The Borders of Race in Colonial South Africa: The Kat River Settlement, 1829-1856

The Borders of Race in Colonial South Africa: The Kat River Settlement, 1829-1856. By Robert Ross. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xvii, 340; illustrations, maps, diagrams, appendices, notes, bibliography. $99.00 cloth.The Borders of Race is the 128th volume in the Cambridge Press's prestigious African Studies Series. It is the third volume in the series by Robert Ross, emeritus professor of African History at Leiden University, after Adam Kok's Griquas (No. 21, 1976), and Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750-1870 (No. 98, 1999). One of the most prolific scholars on South Africa, particularly of the country's history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ross most recently co-edited the two-volume Cambridge History of South Africa (2009, 2011).In this case study, Ross focuses on a few hundred Khoekhoe families who settled in the Upper Kat River Valley, in the Eastern Cape in 1829, with the permission of the commissioner-general of the Eastern Province, Andries Stockenstrom. The Kat River Valley lay in the Ceded Territory between the Fish and Keiskamma Rivers, that is, the borderland between white settlement to the west and the amaXhosa and other black societies to the east. Like all good micro-histories, Ross's work places this small border settlement within a larger context, during a period that was, Ross argues, "both metaphorically and literally at the center of much of what was most significant in the creation of colonial South Africa" (p. 4). Because of the availability of a rare plethora of archival source material on the Kat River settlers, who enjoyed spectacular and nearly unrivalled agricultural success, Ross is able to "investigate the borders between the major socioeconomic and racial blocks, so as to see how the lines of division were created and controlled" (p. 8).In nine astutely detailed chapters Ross recounts the tumultuous history of the Kat River settlement. He begins his study by describing the Kat River Valley-its geography, its inhabitants, and its history as a borderland-in the years prior to the settlement. It is a rich history, beginning with an early San and Khoekhoe presence, followed by the arrival of different amaXhosa branches, some colonial renegades, colonial farmers, and livestock herders who moved in and out of the territory with the seasons, and the arrival of the first European missionaries. Chapter 1 concludes with a discussion of Ordinance 50 (1828), and the seizing of Xhosa land to form a neutral zone between the colony and the Xhosa, which took the name, the Ceded Territory. …