Discourses of Land Use, Land Access and Land Rights at Farmerfield and Loeriesfontein in Nineteenth-century South Africa

Abstract

This chapter examines the controversy over land use, land access and land tenure that engulfed two farms in the mid-to-late nineteenth century in South Africa: Farmerfield, an ethnically heterogeneous Methodist mission farm in the Albany district of the Eastern Cape; and Loeriesfontein, an independent farm occupied by ‘Coloureds’ (‘Bastaards‘) near Calvinia in the Northern Cape (see Map 4.1, p. 63).2 Both farms eventually became isolated places, far from the view of major urban centres, off the radar of the government. Often, the question is posed about what relatively small, isolated places and the subaltern historical figure who usually occupy them have to contribute to the grand questions about the trajectory of South African history, or any other history, beyond their role as another accretion in the historical record. The dreaded shroud of the ‘So what?’ question and the shibboleth of ‘historical relevance’ and statistical significance can be used to frame historical inquiry in meaningful and constructive ways that challenge historians to write for a wider audience, with less jargon, more clarity and more relevance. Yet it can also disenfranchise voices in a historical field where the methodology and the extant sources continue to privilege certain voices over others, while subverting or muting others altogether.