The Lie of 1652. Patric Tariq Mellet
With historical hindsight, the flaw in the non-martial tradition and flat council type democratic system was that it left communities vulnerable to external threat by martial forces of warmongers with imperial-scale command-governance structures. It left the Khoe wide open to the divide-and-rule tactics of the colonialists, and the Khoe’s lack of military structures, command and development of the art of war contributed to their being overpowered. This occurred even though the Khoe fought colonialism bravely in armed resistance for longer than any other people on the continent.
The Khoe had an understanding of how to engage in and win a battle, as the viceroy of Portuguese India Francisco de Almeida found out to his detriment in 1510. On that occasion, the Khoe defeated the Portuguese in battle, killing Almeida and his entire officer corps on the beaches of Table Bay. There is a huge difference, however, between a defensive battle and a war. The Khoe had not experienced war as we know it and did not have the means to win a sustained war. In 1659 the Khoe saw the beginning of a protracted series of wars over 227 years – the longest series of colonial wars in Africa.
The Cape San and the Cape Khoe, who later organised armed resistance groups against colonisation after learning some hard lessons, adapted the leadership council system into guerrilla warfare structures in the 18th century and that served them well. In the case of the |Xam resistance in the central Cape, this adaptation saw them gain the upper hand in warfare over 30 years. They were only overcome through genocide. Khoe leaders such as David Stuurman, Hans Trompetter and Hans Branders proved similarly that, in forming alliances with the Xhosa armies in the Eastern Cape and in using guerrilla tactics organised in foci groups, they increased their effectiveness in war multifold. But in the long run, the combination of ‘divide-and-conquer’ tactics by a large imperial force, with logistical lines that stretched over long distances, overpowered the small democratic social formations of the Cape Khoe.
In her research, Abrahams116 has long emphasised the transfer of early Khoe governance to methods of dealing practically with the new threat they faced:
The conclusion that the Khoisan were not ‘acculturated’ to killing as a way of life is borne out by … Khoisan methods of struggle. They waged what we would call nowadays guerilla warfare, which proved enormously effective against the British troops. Although the Khoisan occasionally made combined attacks, normally leadership was decentralized, with groups of guerillas making decisions on their own.
If one analyses Autshumao’s tactics and strategy for dealing with Jan van Riebeeck, at heart it bears out this key observation of Abrahams. We will explore this in the chapter on the founding of the port of Cape Town and the chapter on wars of resistance.
Cape Khoe community formations in the early 17th century
Elphick117 notes signs that indicate a Khoe communication chain and trading chain that could be tracked from the southernmost communities right through to the Kai !Gariep, and beyond to the far-off north and east. In the early chapters of his work Elphick118 gives just a glimpse of the pre-colonial economy and the local trade and long-distance trade carried out by the Khoe, and in later chapters he elaborates on the rise of the European economy in their ruining of the indigenous Africans’ economy.
Figures of Khoe across the Cape at the time of the first 50 years of colonial settlement are given by Elphick as ranging between 74 000 to 100 000, and the |Xam or Cape San are said to have numbered about 30 000.119
To the south beyond the Gonaqua/Gqunukhwebe, there were nine Cape Khoe community formations right down into the Cape Peninsula that were prosperous sheep and cattle farmers: Hessequa, Attaqua, Outeniqua, Chainouqua, Gouriqua, Cochoqua, Goringhaiqua, Gorachouqua, Chariguriqua and other smaller offshoot clans of these. They were rich in cattle and sheep herds of tens of thousands of each of these livestock.120 Their pastoral economy followed sound sustainable livestock-farming methods involving rotational grazing and protection of the integrity of waterholes and rivers.
From the early 17th century there also emerged a formation of drifters from other Khoe formations that established a modern permanent trading centre next to the Camissa River in Table Bay, who called themselves Watermans or ||Ammaqua. After their expulsion from the Cape Peninsula by the colonists they integrated with the Cochoqua and Nama peoples successively.
There were also some independent Khoe farmers who had settled permanently in the Cape Peninsula, as well as yet others with just a few sheep who defected from the Peninsula Khoe groups to a San line-fishermen group called the Sonqua.
The period 1600–1652 presents a social and economic revolution or state of transformation in Table Bay and its environs. The event of the arrival of Jan Van Riebeeck and his settlement party in 1652 was simply the thick end of the wedge that had already been changing the local cultures for at least half a century. What had been happening more radically in Angola and Mozambique for over a century before the Dutch settlement had already impacted on the Cape Peninsula as a result of mass visits by ships to its shores.
The next chapter will take up this story and the real story of the foundation of the port city of Cape Town between 1600 and 1652.
Perspectives on the Kalanga foundation people
Sometime around 900 BCE, a trickle of ethnically diverse farmers drifted into the northern territory of what we today call Zimbabwe and the Zambezi Basin, into Malawi and Mozambique, and by 200 CE into the territory called South Africa today. By the time micro-groups of farmers reached northern Botswana, southern Zimbabwe and South Africa, they were descendants whose roots were from Central and East Africa rather than peoples had who directly made their way south in a long march of some sort.
Likewise, descendants of peoples from Angola also entered Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa by the first decade CE. As we have already seen in the section on the Khoe, through the construction of timelines applied to pottery and ceramic deposits archaeologists such as Huffman and others have referred to Kalundu, Nkope and Kwale cultures (from West Africa, the Great Lakes area and East Africa respectively), with the latter two being branches of Urewe culture. These slow migratory drifts laid the basis of the earliest farmer foundation people of southern Africa, who progressed through Ziwa-Zhizo-Kalanga phases into the Kalanga foundation people.
Bronwen van Doornum121 shows the intensification of hunter-gatherer occupation in the Limpopo region from about 100 CE in which locally evolved herders and farmers were beginning to take root, as evidenced by the steep increase in artefact densities at several sites.
Hall and Smith122 elaborate on the changing relations between different eras of farmers, herders and hunter-gatherers in the region. They explain how the hunter-gatherers found a means to carve out a niche for themselves, particularly among the farmer elite as that population grew and stratification increased. The form of the niche positioning by the San hunter-gatherers emerged as that of providing spiritual guidance, invoking the power of the spiritual realm and rainmaking. They were revered, and some were brought into positions of the highest status among the multi-ethnic people of the Mapungubwe kingdom that began to emerge in the 10th century. Throughout South Africa San women often became the wives of powerful leaders. This is also evidenced by relatively high mtDNA (maternal-line DNA) among Bantu-language speakers in some areas.
The earliest traces of evolving mixed San, Khoe, and Kalundu-Urewe peoples are called the Bambata culture, which emerged in what is today Zimbabwe. By 80 CE, possibly earlier, the migratory drift of micro-groups of these multi-ethnic cultures had moved across the Limpopo River into what is called South Africa today.
The further mixing of San, Khoe, Bambata, Kwale, Nkope and Kalundu in this area produced a local society that archaeologists Huffman and Pikirayi refer to as the Ziwa agro-pastoralist society. They were joined over time by further migratory drifts through Zimbabwe southwards. In the course of time segmentation and conflicts occurred and through the impact of this, as well as periods of a mini Ice Age and droughts, many other pastoralist societies emerged.
The most outstanding societies that emeged in a continuum progression were Ziwa and Zhizo social formations, and finally the Kalanga social formation. The Kalanga moved out of the area, as the Khoe had done before them, to disperse further along the Limpopo to present-day Mpumalanga and Kwazulu-Natal and to Botswana