A heated debate still rages around the character of European frontier settlement in early colonial South Africa. On the one side of this debate, Leonard Guelke, a historical geographer, has recently revived, and refined, the classic interpretation of an earlier generation of historians, such as George McCall Theal, Eric Walker, and P.J. Van der Merwe. Guelke’s findings, based on detailed research in the Deeds Office in Cape Town, suggest that frontier movement was the last resort of the descendants of the original (pre-1707) settlers. According to this view, the high fertility of the predominantly Dutch and French women led to considerable pressure on the land supply. This “overpopulation” and land shortage forced the younger descendants into the interior. There, these trekboers (migrant farmers), as they came to be known, struggled in an effort to retain their independence and way of life, even at considerable financial loss. At the risk of caricaturing the complex argumentation of this interpretation, we will refer to this as the “diaspora-subsistence” school. On the opposite side of this debate is Solomon D. Neumark, an economic historian, who emphasized the financial opportunities which beckoned from the frontier. While agreeing with the demographic argument, Neumark highlighted the economic gains to be made by stock-raising and trading with the indigenous people. For convenience, if not total accuracy, we may refer to this view as the “entrepreneurial” interpretation of frontier expansion in early South Africa. One could also point out that, whereas Guelke emphasized the demographic push behind the frontier, Neumark saw the economic pull of the frontier. The two are not mutually exclusive, but the exact empirical mix remains elusive in the literature.
Protagonists in this debate assume that immigration from Europe stopped early in the eighteenth century. Therefore, the demographic pressures underlying expansion must have been the result of natural increase of the original settler population. Coupled with the Roman-Dutch practice of partible inheritance and assumed subdivision of property, this natural increase accounted for the rapidity of frontier penetration and settlement.
Guelke and Neumark only disagree about what happened on the frontier: Guelke’s frontiersman is best pictured as a depressed Dutch-speaking would-be squire contemplating his solitude, debts, and the veld. Neumark’s frontiersman, in contrast, is an
active, bright-eyed Yankee trader, who with his wagon-load of trinkets, ironware, and stock, traverses the tricky terrain of the interior. Both they and many other earlier and modern historians share the belief of the importance of the demographic pressures of the large settler family in creating the pre-conditions for European expansion.
Indeed, the emphasis on large family size of the settlers provides a touchstone for much of the historiography of the contemporary Afrikaner volk: the large family size explains the Afrikaners’ emphasis on family values and codes of behavior; it explains the Afrikaners’ patriarchal character; it explains the cherished cultural and biological endogamy of the group; it explains the nostalgia of the plaasroman (farm romance), but most importantly, it explains the ensuing population pressure and dramatic dispersion over the continent. In short this demographic explanation lies close to the heart of all attempts to understand the eighteenth-century European South African. Much therefore is at stake in the debate.
The first hint that this pervasive interpretation is an inadequate explanation for settler expansion into the interior is comparative in nature. If historians of South Africa were correct in their demographic explanation of early South African settler expansion, the New England colonies should provide an analogue for the South African case. For, in New England, there was a clear immigration watershed date: after 1640, immigration stopped for a century.
After this date these colonies were dependent on natural increase for demographic growth. The New England area and the Cape colony should then have some demographic features in common after immigration ceased in each respective area. But it is at this point that the demographic comparison becomes difficult to sustain. Whereas the New England colonies did grow by natural increase, reaching near equal sex ratios by 1700, the settler population of the Cape colony never, in the eighteenth century, reached the point where the number of males equalled the number of females (see Figures 1 and 2).
The regional distribution of adult sex ratios in Figure 2 reveals that throughout the eighteenth century, there was little dramatic downward fluctuation in the maledominated sex ratios. If natural increase were the important component of demographic growth at the Cape, and if there was no immigration, as is held in the traditional view, the sex ratio should have declined quickly, reaching parity in two to three generations. One can see the dramatic effect the French families had on the sex ratio after 1688.
Although both New England and Cape women undoubtedly did have high fertility rates, the consistently high and imbalanced sex ratios at the Cape especially after the 1720s inform us that some other factor interfered with the gross rate of population growth. The only possible explanation for the high sex ratio is sustained immigration of males throughout the eighteenth century. This is confirmed by thousands of requests for burgher status (the rough equivalent of colonial citizenship) by single male employees of the Dutch East India Company (DEIC) and by thousands of applications for leningplaatsen (loan farms) from recently arrived German-speaking immigrants.
It is worth pursuing the demographic history of each colonial area, for frontier settlement in both was in lock-step with quite different demographic pressures. New England frontier movement was due to internal demographic pressures, while South African frontier settlement was due, in part, to external, in this case, European economic pressures, leading to emigration to South Africa. To illustrate, by the end of the eighteenth century, the first U.S. federal census of 1790 revealed sex ratios of below 100 for all the older, settled areas of New England. In Woburn, Massachusetts, for instance, the sex ratio had dropped to eighty-seven. What was happening was that the older settled areas, under pressures of land shortage, were becoming distributing centers for a restless younger male generations. Young males were leaving to go to the western and northern frontiers. In colonial America, the frontier attracted younger males, while the older, settled areas collected the females. This process continued until at least 1840.
A similar process should have occurred in the Cape colony if frontier settlement there was, as historians claim it to be, due to natural increase. However, as Figure 1 and Figure 2 show, this process—males on the frontier, females in the older settled areas— never occurred in South Africa in the eighteenth century. There were no surplus women in the older areas—the Cape and Stellenbosch districts. Stellenbosch, the second oldest district, founded in 1680, consistently had the highest sex ratios throughout the period 1701-1793.
We are far better off if we momentarily jettison the notion that natural increase can—on its own—account for settler expansion and frontier settlement. A comparative perspective from another American colony helps us to understand the process more clearly. The settler population of the Cape colony much more closely resembles the early seventeenth-century male-dominated Virginian population than it does New England. But after the second half of the seventeenth century, mortality of the Virginian indentured male servants inexplicably dropped. Consequently, the colony gradually became less and less dependent on European immigration and more dependent on natural increase. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Virginian natural increase had resulted in near equal sex ratios. The Cape colony, on the other hand, seemed stuck in a male-dominated pattern, which the Virginian population had begun to escape from twenty-five years after the collapse of the Virginian Company in 1624. The point that we must derive from this comparison is that, during each colony’s respective “corporate” periods, their demographic profiles were almost mirror images of each other. The Cape corporate period was the longest in the pre-modern colonial world.
The reason for this similarity is economic. As E.S. Morgan and others have pointed out for Virginia, more labor could be extracted from single men, than from men who had families to support. In this way companies, and later planters and farmers, in each colony avoided paying the reproduction costs of their labor forces and obtained prime male hands at the negligible cost of a sea passage. That the DEIC policy towards single male servant labor paralleled the Virginian Company policy is confirmed by Otto Friedrich Mentzel, himself an ex-Company servant. This German-speaking bachelor draws attention to the meagre pay of the Company and the consequences for anyone contemplating matrimony: “No soldier could marry at the Cape and keep a family on his pay. He is therefore bound to marry a girl with money, or be in a position to earn in any other way sufficient for their livelihood. In either case, he must be prepared to resign from the service.”
Nor was this observation valid only in Mentzel’s time: throughout the eighteenth century we have requests from Company servants which support this comparison with Virginia. Jacobus Brijns, for instance, pleaded with the Council of Policy in 1721, believing “…that by becoming a freeman he will be able the better to support his family and therefore asks for burgher papers.” William Adolph Ackerman, a later immigrant, arrived at the Cape in 1785. Four years later he obtained the Governor’s permission to marry. He therefore petitioned the Council of policy for burgher rights, “finding that he will be better able as a freeman to support his wife and family.” In 1791 he applied for a loanfarm. That the Virginia company and the DEIC had the same labor policy, i.e., employing single European males at low pay, explains the demographic similarity between the two colonies.
Company attitudes to immigration in the Cape Colony, 1657 – 1795
Estimates of immigration
The process of immigration from Europe to the Cape
Towards a typology of European Immigrants
The Hunter-immigrant
The Bywoner immigrant
Conclusion
The character of settler expansion and frontier settlement in South Africa is different from the prevailing interpretations of both the “entrepreneurial” and “diaspora” schools of South African frontier history. Internal demographic pressure and economic attractions on the frontier were only minor aspects of the dispersion of European expansion. A strongly fluctuating European economy was pushing wave after wave of unemployed males outwards. Some of these waves broke on South African shores, in turn setting up locally differentiated demographic ripple effects. But whether these immigrants actually opened up the frontier by trade and hunting as they did in 1702, or married peaceably in the arable areas of the Western Cape, their demographic and cultural pressure was felt. Frontier settlement and settler expansion was as much a function of European economic conditions leading to individuated migration and a delayed citizenship, as it was of the much exaggerated, but to-date, imperfectly understood demographic experience of the original European settlers. The nature of the particular inheritance system at the Cape, which was favorable to women, provides a key explanation for some of the outstanding differences between the North America and the early Cape frontier experience.
* This article originally appeared in The Journal of South African and American Comparative Studies. The complete article can be seen here.
