The Cape swelled as the English conquered the Xhosa people, who inhabited the eastern part of the territory, in the course of a century of conflicts inscribed in colonial history texts as the Kaffir Wars of 1779–1879. In the face of this prolonged armed resistance, the masters of the Cape were determined to uproot all native institutions. The colonists saw the tribe as signifying both a territorial parameter of defense and an ideological anchor of the native struggle for autonomy. Thus, what worked for the colonizer in Natal did not in the Cape. In the Natal colony chiefs were empowered
...more
