How the Settlement of the Dutch at the Cape affected the Khoisan people

How the Settlement of the Dutch at the Cape affected the Khoisan people

It affected them politically, economically and socially;

As the Dutch settlers moved further in land, they immediately disrupted the San way of life. The San were driven to drier and upland areas where they lived desperate attempts to survive.

The San resorted to cattle raiding when game became scarce. The Boer farms were raided at regular intervals during the first half of the Eighteenth Century, which forced the Boers to retaliate ruthlessly and the San were hunted down like animals.

The captured San usually women and children were enslaved by the Boers. The surviving San were forced to withdraw to the desert margins in the North and to the Drankensburg ranges in the Northeast of South Africa.

The Khoikhoi constantly lost their grazing land to the Boer cattle farmers.

The Khiosan herders in the new frontier areas like the Choeho before them, lost their livestock and land.

In response, the Khoikhoi were forced to raid the Boer cattle as a way of revenge for the loss of their grazing land.

After losing their land, several Khoikhoi began working on Boer farms as manual laborers. Some of them became migrant laborers and they were now dependent on the Dutch.

The Khoikhoi near the Cape were tempted to give away their cattle and land to the Dutch traders in exchange for among others beads, tobacco and alcohol.

The Dutch settlers adopted some characteristics of the Khoisan, for instance religion, the use of herbs and other ways of life.

Some of the Khoikhoi established viable settlements in the interior after acquiring some of the European characteristics like the Griqua and the Korana who settled near the Orange River and the Nama who settled in Namibia.

As a result of loss of land and cattle, the social, political and economic structure of the Khoikhoi was disrupted They broke up into smaller groups and dispersed with no culture of their own.

New diseases like small pox and venereal diseases to which the Khoikhoi were not immune were introduced and many of them died especially in the early Seventeenth Century.

Although the Dutch despised African slave women, they got married to them and the result of these inter-marriages was a new race of half-castes called the Coloreds.

A new language was also developed as a result of this intermixing. This language was known as Afrikaan language and by 1820 many coloreds had adopted this language.

The Boers had no respect for the San and hunted them like animals in the arid plains, mountains and caves.

The San who were caught usually women and children were enslaved by the Boer settlers.

The white man’s liquor also helped to kill more and more of the Khoisan