The British force attempted to obey the instruction to ‘gently hush’ the Zuurveld Xhosa over the Fish River, but it had to beat a hasty retreat to its ship in Algoa Bay. Sensing that they were being left in the lurch and afraid of returning to their masters, many of the Khoikhoi joined the Zuurveld Xhosa and began raiding farms over a broad swathe. In their ranks were many who had fought in burgher commandos and knew all their strengths and weaknesses. They had both horses and guns and were backed up by large numbers of Xhosa fighters on foot. Suffering from an acute shortage of ammunition, with the government having cut supplies, the colonists embarked in headlong flight. The insurgents raided far and wide, burning farms and carrying away stock. By mid-1799 virtually all the Zuurveld farmers had fled.
The situation was destabilised further by the arrival in Graaff-Reinet of the Rev. Johannes van der Kemp, a Dutch missionary employed by the London Missionary Society (LMS). In the town he encountered James Read, another LMS missionary, and decided to join him. With nearly 1 000 Khoikhoi converging on the town of Graaff-Reinet to seek security and food, Landrost Maynier provided supplies and allowed the missionaries to use the colonists’ church for religious instruction. The Boers planned to attack the town but held off. Just before the British left they gave the two missionaries an abandoned farm near Algoa Bay to establish a mission station. They called it Bethelsdorp. Xhosa raids continued. By early 1803 observers put the number of farms ‘burnt, plundered and abandoned’ at 470, a figure equal to almost half of the farms registered in Graaff-Reinet and Swellendam. Stock losses were estimated at 50 000 cattle and 50 000 sheep. A wealthy Western Cape farmer believed the losses so enormous that the Graaff-Reinet district would not return to prosperity for fifteen years.
Bethelsdorp, the mission station that the two missionaries Johannes van der Kemp and James Read established on an abandoned farm in 1803.
The representatives of the Batavian Republic who administered the Cape from 1803–1806, like the British before them, deplored the brutality with which some frontiersmen treated their servants. But the farms needed labour and the Batavians saw no alternative but for the Khoikhoi to return to the farms. When some chiefs accepted land offered to them by the government, their resistance disintegrated. To improve control over the interior, the government established two new districts, Tulbagh in the west and Uitenhage, with a drostdy of the same name, near Algoa Bay.
In 1806 Britain took possession of the Cape again. Stability on the frontier steadily deteriorated, with no single pocket of power able to assert its authority. In 1807 Ngqika was badly beaten in a battle by his rival, Ndlambe, and fled with his followers to the Amatola mountains, where, it is said, even his own children starved. Ndlambe and Chungwa were now in control of the Zuurveld.
