From the 1770s the San on the colony’s northeastern frontier offered fierce resist ance when the trekboers encroached on their hunting fields. They were distressed also by the large numbers of game killed by the farmers, often simply for sport. Koerikei, the famous chief of the ‘Chinese’ San, asked a farmer: ‘What are you doing in my land? . . .You have taken all the places where the eland and the other game live. Why did you not stay where the sun goes down, where you first came from?’
Commandos often captured Khoisan women and children left at the scene of a battle. (Painting by F. Steeb.)
The battles of 1770 to 1810 between burghers and San were as merciless as those fought between pastoralists and herders on any frontier. San killed and maimed the burghers’ cattle and sheep at random, murdered herders and mutilated their corpses. Once a farmer woke up in the morning to find his herders slain and 40 cattle and 200 sheep – all his stock – dead. During the last quarter of the eighteenth century the San refused to be deterred by the commandos (see The commando) and began to attack houses as well as livestock. By 1774 the government gave orders to a burgher, Commandant Rudolph Opperman, to head up a commando on the northern frontier. It first had to try to resolve the crisis peacefully, but if that failed, to wage war. The marauders, if necessary, were to be verdelgen, or ‘eradicated’ – that is, killed or expelled – to help the colonists to return to their abandoned farms. The commando, consisting of 100 ‘Christians’ and 150 Khoikhoi, returned at the end of 1774, having killed 503 San and captured 241 across the width of the northern frontier.
Opperman’s commando failed in its principal mission to establish peace. The relentless battle between burghers and San continued. According to official figures, commandos killed 2 480 San and captured 654 between 1786 and 1795, when San captured 19 161 cattle and 84 094 sheep and killed 276 herdsmen, making much of the northeastern frontier uninhabitable for the burghers. British officials considered Sneeuwberg, the large division north of the town of Graaff-Reinet, to be in a state of perpetual warfare in the final years of the century. An aspect of the Opperman commando that deserves to be emphasised is the capturing of San women and children. The government approved of the practice, intending to save lives, particularly during massacres where every member of a San band was shot on the spot. The commandos captured women and children left at the scene of the battle, giving some of the women to the Khoikhoi who had fought with the commando. The children were indentured on the farms until the age of eight een or 25, with the government’s permission.
Soon, capturing women and children became an end in itself for some burghers. In 1780 Dirk Koetse wrote to a militia officer who had called out a commando against some San: ‘I have desired my [Khoikhoi] to catch a little one for me, and I beg of you that if he gets one, he may be allowed to keep it.’ By 1795 there were an estimated 1 000 war captives in the district of Graaff-Reinet, and some burghers asked that those who did commando duty be allowed to sell their captives. In 1817, Andries Stockenstrom, a widely respected landdrost in the district, reported a continuing widespread traffic in San children.
