The hidden histories of marginalisation, race and land dispossession in the Northern Cape (original) (raw)
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Fundamina, 2019
The pastoral indigenous communities living in southern Africa at the start of the colonial period were the fi rst to be dispossessed of their rights in land. They had exercised these rights in terms of their customary law systems for centuries before the arrival of non-indigenous settlers in 1652. During the nineteenth century, the fi nal acts of dispossession of land took place in terms of racially discriminatory legislation and administrative actions, just like the dispossession of land that took place after 19 June 1913. However, the descendants of these communities are unable to claim restoration of their rights in land in terms of the constitutional land reform programme. This contribution identifi es the customary law rights in land of these communities and compares such rights with the rights that non-indigenous settlers had in the land used as grazing on loan places. This comparison shows that the rights in land used * BA (Stell) LLB LLM (RAU) LLD (Pretoria); advocate of the High Court, state law adviser in the Offi ce of the Chief State Law Adviser. This contribution is based on parts of my doctoral thesis entitled The History of the Occupation of Land in the Cape Colony and the Eff ect Thereof on Land Law and Constitutionally Mandated Land Reform (University of Pretoria, 2019). as grazing of non-indigenous settlers and pastoral indigenous communities were in essence the same. However, from 1813 the colonial government implemented legislation in the Cape Colony that created big disparities with regard to rights in land between them. In this contribution, it is argued that colonial dispossession of land from pastoral indigenous communities should be rectifi ed by adopting legislation in terms of section 25(8) of the Constitution that will enable the descendants of these communities to claim restoration of their ancestral land.
The Foreigner in the Politics of the Frontier in the Fish River Marches of the British Cape Colony
2021
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the British Cape Colony was the site of multiple and interrelated constructions of the foreign and articulations of some brand of ‘foreigner’ as threatening. This paper, part of a longer study, explores one construction of foreignness in relation to the ‘frontier’. It makes three main points. First, it analyses the frontier not as a structural condition or zone but as a subjective, political positioning. It proposes the concept of the ‘marchland’ to distinguish between spatial description and political space. Second, it looks at the rendition of the ‘foreign’ in the politics of the frontier, how African land and people ‘beyond the boundary’ were labelled ‘foreigners’ or treated as foreign through the invocation of European norms of international law. It addresses colonial politicisations of chiefly authority in those discourses. Last, it considers the frequently employed idea of ‘the pale’, which speaks to political difference and aids us in conceptualising foreignness in the Cape colonial marchlands. This history considers the relationship between accusations of foreignness and a specific, historical political subjectivity and politics – of the frontier – that politicised foreignness.
Masters and Servants on the Cape Eastern Frontier 1760-1803
Canadian Journal of African Studies, 2000
List of figures page vi List of maps vii List of tables vii Acknowledgments viii Glossary xi 1 A note on the narration of colonial beginnings 1 2 Introducing the characters 11 3 Initial encounters of an uncertain kind 37 4 'A multitude of lawless banditti' 63 5 Strong things 92 6 'The frenzy of the heathen' 105 7 The enemy within 116 8 'We do not live like beasts' 150 9 'A time of breathing' 210 10 Postscript 232 Appendix 1 Currency and measurements 235 Appendix 2 Earnings capacity of sampled estates 236 Notes 248 Bibliography 317 Index 332 v 1 Document signed by Willem de Klerk. page 2 Jeune Hottentot Gonaquoi, by François le Vaillant. 3 Transect across the eastern Cape. 4 Climograms contrasting the general climate of the Cape Fold Mountain area and the Karoo-Cape Midlands area. 5 Kraal van Kaptein Ruyter, by Johannes Schumacher. 6 Head of Housouana man, by François le Vaillant. 7 Head of Housouana woman, by François le Vaillant.
Citizenship Studies, 2003
There was considerable debate throughout the early nineteenth century over the legal status and, by extension, the citizenship rights of the Khoekhoe in the Cape Colony. Successive regimes between the 1790s and 1828 (the Dutch East India Company, the British government, the Batavian government and the British again) all accorded a different legal status to the Khoekhoe and San than was granted to whites. In 1828, as part of a wider project of economic liberalization, the British eliminated legal distinctions between white and non-white inhabitants of the Cape Colony, even as it tried to deny settlement rights to Africans from neighbouring regions who came into the colony to work. A complex network of discriminatory local custom nonetheless continued to affect the daily interaction of white and Khoekhoe. Tensions came to a head in the early 1850s when the Cape both confronted the aftermath of a Khoekhoe rebellion and grappled with the issue of whether the newly-granted franchise should be race-blind. This paper examines contemporary debates over what criteria should be used to determine citizenship, with particular attention to the tension between the commitment of white British settlers influenced by liberalism to equality under the law, and the varying criteria for group membership used in practice, in the aftermath of the de facto enslavement of Khoekhoe children and farm workers.
New Contree
Starting with fragments of information from the archives about a rebellious young man designated a “Ghona [Xhosa]” in 1820, the study constructed a plausible biography to be used in a dance performance. This uncovered several myths and omissions in historical writings about the western part of the historic “Zuurveld” area of today’s Eastern Cape. While many writers pronounced the Gonaqua to have disappeared from about 1750, they remained visible as a special category of versatile and innovative people at least through the 1850s. The imiDange Xhosa chiefs of this era were in the forefront of defending African interests against colonial encroachment, as occupants over a fifty-year period of the land north, south and west of the Fish River. The geographical location of the imiDange meant their fate was intimately linked to the colonial designation of the Fish River as a boundary between white and black. Their consistent role as resisters has been marginalised in historical writing, esp...
Masters and Servants on the Cape Eastern Frontier, 1760-1803by Susan Newton-King
2002
List of figures page vi List of maps vii List of tables vii Acknowledgments viii Glossary xi 1 A note on the narration of colonial beginnings 1 2 Introducing the characters 11 3 Initial encounters of an uncertain kind 37 4 'A multitude of lawless banditti' 63 5 Strong things 92 6 'The frenzy of the heathen' 105 7 The enemy within 116 8 'We do not live like beasts' 150 9 'A time of breathing' 210 10 Postscript 232 Appendix 1 Currency and measurements 235 Appendix 2 Earnings capacity of sampled estates 236 Notes 248 Bibliography 317 Index 332 v 1 Document signed by Willem de Klerk. page 2 Jeune Hottentot Gonaquoi, by François le Vaillant. 3 Transect across the eastern Cape. 4 Climograms contrasting the general climate of the Cape Fold Mountain area and the Karoo-Cape Midlands area. 5 Kraal van Kaptein Ruyter, by Johannes Schumacher. 6 Head of Housouana man, by François le Vaillant. 7 Head of Housouana woman, by François le Vaillant.
‘Otherness’ and the frontiers of empire: the Eastern Cape Colony, 1806–c.1850
Journal of Historical Geography, 1998
Postcolonial analyses of the construction of 'otherness' have enabled an enhanced appreciation of the cultural dynamics of imperialism. However, some postcolonial work has been characterized by an unhelpful degree of abstraction. Within geography, as within other disciplines, the postcolonial perspective has also suffered from a restricted metropolitan focus. Based on a study of the connections between official, settler and humanitarian discourses within the Cape Colony on the one hand, and metropolitan political discourses on the other, this paper sets the metropolitan construction of racial difference in a wider context informed by developments at the periphery of empire. It also establishes some of the ways in which constructions of racial 'otherness' influenced British spatial strategies on the early nineteenth-century imperial margins.