The night of the jackal: sheep, pastures and predators in the Cape - South Africa

Past & Present, Feb, 1998 by William Beinart

Despite the great gains made recently in the writing of southern African rural history, historians have been incurious about the natural world into which commercial agriculture intruded and the extraordinary international exchange in plants, animals and techniques that took place. Agrarian historiography has been deeply influenced by the comparative model of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe. While this has generated vital questions, historians have tended to focus on crop production and tenancy relationships in the more densely populated high veld and east-coast arable areas. Similarly, the rich, comparative research into the history of slavery has focused attention on the vineyards and wheat fields of the Western Cape -- a distinctive zone, almost a social and environmental island. It is intriguing that a country with so small a percentage of arable land, compared to Europe and even the United States, should have neglected its settler pastoral history or understood it primarily in terms of the frontier and trekboer experience. The environmental approach developed in the United States is one route by which to recapture it.(8)

Much of what became the core sheep districts of the Cape and southern Free State was either Khoisan territory or the borderlands of the Xhosa and Sotho-speaking African chiefdoms. In the eighteenth century, trekboers, following the game, pastures and water sources, elbowed out many of the indigenous people in establishing a partly mobile pastoral economy. They initially adopted the Khoikhoi fat-tailed sheep: probably over a million were in their hands when the British finally took the Cape in 1806.(9) Although the boundaries of the colony stretched over four hundred miles to the east and three hundred to the north, the only significant village in the eastern sector was Graaff-Reinet, with less than fifty dwellings in 1811.(10)

By 1865, the midland and eastern districts were the fastest growing parts of the Colony, transformed by British settlement and conquest, the rise of the African peasantry, trade with the interior and, in particular, the development of sheep farming. Khoikhoi country had been covered by a grid of small towns and administrative districts; Graaff-Reinet, now a well-developed commercial centre, had been overtaken by bustling coastal towns. Nearly a third (58,000) of the settler population of the Cape lived in the main sheep districts, not including the ports of East London and Port Elizabeth.(11) This figure had doubled by 1904, although it represented by then a far smaller proportion of the white population as a whole. The black population of these districts easily exceeded the white. Considering the dry environment and large farms, this was a significant total.

Although some African peasants adopted woolled sheep, settlers, both Boer and British, dominated production. Merinos were pushed up into a funnel of land that receives between 10 and 25 inches of rainfall annually, spilling over into the better-watered, largely African-occupied, districts to the east: over 8 million by 1865; nearly 12 million by 1891. Angora goats and ostriches were an important and sometimes more profitable supplement. In the lower rainfall areas of the north and north-west, hardy indigenous sheep were initially retained. They were also a mark of a less commercialized economy, in that their fat provided a wide range of domestic products from tallow for candles to grease for wagons. Imported black Persian, mutton breeds gradually displaced local sheep, but the and lands in the north remained a central problem for the modernizing state in the early twentieth century.