From my south-facing windows I look across the coastal plain towards Port Alfred and Kenton. The landscape is etched and scarred with innumerable human interventions: new roads and the traces of abandoned roads, new fences and the traces of old ones, fields of grass carved out of the infamously thorny Albany thickets. Powerlines and firebreaks and buildings.
The “scratches
on the face of the country”, so characterised by the early traveller John Barrow,
pretty much began in this area with the arrival of the 1820 settlers. No doubt
the plain had been variously modified by human presence, Khoekhoen, Bushman and
Xhosa, long before the colonial invaders came. In 1820 there was scarcely a wagon-track
between outposts; mostly they still followed trails opened up by the elephants.
But they were quickly setting up surveyed farms on the land from which the Xhosa
had been ejected, establishing homes and roads and mission stations and tiny outposts
like Graham’s Town.
The history
of these often hapless and ill-equipped settlers has often been told, whether
in hagiographic or embittered decolonial terms, but not, as far as I know, much
with animals in mind. Jack Skead has exhaustively catalogued the early mentions
of wild animals in the travelogues, but not the domestic. Sandra Swart’s
admirable history of the horse in South Africa, Riding High, rather leaves
the Eastern Cape out. Craig Patterson’s PhD study somewhat fills that gap. But
what of all the other species, wild and domestic, whose presence was constant, but
mostly only casually remarked? It seems to me there’s much yet to be explored
of the intimate network of animal uses and abuses in this period. For it’s
clear that in every aspect of society, whether Bushman, Xhosa or white settler,
dependency on animals was total. They simply would not have survived without
animals.
(This may still be true: I look
down on the one hand on the white flecks of cattle let loose in the bush much
as they were two centuries ago; some of them get periodically stolen, just like
two centuries ago. One prominent cluster of buildings houses a dairy and a
slaughterhouse; the business calls itself “Beefmasters”, which says all you
need to know about the power dynamic there. On the other hand, several former
farms have been amalgamated into a broad game ranch: with binoculars I regularly
spot impala and eland and giraffe – all “extra-limitals”, by the way, which did
not occur here in 1820. The grazers perpetuate the distinction between grassed
fields and thicket, but new pressures on the vegetation are showing: the thorn
trees that dominated one patch have been eaten down to the nub by the giraffe.
The point is: exploitation of animals remains key to local human well-being.)
What of 1820?
I dip here into only three of the
sundry diaries and memoirs dating to 1820 and 1821. It would take much wider
reading to confirm or modify the impressions one gains from this limited
sample. But here we go.
One is The Journal of William
Shaw, edited for the Graham’s Town Series by WD Hammond-Tooke. Shaw was a
Wesleyan missionary specifically assigned to the 1820 settlers of the Albany
district (now Makana), later to the Kat River settlements further east. His
journal for the years 1820-21 is sketchy compared to later years, and one hopes
his sermons were less dull. He batted back and forth between farms and embryonic
centres like Salem and Bathurst, praising God for everything, good or
misfortunate. When he was thrown off his horse, he praised God that he’d
suffered no “material injury”. When his horse gave out and was abandoned on the
road, he praised God that the delay saved him from running into an elephant. No
word on the fate of the horse.
This is typical of the offhand attitude
he brought to animal presences. He rode here and rode there, but says next to
nothing about the animals themselves. Though he did a good deal of exhausting
walking, it’s clear that travel was entirely dependent on animals. Wagons come
and go, but he says nothing of the teams of oxen that drew them under threat of
the whip. Animals must have been looked after, but in a purely instrumental
way. At outspans they were just left to find their own grazing. Inevitably,
some would get lost, or rustled by Xhosa raiders, or taken out by lion, leopard
or hyena. More than once Shaw’s horse couldn’t be found in the morning,
obliging him to walk. Some horses, he recorded, succumbed to a “very peculiar
complaint”, which he attributed to “an almost entire want of food”. Especially
in drought conditions, the prevalent sour veld (Zuurveld) offered meagre
pickings. In short, they starved.
As for wild animals, they were
around. In some tracts “one is surrounded with bushes and hears nothing but an
occasional scream from the Jackalls, a dismal hungry toned howl from the wolf”.
Shaw recorded that one man, on a Sunday, set off to walk to Graham’s Town, but
was turned back by two lions “en couchant”. So the fellow had to attend
church after all, praise the Lord. Once he himself had to take refuge for a
night in a “Hottentot” kraal; having no bread, they fed him broiled buffalo and
milk. Interestingly, Shaw seems reluctant to eat “flesh as a substitute”. He
may have been a closet vegetarian, but most people on either side of the shifting
frontier were largely dependent on animal flesh for survival, whether ‘ranched’
or hunted in the wild. But, looking back on his first year in the district, Shaw
wrote: “Within one year, desert places have been taken possession of by a
multitude of men, the beasts of the field have very generally retreated to make
room for them.”
Another source is the chronicle of the rather less well-educated Jeremiah Goldswain, recently made available in a new edition by Ralph Goldswain. Again, the feisty Goldswain was more focussed on his innumerable setbacks than on the role of animals. Nevertheless, the settlers’ dependencies on animals is clear. Like Shaw, he rode horses or oxen when he could and walked when he couldn’t. Wild encounters were regular, as when he ran into “a very large buffalo. Had it not been for our dogs we should have been in a very awkward position.” Indeed, dogs are omnipresent, but seldom if ever individualised. He also followed tracks pioneered by elephants, though they didn’t always lead to your intended destination. Amongst his many commercial endeavours he tried bartering cattle, suffering like everyone else rustling by Xhosas or Bushmen; the former were often trying to retrieve beasts the settlers or British military had stolen from them in the first place. He mentions the heavy reliance on meat-eating, noting, for instance, supping off a sheep hanging up in a settler hut and roasted. This was after having his own house burned down, leaving him with nothing but his “sheepskin jacket”: the settlers were almost as dependent on animal-skin clothing and leathers as the Xhosa were. (All these examples being drawn from just two pages of Goldswain’s account.)
By far the most eloquent and liberal-minded chronicler of
1820-21 was the Scottish poet Thomas Pringle. He did write some poems regarding
animals, as well as innumerable letters; the latter, finely edited into a
volume by Randolph Vigne, are overwhelmingly involved with the legalities of
land ownership and seeking relief from drought and Cape Town censorship of his
views, and seldom linger on the animal presence. More fruitful for our theme is
his memoir, African Sketches (accessible online). Here the
constant background of conflict over domestic beasts and with wild beasts
emerges more strongly; he devotes a whole excitable chapter to hunting
anecdotes, not all his own, foreshadowing the popularity of African hunting-adventure
books throughout the nineteenth century – the imperial century that would see
the extirpation of almost all wildlife under the assault of European firearms.
The effects are already evident in 1820.
But I want to focus on just one remarkably fine-grained
description, which almost inadvertently reveals how deeply the animal was implicated
in daily household living on the frontier. From his allocated Glen-Lynden, near
Bedford, Pringle takes a ride towards Cradock, on “the light and hardy horses
of this district”, following mountain paths cut by quaggas. In the Tarka
valley, he drops in on the homestead of one Winzel Coetzer – named Elands-Drift,
rather misleadingly translated as Ford of Elks. (Even names are animal.) Pringle
regards it as a “fair average sample” of a Dutch-settler establishment. He is first
greeted by a “host of some twenty or thirty dogs”, “growling guardians” fully
primed to tear a suspicious visitor to shreds, dispersed only by the Coetzers “hurling
at them a few of the half-gnawed bones and bullocks” horns which are lying about
in profusion. A minor industry of stock-raising, slaughter and meat-eating lies
behind this detail – mostly mutton in summer, when beef could not be properly
cured. “Flesh, and not bread,” Pringle writes, “is here the staff of life”, and
it’s not thought odd to have a dead sheep hanging in the voorhuis. The stock
attendants – “Hottentots” – live in reed huts known as hartebeest-huijses. The
more substantial Coetzer house reeks, probably literally, with animal products.
The floors are made of the peculiarly hard prepared earth gleaned from
ant-hills, though only those already raided by the aardvark – otherwise,
Pringle almost chuckles, you’re liable to have another termite colony erupting
under your feet. A skimming of cowdung on floors and walls also helps keep the fleas
down. The unglassed windows are closed at night with untanned quagga skins; the
reeds comprising the front door are lashed with thongs of bullock-hide. On the
walls are hung a variety of animal-derived accoutrements: “hunting apparatus,
dried flesh of various kinds of game, large whips of rhinoceros and
hippopotamus hide (termed sjamboks), leopard and lion skins, ostrich eggs and
feathers”. The men are wearing trousers of home-manufactured sheep or goat
skin, and – sometimes – veld-schoenen of raw bullocks’ hide – a Hottentot
invention. Juffrow Coetzer sometimes sold leather clothing she made; Pringle
bespoke a jacket of springbok skin, with a gesture towards a localised fashion
aesthetic in facings of leopard-fur, for 13 rix-dollars, about a pound sterling.
He also purchased a leopard skin for a handful of gunpowder. The home-made soap
certainly contained animal fat. All of these imply complex processes of
economies far and near: the crafts of weapon- and whip-making, of the
progressive obliteration of wild animals, of their hides’ integration into a
commerce of prideful display and conquest.
Though the family had established
quite extensive orchards and gardens for a variety of imported fruits and
vegetables, old Coetzer regarded his cattle as “de beste tuin” – the best
garden. Pringle describes a complex of kraals and folds for the cattle and
sheep, enclosed with thorn branches against “the nocturnal assaults of the
hyenas, leopards and jackals”. Some of those sheep would be driven – on foot,
that is – seven hundred miles to Cape Town. One heck of a journey. Though
Coetzer possessed what Pringle estimated at 700 cattle, the herders seldom
counted them, but could nevertheless quickly discover whether an individual was
missing. It expressed, Pringle goes on to note, local Africans’ “interest in
the welfare” of their herds, since by custom every youngster grew up with a
cohort of beasts to cherish for the future, not least for paying dowry. Pringle
shows at least some understanding of the profound cultural significance of
cattle to the Xhosa people. This of course would reach a catastrophic
denouement in the 1856 Cattle Killing. Pringle had by then long departed, but
Jeremiah Goldswain witnessed it.
Whichever way you look at it, the animals had a pretty rough time of it, most often fatal.
This pinprick of a spot-check
reveals both the ubiquitous dependency on the animal, as well as the paucity of
attention yet paid to it. Get to work, O ye scholars!
Incidentally, so far I have found no
mention of either the domestic cat nor the donkey – both equally ubiquitous
modern presences in Makana cultures. When exactly did they come in, I wonder?
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