Encounters at ‘Bushman Station’: Reflections on the Fate of the San of the Transgariep Frontier, 1828–1833

ABSTRACT

The London Missionary Society's mission to the San at Bushman Station near the confluence of the Orange and Caledon rivers has been investigated with a view to gaining insight into the ways in which the San responded to pressures on their cultural integrity and independence, stemming from the steady northward advance of the colonial frontier in the Transgariep during the early nineteenth century. Administered by the missionary assistant James Clark, the missionary encounter at the site serves as a means to ‘see’ how the San sought alternative, or negotiated, outcomes and means of resistance in response to colonial processes of land dispossession and water alienation. Adaptations among San residents at the mission point towards the adoption of a more sedentary way of life and the agricultural cultivation of the land. This suggests that other forms of resistance to the colonial juggernaut were pursued by certain San individuals, families and kinship groups. As the last concerted effort to establish a mission directed towards the San by the LMS, Bushman Station was founded during a distinct phase of the colonial process. The tide of the advancing trekboers could no longer be stemmed and any prospects of maintaining transhumant hunting and gathering on the former scale had been forever curtailed, although not totally lost, allowing syncretistic responses to the material reordering of the San's ways of life envisioned by the missionaries.

Keywords:

• San
• Bushman Station
• London Missionary Society
• Bethulie
• Transgariep
• James Clark
• John Philip