Writing the Ancestral River. Jacklyn Cock
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sour-grass hills and plains of the Zuurveld, now known as Ndlambe Municipal Area, one of the poorest parts of South Africa.
The original inhabitants of the Zuurveld were the Khoikhoi, often contemptuously called ‘Hottentots’ by the settlers. These indigenous people were the first to experience what has been described as the ‘violent, even genocidal process’ of colonial expansion in the late eighteenth century as Dutch farmers appropriated their land, their cattle and their power. In 1774 the Dutch government at the Cape ordered that ‘the whole race of Bushmen and Hottentots who had not submitted to servitude … be seized or extirpated’.2 ‘By the end of the century there were no independent living pastoral Khoekhoe in the region.’3 It was from the Khoi language that the name of the Kowie River derives. The different names given to the river reflect changing constellations of power. According to the Dictionary of South African English, Kowie comes from the Khoi word qohi, which roughly means ‘pipe’, an image which could refer to the shape of the river. An early traveller, Ensign Beutler, described how the Khoikhoi smoked their tobacco with a water pipe. According to another authority, the river was called iCoyi, from a Khoi word meaning ‘buffalo’, which used to be numerous in the Kowie valley.4 In the Eastern Cape, ‘it is the rivers that have clung most tenaciously to their Khoi names: Kowie, Kariega, Kei, Keiskamma and Koonap’.5
Rivers like the Kowie were important in Khoikhoi identity. According to Ensign Beutler, whose expedition of 1752 passed through the area, the Khoikhoi ‘do not know of what people they are: they name themselves only after the rivers by which they live’.6 He also observed that before they ‘cross a big river, they first throw into it a green twig, with wishes to themselves for much luck, a multitude of cattle and long life. Afterwards they wash their whole body and then cross the river.’7
Although it is clear from Beutler’s journal that there were no Xhosa living west of the Keiskamma at the time of his 1752 expedition, the Dutch explorer Colonel Robert Gordon found many Xhosa living in the Zuurveld when he visited the area in 1777. By this time, Dutch trekboers, or pastoralists, were already encroaching upon Xhosa and Khoi territory, and within a few years the Zuurveld became marked by struggles over access to land and cattle. The clashes formed the start of what has been called a Hundred Years War between the Xhosa and the colonists, who, after the Cape was taken over by the British, could call on the support of the British army.
The thick bush of the Kowie and other river valleys was the scene of violent clashes during these wars of dispossession. At that time the riverbanks were thick with ancient cycads, wild crane flowers, gigantic yellowwood trees and shady white milkwoods. The dense vegetation, the thickly forested valleys and deep ravines, the towering trees, creepers and vines, all offered hiding places to the Xhosa, for whom this was a familiar landscape. It also made movement difficult for the British soldiers. During one war ‘the Gqunukhwebe showed what could be done with the river beds of lower Albany. Using the banks as parapets, they exposed only their heads … They were able to hide for long periods under water, their nostrils emerging under cover of the reeds at the river’s edge. Otherwise they hid in trees, in antbear holes and in caves.’8 The Kowie was one of the rivers used in this way.
As this history shows, the various groups living in the Zuurveld – Khoikhoi, Xhosa, Dutch and British – interacted not only among themselves but also with the Kowie River in different ways. As with the Khoikhoi, for the Xhosa rivers were geographical markers of identity. Moreover, the Xhosa believed they had sacred qualities. Traditionally Xhosa warriors purified themselves before battle by bathing in rivers. Rivers like the Kowie with their deep pools also provided access to the ancestors, the Abantu Bomlambo (People of the River), elusive water divinities who have the power to shape the lives of their descendants. Different pools of the Kowie River were, and are, especially good places for accessing the People of the River. They are believed to live beneath the water with their crops and cattle. Initiates who are called by the ancestors to become diviners go to the People of the River, who sanction their calling. In the millenarian Cattle Killing of 1856–7, according to legend, the People of the River emerged from the water to instruct the Xhosa to purify their contaminated homesteads. Today gifts for the People of the River are often floated out into the centre of river pools in small reed baskets containing items such as sorghum, tobacco, pumpkin seeds and white beads. I have seen offerings to the river people in beautifully woven grass baskets floating in the Blaauwkrantz pool, at the foot of the Blaauwkrantz Gorge, and in the pool that marks the confluence of the Lushington and Kowie rivers. These are places that feel holy and enchanted.
Researching the history of the Kowie has meant revisiting my own ancestors and engaging with their relationship with the river. This engagement is necessary because the ravages of the past continue in the present and, as Aubrey Matshiqi has written, ‘the lack of acknowledgement of what was done to black people during the colonial and apartheid eras is a recipe for social, political and economic calamity’.9
Acknowledging that past and the inter-generational, racialised privileges it established and perpetuated is one reason why this book is also a personal account of what the river represents to me. As the artist Louise Bourgeois wrote of her childhood, the river weaves ‘like a wool thread through everything’.10 For me, the Kowie River connects a personal and a collective history, the social and the ecological, the sacred and the profane, in both the honouring and the abuse of nature.
This book focuses on three very different moments in the river’s story which involved the linked processes of ecological damage and racialised dispossession. The Battle of Grahamstown, which was fought in the vicinity of the Kowie in 1819, changed the course of South African history by consolidating British control of the Zuurveld. In its aftermath, a settlement was established at the mouth of the Kowie River, known as Port Kowie, though it was soon renamed Port Frances by settlers anxious to win favour with the Cape governor, Lord Charles Somerset, whose daughter-in-law was called Frances. Subsequently, it was given yet another name by settlers eager for government support for development of the harbour – Port Alfred, in honour of the British queen’s second-eldest son, who toured South Africa in 1860. As the prince chose to go elephant hunting instead of attending the ceremonial renaming of the town, my great-aunt Harriet Cock, then aged 8, deputised for him.
It is the harbour, begun at the river mouth in 1821 and extended and altered through to the 1870s, that forms the second ‘moment’ of the Kowie River’s history explored in this book. The establishment of the harbour helped draw the former Zuurveld region tightly into the trading and commercial networks of the British empire, and contributed in this way to the subjection of the Xhosa within colonial society.
The third moment of my story is the development of an upmarket marina at Port Alfred in 1989. This project has undermined the ecological integrity of the river and at the same time has highlighted and entrenched even further the longstanding divisions in the area between white privilege and black poverty.
Writing the story of the Kowie River has been more than an intellectual engagement. It is both a memoir and a paean to place, a love story disguised as a social and environmental history. When we talk of a ‘love of place’, Rebecca Solnit points out, we ‘usually mean our love for places, but seldom of how the places love us back, of what they give us. They give us continuity, something to return to, and offer a familiarity that allows some portion of our own lives to remain connected and coherent. They give us an expansive scale in which our troubles are set into context, in which the largeness of the world is a balm to loss, trouble and ugliness.’11
The Kowie River has given me a great deal. I love the rich prawn smell of the mud banks exposed at low tide, the banks of euphorbia trees, the deep green pools where catfish, giant kob and grunter still live, and the surging tide where the river enters the Indian Ocean. To use the words of the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, ‘we return to the banks of certain rivers’,12 and since infancy there has never been a year when I have not swum in the green-brown waters of the Kowie River, walked its wooded banks or spent hours watching the surge of the tide and the crashing waves as it empties into the sea. In all of these ways – canoeing, swimming, fishing, birdwatching, picnicking or simply sitting on its banks watching the light change – the Kowie River has been a constant