Abstract
In the first 15 years of Griqua Philippolis, Adam Kok II, and the most important of his successors, Adam Kok III, constructed a system of private ownership in land. This was a rather novel land regime at the time for all polities in this part of sub-Saharan Africa, and for it to persevere in the face of increasing white interest in the region, the Griqua state — or ‘captaincy’ — needed to be extensive, bureaucratic, and respected: resilient in the face of serious challenge, coherent to both the Cape Colony administration and Boer communities.1 The organisation of this captaincy was key to its success. The Captain sat at the head of his volksraad, a nominated council of varying size and influence. The raad would come to decisions collectively, but the Captain always retained a right of veto. Together, the Captain and raad codified laws and pencilled out their own land titles. The enforcement of these laws was mostly left up to other executive roles, including the veldkornets, who performed a similar magisterial and policing role as the Boer officials of the same title did, and the kommandants, who also acted as police but were mostly in charge of organising military campaigns and commandos.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The term ‘captaincy’ appears to have been coined by Robert Ross, ‘Griqua Government’, African Studies 33, 4 (1974), pp. 25–42.
Ross, ‘Griqua Government’, pp. 28, 32–3; Robert Ross, Adam Kok’s Griquas: A Study in the Development of Stratification in South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 34–9.
Courtesy of the fat-tailed Cape sheep, Griqua farmers were already ‘rising to opulence’ in the 1810s, and by the 1820s they fostered a healthy knowledge of the workings of the colonial market. See John Philip, Researches in South Africa: Illustrating the Civil, Moral, and Religious Condition of the Native Tribes […] (London: James Duncan, 1828), vol. 2, p. 67;
F. S. Orpen, Reminiscences of Life in South Africa from 1846 to the Present Day (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1964 [1908]), p. 116.
See also Martin Legassick, The Politics of a South African Frontier: The Griqua, the Sotho-Tswana and the Missionaries, 1780–1840 (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2010 [1969]), p. 87.
Andrew Smith was witness to this process at the end of 1835, and left a fascinating description in Percival R. Kirby (ed.), The Diary o f Dr. Andrew Smith, Director of the Expedition for Exploring Central Africa, 1834–1836 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1939–40), vol. 2, pp. 180–2.
CWMA, London Missionary Society Incoming Correspondence (South Africa), 18B/4/a, John Philip to George Napier (25 August 1842), Appendix B: ‘The Tenure by which the Griqua hold the Lands of Philippolis’. See also Karel Schoeman, The Griqua Captaincy of Philippolis, 1826–1861 (Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2002), pp. 64–71.
CWMA Incoming Letters (LMS 18/1/D), reproduced in GR, p. 45. Adam Kok III to John Philip (31 May 1842). Philip in these years confided in a personal note that ‘If their property and land are not secured to the Griquas, and the protection of colonial laws, before ten years there will not be a single Griqua in the country.’ Macmillan, the only historian to have accessed the Philip Papers before their destruction at the University of the Witwatersrand by fire, rightly considered this an important prophecy of what would follow. W. M. Macmillan, Bantu, Boer, and Briton: The Making of the South African Native Problem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 226.
Andries Stockenström, The Autobiography of the Late Sir Andries Stockenström, Sometime Lieutenant-Governor of the Eastern Province of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1964 [1887]), vol. 1, pp. 213–4, 224–6. See also CA, Government House (GH) 8/14. Andries Stockenström to Colonel Hare (14 May 1845).
An outdated study of the Great Trek, which is still perhaps the best in English, is Eric A. Walker, The Great Trek (London: Black, 1934).
I am in agreement with Schoeman that this Danster is not to be confused with Xhosa leader Danster, who was marauding about these haunts since the end of the eighteenth century. This is a matter that other researchers, it is hoped, will get to the bottom of. GR, p. 232, fn. 2; for Xhosa Danster’s life on the middle Orange in impeccably detailed context, see Nigel Penn, The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist & Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the Eighteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), pp. 210–36.
Grahamstown Journal, 26 January 1843; See Grahamstown Journal, 16 February 1843. These clipping are reproduced in Augustus F. Lindley, Adamantia: The Truth about the South African Diamond Fields (London: W. H. & L. Collingridge, 1873), pp. 24–5. Lindley’s collection, a manifesto of documents supporting the right of the Free State to diamond-rich Griqualand, is a valuable resource, though the author is not without his settler preconceptions, and he bounces around different regions to the effect of occasionally confusing the reader.
See, for starters, John Galbraith, Reluctant Empire: British Policy on the South African Frontier, 1834–54 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963);
Timothy Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996).
Government Gazette, no. 2204 (24 February 1848). Original date of treaty was 24 January 1848. Also reproduced in GR, pp. 106–7. As Rev. William Thompson, sympathetic observer, put it: ‘in that division of their country, termed the alienable territory, comprising about 300 farms, were some which had been leased for 40 years, and others, not yet leased or which, if leased at all, were for much shorter periods, viz., for 20, 15, 10, and 5 years respectively. Sir H. Smith, by his mere fiat, and in open violation of the faith of treaties and of the rights of private property, converted all leases of 40 years’ duration into freeholds, and then, still further to favour the Boers, he extended all leases to 40 years; and Captain Adam Kok was intimidated to sign a fresh treaty, which was to ratify this act of injustice’. William Thompson, A Word on Behalf of the Down-trodden in South Africa (Cape Town: Saul Solomon & Co., 1854), p. 6.
See, for instance, J. J. Freeman, A Tour of South Africa, with Notices of Natal, Mauritius, Madagascar, Ceylon, Egypt, and Palestine (London: John Snow, 1851), pp. 242–57; Thompson, Word on Behalf of the Down-trodden, pp. 3–4.
See also William Thompson, The Griquas, as ‘Her Majesty’s Special Commissioner for the Settlement of the Affairs of the Orange River Sovereignty’ Found Them, and As He Left Them: A Chapter for the History of Our Dealings with Weak Tribes (with appendix) (Cape Town: Saul Solomon & Co., 1854), p. 6.
Claudia Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2011).
See also Paul G. McHugh, The Maori Magna Carta: New Zealand Law and the Treaty of Waitangi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
This was an administration ill-equipped to liaise between the Cape and the Griqua, let alone mediate between a formidable community of republican Boere, Moshweshwe’s BaSotho state and various other unaffiliated bands in the region. For this, see John Franklin Midgley, ‘The Orange River Sovereignty (1848–1854)’, Argiefjaarboek vir Suid-Afrikaanse Geskiedenis 2 (1949).
The resident was largely preoccupied with pacifying the threats posed by the factious BaSotho community of the Orange River Sovereignty. Moshweshwe was the main — but not the only — character in this cast. For this, see Peter Sanders, Moshoeshoe: Chief of the Sotho (London: Heinemann, 1975), pp. 89–112, 147–202.
Ross, Adam Kok’s Griquas, p. 81. See also David Arnot and Francis H. S. Orpen, The Land Question of Griqualand West: An Inquiry into the Various Claims to Land in that Territory; Together with a Brief History of the Griqua Nation (Cape Town: Saul Solomon & Co., 1875), pp. 330–3.
For this chain of events, see Ross, Adam Kok’s Griquas, pp. 94–103; H. J. van Aswegen, ‘Die Verhouding Tussen Blank en Nie-Blank in die Oranje-Vrystaat, 1845–1902’, Argieflaarboek vir Suicl-Afrikaanse Geskiedenis 34, 1 (1977), pp. 189–222. See also Arnot and Orpen, Land Question of Griqualand West, pp. 190, 276, 280.
For a study of this kind of discourse as applied to the Eastern Cape, see Clifton C. Crais, ‘The Vacant Land: The Mythology of British Expansion in the Eastern Cape, South Africa’, Journal of Social History 25, 2 (1991), pp. 255–75.
For this, consult this book’s Afterword. See also Mike Besten, ‘“We Are the Original Inhabitants of this Land”: Khoe-San Identity in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, in Mohamed Adhikari (ed.), Burdened by Race: Coloured Identities in Southern Africa (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2009), 134–55;
Edward Cavanagh, The Griqua Past and the Limits of South African History (Oxford: Peter Lang Publishers, 2011).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Edward Cavanagh
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cavanagh, E. (2013). The Griqua Land Regime and Its Challenges. In: Settler Colonialism and Land Rights in South Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305770_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305770_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45490-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-30577-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Economics & Finance CollectionEconomics and Finance (R0)