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From: "Ernest Bessinger" <>
Subject: Re: Early Cape Tolerance
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2000 11:54:09 +0200
References: <200003251446.GAA19306@bl-14.rootsweb.com> <38DD4638.C1FF2F34@clover.com.au>


And, this is most likely the start of apartheid (again by Marq de
Villiers). Two sepperate, yet connected cultures. One, very far from a
church and even more remote from the Dutch Government. The other, the
actual government. Nearly two differrent countries (defnitely 2 different
cultures)

Until about the middle of the 18th century there is little
evidence of "racist" thinking (in the modern sense of the
word). And after about 1760, when it did start to appear, it
was almost always in response to a perceived threat of social
disintegration. At the same time, the official attitudes were
becoming less tolerant: in 1765 a decree had prohibited free
black women from appearing in public in "coloured silk
clothing, hoopskirts, fine laces, adorned bonnets, curled hair
or ear rings"; this was intended to prevent them from consid-
ering themselves not only on a par with "respectable burgers'
wives but often even above them' By the 1790s another
disturbing - and, to modern ears, depressingly familiar -
decree was published in an effort to "control vagrancy": free
blacks had henceforth to carry passes if they wished to leave
town.


On the frontier, among the trekboers, things were very
different. Their connections to European culture were tenu-
ouc and increasingly irrelevant. Company officials and visi-
tors to the interior routinely expressed alarm at the rapidity
with which the frontiersmen were abandoning everything
"European"; visitors to Cape Town from abroad were regaled
with often lurid tales of how the frontiersmen had already
sunk to the level of the squalid Hotnot, and there were
occasional schemes floated to save them from themselves by
separatiflg them from Khoikhoi or even - a radical notion!
- from slave labour.


These not-yet-apartheid schemes, as separatist schemes so
often do, entirely missed the point, which was that the trek-
boers had become Africans. Their economy was African.
Their loyalties were to the place in which they found them-
selves, their dreams and songs were of the blue horizons of
the north, their art, such as it was, invoked the landscape and
their cattle, their hopes were for escape from the dead hand of
the Company and the deadly predations of the San and
Xhosa cattle raiders. Their houses were usually a few rooms
with mud walls and a reed mat for a front door. Only their
Bibles gave them a thin, tenuous link with literacy and the
larger ideas of the outside world.
On the very fringes of the northern and north-western
frontiers, the trekboers often lived in the open, or in their
wagons; some set up house with a Khoikhoi wife. The trek-
boer culture merged with the Bastaards while it created them;
even in the larger houses Khoikhoi and trekboers all lived
together indiscriminately. They learned from the Khoikhoi
matters of survival in the veld that would become essential
items of frontier lore - the storing of milk in skin sacks, the
sun-drying of strips of game later called biltong. Anders Sparr-
man, an 18th-century traveller who wrote in French, no-
ticed how often sheepskin clothing was worn, and how the
trekboers had adopted the Khoikhoi sandal made from cattle
skin, which were called velskoene, skin shoes, later corrupted
by the English to veldskoene, or veld shoes. There is at least
one recorded instance of a trekboer marrying the daughter of
a Nama chief in a Khoikhoi ceremony, and later conducting
himself like a Khoikhoi ruler. But generally the trekboers
didn't "go native" in the traditional sense of adopting native
culture. Instead, they created their own African culture.
On the eastern and north-eastern frontier near the Xhosa
vanguard, the farms were larger and more prosperous, and
more settled. The trekboers here often had substantial invest-
ments in slaves; they were developing their own code of
labour - and therefore interracial - ethics; the proper
though seldom attained) relationship between master and
servant was one of courteous authority and respectful servi-
tude. Their developing attitude towards the Xhosa, whom
they could sense massing across the slender barrier of the
great Fish River, was one of respect and some fear, though
coloured by their already developed assumptions of superior-
ity vis-à-vis native peoples, assumptions that had been
formed by the way the Khoikhoi in the settled areas had
collapsed under the combined weight of disease and a far
stronger alien culture.
By the time substantial contact was made with the Xhosa
masses, the preconditions for Afrikaner nationalism had
been set: the rejection of cosmopolitanism from the Cape
(seen as arbitrary rule based on foreign - that is, European -
ideas); the notion that Boers and their descendants were by
natural right entitled to as much land as they wanted and
needed; the belief that political superiority was theirs by
natural right; the by now developed notion that the land was
"empty" and therefore ownerless; the idea that physical
labour was not done by whites; the assumption that black
cultutres would give way before superior white will; the belief
that retreat into the interior was the way to solve the prob-
lems of poverty and harassment by law and by native.

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