The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  Once their foothold on the Cape peninsula had been secured, company directors became ambitious to develop it from a victualling station into a viable colony. In 1679, an energetic governor, Simon van der Stel, was sent to De Kaap to expand the ‘Cape hamlet’ into new territory. Within a month, he had identified a site for a new settlement on the banks of the Eerste River, thirty-five miles from the fort at Table Bay, that he named Stellenbosch. Stellenbosch grew so rapidly that it became an independent local authority in 1682 and the seat of a magistrate – a drostdy – in 1685. French Huguenot refugees arrived in the area in 1688, developing vineyards in the fertile valleys around Stellenbosch.

  By the early eighteenth century, the Cape Colony extended fifty miles north and forty miles east of the Cape peninsula and had acquired a diverse but distinctive culture. The colonial population by then included about 700 Company employees and a settler community of about 2,000 men, women and children. At the apex of Cape society was the governor and his coterie of senior Dutch officials, a ruling elite based at the Company’s headquarters at the castle in ‘Cape hamlet’ who maintained a monopoly of control and enriched themselves by private trading and by acquiring large blocks of fertile land that they worked for personal profit using Company labour. By 1705, land covering a third of the farming area of the colony was in the hands of twenty Company officials; the governor’s farm employed 200 slaves and sixty white overseers. Among the free burghers there was a small class of wealthy traders and farmers. The majority earned a simple living as stockbreeders, farmers, innkeepers, artisans and tradesmen. There was also a substantial number of ‘poor, indigent and decrepit’.

  Nestling beneath Table Mountain, the ‘Cape hamlet’ remained little more than the size of a village, about 150 houses in all, plus a variety of Company buildings and numerous taverns. It was a seaward-looking community where the great event of the day was the arrival of a fleet bringing news from Europe or Asia and a burst of trade. A Danish visitor, Abraham Bogaert, described the settlement in 1702 as follows:

  The town, lying a good musket shot to the west of the Castle, stretches from the sea to Table Mountain, and at the back touches the outermost slopes of the Lion Hill. It has wonderfully increased the number of its houses since the Company chose this place as a settlement . . . All are built of stone . . . They look very well from far because of the snow-white lime with which they are plastered outside, and many shine with Dutch neatness . . . It now boasts of a Church, built in the Dutch fashion and adorned with a fair-sized tower . . .

  Company slaves provided the main labour force. As well as general labourers, they were employed as gardeners, masons, carpenters, stevedores, coopers, smiths and domestic servants. In 1714, they numbered about 450: 224 men, 129 women and 92 children. They were housed together in the company’s slave lodge, a large brick structure with a central court built in 1679. The lodge was also used as a brothel not only by visiting sailors but also by burghers and Company employees. Three-quarters of children born to slave mothers had European fathers.

  The largest contingent of slaves was owned by free burghers. In 1711, they numbered 1,771. Privately owned slaves were distributed among numerous owners in small groups, used mainly as farm labourers or as domestics. Most tradesmen owned a slave or two; a few prosperous farmers owned as many as a hundred.

  New shipments of slaves were brought in each year, on average between 100 and 200, mainly from the Mozambique mainland. The Cape slave community, with men outnumbering women by more than four times, never became a self-reproducing population. In addition, mortality rates remained high, especially during intermittent epidemics of smallpox and other diseases. Slaves were rarely granted manumission; along with their children, they remained slaves for life.

  The Khoikhoi, meanwhile, known to the colonists as ‘Hottentots’, faced an increasingly perilous future. The main inland group to the north of the peninsula, the Cochoqua, were severely weakened by a series of clashes in 1673–7. Not only did the Khoikhoi lose land to white settlers, but their herds of cattle and sheep were much depleted. Company records show that between 1652 and 1699 it purchased 16,000 cattle and 36,000 sheep from Khoikhoi herders. The Khoikhoi also lost large numbers as a result of burgher raids.

  Unable to withstand white encroachment, the Khoikhoi chiefdoms of the south-western Cape began to disintegrate. Many Khoikhoi became dependent on the colony for their livelihood, seeking work as herders and shepherds. Some became addicted to liquor and tobacco. Others were reduced to a peripatetic existence. In 1705, a Dutch official recorded the plight of Khoikhoi north of the Cape hamlet: ‘ . . . those who used to live contentedly under chiefs, peacefully supporting themselves by breeding cattle, have mostly all become Bushmen, hunters and robbers, and are scattered everywhere among the mountains.’

  Worse was to come. In 1713, a homeward-bound Dutch ship sent ashore a consignment of laundry to be washed by Company slaves. The laundry bore a smallpox virus which ravaged the Cape Colony for a whole year. Europeans and slaves alike suffered heavily; hundreds died. But the Khoikhoi, possessing almost no immunity, were decimated; one contemporary estimate was that scarcely one in ten in the south-western Cape survived. In Company records, the Khoikhoi of the area virtually disappeared.

  Beyond the fertile valleys and mountains of the Cape region lay a vast hinterland of scrub and semi-desert known to the Khoikhoi as the Karoo – the ‘dry country’. In the early eighteenth century, Dutch stock farmers – ‘trekboers’, as they were called – began to spread out across this arid interior, herding sheep and cattle, living simply in ox-wagons or crude dwellings on farms they had staked out, and trading in elephant ivory and animal skins. Some moved northwards towards the Olifant River; others went eastwards along the coastal region towards Mossel Bay.

  Once again, as trekboers sought out the streams, springs and best pastures of the interior, it was Khoikhoi pastoralists who faced the brunt. The trekboers had the advantages of horses, guns and wagons. In his account of the Cape in the 1730s and 1740s, Otto Mentzel, a German traveller, observed how trekboers frequently settled near to Khoikhoi kraals, enabling them to obtain labour already skilled in handling livestock in arid conditions. The kraals were gradually incorporated into trekboer farms, with pieces of land set aside for the Khoikhoi to use. As the remaining Khoikhoi chiefdoms disintegrated, breaking into small family groups, the Khoikhoi became a serf-like workforce for the trekboers. Children were indentured as ‘apprentices’, forced to work in return for food and shelter.

  The Company encouraged this expansion, handing out 6,000-acre farms, ‘loaned’ to trekboers for a nominal annual fee. In 1745, it established a new administrative base and drostdy at Swellendam, a village 120 miles east of Cape Town, appointing two officials to take up residence there. But it had no interest in spending money to provide an effective administration in outlying areas. Thirty years later, Swellendam consisted of no more than four houses. The trekboers were left carrying virtually sole responsibility for maintaining control of the frontier region. With Company approval, they formed their own commandos to act as a fighting force. Commando leaders were given considerable licence. In its instructions to one of the first commandos, the Company decreed its leaders could ‘fire freely and take prisoners and act otherwise as they saw fit’. Khoikhoi employees joined the commandos as auxiliaries. Scattered thinly over vast areas, largely isolated from the outside world, the trekboers led simple, independent lives, relishing their freedom from Company rule, but facing many hazards and hardships, dependent entirely on their own resources. After touring frontier districts in 1776–7, a Company official, Hendrik Swellengrebel, described the living conditions he witnessed:

  As far as Swellendam and Mossel Bay and occasionally as far as the Zeekoei River, one finds quite respectable houses with a large room partitioned into 2 or 3, and with good doors and windows, though mostly without ceilings. For the rest, however, and especially those at a greater distance, they are only tumble-down barns, 40 feet by 14
or 15 feet, with clay walls four feet high, and a thatched roof. These are mostly undivided; the doors are reed mats; a square hole serves as a window. The fireplace is a hole in the floor, which is usually made of clay and cowdung. There is no chimney; merely a hole in the roof to let the smoke out. The beds are separated by a Hottentot reed mat. The furniture is in keeping. I have found up to three households – children included – living together in such a dwelling.

  Once a year or so, trekboers would set out for the Cape to sell their sheep, cattle, ivory, butter and soap and load up there with supplies of guns, gunpowder, ammunition, tea, coffee, sugar and tobacco. The journey would often take several months to accomplish. A Swedish doctor and entomologist, Anders Sparrman, who visited frontier districts in the 1770s, recorded:

  Every peasant for such a journey as this [from east of Mossel Bay to Cape Town] has two or three Hottentots, one to lead the oxen, and either one or two to drive the spare team; besides which his wife often goes with him, either for the purpose of having her children baptized at the Cape, or else for fear of being attacked by the Hottentots in her husband’s absence. Thus, taking it at its lowest, and reckoning only three persons and twenty oxen for thirty days, its stands a great many farmers in ninety days work of themselves and men, and six hundred of their cattle, in order to make one turn with their butter to the market.

  The area of white occupation grew almost tenfold between 1703 and 1780. During the 1770s, a growing number of trekboers began settling in the Camdebo and Sneeuwberg districts, 400 miles north-east of the Cape; others laid claim to the Zuurveld grasslands, 450 miles east of the Cape. For seventy years, the trekboers managed to overcome resistance to their advance from local Khoikhoi and San groups with little difficulty. But now they encountered more formidable adversaries.

  The first sign of a check to white expansion came in the 1770s from San ‘Bushmen’ in the Sneeuwberg mountains. They were provoked not only by trekboer encroachment on their hunting grounds but also the farmers’ wanton slaughter of wildlife, often simply for sport. ‘What are you doing on my land?’ a San leader asked a white farmer. ‘You have taken all the places where the eland and other game live. Why did you not stay where the sun goes down, where you first came from?’

  Bushmen attacks on trekboer outposts became increasingly ferocious. They killed and maimed cattle and sheep at random, murdered Khoikhoi herdsmen and mutilated their corpses. Local commandos were unable to cope, so trekboers were forced to abandon their farms. At its Cape headquarters, the Company at first spurned their pleas for help. But by 1774, the north-east frontier had become so perilous that the Company gave orders for a ‘general commando’ of 250 men drawn from northern areas; more than half of them were Khoikhoi auxiliaries. The commando returned at the end of 1774, having killed 503 Bushmen and captured 241 others. But the raids continued. A young English civil servant, John Barrow, travelling there in the 1790s, gave an account of how precarious life on the north-east frontier had become:

  An inhabitant of Sneuberg [sic] not only lives under the continual apprehension of losing his property, but also is perpetually exposed to the danger of being put to death. If he has occasion to go to the distance of 500 yards from the house, he is under the necessity of carrying a musket. He can neither plough, nor sow, nor reap without being under arms. If he would gather a few greens in the garden, he must take a gun in hand. To endure such a life of dread and anxiety a man must be accustomed to it from his infancy and unaccustomed with one that is better.

  The north-east frontier was reduced in effect to a state of perpetual warfare. According to official records, between 1786 and 1795, Bushmen killed 276 herdsmen and captured 19,000 cattle and 84,000 sheep; the commandos, for their part, killed 2,480 Bushmen and captured 654 others. With official permission, Bushmen children were indentured on white farms.

  The eastern frontier also descended into turmoil. The Zuurveld region, between the Great Fish River in the east and the Sundays River in the west, became a zone of fierce competition between three groups: Khoikhoi pastoralists, long settled there; small numbers of white colonists advancing eastwards; and several Xhosa clans from the southern branch of the Nguni, outliers of the great migration of Bantu peoples, expanding westwards. The contest was made more complex by shifting alliances. Some Khoikhoi sided with Xhosa clans; others with white colonists. Xhosa chiefs pursued their own rivalries, some reaching deals with the whites to spite their adversaries.

  In the early stages of settlement, the colonists and the Xhosa sometimes lived peaceably together. But the actions of one troublesome trekboer family, the Prinsloos, sparked a conflagration in the frontier district of Bruintjes Hoogte in 1779 that came to be known as the First Frontier War. According to an official report: ‘Willem Prinsloo . . . under the pretext that the Xhosa had stolen a sheep from him, shot one of them dead, whereupon the Xhosa rose up and attacked the inhabitants [farmers], resulting in a terrible slaughter of the Xhosa and the ruin of many inhabitants.’ The Xhosa sacked several farms and raided 21,000 head of cattle.

  Despite the mayhem, the Company announced in 1780 that henceforth the Fish River would mark the new boundary of the Cape Colony, thus incorporating the whole of the Zuurveld as a frontier district. The field commandant of the eastern frontier, Adriaan van Jaarsveld, argued subsequently that as the land belonged to the Xhosa, ‘for the sake of lasting peace’ it should be handed back to them. But the Company paid no heed. The Second Frontier War started in 1792. All but four of the 120 trekboer homesteads were burned down.

  The Cape Colony, with its new boundaries, now covered an area of 110,000 square miles. This included a new frontier district, Graaff-Reinet, with headquarters based in a hamlet south of the Sneeuwberg mountains. According to John Barrow, the hamlet of Graaff-Reinet in 1797 consisted of ‘about a dozen mud-houses covered with thatch’. The magistrate there was required to keep some sort of control of the district, amid sporadic warfare and frequent cattle raids, with the assistance of four or five mounted policemen. The journey to Cape Town and back took up to three months.

  The total population of the Cape Colony was no more than 75,000. The number of free burghers had risen by 1793 to 13,800, a fast-growing community with large families; and the slave population now stood at 14,700. Almost every European family of standing in the western Cape owned slaves. There was also a small community of about 1,200 ‘free blacks’, former slaves granted manumission, earning a living as artisans, cooks, innkeepers, fishermen and shopkeepers; initially they were given the same rights as white settlers, but by the 1790s they were required to carry passes if they wished to travel. The remaining population consisted mainly of indigenous Khoikhoi, former pastoralists now dispossessed of their land after 150 years of white rule, who served the white community as a labouring class treated no better than the slaves.

  A variety of languages was used. Some colonists spoke the ‘High Dutch’ of the Netherlands which served as the official language of the colony, the Church and the Bible. Some Khoikhoi retained their native language. But the dominant lingua franca was a simplified form of Dutch incorporating loan words from Malay, Portuguese creole and Khoikhoi known as the taal. It was the language used between masters and servants and among the poorer sections of the white community that eventually evolved into Afrikaans. An increasing number of whites saw themselves not as Dutch or German or French but as ‘Afrikaners’.

  The only real town in the colony – and the only port of entry – was De Kaap (Cape Town). Its population of 15,000 included some 10,000 slaves. It boasted public buildings such as the Castle, the slave lodge, the principal Dutch Reformed Church, a hospital and some 1,100 private houses. But there was no high school, no public hall, no theatre, no bookshop and no newspaper. Although the common practice among Europeans was to identify themselves as ‘Christians’, most residents appeared largely indifferent to religion. On Sundays, there was no prohibition against people spending their time in taverns. A senior Dutch official complained in 1802:
‘The young folk are indolent, and seem to possess an intense prejudice against exerting themselves mentally, and indeed avoid doing so on every possible occasion.’ In the eyes of the VOC directors, De Kaap’s purpose remained much the same as it had always been: a stepping stone on the road between Europe and Asia.

  The rural areas of the western Cape had meanwhile been transformed into a prosperous agricultural region based on wine and wheat production and slave labour. Between 1720 and 1790, the number of vines increased more than fourfold, the wheat crop trebled, and the average net value of white-owned estates grew by nearly three times. A wealthy class of Cape ‘gentry’ enjoyed an affluent lifestyle. A Dutch visitor wrote in 1783 that on several farms he had observed ‘nothing except signs of affluence and prosperity, to the extent that, in addition to splendours and magnificence in clothes and carriages, the houses are filled with elegant furniture and the tables decked with silverware and served by tidily clothed slaves’.

  Many farmers in the western Cape were largely self-sufficient. A German traveller in 1803 described the home of Jacob Laubscher, some eighty miles north of the Cape peninsula:

  He maintained a sort of patriarchal household, of which some idea may be formed by stating that the stock of the farm consisted of eighty horses, six hundred and ninety head of horned cattle, two thousand four hundred and seventy sheep, and an immense quantity of poultry of all kinds. The family itself, including masters, servants, hottentots, and slaves, consisted of a hundred and five persons . . . The quantity of corn sown upon his estate this year, including every description, amounted to sixty-one bushels . . . [I]t will be seen that an African farm may almost be called a State in miniature . . .

  Trips to De Kaap for purchase of cloth, linen, tea, coffee, sugar, iron and ammunition were all that kept him in touch with the outside world.

  Beyond the western Cape, white stock-farmers were spread thinly over a vast area. The population of Swellendam district in 1793 amounted to 1,925, and of Graaff-Reinet, 3,100. They were long accustomed to living according to their own rules, largely beyond the reach of outside authority. In 1795, amid the turmoil on the northern frontier, a group of rebel trekboers arrived at the drostdy in Graaff-Reinet, told the Company’s landdrost (district officer) to leave and announced they would refuse to pay taxes and obey its laws. The Company had limited means of responding to this challenge. It was financially bankrupt and in terminal decline. It did, however, cut off supplies of ammunition.