The Inception of Policing and the Emergence of the Frontier

On 19 May 1659, Jan van Riebeeck, the governor at the Cape of Good, called an urgent meeting of free burghers and his fellow officials of the Dutch East-India Company (VOC) to discuss “malicious robbing and thieving” they had suffered at the hands of the Goringhaiqua people. In the seven years since the company’s arrival at Table Bay, relations with the Khoi had been tolerable, but not warm. When they came to the summer pasturage at Table Bay, the Goringhaiqua would trade away some of their cattle and sheep, but never in large enough quantities. The governor noted with annoyance how the Goringhaiqua grazed their cattle and sheep right up against the wooden walls of the fort and ignored altogether the hedges that encircled the outpost’s newly planted gardens. But when van Riebeeck granted freeholds in the Liesbeek Valley to a handful of his former employees in the hopes of increasing the production of produce, the tenor of relations turned. The Goringhaiqua began seizing crops and livestock in a clear attempt to tip the outpost into ruin.

Neither van Riebeeck nor the farmers in the Liesbeek Valley were wholly surprised by this development. For at least two years, the farmers, who had been granted the status of burghers (“citizens”), had been going about their duties armed. In recent days, they had petitioned van Riebeeck to sanction their formation into a militia, modeled on those in the VOC’s colony at Batavia (present-day Jakarta), a demand that he granted.Footnote ¹ But even so, the burghers continued to lose their newly gained property—cattle, sheep, tobacco, and even the shares of their plows. As they argued during the 19 May meeting, it was clear that peace and security would only be achieved through war.

The governor, however, was more wary. Any course of action, he cautioned, must be made to “ensure the greatest benefit of the Honorable Company.”Footnote ² War could disrupt trade, cutting the outpost off from an essential supply of food and resources. Moreover, in war, the burghers might face “greater hardships…than they could think of.”Footnote ³ After all, the Goringhaiqua leader Doman had been to Batavia and witnessed the people of Java burn the VOC station there to the ground. Should something similar happen to the burghers, the company would not compensate them for their losses nor release them from their debts. He informed them, “Each would have to bear his own burden.”Footnote ⁴ But despite the governor’s cautions, the freemen were adamant. Van Riebeeck reported the burghers’ words to his superiors in Amsterdam: “They were prepared to face all dangers at their own risk. Indeed, this would be far better than continuing to live in such insecurity.”Footnote ⁵

With the terms settled, the entire outpost mobilized. Alliances with neighboring Khoi groups were formed and dissolved, the enslaved people who had been recently brought from Angola and Guinea were armed, and the company garrison and burgher militia attacked the Goringhaiqua in a series of clashes that ended with Doman wounded and his people dispossessed. To seal their control over the land, van Riebeeck ordered that an almond hedge be planted in the shape of a wall like those used by the lords of Cologne.Footnote ⁶ The remnants of the hedge, which briefly marked the colony’s frontier, still survive in Kirstenbosch National Botanic Garden today. The institution founded by van Riebeeck and the burghers would be less enduring. Still, the militia or commando system, as it was often later known, would serve as the colony’s primary police force for the next two centuries.

Of all of the early European colonial settlements on the African continent, the Cape Colony has perhaps received the most sustained scholarly attention. Yet despite this wealth of scholarship, little has been written about the systems of policing that operated under Dutch rule. Not a single monograph or article has been dedicated to policing. Where it is mentioned, it appears only in passing. Facing this gap, one is left to conclude that policing either did not exist in the early Cape or that it played a marginal role in the colony’s economic and political development.

Such a view has been—perhaps unintentionally—reinforced by leading historians of the period. In their brief discussions of policing, Shula Marks and Hermann Giliomee emphasized the weakness of the colony’s police apparatus. Marks writes: “The authority of the full-time magistrate or landdrost…was without adequate police force and could hardly control the trekboer, who was accustomed…to taking law into his own hands.”Footnote ⁷ Giliomee echoes the point: “The Company’s authority was further undermined by the inadequacy of its military and police force…the landdrost could not remotely claim to monopolise the use of force.”Footnote ⁸

Though factually accurate, both Marks and Giliomee implicitly hew to a definition of policing that has become outmoded. As historians like Micol Seigel have argued, policing—though often associated with the state—has never been fully monopolized by the state nor done exclusively by its agents.Footnote ⁹ Indeed, as any number of Africanists have documented, private actors—like for-profit security firms, vigilante groups, and militias—have come to supplement, and in many cases supplant the state’s police in much of the continent today.Footnote ¹⁰ In light of this reality, scholars of policing have abandoned the conventional definition of policing used by Marks and Giliomee and proceeded from the understanding that the practice can and often is carried out by non-state actors.

This article draws on this insight to reframe the historiography of policing in the early Cape Colony. It argues that the systems of policing that developed in the colony under Dutch rule (1652–1806) were not so much weak or incapable as they were intentionally privatized—as evidenced by van Riebeeck’s negotiations with the burghers in May 1659.

Beginning with an examination of Dutch imperialism, this article explores how, within the empire, profit-making was inseparable from war-making and how waging war was indistinct from policing. It goes further to show how the VOC’s focus on reducing costs at the Cape created a persistent tendency to outsource the risks of war and policing by privatizing the control over legitimate violence in the colony. Privatization manifested differently as the frontier expanded outwards from the company’s center of power in Cape Town to its agricultural core around Stellenbosch and Paarl and the pastoral frontier beyond. But in detailing how policing developed differently in these different zones of the colony, I also show how the company’s tight control over the market at the Cape ensured that, for most of its subjects, security required domination and survival necessitated ever-escalating dispossession of indigenous land, livestock, and labor. In this sense, policing formed a crucial intermediate mechanism, translating the pressures of mercantile capitalism into a voracious and ever-expanding frontier—one that not only dispossessed indigenous communities but also incorporated them into its structures of domination and accumulation.Footnote ¹¹

In doing so, I seek to advance the field of African carceral studies, which has been interested in the evolution of police and prisons on the continent. By offering the first account of the systems of policing that developed in Dutch South Africa, I venture into uncharted territory within the subfield. While previous scholarship has focused on the function and evolution of these institutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I show how the oft-noted militarized character of policing in Africa has deep origins.Footnote ¹² By showing how the commando operated as both a police and military institution, I argue that the militarization of African police forces can be traced to the early mercantile Atlantic, where war was indispensable to the construction and maintenance of empire. More critically, however, I seek to illuminate the tight relationship between policing, mercantilism, and processes of racialization in the early colonial world. By documenting how policing was used to forcibly integrate indigenous wealth, land, and labor into global markets, I show how policing as an engine of domination and dispossession became a primary mechanism through which race—as a group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death—gained everyday force in the early Cape.Footnote ¹³

One final note on periodization. While I am primarily interested in the forms of policing that emerged under Dutch rule (1652–1806), my analysis extends up to 1830. I adopt this somewhat unconventional periodization for a simple reason that the social and political processes unleashed by the mercantile economy installed by the VOC, which shaped policing and gave rise to the frontier, did not terminate with the beginning of British rule. Indeed, as we will see, these processes continued to have significant effects, especially in the Southern African interior, where British control was either weak or nonexistent well into the nineteenth century.

War and Profit in the Private Empire

As the first conflict between settlers and indigenous people at the Cape, the First Khoikhoi-Dutch War of 1659–60, recounted above, offers a tempting starting point for understanding the society that emerged at the Cape. But the company’s early beginnings at the Cape cannot be understood in isolation. If one traces the threads that link the Cape to Cologne, to Batavia and Bantam, Angola and Amsterdam, it becomes clear that war did not erupt spontaneously between the Goringhaiqua and the Dutch. When they arrived at the Cape, the Dutch were already at war.

When the VOC was formed, the Dutch Republic was thirty years into what would be an eighty-year war against the Spanish Habsburg Empire, which had ruled the lowland countries since 1506. When the republic finally won its independence in 1648, war did not cease. Indeed, during the seventeenth century, the republic at some point fought against nearly every major European power, including France, England, and Portugal.

War served to preserve the Netherlands’ delicate sovereignty and established the tiny state as a global economic powerhouse. The growing power of the Dutch navy, constituted by the VOC and the Dutch West India Company (WIC), allowed the republic to corner markets across the globe.Footnote ¹⁴ War was seen as the driving force behind the republic’s success. As a 1650 pamphlet addressed to the Dutch people put it: “War, impoverishing all other nations and Empires, has made you rich, has flooded your country with silver and gold, peace makes you poor. War has made all industries and traffics grow and prosper, peace makes them disappear and decay. War has been a bond of union and accord, peace of strife and discord.”Footnote ¹⁵ This tight relationship between war and commerce was a general feature of the early mercantile Atlantic. In Vincent Brown’s words, it was “imperial militarism [that] made the growth of commerce possible and profitable.”Footnote ¹⁶

Dutch prosperity came at the expense of those it dispossessed. Wars against European rivals aimed at commandeering their colonial possessions; imperial clashes were followed by wars against those whose land, wealth, and people the VOC and WIC sought to plunder. In the seventeenth century, the VOC fought wars against indigenous people in present-day Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Japan, and South Africa.Footnote ¹⁷

But even when it secured a foothold, Dutch rule was always tenuous and under threat. The extractive nature of the societies it forged produced new populations of the desperate and disaffected—pirates, bandits, the enslaved, and the otherwise dispossessed—who sought constantly to reverse their position. Under these precarious conditions, any challenge to Dutch rule was tantamount to war. And those institutions that were deployed in war, like the burgher militia, were the same that were deployed to impose order internally, giving them, in the words of historian John Laband, a “quasi-police, quasi-military” quality.Footnote ¹⁸

Contemporary observers, however, only rarely described these institutions as “police.”Footnote ¹⁹ The modern Dutch word politie (Dutch: “police”), at the time, meant something like “administration” or “policy” and was used to describe all manner of governance.Footnote ²⁰ Within the Dutch Republic, the institution charged with keeping the peace—upon which the burgher militia had been modeled—known as the schutterij (Dutch: “shooting guild” or “civic guard”) had both civil and military duties. During times of peace, the male citizens who manned its ranks were charged with night patrols of the town’s streets, while during times of war, they joined the republic’s standing armies on the town’s battlements and in the fields on campaigns.Footnote ²¹ In the colonies where the empire’s subjects were yesterday’s enemies, the distinction between wartime and peacetime duties broke down entirely, ensuring that what we today would call policing in the early Cape was wholly indistinguishable from war-making.

If the militia was a product of the wars that pervaded the Dutch empire, it was also an artifact of the empire’s approach to making war profitable and sustainable. As Pepijin Brandon observes, the Dutch Republic defies familiar narratives about the relationship between war and state formation. Despite fighting several long, globe-spanning wars, the republic did so without a centralized government or extensive bureaucracy. Rather, the Dutch state operated as what Brandon calls “a brokerage and contractor state,” outsourcing most of governance to financiers, military recruiters, small-scale producers, shipbuilders, and mega-corporations.Footnote ²² It was these private enterprises that marshaled the labor, capital, materials, and expertise necessary for the empire to survive and thrive.

The largest of these enterprises—the chartered trading companies like the VOC and WIC—operated abroad as states in their own right. Under Dutch law, the VOC was empowered to coin money, establish colonies, and wage war. But while it outstripped the Dutch state in military power and administrative capacity, VOC’s economic interests tied it to the interests of the state. The state often subsidized the mega-corporation in times of financial hardship, and the VOC lent its ships, weapons, and capital to the state in times of war.Footnote ²³ These sorts of mutually beneficial relationships between the state and its many private contractors formed a web that joined the diverse interests of merchant capital to the interests of the nation, blurring the lines between the two in the process. Contractors controlled their own profits and operations, while the state enjoyed a lower fiscal and administrative burden.Footnote ²⁴ And while companies and state administrators sometimes argued over taxes and lending terms, the system of public-private partnerships worked well. The wealth from the imperial periphery flowed into Dutch ports. The nation’s sovereignty was secure, and its elite became the world’s leading capitalist class.

Martial Entrepreneurs on the Imperial Frontier

So, when Jan van Riebeeck granted his former employees land and approved their petition to form a private militia, it was a solution that all involved would have found familiar and favorable. Many of the burghers entered into the company’s service in Amsterdam through military recruiters and, as will be seen, had strong incentives to become landowners. The VOC’s board of directors—known as the Heren XVII (Dutch: “the seventeen gentlemen”)—certainly would have seen the benefits of turning some of their employees into private contractors.

Indeed, the decision aligned with the company’s strategy. Though instrumental to commercial success, the VOC’s wars in Southeast Asia were also expensive; the Heren and their shareholders repeatedly objected to the size of military expenditures.Footnote ²⁵ Since it was impossible to avoid war, VOC administrators sought to reduce its impact on profits. The pressure to keep costs down was particularly acute at the Cape. As the waystation for the company’s ships coming and going from the Indian Ocean, the outpost was crucial to trade, but ultimately ancillary to profits. Any investment beyond what was required to refresh ships was better returned to investors or spent elsewhere in the empire—as the Heren XVII often reminded the governor.Footnote ²⁶

The early outpost’s failure to become self-sufficient put van Riebeeck in a bind. Repeated crop failures led the governor to consider taking Khoi livestock by force, writing: “Would it matter so much if one deprived them of some 6 or 8 thousand cattle?”Footnote ²⁷ Releasing some of his employees from their service did not increase the military or economic power of the outpost, but it did allow the company to shift the costs of war. With each burgher bearing “his own burden,” the governor could redistribute risk, enjoying war’s dividends while others paid its costs. In feudal Europe, militias were based on the social contract between lord and peasant; on the edge of the Dutch empire, it became a thoroughly commercial affair—one formed by a consensus about the productivity of mortal risk.

Citizen militias were a common feature of colonial societies; across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean basins, colonial officials offered the castoffs of Europe a similar bargain—expropriated land in exchange for military service.Footnote ²⁸ But the Cape’s ancillary position in the empire ensured that the burgher militia would play a larger role than their counterparts elsewhere. In the wars of dispossession waged against the Cochoqua people in the late 1600s, free burgher militiamen fought alongside company soldiers.Footnote ²⁹ By 1715, commandos made entirely of burghers were being dispatched.Footnote ³⁰ By the end of Dutch rule, it was burgher infantry and cavalry, not the garrison, who made up the bulk of the force defending Cape Town against British assault.Footnote ³¹

The company came to rely more and more on burghers simply because it allowed them to dedicate more men to the East Indies where, in their words, “the preservation of our possessions is of much greater importance than at the Cape.”Footnote ³² Instructions written for the incoming governor in 1670 encapsulated company policy nicely. It stated: “Our principal force and support in this place should actually consist of burghers and farmers… Your Excellency will need to continue to apply every faculty and effort to increase the number of colonials…so that our garrison may gradually be reduced, but our fortress still defended without concern.”Footnote ³³ Unlike company employees, burgher militiamen were compensated in expropriated land, not wages, and expected to provide their own uniforms, weapons, horses, and provisions—despite taking time away from their fields and herds.Footnote ³⁴

What the militia gave the company in profits, the company lost in control. For the more affluent, militia duty offered an opportunity to show off their newly gained status as burghers. Visitors described how burghers on parade “loaded [their uniforms] on each side with coat buttons, pieces of money, and the like” and were “puffed up with pride” in comparison to soldiers in the garrison.Footnote ³⁵ But for the majority, militia duty was a serious inconvenience and a drain on resources. Many refused to attend. Some destroyed the placards calling them to muster, others ignored them altogether.Footnote ³⁶ The landdrost (Dutch: “VOC district magistrate”) could levy fines for these acts of defiance, but they were often more rumor than substance. Burghers exercised considerable say over when, how, and whom they would serve. As befitting their status as citizens, burghers elected their own leaders, known as veld-kornets (Dutch: “field captains”).

While veld-kornets had the unilateral power to order a punitive expedition or “commando,” as Susan Newton-King shows, they rarely did so without their men’s consent.Footnote ³⁷ Because military success depended, in large part, on the number and fortitude of the men involved, commandos’ aims usually aligned nearly with its members’ own self-interest. On the pastoral frontier, where burghers lived more-or-less nomadically, commandos became explicitly entrepreneurial. For reasons discussed below, burghers often refused to go on commando without the promise of cattle, captives, or new pastureland. Far from dutiful subjects, the militia became something beyond the control of officials in Amsterdam or Cape Town. It was a machine of dispossession, expanding the settlement far beyond the modest designs of the company.

Labor, Debt, and Discipline from Amsterdam to Cape Town

It was, in no small part, the VOC’s dependence on indentured labor that drove these expansionary pressures in the early years of Dutch rule. While men like van Riebeeck were from upper-class families, the majority of the company’s employees at the Cape came from the lower rungs of European society. Otto Mentzel, one of the foremost chroniclers of life at the Cape in the eighteenth century, described the typical enlistee as someone “who, through poverty and through the utter absence of all other means of help, is driven to go to Holland, and from there as a soldier to the East.”Footnote ³⁸ Throughout the period of Dutch rule, there was no shortage of men in such dire straits. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Thirty Years’ War had wreaked devastation on central Europe. The Thirty Years’ War was followed by the Nine Years’ War and the War of Spanish Succession. These wars were in turn followed by the Seven Years’, French Revolutionary, and Napoleonic wars, each one supplying a new generation of young men with at least some martial experience and little in the way of economic prospects.Footnote ³⁹ Mentzel who was himself a German-born enlistee, described how such men “forced their way into the service of the company” in the courtyard of Amsterdam’s East India House:

Would-be recruits bribed officials, leaped over the heads of their peers in the crowd, and clung desperately to the façade of the building to secure a place as a soldier of fortune.

These men did all this not just because they were destitute. They were also in debt to Amsterdam’s ruthless labor brokers, who waited for the penniless on the outskirts of town. In exchange for a share of their future salary as a soldier for the VOC, these labor brokers offered food and lodging. Originally designed by the company as a way to send remittances to wives and families in Europe, these shares, known as transportbriefs (Dutch: “transport letters”), were tradeable. Because the death of the debtor rendered the letter void, labor brokers preferred to sell their transportbriefs to “rich capitalists [who] hazard their money on this kind of venture.” Since a shipwreck or smallpox outbreak could wipe out an entire portfolio, transportbriefs were inherently risky assets to own. But those buyers who could securitize them with less volatile assets stood to make a killing. If the employee served the full five years of their contract, the holder made a 2150 percent return, some 172 guilders on an eight guilders investment.Footnote ⁴¹ These profits were not without significant cost to the debtor; 172 guilders amounted to a year and a half of wages.

Those recruits who were lucky enough to escape the labor brokers soon found themselves indebted to the VOC. Soldiers’ room and board at the Cape was paid out of future wages. Beds, linen, socks, shoes, and replacement uniforms were not provided; all these, too, had to be bought. Nickeled, dimed, and indebted, company soldiers, Mentzel estimated, lived on less than two stuivers a day (.10 guilder)—an allowance insufficient to buy “a little portion of meat at the meanest eating-houses.”Footnote ⁴²

Poverty drove many to extremes. Many sought to stow away on homebound ships. Some tried to escape overland. Others contemplated suicide. Siegfried Alleman, a friend of Mentzel, at one point became so delirious after days of low rations that he turned his musket on himself, escaping death only when two passing soldiers snatched away his gun. Mutinies, too, were a serious threat; in 1649, van Riebeeck discovered a plot by a group of soldiers in the garrison to capture the fort, murder its inhabitants, and sail away on the Erasmus, a ship at anchor in Table Bay.Footnote ⁴³

Despite this, the company relied on the garrison to impose order in Cape Town. As the company militia, they manned the fort and guardhouse that stood across the main road into town. There, soldiers recorded and taxed all goods entering the city, ensuring that the company’s monopsony—its position as the only buyer for agricultural produce—was unchallenged.Footnote ⁴⁴ Within the city itself, the company militia patrolled regularly to deter deserters and mutineers. If caught, the militia would hand the culprits over to be imprisoned, tortured, or executed at the town’s gallows, whose size and frequency of use shocked even well-traveled visitors like Anders Sparrman.Footnote ⁴⁵ The company militia was also charged with interrupting the more run-of-the-mill disturbances like theft, gambling, drunkenness, and brawling that often erupted in the town’s taverns. In this, they were unreliable. Their miserable lot made them prone to drink and gamble on duty, so much so that the company had to pass a regulation banning soldiers from entering taverns while on watch.

Wary of their soldiers’ lack of discipline, the VOC ordered the formation of a burgher night watch, which became known as the ratelwagt (Dutch: “rattle-watch”), after the wooden alarms they carried on their rounds. These nightly patrols were charged with investigating fires and thefts, ensuring the city’s canals remained clean, and arresting any Khoi or enslaved person on the street after nine o’clock who was found without a lantern to announce their presence.Footnote ⁴⁶ After 1754, they helped enforce the company’s pass laws, which required indentured Khoi and enslaved people to carry letters from their masters permitting them to travel. Until 1722, the ratelwagt was made up of both white burghers and freed Black men, when the two were segregated. The new Black militia was prohibited from carrying arms and charged with preventing crimes like arson and the looting of shipwrecks, which were associated with enslaved people. As Robert Ross writes, this was hardly coincidental. It was a clear message that “manumitted slaves had to justify their freedom by combatting the efforts of their former fellows in bondage.”Footnote ⁴⁷

The change spoke to the rising salience of race in a colony that was becoming ever more dependent on slavery. Indeed, enslaved people fast became the main preoccupation of policing in town. In the early days of the settlement, the Heren XVII had been hesitant to allow shipments of enslaved people to the Cape when enslaved labor were more profitably directed elsewhere. But in 1657, the Heren finally relented; and the following year, ships carrying enslaved people from Angola and Guinea were permitted to sell their human cargo to the company and burghers.Footnote ⁴⁸ By 1731, enslaved people made up more than 40 percent of the colony’s population.Footnote ⁴⁹

As with everything it did, the company sought the most economical way to control enslaved people. In Cape Town and Stellenbosch, the fiscal, who was the legal officer in charge of investigations, prosecutions, and punishment, employed convicts, known as caffers, to serve as jailors, watchmen, and executioners.Footnote ⁵⁰ Drawn from the colony’s bandieten (Dutch: “bandits”), men who had run afoul of the company in other parts of the empire and had been sentenced to hard labor at the Cape, these men were unpaid and lived in the Slave Lodge, where enslaved people owned by the VOC were locked in each night. According to Petrus Borcherds, they went about town on regular patrols, clad in gray uniforms and armed with swords and whips.Footnote ⁵¹ While they worked primarily as overseers for the VOC, they also carried out executions, assisted private slave owners with beatings, and arrested any troublemakers in town, including white burghers.Footnote ⁵²

The men who worked as caffers were reviled, in part, because they confounded the racial hierarchy in the colony. Enslaved people hated them for their brutality, while burghers, too, chafed at the power that they held over them. For some of those men who worked these jobs, these contradictions and the brutalities of the job could be deranging. In 1786, one was driven to insanity and “ran amok,” killing several people on the streets of Cape Town.Footnote ⁵³ In 1709, another by the name of Jan Roskan opened the doors of the jail he was guarding, and escaped with his charges, before turning himself in for reasons that went unrecorded.Footnote ⁵⁴ Others were able to turn their position of isolated impunity to their advantage to run prostitution rings and robbery syndicates in Cape Town.Footnote ⁵⁵ The profits they extracted could be transformed into something like respectability, allowing some to integrate into the city’s free Black community after completing their sentence.Footnote ⁵⁶

Slavery in the Agricultural Core

The men who worked as caffers were not alone in pursuing their own personal fortunes in town. Most of Cape Town was engaged in some form of hustle—licit or illicit. Mentzel wrote, “Every man in the town, be he free burgher, or official, pasganger (Dutch: “artisan”) or free worker, yea even a common soldier, is at the same time a huckster and trader.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Enslaved people caught fish and grew produce to sell on the street. Some burghers set up taverns, while others played on the fluctuations of the city’s commodity market, illicitly buying soap and tobacco from sailors on eastbound ships and reselling to sailors bound for Holland. To scrape together some money for their next meal, drink, or dice game, soldiers trekked around Table Mountain to cut firewood, hunted wild animals for meat, and worked as overseers on burgher farms.Footnote ⁵⁸ Because of the company’s iron grip on trade at the Cape, these hustles were the only means of profit for those without land or a VOC contract.

For soldiers, hustling offered a cushion against debt and poverty—and, if one was lucky, a head start on life after the VOC. Because promotions were rare and salary increases paltry, most soldiers chose to leave the company at the end of their five-year contract. Few, however, returned home to Europe. Ever cost-conscious, VOC ships charged twenty guilders for return passage. Consequently, ships leaving the Cape carried a third as many passengers as those leaving Holland.Footnote ⁵⁹ If even they could afford passage, few ex-employees were willing to spend what little they had on a journey that could just as likely see them shipwrecked as safely delivered home. Most preferred to become burghers, increasing the colony’s population in their aspiration.

Those who had worked as overseers for burghers or seen the farms of the agricultural core that surrounded Cape Town knew the kind of comfortable life they could secure at the Cape. After the lean years of the early outpost, many burgher landowners became rich, some fabulously so. “Many Boers,” Mentzel noted, “possess two hundred or three hundred oxen, one hundred, one hundred-and-fifty or more cows, two thousand to three thousand sheep, forty or fifty horses, twenty, thirty, or more bond slaves, and a large estate.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Many former soldiers leveraged burgher status to great success. Siegfried Allemann, the aforementioned soldier who nearly committed suicide, used the social connections he made as an overseer on a burgher plantation to marry rich. Henning Hüsing, another former VOC soldier and overseer, came to own the winery Meerlust, eventually becoming the colony’s wealthiest citizen.Footnote ⁶¹

The wealth of the emerging burgher gentry was built on slavery. While the Heren XVII still balked at re-directing their own slave ships to the Cape, their decision to allow non-VOC slave ships to sell at the Cape allowed slavery to flourish—especially in the rich, arable land around Cape Town, Stellenbosch, and Paarl. Despite the artificially low fixed prices set by the company for agricultural produce, slavery at the Cape was immensely profitable. As Nigel Worden estimates, “arable slave production [in the Cape] produced profits comparable to, and possibly even exceeding, those calculated for the British Caribbean or the southern United States.”Footnote ⁶² The profitability of slavery fed a persistent demand for land and enslaved people. Mentzel observed, “The expansion of the colony demands an ever increasing number of slaves. Every farmer requires many more slaves than members of his own household to grow his crops and develop his land.”Footnote ⁶³

While the VOC benefited immensely from the abundant wheat, wine, fruit, and meat grown by burgher plantations, the company expected the burghers to supply the violence necessary for production. Burghers were then responsible for instilling terror in those they enslaved. As masters, they were empowered to beat enslaved people for refusing to work, show proper deference, or otherwise submit to their whims. Because they were often outnumbered by those they enslaved, burghers hired overseers or knechts (Dutch: “male servant/mercenary”) who were invested with their patriarchal authority as master. As one knecht who worked at a plantation near Babylonstoren put it: “I am here in the place of a master to them and am obliged to punish them whenever they behave ill to me or to each other.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Towards the latter half of the eighteenth century, mandoors (Malay: “overseer or slavedriver”) who were themselves enslaved, came to replace white overseers, though they were not permitted to use sjamboks, horse whips made of hippo leather.Footnote ⁶⁵

In theory, masters and their agents were restricted in the violence they could use against enslaved people. Under Roman-Dutch law, enslaved people could not be tortured, killed, or otherwise mistreated without cause. But in practice, these restrictions carried little force. Because it was the landdrost who was charged to be “judge between master and slave,” slave owners who violated the law were rarely prosecuted.Footnote ⁶⁶ The landdrost had little in the way of investigative capacity, and often less inclination to use it. After all, he was often a wealthy slave owner himself, and more inclined to help his peers cover up their brutalities than punish them.

More commonly, state agents worked in concert with slave owners. Fiscals ordered the men who worked as caffers to assist burghers with floggings, landdrosts used the company’s jail to imprison “unruly” slaves, and veld-kornets called commandos to retrieve runaways and suppress rebellions. With the passage of the aforementioned pass laws, responsibility for repression was further distributed to citizens who were empowered to apprehend and shoot any enslaved or Khoi person found without a pass.Footnote ⁶⁷

Slave owners’ extreme brutality was, in part, a measure of the fear they felt regarding those they enslaved. Anders Sparrman observed of Stellenbosch: “Everybody in this country is obliged to bolt the door of his chamber at night, and keep loaded firearms by him, for fear of the revengeful disposition of his slaves.”Footnote ⁶⁸ To Sparrman, slave owners’ restless nights were a sign of their unconscious guilt. But the records of the colony show slave owners’ fear was not misplaced. Enslaved people were persistent in fighting the conditions of bondage. They refused to work; broke tools; ran away; stole food, alcohol, and money; set fire to farms and homes; killed livestock; beat knechts; poisoned and killed their owners; and took their own lives.Footnote ⁶⁹ It was enslaved people who, day after day, appeared on Cape Town’s gallows, as the governors’ journals attest. If empire made war a general condition of life, then slavery brought war into the household itself, bottling its violence into the close air of burghers’ homes.

Because of the speed of commandos, the war in the household rarely exploded into full-scale insurrection. But enslaved people who ran away waged what amounted to a low-level guerilla war throughout the eighteenth century. Burghers lived in “continual dread” of these runaways, who were known as drosters (Dutch: “those who have absconded”).Footnote ⁷⁰ Droster communities were agile survivors, living in the caves and gullies of the Cape Fold Mountains, foraging for food and infiltrating the colony to steal weapons and other supplies.Footnote ⁷¹ In the 1730s, drosters were suspected of setting fire to homes in Cape Town. In 1760, droster attacks led to a ban on enslaved people climbing Table Mountain. Throughout the eighteenth century, raids in Stellenbosch and Swellendam by drosters who joined with the Guriqua—a Khoi people who lived north of Table Bay—triggered repeated commandos.Footnote ⁷² Indeed, it was fear of drosters that precipitated the passage of the pass laws and made running away the most frequently punished crime in nearly every district of the colony.Footnote ⁷³ But despite these efforts, droster communities, Robert Ross shows, survived until emancipation.Footnote ⁷⁴ Among them was the Guriqua, who eventually became the most feared military force on the colony’s northern frontier.

Commandos on the Pastoral Edge

Ironically, it was the profitability of slavery that allowed drosters to evade capture for so long. A range of geographic and economic factors ensured that the agricultural areas that surrounded Cape Town, Stellenbosch, and Paarl were thinly populated with burghers. Limited arable land, the high costs for purchasing enslaved people, and the company’s fixed price for produce gave the wealthier slave owners an advantage over their less fortunate peers.Footnote ⁷⁵ These lucky few plowed their profits into more and more land, expanding their property into expansive states and, in the process, opening wide corridors for drosters to travel and maneuver.

Consolidation of land ownership jeopardized not only the colony’s security but also its economic stability. According to Leonard Guelke and Richard Shell, by 1705, the landed gentry made up only 7 percent of the free population, while 40 percent of burgher households reported no assets at all.Footnote ⁷⁶ By 1715, much of the arable land within a day’s ride of Cape Town had been occupied; by 1751, the districts surrounding Stellenbosch and Paarl were beginning to run short of pasturage; by 1775, officials judged arable land in the districts to be entirely settled or exhausted.Footnote ⁷⁷ Land expropriation had been extensive, but it was not enough when so few owned so much and so many so little.

Slavery had once offered a path to affluence for the landless, but by the mid-eighteenth century, it had become an obstacle to the aspirations of the crush of ex-soldiers, landless burghers, and disinherited sons at the Cape. Undercut by slaves in the labor market and outbid by the gentry for property, many found themselves living off alms or credit.Footnote ⁷⁸ This mounting crisis forced the VOC to rescind its ban on grazing stock more than a day’s ride from one’s freehold and allowed burghers to lease “loan farms” in the land over the Cape Fold Mountains. Owning land was preferable to leasing it, but leased land offered a chance at a livelihood—and perhaps as importantly, a wife. The VOC’s recruitment strategy ensured men outnumbered women for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With suitable partners in short supply, some 35 percent of men in the colony never married. But men on the frontier did better than those elsewhere; frontiersmen were more likely to marry and to marry young.Footnote ⁷⁹

The loan farm system was designed as a release valve for the desires of the colony’s young men and the expansionary pressures they embodied.Footnote ⁸⁰ In practice, however, it acted as an accelerant for those pressures. Unlike the agricultural core, the land beyond the mountains was dry and better suited to raising livestock. Because they were renters, burghers worked to grow their herds rather than improve their plots. With little invested in any one piece of land, burghers in the arid interior lost nothing when the soil was exhausted. They could simply load up their wagons and trek to pristine pastures.Footnote ⁸¹

For these trekboers (Dutch: “nomadic pastoral farmers,” lit. “pull-farmers”), as they became known, overstocking was as much a matter of survival as enrichment. Many were in deep debt. Distant though they were from Cape Town, they could not escape the gravitational pull of the city’s markets, where they sold their livestock at a fixed price and bought essential goods like clothing, guns, ammunition, and wagons at a premium.Footnote ⁸² According to one merchant in the eastern Cape, nearly every farmer in the district was “deeply in debt,” some to the tune of 6,000 rixdollars—250 times the annual rent for a loan farm.Footnote ⁸³ Debt necessitated overgrazing, and overgrazing required an endless supply of fresh pastures. For their part, burghers recognized that this process was rooted in the peculiar market at the Cape—though they apportioned more blame to the company’s monopsony than to the plantation economy. In 1779, a group of burghers complained to the VOC that “this defective condition [of the company’s monopsony] has brought about a situation in which many colonists who are not able to subsist on arable farming have had to trek over the mountains.”Footnote ⁸⁴

In this way, the loan farm system took the internal contradictions of the colony’s economy and transformed them into a centrifugal process of land dispossession. By 1720, settlers had dispossessed the Cochoqua, Guriqua, Chainouqua, and San communities who lived south of the Olifants River and east of the Breede River. By 1750, they had taken the land of the Hessequa, Gouriqua, Attaqua, Gamtoos, and Little Namaqua people who lived south and west of the Gamtoos and Buffels rivers. By 1778, trekboers had reached the westernmost Xhosa polities who lived along the Bushmans River, some 700km east of van Riebeeck’s almond hedge.Footnote ⁸⁵

Trekboer militias and the commandos they organized were essential to this process of dispossession. Tight connections with the market at the Cape gave trekboers a sharp military advantage over the Khoi, San, and Xhosa communities on the frontier.Footnote ⁸⁶ As Martin Legassick shows, while indigenous peoples quickly adopted commandos’ hit-and-run tactics, they could not access the same supply of horses, guns, and ammunition from the Cape.Footnote ⁸⁷ As trekboers moved further away from Cape Town, the commando became the central institution of settler life, suffusing the everyday with anticipation of war. Trekboers lived in a constant state of fear and readiness—not unlike slave owners in the agricultural core. A traveler to the mountains near Graaff-Reinet wrote, “An inhabitant of Sneuberg not only lives under the continual apprehension of losing his property but also is perpetually exposed to the danger of being put to death. If he has occasion to go to the distance of 500 yards from the house, he is under the necessity of carrying a musket. He can neither plough, nor sow, nor reap, without being under arms.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Company officials attempted to constrain the pace of land dispossession, fearing it would destabilize the colony. But trekboers argued that their commandos were necessary for the security of their households, property, and the colony at large.Footnote ⁸⁹ However, it is clear that commandos were used not only to defend settlers’ ill-gotten gains. Commandos were often used offensively to release new pastures, and to capture livestock and captives. For example, the first commando sent against Xhosa communities gathered some 2000 cattle and 2500 sheep, which by custom were divided among commando members.Footnote ⁹⁰

Trekboers in Graaff-Reinet, according to the British traveler John Barrow, used commandos as de facto slaving expeditions in their efforts to “extirpate” the San communities they had displaced.Footnote ⁹¹ San women and children were captured en masse and sold westwards to the plantations where demand for unfree labor was high. Others were “apprenticed”—forcibly indentured—to trekboer households, where they were forced to work herding livestock or manufacturing soap.Footnote ⁹² Soap, unlike cattle, could be sold quite profitably at the Cape, and, as Elizabeth Eldredge shows, it was, in part, the VOC’s monopsony that drove what amounted to an internal slave trade—one prohibited de jure, but licit de facto.Footnote ⁹³ Initially focused on Khoi and San communities in the north, commandos raided indigenous communities across the interior of Southern Africa especially after the British banned the maritime slave trade.

Veld-kornets became crucial brokers in the internal slave trade. As commando leaders, they decided how captives were distributed.Footnote ⁹⁴ At times, burghers often begged commando leaders to supply them. One burgher sent his Khoi servant on commando with this message for his veld-kornet: “I have desired my Hottentot to catch a little one for me, and I beg of you that if he gets one, he may be allowed to keep it.”Footnote ⁹⁵ For others, the ability to take captives became their condition for joining commandos; during the Anglo-Xhosa wars, some trekboers would only join British-led expeditions if they were promised its captives as servants.Footnote ⁹⁶ The commando, in short, became an engine of theft—theft of land, livestock, and people. Through violence, it reopened a path for accumulation that the inequalities of the mercantile economy had closed.

The commando’s transformation from a technique of imperial cost-cutting into a machine of settler accumulation had a devastating impact on indigenous communities. Wars reverberated deep into the interior of Southern Africa, as communities close to the frontier staged raids on those farther away to replace the land and livestock lost to white settlers. Constant war deprived Khoi and San peoples of the most basic means of collective social reproduction. Most crucial among these was water. As Leonard Guelke and Robert Shell argue, settlers’ expropriation of the springs and streams of the interior caused many Khoi and San communities to simply disintegrate.Footnote ⁹⁷ Some fled north and east to integrate into Bantu-speaking communities, while others were forced south and west, where they sought work on burgher farms.

Most were indentured and treated little better than enslaved people, but some were integrated into the machinery of the commando. The company had long permitted burghers to evade militia service by sending a servant in their place.Footnote ⁹⁸ These men, known as agterryers (Dutch: “after-riders”), were charged with cooking, tending to the wagons and the wounded, minding any plundered livestock, and reconnaissance.Footnote ⁹⁹ As indigenous societies collapsed, men of Khoi heritage came to make up the bulk of the commando and did much of the fighting.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ As a racial underclass within the commando, they served as shock troops, fighting in positions where the likelihood of death was highest. As H.C.D. Maynier, the landdrost of Graaff-Reinet, noted: “I have always found that when there were not a considerable number of Hottentots with them to be placed in the front and the first to be exposed to danger, [commandos] never succeeded.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Fear of conscription caused many Khoi to flee the colony, but for some, the risks of war had dividends. Members of the commando were entitled to some of the plunder, albeit a lesser share than burghers.Footnote ¹⁰²

Even those frontier communities that remained intact could not avoid becoming imbricated in the circuits of war and dispossession. In 1820, Gontsi, a Rolong chief living some 1300km northeast of Cape Town near Mahikeng, reportedly told the missionary John Campbell that “he had been on commandoes [sic] all his life.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Campbell, who visited the area before the so-called Difaqane, noted how war had penetrated deeply into Rolong life, defining how men told their own life stories. In another interview with another man, Campbell wrote: “Commandoes, or plundering expeditions, being the greatest events which happen in the interior countries of Africa, they are generally the first thing noticed in the life of a South African; of course, in relating his life, he began telling us of the first commando in which he had been engaged.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Because missionaries often served as informal agents of the Cape government, war stories like the one above also served as oblique appeals for ammunition, which Rolong needed to defend themselves from their neighbors, the Griqua.

The aforementioned Guriqua were a Khoi people who originated from the coast area north of Table Bay between present-day Malmesburg and the Olifants River. As they fought and subsequently fled advancing settlement, they absorbed others who were fleeing the depredations of the colony—mostly drosters but also company soldiers who deserted.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ As the frontier marched northwards, the Griqua, as they came to be known, found themselves subject to the pass laws, cattle raids, and conscription.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Seeking autonomy, they moved east into the dry areas across the Gariep (Orange or Senqu) River where, as Legassick shows, they formed independent states. However, even across the Gariep, they were not immune to commando raids. Sovereignty on the voracious frontier required ammunition. And ammunition which was tightly controlled by the company could only be bought with cattle, ivory, captives, or credit.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ As they militarized, the Griqua—alongside related groups like the Koranna—became key players in the internal slave trade and gained a fearsome reputation.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Thomas Arbousset and Francois Daumas, who were on missions in the area, wrote of the Griqua: “From the time of their emigration to the banks of the Gariep, no tribe in the neighbourhood has enjoyed a moment of repose. Furnished with firearms and mounted on good horses, they have pillaged all of the tribes around them in quick succession… Their chiefs have filled all their neighbours with terror. They speak of them as wolves.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

In the eyes of Arbousett and Daumas, Griqua peoples’ investment in war was a sign of their need for Christ’s salvation. Only through “Christianity and civilization” could they hope to abandon their odious notion that “a horse and gun” made one rich. In their writings, however, the missionaries also noted how men in Griqualand often complained of their “debts and loans,” briefly illuminating the momentum of the market that made war their hosts’ means of survival.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Indeed, the Griqua who were both Khoi and commando, slave traders and drosters knew imperial “civilization” better than most.

Race and Dispossession on the Voracious Frontier

From where they stood at the northern extreme of the colony’s frontier, the Griqua represented a certain endpoint for the processes unleashed by mercantile extraction. As seen above, the modus operandi of the Dutch empire produced a situation at the Cape where policing and war-making tended to be privatized—becoming available for a wide range of people and political units, all of whom used violence towards their own ends. The challenge for state actors lay not so much in imposing their political will on these martial entrepreneurs, but by hinging their accumulation to the empire’s through relations of economic dependence—the labor contract, debt, the land lease, the monopsony on produce, the monopoly on ammunition. By and large, this strategy worked well. Emanating outwards from Amsterdam to Cape Town and from the Cape to the agricultural core, the pastoral edge, and beyond, these relations of dependence ensured that the market moved the commando, and the commando fed the market.

But at the same time, these relations of dependence produced unstable contradictions. Insofar as mercantile capital required artificially cheap produce and labor, it generated a political economy that was profoundly unequal, even for settlers. The colony had a surplus of men, whose economic survival was continually under threat, and whose aspirations it could only displace to the frontier. However, because this frontier was outside of the formal political control of the company, but not beyond the reach of its markets, individual accumulation required dispossession of indigenous land, livestock, and labor.

In the process, war and policing became central to the incipient processes of racialization in the colony. As the indigenous societies came under the onslaught and the deprivation, enslavement, and extermination the onslaught brought, they became systematically vulnerable to the forms of premature death that is the hallmark of racialization. It was a process that even those relatively powerful polities like the Griqua could not escape. Enveloped by the colony’s circuits of debt and plunder but deprived of the easy ammunition that was the cornerstone of burgher privilege, the Griqua had no choice but to risk their lives in war, joining the voracious frontier that had once dispossessed them.