These Oppressions Won't Cease

Robert Ross

Description

Indexed in Clarivate Analytics Book Citation Index (Web of Science Core Collection)

Sujets

• HISTORY
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Histoire
• África
• General officer
• History of Africa
• General
• Africa

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 28 novembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776141821
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

These Oppressions Won’t Cease
These Oppressions Won’t Cease
AN ANTHOLOGY OF THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF THE CAPE KHOESAN, 1777-1879
Robert Ross
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg, 2001
www.witspress.co.za
Copyright Robert Ross 2017
Published edition Wits University Press 2017
Maps redrawn by Rizelle Hartmeier Stander
First published 2017
978-1-77614-180-7 (print)
978-1-77614-181-4 (Web PDF)
978-1-77614-182-1 (EPUB)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
The publishers are grateful for permission granted by the Western Cape Archives and Records Services and the Council for World Mission Archive, SOAS Library, University of London to publish archival material.
Transcriptions of the original documents translated by the author in this book are freely available from the OAPEN library (www.oapen.org) under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 Creative Commons License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). ISBN 978-1-77614-209-5
Cover image Report of a meeting on vagrancy law held at Philipton - August 5th 1834. Western Cape Archives and Records Service, LCA 6.
Copy editor: Russell Martin
Proofreader: Lee Smith
Indexer: Margie Ramsay
Cover and book designer: Peter Bosman Design
For John
CONTENTS
List of abbreviations
Terminology
Preface
Introduction
PART ONE THE INCORPORATION OF THE KHOESAN INTO THE COLONIAL BODY POLITIC
Chapter 1 From the earlier history
Chapter 2 In the aftermath of Ordinance 50
Chapter 3 The beginnings of the Kat River Settlement
Chapter 4 The politics of vagrancy
Chapter 5 Stoffels in London
Chapter 6 The interbellum
Chapter 7 The War of the Axe
Chapter 8 The business of life
Chapter 9 The Kat River Settlement under strain
Chapter 10 Madolo and his people
Chapter 11 Freeman and the church
PART TWO COLONIAL CRISIS AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A NEW ORDER, 1848–1853
Chapter 12 Convicts and the franchise
Chapter 13 Rebellion in the Kat River valley
Chapter 14 The rebellion spreads
Chapter 15 The franchise
Chapter 16 Uithaalder’s vision of the rules of war
PART THREE POST-REBELLION POLITICS
Chapter 17 Contesting reconstruction
Chapter 18 On the politics of the church
Chapter 19 On the rights of burghers
Notes
Bibliography
Index
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ACC Accessions series in the CA BPP British Parliamentary Papers CA Western Cape Archives Depot CCP Cape Command Papers series in the CA CO Colonial Office series in the CA CPP Cape Parliamentary Paper DRC Dutch Reformed Church LCA Legislative Council A series in the CA LCB Legislative Council B series in the CA LG Lieutenant-Governor series in the CA LMS London Missionary Society (later, Council for World Mission) SACA South African Commercial Advertiser VOC Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company)
TERMINOLOGY
This volume includes a number of terms for people which are not acceptable in the modern day. However, given the sort of book this is, which presents texts created in the nineteenth century, it is inevitable that words which were then common currency are included, even though they have become thoroughly insulting. My apologies for this, but there is really no choice but to use them.
I have of course used the appellations which are currently correct in those parts of this book that I have myself composed. The nineteenth-century texts and my own writings are distinguished from each other typographically.
Khoe, formerly Khoi (men), or Khoekhoe (men of men), refers to those who precolonially owned cattle and sheep, and generally spoke a variation of the Khoekhoe language, of which only the Nama dialect, spoken in the Northern Cape and Namibia, has survived. San is a Khoekhoe insult for those who had no stock and thus no status. It has been extended to describe all those who lived as hunter-gatherers in southern Africa. Khoesan is a portmanteau word used to designate the collectivity of Khoe and San, as often it is not easy to assign people to one or other category, particularly when the precolonial economy had been shattered, and the descendants were living within an entirely different lifestyle.
Map 1 The Cape Colony and its surrounds in the early nineteenth century.
Source: First published by Longmans Green (London) in J.S. Marais, The Cape Coloured People (1939), and later reprinted by Wits University Press in 1957 and 1968. Redrawn by Rizelle Hartmeier Stander.

Map 2 The Kat River district and its constituent wards.
Source: The Cape Archives, reference M# 1954 and 1955.
PREFACE


This book is a fairly natural spin-off from the work which I had long done on the history of the Kat River, and so the acknowledgements that I made in my book The Borders of Race in Colonial South Africa are equally applicable here. In particular, I would like to thank Candy Malherbe for a number of transcripts of texts, and also Fiona Vernal and Alan Lester for helping me obtain an electronic text of Stoffels’s testimony before the Select Committee on Aborigines. Above all, I would like to thank Katie Carline for transcripts of the post-1853 material from the London Missionary Society (Council for World Mission) archives. She and Nigel Worden both read drafts of the introduction, to its great benefit
As ever, I am dependent on archivists and librarians, as are most historians. In this case I have to thank, above all, those of the Africa-Studiecentrum in Leiden, especially Ella Verkaik, Monique Kromhout, Gerard van de Bruinhorst and Jos Damen; the Western Cape Archives Depot, which I still fondly know as the Cape Archives, especially Erika le Roux and Jaco van der Merwe; and the Special Collections Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.
There are two people to whom I need to pay special thanks. The first is John Iliffe. I belong to that tribe of historians of Africa for whom the unqualified mention of ‘John’ can only mean one person. For over forty years, he has been giving me encouragement and help. Specifically, one evening in the autumn of 2012, at the foot of E staircase, New Court, St John’s College, when I gently mooted the possibility of compiling this anthology, his enthusiasm convinced me that it was a worthwhile project. It is with great pleasure, and true humility, that I dedicate this book to him. I hope he thinks it worthwhile.
The second person I wish to thank specifically is Janneke Jansen. Without her encouragement, her help and her love, my life would be so much poorer. But she knows that.
Robert Ross Leiden, August 2017
INTRODUCTION
This book contains ninety-eight longer or shorter texts in which individuals who would later be considered Khoesan gave their opinions on the political, social and ecclesiological events and proposals of largely the middle decades of the nineteenth century, from around 1828 to the 1860s, with outliers in both cases. This, then, is a continuation, or perhaps a reformulation, of work which I have conducted over the years, notably on the Griquas of Philippolis and the Kat River Settlement. 1
Between them, I hope, these texts, properly understood, provide a window into the experience and understanding of European colonial suppression, which the Khoesan were the first people in Africa to undergo. Their reactions to the circumstances in which they found themselves, and which they attempted to forge to their own advantage, were of course highly specific. The conditions under which the Khoesan had to endure colonial conquest and subjugation were significantly different from those of other South African peoples. Nevertheless, these texts provide a commentary on colonial life which is at once unique in its detail and extent, at least for the period, and which also presented a model for later forms of African nationalism. This was devised, in part, on the basis of precolonial Khoesan ideas of worth and right, and so can form an example for those who still, or again, consider themselves to be of Khoesan descent. At the same time, the importance of the conversations between the Khoesan and the missionaries for the formulation of these texts cannot be overstated.
The backstory
Before the European conquest of South Africa, the south-western parts of the continent were inhabited by people who called themselves Khoekhoe and called those around them San. The distinction between the two was economic and, to some degree, linguistic. Neither group practised agriculture, except for some narcotics, 2 but the Khoekhoe had very considerable herds of sheep and cattle, while the San lived as hunter-gatherers and raiders. The wealth of some Khoekhoe formed the basis for political power, and as a result there were a number of long-lasting political groupings. Nevertheless, that power had to be continually demonstrated, and chiefs could lose their authority with their stock. The San called themselves by a variety of names: |Xam in the Karoo interior, Oeswana in and around the Sneeuberge, N||ŋ in the mountains of Lesotho and the Eastern Cape, and undoubtedly several other ethnonyms in the mountains of the Western and Southern Cape, which have not been recorded. 3 There are occasional references to chiefs within the bands in the Eastern Cape, but in general they lived without formal political authority. 4
What precisely the relationship was between the Khoekhoe and the various San groups has been a matter of historical controversy. 5 At times they were clearly antagonistic, as the San raided Khoekhoe cattle; at times the San acted more or less as clients of the Khoekhoe, though there is a fine distinction between clientelism and the extortion of protection money. Certain