Settler Colonialism and Land Rights in South Africa

Possession and Dispossession on the Orange River

E. Cavanagh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137305770
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

This local history of Griqua Philippolis (1824-1862) and Afrikaner Orania (1990-2013) gets at the crux of the ever-pertinent land question in South Africa. Identifying the many layers of dispossession definitive of the South African past, the book presents a provocative new argument about land rights and the residues of settler colonialism.

1

The Erasure of Past Interests in Land at Philippolis

The San and the Griqua have captured the imaginations of many in South Africa for a long time, if for very different reasons. Both labels are deeply problematic for they elide the complexities of ethnogenesis, the dynamics of inter-community politics, and the function of colonial discourse, as will probably become clearer throughout this book.¹ Yet in the absence of any alternatives, ‘San’ and ‘Griqua’ are applied here as they are by others now and in the recent past: the former to the oldest cultural group in the African sub-continent, the latter reserved for those comprised of many strands, who experienced ethnogenesis much later and expanded across the Transorangia region as they did.

The relationship between the San and the Griqua in the early nineteenth century forms the main subject of this chapter. The narrative also features a number of other characters, among them some missionaries, a few notable representatives of the British colonial government at the Cape, and a number of aggravated white farmers who moved into the region as well. Out of these interactions and others like them, the land question definitively emerged as one of the most pressing ideological contests in South Africa. Whose laws regulated land on the frontier? Which conceptualisation of property ought to prevail? At stake here were the rights of those with interests in land – specifically, in this chapter, the land in and around Philippolis.

Various communities used this land and competed over it, until in 1826 it was alienated by a group of missionaries who had negligible right to it in the first place. These missionaries, by intention or accident, gave it over to the Griqua in full. After this, the remnant interests in land of the region’s earlier inhabitants had to be annulled, in order for the Griqua to transform the region into an exclusively Griqua domain and expand its borders northwards across the pasturage of the Transorangia. In this contest over rights, a contest marked by a series of violent dispossessions, the San lost out to another, more powerful, group, in what was for them a most apocalyptic period of history that historians are only now coming to terms with.

The San were victims of colonial genocide, as a number of other indigenous groups were across the world during the period of European expansion. Until recently, however, there has prevailed some reluctance among historians to consider South Africa within the comparative frame of genocide studies, due perhaps to the great shadow cast by apartheid over other periods in the South African past.² Mohamed Adhikari’s recent research has broken new ground in this respect. As he succinctly shows in his accessible study of genocide during the conquest of South Africa, San society was annihilated by the end of the nineteenth century, and a classical settler society was erected over the top of it.³ In this chapter, I describe how this process occurred in greater Philippolis and advance his thesis by suggesting that the extermination of the San accorded not only with the interests of the white Boer population, but other groups, like the Griqua, as well.

* * *

The Griqua people had ancient links to southern Africa, like many groups did – though they were relative newcomers to the lands north of the middle Orange River. The adoption of the name ‘Griqua’ – adapted from the ‘Grigriqua’ (Khoekhoe) of the western Cape coastal belt – was roughly coincident with their ethnogenesis as a group, in the early nineteenth century. They were formed out of a collection of rather diverse peoples: initially among them was a large proportion of Khoekhoe and Bastaards, along with the odd San and a few runaway slaves; but their communities soon came to incorporate large numbers of baSotho and baTswana.⁴ What separated the Griqua from most others was their social and political organisation.⁵ Manipulating the uncertain geopolitical conditions of the regions in which they settled, and eagerly making use of the enthusiastic missionaries deployed by the London Missionary Society (LMS), they established powerful polities in their own right.

To the distress of the missionaries, the original Griqua state, Griquatown, had in the 1820s become split into a number of factions. The controversial installation of a new leader, Andries Waterboer, inspired a contingent of rebels (known as the Bergenaars) to attempt an overthrow of the government in favour of one of the more traditional Griqua leaders, such as Berend Berends, or a member of the Kok dynasty.⁶ A number of meetings were held to no avail, before the Griqua eventually split into four groups that went their own ways. Many moved to the nearby Campbell settlement, while others sought to establish a new Griqua polity.

In 1826, with the permission of LMS superintendent Dr John Philip, some of the dissenting Griquas were allowed to move east and settle at Philippolis, a missionary station 200 km to the southeast of Griquatown, established in 1822 for the San.⁷

* * *

The Philippolis region – the land of the middle Orange River – like much of southern Africa, was originally the domain of a hunter-gatherer population of San (or ‘Bushmen’). Whether the San owned this land or simply occupied it is a moot point, as will be clear once a patchwork of human history in the region is unravelled.

Like other indigenous hunter-gatherer communities across the settler world today, the San are commonly esteemed in the popular imagination to have a ‘special’ or ‘mystical’ relationship to land, but seldom has this relationship been considered orderly, governed by norms and laws, or even cognisable to courts.⁸ This estimation deserves our closest interrogation. The conventions that dictate, say, the value given to semi-permanent hunting camps, or when a community moves onto new land for foraging, or how one group shares the produce of a particular area with another migratory group – although never codified into the written form – are far more complex than many assume, and were certainly central to the political organisation of San communities of Bushmanland-proper for tens of thousands of years.⁹ Or so they were until established property relations were further complicated by increasing interaction with relative communities, the herding Khoekhoe, just in the last 2,000 years.¹⁰ New kinds of ecological adaptation (considering the land for pastoral use, and not exclusively for foraging, for instance), the introduction of improvable chattel property in the form of domesticated animals, and the addition of semi-fixed dwellings, all combined to inform the types of land regimes developed by communities in this period.

These indigenous systems of property relations which evolved in South Africa, at the hands of hunters and herders, while never placid or static during this period of history, were heavily rattled by the southern migrations of agro-pastoralist Briqua, and, more devastatingly, by the commencement of company colonialism in 1652. As colonisation intensified at the Cape, and settlers (and their slaves) came to stay, local communities of Hottentots and Bosjesmen were split apart; indeed, their numbers fell away just as gradually as European and Briqua populations strengthened over the same period. The ‘Khoe-San’ – for their populations were never discrete, and the distinction always blurred, scholars argue¹¹ – adapted to these changes. Out of fear from disease, servitude, and murder, most kept their distance from the dense coastal settlements, and continued life as they otherwise would – hunting, gathering, and herding – sometimes cooperative with other groups, and sometimes antagonistic.

By the late eighteenth century, the middle Orange River region, beyond the frontier of settlement, had become a busy meeting place. San, who foraged across the area and hunted native animals ingeniously, and Khoekhoe (mostly Korana groups), who on top of this established seasonal herding routes between the springs punctuating the patchy pastures, were no longer alone. One could also find the southwardly spreading populations of baSotho and baTswana: those Briqua only emergent in this region during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were now everyone’s neighbours. Entrepreneurial trekboere, in the first of many waves of white pastoralism, were making their way there too. And there was also a growing number of outcasts who had fled an expanding Cape society, among them the mixed-descent (European-slave and European-Khoe-San individuals) Bastaards.¹² This was a meeting place that soon became incredibly volatile, and sadly it would be the San, particularly those who held on most strongly to their traditional hunter-gatherer ways, that were most victimised.¹³ Into this context stepped the missionaries.

The LMS – before their cataclysmic Christianising campaign across southern Africa from the mid-nineteenth century onwards – were only tentatively venturing into the South African interior in the first two decades of the century.¹⁴ After the rise and fall of the Sak River mission (1800–06), and following a number of exploratory expeditions after this, it quickly became apparent to the LMS just how destitute the San people, on the fringes of Cape settler society, had become. Their plan to offset their complete annihilation was to create a number of stations for the San, between 1814 and the mid-1820s.¹⁵ Among them was Philippolis, just north of what would become the Orange River border, established in early 1822. Seemingly like the other LMS stations, Philippolis stood on land that was not formally ceded by prior inhabitants.

According to one estimate, within six months of establishment Philippolis had become a base for approximately 80 San, with just 20 or so actually living at the station. All were under the instruction of the ‘Native Teacher’, a Bastaard called Jan Goeyman.¹⁶ Goeyman was eventually replaced – or rather, demoted and ignored – by James Clark of the LMS in 1825, by which time several families of Bastaards and Khoekhoe, many from nearby Bethelsdorp, had also congregated in Philippolis, apparently living in amity with the San there.¹⁷ On top of this, a number of white trekboere – ignorant of the LMS project and tenuously loyal to the Crown – were making their way through the region, in their early expeditions away from the colonial settlement in search of springs and pastures.

It was around this time, in 1825, that Dr John Philip of the LMS crossed the Orange on an important tour. He would soon head to England for an extended visit, and so desired to tie up some loose ends on the frontier. One of the main issues he wanted resolved was the political conflict that had recently broken out in Griquatown, between those loyal to Andries Waterboer and those opposing him. About this, he is said to have given a number of instructions to his stationed missionaries: Waterboer, primed by the Griquatown missionary John Melvill, was to be supported as leader, and Adam Kok II’s followers and any other dissenters would have to comply with this mandate, or move out to settle elsewhere.

Another pressing issue for Philip was the state of the San mission stations, which in his eyes were failing miserably. Recalling his 1825 visit to Philippolis and general tour of the South African interior in 1842 (though perhaps with the haze of time distorting the specifics), Philip described the oppression of the Bushmen. ‘The Boers who had been recently settled in the new District so lately added to the Colony’, Philip complained, ‘had found their way across the river, and were beginning to annoy those […] conducting of the mission and to oppress the Bushmen, under the pretext of searching for stolen Cattle, and runaway Bushmen, and Children, who they alleged to have been contract[ed] to them, and promised them by their parents.’ In this country there was ‘no authority’, he explained. ‘The missionaries were set at defiance, the Statements of Bushmen were disregarded by the Boers […] and the Bushmen were unable to protect themselves.’ The solution was, as Philip reckoned at that time, to rally the Griqua to his cause – those ‘under the residence of Adam Kok [II], one of our Griqua Chiefs and the father of the present Chief of Philippolis, whose territory lay next to the lands of Philippolis’. As Philip recalled, Kok ‘proposed to protect the Bushmen against the aggressions of the Boers’, in exchange for permission ‘to reside at Philippolis’. But the two had to reach a deal, and land was at the centre of that deal:

To this proposal I gave my consent on this condition, that he not to dispossess the Bushmen of such lands as they might require nor consider himself or his heirs as having any right to sell any part of the Country or to give a lease of any part of it, except to his own people, and that he and they were merely to have the use of the lands as belonging to a Missionary Institution.¹⁸

With the Philippolis San in such a miserable condition, and Kok II still loyal to the LMS and eager to relocate, Philip apparently gave instructions to kill two birds with one stone, as the above recollection makes clear. When, early in 1826, Peter Wright of the LMS arrived to relieve Melvill of the Griquatown posting, the plan was put into action, and a mariage de convenance was hastily arranged for Kok II and the restless Bergenaar faction, on the condition that the San receive protection. But just how this took place, and what happened afterwards, would become the source of a bitter feud between Clark and Wright – and a great worry, of course, to Philip.

As Clark remembered the event, he was in Philippolis and caught off-guard when Wright arrived citing instructions from Philip to ‘form a station among [the Bergenaars] where he choosed, even at Philippolis’. Following this, ‘Mr Wright proceeded to the Bergenaars and gave them Dr Philip’s authority to occupy Philippolis, which they consented to do.’ Clark, a little unsure of his role, did not object; he handed Philippolis over to Adam Kok II in July of 1826. ‘[N]ot doubting Mr Wright’s authority’, he recalled, ‘we called in the Bergenaars to Philippolis, and I even gave them the station over in Writting [sic], in order that they might be inclined to protect it.’¹⁹

That Philippolis had fallen out of the LMS’s hands and straight into those of Kok II quickly became a source of regret to both Clark and Wright. When the situation became embarrassing, White deflected the blame onto Clar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Terminology
• Introduction: Land, Sovereignty, and Indigeneity in South Africa
• 1. The Erasure of Past Interests in Land at Philippolis
• 2. The Griqua Land Regime and Its Challenges
• 3. The Erasure of Past Interests in Land at Orania
• 4. The Oranian Land Regime and Its Challenges
• Conclusion: Land Regimes and Property Rights on the Orange River
• Afterword: On Restitution and Dispossession
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index