Soon after the agro-pastoral frontier engulfed the thornveld, the Cape frontier began to lap at its southern edge. As on other frontiers, the European-indigenous encounter in southern Africa involved renegotiating the ways people interacted with the environment. It is widely understood that the Cape frontier introduced Christianity and cash-based commerce to the Kuruman thornveld, but it is less often recognized that these had a definite impact on people's relations with the environment. Christianity entailed irrigated cultivation, while commerce depended on exploiting wild fauna and flora as resources, and both were challenges to existing land uses. Irrigated cultivation is sedentary and more labor intensive than the shifting cultivation practiced by the Tlhaping and Tlharo. Commercial hunting and woodcutting brought a way to accumulate wealth without investing in cattle. Clearly, these new forms of production had the potential to revolutionize social relationships. However, by no means did Christianity, commerce, irrigation, commercial hunting, or woodcutting displace older ways of thinking about and producing from the biophysical world. Irrigation and trading were grafted onto older practices of agro-pastoralism, and their revolutionary impact was muted. The fundamentals of thornveld society and production methods endured, at least until colonial annexation.

IRRIGATION AS AN INNOVATION IN PRODUCTION AND SOCIETY

Channeling water from their springs to cultivated areas was a foreign notion to people in Kuruman. Rather, they devoted themselves to making rain.