Writing the Ancestral River. Jacklyn Cock
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River mountain chains in the north, the Fish River in the east, the Sundays River in the west, and the Indian Ocean to the south. However, during the period 1770–1812 ‘contemporaries also referred to the Zuurveld in the more restricted sense as the area between the Boesmans and the Fish Rivers’.42 In 1778 Governor Van Plettenberg persuaded some imiDange chiefs to recognise the boundary of the colony as the upper reaches of the Great Fish River and the Boesmans River Mountains. Jeff Peires points out that ‘it was not a solemn treaty with all the Xhosa chiefs along the Great Fish River’.43 Two years later the Council of Policy proclaimed the Fish River along its entire length as the boundary.
The Dutch word zuurveld, the name for the catchment area of the Kowie, refers to the prevalent grass type in the area, meaning ‘the land of sour grasses’. Being of high acidity, the soil produces grass which is harmful, even fatal, to cattle in autumn and winter. The main characteristic of ‘sourveld’ is that its ‘nutritive value and palatability decreases as it matures. In the spring and early summer its food value is high and the grass is of great importance to the herdsmen. But it can only be fully utilised for about four months in the year before its food value becomes depleted and it loses its palatability. “Sweetveld” is therefore of particular importance as winter grazing if cattle are to maintain condition.’44 Consequently the Zuurveld was only suitable as pasture during the summer months, though the sweetveld of the river valleys provided good grazing throughout the year. All the early inhabitants of the area, Khoikhoi, Dutch and Xhosa, needed therefore to move their herds of cattle between seasonal pastures, alternating summer grazing on the sourveld with winter grazing on the sweetveld.
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The original inhabitants of the Zuurveld were Khoikhoi pastoralists, who moved about the area seasonally in search of water and grazing. Their prior inhabitation has been shown conclusively by the written accounts of all the early European travellers who passed through the region in the eighteenth century. When Ensign Beutler visited the Eastern Cape in 1752 he found the Kowie area was inhabited by Khoikhoi people identified as the Gonaqua. They were already in the process of intermarrying with and being absorbed by the neighbouring Xhosa into what would become known as the Gqunukhwebe chiefdom. Beutler observed that ‘the clothing and way of life’ of the Xhosa and the Gonaqua ‘are similar and they intermarry without differentiation’. As has been observed, ‘the longevity of their interaction is illustrated by the wholehearted adoption of Khoisan clicks into isiXhosa’.45 In this way the Zuurveld became a site of intense social interaction and ‘ethnic ambiguity’.46
Khoikhoi was a very fluid social and political category: groups constantly broke up and amalgamated over time. Between about 1752 and 1772 the dominant political figure in the Zuurveld was the Hoengiqua chief known to the Dutch as Ruyter. He was not a chief by birth but gathered together numbers of followers and was respected by the Xhosa as well as by the Dutch. According to the traveller Colonel Robert Gordon, who came across the clan in the vicinity of what is now Kenton, Ruyter’s people claimed sovereignty over the Zuurveld between the Sundays and the Fish rivers.47
Much of the land the Khoikhoi occupied was taken from them by incoming trekboers. From about 1770 these semi-nomadic Dutch farmers, whom the English missionary Stephen Kay referred to disparagingly as ‘white barbarians’, began to settle in the Zuurveld, drawn to its well-watered grazing lands and fertile soil. ‘In defiance of the colonial regulations, they had taken possession of the choicest spots they could find beyond the nominal boundary – then the Gamtoos river.’48 They raided the livestock of the Khoikhoi, burnt down their dwellings and drove them off the land. Khoikhoi were also attacked by the Xhosa under Rharhabe, who had moved westwards over the Kei River.
By the end of the century the Khoikhoi had lost most of their land to European colonists, large numbers had died of newly introduced diseases such as smallpox, and many were forced into the service of the colonists either as labourers or as soldiers. The missionary John Philip wrote, ‘The Hottentots are acknowledged to be a free people but labour is every day becoming scarcer, and the colonists are resolved to indemnify themselves for the loss of the slave trade by reducing the Hottentots to a condition of slavery the more shocking and oppressive.’49 One of the ironies of history is that Khoikhoi soldiers played a decisive role in the defeat of the Xhosa in the Battle of Grahamstown in 1819 and in the expulsion of the Xhosa from the Zuurveld in 1811–12. Their vulnerability had turned them into collaborators with the colonists.
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Land and water are crucial to understanding the history of the area. The Kowie River was at the centre of the Xhosa world for the thousands living in the Zuurveld on the eastern frontier of the colony. The Xhosa lived in dispersed settlements, with each chiefdom occupying a particular river valley. According to Jeff Peires, ‘It was the water not the land which determined the pattern of human settlement. Ideally each chiefdom had its own river and each sub-chiefdom had its own tributary … there was no latitude for doubt in the matter of access to water. Only the people of the community and their cattle had the right to drink the water of their own particular stream. Thus nearly all Xhosa place-names are the names of rivers.’50
It seems fairly certain that, at least by 1778, the Gqunukhwebe under Chief Tshaka occupied the Kowie River valley and the area as far west as the Bushmans River. They had lived longer in the Zuurveld than the other Xhosa groups and had long intermarried with the Khoikhoi. When Colonel Gordon visited the Zuurveld in 1778 he met with several Xhosa chiefs who had crossed the Keiskamma after 1752. A number were living west of the Bushmans River and one as far as the Zwartkops River. In 1798 the British official John Barrow described encountering ‘a prodigious number of Kaffers with their cattle, belonging, as they told us, to a powerful chief named Congo [Chungwa, the son of Tshaka]’.51 ‘Two officials sent in 1797 to visit the Zuurveld and report on conditions, met with a number of Xhosa chiefs living near the coast, close to the Bushmans and Kariega rivers.’52 These encounters completely refute the colonial myth that white and black arrived in the empty land of the Zuurveld simultaneously in the late eighteenth century.
At this time the Kowie River catchment area was dotted with Xhosa homesteads containing clusters of beehive-shaped dwellings with clay walls and thatched roofs, thorn-fenced enclosures of cattle with elaborately shaped horns, and gardens of maize, sorghum, pumpkins and melons. These horned cattle were the fulcrum of Xhosa social and spiritual life, and their meat and milk were the principal means of subsistence. The Xhosa had twenty-five names to describe different cattle-skin patterns and colours, and seven different names for the shapes of their horns. ‘The Xhosa lived in an intensely personal environment. He was part of it and he felt at home in it.’53
But by 1779 armed clashes began between the Dutch and Xhosa chiefdoms such as the Gqunukhwebe and Ndlambe in the area between the Sundays and Fish rivers. Fundamentally, these were struggles for access to and control of pasture and water. The tension was exacerbated by conflicting views about both land and identity. The colonists thought of occupation as conferring an exclusive right on individuals, whereas the Xhosa saw land as communal property, the boundaries of which were very loosely defined. Conflict was also informed by different understandings of society and identity. ‘Xhosa society was basically an open one which, through intermarriage and other means, incorporated and eventually integrated non-Nguni speakers. There is evidence that Xhosa were inclined to incorporate the colonists in the same way.’54 In sharp contrast to this egalitarian inclusivity, the colonisers claimed a dominant and exclusive identity.
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The armed clashes which marked the years of conflict were intermittent and involved episodic cattle raids and skirmishes rather than dramatic confrontations between armed protagonists. But the stakes were high and many lives were lost. It was a conflict which extended in a Hundred Years War from 1779 (the outbreak of the first war) to 1878 (the conclusion of the ninth and last). These are usually described as ‘frontier wars’ or, more recently, as ‘wars of dispossession’. The first two clashes took place between the Dutch and the Xhosa, but during later clashes the British colonial forces gradually forced the Xhosa back across the Kowie, then the Fish, and finally across the Keiskamma and the Kei, almost to the site of what is now Mthatha.
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