Khoikhoi Dutch Wars
Khoikhoi Dutch Wars: The territory where the Dutch East India Company settled at the Cape had been inhabited for well over a millennium by Khoikhoi pastoralists and herders. San hunter-gatherers had come before them, however by the seventeenth century, many of them had fled to more isolated mountain locations.
Although there are indications that this local market for metals was becoming saturated by the early seventeenth century, European ships arriving at Table Bay had been obtaining cattle and sheep from the Khoi in exchange for copper and iron since the sixteenth century. The Khoi herders’ seasonal pastorage was infringed upon when the Dutch constructed a “fort and garden” on the shores of Table Bay and then introduced arable cultivation in 1658.
This was rejected by the Khoi, who insisted on grazing their cattle as before and tore down the hedges that had been put up to keep them out. When open warfare erupted in 1659–1660, the free burghers organized a military company and evacuated their families to the fort’s increased security. Conflicts persisted even after an uncomfortable truce.
The Khoikhoi of the Boland and Saldanha Bay districts were relegated to tributary status, lost their cattle, and were defeated in a series of Dutch invasions in the 1670s. This territory was later seized by the Dutch East India Company through conquest, and it was divided up for settlement farms.
As a direct result of their loss of economic independence, some Khoikhoi started working on the farms alongside imported slaves. The smallpox pandemic of 1713 severely decimated the Khoi, but the loss of grazing land previously had been the key to their downfall.
Despite not being legally enslaved, they were gradually placed under corporate control and forced to rely on settlers for work and sustenance. This pattern of antagonism persisted as some Dutch settlers pushed their operations farther inland and adopted pastoralism.
The Khoikhoi were denied access to water and pasture resources to the north, and settler commandos occasionally stole cattle from them. There is unmistakable proof that by the early eighteenth century, some Khoi had been reduced to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the San, fleeing to the more isolated and arid regions of the Roggeveld or the highlands of the Cederberg.
Beyond the Piketberg, the Khoikhoi and San engaged in a protracted phase of guerilla resistance against European colonial farmers in the late 1730s. After Namaqua livestock were taken by settlers on an unauthorized trading mission to Little Namaqualand in 1739, this became more intense.
Some of the Khoi who had accompanied them apparently joined the Namaqua and raided Dutch farms and cattle in the Bokkeveld because they were unhappy with their portion of the booty. By sending a strong commando to the area, murdering several Khoi “rebels,” and so allowing settler theft of Namaqua livestock, the firm was only able to regain control of the area.
Although guerrilla-style resistance persisted in the Bokkeveld and Roggeveld mountains until the end of the century, settlers eventually took control of the Onder Bokkeveld’s grazing fields. Conflict over environmental resources resurfaced from the 1770s until about 1800 when colonial pastoralists pushed further north.
Consequently, the armed trekboer commando gained more stability in order to fight against Khoikhoi and San resistance as well as to apprehend women and children who were to be exploited as indentured servants. By using tactics like the forced pass-carrying by “Bastaard Hottentots” (the children of Khoikhoi and slaves, or Khoikhoi and colonists), settlers also exerted control over native workers.
By the late eighteenth century, many Khoikhoi, San, and runaway slaves had fled to Namaqualand and the Orange (Gariep) River region, where they established autonomous Oorlam captaincies (later known as the Griqua) as a result of these battles and struggles.
For instance, in the 1790s, the well-known Oorlam chieftain Jager Afrikaner escaped with his family to the islands of the Gariep River after killing a white settler in the Hantam district with whom he had formed a clientship relationship over grazing rights.
From there, he recruited more Khoi and San refugees as followers and conducted raids on the neighboring regions, including Nama and Dutch grazing grounds. After being banned from the Cape, he moved to Namibia in 1806, where missionaries converted him and he began hunting and trading.
In the meantime, settlers were dominating grazing and water resources by moving eastward along the south Cape coast. In the process, they drove out a large portion of the wildlife that San hunters relied on and drove Khoikhoi pastoralists, who were already weakened by the flood of Khoi refugees from the west, toward the Karoo and Camdeboo regions.
The fertile grazing grounds between the Gamtoos and Fish rivers, which were also utilized by Xhosa farmers and herders, had been overrun by settlers by the 1770s. The corporation established a landdrost (magistracy) at Graaff-Reinet in 1786, formally extending the colony to this area.
As a result, the 1770s and 1790s saw a protracted era of strife. Susan Newton-King (1999), a historian, has shown that the necessity for settlers to acquire war prisoners was at least partially responsible for the increased violence during this time. Settler commandos frequently kidnapped Khoi and San women and children, along with a few men, to use as bonded inboekseling labor because they lacked the funds to hire waged labor.
Since they no longer had access to cattle and pasturage, other Khoi and San were forced to serve as herders for the hikers. However, there was some reprisal for this. By the middle of the 1790s, the frontier meat trade was severely hampered by Khoisan resistance, which manifested itself in the form of direct attacks on settlers and their slaves as well as stock theft.
When Khoikhoi and San inboekselings abandoned the farms in 1799, organized into captaincies based on precolonial social systems, and launched a four-year struggle to retake the “country of which our fathers have been despoiled,” a great uprising ensued. The 1799–1803 insurrection was very different from previous Khoikhoi and San resistance in a number of respects. Those who had already lost the means to live independently, worked for the trek boers, and wanted to topple colonial society from within rather than just stop its geographical growth were the first to rebel.
Additionally, the rebels joined forces with the Zuurveld Xhosa chiefs, who were successfully fending off colonial advances in the area.
In addition to raiding the regions of Graaff Reinet and Swellendam and defeating a settler commando, they also forced the abandonment of other farms. The new colonial rulers who had seized the Cape from the Dutch East India Company—the British and, for a short time, the Dutch Batavian administration—decisively intervened in response to the threat this constituted to the colonial order.
Conflicts between the Khoi and the Xhosa ultimately resulted in a peace in 1803. The uprising was the Khoisan people’s final sustained resistance to settler occupation. Few Khoi or San still had independent access to land at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The British attempted to force them into field labor with laws like the Caledon Code (1809). Ordinance 50 (1828) lifted these restrictions, and while independent farming was discouraged, efforts were made to settle some Khoi groups at mission stations or on land at Kat River. Some of them favored living with Xhosa farmers. Additional battles against the San, who were uprooted by the fencing of settler pastorage, occurred in the Northern Cape in the 1860s and 1870s. This amounted to genocide in certain locations.
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