African Farmers and Medicinal Plant Experts

Abstract

This chapter reflects the difficulty of obtaining information on African experts and their knowledge production. The discussion focuses on photographs/illustrations, carefully assessing their unwieldy dimensions which convey more than their producer could control. Such sources offer insights into how tacit African knowledge (agriculture, nutrition, medicine) was crucial for the survival of settlers/colonisers. The Bowker/Barber family at first relied on their Mfengu, Xhosa and Khoekhoe neighbours, imitating their agricultural and husbandry practices. Moreover, settler families learned about the nutritional, medicinal and veterinarian potentials of plants and were heavily dependent on African wagon drivers. Through the course of time, such aspects of emulation and collaboration would give way to much more rigid divisions. Insights are also provided into how knowledge was shared or co-produced and the limitations involved

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Co-operation in Farming the Land

Once the Bowker family from South Newton, Wiltshire, in southern England arrived on the allotted 1500 acres of land in 1820, they started copying their Xhosa, Khoekhoe and Mfengu neighbours who had cultivated the land and had been experienced pastoralists for centuries. They first built a wattle-and-daub house, using a technique that had been widely spread in Africa for at least six thousand years. Long grass was taken for the thatched roof as was done by ‘everyone both black and white’.¹ From the mid-1820s to the mid-1830s, the white settlers and the amaXhosa, amaMfengu and Khoesan in the area were in close contact and shared their knowledge. Settlers’ attitude towards Africans is highly ambiguous at the time, as articles in the Graham’s Town Journal show. In this period, for instance, the Bowker children attended Sunday School meetings together with ‘the native children who were residing in the neighbourhood beneath the shade of a large thorn tree’. They described their African school colleagues as ‘willing scholars’ who progressed and enjoyed their regular mutual exchange with them.² The farm school that Miles Bowker established in 1834 probably also co-educated black and white boys and girls, as the majority of schools in the area had been established by missionaries and co-education was common practice at the time. Co-education is but one example of the close ties and cross-cultural exchange in that early period.

In the late 1830s, the Bowkers did the farm work themselves. In 1809 the Caledon Code, or Hottentot Code, was passed which stipulated that every Khoekhoe should have a fixed abode and be in a labour contract, of no longer than a year, that had been validated by a magistrate. They also had to carry a pass if they wished to move around and could be shot when suspected of not complying with this ruling. Their children were bound by an apprenticeship law a year or two later. These laws were an attempt to compensate the colonists for their loss of labour due to the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the British Empire in 1807. The Caledon Code did, however, give the Khoekhoe some legal protection against abuse by their masters. In 1828 Ordinance 50 was passed, which rescinded the Caledon Code. Ordinance 50 gave the Khoekhoe the same rights as any free people: they, for instance, did not have to carry a pass and were free to seek labour in a free market. In 1834 slavery was abolished but there was a four year Apprenticeship Period for slaves until 1838. The Bowkers, thus, sowed seed-wheat and barley that they had received from the British government, but wheat did not grow in this soil unknown to them, which left the settlers in great distress for want of bread. Mealies (maize or Indian corn) grown in Africa since the sixteenth century³ had been successfully cultivated in South Africa and locally had been a staple food for a long time. It soon replaced the Bowkers’ wheat.⁴ In the hope of introducing merino sheep breeding to the Cape, Miles Bowker imported various breeds from Europe. He soon learned that it was very difficult to rear them at the coast on the Zuurveld and that many already died on their way from Europe to the Cape. Observing his Xhosa, Khoesan and Mfengu neighbours, he recognised that they had cattle but did not value sheep.⁵ He thus began experimenting with cattle, cotton, crops and fruit. He realised that he had to abandon mixed agriculture, and focused on oats and cattle on his farm Tharfield instead.⁶ Three of his sons established sheep farms inland on Willowfountain and Thorn Kloof, both near Carlisle Bridge on the Fish River, and at Elandskop on the Koonap, as the wool industry was flourishing.⁷

With the shift in farming came the need for more staff. The number of Africans working on the Bowkers’ farms fluctuated considerably over the years. Before the Seventh Cape-Xhosa War (1846–1847), the Bowkers, according to their descendants, had 8000 sheep, 900 cattle and 100 horses managed by 18 white men and 25 Xhosa and Mfengu herders and guards who worked day and night.⁸ Later, according to one of Barber’s brothers, each Bowker farm generally employed an average of 15 Xhosa and Mfengu workers who had their own goats and cattle depending on their terms of contract and length of service.⁹ Over the years, the number might have risen again. By the end of 1857, a total of 29,142 Xhosa were registered for service in the colony.¹⁰

The Bowker brothers, Mary Barber and her husband employed numerous herders whom they called ‘herd-boys’ and with whom they communicated in Afrikaans.¹¹ Herders were grown men; the infantilising analogy involves a fundamental denial of equality and was a component of racist, sexist and classist ideologies.¹²

The Xhosa and Mfengu co-workers remain unknown, except a two-year-old Xhosa boy whom Barber’s brother Thomas Holden Bowker heard crying in an ant-bear’s hole with a stone put over the entrance. The child was fed, tied on Holden’s back ‘in the Kaffir manner’ and given to a Xhosa woman on Tharfield who had a small child of her own and was asked to feed both of them. She was promised a cow if he survived. He did survive, was named ‘Resurrection Jack’ and became ‘a house boy’ who lived with the family for many years.¹³ In this feel-good story that the Bowkers have told each other over generations, they stressed the difference between their charity and Africans’ cruelty. The story allowed them to emphasise their cordiality while silencing how many Xhosa people they killed or injured. As close to the Bowker family as Resurrection Jack was a Sothocattle herder called Jafta.¹⁴ There also seem to have been Tswana refugees from the valley of the Caledon River on Miles Bowker’s farm. A ‘boy’ who had taken up English, for instance, is said to have provided James Henry Bowker with information on Tswana life and customs.¹⁵

Mary Elizabeth and her husband Frederick William Barber also set limits on how they related to black people, but they too were open to learn from them. In the winter of 1862, the farmers used burnt bones that were ground by Xhosa women when planting oats, which made the oats they later harvested soft and a much better crop than the Barbers had expected.¹⁶ What was unusual in the eastern as compared to the western part of the Cape Colony was that domestic and agricultural wage labourers were predominantly female.¹⁷ Wages, particularly for Xhosa women, were extremely low at that time. In 1828, a woman employed in Albany received a monthly salary of 1s 3d, plus five goats after completion of her contract.¹⁸ As board and lodging was included, settlers found the low price for domestic service, an ‘unskilled’ occupation, justified. Presumably, the Xhosa women Barber mentioned were not the only women employed on their farms, but also women she encountered on her journeys and excursions to observe flora and fauna.

These few glimpses into farm life show that the Bowkers and Barbers benefited from and exploited their African neighbours and that African employees and fleeting acquaintances were willing to share (some of) their farming knowledge with them in English, Afrikaans or the isiXhosa that the Bowkers were in command of. Besides farming, Africans taught the Bowkers how to fish, how to find honey and to rely on local nutritional plants to satisfy their hunger.

Living with Plants

Africans often saved European travellers’ and settlers’ lives with their knowledge of plants.¹⁹ For instance, the Czech medical practitioner, explorer and naturalist Emil Holub (1847–1902) disclosed that he only survived thanks to a Mosarwa’s knowledge of a water-rich berry that helped him when he had been dehydrated, exhausted, confused and disoriented, even unconscious at times, which would have led to certain death. The illustration accompanying his description is revealing (Fig. 2.1).

Fig. 2.1

Mosarwa saves Holub, in: Holub, Seven Years in South Africa, Vol. 1, 360–361

The illustration drawn by J. Vanione shows how an unspecified Mosarwa was in command of the situation while Holub was clearly not, as signalled by his guns, hat and other equipment lying randomly around as well as by his passive posture. All he could do in this hopeless situation was trust and take whatever he was given. As no name was recorded, it can be assumed that the two could not communicate, but nevertheless the Mosarwa immediately assessed the situation and did what he could to help Holub regain strength. Holub’s anecdote is full of colonial tropes. The European adventurer tells us the story of his survival and in the entire account constructs himself as the hero. His saviour, on the other hand, remains nameless in the background. Yet it can be read as an example of how such a journey would not have been possible without African experts who ensured European survival.

In many situations, white settlers and explorers only survived because of Africans’ knowledge of medicinal plants. One example is the accident of Barber’s son Henry Mitford Barber (1850–1920), known as Hal. He and his older brother Frederick Hugh (1847–1919) went on a hunting trip to Matabeleland in 1877 to get away from the diamond fields. On 16 June, he nearly died after a buffalo bull struck a horn through his left thigh.²⁰ Xhosa associates brought a calabash of water and revived him and went back to their camp to get a bottle of brandy to stop the pain. They were thanked with ‘a blanket’ for acting as fast as they could. The incentives such as money and goods—more than loyalty—were most likely the reason for keeping him alive. The wound was sewed with needle and cotton, and he was nursed, ‘poulticing and bathing his wounds with water and a concoction of herbs brought by the local natives’.²¹ The ingredients of the medicine the amaNdebele prepared were unfortunately of secondary interest to the newcomers; what mattered to them was that it helped Hal to recover.²²

The power dynamics among neighbours and the gendered manner in which Barber accumulated information is also striking. Barber was interested in vegetables she could cook. The ‘Matabele tribes, […] the Zulus and the Swazies’ cultivated a popular vegetable marrow. As a calabash plant, it produced gourds, grew to the size of an orange and was eaten green before it became hard. At the gold fields, this vegetable ‘the best of all vegetable marrows’ was ‘a great favourite’ and usually fetched a high price in the Johannesburg market. Even though the revenues probably did not reach the African cultivators, it was considered ‘the best of all vegetable marrows’. Marrows were boiled whole, served with spices and eaten entirely including the seeds.²³ Barber was also told that the fungala seed was a very tasty fruit and that from the Dovyalis rhamnoides berries one could cook a delicious preserve.²⁴ At times she learned about plants not directly from Africans but from Afrikaner acquaintances who had settled decades ago and accumulated crucial nutritional information from the Khoekhoen, amaMfengu and amaXhosa living in the area. ‘Dutch inhabitants’ presumably learned about a species of Boerhaavia from Africans. Afrikaners valued it for its nutritious properties, called it ‘veld batatas’ for its resemblance to potatoes and cultivated it.²⁵Brachystelma filiformis grew in the Cradock district and was much esteemed as a preserve called ‘Kalkonjes’.²⁶ Whether the Afrikaners had heard how to prepare this plant from Africans is unclear; they might also have learned about its nutritional properties and developed a way to prepare it by themselves. Barber mostly referred to Afrikaans names of edible plants and much more often shared meals with Afrikaner than Xhosa or Mfengu farmers. Given that the Bowkers were introduced to their new surroundings by their Afrikaner neighbours and that two of Barber’s brothers William Monkhouse Bowker (1803–1876) and Miles Brabbin Bowker (1805–1864) were married to two Afrikaner sisters Hester Susannah Oosthuisen (1816–1911) in 1827 and Barbara Petronella Oosthuisen (1809–1895) in 1836, there must have been constant exchange and close ties.

Identifying the right nutrition was also important for birds, sheep, cattle and goats. Barber found Lessertia flexuosa at the Tarka River, one of the sources of the Great Fish River rising in the Winterberg and flowing through the district of Cradock. Lessertia flexuosa was eaten by sheep and goats and was so beautiful that Barber suggested Harvey introduce it in Britain as a garden plant.²⁷ Sheep and goats also voraciously ate Indigofera.²⁸ Barber lamented that sheep and goats rapidly altered local flora and pasturelands. She had observed aloes becoming rarer and rarer within the Colony.²⁹Cattle, sheep and goats fed greedily on stapelias, and so did ostriches when they spotted one, taking the entire plant with them.³⁰ From the amaXhosa, Barber learned about plants that could be used to produce dye.³¹ She became familiar with the leaves of a plant that were used instead of soap and ‘produce a grand lather’.³² Vernacular names were not of interest to her; she contented herself simply with learning the plants’ usage. Classification was left to botanists in Cape Town and overseas whose interest for plants was triggered in hope of financial benefit in cases of large-scale import of certain species. She rarely stated where she gained her information from, presumably this occurred on the farms and on her ox-wagon journeys and horse-riding excursions. In these spaces, Africans had much more agency than hitherto seen. There, they decided which knowledge they wanted to share with her.

Veterinary Plant Knowledge

Xhosa, Mfengu and Sotho farmers’ veterinary plant knowledge was crucial, and the Bowkers took it into consideration and adapted it into their own veterinary and agricultural knowhow. All of William Monkhouse Bowker’s cattle went blind from ophthalmia when he moved to the Fish River in late 1849, during a drought. Two hundred out of 1500 sheep and the majority of goats also got ophthalmia and went blind.³³ In August 1848, many of his sheep became weak and dragged their hind legs behind themselves. In 1854, Bertram Bowker lost three-quarters of the previous year’s lambs from taenia (tapeworm), and his sheep continued to suffer for twelve years. A Xhosa farmer told him to use sorrel root (Oxalis smithii) that grew abundantly in the Zuurveld. Xhosa farmers also used the bark of the male fern (Leonotis leonurus) to kill a large quantity of worms. Bowker experimented with these Xhosa remedies and eventually cured his sheep.

After the Eighth Cape-Xhosa War (1851–1853), Bertram Bowker began having difficulties with his sheep again. They were shorn and dipped twice a year. He sold his farm Oakwell and bought two others nearer to King William’s Town. Initially, the sheep did well on the new farms, but then they got sick again, the cause? A mystery.³⁴ It could well have been bovine pleura pneumonia, popularly known as lung sickness, which spread in the 1850s from cattle imported from Holland and moving from Mossel Bay to the northeast (1853), reaching either side of the Kei in 1855.³⁵ Almost all the cattle were affected and more than 80% of cattle, sheep and goats died in some chiefdoms.³⁶ Presumably, Bowker used several medicinal plants to try healing his sheep.

We have seen that Africans’ knowledge about living in and with the environment over generations informed settler living and farming practices. In the following section, I focus on how knowledge was shared on journeys.

Wagon Drivers’ Knowledge Creation

While travelling, African wagon drivers were largely responsible for the success of an expedition. Surprisingly little is known about the experience of riding and drivers’ everyday experiences. They were looking after the oxen and travellers, explored the routes and were experts on how to handle the challenges the landscapes they travelled through brought with them. They knew how to convince oxen to continue walking and managed to get them out of rivers and soft ground, while European travellers sat helplessly passive in the wagon.³⁷ Praising one’s driver was a frequent trope in expedition journals. Europeans often stressed how much they admired how, for instance, the Khoekhoen could ride oxen and how they managed to make them walk, trot or gallop where and how they wanted them to.³⁸ They were also impressed how quickly they knew all the oxen by name and openly admitted that they would not have been competent to control the oxen and much appreciated their skills and expertise. Those ‘herders’ who had travelled before knew much about the flora and fauna the travel parties encountered and the practicalities of travelling, and shared their valuable insights with their employers.³⁹ Besides looking after the oxen, wagon drivers organised the wood supply when needed, hunted animals to dry meat for stock and collected stapelias or other fleshy plants in the Karoo to provide the travel party with liquid, when water was scarce.⁴⁰

The scope and limits of Barber’s wagon drivers’ knowledge creation are explored in detail here. On her journeys, African wagon drivers and cooks who allowed her to devote all her time to science always accompanied Barber. In her travel journal about her journey from Kimberley to Durban via Cape Town, she mentioned the ‘Matabele boy’ Kamel and Klaas from Cape Town—nothing is known about his origins—with whom she probably communicated in a mixture of Afrikaans, English and isiXhosa.⁴¹ The names suggest they could also have been coloured, but this is unlikely. Julia Wells has shown that Xhosa prisoners on Robben Island at the time were referred to ‘by meaningless common colonial names such as Jacob, Jan and Klaas’.⁴² Not much is known about how his day was spent and the extent of Barber’s and his interaction. He seems to have been responsible for ensuring the travellers had a smooth journey. His tasks combined those of a travel guide, driver, veterinarian, oxen trainer and tamer, cook as well as waiter. Klaas was harshly criticised for being unreliable and dumb, a good-for-nothing. He lost a coffee kettle and the lid of a pot, broke their whip stick, and one might wonder why she hired him or kept him on.⁴³ She repeatedly portrayed him as ‘rather good-looking’. Yet her apparent sympathy to him did not make the relationship last (Fig. 2.2).⁴⁴

Fig. 2.2

Barber’s pencil sketch of Klaas. Initial of Chapter 4 for ‘K’, MS 10560. (© Cory Library. All rights reserved)

From Barber’s description, Klaas remains as unknown and unfathomable as in this pencil sketch. She never mentioned individual characteristics and positive traits. Presumably recompensing him for his services, Barber took it for granted when he fulfilled his tasks to her fullest satisfaction. Yet, Klaas was unhappy and did not like the work that was expected of him, which Barber fully admits. Once he told the travel party that he would leave them if he was not treated better, which Barber found impertinent.⁴⁵ Soon afterwards, she described him looking sulky and out of temper. On another occasion, she disclosed that some of her party had several times ‘given him orders to go “where good manners won’t let me tell”: sometimes they have threatened to kick him’, an interesting gender and racialised description.⁴⁶ In this passage, Barber seems to understand Klaas and to have tried to mediate between him and the travel group. Probably, they had a short-term contract that both of them wanted to maintain. They had been travelling together for a few weeks before the situation escalated. According to Barber, one day Klaas was in a bad temper and treated one of the hind oxen violently; the travel party could not stand this and one of them ‘kicked him soundly’, which Barber accepted and legitimised. For Klaas, this was the last straw; he was now convinced that it was not ‘a good thing for him’ to be with them and left the travellers for good.⁴⁷ These notes show that he was both their driver and cook and probably responsible for much more on their journey. Barber was anxious and aggressive at the time, potentially due to the strained relationship with her husband, as detailed in Chap. 8. She never interpreted Klaas’ losing a kettle and breaking the whipping stick as acts of resistance, but they probably were, since Klaas had been at least as unhappy with the travel group as they with him.

In Victoria West, Barber employed Cobus, who was everything Klaas was not. He treated the cattle well, worked hard, was balanced and ‘a true South African wagon driver’, humorous, experienced on the road, friendly with everyone and diligent.⁴⁸ Cobus seemed an obedient friend and convenient servant who was well adapted to settler society, ‘a reformed, recognizable “Other”’ with ‘a difference that is almost the same, but not quite’,⁴⁹ to use Homi Bhabha’s words. Describing him as a ‘true South African’, Barber stressed the ‘ambivalence’ between herself and him. The Africans mimicked European behaviour and thereby could unintentionally become subversive, as Klaas did. In these cases, ‘mimicry’ became ‘one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge’.⁵⁰

Cobus highlighted the difference between how Africans and Europeans treated the oxen. Barber had written the poem ‘The Cry of the Ox’ in Kimberley in 1876 from the oxen’s point of view after tragically losing an ox when it had been four days without water.⁵¹ In her travel journal, she addressed the oxen directly and argued that, just as there were Aborigines’ Protection Societies to protect the health and well-being of indigenous people under colonial rule, there should also be a limit for wagon loads that would prevent unscrupulous, greedy carriers from overloading their vehicles. Her comment that oxen were fattened, slaughtered and remorselessly eaten indicates that she referred to white settlers’ treatment of oxen, as they were not part of Africans’ regular diet. The amaXhosa, for instance, slaughtered cattle for ceremonial occasions.⁵² Xhosa poetry of the period provides evidence: oxen were their favourite subjects, as they were ‘their most valuable possessions’, which they praised in songs and as mediators between the living and the dead ancestors. Hence, the oxen were not tormented.⁵³ Barber might have known about societies and legislation to prevent cruelty to animals in other parts of the British Empire, but her immediate environment was more influential. She did not refer to the English Act to Prevent the Cruel and Improper Treatment of Cattle (1822) under which anyone who did ‘beat, abuse, or ill-treat any horse, mare, gelding, mule, ass, ox, cow, heifer, steer, sheep or other cattle’ was punished by fines up to five pounds or two months imprisonment, legislation that became the Cruelty to Animals Act (1835), amended in 1849 and 1876. Neither did she mention the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (England 1824, Victoria 1871, Tasmania 1872, etc.) or the Cape of Good Hope Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (1872).⁵⁴ Barber learned from Cobus that one could be a friend to people and oxen, always treating them kindly, which differed greatly from common practice among the settlers.⁵⁵ She never mentioned the Xhosa cattle killing movement of 1856–1857 when, after Nongqawuse’s prophecy, Xhosa pastoralists killed their cattle in the wake of a cattle lung sickness epidemic.⁵⁶ The analysis of Barber’s examples relied on her written sources such as poetry and her travel journal as well as an illustration. Let us now turn to contemporary photographs.

Her husband’s cousin the Grahamstown-surgeon William Guybon Atherstone’s private photographs of Xhosa and Mfengu co-operators are interesting as they differ much from Barber’s account and illustrations. Atherstone was at the meeting of the Academie des Beaux Artes in Paris where Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre had announced photography. He brought detailed information to Albany. Early photographs were static studio portraits of elegantly dressed settlers taken with the first cameras in the area in the early 1840s and with an exposure of about fifteen minutes in a good light.⁵⁷ Atherstone had studied medicine in Ireland, England and continental Europe.⁵⁸ In 1839, he became his father’s practice partner and succeeded him as district surgeon of Albany from 1855 to 1879. This is one of his photographs with an African co-worker—a photographer, wagon driver or carrier (Fig. 2.3).

Fig. 2.3

An elegantly dressed African next to a horse drawn carriage, a portable dark room tent and presumably William Guybon Atherstone’s wife in the Howieson’s Poort Valley near Grahamstown in 1864. (© Van der Riet Collection, HM, Accession Number: AM3816. History Museum, Albany Museum Complex. All rights reserved)

He is elegantly dressed and posing for the camera. What is striking is his unwavering, piercing gaze. According to Roland Barthes, every image has a ‘punctum’, the point ‘that pierces, that holds the attention’.⁵⁹ The punctum in this image lies in this man. He returns the camera’s gaze, the photographer’s gaze, the gaze of the viewer back then and now, with something in his expression: Self-Confidence? Pride? Vanity? Mockery? Challenge? Reproach? A feeling of supremacy, knowing how dependent his photographer is on him?⁶⁰ As such he is a counter-example of the half-naked associates in Holub’s illustrations. From travel experts, let us now concentrate on medicinal plant experts and healers, how they shared their knowledge or kept it private.

Diviners’ and Herbalists’ Co-operation and Resistance

The African experts on nutritional, agricultural and veterinary plants helped European and settler travellers to survive, as we have seen, and simultaneously advanced botany and medicine. To live healthily, people had to know medicinal plants and how to use them. Africans knew, collected, used and treasured plants long before the first Europeans arrived at the Cape. The importance of plants in Khoesan life and their knowledge and use of medicinal and nutritional plants—such as stapelia—over centuries was recorded in rock art paintings, for example, although plants featured far less than animals, humans and geometrical patterns.⁶¹

Afrikaners in the nineteenth century are said to have continued using the preindustrial ideas of European medicine that they had brought to the Cape, and their contact with the Khoekhoen presumably entailed shared healing practices. They are said to have been isolated from Western medicine, to have had very few doctors and dated medical knowhow.⁶² It is not clear how far the Afrikaners exchanged medical knowledge with the amaXhosa.⁶³ It has been argued that they ‘borrowed and adapted plant remedies from African people’ to a greater extent than English speakers.⁶⁴ In what follows, I focus primarily on the English-speaking community in the district of Albany and the settlers’ exchanges with Africans.⁶⁵

By the 1840s, when Barber became interested in medicinal plants, there were hardly any publications she could draw her knowledge from. Settlers and European travellers had overlooked the use of native plants in the Cape Colony, assuming that if they were ‘not worth exporting’ they were ‘of small value’.⁶⁶ Western visitors seemingly used the remedies for themselves but did surprisingly little ‘towards working out the pharmacography and precise mode of action’.⁶⁷

Barber was in contact with amaXhosa and amaMfengu—but not ‘with the other numerous races’, as she wrote in 1867, with whom she had ‘had no intercourse and kn[e]w nothing of their manners and customs’.⁶⁸ This led the anthropologist Robert Shanafelt to conclude that Barber knew some Xhosa men and women, but ‘only from a reserved distance’.⁶⁹ This changed with her journey to see the New Rush of miners in Griqualand West in 1870 and the decade she spent at the diamond fields that came to be known as Kimberley.

Leaving Kimberley and travelling to Durban via Cape Town in 1878,⁷⁰ she was deeply fascinated with Khoesan knowledge of the poisonous plants used in their very effective arrowheads. The arrowheads were carefully stored away for war or shooting large game, not for fish or birds. When shot, the shaft fell off and a poisonous piece of wood was left in the victim’s body to do its ‘deadly work’ within an hour or two, while the Khoesan watched keenly from a distance. ‘The ingredients of this poison are not known to Europeans’ and ‘natives’ spoke of various species of plants that they used. One frequently mentioned was the ‘Bushman Poison Plant’ (Toxicophloea) common at the coast. Barber noted that a traveller and sportsman called Mr. Jameson told her that in the interior near the Zambezi River, a species of grub or caterpillar was used as one of the ingredients. Barber much admired plant knowledge as a weapon.⁷¹ The examples she gave suggest that she learned more from hearsay about African plant knowledge than from actual personal contact with Africans.

Medicinal plants also cured minor illnesses. The seeds of the baobab tree were as hard as a calabash shell, and the grey pulp around them when dried tasted like tartar emetic, a poisonous chemical called potassium antimony tartrate, used to make people vomit.⁷² The Afrikaners and Africans of the Moregua country used the pulp to treat fever just as British settler doctors used tartar emetic.⁷³Lippia scaberima was a valuable medicine for fever used by Free State people between the Vaal River near Rustenburg, and some species of Helichrysum could heal sores and inflamed spots.⁷⁴ African farm workers presumably showed Barber how to treat fever, dysentery, diarrhoea, colds and minor illnesses with plants in the vicinity. She had a peach orchard and probably knew how to use the peach leaves as a sedative.⁷⁵Bulbine latifolia and Salix capensis were widely used for rheumatism and rheumatic fever, and as she herself suffered from rheumatism, presumably she used them as well. Her grandson used her rheumatism as an excuse for the Barbers’ leaving, letting the farm Lammermoor on the Zwart Kei River near Queenstown silencing their financial difficulties, mentioning her attempts to get better by going near the sea or even on boat trips for a while.⁷⁶ Looking after her three children, husband, parents and siblings, she drew richly on this stock of advice that she did not circulate in publications but kept for her personal needs and shared with her relatives. This was tacit knowledge used in everyday practice and held strictly separate from her scientific studies of plants.

Dutch settlers and later English contemporary literature spread other information on Xhosa and Mfengu medicinal plant use. ‘The natives’ and Afrikaners used large Monsonia to treat dysentery, and it was known to cure very bad cases. The whole plant was used, with its root and branches.⁷⁷ It remains unknown who had given Barber this information. She might have read the German physician and botanist Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Pappe (1803–1862) who mentioned that the root and herb of the ‘Keita’ of the Khoekhoen are ‘very astringent, and used with great success in dysentery’ or learned it from her sisters-in-law or acquaintances.⁷⁸ Pappe had first published A List of South African Indigenous Plants Used as Remedies by the Colonists of the Cape of Good Hope in 1847 which was the basis of his well-received Florae capensis medicae prodromus published in Cape Town in 1857, generally held to be the ‘first significant contribution to the study of indigenous medicinal plants’.⁷⁹ It informs about the medicinal value of 150 plants, and he gained a prize at the Great London Exhibition of 1851. Pappe acknowledged Afrikaners in the hinterland for their collaboration and not ‘native doctors’, ‘an observation largely refuted in nineteenth-century pharmacology’.⁸⁰ The case of Monsonia seems to have been well-known among interested settlers. The Khoekhoen are said to have called this Monsonia ovata ‘Geita or Nceta’, the amaXhosa ‘i-Gqita’ and to have used this geranium to cure ‘dysentery and chronic diarrhoea’, to have used it as a snakebite remedy, a sedative, to keep down inflammation as well as a remedy for anthrax (milt-ziek blood poisoning).⁸¹ At the same time as knowledge for everyday usage of medicinal plants for households spread, medicinal science and botanical medicine established a large body of knowledge and professionalised.

Settlers, slaves and Khoesan had shared medical knowledge for a long time, but for most of the nineteenth century, ‘licensed doctors’ did not publicly acquire or apply this knowledge. While some botanists and botanist-doctors such as Pappe published information on indigenous medical plants, few licensed doctors engaged with these, as ‘botany was regarded as a “puerile hobby horse”’, and doctors preferred the established European plant remedies. Pharmacological analysis and extraction in the late nineteenth century caused a shift in perception, but Africans’ knowledge still ranked low for the ‘licensed doctors’.⁸²

Yet before this shift occurred—when botany seemed unrelated to medicine and Africans’ plant knowledge was demeaned—missionaries-cum-doctors published and circulated what they knew of medicinal plant usage among the amaXhosa. Andrew Smith of St Cyrus (1828–1898), a small town on the east coast of Scotland north of Montrose,⁸³ is best known for such publications. A qualified teacher with a Master of Arts degree from the University of Aberdeen, from 1867 to 1887 he was a ‘most devoted’ teacher in the College Department at the Presbyterian mission station of the Glasgow Missionary Society at Lovedale, near Alice, eastern Cape.⁸⁴ It is no surprise that he was interested in medicinal plants, given that the Glasgow Missionary Society particularly required its missionaries to have some medical training.⁸⁵ At Lovedale, he taught history, geography, philosophy and mathematics, and in his free time was a passionate botanist. In 1885, Smith exhibited a collection of medical plants at the South African Exhibition in Port Elizabeth from 10 December 1885 to 9 January 1886. The collection was accompanied by a twenty-three-page pamphlet on how ‘natives’ use medicinal plants.⁸⁶ After the first edition, he received information from various parts of the eastern Cape that helped him extend his manuscript over the next three years and resulted in a second, 163-page edition. In 1895, the final, third and further extended 240-page edition was published.⁸⁷ What Smith recorded was also reproduced in English–Xhosa dictionaries compiled largely by missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as by the German missionary and doctor Albert Kropf (1822–1910).⁸⁸ In these entries on plants, Africans do not feature as individual actors but ethnic groups who are generalised as all using plants for certain purposes.⁸⁹

Smith’s two most famous Xhosa co-workers were Dr Jotello Festiri Soga (1865–1906), the first South African veterinary surgeon and son of the Reverend Tiyo Soga, and William Wellington Gqoba (1840–1888), a famous Xhosa poet, translator, journalist and editor of Isigidimi samaXhosa (The Xhosa Messenger), who had attended mission school at Tyhume and the Lovedale Institute. They were acknowledged by name and introduced as co-workers. Jotello Soga had won a gold medal for his studies in botany while studying veterinary surgery in Edinburgh. Back home, he sent plant specimens to the British colonial botanist and teacher Peter MacOwan.⁹⁰ Smith mentioned Gqoba as a most enthusiastic contributor who did research to learn more about remedies from others which he then shared with Smith.⁹¹ Other experts consulted by Smith also seem to have been mainly within the mission networks. He admired them and described them in most cases as ‘native herb-doctors’, ‘an old Fingo doctor’, ‘the old Hottentot women’, ‘a skilful native doctoress’, ‘Native experts’, ‘Native specialists’ and ‘Kaffir specialists’, but occasionally more negatively as ‘Kaffir witch-doctors’.⁹² Smith often listed individual medical cases descriptions where Western medicine failed and local medicinal plants helped to solve a problem. In these cases, when Xhosa medicinal plant knowledge was superior, he referred to individual patients, healers and diviners.⁹³ Men of similar rank to himself such as chiefs and Xhosa missionaries were mentioned by name—for example Chief Kama and Reverend John Mtila, of the amaNgqika, the missionary in charge of Knapp’s Hope.⁹⁴ African medicinal knowledge was described as ‘largely experimental’, and indeed, it was by experimenting that the amaXhosa found out about the effects of plants that looked very unrelated to those used for similar Western remedies but were in fact species of the same genus.⁹⁵

Smith’s publications were well received. European doctors and pharmacists at the Cape were particularly interested in Africans’ medicinal plant use. The pharmacist Ernest L. Ralling argued that in nine out of ten cases he and his colleagues were ‘indebted […] to the empirical aboriginal inhabitants’ use’ of medicinal plants and demanded that plants should first be used experimentally and observed by ‘the local medical man’ and only later should ‘scientific investigation’ follow.⁹⁶ He thus suggested that Xhosa medical practices were likely to be superior to Western ones and that Western doctors should open up to their African colleagues in order to learn more about medicinal plants.

Europeans distinguished between ‘empirical’ and ‘scientific’ knowledge. Empirical knowledge was based on trial-and-error experience where Africans applied certain plants to wounds and illnesses. Coming from the West where science had become professionalised, Europeans now saw African experimentation as one link in a larger chain of knowledge creation. For them, science had a wider ability to explain and predict causality. While experimenting and empirical knowledge were based on the past, science opened up a predictable future. Yet, only a few Europeans were as impressed and as favourably outspoken on Africans’ systems of knowledge on plants as Pappe, Smith and Ralling. White doctors often accused African medical practitioners of ‘quackery’.⁹⁷

When it came to curing snakebites, however, Western medicine depended on African knowledge. Premesh Lalu has observed that individual actors such as an anonymous ‘old woman living in Namaqualand’ who had gained a wide reputation as a snakebite doctor were consulted and quoted in the South African Medical Journal in the late 1890s. Derogatory terms such as ‘quackery’, ‘superstition’ or ‘witch doctors’ were never applied in this context. Displays of African doctors’ medical utensils and medical sources in plants and animals showed settler doctors’ appropriation of Africans’ knowledge as well as their anthropological fascination.⁹⁸ Barber was also interested in snakes. While in Natal, she and her brother used isiZulu words for snakes and plants such as umzambete (Millettia caffra), ibululu (puff adder), imamba, inhlonhlo and inhlangwana for deadly vipers.⁹⁹ With regard to snakebites but also more generally, the view of indigenous medicinal knowledge seems to have changed with successful treatment and curing of white patients. White settlers did not record their own doubts about western knowledge as rigorously as they did about information obtained from Africans.

As seen above, Barber did not use African vernacular names. Yet in the late 1870s she favoured vernacular place names as they were ‘much prettier, and less confusing’ and did not repeat ‘threadbare names’ or ‘denote too plainly the utter blank which must prevail the minds unable to select or invent new names for new countries’. She for instance made fun of ‘“East London West”, whatever that means?’ She thereby echoed Burchell who had given Dutch names to many places, ‘when I ought to have given the original’. ‘It is certainly bad taste to substitute, in any country, a modern or a foreign name, for one by which a place has been for ages known to its native inhabitants’ and he was bewildered that the Khoekhoen with whom he travelled used Dutch names themselves.¹⁰⁰ The example Barber gave for a native place name was Berea, the ridge of hills overlooking the bay of Port Natal that she mistakenly took for a isiZulu word. She was unaware of its being a New Testament derivation of a place where noble men resided. The name, initially applied to the explorer and ex-navy officer Allen Francis Gardiner’s mission station on the ridge above Port Natal in 1835, is said to have been ‘gladly received’ by the amaZulu living in the area.¹⁰¹

‘Colonial’ experts on medicinal plants often lamented the amaXhosa’s secrecy or unwillingness to share their knowledge. The surgeon Atherstone was in Grahamstown when it was the medical centre of the eastern Cape as the military frontier post, and the first and second hospitals were located in town from the 1820s.¹⁰² In his free time, he built up his own herbarium that he donated to the Albany Museum in 1889, sent specimens to the South African Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, and served on the committee of the Grahamstown Botanical Gardens for many years. Parts of his vegetable produce and ethnographic collection as well as photographs of scenery in the eastern Cape were exhibited at the Paris Exhibition of 1867.¹⁰³ He was once called through a settler as a consultant to an Mfengu doctor called Umbon. Umbon refers to the clan of the amaGcina, and umbona is mealie in isiXhosa. We can assume that the doctor was a Xhosa belonging to the clan amaGcina rather than an Mfengu. The doctor had been treating an Mfengu girl in the last stages of phthisis with a shrunken non-functional eye for three months. Out of his mooty that Atherstone translated as bag—but muti is derived from the Zulu word for tree and means medicine—Umbon took fresh euphorbia that he cut into two-inch squares and put into half a cup of warm water, strained it and gave it to his patient. According to the African doctor, this purgative usually worked within five minutes and was also efficient against worms. He explained that he also had snakeroot and leonotis in his bag to treat snakebites as well as aromatic grasses and herbs for other ailments. Atherstone was eager to learn more, and the Mfengu doctor promised to bring him fresh supplies and instruct him how to use the plants.¹⁰⁴ This case indicates that Atherstone wanted to learn from African doctors if they initiated contact with him and were willing to share their knowledge.

Atherstone’s list of plants and their medicinal purposes suggests that he did not have a general interest in African medicinal plant use, but limited himself to finding alternative cures for illnesses that his settler patients frequently had such as dysentery, tropical fever, diarrhoea, rheumatism and the like.¹⁰⁵ He was interested in new remedies and regarded them as similar to the homoeopathic treatment that was discussed by European doctors and pharmacists in the wake of the German physician Samuel Hahnemann’s Organon der Heilkunst (1796). The information that Atherstone accumulated from acquaintances and patients, near and far, as well as from amaXhosa, amaMfengu and Khoekhoen, he passed on in his address on ‘Plants with Medicinal Properties’. In it, he, for instance, mentioned that his actual experience proved that crassula, for instance ‘Hoender Been’, was an effective remedy against dysentery. His brother John was in excruciating pain after three days and tried crassula. ‘A handful of leaves was boiled making a cupful of strong decoction. He took a wineglassful twice. Shortly after the first dose, all pain left.’ And another settler, Fallegan, in Lower Albany had suffered from chronic dysentery for four to five months and consulted several medicinal practitioners in vain before he took ‘a strong decoction of crassula – a wineglass three times a day. After a few doses, he was much better and within a week, he was perfectly well’. Given that crassula were ‘found in great abundance on the road from “Tharfield” to Biddulph’s as one ascends the hill after crossing the Kleinemond’, we can assume that Barber and the Bowkers also used this cure.¹⁰⁶ Atherstone recorded his gathered information on medicinal plants in one of his more than 200 surviving notebooks.¹⁰⁷ He experimented with the information and treated his patients accordingly. The plants for these experiments were grown in his garden on Thursford or collected in the vicinity. He kept notebooks and gave lectures, but does not seem to have published his findings.¹⁰⁸

Settlers and European travellers almost always referred to Xhosa men, not women, in this regard, and they seem not to have understood the difference between ixhwele (pl: amaxhwele) the herbalist and igqira (pl: amagqira) the diviner.¹⁰⁹ Early observers such as the naturalist Andrew Smith (not Andrew Smith of St Cyrus) in 1832 had noted that ‘Xhosa diviners were almost invariably women’, ‘while herbalists were more usually men’.¹¹⁰ In an early photograph of a diviner, probably a woman, from the 1850s or 1860s, in the Collection of Sir George Grey at the National Library of South Africa, in Cape Town, the diviner wears the traditional garb of the calling consisting of an animal-skin cap, bracelets and necklaces. The gaze is piercing, demanding and challenging, even though her position gives the impression that she feels uncomfortable. She seems to protect or distance herself from the camera by crossing her hands. She has a reproachful gaze as if she wanted to say: ‘What is the purpose of photographing me?’ She might also be hiding herbs or something else in her palms (Fig. 2.4).

Fig. 2.4

Early photograph of a Xhosa diviner, sex not clear. (Collection of Sir George Grey. © National Library of South Africa: ALBX 19, 15,611)

Barber’s few passages on medicinal plants show that she was in contact with Xhosa women, but we can assume she did not grasp the important role they played in society, otherwise she would have stressed this in her attempt to gain more rights for women, as will be discussed in Chap. 8.

Smith and Atherstone may have been in touch only with Xhosa herbalists, rather than (mostly women) diviners. That women played such a key role in society was a thorn in the missionaries’ side, so it is not surprising that Smith referred almost entirely to men, with whom he seems to have been in much closer contact. Contact with European society altered traditional practices so there could also have been more men diviners by the time Smith was at Lovedale. But I would suggest that the predominant reference to men reflected the patriarchalEuropean society at the Cape. In this system, men and their knowledge systems mattered.

‘Colonial’ experts often complained about the amaXhosa’s unwillingness to share what they knew. Smith of St Cyrus lamented that some ‘herb doctors’ ‘keep the knowledge of their virtues to themselves with profound secrecy, and occasionally mislead people by showing them some other plant, or by ascribing to a plant some use very different from its real one’. In cases of typhoid fever, he also observed that ‘native experts’ wished ‘to keep the key to knowledge to themselves’ and ‘The virtue of Melanthus comosus in snake-bite has been kept very secret’.¹¹¹ The information often remained within families. European doctors frequently complained that Africans were jealous of their knowledge and kept their most valuable drugs secret, even though doctors such as the Scottish doctor and teacher Jane Elizabeth Waterston (1843–1932) offered a substantial amount of money for it.¹¹² Waterston had been one of the first women to study medicine and gain a medical degree in Britain. If a woman wished to enter the medical profession, it was necessary to qualify in New York, and in 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell, born in England but living in the US, was the first to follow this path. In 1869, Barbara Bodichon and Emily Davies finally founded a women’s college at Hitchin, which in 1873 moved to Cambridge as Girton College. A year later, University College in London eventually admitted women to its classes, and in 1877, they were at last allowed to enter its medical school to train as doctors. Waterston studied at the London School of Medicine for Women from 1874 to 1878 as one of the first students. She ran a medical department at Lovedale from 1880 to 1883, and worked as a physician in a private practice in Cape Town. In another case, a doctor was successfully treated with beans when he suffered from malarial bilious fever at the Lebombo Heights. After testing the treatment later on 200 white miners in the Transvaal, the doctor returned and witnessed how ‘the local native doctor’ had informed his community that the trees had to be destroyed, as they were ‘bewitched’. Time and again, white doctors were suspect and their intrusion was seen as dangerous to local healers’ skills.¹¹³ These examples show how some African experts successfully resisted attempts by colonials to appropriate their knowledge.

Barber and Her Brothers’ Social Darwinism

In a letter dating from 1865, Barber voiced her most explicit opinions on what she regarded as the necessary eradication of the amaXhosa from the Albany district.¹¹⁴ This letter was written in the context of the ongoing debate between the missionary John Aitken Chalmers and Tiyo Soga. Soga is said to have been the first African minister, journalist, translator, missionary and intellectual. Chalmers and Soga’s discussion on the role of the amaXhosa in Cape colonial society culminated in a fierce exchange of views published in the magazine Indaba and the King William’s Town Gazette. Indaba was a magazine in isiXhosa which was edited by the missionary Rev. Bryce Ross and the Gazette was a settler newspaper published from 1856 to 1874.¹¹⁵ Barber’s message to her brother Thomas Holden Bowker was a response to this debate.

In her letter, Barber wrote that she was of the opinion that ‘the black fellows’ had to ‘“go to the wall” for they [were] the weakest – both in intelligence and common sense and [could not] stand against the white races’. Either they were to obey the settlers’ laws or face being ‘driven out’ as it would never be possible, she believed, for both groups to ‘live together as one people’.¹¹⁶

She echoed her eldest brother John Mitford Bowker’s oft-quoted ‘springbok speech’ from August 1844 which was inspired by Thomas Carlyle and theological racism. In it, ‘the most outspoken ideologue’ had claimed that the amaXhosa had only looting and homicide on their minds and should thus make way for settlers just as the springboks had done previously for the latter’s sheep.¹¹⁷ He was also convinced that the potential of the area would be wasted if a few thousand ‘ruthless worthless savages’ populated land that millions of ‘civilised men’ would ‘happily’ live on and cultivate. In his notorious springbok speech, he said:

I said I felt sorry for the spring buck, and who but regrets the waning herds of them? Yet the merino (sheep) is far preferable to them. And this extinction of races even amongst men is a palpable fact which we have every day experience of, and over which we have no control, and it is well we have not, with our whining nonsense. And Scripture shows, too, in the destruction of the Canaanites, etc., that God at times wills it that one race should summarily make room for another.¹¹⁸

In a speech before likeminded 1820 Settlers, he argued that the amaXhosa could only be incorporated into colonial society as labourers. They could never take on leadership roles as they would always have to be instructed how to perform manual labour roles such as those of herders, wagon drivers, woodcutters and drawers of water.¹¹⁹ Historians have described him as an ‘anti-liberal extremist’ and his speech as ‘the first manifestation of a genuine racism in South Africa’.¹²⁰

John Mitford Bowker had arrived at the Cape in 1822 when he was 21-years-old and died in 1847 of pneumonia that he had developed after a fall from his horse.¹²¹ His demise has largely been seen as a result of the traumas of the Seventh Cape-Xhosa War and its aftermath, and many sources claim he died in the war.¹²² His premature death had a deep impact on his siblings and radicalised their ideas on settlement and dispossession of land.

Thomas Holden Bowker shared his brother’s views and acted accordingly. He had been a lieutenant in the Provisional Colonial Infantry in the Sixth Cape-Xhosa War. In his war diary he enthusiastically noted his killing of Xhosa warriors without regret.¹²³ During the Seventh Cape-Xhosa War, he had been captain of the Grahamstown Native Levy.

In 1848, after mismanaging the farm Tharfield which he had inherited from his father and facing the prospect of being sent to a debtor’s prison,¹²⁴ Bowker joined a group of 1820 Settlers. One of the group’s most prominent members was Robert Godlonton who in the Graham’s Town Journal argued that it was the Albany settlers’ ‘task of colonizing Kaffirland’. A Grahamstown petition submitted that in ‘Kaffirland […] there is a wide and most fertile tract of country which must, to preserve the advantages of the British forces have gained over the Kaffir tribes, be occupied by British subjects’.¹²⁵

In the process, the petitioners sought to connect the eastern part of the colony with the new colony of Natal and secede from the Cape Colony.¹²⁶ Godlonton, Bowker and kindred spirits had hoped to gain executive power—they were less concerned with legislation, had economic interests as well as a ‘frontier psychosis’.¹²⁷ When the railway came to Albany in the 1870s, separatism outlived its purpose and Bowker focused on other ways to justify land claims.

From 1848 to 1851, Bowker was resident magistrate at the Kat River Settlement. This was a scheme which provided the Khoekhoen with a modicum of land between the Cape Colony and the Xhosa territory. According to Bowker, this was the best-watered and most fertile district in the area and would prosper better under the control of Europeans. However, he had little understanding of the nuances of the inter-ethnic relationships, alliances and allegiances on the frontier. He, for instance, commented that he was ‘frequently at a loss to tell when a Gonah is a Hottentot, Fingo or Kafir as he appears Proteuslike as each occasionally’.¹²⁸ This was illustrated by his introduction of fines against some Gonas for cattle trespassing on ‘white land’ and his summary confiscation of their cattle in lieu of unpaid fines.¹²⁹ He believed he could rule and take land from them at will. Reverend J. J. Freeman had written about the case while touring the country, and his intervention had been assessed by higher officials who reprimanded Bowker for his imposition of fines which they asked him to return. Bowker and his colleagues responded by burning down more than 300 huts, in the process evicting 500 Gonas and amaMfengu and their 2500 cattle and 1400 goats from the Kat River Settlement during six days of hail, freezing rain and stinting wind in the winter of 1850. These actions were in contravention of Ordinance 50, which had been adopted in 1828 to render race no longer relevant to legal status. Bowker did not discriminate between recent squatters and residents who had been living there for more than twenty years.¹³⁰ There were immediate protests by whites against Bowker’s legal ignorance and hostile rule over Africans. The governor subsequently declared him unsuitable as a magistrate and dismissed him.¹³¹ Before his dismissal, however, Bowker had confiscated some 300 guns which would be useful during the Kat River Rebellion when he was commandant of the burghers defending the settlement of Whittlesea at the northern front, north of the Amathole Mountains, which had been unsuccessfully attacked by the amaXhosa twelve times in January and February 1851.¹³² His racialism was certainly also informed by his reading of works on race, such as by Thomas Carlyle, Herbert Spencer, Ernst Haeckel, Thomas Malthus and Robert Knox.¹³³

Barber’s radicalisation was more implicit. In 1867, she answered Darwin’s questionnaire for his research on human emotions, expressing her opinion that Europeans and Africans shared similar emotional expressions, but not rationality and intelligence. It is not clear how Barber received this questionnaire. J. P. Mansel Weale, who was responsible for circulating it at the Cape, may have sent it to James Henry Bowker who asked her to answer the questions for him. Darwin only received two questionnaires from South Africa, the other from Xhosa chief ‘Christian Gaika, brother of Chief Sandilli’, which would have meant ‘a return of perhaps twenty percent’, compared to his total return of ‘thirty-six questionnaires from throughout the world’.¹³⁴ She was a ‘stout Darwinian’, as she called herself, or a ‘fierce social Darwinist’, as in the words of the anthropologist Robert Shanafelt.¹³⁵

Barber had hoped Darwin would definitively prove Africans’ intellectual inferiority. This became particularly important to her in the 1870s while living on the diamond fields in the northern part of the Cape Colony. There, her husband and sons hoped to prove themselves as successful miners after the difficulties which they had experienced while farming in Albany.

On the diamond fields, African miners outnumbered whites by a ratio of more than ten to one. For the first time, Barber, who was used to living on remote farms and being in constant exchange with relatives, neighbours and the settler community in Grahamstown, became acutely aware of the small minority which the white settler community at the Cape actually formed.

Barber was thus disappointed when she received a copy of Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872),¹³⁶ which she found stimulating but ‘not exactly in [her] line’.¹³⁷ Darwin had not provided her with evidence for African inferiority and thus a legitimisation for 1820 Settlers’ rule. The newcomers placed African experts from various ethnic groups in a racial hierarchy with whites at the top, as will be further discussed in Chap. 7.

Cross-cultural collaboration, as discussed in this chapter, became common practice over time and, according to settlers and European travellers, no longer required constant or explicit mention, as Chap. 3 will show in more detail. Like the herbalists and diviners, the informants, collectors and taxidermists had the power to decide what they would share, when, and with whom.