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Rape is a shockingly prevalent crime in contemporary South Africa. Using a micro-historical approach to analyse a rape case in the criminal records of the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) this article seeks to explore whether rape was as widespread in the eighteenth-century Cape as it is today. In examining the details of a case in which a white knecht (hired labourer) raped a Khoikhoi woman and murdered her son the article finds that no white man was ever convicted for the rape of a Khoikhoi or a slave woman and seeks to explain why this was the case. It also finds that though white settlers greatly feared that their women would be raped by slave or Khoikhoi men, this seldom happened. Though focusing on rape the article also examines colonial attitudes towards illicit or extra-marital sex between members of different racial groups. It concludes that issues of honour and respectability played a factor in limiting rape and that, despite a climate of violence, there is plentiful evidence of consensual interracial sex, especially in the frontier regions. Thus, although rape was a crime that white men could commit with virtual impunity, the records do not provide evidence that rape was common. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the first three decades of the British occupation of the Cape the government was committed to stopping the massacre of the San (the hunter–gatherer inhabitants of southern Africa). Under the rule of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) commandos had waged a genocidal war against the San on the colony's frontier. British policy, in contrast, was to protect and ‘civilize’ the San. By 1828, however, the Cape San were in a worse situation than they had ever been in. The superintendent of the London Missionary Society, Dr Philip, claimed this was because the British authorities at the Cape had presided over and permitted one of the bloodiest episodes in British history, the destruction of the San. This article seeks to evaluate Philip's accusations and to ascertain whether massacre was indeed prevalent in the British colony of the Cape of Good Hope. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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When the early white settlers began crossing the Orange River during the early nineteenth century, they claimed to have found an empty land, and not to have encountered the San (‘Bushman’), Euro-Khoe (‘Bastaard’/Griqua and Koranna) and Bantu-speaking (Batswana and Basotho) inhabitants of the country. This was not at all so, and the undeniability of the encounter was soon made patent by the violent but sometimes collaborative relations that ensued. Distinguished South African historians have given us harrowing and pitiless accounts of Khoe-khoe and, more often and more fiercely, San resistance to their dispossession, enslavement, and extirpation by white settlers in Transorangia in the first third of the nineteenth century. Accounts of cooperation and mutually benevolent interaction also exist, though they are far more the exception. This account explores who the Transorangians were and how they perceived and dealt with one another. The ‘identity violence’ practised on the frontier has shaped how they have related until today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article considers the writings of Scottish Enlightenment authors Adam Smith and John Bruce to determine their models of colonial governance for Cape Colony, in what is now South Africa. It considers subjects such as indirect rule versus direct rule, protectionism versus free trade, Great Britain’s political economy, the East India Company, and the Dutch East India Company,

This article explores the origins of Fingo (Mfengu) identity in South Africa's Eastern Cape. While observers have generally understood the Fingo as an ethnic group, this article argues that Fingo-ness developed out of a lifestyle and worldview that emphasised agriculture and trade, and rejected established systems of Xhosa authority. The participation of men in farming activities, as well as attempts to engage in trade outside the control of chiefs, constituted a significant break with social practice by those who identified as Fingo, who, in challenging widely accepted standards of Xhosa-ness, were perceived by many Xhosa (and especially Xhosa chiefs) as anti-social and supernaturally dangerous. The idiom of witchcraft therefore became essential in marking out the distinctions between Fingo and Xhosa identities. While the 1835 frontier war saw the movement of the Fingo into the Cape Colony, the contours of Fingo-ness had already been established in the context of Xhosaland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an examination of the role that Khoi-Khoi leader Klaas Stuurman played in the Khoi-Khoi insurrection of 1799. It examines an oration he gave in April 1799 that was recorded by John Barrow, a British official in the Cape Colony. Stuurman expressed anger over land lost to Boer farmers. It discusses relations between the Khoi-Khoi and surrounding groups in the final decades of the 18th century including the veeboers who were encroaching on Khoi-khoi land. It examines the attacks the Khoi-Khoi made on Boer homesteads and discusses their inability to secure and maintain their independence.

Focuses on the revised dating of the Nahoon prints, human footprints on display in a South African museum, as being 200,000 years old. Discovery of the prints by chance; Initial carbon dating; Details about the thermoluminescence technique that was used for the revised dating; Correspondence of results with geological evidence at the site.