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PREFACE

This book is a series of essays on the 19th- and 20th-century history of what was at the time called Gordonia (now essentially the Z.W. Mgcawu district of the Northern Cape Province, together with parts of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park). The region surrounding Gordonia – the northern part of this province – though a large land area, is marginal in South Africa. Some reports on this region estimate it as containing only 2.2 per cent of South Africa’s population in 2014, and the lowest growth rate in the country of 2.2 per cent in 2011.¹

Gordonia is a part of central Transorangia, which may be defined as ‘the region to the north of the middle Orange River mainly comprising Griqualand West and what was once called British Bechuanaland’. Gordonia proper lies north of the Orange, between Groblershoop and the Aughrabies Falls. To its west is Namaqualand – ‘the mountainous and rugged granite terrain along the escarpment south of the lower Orange… [comprising] Little Namaqualand; the area extending from the Orange River to Rehoboth in the north and from the great escarpment to the Kalahari sands… [comprising] Great Namaqualand’.² To the south of Gordonia is Bushmanland, which lies to the east of Little Namaqualand and shades away to the west into the Great Karoo. The Orange River cuts its way between the arid semi-desert of Gordonia to the north and Bushmanland to the south. The river valley is an elongated fertile oasis, the only historical source of permanent water and excellent grazing pasture, with rainfall progressively lessening to the river’s mouth. Between Upington and the Aughrabies Falls the valley widens out (variably between one and 11 kilometres wide) into an 80-kilometre long chain of islands, big and small.

From late October until May, when summer rains fall, the Orange River is generally in flood, though for the remainder of the year its bed is dry. When the river is in flood, the islands are ‘intersected by innumerable streams, almost all unfordable, and many of them swift as mill races’.³ Leading a military expedition against the Kora on the islands in 1869, Sir Walter Currie commented that he ‘used to think the Fish River bush [on the eastern Cape frontier] a stronghold, but it stands nowhere in comparison with this water jungle’.⁴ But from areas of indigenous resistance against the expansion of colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries, the islands became the fertile beneficiaries of irrigation, which became the lifeblood of Upington and of Gordonia for the whole of the 20th century.

As the present name of the district indicates, there is a substantial Xhosa-speaking presence in Gordonia, and Xhosa have been present in the area since the late 18th century. However the distinctive feature of the area was its colonisation by Basters in the late 19th century. The present brown population comprises descendants of these, together with other previously resident Khoisan peoples – including the Korana, Nama, San and others.⁵

Driving from Johannesburg to Cape Town in the early 1990s, soon after my return to South Africa from exile, I passed through Upington. I was giving a lift to a friend from Khayelitsha who lived in Paballelo, the ‘Xhosa location’ in the town. Up to the time of my visit, I had known of Upington only in connection with the ‘Upington 26’, the people collectively charged with the killing of a municipal policeman in Paballelo in 1985. Now I became intrigued with this area, with the fertile irrigated lands along the Orange River surrounded by semi-desert to the south and north. When I returned to Cape Town I did a library search on what was written about the area, and discovered virtually nothing – and what there was was about the whites.

In July 1993 I made the first of a number of field trips to the area. These essays are the product of those field trips in which I conducted (with assistance from colleagues mentioned in the notes) many oral interviews, and of collateral archival research. They present aspects of a relatively unknown ‘brown’ and ‘black’ history of the area, and are intended to emphasise the lives of ordinary people.

Originally I had intended to write a full local history of Gordonia from the time of its settlement by Basters in the 1870s up to the present. This has proved too much to accomplish. Instead I have used a variety of methodologies to approach the various topics – methodologies influenced by my post-modern and post-colonial erstwhile colleagues in the University of the Western Cape (UWC) History Department as well as by their concern with public history and heritage. I am grateful for their inspiration. Though this was not originally intended, these essays have also turned out to be in part an exercise in ‘applied history’, that is to say, historical writing with a direct application to people’s lives in the present.⁶ Applied history looks for transformation in the present on the basis of evidence from the past. In outlining the essays below, I draw attention to their applied effects. Yet still much remains to be done to overcome the injustices of the past.

The first two chapters provide a background to the colonial occupation of Gordonia, tracing the indigenous history of the area as well as the northward movement of Basters and whites from the western Cape through Bushmanland to the Orange River, the establishment of the Baster settlement in Gordonia in 1880 and its subsequent decline.

The third chapter focuses in on Abraham and Elizabeth September, a true ‘pioneering’ Baster family in Gordonia. Abraham, formerly a slave, was a member of the Baster settlement. He was the first person to lead out water from the Orange River for irrigation purposes. This was the start of the Upington canal, which has been the lifeblood of the area since the 1880s – and which in the mythology of the white town is associated with the Reverend Christian Schroeder, the missionary in the area. I am pleased to say that my research on Abraham September, which was first published in the Journal of African History in 1996, has resulted in the local rediscovery of this ‘pioneer’. There is now a plaque to him in Upington, placed there by Nelson Mandela on Heritage Day 1997, and Abraham is now mentioned in local guidebooks and material for tourists. The canal which is Upington’s lifeline has been renamed after him. The essay is, however, not about his canal-building, but about the loss of land by his family in the early part of the century, as the result of crookery by lawyers. This is a case-study of a phenomenon that many Baster families still living in Gordonia complain of: between the 1890s and 1920 most Baster families were dispossessed in Gordonia and the land fell into the hands of whites. Exercising ‘applied history’, in 2009 I presented evidence to the Land Claims Court (established under the Restitution of Land Rights Act No. 22 of 1994 to adjudicate on disputed claims) on the Septembers’ case for restitution, which they have won as regards an erf in Upington. The case of their farm Ouap is still to be finalised by the court. Other dispossessed Baster families are also receiving compensation through the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights.

The fourth chapter is a reminder of some of the previous inhabitants of the area, the so-called ‘Bushmen’.⁷ Together with Korana, they were the main inhabitants of Gordonia prior to its settlement by Basters. From genocidal extermination, policy towards the Bushmen from the mid-19th century shifted to their ‘preservation’ – sometimes, as will be seen, by the most inhuman means. The essay deals with representations of them – opinions and consequent behaviour towards and treatment of them – between 1880 and 1900 in Gordonia. At the start of this period the local magistrate ( John Scott, not to be confused with the notorious Upington inhabitant ‘Scotty’ Smith⁸) sent some, guilty of cattle theft, to Robben Island in the hope that they would be studied by the German linguist William Bleek. By the middle of the period they were being dispatched to Europe to be exhibited in public. The subsequent fate of some is described in the fifth chapter. The idea of the ‘representation’ of Bushmen emphasises that the image of these people was created by colonialism.

The fifth chapter concerns the results of research by myself and Ciraj Rassool on the illegal trade in Bushmen soon after the turn of the 20th century, published by the South African and McGregor Museums in 2000 as Skeletons in the cupboard: South African museums and the trade in human remains.⁹ Recently buried bodies of Bushmen were dug up and the flesh boiled off the bones, so that their skeletons could be displayed in local and overseas museums as a ‘disappearing race’, and their skulls measured for purposes of racial research. One consequence of our research has been the repatriation of the remains of Trooi and Klaas Pienaar from the Natural History Museum in Vienna and their reburial, presided over by President Jacob Zuma, in Kuruman in August 2012 – a striking example of applied history.¹⁰

The sixth and eighth chapters take as their centre point the area of Riemvasmaak on the South African-Namibian border and trace the history of its occupation from the late 1700s. The first main protagonists are the (brown) Afrikaner family, rebels from further south, a branch of which built a state which dominated central South West Africa in the mid-19th century. Later in the century the family rebelled again, on two occasions, against the Cape Colony. The second main protagonist is Jacob Marengo, a mixed Nama-Herero leader of the revolt against German rule in South West Africa in 1903–7. He was captured in Riemvasmaak by the British in 1906 and imprisoned in Tokai, Cape Town. When he was released in 1907 he once again made for Riemvasmaak, before being killed by a combined German and British patrol in the middle of the Gordonia desert.

The seventh chapter concerns the battle of Naroegas during the South African War of 1899–1902, when a patrol of Northern Border Scouts, largely Baster in composition, inflicted a major defeat on a Boer commando at a spot just off the present road between Keimoes (on the Orange) and Kenhardt (in Bushmanland). The rediscovery of this battle by means of oral history was the work of a local historian, Jesse Strauss. My own work on this subject supplemented his article published in Kronos.¹¹ These three chapters as yet have acquired no applied effects!

The ninth chapter is concerned with the (rural) racial segregation of Gordonia by the South African government in the course of the 1920s, when as a result of a petition by descendants of the original Baster inhabitants demanding the restitution of their land, two small pieces of Gordonia were turned into ‘reserves’ for ‘coloureds’. One of these was a group of islands on the Orange River, which became known as Ecksteenskuil. The second was territory in northern Gordonia around a Rhenish mission station at Rietfontein, known as Mier. In roughly the same period Riemvasmaak also became a ‘native reserve’. I believe this essay, as ‘applied history’, has assisted land claimants in Gordonia.

The tenth chapter is a complementary study of the (urban) racial segregation of the town of Upington. The origins of Keidebees and Blikkies ‘locations’ in the town lie in the late 19th century. From the start they were inhabited by ‘mixed’ populations, including Korana, Basters and Xhosa. There was a history of attempts at removal of them right through the 20th century. The segregated ‘native location’ of Paballelo was envisaged from the 1940s, and actually established at the end of the 1950s. From the mid-1960s the area which was Keidebees location has been barren land (like District Six in Cape Town) as people were removed from it, ‘natives’ to Paballelo and ‘coloureds’ to Blikkies. Blikkies was also turned into a ‘pure coloured’ area by the removal from it of ‘natives’. The ‘applied’ aspect of this essay consists in the fact that it was produced to verify claims for restitution of those evicted from the locations, which resulted in substantial financial compensation.

The final chapter is the autobiography of an old-time black resident of Upington, Alfred Gubula, as related to me and tape-recorded in the course of several interviews. He arrived there from the eastern Cape in the 1950s and lived in Paballelo from the time of its establishment. He has a continuous history of political activity from the 1950s. His son and two nephews were among the Upington 26, and he was prominent in organising the defence of the 26. He was president of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in the northern Cape from 1989 to 1991.

The essays in this collection are united by the themes of dispossession of land (from colonial times to the imposition of the Group Areas Act) and resistance to it, whether in the form of the stock-thieving resistance of the Bushmen, the wars of the brown Afrikaners, Marengo and the Border Scouts during the South African War, the resistance through official channels of the Basters, or the modern protest of the Upington 26. Another theme which emerged is ‘hidden history’. This is perhaps most extreme in the case of the battle of Naroegas, where bringing the story to the surface was an emotional experience, bringing tears in some cases. Apart from Deneys Reitz’s partial account, the scope of the war in the northern Cape is not well known and chapter 7 brings the facts to the surface.¹²

There are other examples. The Pienaars (chapter 5) had disappeared into unnamed remains. The contribution of Abraham September (and Klaas Bok) to the initiation of irrigation from the Orange River was suppressed (chapters 2 and 3). And the dispossession of Baster land by fraud was disguised as loss through debt and drink (chapter 2). Even, as Neville Alexander has pointed out, the role of Jacob Marengo in the 1903–6 Herero-Bondelswarts revolt was relatively neglected (chapter 8).¹³ Much remains to be done in recovering the history of Gordonia and the northern Cape in general. One theme which I have not explored, for example, is the history of the (coloured) Labour Party – which is prefigured in the protest letters of J. Mouton (see chapter 9). But hopefully others will draw inspiration from this book to investigate other topics further.

Also mentioned is the lack of communication between the Cape and British governments which allowed South West Africa to fall into German hands in 1885 (until its recapture by South Africa during the First World War). Attention is drawn to the presence of missionaries in the area from the mid-19th century, although this topic is not developed because this has been done elsewhere.

A further theme present across the essays is the establishment and utilisation of borders. Unlike the natural border of the Orange River, the 20th parallel border between German South West Africa and the Cape Colony was an arbitrarily imposed one. The book shows how this border was shaped not by a line on a map but by the practice of enforcing it – or ignoring it. The Afrikaners in 1897 used the border to plead for surrender to the British though earlier they had resisted its implications (the declaration of a cattle-free zone). Marengo ignored the border in his military activity but used it to establish secure rear bases on British territory, thus where necessary utilising the ambiguities and contradictions in British and German policy. At first the British tolerated this, but in the end they succumbed to German demands. In killing Marengo, German-British military cooperation dissolved the border temporarily.

In these stories of dispossession and resistance one persistent issue that raises itself is the question of identity. Later under apartheid, this crystallised into ‘white’, ‘Indian’ (though there were few if any in Gordonia), ‘coloured’, and ‘native’ (later ‘Bantu’) partly imposed identities. However in earliest times there appears to have been extreme ethnic fluidity, with intermarriage and other forms of social mixing among Bushmen, Khoi and even Sotho-Tswana. The Tlhaping, first a derogatory name applied by others, emerged for example as a mixed Xhosa-Khoi chiefdom. At the same time there are identifiable ethnic (for example Nama) or narrower ‘tribal’ (for example Wikar and Gordon’s listing of ‘Namynkoa’, ‘Kaukoa’, and other)¹⁴ identities – in which language or dialect formed a main theme – engaged in occasional conflict (chapter 1). In the 19th century, ‘Oorlamisation’ went along with a further merging and mixing of identities into multi-ethnic communities as well as disappearance of identities (the Einiqua) – though perhaps their identity merely continued hidden (chapters 1, 6). As whites trickled in, so they added at first to the fluid mixture.

With colonisation in the later 19th century, first by Basters and then by whites, matters changed. Some fluidity persisted: in 1866 ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Kafirs’ could be called ‘Bastards’, and Xhosa, Bushmen, and Basters intermarried (chapter 1). Resisters joined forces across ethnicity – as in the 1879–80 war on the Orange of Kora, Griqua, Xhosa, Nama, Damara and Bushmen, ultimately stimulated by Xhosa resistance in the eastern Cape (chapters 1, 6). There grew recognisable differentiation into classes, with Bushmen, and poorer Kora and Basters, turned into servants (chapters 1, 2). But with white urban settlement, the church in Upington, whose membership had ranged, in the Reverend Schroeder’s words, ‘from wholly white to wholly black’ in the 1880s, became racially segregated in the 1890s, as did the schools (chapter 2).

With final conquest came imposed racial classification. Urban locations (though of mixed Khoi and Xhosa) were established and later officially proclaimed – though initially there was indecision over whether these should be separated along class lines (servants and other labourers), or along racial ones. Their crude conditions are brought out in chapter 10. The 1891 census divided the population of Gordonia among ‘whites’, ‘aboriginal natives’ and ‘other coloured persons’, and in 1904 the divisions were ‘European’, ‘Hottentot’, ‘Fingo’, ‘Kafir and Bechuana’, and ‘Mixed and other’ (chapter 2). With the official imposition of segregation in Gordonia in the 1920s categories were more clearly defined, and there was compression of categories. Thus in 1923 the Acting Secretary for Native Affairs wrote to the Department of Lands arguing that ‘it would seem unnecessary to have two separate reserves for the accommodation of coloured persons on the one hand and Hottentots and Damaras, to whom the bastard population are doubtless closely akin, on the other’ (chapter 9). The inhabitants of Riemvasmaak, hitherto regarded as ‘natives’, were redefined by Herbst in 1926 as ‘coloureds’ – and took advantage of the fluidity to continue pressing their case for a ‘reserve’ (chapter 9). Basters, as Piet Beukes commented, were officially turned into ‘coloureds’ – though unofficially they retained their sense of identity, including some superiority to other coloureds (chapter 9).

Under apartheid identity imposition was strengthened – along segregationist lines suggested by the supposedly anti-segregationist war-time Smuts government. This applied to the Upington locations, where ‘native’ legislation as well as the Group Areas Act was used to impose apartheid. In addition, on their eviction in 1974, some Riemvasmakers were moved, as ‘Damaras’, to Khorigas in the then South West Africa, others as ‘Xhosa’ to Welcomewood in the then Ciskei; others (‘coloureds’) settled elsewhere in the northern and western Cape (chapter 6). The class/race hierarchy of apartheid is well illustrated in Alfred Gubula’s recollections (chapter 11).

Today, Xhosa and coloured identities are clearly defined and internally accepted. A Xhosa identity existed from the time of Danster in the late 18th century to the habitation of Paballelo, and its resistance in the 1980s. ‘Coloured’, though a contrived identity arising from colonisation, is now also accepted by many. There is an aversion to intermarriage, partly due to propinquity but reinforced by ‘racial’ prejudices.

There are many translations into English from Afrikaans sources drawn on in the book, with the original text excluded. Except where indicated otherwise, these are my own work. It should be mentioned that names in the original source documents often have a variety of different spellings. In the text the most generally accepted spelling has been used; variants sometimes occur in quotations from these documents, and in citation details.

As always, one acquires many debts in writing a book. I am grateful to the staff of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service in Roeland Street, Cape Town, particularly Erica le Roux but also all the other staff members, unfailingly courteous and helpful. I am equally grateful to the staff of the African Studies Library at the University of Cape Town – to Sue, Allegra, Boesie, Bev – also ever ready to assist. Suzie Newton-King, too, has shown ever-willingness when asked to assist. Thanks to all my former colleagues at UWC, especially Ciraj Rassool and Premesh Lalu for their encouragement. I am particularly grateful to Aubrey Beukes for guiding my enquiries at the beginning and to his wife Dina and family for their hospitality and continued friendship; also to Jesse Strauss for providing me with key knowledge and for his family’s hospitality. Alfred Gubula has continued to be a friend and an acute observer of the local and national scene. Working with Mikey Abrahams on the Keidebees and Blikkies evictions was a stimulating experience. Work for the Northern Cape Land Commission has allowed me to deepen my knowledge of the area and I am particularly grateful to Virgil Gabarone for this. Thanks to Roshan Cader of Wits University Press and particularly to Karen Press, with whom working on editing and shortening the book has been a pleasure. Margie Struthers, my partner for more than 30 years, has helped with bibliographical references, as well as constantly providing support and sustenance.

Notes

1Statistics South Africa, Mid-year population estimates 2014, Statistical release P0302, http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0302/P03022014.pdf; Regional economic growth, http://www.statssa.gov.za/economic_growth/16%20Regional%20estimates.pdf, accessed 15/10/2015.

2See M. Legassick, ‘The northern frontier to c.1840: the rise and decline of the Griqua people’, in R. Elphick and H. Giliomee (eds), The shaping of South African society (Cape Town: Maskew Miller, 1979), p. 358.

3J.H. Scott to Secretary for Native Affairs (SNA), 13/5/1880, Cape Parliamentary Papers (henceforth CPP) A30-1880, Papers connected with affairs on the northern border of the Cape of Good Hope, p. 133.

4Western Cape Archives and Records Service (henceforth CA) HA80-104, Sir W. Currie to R. Southey, 4/7/1869, quoted in R. Ross, ‘!Kora wars on the Orange River, 1830–1880’, Journal of African History 16, 4, 1975, p. 575. See also on the islands T. Strauss, War along the Orange (Centre for African Studies, UCT, Communications 1/1979), pp. 20–1; R. Moffat, CPP G1-1858, Report of a survey of a portion of the Orange river, eastward of Little Namaqualand, pp. 4–5; Scott, ‘Report of the Special Magistrate, Northern Border, CPP G20-1881, Blue Book on Native Affairs, pp. 84–5.

5Ethnic terminology is a nightmare in South Africa, with little consensus on what is ‘correct’. In this book, which is partly about ethnic identity, I generally refer to the Khoisan peoples who were previously resident in the northern Cape region – including the Korana (Kora), Nama, Bushmen and others – and their descendants as ‘brown’ people, and the descendants of Bantu peoples – including the Sotho, Tswana and Xhosa – as ‘black’. The term ‘Khoisan’ is an umbrella name sometimes used to refer to peoples belonging to Khoi and Bushman groups; it references the term ‘San’ which was coined by academics in the 1950s to replace ‘Bushman’, but was never widely recognised by the people themselves: see W.F. Ellis, ‘“Ons is Boesmans” (We are Bushmen): commentary on subject terminology from the southern Kalahari’ (Anthropology and Sociology Department seminar, UWC, 20/8/2014). See also note 7 below.

6M. Legassick, ‘Reflections on practising applied history in South Africa, 1994–2002: from skeletons to schools’, in H.E. Stolten (ed.), History making and present day politics: the meaning of collective memory in South Africa (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrika Institutet, 2006).

7I have used the term ‘Bushman’ in this book to emphasise the ‘othering’ and the dehumanisation that was involved in the period of which I am writing. ‘[The] terms “Bushman” and “forager” lump together more than a dozen living southern African peoples – plus several others who have disappeared under colonial pressures and introduced disease – who have distinct languages and traditions and whose economies cover the entire spectrum of indigenous forms from extensive foraging to intensive agropastoralism. They are imposed category terms that mark persons as belonging to social entities that nowhere exist... the term, and category, “Bushman”... [is a] colonial construct... created to control subjugated peoples in manageable, depoliticised, arbitrarily bounded enclaves of homogeneity in a previously flourishing landscape of political-social diversity’: E. Wilmsen, ‘Decolonising the mind: steps towards cleansing the Bushman stain from Southern African history’, in P. Skotnes (ed.), Miscast: negotiating the presence of the Bushmen (Cape Town: UCT Press, 1996), p. 188.

8F.C. Metrowich, Scotty Smith: South Africa’s Robin Hood (Cape Town: Books of Africa, 1962).

9M. Legassick and C. Rassool, Skeletons in the cupboard: South African museums and the trade in human remains (Cape Town: South African Museum and Kimberley: McGregor Museum, 2000).

10See ‘Speech by President Jacob Zuma on the occasion of the reburial of Mr and Mrs Klaas and Trooi Pienaar at Kuruman, Northern Cape Province’, 12/8/2012,

http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/pebble.asp?relid=6588, accessed October 2015.

11J. Strauss, ‘Die veldslag van Naroegas’, Kronos, 21, 1994, pp. 16–31.

12D. Reitz, Commando: a Boer journal of the Boer War (London: Faber & Faber, 1929).

13N. Alexander, ‘Jakob Marengo and Namibian history’, Social Dynamics, 7, 1, 1981, pp. 1–7.

14See N. Penn, ‘The Orange River frontier zone’, in A.B. Smith (ed.), Einiqualand: studies of the Orange River frontier (Cape Town: UCT Press, 1995), pp. 38–42; N. Penn, The forgotten frontier: colonist and Khoisan on the Cape’s northern frontier in the 18th century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), pp. 160–164.