In 1779 Willem Prinsloo, a farmer living in the vicinity of Bosberg, near the present Somerset East, shot a Xhosa dead. Soon the incident escalated into a war, with raids and counter raids. The district authority in Stellenbosch called out a commando under Adriaan van Jaarsveld. They seized back some 5 000 head of cattle and drove the Xhosa over the central sector of the eastern border.
He and his men also perpetrated a massacre. Encountering a group of Dange in the field, Van Jaarsveld tossed out some pieces of tobacco to them and gave the order to fire while they were scrambling to pick them up. This massacre was remembered for many generations among the Xhosa, who gave Van Jaarsveld the nickname of the ‘Red Captain’. The focal point of the interaction between the frontier farmers and Xhosa now shifted to the Zuurveld. It was narrowly defined as the area between the Fish and the Bushman rivers, but more broadly as extending to the Sundays River and Algoa Bay.
In 1786 the government carved out a new district with a drostdy in Graaff-Reinet. Moritz Hermann Otto Woeke was appointed as landdrost for the new district. He soon grasped the impossibility of attempting to impose laws in the district with only three or four messengers-cum-policemen as his staff. In despair, he reported that unless he was supported by 50 or 60 soldiers ‘the rot will continue . . . and if not suppressed will increase to such an extent that everyone will act arbitrarily and do everything at his sweet will’.
