Elizabeth Elbourne

Broken Alliance: Debating Six Nations' Land Claims in 1822

ABSTRACT The article uses the diplomatic efforts of John Brant and Robert Kerr to negotiate land claims with the Colonial Office in 1822 on behalf of the Grand River Six Nations, while presenting themselves (however problematically) as Mohawk indigenous modernizers, as a case study in the complicated interaction between colonialism and ideas of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ in the early nineteenth century. Six Nations efforts to adapt to the colonial economy were frequently stymied by the colonial states refusal to accommodate Mohawk demands, and in that sense modernity was a discursive trap for indigenous modernizers, not a real route to change. The failure of the diplomatic visit also illustrates the difficulties of negotiation in a changing colonial context in which indigenous peoples were increasingly seen as wards of the settler state rather than imperial military allies. Nonetheless, Grand River community members consistently tried to use both ‘modernist’ and ‘traditionalist’ strategies to defend indigenous sovereignty, whatever their internal disagreements over assimilation policies and economic options.

‘The fact so often disputed by the black man’: Khoekhoe citizenship at the Cape in the early to mid nineteenth century

There was considerable debate throughout the early nineteenth century over the legal status and, by extension, the citizenship rights of the Khoekhoe in the Cape Colony. Successive regimes between the 1790s and 1828 (the Dutch East India Company, the British government, the Batavian government and the British again) all accorded a different legal status to the Khoekhoe and San than was granted to whites. In 1828, as part of a wider project of economic liberalization, the British eliminated legal distinctions between white and non-white inhabitants of the Cape Colony, even as it tried to deny settlement rights to Africans from neighbouring regions who came into the colony to work. A complex network of discriminatory local custom nonetheless continued to affect the daily interaction of white and Khoekhoe. Tensions came to a head in the early 1850s when the Cape both confronted the aftermath of a Khoekhoe rebellion and grappled with the issue of whether the newly-granted franchise should be race-blind. This paper examines contemporary debates over what criteria should be used to determine citizenship, with particular attention to the tension between the commitment of white British settlers influenced by liberalism to equality under the law, and the varying criteria for group membership used in practice, in the aftermath of the de facto enslavement of Khoekhoe children and farm workers.

African Traditional Religion in South Africa: An Annotated Bibliography@@@Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism in South Africa: An Annotated Bibliography

Preface African Traditional Religion General Overviews Khoisan Religion Xhosa Religion Zulu Religion Sotho-Tswana Religion Swazi Religion Tsonga Religion Venda Religion Index