Chapter 1
Introduction
If their property and land are not secured to the Griquas, and the pro- tection of the Colonial laws, before ten years there will not be a single Griqua in the country. — Rev. John Philip, London Missionary Society (1842)
The past which an historian studies is not a dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living in the present. — R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (1939)
The Griquas can not accept that a Minister can just write of f their his- tory with a pen, and then it’s all over. […] They came from all over the country to trek into Kokstad. If this is not history – if it is not labelled as ‘historical background’, then well might the Coloured of this country forget 300 years of hardship. […] Historically these people became so well known that had a Griqualand West and a Griqualand East, but [now] ‘there is no historical territory available’ for these people.
Die Griekwas kan nie anvaar dat een Minister hulle geskiedenis met ’n pen kan afskryf nie en dan is allesoor. […] Hulle het dwarsdeur die land getrek tot in Kokstad. As dit nie geskiedenis is nie – as dit nie as historiese agtergrond bestempel kan word nie, kan die Kleurling van hierdie land maar vergeet van 300 jaar se swaarkry. […] Geskiedkundig het hierdie mense so veel naam gemaak dat daar ’n Griekwaland-Wes en ’n Griekwaland-Oos is, maar ‘there is no historical territory available’ vir hierdie mense nie. — Andrew Le Fleur, Debates and Proceedings of the Coloured Representatives Council (1972)
In March 2011, three prominent Griqua people caught a train from the Northern Cape to Pretoria. They did so to take in all the history of the Voortrekker Monument, and more specifically, to investigate what makes 2 Chapter 1
Afrikaner heritage so unforgettable in South Africa. In an interview with Alet Rademeyer of Beeld, the main Afrikaans newspaper which covered their journey, the three expressed their dismay at the pitiful recognition which the Griqua people receive in today’s South Africa. They demanded the government pass legislation that recognises their status as the nation’s ‘inheemse volk’ [indigenous people]; and they requested the same, special cultural treatment ‘that the Zulus, for instance, receive’.1 In November of 1983, a similar, but not identical campaign was publi- cised in the Star, an Anglophone-medium newspaper.2 The piece was com- piled following an enquiry into the ‘Needs and Demands of the Griquas’, for the President’s Council.3 After reciting a well-known nineteenth-century narrative about the Griqua past, the author Anthony Duigan catapulted into the present, observing how
[t]oday, the Griquas maintain that they are a specific people with a desire for regions where they can live undisturbed and share in national decision-making processes. One of the key demands of some Griquas is for three or four seats in the coloured chamber under the new constitutional dispensation.
Just why, in the 1980s, such a report was even compiled in the first place, and why, in 2011, three Griqua individuals felt the need to make such a trek in pursuit of memorialisation, are complicated questions. They are perhaps best answerable by placing critically into context a century of South African historiography.
1 Alet Rademeyer, ‘Griekwas soek Raad oor Erfenis’, Beeld (3 March 2011). Available online at:
There is more to the job of the historiographer than dead historians and old books. On the contrary, good historiographical studies provide insight into how historical discourse is formed, how it receives momentum from a variety of determinants and how it is interwoven with complex patterns of meaning. Such studies should also be able to identify why certain ele- ments of the past are memorialised while other elements are hidden away, and why some passages of history are revered while others are denounced. They should also be able to question why certain casts of characters come to be included in the narratives of historical discourse while various other characters come to be excluded from the very same narratives. And they should also be able to acknowledge that the particular experiences of his- torians can often shape their own understandings of social forces, and that the many discourses which circulate around their environment can often feed into their own writings, and that the socio-political and intellectual context in which these historians write can often have a crucial impact upon their own historical perspectives. South Africa is rich terrain for historiographers. To date many of those who have focused on the region have, rather ambitiously, approached it as a single and national body. According to the framework they construct, South African history is a great tabula rasa into which grand ideas like nationalism and imperialism, as well as those more contentious understand- ings of race, class and politics, were variously etched by historians based not only in South Africa but also in the Anglo-American world.4 Research
4 See, for example, F. A. van Jaarsveld, The Afrikaner’s Interpretation of South African History (Cape Town: Simondium Publishers, 1964); F. A. van Jaarsveld, ‘Eise van ons Tyd aan die Geskiedskrywing’. Inaugural lecture at the Rand Afrikaans (Johannesburg: Randse Afrikaanse Universiteit, 1968); Christopher Saunders, The Making of the South African Past: Major Historians on Race and Class ( To t o w a , N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1988); Ken Smith, The Changing Past: Trends in South African Historical Writing (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989); Andrew Bank, ‘The Great Debate and the Origins of South African Historiography’, Journal of African History 38/2 (1997), 261–81; Wessel Visser, ‘Trends in South African Historiography and the Present State of Historical Research’. Paper presented at the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden, 23 September 2004,
accessed 12 August 2010; Merle Lipton, Liberals, Marxists and Nationalists: Competing Interpretations of South African History(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 5 Elizabeth A. Eldredge, ‘Land, Politics, and Censorship: The Historiography of Nineteenth-Century Lesotho’, History in Africa 15 (1988), 191–209; Timothy Stapleton, ‘The Expansion of a Pseudo-Ethnicity in the Eastern Cape: Reconsidering the Fingo Exodus of 1865’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 29/2 (1996), 233–50. See also, below, fn. 8. 6 Nigel Penn, ‘The Northern Cape Frontier Zone in South African Historiography’, in Lynette Russell, ed., Colonial Frontiers: Cross-Cultural Interactions in Settler Colonies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 19–46. 7 Carolyn Hamilton, ed., The Mfecane Aftermath (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1995); Premesh Lalu, The Deaths of Hintsa: Postapartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2009). 8 Mohamed Adhikari, ‘From Narratives of Miscegenation to Post-Modernist Re-Imagining: Toward a Historiography of Coloured Identity in South Africa’, African Historical Review 40/1 (2008), 77–100. See also Mohamed Adhikari, Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005). Introduction 5
As Adhikari persuasively argues, there were a number of competing interpretations when it came to the Coloured experience during the twen- tieth century. What seems just as remarkable to me, though, is that this was a period in which Coloured voices were homogenised by these authors to an extent that allowed them to write about a single Coloured experience in the first place. After all, there were many dif ferent South African peoples to fall under the ‘Coloured’ umbrella during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (and, indeed, that the glue between them was strong enough to withstand, and ultimately outlast, the Apartheid regime is nothing short of remarkable). Adhikari is, of course, all too aware of this diversity, although he does not take it upon himself to investigate the variation in historical writing that developed between each component of Coloureddom. And with good reason, for to do so would defeat the purpose of undertaking such a study, much like picking away the bones from a small fish to leave the carcass destroyed and unrecognisable. By contrast, in this historiographical study, I have a dif ferent goal. Here I want to pick out the Griqua, one of the many social groupings that, by rather arbitrary decree, came to be regarded as ‘Coloured’ in South Africa; and I want to look at the ways in which their experiences have been appro- priated and mobilised in historical discourse. But before launching into the historiography, it is worth going over the fundamentals of Griqua history – or, at least, that which we can claim to know about Griqua history.
* * * In the early nineteenth century, the Griqua – their name adapted from the Grigriqua (Khoekhoe) of the Western Cape coastal belt – were a com- munity formed in the Transorangia out of a collection of rather diverse peoples. Among them were to be found a large proportion of ‘Bastaards’ (European-slave and European-Khoekhoe mixed-descent individuals); but at various times, their states came to incorporate several Khoekhoe (mostly Kora), several San, and even a few BaSotho and BaTswana – each of whom with their own unique links to the region. In a sense the Griqua were not too dissimilar to the many social clusters which formed in the ‘frontier zone’ in this period – spontaneous, competitive and entrepre- neurial – but what separated them from most others was their social and