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Article |
| Trekboers and
KhoeSan |
By 1700, venturing
farmers had established large cattle ranches over the Hottentot-Holland
mountains that lie beyond the winelands; other aspiring landowners had ventured
north into the Swartland.
Their advance inevitably brought them into conflict with Khoe
clans. The scene repeated what had happened under van Riebeeck at the Peninsula
- the Khoe were driven off the land and forcibly excluded or employed.
The advance of the trekboers was supported by another, and
stronger assault, that of smallpox that spread from a ship in the harbour to
decimate Khoe populations, hastening their decline.
Ironically, the trekboers copied the pastoral farming
techniques of the Khoe, whose societies they had destroyed. They raided Khoe
herds and utilised the same migratory grazing routes. In fact they forced the
displaced Khoe to work for them as shepherds.
Steadily the extent of European settlement grew further, and as
they spread from Cape Town the influence of the VOC became nominal.
Furthermore, they seldom visited town because of the great hazards and
difficulties of crossing the mountains.
Eventually, in 1745 the VOC established Swellendam 120 miles
east of Cape Town and sent a clerk, two soldiers and a landdrost (magistrate)
to form an administration. Thirty years later there were still only four
buildings and the landdrost relied upon the help of the strongest trekboers to
exert any authority. A similar outpost was established further east called
Graaff-Reinet, but only in 1786.
The farmers lived in rudimentary conditions - especially on the frontiers. They
maintained a subsistence economy, periodically trading cattle for gunpowder and
other supplies from Cape Town. The trekboers had large families. There was a
tiny primary school attached the church at Swellendam but apart from this there
were no churches or schools, and the parents had little formal education of
their own to pass on.
Literacy levels declined and a version of Calvinism, narrow and
rooted in the stories of the Old Testament and characterised by a divine right
of conquest, took root as a guiding philosophy. Trekboers formed 'commandos' -
mounted patrols - to protect cattle and drive out the Khoe. They shot male Khoe
on sight, and took their women and children as workers.
They also hunted game, and had a dramatic effect on herds in
the Karoo region, exterminating the Blauuwbok and Quagga entirely and reducing
other species to tiny remnant populations. The loss of biodiversity has done
permanent damage to the ecology of the Karoo and its carrying capacity.
The Khoe and San combined to maintain guerrilla resistance to the trekboers
from the 1730s onwards. In the 1770s groups of KhoeSan 400 strong succeeded in
driving trekboers from large tracts of land in the Karoo and from the area of
Graaff-Reinet. A San leader, Koerikei, called out to one group of farmers
'what are you doing on my land? You have taken all the places where the
eland and other game live. Why did you not stay where the sun goes down, where
you first came from?' (quoted, Ross Pg. 22)
The success of Khoe attacks, however, mobilised the VOC to some action - they
despatched forces from Cape Town and a ruthless genocide followed.
As the trekboers continued to spread east, they eventually came
into contact with the Xhosa and warfare broke out in 1779 and again in 1793
over control of grazing land to the west of the Fish river. The Xhosa, however,
were a more organised and well armed society than the Khoe, and the warfare was
indecisive.
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