The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape's Northern Frontier in the 18th Century

by Nigel Penn

A 2007 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

Traditionally, the Eastern Cape frontier of South Africa has been regarded as the preeminent contact zone between colonists and the Khoi (“Hottentots”) and San (“Bushmen”). But there was an earlier frontier in which the conflict between Dutch colonists and these indigenous herders and hunters was in many ways more decisive in its outcome, more brutal and violent in its manner, and just as significant in its effects on later South African history.

This was the frontier north of Cape Town, where Dutch settlers began advancing into the interior. By the end of the eighteenth century, the frontier had reached the Orange (Gariep) River. The indigenous Khoisan people, after initial resistance, had been defeated and absorbed as an underclass into the colonial world or else expelled beyond it, to regions where new creole communities emerged.

Nigel Penn is a master storyteller who brings a novelist’s sensitivity to plot and character and a command of the archival record to bear in recovering this epic and forgotten story. Filled with extraordinary personalities and memorable episodes, and set in the often harsh landscape of the Western and Northern Cape, The Forgotten Frontier will appeal both to the general reader and to the student of history.

Genres: South Africa

264 pages, Paperback

First published March 8, 2006

About the author

Nigel Penn has a PhD from the University of Cape Town. He has written about the impact of colonialism on the Khoisan societies of southern Africa and on the nature of early colonial society in both the Dutch and British periods. He has been awarded the UCT Book Award three times and won a Choice Award from the American Library Association in 2007. He is interested in using the techniques of microhistory and cultural history to illuminate the contacts that occurred between different societies and individuals in the colonial context of southern Africa and Australia.

Reviews

[Chandré De Wet]

Wow, what a book.

I'm a detail person, and this book had enough detail to really explain different things as well as references for you to follow, there are many other books on South African history, where you can't tell if its fact or opinion, or you just don't have enough information to understand how that guy came to that conclusion.

Secondly Nigel Penn writes broadly! While you think this book is about the Northern Frontier in the Northern Cape, you end up learning about Capitalism, and the first 50 years in the Cape, little interesting bits of the Khoisan, Missionaries, throughout South Africa, the british, Dutch, etc.etc. etc.
This book is 10 books in one. I will admit I took this out of the library for about 3 months, if not more. Because there was much to mull on digest and pick up and read.

In the beginning I was so inspired,I created a powerpoint on the chapter of how Cape spread from refreshing station to when the freeburghers are able to go further... And I created a painting of one of the maps, and as I would read a section, i would mark it on my painting. I forsee new school textbooks being made from this book.

And finally to the author, as said before. Thank you, for taking the time and writing an objective, well researched and detailed account of what really occured in South Africa. Every South African needs to read this book, up to 1994 our school text books were rigged, and I'm not so sure we have many new books written, use Nigel's book as one of the first to fill you in on some events at the Cape!

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting argument, and meticulously researched (brings a whole new meaning to the word "detailed"). Not for the faint of heart.