INTRODUCTION

How did the indigenes of the Cape write back to the northern-hemisphere discourses of nation and colony at the start of the nineteenth century? This final chapter addresses this question by reflecting upon histories by the Griqua leaders, Andries Waterboer (1789–1852) and Hendrick Hendricks (c. 1795–1881). Waterboer's A Short Account of Some of the Most Particular and Important Circumstances Attending the Government of the Griqua People (1827) and Hendricks's ‘Oppressions of the Griquas’ (1830) have been carefully mined by social historians in order to reconstruct the complicated events of the Cape's northern frontier from 1770 to 1830. My aim here is somewhat different. Rather than reading these texts for the information they disclose about the facts of Griqua history, I am interested in how they narrate the relationship between the origins, the early history and the contemporary politics of the Griqua nation. In other words, I am less interested here in assessing whether Waterboer or Hendricks describe Griqua history accurately than with understanding how they ‘imagined’ the emergence of the Griqua nation. To appreciate Waterboer's Short Account and Hendricks's ‘Oppressions of the Griqua’, an extended preliminary is required, namely a detailed analysis of the northern-hemisphere accounts of the Griqua between 1800 and 1830. Traces of all the northern-hemisphere nationalisms in Chapters 1 to 5 are inscribed in missionary and traveller accounts on the Griqua.