Biko: A Biography. Xolela Mangcu
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amaNtinde have had a significant degree of integration with Khoisan groups”.[24] The missionary station of Bethelsdorp was “a thriving centre of Khoisan life”, and there were many visitors from Xhosaland because of “the preponderance of Khoisan kinship ties among the Xhosa”.[25] Indeed, the amaGqunukhwebe, which to all intents and purposes is a Xhosa clan, has its origin in intermarriage between the Khoisan and the Xhosa. Martin Legassick describes the Kat River settlement as “an area of intermingling of all the peoples of the Eastern Cape (save whites), including Maqoma”.[26] In his biography of Tiyo Soga, Donovan Williams describes the same settlement as follows:
Between the Amatole and the Great Fish River lay an area which, by the early nineteenth century, was the last cushion for absorbing the increasing European thrust from the Cape colony. Therefore it was worth fighting for. It was also rich in cultural diversity: amaXhosa and Mfengu mingled with European missionaries, traders and travellers, administrators and military. To the northwest of the Amatole lay the Kat River valley. After Maqoma had been expelled from it in 1829 it was filled with Hottentot (Khoi) and Coloured farmers, a sprinkling of European missionaries, and after 1851, white farmers.
Dutch Rule and the Khoisan Resistance: 1657-1806
When the Dutch East India Company settled at the Cape, they immediately sought to establish a farming system that would provide them with food and meat. The Company thus settled the Cape with free burghers (independent farmers) who would provide passing ships with food supplies, which was itself a recipe for disaster given the existence of Khoi-Khoi communities with cattle in the area. In fact the Dutch governor Simon Van der Stel had feared that the free burghers could not be trusted not to encroach on the Khoi-Khoi by force, and in the process jeopardise the steady supply of food and meat to the settlement. He also feared that “in place of a class of sedentary agriculturalists, there would be created a class of roving herders, continually in search of better nourishment for their animals”.[27]
Van der Stel’s son Willem Adriaan succeeded him in 1699, and encouraged the free burghers to practise pastoralism, and the colony spread to places such as Stellenbosch, Franschhoek, Paarl and Tygerberg. As the older Van der Stel had feared, that was the beginning of interminable wars between the free burghers and the Khoi-Khoi for the first half of the 18th century – culminating in the ferocious 1739 Khoi-Dutch war. According to Nigel Penn there was a respite in the fighting between 1700 and 1740, as the free burghers moved further and further into the interior, reaching the escarpment. The vast escarpment with its little rainfall and a sparse population meant that the colonists – or trekboere as they were now called – did not meet much resistance as they forayed and foraged into the interior. They were in no mood to stay as they could not sustain pastoral farming in such an inhospitable terrain. They had their eyes on the better-watered lands of the Eastern Cape. But first they had to reckon with one more obstacle – the unanticipated existence of the San people in the Sneeuberg region of the Karoo. The trekboere had simply assumed – as colonialists tend to assume to this day – that there were no people in the area. But, according to Penn, “the entry of the trekboere into the region was to inaugurate the most violent period in the colony’s history”.[28]
Unlike the Khoi-Khoi, the San could not be brought under the control of the free burghers because they were of no economic value to the Dutch pastoralists – they could not be forced to labour as pastoralists. When they had cattle, it was with the intention of eating instead of herding them. Central to colonial pastoral farming was what was arguably its most important institution – the commando system, whereby a group of armed men would violently put under their control those whose land and cattle they raided. The San were not easily conquerable by the commando system because they could not be put to use. And so the free burghers approached them with a shoot-to-kill policy. The San also seemed to come from a mystical world that was completely foreign to one of the fundamental aspects of Christian societies – the idea of a settled, sedentary life. The differences between the Khoi-Khoi and the San did not, however, prevent the emergence of a strong Khoisan resistance, leading to pleas by various commandos for government assistance as the loss of livestock was becoming intolerable – the San ate the livestock, making its recovery by the pastoralists a moot point. In 1774 the colonial government decided to put all of the commandos under one general command – the General Commando. The San became the target of the most genocidal campaigns precisely because they could not be caught with the cattle or be captured and put in service of the pastoralists. What frustrated the burghers most was that they could not easily win against the San:
The San were not passive, unsuspecting victims of colonial aggression. The General Commando was, after all, an attempt to crush a most threatening and no doubt concerted campaign of resistance. Nor was this resistance overcome by the General Commando. Although the great numbers of casualties suffered by the San and the negligible losses suffered by the colonists would seem to suggest that the commando had been an overwhelming colonial success, this was not in fact the case. The struggle was far from decided and for many years the colonists were unable to find a military solution to the most effective guerrilla war that was being waged against them.[29]
Penn further notes that:
. . . on the eve of the British occupation, there was little to indicate that conditions in the Roggeveld were conducive to peace negotiations between the trekboere and the San. Neither side appeared to be defeated, though it is possible that both had come to realise that there was no military solution to their conflict. [30]
It is to the entry of the British into the Cape and their encounter with the Xhosa people that I now turn. Here we see the antecedents of what Steve Biko would later achieve when he forged an identity of Blackness that included Africans, Coloureds and Indians. To be sure, there were wars between the Xhosa and the Khoi and San people. War between pastoralists and hunter-gatherers is inevitable because the latter want to eat what the former want to preserve. Equally, though, there were also efforts by warriors from both sides to bridge the gap and stand together against the trekboere. This unity was to be of crucial importance in the ensuing resistance to the British who, unlike the Dutch pastoralists, now sought to entrench a more elaborate administrative system over the colony. Their aim was to anglicise what was still a Dutch-dominated colony by bringing their language and culture to bear on the entire landscape. According to Mostert,
the British were indeed to do all these things, to impose their language, their currency, their legal system and their political concepts and to bring the single greatest alteration in the course of South African affairs since the Dutch East India Company’s sanction of permanent settlers in 1657.[31]
British Colonial Rule and the Xhosa Resistance: 1779-1909
Events in Europe at the beginning of the 19th century changed the pattern of colonial rule in the Cape. Napoleon Bonaparte dominated Europe and occupied Holland, which meant that the Cape was an indirect colony of the French, except for one factor: England retained “mastery of the seas”[32] and was able to inflict severe damage on the French navy. According to Georges Lefebvre, France had 1 500 vessels in 1801 but this number had been reduced to a mere 179 in 1812. In 1806 Britain had 36 000 French prisoners and the number increased to 120 000 in 1815 – “a large part of them captured by the British sea forces”.[33] Britain’s naval supremacy guaranteed her control of maritime trade, and at this point colonial conquests were secondary to British interests: “England, mistress of the seas, was now in other parts of the world the only nation capable of imposing the authority of the white man. It was a task to which she was not so much disposed