Over the previous 40 years the Xhosa, in the eyes of the Boers, had been many things – foes, certainly, but also trading partners, labourers and potential military allies. Instead of concentrating on dislodging the Xhosa and making it impossible for a return, the commandos focused on capturing cattle.
Colonel John Graham established Grahamstown in the immediate aftermath of the Fourth Frontier War (1811–1812), when he used a large force to drive many of the Zuurveld Xhosa across the Fish River.
It was the British military that would try a radical solution: total expulsion by an overwhelming force. To Colonel John Graham, the officer who would conduct the expulsion, the Xhosa were simply ‘horrid savages’. He ordered the pursuit of plundering parties of Xhosa to their settlements where ‘every man Kaffer’ who could be found was to be slain. If possible the chief had to be ‘destroyed’. All was designed to inspire the Xhosa with ‘a proper degree of terror and respect’ to prevent their return.
In the final months of 1811 a large force was assembled of 440 British troops, 431 Khoikhoi soldiers and 450 burghers on commando. In the first three months of 1812 this force expelled some 8 000 Xhosa from the Zuurveld and destroyed their crops. A series of forts was built along the border. Two new frontier villages, Grahamstown and Cradock, were marked out.
For the Xhosa, the expulsion of 1811–1812 and the follow-up operation were new and shattering experiences, nothing less than total war. The number of lives lost, the killing of the chief Chungwa in his bed by soldiers and the destruction of Xhosa chiefdoms in the Zuurveld were incomprehensible to them. They discovered that the colony could draw on more military and other resources than they could ever imagine. Nor did the conquerors deign to incorporate the defeated into their society. They were pushed away as if they were not fit to live with. The military expedition etched out the ‘otherness’ of Africans and Europeans in the starkest possible way.
