Robert Ross

The Rise of the Cape Gentry

Over the last two centuries, among those groups who have formed part of the ruling class of South Africa, the gentry have been continually represented. By gentry, I mean the relatively prosperous, market-oriented farm owneroperators, almost invariably white and in general considerable employers of labour. 2 By the mid-twentieth century they came to own and control the vast majority of South Africas agricultural land outside the African reserves.3 It is their position of dominance that has shaped the character of much of the white South African countryside. With the exception of the sugar estates of Natal, plantations were not known in South Africa, and even in Natal these did not entirely dominate the colony.4 And where large company holdings were accumulated, they were usually held for rent and speculation until the price of land had risen sufficiently for them to be turned into farms. 5 Clearly it would be wrong to equate the emergence of a gentry group with the establishment of white settlement. Rather the emergence of the gentry in any particular region of southern Africa can be dated to that moment when the

The !Kora wars on the Orange River, 1830–1880

This article argues that the !Kora, an essentially Khoisan group in central South Africa, consisted not of hereditary tribes, but of people who had chosen a predatory, raiding way of life. It then traces the history of those !Kora who were based on the jungle-covered islands of the middle Orange river, concentrating particularly on the three wars that occurred between them and the Cape Colony: in 1832–4, when the !Kora were led by Stuurman, 1868–9, when they were under Piet Rooi and Jan Kivido, and the final episodes during 1879–80. Pointing out the difficulty that the colonial forces had in reducing the islands, it shows how the !Kora were able to raid up to 250 kilometers across the Bushmanland Flats, and thus make colonial subsistence over a wide area of the northern Cape Colony non-viable. Nevertheless, it argues that the way of life that the !Kora had chosen could not be sustained in face of the consolidation of colonial society, and describes the processes whereby they were destroyed.

The Rule of Law at the Cape of Good Hope in the Eighteenth Century

According to Rodney Davenport, in the Oxford History of South Africa, the rule of law did not exist at the Cape in the Company period. This statement secms incredible in view of the immense volume of the survivmg legal archives—a volume of the criminal court cases for a single year can easily be over 1000 paees of manuscript—and the large number of placcaaten issucd by the povernment of the Cape of Good Hope in the eightcenth Century.This, so it would seem, is evidence of a society in which the Roman-Dutch law of the Republic of the Netherlands, as amcnded first to suit the requirements of an castern trading empire and then of the port and colony of the Cape, was used to settlc disputes and to maintain public order and the rights of property. South Africa was clearly rulcd by a code of law—as indeed is probably every society in the world, in some sense or other—and moreover by one which was based on a system to which more concentrated legal thought had been given, at a higher theoretical level, than any other m the seventcenth and eighteenth centurics. To be sure, there were no junsts of any standing whatsoever at the Cape at the time. Most of the meinbers of the Court of Justicc had. no legal training at all. Ncverthcless, the codifications and tcxtbooks which they used were among the finest products of the greatest pcriocl of Dutch intcllcctual history. Tt is doubtful if the modernity of the legal system of any other country could be comparcd with that of the Nclherlands in the eightcenth Century. Certainly that of the Netherlands could be comparcd with that of any other country. The batllement which Davcnports init ial sentencc presents is, to a certam extent eascd by the rest of the paragraph in question, whcrc he imphcitly defines the rule of law as one where the law was imposed uniformly and fully impartialfly], so that the sevcrity of the sentcnccs [did nol] depend .; . largely on the lenal status of the offender or the person olTcnded agamstV That the contrary was the case was clearly admitted by the Dutch authonties. When, after the British capture of the Cape in 1795, the Court of Justicc was informed that the barbaric nature of the capital punishment imposed m Company t i mes was hcnccforth to be mitigatcd, so that slaves would mercly be hanged or bcheadcd, they replied as follows:

Pre-Industrial and Industrial Racial Stratification in South Africa

Let us begin with an assumption: the most fitting category with which to analyse the patterns of stratification within modern South Africa are Weberian estates. The problem about so doing, however, is to find a suitable definition of what Weber (or anyone else for that matter) meant by “estates”. Weber himself emphasised honour and style of life as the main determinants of an estate, a status situation, while later commentors have stressed that estates are recruited very largely in terms of primordial loyalties. Individuals are born into estates, but “bot propertied and propertyless peoples can belong to the same status group, and frequently they do, with very tangible consequences”. Thus the nations, “tribes” and ethnic groups of southern Africa would seem, at first sight, to be estates, although the Weberian criterion of “honour” would have to be replaced by others stressing the ways in which conquest situations created designation of people with presumed distinct ancestry and thus ascription.1