Beyond the Pale: The ‘Foreigner’ in the Politics of the ‘Frontier’ in the Fish River Marches of the British Cape Colony, c. 1830–1850

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the first half of the nineteenth century, the British Cape Colony was the site of multiple and interrelated constructions of the foreign and articulations of some brand of ‘foreigner’ as threatening. This paper, part of a longer study, explores one construction of foreignness in relation to the ‘frontier’. It makes three main points. First, it analyses the frontier not as a structural condition or zone but as a subjective, political positioning. It proposes the concept of the ‘marchland’ to distinguish between spatial description and political space. Second, it looks at the rendition of the ‘foreign’ in the politics of the frontier, how African land and people ‘beyond the boundary’ were labelled ‘foreigners’ or treated as foreign through the invocation of European norms of international law. It addresses colonial politicisations of chiefly authority in those discourses. Last, it considers the frequently employed idea of ‘the pale’, which speaks to political difference and aids us in conceptualising foreignness in the Cape colonial marchlands. This history considers the relationship between accusations of foreignness and a specific, historical political subjectivity and politics – of the frontier – that politicised foreignness.