Cape frontier in the end of the 18th century

The land north and east of the mountain ranges of the Cape interior was for a long time, the land of khoi and san. The khoi herders moved their cattle and sheep in a semi-nomadic lifestyle and lived in small villages, kraals. The San hunter-gatherers had a profound knowledge of the environment, hunted the game and used plants for cooking and medicine.

In the 18th century the whole situation changed. The colonists at the Cape moved eastwards and northwards and the colony expanded further and further inland. The farms at the frontier were rather isolated and their main way of living was holding sheep and cattle breeding. The burghers held servants and used slave labour. Their herders moved the livestock up and down the mountains to find the best grazing land and pastures, a typical transhumance.
In the beginning the khoi herders took advantage of the trekkers but very soon the relations became more hostile. The khoi and the free burghers used the same land and the same water holes for their cattle. Through the burgher activities, the soil deteriorated and the game decreased. The khoi and the san got more and more marginalised and their traditional way of life was threatened. Still small groups of san, like the sonqua, tried to keep on living an independent life in the mountains. But many of the khoisan fought back in order to survive.

It was not easy to pass the mountain ranges at the frontier. In 1765 the farmer Jon Moster built a pass, called Mostert’s hoek’s pass, over the Witzenberg and Skurweberge mountains from Breede river valley to Warm Bokkevald. The pass was so steep and hard that the wagons had to be dismantled. Jon Moster had his farm, Wolwekloof, on the southern side of the mountains. Maybe once or twice a year the burghers at Warm Bokkeveld travelled through the pass to Stellenbosch to buy the utensils, clothes and foodstuff they needed, to baptize their children and go to church.

In the 18th century the mountains at Bokkeveld and Roggeveld were also attractive as hiding places for runaways and outlaws. Runaway slaves, servants, deserted soldiers and seamen, and from the 1770s also khoi and san, formed droster gangs with men, women and children. These people felt a common consciousness of oppression and tried to survive in the mountains, avoiding discovery, by stealing cattle, tools, food and clothes from the farmers.

In order to defend their farms, the burghers set up military commandos to track and kill the drosters. “I shall come with a commando of Bokkeveld people, if I get permission from the Landdrost, and shot dead all of the kraal-dwelling Hottentots and bastaards because they only exist by stealing,” Pieter van Heerden pronounced in April 1772. The heaviest fighting at the frontier was in the period 1770-1800. As a consequence of the resistance a General Commando was set up in 1774 in order to crush all enemies. It was a fight of life and death. Now the final eradication of the khoi and the san cultures took place. After the turn of the century 1800 there was nothing left of their traditional way of living and most of their people had been killed.