Mohamed Adhikari, University of Cape Town, South Africa
The lament ‘We have been made into nothing’ was uttered in 1998 by Dawid Kruiper, the leader of the ≠Khomani San people who live on the fringe of the Kalahari Desert in the furthest reaches of South Africa’s Northern Cape province. The ≠Khomani San are a tiny remnant of the foraging communities that once inhabited most of South Africa. Whereas Kruiper was voicing distress and grievance about the marginalization of the ≠Khomani San in post-apartheid South Africa, his judgement applies more directly to the fate of hunter-gatherer societies of the Cape Colony that were destroyed by the genocidal impact of European colonialism. Much of the dispossession and slaughter happened in the eighteenth century along the frontiers of the Cape Colony under Dutch East India Company (DEIC) rule, with continued displacement and killing under British imperialism through the nineteenth century. The main agents of destruction were Dutch-speaking pastoralists whose murderous land-grabbing and ecologically ruinous farming practices ensured the virtual extermination of the Cape San peoples.
Early colonial expansion at the Cape
‘San’ refers to the hunter-gatherer peoples of southern Africa who were the earliest inhabitants of the region, having lived there for perhaps 140,000 years. They formed loosely knit, family-based bands of usually between 10 and 30 people, with a total pre-colonial population of no more than 50,000 in what would become the Cape Colony. San bands roamed within a defined area, determined by the availability of water, game, and seasonally available plant foods. They lived in makeshift shelters or in caves, used a range of stone and bone tools, and are renowned for their exquisite rock paintings.
By the start of European colonization, the San had largely been displaced to the drier and rugged interior by Khoikhoi pastoralists and Bantu-speaking cultivators, both of whom had migrated into the region about two thousand years ago. The first European colonial settlement in southern Africa came in 1652 when the DEIC set up a refreshment station along Table Bay. It took roughly half a century for the arable southwestern Cape to be occupied by European farmers.
From the early 18th century Dutch-speaking, semi-nomadic pastoralists rapidly infiltrated the dry Cape interior, which was suitable only for transhumant pastoralism. This brought into existence a new social group in Cape colonial society, the trekboers—which means ‘migrant farmers’ in Dutch, and refers to their need to move around with their flocks and herds in search of seasonally available grazing and water. Hardy and resourceful, but vulnerable because of their isolation, trekboers were ruthless in their appropriation of natural resources and their treatment of indigenous peoples. The penetration of the hinterland by trekboers held dire consequences for the pastoralist Khoikhoi peoples who within a few years were stripped of their herds by marauding gangs of colonial raiders. Most Khoikhoi were reduced to hunter-gathering or forced labour on settler farms.
As they moved beyond the cultivable southwestern Cape from about 1700 onwards, colonists started coming into growing conflict with hunter-gatherer societies. The dynamic behind trekboer confrontation with San tended to be different to that with Khoikhoi. Whereas traditional Khoikhoi society crumbled in the face of settler invasion, San society proved to be much more resilient. They were more mobile, adaptable, and able to live off the land. Dispersed in small groups across an extensive and rugged terrain made it considerably more difficult for sparsely spread trekboers to subjugate the San.
The dynamic of frontier conflict under DEIC rule
San and trekboer were bound to clash. The trekboer presence put San under tremendous pressure because they were in direct competition for the same environmental resources, namely, water, game, grazing and access to land. San bands found their access to water cut off by trekboers who occupied springs and waterholes. Trekboer livestock contaminated water supplies, and destroyed edible plants on which the San subsisted. Overgrazing damaged and, in many areas, permanently changed the ecology. Colonists decimated herds of game, a primary source of food for the San, with their firearms. Because game followed a migratory pattern similar to that necessary for pastoralism, San and trekboer ranged through the landscape in similar seasonal patterns. The scarcity of game and the deterioration of the environment gave hungry San little option but to raid trekboer livestock.
San reacted to trekboer intrusion in one of two ways. The first was to withdraw. This was not an attractive option as it inevitably meant moving to inhospitable terrain and encroaching on another group’s territory. Also, the San had deeply spiritual connections to homelands and would abandon their domains only as a last resort. A second, increasingly common reaction was for San to resist trekboer incursions using guerilla tactics. This included raiding or killing trekboer stock, slaying herders, destroying crops, and sometimes burning down farmsteads. San usually attacked at night, striking where trekboers were most vulnerable—their herds. It is clear that San motives went beyond rustling stock. They also wanted to drive trekboers from the land. San attacks were at first sporadic and small scale but became ever more frequent and co-ordinated through the eighteenth century.
Colonists responded to San insurgency with individual acts of slaughter and the massacre of bands. They also organized retaliatory raids by armed, mounted, militia units known as commandos. The commando was the main institution of military force at the Cape under Dutch rule and the main instrument of war against indigenous peoples. These militias, which consisted of trekboers and their dependents, conducted regular state-sanctioned, punitive expeditions led by prominent farmers co-opted as government officials. These officials had the authority to raise commandos on their own initiative. As frontier conflict escalated through the 18th century going on commando for a few weeks a year became a way of life for trekboers. Besides its principal functions of defending trekboer society and crushing indigenous resistance, commandos also served as a means of acquiring forced labour. Farmers were, moreover, allowed to form their own private commandos, and thereby take the law into their own hands in dealing with indigenous people. Several hundred such informal commandos were mounted through the eighteenth century.
The dynamic of the encounter between San and settler on the frontier was thus one of trekboer encroachment, San resistance, followed by extreme trekboer retribution—an escalation that culminated in commando raids usually conducted with local exterminatory intent. In these spirals of attack and counter-attack trekboers enjoyed a huge military advantage because of their access to firearms. Their flintlock rifles were far superior to the stone-age weapons of the San and allowed even small groups of settlers to inflict severe casualties on much larger San bands or raiding parties. Importantly, the speed and power of horses compounded trekboers’ military advantages greatly.
From about 1770 through till the late 1790s, when San resistance was at its height, large, state-sanctioned commandos against the San were organized annually, often more frequently, and consisted of anything between 40 and 250 armed men on horseback. The preferred modus operandi of the commando was to locate San camps by means of their fires, surround the sleeping kraal under cover of darkness and then attack at dawn. With trekboer advantages of guns, horses, numerical superiority and surprise, San encampments stood little chance against such attacks. A large number of San bands were eradicated in this way.
In commando raids San men were, with few exceptions, put to death on the spot. Adult males were killed because they were regarded as extremely dangerous and as not having economic value. Women and children were also often massacred. Women not killed were taken as labourers or as concubines for Khoikhoi dependents. Female captives had added value in that their offspring would in time augment the farmer’s workforce. San children were prized because they were seen as tractable and more easily assimilated into the trekboer economy as menial labourers. The vulnerability of child captives and children born into captivity made them an ultra-exploitable class of labourers, most remaining effective slaves for life. This resulted in widespread trafficking in San children along the Cape frontier.
Racism was an important determinant in the extreme violence and inhumane treatment inflicted on San as colonists judged them to be on the very lowest rung of the racial hierarchy, even less than human. They were generally referred to as schepselen (creatures). Because of their nomadic way of life, San were not seen as being in possession of their land but to be ranging across it, much in the manner of animals. This dehumanization made it easier for colonists to justify occupying San land, enslaving, and killing them.
Their fierce resistance only intensified the fear and hatred felt toward the San. Some frontiersmen shot San with impunity, arbitrarily and often on sight. As conflict intensified through the 18th century trekboer society also developed an exterminatory attitude toward San—that they were little better than vermin and San society as needing, even deserving, to be eradicated. Commandos hunted San bands often with the express intention of completely clearing particular areas of them. In 1777 the Cape government became complicit in the exterminatory drive by sanctioning the indiscriminate killing of San by official commandos. It was not unusual for these commandos to kill several hundred San in expeditions lasting several weeks. Though they had suffered severe loss of land and life by the end of the eighteenth century, the San peoples of the Cape Colony were far from subdued.
Attrition under British colonial rule
The dynamic of frontier violence against the San changed at the end of the eighteenth century when Britain took control of the Cape Colony. When the British first occupied the Cape in 1795 they were disconcerted by the social and economic costs of incessant frontier conflict. The British administration realized that despite trekboer complaints of depredations by San, it was the San who were the real victims. The British favoured a policy of assimilation, what they thought of as ‘civilizing’ the San. They wanted the San to become pastoralists and labourers which they saw as the next step up from hunter-gathering in the evolutionary ladder. While British policy was ethnocidal—eradicating their culture—it did little to mitigate the genocidal outlook of frontier society.
The British administration tried a three-pronged approach to putting an end to the relentless violence against the San. Firstly, it encouraged farmers to make gifts of livestock to San. They hoped that this would induce the San to abandon foraging and and raiding, and become pastoralists. Secondly, the government promoted missionary activity amongst hunter-gatherer communities to foster sedentary, Christianized lifeways among them. Thirdly, the Cape government declared Bushmanland, the area between the colonial boundary and the Orange River, a reserve for San and forbade colonists from entering it. By this time Bushmanland was the last refuge of independent Cape San society because the semi-desert of the northern Cape held little appeal for trekboers.
All three British initiatives failed. Making them gifts of livestock did not work because the plan, though well intentioned, was ill-conceived and patchily implemented. Few farmers were prepared to try the gift-giving experiment and starving San were most likely to eat the animals they got than try and farm with them under semi-desert conditions. Missionary efforts had little success as San showed little interest in abandoning their world view in favour of Christianity. All eight mission stations aimed specifically at San established between 1799 and 1846 failed because of their extreme isolation, inadequate funding, and because they attracted few converts. As for the Bushmanland reserve, trekboers simply ignored this proclamation as policing the isolated Cape frontier was an impossible task for the government. Colonial hunting parties regularly traversed the territory depleting the game, and trekboers regularly made use of temporary grazing after good rains.
While British initiatives for peace had some success in reducing lawlessness and turbulence on the frontier, they failed to eliminate violence against the San. The unremitting warfare of the last decades of Dutch rule gave way to a fragile peace punctuated by periodic bloodshed. More settled conditions on the frontier served only to spur settler penetration of the interior. As frontier farmers continued to infiltrate areas occupied by San they often resorted to violence and the formation of informal commandos to grab coveted land. Under conditions of uncertain peace, and unable to match trekboers militarily, the San invariably found themselves on the back foot when violence broke out. Outnumbered and outgunned, the San of the northern Cape were progressively squeezed off their land. Those not killed, or who did not die of dehydration or starvation, especially in times of drought, were forced to enter the service of farmers as virtual serfs.
A most unfortunate development for the continued survival of the San was that in the mid-nineteenth century merino sheep were found to acclimatise well to semi-desert conditions. As a consequence, the number of wool-bearing sheep in the region increased dramatically from the 1850s onwards. In addition, the 1850s copper mining boom in the Namaqualand gave rise to demand for meat and rapid growth in the number of sheep raised for slaughter. The semi-desert scrub of the northern Cape to which the surviving San had been confined now had economic value. This guaranteed settler encroachment on Bushmanland.
The final throes of primary resistance by San within the Cape Colony came during a series of skirmishes first in 1868-69, and then in 1878-79, along the middle reaches of the Orange River when remnant groups of San and Koranna, a Khoikhoi group, joined forces against encroaching white farmers and the colonial army that supported them. A number of San, including women and children, were killed. Others died of starvation as a result of drought and disruption caused by the conflict, while many taken prisoner were deported as forced labourers to far flung farms and jails.
San society within the Cape Colony was extinguished during the course of the nineteenth century through ongoing seizure of their land, enforced labour incorporation, and periodic massacre. A few independent bands managed to survive on the edge of the Kalahari Desert giving rise to a common contemporary misconception of the San as a ‘desert people’. Although Cape San society was destroyed and few people currently identify as San, their genetic presence in modern South African population is greater than these numbers would suggest because of the incorporation of survivors as captives and labourers into colonial society.
Conclusion
The destruction of the Cape San peoples is a clear case of genocide. It was not the unintended consequence of economic competition, but a consciously desired outcome integral to Cape colonial society’s vision of itself, its future, and the nature of humanity. The effects of this atrocity reverberated down the generations to find expression in Dawid Kruiper’s anguished protestation, for the essence of genocide is indeed for a people to be ‘reduced to nothing’. There remains a strong sense among San that historically a great injustice was perpetrated against them. In response to a request for advice on what restitution be demanded from the South African government, one ≠Khomani elder replied: “Land, water, and truth”.