A late-1860s settlement scheme south of modern Kimberley, for British “Albania Settlers” from the Eastern Cape district of Albany, was devised to create a buffer against the intrusion of Free State farmers into Griqua territory.

In 1868 the Griqua captain, Nicholas Waterboer, advised by the government agent, David Arnot, leased farms in the south-eastern section of his territory to the English colonists. This effectively led to a loss of land for the erstwhile occupants of these farms – just on the eve of the discovery of mineral wealth namely diamonds, centred on Kimberley – a discovery through which the course of South African history was changed.

Various groups of Xhosa were driven from the Eastern Cape through conflict in the late eighteenth century. Some Xhosa settled along the Orange River near Prieska, while others established themselves in the Karoo as subsistence herders, hunters and traders.

Of different clan groupings, their leaders included Nzwane, Gola and Olela. Relations between them were seldom cordial, but they occasionally united in conflict against San and other frontier communities.

Some Xhosa entered employment on Cape frontier farms to obtain access to firearms, later returning to the frontier zone to exploit varied herding, hunting, trading and raiding opportunities, in competition with other frontiersmen. Interacting with local communities, they created new identities and played a key role in the turbulent nineteenth century history of the Northern Cape region. Nzwane worked for Floris Visser, Field Cornet of the Roggeveld. He learned Dutch, and adopted the name Danster. As a successful raider, Danster formed alliances with colonial deserters, Griqua rebels, and even white farmers, in illicit arms trade. Danster is reputed to have been imprisoned briefly on Robben Island in the late 1820s, escaping by boat.

In 1829 Field-Commandant P.D. Jacobs suggested using the Xhosa as a buffer for farmers against attacks from beyond the colonial boundary. Schietfontein was to be granted to Xhosa who reside in the colony, so that they were “placed between the Bushmen and the Colonists [and] might be a check upon the conduct of the former, and ultimately put a stop to their depredations upon the colony”. In 1830, Xhosa from the northern border regions of the colony resettled in the vicinity of Schietfontein. They called it Phalane. Today it is Carnarvon. A mission community grew at Schietfontein following the arrival of missionary Alheit in 1847.

The independence of remnant Khoisan, and of Xhosa, Bastard and even Trekboer farmers in the frontier zone was threatened from the 1840s by several factors. First, the colonial boundary was extended to the Orange River in 1847. Next, a wool boom heralded the arrival of wealthy commercial sheep farmers, and Crown land, previously leased, was instead sold by public auction. There was finally, increased competition over pasturage after the founding of towns, for example Victoria West. This led to direct conflict over Xhosa-held land at Pramberg (near Victoria West) and expulsion of Bastards from Amandelboom (now Williston) in the 1850s. In the second half of the nineteenth century, descendants of Xhosa, Korana and other groups living along the Orange River, joined in two Northern Border Wars, to resist colonial conquest.

Trekboers (the name means “moving farmers”) were mainly  Dutch colonists who gradually penetrated inland. (The population of the white settlement at the Cape had been expanding, but employment, farming and marketing opportunities were limited).

They adopted a subsistence herding lifestyle similar to that of the Khoikhoi, on whose resources they increasingly encroached. With  access to firearms and horses, and mounting commandos to meet any Khoisan resistance, Trekboer society was able to dominate the frontier by the late 1790s. Charles Warren described something of the domestic arrangements of Trekboers in the Northern Cape in the nineteenth century: as he said – “I thought at first that they only went into tents for a season, but I find that some of them have never lived in houses, nor their fathers before them… We paid a visit to the Boer who now occupies the farm at Ramah; he has a wife and grown-up sons and daughters all living in two tents and a waggon. Everything about the living room tent was nice and clean, there were chairs and the floor matted with skins of springbuck. I cannot make out what the girls do all day long, they seem to me to be sitting in chairs doing nothing. The wife seems also generally sitting down shouting out directions to the servants and making coffee…”

During the “Great Trek”, in the later-1830s, thousands of frontier farmers of Dutch descent left the Cape Colony, rebelling against British rule. They crossed the Orange River into what is now the Free State, and beyond, some spreading gradually west to areas occupied by Khoisan, Tswana and Griqua.

“Bastard Hottentots” was one of the terms applied to people of mixed Khoisan, slave and European descent in the frontier zone. The Kok and Berends families attracted a following who migrated through Namaqualand and up the Orange River.

Here they called themselves Griqua, from a name of Cape Khoikhoi members of their group. Other “Bastards” remained south of the Orange River, settling at mission stations in the Karoo. Some later moved northwards beyond the encroaching colony.

The histories of the Griqua and Bergenaars were shaped by the unique circumstances of the frontier. Their settlements at Klaarwater (later Griquatown) and Campbell were established in the company of missionaries; and their western clothing and customs, rifles, horses and wagons set them apart from other people in the area. They entered agreements with the Cape government to regulate trade between themselves and “neighbouring tribes beyond the Northern Frontier.” Yet these mission communities interacted with, and to some extent absorbed, indigenous individuals and groups. At one Griqua mission station later named in his honour, the reverend John Campbell said “The people of this little village seem to live as one family…Five languages were spoken…namely Dutch, Coranna, Bootchuana, Hottentot and Bushmen.”

Under missionary guidance the Griqua adopted a formal constitution in 1813, and “Griqua Town” coins were struck in England a year later, which bore an image of a dove, the emblem of the London Missionary Society.

Some Griqua, who in the 1820s rejected missionary control, came to be known as Bergenaars. Led by Andries Hendriks and, for a time, Coenraad de Buys, among others, the Bergenaars also absorbed individuals from disrupted communities of Koranna and San in the region.

Adam Kok II was the first Griqua captain at Klaarwater. Later, mistrusting the missionaries as colonial agents, he led a break-away faction and moved to establish the Philippolis captaincy. In his place, Andries Waterboer was appointed captain at Griquatown in 1820. His son, Captain Nicholas Waterboer, was awarded the disputed Diamond Fields in the arbitration of 1871. Colonial rule had been extended north eastwards after the discovery of diamonds in the region in the late 1860s. The Crown Colony of Griqualand West was proclaimed in 1874, and incorporated into the Cape Colony in 1880. Adam Kok III, was the Griqua captain at Philippolis, who in 1860-1863 led an epic trek across  the Drarkensberg to Nomansland, subsequently called East Griqualand.

The Griqua were principally pastoralists, traders and hunters. The missionaries encouraged agriculture, and wheat was cultivated around the settlements.

SeTswana-speaking communities lived in large towns in the north-eastern part of the Northern Cape. They were farmers, practising both agriculture and pastoralism. Eighteenth century records indicate seasonal trading expeditions by Tswana as far westwards as Augrabies, west of modern Upington.

“Briqua” (meaning “people of the goat”) was the name by which the Khoikhoi referred to the Tswana.   They were first mentioned in Cape records in 1661 when rumours reached the Dutch, of black people “far in the interior”. It was said that the Briqua  “live in permanent houses and cities [and] are well provided with a variety of household equipment…they possess much ivory and gold which they barter with other people…”

An official Cape expedition led by Petrus Truter and William Somerville made direct contact with the Tswana at Dithakong in 1801. Dithakong, the Tlhaping Tswana capital, was reckoned to be “as large as Cape Town”, with 2000 – 3000 huts and a population between ten and fifteen thousand people.

William Somerville reported a meeting with “the brother of the chief” on their approach to Dithakong in Nov 1801: As he wrote: “Our conversation with him turned chiefly upon the object of our mission, and the novelty of anyone coming so far from any motive but that of plunder and rapine.”

The road through Kuruman became the main route of early colonial penetration and missionary influence in the interior of southern Africa. In 1816 missionaries were allowed to stay at Kuruman, where Robert Moffat later translated and printed the Bible in Setswana.

Difaqane is the name of a time of great upheaval. Conquering armies of displaced and warring Africans swept through the subcontinent. An attack on Dithakong in 1823 was repulsed, with the help of missionaries and mounted Griqua commandos.

The Tswana resisted colonial encroachment towards the end of the nineteenth century, but the conquest of the Southern Tswana was advanced by establishment of “locations” in Griqualand West in 1877, and completed in the crushing of the Langeberg Rebellion of 1897.

The Khoisan comprised indigenous San hunter-gatherers (including the |Xam in theKaroo) and Khoikhoi herders (of the latter, those living along the lower Orange River were known as the Nama; the !Kora or Korana lived further upstream).

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Khoisan in the frontier zone were devastated by conflict and disease. Furthermore, food resources of the hunter-gatherers became scarce when Trekboers and “Bastards” invaded the Karoo with sheep and firearms for hunting. As colonists took over  land, starving hunter-gatherers began hunting the sheep instead. Many of them were arrested and taken as convicts to build the breakwater in Cape Town. In the 1870s, ||Kabbo spoke of his, and his ancestors’ attachment to places in the Karoo, by then inhabited by others. As he said, “strangers were those who walked at the place. Their place it is not; for ||Kabbo’s father’s father’s place it was.” ||Kabbo had been arrested for stock theft and taken to Cape Town.  He spoke of his longing to return home.

Survivors were either absorbed into colonial society as slaves or workers, while others moved north towards the Orange River.  Here they mingled with other communities and formed distinctive groups,  exploiting the trading and raiding opportunities of the frontier. The Oorlam were a group of mixed Khoisan and escaped slaves who moved north across the Orange River. Their name, meaning “wise guys”, was from the Malay language of the slaves. The  group of Oorlam led by Jager Afrikaner, called themselves “Afrikaners.”

Freed slaves had limited options. They either remained in the colony as a landless laboring class, or they could leave to settle beyond the colonial boundary.

Abraham September, a freed slave, was granted a farm north of the Orange River in 1882. He realised the potential of leading water from the river by canal to irrigate his land. When local missionary C.H.W. Schroeder and magistrate J.H. Scott heard of this, they took steps to irrigate more extensively. The result was the Upington canal, “the largest work of its kind in South Africa at that time.”

The sustained high level of violence with which the Trekboers expanded their control over land and people beyond the Cape frontier seriously disrupted the social and political stability of indigenous communities.

In the nineteenth century the tradition of slave raiding, to satisfy labour demands, spread with the advancement of the Trekboers. Until the 1820s the victims were mainly Khoisan, but as these populations dispersed or vanished and Trekboers moved further inland, Tswana and other groups were raided as well. Frontier communities such as the Bastards, Griqua and Korana  escaped enslavement by raiding the Khoikhoi and Tswana, and exchanging captives in eastern Cape markets for guns and ammunition.

Frontier farmers preferred enslaving women and children, who were more easily controlled and could be kept indefinitely. Slave and Khoisan women had no freedom, were vulnerable to physical abuse, and remained bound by love for their children. Men could retain some autonomy herding their masters’ animals.

In 1775 the government legalized the keeping of  “apprentices”, the children of Khoikhoi slaves and servants on Boer farms, who were bound over in the same place until their 25th year. This system continued under the first British government. Apprenticeship, as oppressive as slavery, offered no legal protection to its victims.

Children captured during commando raids were given out as apprentice servants to the Boers of the commando. Child apprentices were brought up speaking Dutch and were made to serve their masters until they were in their twenties. Most stayed on as free workers on farms.  By the end of the eighteenth century few independent Khoisan were found within the colony’s borders.

In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias, a Portuguese seafarer, reached beyond Mossel Bay, naming it Angra dos Vakairos – Bay of Cowherds – with reference to Khoikhoi herders seen on shore. In 1503 Antonio de Saldanha landed at Table Bay, where Jan van Riebeeck would establish a permanent V O C re-victualling station just short of a century and a half later.

This initial settlement was destined to expand, and it was not long before there was conflict between the Dutch and local Khoikhoi over Free Burgher seizure of their land. By the 1690s a Trekboer class was emerging at the Cape, which would have enormous consequences for the region that is now the Northern Cape. And, as early as 1661 rumours were noted at the Cape concerning “Briqua” – people later known to be Tswana.

A volatile frontier zone evolved in the Cape interior, with different societies existing side by side, and characterised by people living a herding and trekking lifestyle, together with hunting, trading and raiding. Social identities became blurred and changed as people intermingled, competing over resources such as land or access to trade. By the early nineteenth century settlements such as Klaarwater (Griquatown/Griekwastad) became centres from which new lifestyles and new forms of political organisation, authority and legitimacy were established.