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Lifting a history from an undeserved state of obscurityRussel Brownlee
Some time ago I bought a rather dilapidated copy of a long out-of-print book with the captivating title Forgotten Frontiersmen. It was by a journalist, Alf Wannenburgh, and it consisted of a collection of small studies on the lives of several key figures in the early history of what the author referred to as the "coloured" people. The fact that I had only ever heard of one or two of them was confirmation of the accuracy of at least part of the title. The other part of it I found so evocative of the great mythical frontiers of America that I became curious to discover whether this country had ever really experienced something similar. The stories in the book gave some sense of a frontier experience in the northern Cape and along the Gariep, but because the author made little attempt to connect the disparate tales the effect was somewhat fragmented. The book evoked the sense of a great and forgotten history, but it could do little more than scratch the surface. In an effort to find more detail on the subject I began searching libraries and the shelves of Africana book dealers. Within a short while I realised that any enquiry on the subject of the northern frontier would be arduous indeed, because there was a distinct lack of commercially published material of any relevance. The only comprehensive works covering the subject were two PhD theses - one by Martin Legassick and the other by Nigel Penn. But a fat thesis on library loan was not really something that lent itself to a leisurely read, so I found my enthusiasm for the project gradually waning. I regretted the fact that nobody had thought to make Penn's thesis commercially accessible, and thought that if I ever met him I would urge him to approach a publisher with this in mind. As it turns out, Double Storey were already working on the matter, and a short while ago they brought out a version of his thesis under the very apt title The Forgotten Frontier. Penn begins by outlining the concept of a frontier - a region where competing social forces are held in a rough balance and where identities exist in a state of flux. We are used to thinking of the black-white issue in this country as being a very one-sided thing, but the frontier was a geographic and temporal moment in which the balance was not yet decided, in which both societies influenced each other and new, hybrid, identities were formed. Unlike the Eastern Cape, where the frontier closed relatively quickly under the overwhelming strength of a foreign power, the northern frontier remained open for a hundred years or more and created a fertile ground for any number of experiments in social organisation. The opening of the northern frontier was a haphazard affair, beginning with the gradual movement of trekboers out of the bounds of the colony and the wanderings of hunters and runaways. The Khoisan found themselves pushed northwards by this influx but were able to hold their ground in particular areas for some time. And where they didn't resist, they were either co-opted, becoming clients of the colonists or - more interestingly - adopting the ways of the colonists and setting themselves up as independent pastoralists, traders and, often enough, plunderers and brigands. The story of the Oorlam groups, in particular the notorious Afrikaner gang, is a fascinating illustration of the type of role-switching that the frontier could accommodate. For several years large stretches of the Gariep river were controlled by Khoi and mixed-race bandit groups that were more than a match for any of the local tribes or the colonial forces sent out to confront them. At the same time, peaceable Oorlam or Baster groups like those under the Kok and Barends families experimented with more productive uses of the environment, often outdoing their colonist neighbours in agricultural production. In the end, however, the state of flux that made such freedoms possible had to come to an end as the inexorable might of the colonial powers assumed control of the region. The blurb notes enticingly that Penn's previous book, Rogues, Rebels and Runaways, revealed him as a master storyteller with a "novelist's sensitivity to plot and character," the same skills, we are assured, he now brings to bear on this new work. However, Rogues was essentially quite a different type of book, its primary aim being to entertain and to capture readers' attentions with a carefully chosen array of interesting dramas. His latest work sets out to achieve something quite different - to tell the story of a whole geographic region over a relatively long period. His motivation is not so much to tell a dramatic tale but to make a case for the status of the northern Cape frontier in the general history of South Africa. He is also, like all serious historians, wary of imposing more of a narrative structure on the past than is absolutely necessary. As such, the dramatic drive of the work is somewhat diluted in favour of a more academic exposition of facts, but this is probably unavoidable. With the lack of generally accessible published material on this part of history we desperately need a work that covers the details, that loads itself with events and attempts to expose the scarce and fragmented records to the public gaze. And Penn does succeed marvellously in this. From some rather sparse records he manages to build up a remarkably full picture of life on the frontier. If the impression is somewhat crowded, it is a minor complaint. The work remains a fascinating read and admirably fulfils its aim of lifting a history from an undeserved state of obscurity. It will perhaps be for others to create more dramatic and plot-filled accounts by narrowing the focus and following particular narrative threads. I, for one, would love to read more of the long history of the Kok and Barends clans, touched on in this book but left off before their histories took on the dimensions of heroism and tragedy that a few people might be familiar with. The dramatic conquests of the Afrikaner clan, the experiments in creating independent Griqua states, the Griqua Trek, all these are stories with origins in the northern frontier that have yet to receive the treatment they deserve. The Forgotten Frontier should go a long way in inspiring popular accounts of these and other important though neglected stories.
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The Forgotten Frontier
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