When groups meet in frontier zones, they have to negotiate many issues, including the ways of using the environment. Because these encounters introduce and establish new environmental relations, they are of particular interest to environmental historians. In early Kuruman, as in other places, frontier encounters provided fuel for a dynamic of change. In fact, the two major considerations of this book – social difference in environmental relations and the process of intensification – first appeared with the agro-pastoral frontier washing over Kuruman in the eighteenth century. Thus, our starting point for the environmental history is the shift from foraging to herding and growing crops and the associated political and social changes on the agro-pastoral frontier.

Broadly speaking, southern African frontiers involved contact between three economic groups that largely correspond to linguistic groups. The first inhabitants were foraging “bushmen,” or “San,” who spoke the click languages of the Khoisan family. Second were the Khoikhoi, also speaking a Khoisan language, who kept stock, although they did not cultivate. Third and last appearing were the agro-pastoralists, whose men herded cattle, sheep, and goats, while the women cultivated with iron tools.