AmaXhosa Archives - One Hundred and Twenty

Redhouse on the Frontier

This episode starts in the year 1700, two hundred years after the Portuguese turned up their noses at the Cape, one hundred years after the Dutch and English began to show interest and a mere 48 years after Jan van Riebeeck landed.

Van Riebeeck asked the locals what they were called, and they said Quena. The Dutch called them Hottentots, modern-day scientists invented the term Khoi-Khoi, so we are going with the original name.

I have always wondered who lived where in those days. After much sleuthing, I have figured out the general location of the Quena and AmaXhosa tribes. In the interests of a flowing narrative, you will find the detail in Appendix A.

All you need to know right now is that a couple of thousand whites and an equal number of slaves of diverse origins lived in Cape Town. Between Cape Town and the Swartkops River various Quena tribes were located. Beyond them, the AmaGqunukhwebe, a mixed Quena-Xhosa bunch, inhabited the Zuurveld, between the Swartkops and the Fish Rivers. Across the Fish River lay the various kingdoms of the AmaXhosa. Intermingled with all these tribes roamed bands of Kung (the name the Bushmen called themselves), much hated by the Quena, the AmaXhosa and the Dutch, for stealing their cattle.

Only the Quena in the west were familiar with the colonists. Not many of the inland AmaXhosa had ever seen a white man, a horse, or a gun.

The African people on the coast, all the way from the Fish River to Mozambique, had over the preceding two hundred years helped shipwrecked Portuguese, Dutch and English sailors trudging along the endless coastline towards De La Goa Bay. They often took them in permanently.

Survivors who chose to head west along the beach did not live long enough to regret their decision. The Kung invariably murdered them. Best to build a boat and take your chances on the sea route to Cape Town.

The AmaXhosa males were trained from boyhood in stick-fighting. Two sticks were used, one for attack and the other for defence. One English wreck survivor was invited to try his hand at stick fighting but lost his cool when he was repeatedly beaten about the head. He flattened his opponent with good right hook. This was not considered good form.

I know of no connection between the AmaXhosa and the Irish, but the latter have their own form of stick-fighting. It is called hurling. Fifteen men a side play on a rugby field. They are armed with “hurls”, wooden battle-axes, with which they smash the ball and each other. The object is said to be to hit the ball through the goal posts with the battle-axe. On the way, you can kick and handle the ball. Not to mention the opposition. Rugby on steroids.

When I say battle-axe, I am not kidding. I have several in my garage, left behind by a tribe of Irish who invaded Redhouse several years ago when one of them carried off my youngest daughter to live in the wilds of County Cork, amidst much happy carousing.

Hurling has been a major sport in Ireland since about 1200 BC. I am sure they have entire hospital trauma wards devoted to the game. It took until 2010 before the authorities reluctantly consented to players wearing protective helmets. Over 3000 years of constant brain damage finally made an impression. Ireland is a conservative society.

I wonder if we couldn’t recruit a team from the deepest Transkei and enter them in the All-Ireland Hurling Championship. They would soon learn the rules (if there are any) and their stick-fighting skills would be a great asset.

Speaking of the Irish, not only are they great rugby players, they have a game called Gaelic Football. It draws immense crowds of over 80 000 at the finals. The first legal reference to the game occurred in 1308, when John McCrocan, a spectator, was charged with accidentally stabbing a player named William Bernard. Accidentally?

Gaelic Football is sometimes incorrectly associated with Australian Football, or Aussie Rules. This game is played on an oval cricket pitch, eighteen players a side, and the highlight of the game is when someone scores a goal, an umpire wearing a white coat like a butcher, runs to the goal line and extends his arms, elbows to his sides, index fingers outstretched, and yells at the top of his voice, “How long is my dick”! Or so I am told.

Back to 1700, most of the world was more or less at peace, including the Eastern Cape. But it couldn’t last. The very next year, John Churchill, Sir Winston’s famous ancestor, better known as the Duke of Marlborough, arguably Britain’s best general ever, took on Louis XIV of France, who came second by a long shot. Marlborough never lost a battle and only fell from grace because his extremely bossy wife squabbled with Queen Anne. Women!

Down south, the Cape government made a decision which started the total disruption of indigenous society. Trekboers were permitted to travel freely beyond the Colony’s borders.

In 1702 a Dutch hunting party clashed with AmaXhosa along the Fish River. Their attempt at stock theft having failed, they retreated, plundering cattle from the Quena on the way back. Meanwhile, the exodus of trekboers from the immediate vicinity of the Cape began to take off.

In 1713, a passing ship introduced smallpox. Twenty-five per cent of the white population died, but the effect on the Quena in the colony and in the south-western districts was absolutely disastrous. Ninety per cent of them succumbed due to lack of immunity to this strange disease.

Entire tribes were annihilated. The few survivors could not reconstruct their clans as they had lost their chiefs. The empty land was soon occupied by farmers from the Cape.

Amidst this chaos, a group of slaves escaped and attempted to set up a new life up the west coast. They were recaptured. The leader, Tromp van Madagascar, was sentenced to death by impalement but understandably chose to commit suicide in gaol. One guy was hanged, and the rest either had their Achilles tendons severed or their feet broken on the wheel.

Fifteen years later, the Dutch began to take over Quena land and cattle through direct attack. It became the done thing to kill the men and to force the women and children into domestic labour.

In 1734 the Groot Brak River was declared the eastern boundary of the Cape. Five years later, the Quena in the area took up arms in their last stand against the Dutch. They lost, and those still alive were absorbed as unskilled farm labour.

Meanwhile, the Kung began an unending campaign of cattle theft and murder against the trekboers in defence of their rapidly shrinking ancestral lands, which resulted in commandos being assembled to hunt them down.

While the millennia-long way of life of the original inhabitants was being destroyed in a matter of a few decades, all was not well across the Fish River.

In 1730 Phalo became king of the AmaXhosa. He reigned for forty-five years. Two of his sons, Gcaleka and Rharhabe, started a power struggle which lead to a major schism in the kingdom, at a time when the Dutch encroaching from the west required unity of purpose.

There was dissent amongst the whites in the Colony as well. One Etienne Barbier lead a group of unhappy farmers in rebellion against the authorities. For his pains, he was drawn and quartered (entrails extracted, and limbs severed) and his legs and arms exhibited on the main roads as a warning. No wonder Cape Town is such a hotbed of violence.

In 1752 Ensign Friedrich Beutler led an eight-month long expedition as far east as the Butterworth region. On the way they erected a beacon at the mouth of the Swartkops River. When he returned, he reported that the land of the AmaXhosa was way more suitable for farming than the Karoo. An ominous sign for the future. He was most impressed by the Kung rock art in the Fish River valley.

In 1756 the Seven Years War, said to be the first ever “world war”, led to brawling in Europe, the Americas and India. The Brits and the Prussians beat the French and their numerous allies. The British Empire expanded.

The trek from the west was gathering momentum. The Cape government was always a few steps behind the trekboers. Nevertheless, they declared the eastern frontier to be established on the Gamtoos River in 1767. In the same year trekboers reached the Swartkops River, and the first serious clashes between them and the AmaXhosa were recorded. By 1772 there were a number of farmers settled in the Algoa Bay area.

There were several intelligent explorers in the area at this time. Carl Peter Thunberg, a Swedish naturalist, on his second trip to the Eastern Cape in 1773, crossed the Gamtoos River. He recorded two villages inhabited by the Gonaqua Quena, probably in the area of the present-day Woodridge College, plenty of wild animals including buffalo, elephant, rhinos, lions, hyenas, and different kinds of buck. He also describes the salt pans near the Swartkops.

In 1775, King Phalo died and the AmaXhosa split into the AmaGcaleka led by Nqgika, and the AmaRharhabe. Civil war broke out. In 1778 the Cape Colony’s border was extended to the Bushman’s River. In 1780 they made it the Fish River.

Over the ocean, the British managed to lose their American colonies through the sheer ineptitude of politicians, generals and admirals, and major naval and military intervention by the French.

By now, the AmaXhosa were well aware of the trouble they faced from the encroaching white farmers. Attitudes towards whites changed. Whereas in 1686 the survivors of the wrecked Stavenisse were looked after well by the coastal people, the crew and passengers of the Grosvenor had no such luck in 1782. Wrecked on the coast on Pondoland, the 108 survivors had a dreadful time as they headed west. Six sailors were found 118 days after the disaster by a farmer near the future Port Elizabeth.

It wasn’t only human life that was impacted by this descent into misery. In 1770 the area around Algoa Bay abounded in wildlife. By 1820 most of the big game had disappeared, leaving small pockets of elephant in the Addo and Alexandria districts. It is hard to imagine how so few people could have caused so much ecological damage. In the 1930s my father could ride from the farm at Greenbushes to Redhouse on horseback through bushveld. The only human habitation on the way were the tiny villages of Bethelsdorp and Veeplaas.

In about 1970 troops of baboons still roamed the escarpment opposite Redhouse along with large numbers of buck. In 1984 they started construction of the Motherwell township. Very little remains of that wildlife.

In Europe, France was going bankrupt and scene was set for big trouble. So bad that they actually summonsed the first parliament since 1614. Madame Guillotine was to shorten the lives (excuse the pun) of lots of French citizens, including the King and Queen. The last victim lost his head in 1977.

The scene was set for another world war, which would last 25 years and come to a gory end at Waterloo in 1815. All this had a decided influence on affairs at the Cape.

Back to 1779. The scene was set for the first of nine Frontier Wars which would provide much grief and drama before the last one ended 100 years later. Five of these wars took place before the 1820 settlers landed.

When one reads the history of these conflicts, it reminds one of the Middle East. Everybody fights everybody else. Without boring the pants off you, you will be interested to know that in the fifty years between 1770 and 1820, and in no particular order, the following fisticuffs took place:

The trekboers fought the AmaXhosa and the Quena.
The Quena fought the AmaXhosa and the trekboers.
The British fought the Dutch in 1795 and took over the Cape and gave it back as soon as possible in 1802.
The AmaRharhabe fought the AmaGcaleka. In fact, the battle of Amalinda between these two tribes cost at least 500 lives in the bloodiest clash in AmaXhosa history.
The British fought the Dutch again in 1806, and this time kept the Cape.
The British fought the trekboers and hanged them from time to time.
The British fought the AmaXhosa.
The British fought the French in a small naval battle in Algoa Bay.
The Kung fought everybody.

Let’s conclude this sad tale in 1799. The Third Frontier War saw the AmaXhosa and the Quena ravage the land as far as Oudtshoorn. The British built an earthen fort on the farm Papenkuilsfontein at Algoa Bay, probably in the area lying between the present day Korsten and Algoa Park.

Large numbers of Quena and Xhosa warriors attacked the fort in broad daylight on the 10^th August 1799, driving off cattle and sheep pastured close by. They headed for Kleinskool with their booty. Meanwhile, a troop of Dragoons had found their horses and charged after them, accompanied by two light field guns. They surprised the enemy enjoying a braai. Forty were killed and the rest fled into the bush.

Remember iClick, buried in Carden Street? Could he possibly have been a casualty?

Just a few days later, on 20^th September, the French frigate Preneuse engaged the transport HMS Camel and the sloop HMS Rattlesnake in combat which continued through the night before she broke off the action at 03h30 and fled the scene.

Algoa Bay’s only naval battle. Although if they persist with the proposed fish farm, we might have another one.

Appendix A – who lived where

Around the Cape, there lived the Goringhaicona (Strandlopers), the Goringaiqua (the guys with the war-oxen who killed the Portuguese Francesco D’Almeida), and the Gorachoqua. Across the Berg River the Cochoqua numbered as many as 18000 when Van Riebeeck arrived. Further north the Namaquas held sway, and way beyond them lived the Briquas, probably across the Gariep River.

Over the Hottentots-Hollands mountains lived the Chainoqua, then the Hassequa and Guriqua around about Riversdale. Then came the Attaqua and Houteniqua, near George. Over the Swartberg mountains a large tribe called the Inqua held sway.

Further east lived the Ganumqua, the Nambunqua, the Gonaqua and the tribe closest to the AmaXhosa, the Damaqua, who probably camped between the Gamtoos and Swartkops Rivers. The Damaqua bought dagga from the AmaXhosa and sold it down the supply chain until it reached the Inqua up in the Karoo.

Between the Swartkops and the Fish Rivers the AmaGqunukhwebe, a mixture of Quena refugees and some AmaXhosa, occupied the Zuurberg.

To the east of the Fish lived the AmaXhosa, AbeThembu and the AmaMpondo, stretching all the way to Natal.

Small bands of Kung roamed about across the entire area.

Redhouse and the Ancestors

In the last blog, we flashed through 125 000 years of exciting events in three pages. I will try to slacken the pace.

We discussed the possibility of the Phoenicians visiting the Swartkops River, and the panic this must have caused amongst the little band of Bushmen resident in our future Village.

By the Year Dot, approximately 24 generations after this dramatic event, the indigenous population had forgotten all about the Phoenicians and had resumed the even tenor of their ways. Incidentally, there never was a Year Dot. The early monks who dreamt up the Anno Domini method of counting years had no concept of zero, so they went straight from 1BC to 1AD.

Life was chilled. As long as you avoided annoying the elephants, rhinos, hippos, lions, leopards and buffalo, and didn’t tread on a wide variety of reptiles, you could happily spend all day long eating oysters off the rocks. No champagne unfortunately, but they did drink Karri, a fermented honey mead.

According to legend, they discovered a hollow tree containing a small pool of water, into which honey had dripped from a hive above. It had fermented naturally. When they got over their hangovers, this seemed like a brilliant idea. In due course, different varieties of Karri became available, depending upon the flavour of the local honey, which of course depended upon which flowers the bees visited.

But this idyllic lifestyle was too good to last. People now termed Khoikhoi but who called themselves the Red People, decided to leave Botswana and head south. Two thousand years ago they reached the sea.

Genetically, the Khoi and the San were related. Linguistically both relied on lots of clicks. Genetic studies indicate that 22 000 years ago the Khoisan constituted the largest group of hunter-gatherers on the planet. The San are the descendants of the first Homo sapiens, i.e. modern man. They have the oldest gene pattern of any existing people and it is thought that all other nationalities are descended from them.

But there was still a serious cultural distance between them. The Khoi looked down upon the Bushmen – the name San they gave them means “those who pick things up from the ground”.

The Khoi brought with them cattle and sheep, seriously displeasing personal habits and a bad attitude. They smeared animal fat over their bodies to exhibit their wealth. The richer, the smellier.

The concept of personal property was part of Khoi culture, those with large herds were the rich people, those without worked as servants. Whereas the San were the original socialists. Nobody owned anything of note. And if hungry, they felt zip about pinching a Khoi cow.

Despite divergent lifestyles, the Khoi and the San coexisted and probably interbred once they got to know each other.

Of course, the Khoisan formed the bedrock of the Coloured folk of South Africa. The numerous “click” languages were lost except within those remnants of the San people still found in areas of Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Lesotho. They were replaced by a version of Afrikaans which has to be the most expressive in the country.

It is well known that the Eastern Cape is the home of Black and Coloured rugby. Some clubs have been in existence for over 100 years. I have been to plenty of games in my role as driver of the referee’s getaway car. The ref being Michael, my son. We have been to places I didn’t know existed. You have no idea how popular rugby is out in the bundu!

Imagine the scene at a typical derby between two Coloured teams if the click language had prevailed.

The original is followed by the Afrikaans equivalent, and then the English translation.

The referee to the scrum: “Clack, click, clock” (“Crouch, Bind, Set”).

The spectators, advising the referee:

“Clickity-click”, clickity-click” (”Hy hou! hy hou”). [“He won’t release the ball!”]

“Cluckity cluck!” (“Hy’s omkant! Hy’s omkant!”) [“That player is offside!”]

“Clockity clockity cluck” (“Jy blaas soos ‘n doos!”) [“You are not reffing very well!”]

“Clackity, clickity, clockity cluck! (“Vat jou fokken oë uit jou gat uit!”) [“We advise you to observe the game more closely!”]

Let me come back to the straight and narrow.

For the original inhabitants this was the first of many more intruders yet to come, of which more later.

It is very likely that a Khoikhoi clan took up residence at the site of the future Redhouse. They set up their huts and grew some crops. They didn’t move around as much as the San. They had clay pots in which they stored food and Karri.

They lived in clans on what they considered their tribal territory. Every so often, they would decamp and move to another spot, perhaps in pursuit of grazing for their cattle.

Now, what earthly reason do I have for thinking that the Khoikhoi once lived in Redhouse, you may well ask.

Firstly, their descendants are still traversing the Village with their cattle, fertilising our greenery as they go!

Secondly, it is well known that Redhouse has been the home of hordes of egrets for ever and ever. Every trick in the book has been tried to get the egrets to leave the Village for as long as I can remember. Nets over the trees in which they live. Toy snakes placed strategically on the branches. Loud bangs. Shotgun blasts. Nothing will make them go away.

There are many kinds of egrets, but I guess ours are Bubulcus.Ibis. In Latin, Bubulcus means cowherd. These egrets like ticks. I reckon this is their ancestral home, harking back to the days of Khoi and their cattle. We are doomed to live forever with the incredible mess they make, not to mention the smell.

So what made the Khoi up sticks and head south? It so happens that even further north there was a great stirring.

Probably due to a rise in population, a slow but steady exodus of people began, moving eastwards and southwards out of the area where Cameroon is today, from about 3000BC.

It took them a while but in due course the first of the so-called Nguni speakers arrived in Northern Natal. It wasn’t so much an invasion as a slow advance into new lands looking for fertile soil to plant their crops and water for their cattle.

As the centuries passed, these people comprising several tribal groups collectively called the AmaXhosa, and behind them many more tribes now lumped together as the AmaZulu, gradually filled up the east coast of South Africa.

Their encounters with the San and the Khoikhoi they found in their path cannot have been all that unfriendly. They absorbed some of them into their ranks which is why their language, isiXhosa, contains a few of the original San clicks. Nelson Mandela was of the royal house of the abaThembu, and his DNA test showed that he had Khoisan ancestry.

This gradual southward movement and social interaction between the San, the Khoikhoi and the advancing black tribes was a pretty laidback expedition. Bear in mind that they first entered northern Natal around 1AD, and it took until 800AD before the vanguard made it to the Fish River.

Let’s call it about 1000 km from the northern border of KZN to the Fish River. That’s an average trek of 1.25 kilometres per annum. Even our decrepit railway system moves faster than that!

Several more waves of immigrants followed and by 1500AD the land east of the Fish was well settled.

Elsewhere in the world a huge amount was going on. During that 1500-year period, in Asia, Europe and the Americas, numerous empires rose and fell, major religions emerged for better or for worse, dreadful plagues swept the world from time to time, millions upon millions of people were wiped out by warfare, the Dark Ages descended, China invented paper and gunpowder, eventually the Renaissance enlightened the dismal scene, America got “discovered” and, more importantly for this romantic series, Vasco da Gama made it round the Cape to India.

Where would you have rather been 1000 years ago? Merry England, or the Eastern Cape? Read on!

If you are of European descent, and you could go back 40 generations in your time machine to visit your ancestor, the chances are that you would be absolutely appalled at what you found.

Let’s assume a man of middle age (in those days probably between 35 and 40). By the law of averages he would have been a serf, bound to his master’s land for life. Do you really think you are directly descended from William the Conqueror?

Being a serf meant that his daily grind was dictated by the local baron, who could do with him and his family as he wished. This included handing over his daughter to his lordship on the eve of her wedding day, the so-called droit du seigneur!

When you introduced yourself, shivering in the pouring rain of a typical English summer, he might have opened his gob to reply, and you would have been greeted with a mouthful of broken and missing teeth, seriously bad breath and a hacking cough brought on by the latest bout of plague.

You wouldn’t have been able to refuse his invitation to enter his odorous cottage, made of mud and timber and a thatched roof, with a fireplace in the middle of the single room. Don’t shriek if you see a rat and, yes, that itching really is a horde of fleas.

And please don’t ask to go to the toilet!

However, if your great, great, plenty more greats, grandfather was part of the long, slow migration of the amaXhosa, well, what a pleasure. Hey ho, up at dawn to check on the cattle. That was the man’s job, and he was also in charge of making the Amasi, fermented milk, like yoghurt.

After that was done, and the women were busy tending the crops, making food, looking after children, skinnering and all the other tasks they constantly complain about, well, sit down with the amadoda and discuss affairs of state.

And if the urge is upon you, take a stroll a little way up the nearest kopje, check that no ill-intentioned serpent is lurking in the grass, crouch on your haunches, give thanks for the lovely view of rolling green hills dotted with your fat cattle, the lazy brown river flowing past your kraal, the bluest of skies, and enjoy what is so well described in that most earthy language, Afrikaans, a hearty boskak!