The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape's Northern Frontier in the 18th Century (review)

Some writers believe that violence is the "key" to their countries. Novelist Haruki Murakami has said as much about Japan. South African historian Nigel Penn might agree. He suggests this viewpoint in his examination of an area, the northern Cape, neglected by other historians. He calls it a "forgotten frontier." This dry and rocky land, stretching from Cape Town north all the way past the Orange River, has long been considered of marginal importance compared to the Eastern Cape, and so its role in shaping the racial hierarchy that emerged in modern South Africa has been "forgotten" too.

Historians have typically looked for the "key" to South Africa in nineteenth-century gold-mining or seventeenth-century Cape Town, but Penn focuses on the eighteenth century. He trains his scholarly eye on the Dutch settlers who, it has been said, turned their backs on the Enlightenment, and on the Khoisan hunter-gatherers and pastoralists they encountered as they trekked northward with their herds. On the frontier, the zone where no single power held indisputable sway, they engaged in intense and complicated competition for pastures and water. In choosing this period and these people, Penn is taking up a challenge posed nearly thirty years ago by Martin Legassick. Unlike Legassick, who argued that it was fruitless to search the frontier for the origins of modern racial segregation, Penn believes the violence of the frontier "is still a prime suspect" in having given rise to the divisions and inequalities still plaguing its people (p. 291).

I doubt the northern Cape frontier will ever again find as thorough and caring a student as Nigel Penn. He is the indisputable master of its historical terrain. To write this book and the (longer) University of Cape Town doctoral thesis on which it is based, he studied archaeological evidence and archaic Dutch. To learn from "mimetic rhythm," he transcribed by hand and then translated hundreds of sometimes barely literate documents—especially reports and court cases—produced by and for the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Believing that the narrative mode is essential to making history "human," he retells their tales in prose marked by simplicity, clarity, the complete absence of jargon, and a fair amount of gruesome detail. His meticulousness is unapologetically prodigious; we learn how much rice liquor (arrack) a Khoi was paid for his cattle, and who drank it; we learn how many cattle and sheep were stolen in a given raid, and the manner in which people were killed. In the 1739 war, for example, some soldiers cut off the breasts of dead Khoisan women and made them into tobacco pouches.

We cannot learn much about how the Khoikhoi saw things, because their oral traditions were not recorded, and their silence "is itself indicative of their fate" (p. 4). Their culture was vanishing by about 1815, when missionary activity and British rule effectively closed the frontier. Penn concludes with reference to the San in the mid-nineteenth century, "there was no place left for them on earth" (p. 287).

While Penn presents the demise of Khoikhoi culture as undeniably tragic, he eschews the language of blame. He treats the historical actors—the VOC, the trekboers, the pastoral Khoikhoi, the hunting and gathering San, and creole groups like the "Bastaards"—evenhandedly. He writes that the VOC, in need of cheap meat, tried to control the excesses of the trekboers, whom it blamed for the degeneration of the early livestock trade into brigandage; that trekboers were occasionally paternalistic toward the Khoisan; that trekboer evidence of San atrocities is probably accurate; that the San did not have a useful way of understanding what was happening to them; that the Khoisan and creole peoples of the frontier did not usually unite against the intruders; that miscegenation was the rule on the frontier; and that white men frequently got Khoi to serve...