An unstable peace is one that embitters ‘the losers without depriving them of the capacity for seeking revenge and without establishing a system able to restrain them – and then taking the trouble to make it work’. So wrote an historian of the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. Such a peace also characterised the frontier between the colonists and the Xhosa between 1812 and 1835. Hampered by financial constraints and bewildered by the complexities of the problem, the British governors struggled to formulate a fixed frontier policy. This inconsistency was exacerbated by the Imperial government’s interventions. In all, the policy amounted in the words of Andries Stockenstrom to a ‘vacillating and contradictory doctrine’.Together with the lack of land, a sense of pervasive insecurity gave rise to large numbers of farmers trekking out of the colony in a movement that would become known as the Great Trek.
In the early months of 1812, a colonial force drove the Xhosa over the Fish, but they were by no means conquered. The military force stationed on the Fish River was much too small to deter the Xhosa from engaging in cross-border raids. The colonists remained fearful. In 1817 it was found that 90 of the 145 burgher families in the southeastern region of the colony had abandoned their dwellings, while the rest were ready to flee.
Lord Charles Somerset, who became governor in 1814, was a brash and wilful man with no grasp of the complexities of the frontier problem. He wanted the Xhosa chiefs to assume collective responsibility for thefts under a ‘spoor’ or reprisal system. It was supposed to work as follows: a farmer would report losses to a military post, and a patrol would follow the tracks to the first kraal, which would hand over the stolen cattle or pay compensation. A chief innocent of the theft could recoup the loss by demanding the equivalent number of cattle from the real thieves. From the start it was a disastrous policy. The man on whom part of the burden of making it work fell was Andries Stockenstrom, who became landdrost of Graaff-Reinet in 1815 at the age of 22. His leverage was reduced when the districts of Albany and Somerset were established in 1820, but he remained influential for a considerable length of time.
