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Abstract
Between 1834 and 1853 the British colonial army fought three wars with the Xhosa peoples who resided on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony of South Africa. Based on the published and unpublished diaries, journals, correspondence, and memoirs of British soldiers who served in these wars, this paper examines how these wartime experiences led to the creation of a military knowledge system of the Xhosa that stereotyped them as treacherous savages and merciless barbarians. Further, this essay argues that these stereotypes played a crucial role in the conquest of the Xhosa by justifying policies of dispossession and subjugation in the name of colonial security, and allowing British soldiers to conduct unlimited warfare against them. In this regard, the British military knowledge system of the Xhosa casts long shadows of violence and distrust over the history of South Africa.
Between 1834 and 1853 the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony of South Africa was a site of intensive social interaction between European settlers, missionaries, and soldiers, on the one hand, and the indigenous Xhosa1, on the other. It was also a time and a place where Europeans created knowledge systems of Africans in general, and the Xhosa in particular. These knowledge systems were articulated through various forms of discourse and served, in combination with British metropolitan interests and ideologies, as the basis for colonial policies visà-vis South Africa's black peoples. To date, most studies have focused on the forms of knowledge and discourse produced by European settlers and missionaries and their role in the subjugation of the various Xhosa polities over the course of the nineteenth century. For example, in his book White Supremacy and Black Resistance (1992), Clifton C. Crais noted that while the settler discourse on the Xhosa had been inclusive in 1820, two decades later it had stereotyped them as the inferior "Other," opening the way for policies of dispossession and subjugation.2 More recendy, Andrew Bank and Richard Price argued that the two frontier wars between 1834 and 1846 provoked a hardening of missionary attitudes toward the Xhosa polities.3
With all this focus on settlers and missionaries, historians have paid comparatively little attention to the British colonial army and its part in creating a (military) knowledge system of the Xhosa...