Khoisan resistance to the Dutch in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Abstract

The responses of the Khoisan peoples to the Dutch at the Cape of Good Hope in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have generally been dismissed summarily by historians. This article attempts to place their reactions into the broader framework of the receptivity of Late Stone Age society in South Africa to cultural innovation, and suggests that the usual dichotomy drawn between the rapid disintegration of the pastoral Khoi in the face of the Dutch settlers and the fierce resistance of the San hunter-gatherers is an oversimplification. There was little to distinguish cattleless Khoi from San, or San who had acquired cattle from Khoi, and both processes were at work both during and before the Dutch period in South Africa. The belief that the Khoi ‘willingly’ bartered away their cattle for ‘mere baubles’ is challenged, and it is maintained that the violence which punctuated every decade of the eighteenth century, and which culminated in the so-called ‘Bushman Wars’, were in large measure the Khoisan response to their prior dispossession by the Boers. On the other hand, the readiness of the Khoisan to acculturate to both the Dutch and the Bantu-speaking intruders, their relatively small population and loose social organization, meant that their ethnic identity virtually disappeared. Nevertheless their responses were more complex than is generally realized and resemble those of other colonized peoples. They were also to have a profound influence on the attitudes towards whites of Bantu-speakers on the Cape's eastern and northern frontiers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.