Further Beyond the Pale: Decolonisation, Historians and Military Discourse in the 18th and 19th Centuries on the Eastern Cape ‘Frontier’

Abstract

Recent debates on decolonisation of the curriculum at South African universities have yet to cause much of a ripple in South African historiography, despite a wide range of conceptualisations that would benefit from revision. One of these is the concept of the frontier. Notions of a frontier derived directly and indirectly from the writings of Frederick Jackson Turner have dominated the writing of the history of South Africa’s Eastern Cape for almost three-quarters of a century. Illuminating as these various interpretations have been, they have obscured the fundamental issues of how contemporaries used the concept, how it reflected their worldviews and how this influenced colonial society. Examining the evolution of perceptions of boundaries and frontiers in colonial discourse suggests that the emergence of racial attitudes towards the Xhosa was intricately connected to the manner in which the military and colonial officials perceived ‘the frontier’. Uncritical use of the term in modern histories perpetuates the ‘othering’ of indigenous people. The absence of discussion of how pre-colonial people and the colonised conceived of boundaries and frontiers further exacerbates the imbalance in the historiography of liminal spaces in South Africa.