Promised Land. Karl Kemp
imperialists and socialists. The setting is the land.
It was only in researching and writing this book, for which I spent the majority of 2019 driving up and down the country from farm to township, township to land invasion, from riots to fields of shacks stretching as far as the eye can see, to former homelands, to the country’s borders, that I got some sense of the real story of land conflict in South Africa. I hope that the resulting report can in some small way replicate that for you.
KARL G. KEMP
PRETORIA, JULY 2020
1
The Great Cattle-Killing and Other Stories
IN 1998, A community of several isiXhosa-speaking families lodged a joint land claim under the Restitution of Land Rights Act, one of the three pillars of the post-1994 land reform plan and the first Act to be passed in democratic South Africa, signed by President Nelson Mandela himself. The group sought the restitution of a sixty-six-square-kilometre grazing area, or commonage, in the Eastern Cape town of Salem, from which they were dislodged in 1947. It would take almost two decades for their claim to conclude. Apocryphal stories define South Africa’s history, and this claim was based on one of them.
Salem is in the old district of Albany, twenty kilometres south of Grahamstown (now Makhanda) at the eastern edge of the Zuurveld along the Assegaaibos River. It was founded in 1820 by a group of British settlers under the command of Hezekiah Sephton, and many of the defendants in the claim are the descendants of this group.
The Zuurveld is the first place of protracted contact between Europeans and Bantu-speaking people, over a hundred years after Van Riebeeck landed at Table Bay. Over time it has taken centre stage in the historical debate raging in South African academia for precisely this dubious honour. The facts are a constant source of dispute.
This area had been populated for time immemorial by the hunter-gatherer San, and for the past 2 000 years by the pastoralist Khoikhoi. These groups did not always live in harmony. But such as their society was, it was broken up by the arrival of the Xhosa from the north.
By 1730, many Xhosa had branched off from their political nucleus into various chiefdoms. The Xhosa who came to the Zuurveld around 1750 were largely pastoralist and specifically grazed the area only during certain parts of the season, after which they moved back east over the Fish River to the ‘sweetveld’, where it was possible in the far wetter conditions and summer rains to plant the maize and sorghum that was their staple food. Some of these groups intermarried with the Khoikhoi, giving rise to the two local authorities: the Gqunukhwebe under Tshaka, and then his son Chungwa, and later the Mbalu under Langa. To the north, a larger body politic of Xhosa people had settled under far more powerful chiefs, and further north than that were a host of other Bantu-speaking chiefdoms that had yet to deal with whites in any meaningful way.
The first Dutch trekboers entered the area some three decades later and set about making themselves at home, as far away as possible from the new, stifling British presence at the Cape. Tit-for-tat cattle raids ensued between all three groups, the Khoikhoi being the weakest. Historians are fond of referring to this period as a time of ‘frontier’, when the land was open, subject to no central authority, and marked by a flux of shifting alliances and blood and trade in equal measure – much like the American Wild West.
This changed when the British Empire took possession of the Cape for the second time, in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars. The British, at various times pro- and anti-expansion, acted decisively in closing the border and putting an emphatic damper on the constant troubles of their newly gained territories.
The trekboers had fought the Xhosa in loosely constituted, poorly armed and highly disorganised commando raids; by contrast, the British had an army and the backing of an empire, and in 1812 used it to drive 20 000 Xhosa across the Fish River in brutal fashion assisted by a Khoikhoi regiment from the Cape, settling an officially recognised border between the parties.
This became known as the Fourth Frontier War, by which the frontier was closed. Chungwa, the Gqunukhwebe chief who had left the Zuurveld so many years before, was murdered. A central authority arrived, signalling an end to the open land and trading of the frontier era. The Fish River was fortified. The Boers, some of whom had taken part in the British offensive, were eventually no happier than the Xhosa, raising a rebellion in 1815. It became known as the Slachter’s Nek Rebellion and its suppression played a decisive and symbolic role in the launch of the Great Trek two decades later. The Khoikhoi were relegated to the protection of missionary stations.
The British approached the Colony’s borders with schizophrenic policy in the decades to come. Various governors and commanders differed wildly as to whether the natives should be conquered (expensive, risky and with low reward) or the border simply maintained. The Xhosa, for their part, appeared to have been caught in much the same historical pragmatism: different chiefs had different attitudes towards the settlers and their ways, but currying favour with them yielded guns and tobacco. The British did not always keep to themselves, though, and the remainder of the nine Cape Frontier Wars was the drawn-out result.
In 1819, the newly installed military commander in Grahamstown, an Englishman called Lieutenant Colonel Brereton, launched a massive cattle raid on the Xhosa across the Fish in a fit of jingoistic frenzy. The Xhosa, under the prophet Makhanda (also known as Nxele), responded in kind, and 10 000 Xhosa soldiers almost put Grahamstown – which had become the settlers’ de facto military base – to the torch. The Xhosa were again driven out, this time even further back beyond the Keiskamma River, and the newly empty territory was negotiated with Chief Ngqika to be neutral land, belonging to no one.
Amid this turmoil, the British sought to populate the frontier with their subjects, and so the 1820 Settlers entered the picture. Salem was settled by the Sephton party a good fifty or sixty kilometres from the border. Many of the settlers were from the lowest echelons of British society, much like those sent to Australia and New Zealand, and it took them a long time to make proper use of the poor-quality soil and the ‘sour’ grazing veld the Xhosa had avoided for large parts of the year.
Being so far from the border, there was relative peace until 1834, when a massing Xhosa army threatened the livelihoods of the Salem settlers in the Sixth Frontier War. It is from this period that the tale of Richard Gush originates.
Gush was a righteous, God-fearing man – a Quaker who had settled in Salem along with the Sephton party. The story goes that in the mid-1830s, Gush and the village were under siege by Xhosa cattle rustlers. At one stage, Salem was surrounded by an innumerable force and things were looking grim for the settlers. One day, the Xhosa chief and his soldiers approached with spears in hand. Gush is said to have stepped out of his hut, put his gun aside, walked up to the Xhosa and asked them what they wanted. After a brief discussion, he walked back to the church, emerged with bread, rolls of tobacco and several pocketknives, gave the spoils to the chief, and delivered a sermon about the wrath of God. He then explained the settlers’ concerns about the cattle raids in the area. The Xhosa are said to have shaken his hand one by one and promised to leave the area. The Xhosa tell the story differently, as we shall see.
By 1847, the Salem settlers had obtained full freehold titles of the Salem lands from the colonial government, and the commonage on which the Xhosa had once grazed their cattle was held between them in equal portions. Being English, they immediately built a cricket pitch, and much later a community hall.
Meanwhile, the remainder of the Frontier Wars played out to the east, across the border. At one stage, an epidemic of lung sickness emanating from Mossel Bay decimated the region’s cattle population, and drought became another long-standing concern. The Frontier Wars ended with the British push for federalisation in the late 1870s, which culminated in the fall of the Boer Republics in the interior. The Salem settlers escaped the worst of the plague and conflict, and watched the border and army move further and further into the distance up the coast. However, there is one great historic event that did affect them: the great Xhosa cattle-killing under the prophetess Nongqawuse, which took place between 1856 and 1857.
Nongqawuse was a fifteen-year-old Xhosa girl, born across the Fish River in the independent