Episode 27 – The slaughtering in the Sandveld and the causes of the 1739 frontier war

This is episode 27 and we’re dealing with the period in the first half of 1700 – give or take a decade.

Last episode we heard how the TrekBoer economy had developed and a new farmer had emerged on the landscape called the Boer.

The descendents of Dutch and French immigrants were beginning to expand their footprint across southern Africa and of course the repercussions were enormous.

Remember last episode we heard the minister of the Church at Drakenstein Petrus van Arkel who had written an extraordinary letter to Governor De Charonnes based in Cape Town. The minister had been shocked by a report he’d just received about the actions of a settler raiding party which made it all the way to Algoa Bay in the Eastern Cape and they had been particularly brutal in their treatment of the Khoi.

A party of 70 barterers – or as the Minister pointed out – murderers and robbers – had taken 200 rixdollars worth of goods with them when they setout from Stellenbosch and headed to the Gonakkens as the Dutch called them – the Gonaqua near present day Qeberga or Port Elizabeth.

The tribe was massacred and all their cattle and sheep were carried off. The Gonaqua who survived followed the Dutch raiding party and begged to be killed or taken captive as they were going to starve to death without their animals. Van Arkel back in Drakenstein was briefed by the shocked Khoi from the Peninsular who had joined the raiding expedition not realizing it was going to be a murdering expedition.