Gquma, Mdepa and the Amatshomane clan: a by‐way of miscegenation in South Africa

SYNOPSIS

In 1791 Jacob van Reenen, who kept the journal of an expedition sent from Cape Town to search for possible survivors from the Grosvenor East Indiaman, wrecked on the coast of Pondoland in 1782, reported the existence of Bantu clans of mixed blood, some of whose ancestors were European and Asiatic. The author has collected all available information about these peoples, and has traced their movements from the second half of the eighteenth century to recent times. He has also furnished a chronological table of important events in the lives of certain members of these clans, and genealogical tables showing how European and Asiatic blood has spread in those areas inhabited by them. He has, further, obtained and identified the photograph of one member of the clan descended from a European woman, and has finally demonstrated that the foreign ancestors of both clans were wrecked on the Pondoland coast many years before the Grosvenor disaster.