The margins of order: strategies of segregation on the eastern Cape frontier, 1806‐c. 1850

Abstract

This paper draws attention to the inconsistent development of segregationist strategies on the eastern Cape frontier during the nineteenth century. It argues that the primary thrust of official segregationist strategy shifted throughout the century in response to Xhosa resistance, the material demands of colonists and competing discourses surrounding ‘the Xhosa’. A periodisation is developed around three broad phases. In the first, the colonial state attempted the complete economic and cultural exclusion of Xhosas from the colonial margins. In the second, spanning the period in which overt Rarabe Xhosa resistance was finally crushed, attempts to maintain spatial separation between colonists and Xhosa were tempered by efforts to modify Xhosa culture in order to render Xhosas more amenable to the colonial presence. Spatial exclusion was accompanied by degrees of attempted cultural inclusion. The intensity and scope of these efforts, however, shifted in accordance with changing frontier conditions. In a third phase towards the end of the nineteenth century, the eastern Cape became enmeshed in a wider, industrial form of segregation premised upon both spatial and cultural exclusion, but with the fundamental addition of more efficient mechanisms for controlled labour absorption. However, constructions of the Xhosa generated during earlier phases provided legitimation for this subsequent system of industrial segregation.