leader
The Griqua people have a long history of dispossession. Now, with political parties courting their vote, the y are asking some searching questions about themselves. John Matshikiza went looking for the people and their leaders
A quiet drama unfolds in a small room in a building squashed between the police station and the Mary Moffat Museum in Griquatown.
It is the office of Kaptein Johannes Jakobus Waterboer. The heir to the Griqua paramount chieftaincy, surrounded by a few councillors, is going over a report in the Diamond Fields Advertiser, the local version of the Johannesburg Star. The question in the report is: will the Griqua take part in the general election? There is a strong suggestion that there will be a boycott from the entire Griqua community if certain pressing questions are not resolved before June 2.
The key issue, as articulated by Martin Engelbrecht, national co-ordinator of the Khoisan National Council, is the recognition of the Griqua as a sovereign group within the South African constitutional arrangement. The Griqua, he argues, have slipped through the cracks of the negotiated new dispensation, and neither their language rights nor their legitimate land claims have been taken into account. As such they continue to be dispossessed. The threat of a boycott is designed to draw attention to an age-old grievance.
It is a finely timed intervention in the politics of the Northern Cape. Who will win the votes of the Griqua community? Is it a significant vote in any case? Who, and how many, are the Griqua?
None of the major parties have been able to avoid the issue. The National Party has always thought that it could count on the Griqua vote, packaged in as it was with the controversial, broader ”coloured” vote that secured it the Western Cape and a substantial representation in the Northern Cape in the last election.
Its successor, the New National Party, is now crying foul at what it calls the ”sudden interest” of the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party in one of their traditional strongholds , Griqualand West. The ANC and the IFP, in turn, along with lesser parties, are frantically courting rival claimants to the Griqua throne. It seems that there is more at stake than the usual campaign politics.
So who are these Griqua that are causing all the excitement?
Alf Wannenburgh, in his book Forgotten Frontiersmen, paints a compelling picture of the Griqua as a tribe of nomadic hunters and traders, descended from South Africa’s oldest inhabitants, but with their blood mixed with many other nationalities. The founding father, Adam Kok, was a leader of a series of migrations that preceded the Great Trek, and gave his name to the town of Kokstad, on the border between KwaZulu-Natal and the Transkei.
Kok and his successors made and remade alliances with Xhosa, Zulu and Afrikaner groups and individuals whose way of life was being threatened by the expansion of the Cape colony. The Griqua personified the last frontiers of a noble resistance.
In the end, the last strands of the resisting Griqua retreated into the sands of the Namib desert, and their history all but came to a halt.
And yet the name lived on. It was a sort of a joke. Their blood was scattered all across Southern Africa, but no one came forward and said, ”I am a Griqua.” Not with pride, anyway. They became a strategic addendum to the human category classified as ”coloured”. In the old system, the Griqua were one of 10 official categories of non-whites and non- Africans, along with Indians, Chinese, ”Cape coloureds” and ”other coloureds”. In terms of group areas, education and general perception they were coloured.
Through most of the four decades of apartheid government, the Griqua’s interests were spoken for by a man named Bishop Daniel Kanyiles. He held the title of paramount chief of the Griquas of Griqualand West and Albania, but he was not part of the bloodline of Adam Kok or any of the other Griqua chiefs. Some claim that he was not even a Griqua. He was, and still is, a staunch member of the National Party. He runs Griqua affairs from the provincial capital of Kimberley, and is seldom seen in Griquatown.
Griquatown is a quiet village on a spur between Upington and Kimberley. There is one main street, on which sits the one hotel, along with the instruments of law and order and the museum that valiantly keeps a record of its history.
What I was looking for, however, was not the fragments of stone and wood and faded photographs captured in the glass cases of the tiny museum. I was looking for real Griqua who could tell me their story. I thought this would be easy, standing here in Griquatown. I was wrong.
The curator of the museum tried to be helpful, but there was something preventing her being direct about my question about the Griqua. She called a young coloured lady out of the building next door and asked her if she could help me. The young lady called two men out to come and join in the discussion. They all looked at me appraisingly for a long while, and then shyly muttered that it would be impossible to do anything until ”the kaptein” was around. The kaptein was away in Kimberley having discussions with Premier Manne Dipico. His deputy was with him. No one else was entitled to speak to strangers about the Griqua.
I was baffled. Haltingly, I asked one of the young men if he was not himself a Griqua. He laughed in amazement. He was a coloured, he said. He couldn’t tell me anything about any Griqua. One of them tried to suggest to the others that there was an old Griqua woman in the Griqua township who might be able to tell me something, but the others discouraged this initiative, for fear of terrible retribution on the kaptein’s return.
Like any other uitlander, I was baffled. At that time, I didn’t realise that the line between Griqua and coloureds was such a defined one, and that penetrating it could be so difficult. There was a huge, almost terrified silence about the Griqua in Griquatown.
I left my contact details for the kaptein, and moved on, holding out little hope that I would be able to speak to him.
It took three weeks before I was able to have a face-to-face meeting with Kaptein JJ Waterboer. In the interim I had several hushed telephone conversations with an Afrikaner woman who appeared to be the kaptein’s spokesperson and champion. She spoke on condition that I did not identify her in anything I wrote about the Griqua. The plot was getting thicker.
The kaptein, she told me, spoke very little English, and I was unable to communicate in Afrikaans. Therefore she would speak for him.
She conveyed the impression of a man who immediately impressed with his regal authority. She was a believer in his claim to the Griqua throne. She proceeded to tell me softly about the history of the Griqua of Griquatown, and why it was that the restoration of their monarch and their dignity was of such urgency.
She told me the history of Kaptein JJ Waterboer’s forbears from the early 1800s – how the Waterboers had assumed authority over the region when Adam Kok, frustrated by the interfering missionaries who wanted to tell him how he should govern his people, had left Griquatown and settled first in Campbell, 50km to the east, and then in Philippolis and Kokstad to the south, the area that became Griqualand East. Andries Waterboer, and his son Nikolaas after him, kept the Griqua flag flying in Griqualand West, and when the remnants of Kok’s people finally returned to Campbell in the latter part of the 19th century, it was accepted that Waterboer was the paramount chief.
This was not enough to guarantee stability, however. Waterboer’s territory was being pressured by the Cape colony and the Boer republics. The Griqua chief went to the supreme court to fight for his territorial rights. After seven years, in 1871, the court found in his favour. But 1871 was also, critically, the year that diamonds were found at Kimberley, in the northern part of the Griqua territories. This was a different ball game. A second supreme court judgment ruled that, although Waterboer was indeed the rightful ruler of the Griqua, his rule did not extend over the land that they lived on.
The way was clear for Cecil Rhodes and the De Beers Diamond Company to annex the land of the Griqua for mineral exploitation. Even the farms that Waterboer and his people lived on disappeared beneath their feet, as they were forced to sell them off to pay the huge legal fees that had been incurred to achieve that short-lived victory in the courts.
Around 1905, Waterboer’s son Nikolaas Waterboer II took over the captaincy (a title that was bestowed on the first Griqua leader by the Cape colony in recognition of his pacifying role among the other Khoi groups). He had no male heirs, but at the time of his death in 1962 he had grandsons to whom he bequeathed the staff of captaincy. Because these grandsons were still children, Nikolaas II appointed his bodyguard, a former policeman who was later to become a bishop in, and later the patriarch of, the Independent African Orthodox Church, to be regent over the Griqua until the boys reached maturity. Bishop Daniel Kanyiles has had control over Griqua affairs ever since.
Johannes Jakobus Waterboer, grandson of Nikolaas II, is now 44 years old. He is a small man with sharp features and a soft voice. He speaks little, and what he says is uttered with caution. He is taking his role as Griqua captain-in-waiting very seriously. He and one or two of his councillors are sporting ANC election T-shirts as they sit in the office, discussing the newspaper report about whether or not the Griquas will go to the polls, and who they will vote for if they do.
What the report in the Diamond Fields Advertiser does not address is the position of the man whose photograph dominates the report: the stern-looking Bishop Kanyiles, who the newspaper describes as the Griqua paramount chief.
”I have documents,” says Waterboer, ”that prove that Kanyiles has no right to call himself paramount chief. He was appointed regent, but he has sat on the paramountcy for nearly 40 years now, and he must restore my rights. And yet he is blocking me. If he continues to block me, we will go to court.”
Kanyiles also insists that he has legal documentation proving his right to the paramountcy, and goes on to say that no one has approached him about surrendering it. Quietly, however, he has said that, at his advanced age, he is prepared to consider retirement. This could be everybody’s let- out.
Kanyiles also insists on setting the record straight about his role in Griqua affairs. He says that it is entirely thanks to him that the Griqua regained their separate identity after the introduction of the 1955 Population Act – otherwise they would still have been ”other coloureds”. He was therefore the major Griqua activist of the 1950s, and has been the guardian of the cause ever since.
Martin Engelbrecht is the new activist for the Griqua cause, and it is due to him that the whole issue of the Griqua succession has come to the fore at this time. Although he professes respect for Kanyiles’s position, his activism has brought the two men into confrontation.
Until two years ago the Griqua captaincy was defunct. Waterboer was living an unremarkable life in Griquatown, working as a master bricklayer. Before that he had served in the South African army for two years, and then as a prison warder and as a municipal superintendent. To all intents and purposes, his life was similar to that of any other coloured man in the Northern Cape.
Engelbrecht had had a similarly undramatic history, growing up in a coloured township on the outskirts of Kimberley, working as a machine operator in the diamond mines, and then migrating to Pretoria, where he worked as a computer operator, as well as dabbling in music.
He returned to Kimberley and worked in journalism, then worked in the ANC office. That is when he started reading, finding books and archive material about Griqua history that opened his mind to his heritage. He climbed deeper and deeper into this scattered material, gradually weaving together a version of what had happened to himself and his people, and gaining an overview that offered itself as a strategy for the future. His first step was to alert the heir to the Griqua throne about his duties.
On the road from Kimberley to Griquatown and back, Engelbrecht never stops talking. He has all the dates off pat, and illustrates this tale of dispossession with vivid detail.
We started off, naturally, at the Groot Gat in Kimberley. The ugly sore left on the earth’s surface is both a metaphor for and a graphic illustration of Engelbrecht’s theme. De Beers, he says, may have signed deals with gullible Afrikaners to obtain mining rights on their farms, but they never signed the same kind of deals with the Griqua kings. The Griqua still have access to the treaties by which they are demonstrated to be the rightful owners of the land. These treaties have never been cancelled, and restoration is the bottom line.
The long, straight road west out of Kimberley is surrounded on both sides by fenced-off land, all once belonging to the Griqua, says Engelbrecht. To prove his point, he makes me stop at a grave site just off to the side, near the banks of a river. A group of graves, none marked with names, only identified with broken personal belongings cast on top of the stone mounds.
”When we showed De Beers these graves to prove that our people had always been living here,” says Engelbrecht, ”they threw another fence around the area so that we couldn’t even tend the graves.” The new fence has recently been torn down, and people obviously come and go to pay their respects to long- gone relatives.
”Once the Griqua had been removed from their land, they had nowhere to settle. They were only allowed to squat like gypsies at the outspans that had been set aside for the trek boers.” When the ox wagon went out of style, the outspans disappeared, and the Griqua had nowhere to go but to the settlements around the mission stations and the landdros courts.
A little further down the road, he invites me to turn off again to take in another amazing scene. This is the town made up of 4 500 army tents, home to a huge community of ”bushmen” who have been relocated from southern Namibia. These are the men who served as trackers for the South African Defence Force at the height of the anti-Swapo/ANC wars, and who have now been dumped at this spot in the Northern Cape with their families: former nomads, former military pawns, now awaiting a new identity in the new South Africa.
Their children go to the Afrikaans-medium school housed in rows of corrugated iron structures on one side of the camp. Outside the school perimeter, the only languages spoken are !Xu and Khwe. Like the Griqua, this is one of the groups whose interests Engelbrecht’s Khoisan Representative Council has been set up to articulate.
Returning from Griquatown through the dusk, we stop in Campbell. The first landmark is the Livingstone Liquor Store, a reminder that that frightfully abstemious Scottish doctor spent much time there proselytising among the Griqua in the 1830s. Today the forlorn collection of sandstone and breeze-block houses waits for the next emancipation. Women and old men sit immobile in their kitchen doors, flat on the ground, sucking in the thin winter sun, watching the world go by.
Jan Balie’s family has lived in Campbell since before Adam Kok’s group returned from Kokstad. The old man is not impressed with any of those who pretend to the Griqua throne – not even the current Adam Kok V, the IFP’s man and a challenger to Waterboer’s claims on the paramountcy, and a resident of Campbell.
”The trouble is,” says Balie, ”none of them can talk. Waterboer can’t talk. Adam Kok can’t talk. Louis Luyt was here just now, also trying to talk to the Griquas. The only reason anybody went to listen to him is because they know him from the rugby. But that’s another thing, Martin,” he continues, pointing a gnarled finger in Engelbrecht’s direction, ”while you’re busy talking about restitution, you can tell them to pay compensation for stealing our name for that rugby team of theirs. Not so much as a please or a thank you.” The old man turns back to me: ”Now, this Martin,” he says approvingly, ”the others don’t know how to talk, but Martin, he can really talk.”
Which is confirmation of what I have been beginning to suspect. If the Griqua and the other Khoi groups are players on the political field in 1999, it is largely through Engelbrecht’s subtle manipulation. Does he have a personal, long-term agenda in national politics? He doesn’t say.
For now the issue is about something far greater than personal ambition. It is a massive question about identity.
Earlier, in the kaptein’s office in Griquatown, the question of identity had been raised in relation to Kanyiles and the Griqua throne. The room had grown uneasy. Nobody was sure, but everybody felt that there was something in this rumour that Kanyiles was not a real Griqua. Finally Councilor Visagie, who is blind, had spoken up:
”We don’t want to discriminate against anyone,” he had said, ”but we have heard that this Kanyiles is an African man who was employed by the old South African police, and who then became regent here.”
The unease in the room deepened.
”What do you mean, ‘an African’?” said one voice. ”Are Griqua not Africans?”
”A black man, then,” replied Visagie.
”Are Griqua not black people? Are we not Africans?”
”’n Griqua is nie ‘n swart man, en hy is nie ‘n coloured [A Griqua is not a black man, and he is not a coloured],” Visagie had replied. But the questioner was not satisfied. He had opened up a can of worms, and was forcing into the open the issue of who the Griquas are, where they stand in the debate about coloured, black and African, and with whom they intend to identify.
This quiet and insistent voice belonged to Engelbrecht, Khoi activist extraordinaire, self-appointed voice of the revival of the Griqua people and spokesperson for many other ancient identities long hidden under the apartheid cloak.