Maverick Africans. Hermann Giliomee
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for the mere performance of her animal sex function’, while employing other women to raise her children. There was no mental chasm between the Boer woman and her male comrade, Schreiner concluded; she instead enjoyed a position of ‘intellectual equality with her male companion, a condition which seems to constitute the highest ideal in the human sexual world’.3
Chapter 2 deals with the different frontiers opened up by the Afrikaner trekboers and the Voortrekkers. In these frontier zones a new society was formed from a combination of the indigenous population, European settlers and slaves from both Asia and other parts of Africa. The history of the frontier was marked not only by dispossession and discrimination but also by economic growth and social development. The trekboers and the trekkers kept cattle just as the Khoikhoi and Bantu-speaking Africans did. Because their economies were compatible, the different communities did not try to wipe each other out but sought to find ways in which they could coexist. Unlike other colonies settled by Europeans, the indigenous population here was not decimated but instead grew strongly.
A quick look at the populations of Australia and the United States demonstrates the different patterns of development. In Australia the aboriginal population today is about half a million strong and forms just under three per cent of the population. In the US there were by 1890 about 248 000 Native Americans (0,4 per cent of the total population). By 2010 they formed just under one per cent of a total of 309 million people.
By contrast, in 1910 Africans in South Africa numbered just over 4 million and formed about two-thirds of the total population of 6 million, while there were 1,2 million whites, representing about one-fifth of the country’s population. The African population would grow to 12,6 million by 1951 and to 45 million by 2018, when they formed nearly four-fifths of the country’s population.
Decimation of the indigenous population, as happened in countries like Australia and the US, only occurred in South Africa in the north-eastern divisions of the Cape Colony at the end of the eighteenth century. Here a relentless battle was waged between burghers (later called Afrikaners) and Bushmen (later called San). Records show that burgher commandos killed 2 480 Bushmen and indentured 654 of them, while Bushmen captured 19 161 cattle and 84 094 sheep from the colonists and killed 276 of their herdsmen. In the final years of the century the Sneeuwberg was considered to be in a state of perpetual warfare.
A remarkable figure now appeared among the frontier burghers. He was Field-Commandant J.P. van der Walt, who in 1793 settled in a division largely abandoned after Bushman attacks. He received a free hand from the government ‘to eradicate and extirpate the robbers’.4 Initially, he did not question commandos shooting as many Bushmen as possible and forcing their women and children to return with the colonists to work on their farms.
Five years later, however, Van der Walt changed his views. The commandos had been unable to prevent the Bushmen from staging attacks along a broad swathe of country, as a result of which many burghers abandoned their farms. Van der Walt now asked the landdrost to refuse permission for commandos to attack the Bushmen and capture their children since ‘the burghers would also give their all if they were robbed of their children’.5 Under Van der Walt’s leadership the burghers in his division donated 283 sheep and supplies of tobacco and beads to the local Bushman clans to induce them to live peacefully on land of their own. The veldwachtmeesters of Mid-Roggeveld and Hantam also collected sheep and other gifts to hand over to the raiders to persuade them to stop stealing. In 1809 a British officer, Colonel Richard Collins, noted how pleasing it was ‘to observe the anxiety evinced by the farmers of the north-eastern districts to preserve peace with that people [the Bushmen] rather by conciliation than by terror’.6 During the 1820s the landdrost Andries Stockenström and the missionary James Clarke expressed similar sentiments.7
On the eastern frontier government attempts at enforcing territorial separation between the colonists and Xhosa were undermined because so many farmers insisted on retaining the services of their Xhosa herdsmen and on trading with the Xhosa beyond the colonial boundary.
In the meantime, a community of wine and wheat farmers had begun to prosper in the western Cape. While the economy of Cape Town was based on trade, that of the rural Cape, west and south of the first mountain ranges, was based mainly on wine and wheat production on land given out as freehold farms. Production expanded steadily: between 1720 and 1790 the number of vines increased more than fourfold, the wheat crop trebled, and the average net value of cultivators’ estates grew nearly threefold. Historians have used the term ‘gentry’ to describe the stratum of wealthy plantation owners and reasonably well-off farmers that emerged in the western Cape so as to distinguish them from the great majority of hard-working yeoman farmers in the rest of the colony.
Chapter 3 discusses the development of a white community in South Africa which from the early nineteenth century increasingly called themselves Afrikaners. Among them were the western Cape gentry, who by second half of the eighteenth century had amassed sufficient wealth to engage in conspicuous consumption. Large houses built in the ‘Cape Dutch’ style were a splendid example of this. By the 1780s visitors began to comment on signs of affluence and prosperity on several farms in the south-western Cape. Houses were filled with elegant furniture and the tables were decked with silverware and served by tidily clothed slaves.
In this respect the history of South Africa was not fundamentally dissimilar to that of the American colonies founded at roughly the same time. But the Cape was different in that it was ruled by a commercial company which looked at everything from the perspective of its own interests. Even when the burghers were consulted, the Company considered its own interests as of paramount importance. In the eighteenth century, however, the burghers rejected the Company’s plan to replace the importation of slaves with subsidised white immigration from Europe. They wanted to have as much land as possible available for their children so that they could also engage in extensive farming.
In the society that developed at the Cape, members of the gentry preferred to intermarry, but the shortage of European women made this impossible, so instead they married across class lines. Burghers of all classes attended the four churches in the rural western Cape (Stellenbosch, Paarl, Roodezand and Swartland). Both wealthy and poor burghers participated in the same militia exercises and rode out on commando together. So, too, the extension of credit helped to tie the burghers to one another. In the absence of banks, the gentry granted credit on an extensive scale to the middling and poor burghers.8
The other part of the community was commonly known as ‘Boers’ but some observers also called them Afrikaners. They lived in the interior beyond the first mountain ranges, where a form of community developed in the course of the eighteenth century that was quite different from that in the south-western Cape. C.W. de Kiewiet, a truly exceptional historian, describes the origin of the trekboers of the interior well: ‘In the long quietude of the eighteenth century the Boer race was born.’
Unlike the Dutch- or Afrikaans-speaking white community of the south-western Cape, ‘they had left the current of European life and lost the economic habits of the nations from which they had sprung … They had the nomad’s appetite for space and possessed the hardness and courage of men of the saddle who watched their flocks and hunted their meat … Their life gave them a tenacity of purpose, a power of silent endurance, and the keenest self-respect.’ But their tenacity could develop into obstinacy, their power of endurance into resistance to innovation, and their self-respect into suspicion of foreigners and contempt for their inferiors.9
By the mid-1830s the Afrikaner farmers of the eastern frontier had come to realise that on their own they would not be able to defeat and push back the Xhosa. Only the British army was capable of defeating and subjugating the Xhosa chiefdoms. In what became known as the Great Trek, the Afrikaner farmers of the eastern frontier pulled up their roots and outflanked the Xhosa, moving into the thinly populated central interior of South Africa. They settled in areas that would become known as the Free State and Transvaal. The model of land settlement adopted here was the loan farm system of the Cape Colony of the eighteenth century. This did not embrace the English system of exclusive, private property rights but rather encouraged a farmer to attract white and black employees to help him look after his cattle and defend his farm.
As a result of a decision by the British government to retreat from direct control of the interior