The Conflict between Boer and Bantu

In tropical Africa, the basis for the early meetings between Africans and people from the rest of the world was trade. In South Africa, such encounters were usually over land. In tropical Africa, European and African merchants, even those engaged in the wretched slave trade, met on an essentially equal footing. They treated each other with a mixture of suspicion and respect. Europeans and Arabs were careful to acknowledge the authority of African rulers and to pay attention to the manners and customs of African peoples. In South Africa, the Europeans were present from the beginning not as traders, but as settlers. As their numbers grew and as they pushed inland from their first foothold on the Cape peninsula, they cast envious eyes on the land of the local people. During the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries, this land was occupied by the San hunters and by the Khoi herdsmen. Thereafter, it was the much more densely settled land of the Bantu, who were agriculturalists as well as pastoralists. The only way the Boers could gain possession of the fertile land of the eastern Cape province was by conquest. Such a conquest might take the form of a party of frontier farmers, on horseback and armed with their hunting rifles, driving out the inhabitants of a nearby San or Khoi encampment or Bantu village.