Among the Headless Hordes: Missionaries, Outlaws and Logics of Landscape in the Wittebergen Native Reserve, c. 1850–1871

Abstract

In 1850 the Cape Colony and the Wesleyan Missionary Society jointly established the Wittebergen Native Reserve with two aims: 1) through Christianity and peasant labour, to control the nomadism of the 'acephalous' peoples dispersed by early nineteenth-century frontier conflicts; and 2) to curb the power of Moshoeshoe I's Sotho nation by acting as a buffer between his people and potential ally nations to the south and west. While these missions broadly resonate with 'colonisation of consciousness' projects, the significance of Wittebergen lies in its asyet-unexplored position as a node in a landscape crafted by peripatetic raiding polities. This paper treats land as idiom and object to explore how missionaries, administrators, settlers, and Africans negotiated identities in the nineteenth-century. I discuss how European land idioms emphasising tenure, security, and sedentism engaged with those of African polities that emphasised relationships between chiefly authority, deliberate lawlessness, and aspects of the landscape. Employing new * A version of this paper was presented at the 'Missionaries, Materials, and the Making of the Modern World' conference at Cambridge, 15-17 September 2014. I thank the conference organisers, Chris Wingfield and Karen Jacobs, and the following colleagues for their comments on that presentation and drafts of this paper:

In praise of outlaws

“…The Cape Colony's eastward march manifested itself in part through the establishment of native settlement projects, such as Fort Peddie (Webster 1995), that paired cultural and spiritual improvement with the creation of rural labourers. The Wittebergen Native Reserve (established in 1850) offered African agropastoralists individual land ownership (free from traditional laws favouring chiefly authority) and proximity to a mission station, creating an agricultural labour force (King forthcoming). Squatters – unregistered and unsettled people within the reserve – threatened this project, not necessarily (or not only) because of the activities they practised but rather because of the activities they did not practise.…”

“…Squatters – unregistered and unsettled people within the reserve – threatened this project, not necessarily (or not only) because of the activities they practised but rather because of the activities they did not practise. ‘Squatters’ harkens back to ‘Hottentot’ vagrants (Crais 1992, 142), but at Wittebergen these were not berry-pickers or nomadic herders; they were people without arable plots, not paying the requisite hut taxes, and liable to participate in cattle raids (King forthcoming).…”

“…Contouring to the landscape's aridity, mobility had enabled these people to exploit a variety of ecological niches, and participate in cattle raids that escalated throughout the 18th and 19th centuries (King and Challis 2017). When people accustomed to practising these strategies opted not to settle in Wittebergen, they became squatters – by dint of continuing their accustomed movements through Wittebergen's landscape (King forthcoming). With this territorial expansion, the Khoe/San ‘vagrant’ of Cape legislation shifted to accommodate new constituents, who spoke different (southern Bantu) languages and had connections to recognized chiefdoms.…”

Cattle, raiding and disorder in Southern African history

“…Within the Reserve, authority was enacted through a system of ethnically segregated ‘villages’ administered through carefully restructured traditional leadership, legal restrictions on mobility, requirements for agricultural labour, and severe punishments for transgressing these and other laws. Responsibility for administering these punishments lay with the Reserve Superintendent, a position held for the majority of the time considered here by John Austen (King forthcoming).…”

“… 10 Treatments of Wittebergen are found in work by Colin Bundy (1988) and Helen Bradford (2000). More detailed descriptions of Moorosi's activities in the Reserve – including a fuller description of the episodes mentioned here – are found in my own writing (King forthcoming). …”