho by paying over 800 cattle to settle in her land around the Amathole Mountains. In time, because he was more powerful and had greater prestige, Hoho’s people were subsumed into the Xhosa nation. This is how the amaXhosa came to be permanently in the area. Rharhabe’s great wife, Nojoli, was a daughter of Ndungwane, a Thembu chief. The following is according to SEK Mqhayi’s biography of Rharhabe, which has been reprinted in J Opland’s Abantu besizwe (Wits University Press, 2009):
The sites Rharhabe occupied are at Mngqesha in the King Williams Town district and others facing the Debe station near Middledrift. He produced his senior children with his wife Nojoli, after whom the Nojoli Mountains in Somerset East are named. This Nojoli is a Qwathi woman from the Thembu …. She was not the “head” wife of the chief but was made an arm of the chief’s “right hand”. (284)
It was then a common practice for royal houses (Great and Right Hand Houses) to avoid conflict by establishing kraals far away from each other. Nojoli had hers under the mountains of present-day Boschberg, now known as intab’ ka Nojoli among the amaXhosa. This mountain towers over the present-day town of KwaNojoli, formerly known as Somerset East.
The land claims of the KhoiSan and amaXhosa were hotly contested by the British colonists. In 1811, Governor Cradock sent Colonel John Graham, who had been instrumental in capturing the Cape Colony from the Dutch, to clean the Zuurveld area of all KhoiSan and Xhosa in preparation for the arrival of more white settlers.
Doringnek Massacre I
The amaGqunukhwebe, amaMbalu and imiDange were the first Xhosa to encounter the Boer encroachment into the Cape’s eastern territory. In 1780, Adriaan van Jaarsveld (known as Umbomvana by the amaXhosa because of his red hair and proclivity for spilling blood) was appointed by the Dutch Council of Policy to clean Bruintjieshoogte (later known as Somerset East) of amaXhosa and KhoiSan. After a few vague clashes with the amaXhosa, Van Jaarsveld called a conference with inkosi and councillors of the iMidange, KhoiSan and other people who lived there. Purportedly, this was to discuss the land border issues, especially the iNxuba boundary. About 200 native people were in attendance at this parley. After several unsuccessful talks, Jaarsveld made as if to offer a tobacco peace offering. (Smoking a peace pipe after negotiations was a common thing in that era.) He threw several bags of tobacco onto an open space. While the KhoiSan and iMidange were busy scrambling for the tobacco, he ordered his prepped commando to open fire. Thomas Pringle’s Narrative of a residence in South Africa quotes an extract from Robert Hart’s journal about the incident. Hart, who was present at the treachery, known to history as the Doringnek Massacre, writes: “All their men were overthrown and slain, and part of their cattle to the number of eight hundred were taken.”
Among the dead was Nkosi Jalamba of iMdange. This will be of major significance later on, when we discuss the tragic death of Anders Stockenström, the landdrost of Graaff-Reinet. Of interest for now is the British claim that, by retaking the Cape Colony from the Batavian Republic, they also inherited its land claims treaties. This obfuscation informs the historical revisionism of those who pretend that the land, confiscated by military force and duplicity by the colonial masters, belongs to the descendants of the Europeans by dint of hard work and honest inheritance.
Chungwa
The British colonial government allowed only a few KhoiSan people to remain west of the iNxuba, based on their understanding of the Van Plettenberg Agreement of 1778. Nkosi Chungwa of the amaGqunukhwebe, in particular, was adversely affected by this colonial government demand. He tried peacefully to reason with them that his father, Tshaka, had settled west of the iNxuba toward the iQhagqiwa (Sundays) River and had paid the price of more than 800 head of cattle. According to the written record of James Read, who was the second London Missionary Society (LMS) representative in the area after Johannes van der Kemp, the area was a peaceful settlement at the beginning of the 19th century.
To avoid the tumultuous and endless fighting between Ngqika and Ndlambe, Chungwa and his people sometimes pressed further west, away from the iNxuba to the area that the amaXhosa called Qhoboka (Addo Forest). Fleeing defeat from Ngqika during their first war, Ndlambe pushed west of the iNxuba to the Zuurveld area around the present-day sea resort town of Port Alfred, whose municipality is now called Ndlambe Local Municipality. His settlement went from eBumnyameni (Alexandria) to the present-day town of Makhanda/Grahamstown along the meandering Qhoyi (Kowie) River. By crossing west of the iNxuba, Ndlambe made himself a menacing nuisance to Nkosi uChungwa, whose people he wanted to subdue. This pushed Chungwa further west beyond iNgqurha (Coega), over the Gqeberha (Baakens) River, to the Xelekwa (Van Stadens) and Qukashe (Gamtos) area. To date, Chungwa is proverbially known in Xhosa as the one who knows no peace (he was attacked by the Boers, the British and Rharhabe at the same time).
Stuurman
The land around Qukashe had been given by Dutch authorities to a group of KhoiKhoi, led by David Stuurman in 1799. They wished to be independent of Chungwa, with whom they had coexisted around Qhoboka. This worked well for the colonial masters, who relied on the KhoiKhoi for indentured farm labour. The amaGqunukhwebe harboured many KhoiSan people who fled from this slave-like labour for Boer farmers. When Chungwa and his people pressed further west, Stuurman paid them in kind by welcoming them at Qukashe. When the British took over the Cape Colony, they felt threatened by the KhoiKhoi-Xhosa unity of Chungwa and Stuurman. Almost a third of Graham’s army (the Cape Regiment) were KhoiKhoi recruits. He also competed with the Boer farmers for KhoiSan manpower. Several acts, policies and prohibitions were passed to curtail the free movement of the KhoiSan people, with the penalty of imprisonment and sometimes death. But what the European authorities feared most were Xhosa-KhoiSan alliances. Rightfully so, because during the nine frontier wars, the battles which the amaXhosa had won decisively against the British colonial government were those they fought with the KhoiKhoi on their side. This was the case during the Kat River Settlement Rebellion. The KhoiKhoi were excellent marksmen and were better armed than the Xhosa due to their greater interaction with the Boers, who illegally traded mostly old guns and gunpowder with them. David Stuurman is the person after whom Port Elizabeth’s/Gqeberha’s airport is named. We shall meet him again later on to understand the part he played in the history of the area.
Zuurveld clearance
Jacob Cuyler was the second in command to John Graham in the Cape Regiment during the genocidal clearing of the Zuurveld. Many of the atrocities that were committed there were done by him and George Fraser, another member of Graham’s squad from the beginning, when they had conquered the Cape Colony and taken it from the Dutch. Cuyler was also the landdrost of Uitenhage, a position that put him in direct confrontation with the missionaries of Bethalsdorp (Van der Kemp and James Read). This first LMS missionary station was situated between Algoa Bay and the small town of Uitenhage under the Vuba Mountains. The first missionaries and British officials fought like cat and dog. (The policy of using missionaries as the sharp point of colonial imperialism was not yet established. Pure missionary vocation was still a matter of moral shielding and religious conviction for evangelisation of gospel values for them. This would change only after the arrival of John Brownlee in 1817. His sons, especially Charles, later became a fully fledged British official, at first under the guise of doing missionary work.)
Sometime around 1809, a group of Boers went to confront and repossess some KhoiKhoi farm labourers who they claimed had fled their contractual obligations on the farms. They found David Stuurman and his people armed and in no mood to hand over their own to the servile Boer farm system. The Boers retreated in fear. They reported the matter to their landdrost, Cuyler. He also didn’t feel strong enough to confront Stuurman, so he decided to cook a ruse (the standard modus operandi of European officials then). They labelled Stuurman a rebel leader to justify their action to the British government. Through an action of betrayal by Cornelius Routenbach, a Boer who was on friendly terms with Stuurman, they invited Stuurman for a friendly visit. Upon his arrival with a few of his people, Stuurman was ambushed and arrested with his brother, Boschmann. They were subsequently taken to be incarcerated on Robben Island. Within weeks, Stuurman escaped from Robben Island through a daring stunt of hijacking a whale boat. He managed this not once, but twice, with the likes of Makhanda, aka Nxele. Nxele drowned when the boat capsized in the rough seas of Bloubergstrand. The amaXhosa proverbially still await ukuza kuka Nxele (the coming of Nxele), who claimed he would return in triumph no matter what the British did to him. Speculations are still rife in the Xhosa nation that Nxele faked his death. But the Methodist missionary Stephen Kay, in his book Travels and researches in Caffraria: Describing the character, customs and moral condition of the tribes inhabiting that portion of southern Africa, claims to have been one of the people who saw Nxele’s washed-up body on display in Cape Town. When the British caught Stuurman for the third time, they arranged for his incarceration to be in Australia, where he eventually died in 1830, but not before he had played a crucial role in the Doringnek Massacre II.
Villainy
The British eventually drove Chungwa and a remnant from Stuurman that had been reabsorbed into the amaGqunukhwebe, out of Qukashe and towards the east. Chungwa went back to his ancestral land under the Vuba Mountains, to resettle and hide in the Qhoboka forests. A few months before he died, he said he was forced to “live like a hyena” in his old age. During the 1812 Zuurveld clearance by the forces of Colonel John Graham, the British finally cornered and shot him point-blank, like a dog, while he was sleeping, on 12 November. He was old, partially blind and paralysed on one side. Even Stockenström in his autobiography, The autobiography of the late Sir Andries Stockenström (edited by CW Hutton, two volumes, 1887, facsimile reprint Cape Town, C Struik, 1964), thought the killing unnecessary: “Active operations were continued in the Addo Bush, where, amongst others, the noted Chief Conga (Chungwa) was killed unnecessarily, as he was dying of disease and old age.”
After the KhoiKhoi, who had legitimate claim to the Zuurveld land, Chungwa was the next just claimant of the land. This is probably the reason the British colonial government decided to do away with him. The story of his death is narrated by the biased John Campbell in his Travels in southern Africa (London, T Rutt, 1815).
Andries Stockenström, the deputy landdrost of Graaff-Reinet, was another person who distinguished himself in the campaign to clear the Zuurveld for white settlers. His account of the Zuurveld campaign and death of his father, Anders, is told in a mild manner that has the effect of making them seem like the civilising force bringing progress to the “kaffir” heathen. The truth of the matter is that this was a brutal campaign whose barbarism is told in a well-researched book, A proper degree of terror: John Graham and the Cape Eastern Frontier (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1986). These loyal servants of the British had genocidal (I don’t use this term lightly) tendencies of waking up every day to hunt the Xhosa and KhoiSan people as game in the forest, talking of overwhelming boredom when the raid yielded only a few or no human targets to shoot at. Stockenström was once taken to a commission of enquiry for excessive cruelty that involved shooting an unarmed KhoiSan boy point-blank. He won the rigged case not by denying the incident, but by claiming that it was a common practice among those who were part of the Zuurveld campaign and commandos. Hart testified in the commission: “The orders on the frontier generally were to shoot all Kaffirs.”4 (158)
Doringnek Massacre II
On a summer’s day, 28 December 1811, during one of the campaigns against the amaNdlambe, amaGqunukhwebe and iMidange in the Zuurberg Mountains, a tragic banana peel slip again happened at the narrow Doringnek ridge. The Zuurveld clearance campaigners of Anders Stockenström met an assembly of men of the iMidange and several KhoiSan led by David Stuurman, who had till then evaded colonial means to recapture him after his first escape from Robben Island. Against the advice of his field cornets, Stockenström chose to invite the amaXhosa to a peaceful conference, hoping to persuade them to leave the area before any more blood was shed. He even promised government pardon to Stuurman when he found out that he was present among the men. The parley went well until the amaXhosa received news that the blood of their brethren had been shed by another white man’s campaign close to the Nqweba River crossing. A knot of warriors who received this news immediately became agitated and came to share this with Stuurman, who at the time was about to smoke a peace pipe with Stockenström. Stuurman retreated to his agitated warriors under the pretence of calming them down. Coming back to the parley, he assured the British and Boer commandos, whose neck hair were standing, that there was no danger, even though they noticed that there was some angry rumbling going on among the warriors. Antonie, Midange nkosi Galata’s headman, brought a reed bowl of amasi as a peace offering. As Stockenström raised the basket to drink, Antonie stabbed him in the back of the neck with a spear. This was an agreed sign to begin the massacre of the whites by the amaXhosa and the KhoiSan. Several Xhosa immediately emerged from the forest and fell upon the whites with shrill yells, exclaiming as they stabbed: “Jalamba! Jalamba!” They were clearly invoking the spirit of Jalamba and avenging his inglorious death over 30 years before. According to Stockenström:
Fourteen out of the forty-one that had left our camp, exclusive of the bushboy, were now still missing. Their bodies were found on our march to the Kournay, which we were ordered to do, and we buried them not far from the tree already named on the slope inclining eastward.5 (61)
The distant Boer commando shot and killed about five black men with their muskets before they were overwhelmed and cut down themselves. They could not fire properly for fear of shooting their own people, and chose to save their own skins by fleeing in the end. The son of the murdered landdrost and the narrator of these events, Andries, was in Graaff-Reinet when he received the news of his father’s death from the “bushboy” who had survived the massacre. He swiftly gathered a force of about 18 men and hurried off to Doringnek to look for survivors. He says in his autobiography that they met the Xhosa in retreat, led by their chiefs, and took them by surprise in an open veld. They shot at them in a panicked retreat and boasted that every shot they fired “told on their (Xhosa) dense masses with fatal certainty”. His father’s death awoke a beast of revenge in him. He became obsessed with cutting off the head of the Xhosa hydra they identified as Ndlambe. This was in vain, because Ndlambe, after a lifetime of being the bane of the British colonial government, died of natural causes at the ripe age of 90 years. There was no atrocity the British villains didn’t commit to achieve their purpose of clearing the Zuurveld. Even among British colonial cruelties, their work took the crown, including their being founders of the so-called “scorched earth policy” of starving and expelling the natives by burning their agriculture fields used for sustenance.
Loan farms
I have dwelt a little on the deeds of these men, because once they were sure most of the Zuurveld had been cleared of the natives, they began dividing the land and cattle spoils among themselves. They founded most of the Eastern Cape towns, naming the towns and streets therein after their governors and themselves. Graham had recognised that the purpose of clearing the Zuurveld was to bolster white entrepreneurship and supply of meat for the colony through cattle farming. The best of these meat suppliers, through government contracts, was Frederick Korsten, who set up a meat processing works in Algoa Bay. To date, the site of those works is a vibrant merchant area in Gqeberha/Port Elizabeth and a coloured area, still called Korsten.
When on 6 September 1811 Cradock became the governor of the Cape Colony, he was dissatisfied with the loan farm system that the British had inherited from the Dutch. A farmer was supposed to apply for any unused land and pay a low annual token fee, which hardly anyone bothered to pay. The size limit of a farm was 3 000 morgen, or about 6 000 acres. Hardly any farmers paid this government rent, including government officials who set a bad example by defaulting. Cradock said that this system discouraged farmers from investing capital on the land they occupied. He changed the system by introducing what he called a land tenure of perpetual quitrent from 6 August 1813. Under this new system, the holder was required to survey and diagram the land properly, cultivate its greatest area and pay rent according to land fertility. After that, the land would no longer be resumable by the government. It legally became propertied to the holders, who could sell it at profit at will. Cradock commanded this new system for his implementers, Graham and his villainous cohorts, who, knowing very well that charity begins at home, allocated the best land to themselves first. Cradock wanted a chain of farm settlements with military posts along the eastern frontier – what he termed mutual benefits between farmers and troops. He hoped that the system of perpetual quitrent would bring along “progressive civilisation, agricultural improvement and common defence”.6
The young Stockenström was given the title of deputy landdrost of Graaff-Reinet. He was to train under the landdrost, his brother Andries, who had inherited this government position after their father’s death. Graham asked him to choose his own preferred site for the building of his drostdy. He chose what he eventually called the Buffel’s Kloof Farm,7 on the banks of the iNxuba. This became an embryo for the Karoo town of Cradock, named after the governor. At some stage in its long history, the farm became a prison. The town has now been renamed iNxuba Yethemba, the Tributary of Hope. It became one of the administrative towns which Governor Cradock set up as frontier district towns.
Robert Hart, who was part of the villainous Zuurveld clearance cohorts, was given land on which he eventually built what he called the Avalon Farm. The land was wrestled from the Prinsloo brothers by the British government. Hart became very successful in farming merino sheep and trading their wool. Seeing the great potential of the area as the bread basket of the eastern frontier, the governor who followed Cradock established government farms and a military base in the area and named it Somerset East, after himself, in 1825. It has recently been renamed KwaNojoli, after Rharhabe’s great wife who had settled in the area. Grahamstown was named after Colonel John Graham.
If you google the Doringnek Massacre today, the chances are that only the 1811 one will come up, where Anders Stockenström with 14 other white people were killed. Hardly anyone talks about the black people who died by the treacherous hand of Jaarsveld’s commando in 1790.
Amadlelo
Ask any Xhosa person why the Fish River is called that, and they most probably will not know. But ask them why is it called the iNxuba Yethemba. They will tell you about how in ancient times, especially during times of drought and threatening famine, people would move to what they called Amadlelo, the green grazing oases. Most of these oases ran along the fertile banks of the iNxuba, hence the Xhosa called it the iNxuba Yethemba: the Fertile Valley of Hope. AmaXhosa kings in particular used to settle and even fight over Amadlelo. JH Soga, in his seminal book of oral Xhosa history, The south eastern Bantu: Abe-Nguni, Aba-Mbo, Ama-Lala, reminds us that the reason Nkosi Hintsa of the amaGcaleka, the paramount of the amaXhosa, chose sides in the fight between Nkosi Ngqika and his uncle Ndlambe, is that Ngqika disrespected him by sending him and his cattle away from iDlelo of Qab’ Imbola, close to where the little town of Hogsback is now situated. With the Gcaleka councillors, Prince Hintsa was looking after his father’s cattle. When he returned home, his father (Khawuta) soon died, which opened a gap for Hintsa to avenge himself on Ngqika by supporting Ndlambe while the reign was still under councillor regency. This informed part of the first war between Ngqika and his uncle Ndlambe. Hintsa, who had been nursing a grievance, joined the war on the side of Ndlambe to teach the young Nkosi Ngqika never to disrespect the paramount of the amaXhosa again. Ngqika defeated them both twice, keeping them prisoner, and at some stage he later relented by releasing Hintsa. Ndlambe escaped through the machinations of his half-brother. Ndlambe and Hintsa were able to overcome Ngqika only in 1818 during the third war, which became known as the Battle of Amalinde or the War of Thuthula. These violent segmentations and wars over land are the major reason why the Europeans found the amaXhosa in disarray and were able to take advantage of it through the divide-and-rule strategy. Many Xhosa kings and chiefs used Boers in particular to defeat their own Xhosa enemies for land and domination. Ngqika’s misfortune, which informs his being regarded as a sell-out, is that his major allies, the British, were triumphant and eventually became the colonial masters who hammered in the final nail of Xhosa land dispossession.
In his book of journals, An account of travels into the interior of southern Africa in the years 1797 and 1798, John Barrow, newly arrived from China on British official business, travelled into the interior of our country. He was fortunate enough to be granted audience with Nkosi Ngqika during these travels. Young Xhosa kings always tended to be under the commanding influence of their mothers. They often fought a son’s heir battles when their regent, like Ndlambe, refused to hand over power. After the death of Ngqika, Suthu, his great wife, would later do the same for his son Sandile when Maqoma’s regency became too powerful. Yese, Ngqika’s mother, made a strong impression on Barrow. She was a copious-bodied woman of sharp mind and brilliant diplomatic skills, according to Barrow. This is demonstrated in the fact that to forge closer relationships with the newly arrived white people, and in order to learn their ways, Yese8 married someone who today is regarded, for better or worse, as one of the founders of the Afrikaner nation. The amaXhosa knew this man as Khula because of his tall stature. In the history books, he is known as Coenraad de Buys. Nojoli was one of the many wives of De Buys, one of the first white men who took refuge with the amaXhosa after falling foul of the colonial British government. (He was one of the leaders of the Graaff-Reinet Boer Rebellion.) When Van der Kemp arrived in Xhosaland and was stationed kwaNgqika, De Buys built him his first house and acted as an interpreter between Nkosi Ngqika and the whites. She was regarded as the mother of the Rharhabe nation. It makes sense that the seminal historical town of Somerset East has been renamed KwaNojoli (the Place of Nojoli). The only better name for it would be Hinsati, after the powerful Inuqua KhoiKhoi chief who gave the land to the amaXhosa.
Conclusion
Despite the current attempts at historical revision, the historical fact is that this land was taken by duplicity, violence and war conquest from the South African natives. What we see in the status quo now is perhaps a perfect demonstration of the fathers eating sour grapes and the children’s teeth being set on edge. We cannot change history, but we can ameliorate its unjust effects if there’s a proper political will. Changing names where the majority find offence or are reminded of an invidious past, is a small gesture towards reconciliation and redress. It is not something any progressive government should be apologetic about.
I have deliberately used the original indigenous names of the areas, rivers and mountains to showcase that the Europeans didn’t find blank spaces when they came here. Instead, they deliberately changed names to cater for their needs, pamper occidental nostalgia or promote their heroes. The thing that strikes you most when you travel to the UK is the familiar names of towns and streets. This is because there are several duplicates of them in South Africa, particularly in the Eastern Cape, where the colonial mischief had most effect.
Unfortunately, to those, like AfriForum and Solidarity, who are too used to privilege, equality and justice look like oppression and injustice. Their actions of engaging the in psychological warfare of subversive political canvassing against the government will only end up in awaking the simmering resentment of many black people about our invidious history. Only the ANC, despite its glaring faults, was/is able to pacify the anger of the South African natives, especially when it comes to the land issue, which to date remains unresolved. You can read Tembeka Ngcukaitobi’s The land matters to gain a proper understanding of the mess the ANC government has made of our much needed land restitution and redress. Their system has ended up benefiting the mass land owners, most of whom are white. I am not aware of any incident whereby the ANC government has expropriated land without compensation, or with prejudice against the owner. Even the recently signed Expropriation Act clearly states that this would only happen in unique cases, where the land is either in disuse or required for the exigence of public needs utility. According to the government, its major targets are disused Johannesburg buildings.
Once the ANC begins to feel desperate due to losing political power, it will, like most failing political parties, most probably start blaming the likes of AfriForum and Solidarity for their failures. They’ll weaponise the message to fan the explosion of black fury. Only then will the dangers we averted during the Mandela years remerge with a vengeance. And the likes of AfriForum and Solidarity will be at fault for having provided the ANC with a leaf to hide the shame of their own failings and corruption.
The resurgent attitudes of ethno-racist nationalists from the likes of AfriForum and Solidarity are a global phenomenon that has emboldened them. As a student of history, I am amazed at this repeat of history. In the 19th century, there was a group of white settlers suffering from what I call the Godlonton syndrome. They took their cue from the Grahamstown Journal editor, Robert Godlonton, a vile and greedy individual who saw in the frontier wars opportunity to enrich himself quickly. Without that group, who peddled lies and disinformation to fan the embers of frontier wars, at least three out of the nine would have been avoided, according to my estimation. To me, the AfriForum and Solidarity groups are of the same DNA. If not checked, they’ll drag this country into a catastrophic abyss just to prove a point that they had warned us. They’re playing a dangerous game.
South Africa is an open society that is tolerant of divergent views. This should remain so. But there is a scenario which Karl Popper puts in his book The open society and its enemies, where he says:
Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
This brings shivers to my spine. I used to dismiss it outright, until I saw the rise of the ethnonationalism and late capitalist fascism that are being ushered in by the likes of Donald Trump and his tech oligarchs, Putin, Alternative for Germany (AfD), AfriForum and others. It makes me wonder if, as a country, we should, like Germany and other countries who have embarked on this route regarding Jewish genocide, make the denial of colonialism and apartheid a prosecutable criminal offence? After all, the United Nations gave us the nod to do so when it declared apartheid “a crime against humanity”. We need to make a sharper legal distinction regarding what constitutes political lobbying versus political subversion, especially that which involves foreign involvement in domestic political systems of governance. This goes beyond Mickey Mouse ethnoracist groups like AfriForum into the realm of the cyber sphere. When we have powerful enemies like Elon Musk, who controls one of the most powerful instruments, internet propaganda tools, we need to, like the European Union is doing, clearly define what is permissible and when a propagandist is going too far into the realms of treason.
Be that as it may, no amount of lie peddling, gaslighting and manipulation of facts is going to change the real status of our reality. There is, and has never been, white genocide in South Africa. The clear genocide we have known in this country is the manner in which the colonial villains cleared the so-called black spots for white settlement, in both the colonial and apartheid eras – from the Afrikaners’ push eastwards from the Cape, to the 1820 British Settlers and the German settlers who were paid by the allocation of farm plots for fighting with the British Empire during the Crimean War. The land given to them under the perpetual quitrent was free and was organised into farms that could be individually sold at a profit. These were not empty lands. If anything, the areas were overcrowded with natives, whose blood was shed to remove them forcefully for these white settlers. The Zuurveld is just a prototype of the colonial modus operandi that was duplicated and repeated over and over again in other areas of our country. The apartheid system inherited and institutionalised this into an order of systemic oppression.
Lastly, despite our pretensions, our histories and identities are more interlinked than we care to admit. This is one of the things I am learning against the grain in reading archival records of our history, especially about the founding towns like Somerset East, Simon’s Town, Graaff-Reinet, Cradock and Grahamstown, etc. Until we learn to use that as our strength rather than let it be what divides us, we will continue only mourning our past instead of celebrating our history. If we mourn what needs to be mourned, we may find enough empathy to understand the legitimacy of calls for setting things in order that are based on natural justice. Only then, perhaps, we shall stop being angry with each other and begin healing from our historical traumas, and, per chance, even celebrate our history as part of our collective identity instead of as something that embarrasses us.
Notes:
1 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/368881386_THE_OTHER_SIDE_OF_THE_BLACK_SILK_HANDKERCHIEF_The_Van_Plettenberg_Agreement_of_1778.
2 J Laband, The land wars: The dispossession of the Khoisan and AmaXhosa in the Cape Colony. Johannesburg: Penguin Books, 2020.
3 PT Mellet, The lie of 1652: A decolonised history of land. Cape Town: Tafelberg).
4 Ben Maclennan, A proper degree of terror: John Graham and the Cape Eastern Frontier. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1986.
5 Stockenström, in his autobiography, The autobiography of the late Sir Andries Stockenström (edited by CW Hutton, two volumes, 1887, facsimile reprint Cape Town, C Struik, 1964).
6 Ben Maclennan, A proper degree of terror: John Graham and the Cape Eastern Frontier. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1986, 143.
7 Ben Maclennan, A proper degree of terror: John Graham and the Cape Eastern Frontier. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1986, 144.
8 J Barrow, An auto-biographical memoir of Sir John Barrow, Bart, Late of the Admiralty including reflections, observations, and reminiscences at home and abroad, from early life to advanced age. Cambridge University Press, 2009, 171-2.
See also
Willa Boezak: Die Khoi-San se eeue-oue trauma
Mphuthumi Ntabeni: The lost diaries of Tiyo Soga
Mphuthumi Ntabeni: PenAfrican: Gompo Book and Cultural Festival 2025
Henning Snyman: LitNet Akademies-resensie-essay: Buys deur Willem Anker
Phil van Schalkwyk: Our hunting fathers
Rodney Warwick: 200 years ago – The Battle of Grahamstown and the name change to Makhanda
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