Whites Writing Whiteness
Frontiers and the Eastern Cape – Introductory Reading List
Recommended key reading is indicated with ** against author names
A. USEFUL BACKGROUND READING
Richard Elphick & Hermann Giliomee (eds 1988) The Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1840 Middletown, Con: Wesleyan University Press. (This outstanding collection covers economy and society in the period before the mineral revolution. A good few of the contents are important reading; alas, there is no parallel collection for the period after 1840.)
Rodney Davenport & Christopher Saunders (5th edition 2000, or later) South Africa: A Modern History Basingstoke: Macmillan. (Outstanding, thorough and compendious textbook. To be used for dipping into, rather than necessarily sitting down and reading cover to cover.)
Alan Lester, Etienne Nel & Tony Binns (2000) South Africa Past, Present and Future Harlow: Pearson Education. (The Introduction and Conclusion are helpfully succinct in putting across their key ideas. Sees the economy and its transitions as the key driver of change. Very helpful discussion)
**Neil Mostert (1992) Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People London: Jonathan Cape. (This is huge, in all senses. Good for dipping into.)
B. PRECURSORS ON THE FRONTIER THESIS
**Leonard Guelke (1985) ‘The making of two frontier communities’ Historical Reflections 12, 3, 419-48. (Influential article proposing a view half way between the ‘classic’ frontier argument of Macmillan, Walker & MacCrone, and the ‘revisionist’ one of Leggasick that frontiers are open zones, pointing out that different circumstances exist regarding different frontiers.)
I.D. MacCrone (1937) Race Attitudes in South Africa Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. (Sees individualism, the frontier life style, Calvinism, strong group consciousness, all confirming an ingrained sense of superiority and us and against them views.)
W.M. Macmillan (1927) The Cape Colour Question London: Faber & Gwyer. (Sees 18th century Boers on the frontiers as already having deeply ingrained racial views.)
**Eric Walker (1930) The Frontier Tradition in South Africa London: Oxford University Press. (Sees the isolation of the trekboers leading to a racial outlook. Has been much disagreed with, but early contemporary accounts of trekboer (and more settled groups) institutionalised violence remain recalcitrant.)
C. RECENT FRONTIERS RESEARCH
Edward Cavanagh (2011) The Griqua Past and the Limits of South African History, 1902-1994 Berlin: Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften.
Clifton Crais (1992) White Supremacy and Black Resistance: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770-1865 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (The re-making of the territories now known as the Eastern Cape, from a cultural historical approach that melds interesting theory with rich detail.)
Norman Etherington (2001) The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa, 1815-1854 Harlow, UK: Pearson Education. (Fascinating reconceptualization of a crucial period in South African history on the high veld in terms of all the different peoples on the move there over the crucial period of 1815 to 1854. It provides a still new approach, by treating such matters in a unified way, with the idea of frontiers by implication problematized root and branch.)
Timothy Keegan (1996) Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order Cape Town: David Philip. (The chapter on frontiers is especially helpful.)
**Martin Leggasick (1980) ‘The frontier tradition in South African historiography’’ in Shula Marks & Anthony Atmore (eds, 1980) Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa London: Longman, pp.44-59. (Leggasick’s chapter provides a succinct and highly influential overview of his early thinking about the frontier in the South African past as a complexly open zone. Essential reading.)
**Martin Leggasick (1969/2010) The Politics of a South African Frontier: The Griqua, the Sotho-Tswana and the Missionaries 1780-1840 Basel, Switzerland: Basler Afrika Bibliographien. (In the South African context, Leggasick’s PhD thesis research, from which this book version was published long after, is the key recent work on frontiers, although in fact much subsequent work has arrived at a position closer to Guelke’s. Published in full in this recent book. Important reading.)
**Howard Lemar (ed, 1981) The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared New Haven: Yale University Press. (One of the progenitors of ‘new frontier history’, as a comparative project it now has a clunky feel: each section features a chapter on North America, then a separate chapter on Southern Africa, leaving the reader to do most of the work of making the comparisons. The two introductory chapters, by Thompson and Lemar are however very helpful in this regard.)
Roger Levine (2011) A Living Man from Africa: Jan Tzatzoe…. And the Making of Nineteenth-Century South Africa New Haven: Yale University Press. (Extremely interesting, written in the present tense, which some reviewers have loved but others find annoying and distracting. The focus is Jan Tzatzoe, son of a minor Xhosa chief, later one himself, and a Christian convert adopted in youth by James Read senior. Later returned to the Eastern Cape, and also became an important figure around the 1836 Buxton Committee. Fascinating as a study of a ‘betwixt and between’ person pulled by and attracted to opposing forces in society of the time.)
Susan Newton-King (1999) Masters and Servants on the Cape Eastern Frontier 1760-1803 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Good detailed study, important on the trajectory of change. See especially here the Postscript, which reflects critically, fairly and insightfully on the frontier literature from the perspective of doing this research. Nicely balances structures and events with people and their doings.)
Laura Mitchell (2009) Belongings: Property, Family and Identity in South Africa – An Exploration of Frontiers 1725-1830 New York: Columbia University Press. (Thorough detailed study, good on structures etc but more detail on people would have been helpful, as reading can be hard going at points.)
Nigel Penn (2005) The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist & Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the 18th Century Athens: Ohio University Press. (Interesting study focusing around Boers, San and Khoikhoi on the northern frontier.)
Robert Ross (1976) Adam Kok’s Griquas Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (The Griquas moved on as frontiers moved and Europeans moved in on their former territories, later becoming key players in Eastern Cape frontier events.)
Robert Ross (1997) ‘The Kat River rebellion and Khoikhoi nationalism’ Kronos: A Journal of Cape History 24: 91-105. (Is concerned with the rise of an ethnic identity among some Khoikhoi people, men in particular, in the circumstances of the Frontier War of the early 1850s in the Eastern Cape.)
Fiona Vernal (2012) The Farmerfield Mission: A Christian Community in South Africa 1838-1998 New York: Oxford University Press. (The history of an Albany residential Wesleyan Christian community in the Eastern Cape over a long time-period.)
Roger Wagner (1980) ‘Zoutpansberg: the dynamics of a hunting frontier 1848-1867’ in Shula Marks & Anthony Atmore (eds, 1980) Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa London: Longman, pp.313-49. (A useful discussion of one of the frontiers that has been less scrutinised.)
A.D.M. Walker (2013) Pawns in a Larger Game: Life on the Eastern Cape Frontier London: Calamaish Publisher. (Popular history account focusing on a number of 1820 Settler men who were the forefathers of Walker. Lots of interesting stuff here, pity there are so few women among the reproducing men.)
SOME USEFUL JOURNALS
J African Studies
J Commonwealth & Imperial History
J Southern African Studies
South African Historical Journal
South African Review of Sociology
Last updated: 20 December 2014
