Life and death of a little river

A daughter of the 1820 Settlers looks at events that ruthlessly shaped the lives of those linked to the Kowie River

because the animals are believed to be messengers from the ancestors.

She elaborates on understandings of who the River People are; some say these water divinities are the ancestors of the Xhosa, some say they are intermediaries between the ancestors and living Xhosas. They live in the sacred pools and are summoned by drumming. Offerings of pumpkin seeds, sorghum, tobacco and white beads are floated out on baskets.

The iQohi/Kowie runs through the centre of an area historically called the Zuurveld, between the Bushmans and Fish rivers. The original inhabitants were Khoikhoi, the Gonaqua and the Hoeniqua. The former were absorbed into the Gqunukhwebe Xhosa, and the Hoeniqua are recorded as the people to whom the Ndlambe Xhosa paid many cattle for a piece of the eastern Zuurveld area.

Cock says simply of the Khoikhoi that by 1800 there were no independent Khoikhoi left there, since almost all had gone into labour for white farmers, to the mission stations or into the Cape Regiment (later the Cape Mounted Rifles). She cites many diaries and records of early travellers like August Beutler in 1752 and Robert Gordon in 1777.

Cock notes three main events in the history of the iQohi/ Kowie River: the Battle of Grahamstown, the development of the small boat harbour in 1841 and the development in 1989 of the Port Alfred Marina.

It is not a moment too soon that the recent renaming of the city Makhanda has consigned the name of Lieutenant-Colonel John Graham to the past. This change has met with some resistance but I would urge everyone, of whatever ancestry, to read Cock's account of the Battle of Grahamstown. She tells it mainly through the diaries and reports of those who were there.

Not only did the river run with the blood of the 1 000-plus Xhosa who were killed, but Graham, under the instruction of Governor George Cathcart, drove the remnants of the Ndlambe across the Fish River, and even the Keiskamma, which is further east. Thomas Pringle, respected 1820 Settler writer and poet, described this later. “The villages … were burnt, their cattle carried off, their fields of maize and millet trodden down, and the wretched inhabitants driven into the thickets and there bombarded with grapeshot …”

This “scorched earth” military tactic was first pursued in the Frontier Wars, but the British used it later as well against the Boers.

Interestingly, in an inversion of the usual historical timeline, Cock describes the battle before she describes what led up to this attack on Grahamstown, showing what led Makhanda the prophet to become Makhanda the warrior. His surren- der and incarceration on Robben Island did not save his people, as he had hoped, from what today we would call a genocidal attack. It is not easy to read.

The following year the 1820 Settlers arrived and there were many more battles in the three wars yet to come but Cock does not tell that part.

For those curious to read more, there are endnotes every step of the way and an extensive bibliography.

This applies to the following chapters as well, when she turns her attention to the activities of her own ancestor, William Cock, who arrived in 1820. An enterprising man who soon abandoned his farm to become a trader, he must have had access to resources because he bought wagons and small ships and supplied meat to the colonial forces in the Frontier Wars — a profiteer, like many others.

He eventually built the small boat harbour at the mouth of the Kowie River, at what was then called Port Frances, later Port Alfred.

Cock courageously and honestly acknowledges his role in the destruction of the Xhosa and, in the beginning, of the destruction of the Kowie/ iQohi River.

She has abandoned what she refers to as the “consoling narrative” we have been told in earlier histories to look at what really happened. She quotes Aubrey Matshiqi in an article in 2016 in which he says the lack of acknowledgement is “a recipe for … social, political and economic calamity”. Most settler descendants have been there.

Cock tells of finding a letter in the Albany Museum, in which her own mother was described as an “unreliable” source of information on settler history, with a tendency to “invent”.

She goes on to look at the effects of the Port Alfred Marina, a highly contentious development, which was supposed (by the developer, Justin de Wet) to be of great benefit to the whole Port Alfred community. In the long term, it has caused huge ecological damage to the estuary; the rates revenue that was supposed to go into upgrading Nemato township is these days spent on dredging the mouth, which silts up and renders the marina unusable for boats.

This story is given in great detail, an important record, and useful to others who might be defending estuaries against questionable “development”.

Although the Kowie/iQohi River biodiversity is much reduced, and the poorer sections of the community are still suffering, Cock ends on a positive note. This is when we realise why she has subtitled this book “a biography”, a term usually applied to people: she writes of recent events in which rivers have been given status as “living entities” in India and New Zealand.

The river iQohi itself, the River People in the sacred pools and indeed all the people who love and need the river and its life would be better off if we began to show it a proper degree of respect.