In the years after the War of the Axe, the pressure on the Kat River Settlement grew considerably. To a very large extent, the attacks came from the British settlers, who had been brought to the Eastern Cape in 1820, and had been granted land largely in the vicinity of Grahamstown. There were a number of reasons for their opposition to the Kat River. They blamed the missionaries of the LMS, under whose influence they considered many of the Kat River people fell, for the retrocession of Queen Adelaide Province to the amaXhosa in 1836. As a result, the potential acquisition of more land, and the prospect in due course of speculative profits, were taken from their grasp. They also coveted the land of the Kat River valley itself, although it was too small to provide many sheep farms. But, above all, the British settlers found the prosperity and respectability of the Kat River Khoekhoe an existential threat. The settlers could cope with Khoe violence or drunkenness, as this was expected, and it did not threaten the justification for their occupation of the Eastern Cape. Intelligent, articulate Khoekhoe, who also on occasion saved the British Army from military catastrophe, were a much greater threat to them.

In this visceral hatred of the Kat River, the British settlers were supported by the Cape's political establishment, notably by Sir Henry Pottinger, governor from 1847 to 1848. He considered the Kat River people, who had been hardest hit in the war, a bunch of shirkers, who should be working for the colonists, and refused to allow them rations, so that many began to starve. He also appointed T.J. Biddulph, a notorious antagonist of the Khoekhoe, as magistrate in the Kat River valley. Biddulph's report on the valley, published by order of the governor, was full of the most hurtful misrepresentations of the Kat River people. When Sir Harry Smith replaced Pottinger as governor, he transferred Biddulph to Winburg in the newly annexed Orange River Sovereignty, but Smith himself was quickly won over by the Grahamstown English, to the detriment of the Khoekhoe.