ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of state-sanctioned militia, especially the impact of their slaving activities, on the destruction of San societies along the Cape Colony’s northeastern frontier district of Graaff-Reinet during the five decades straddling the turn of the nineteenth century. The missionary John Philip was absolutely clear that the settler militia was the primary instrument of the crimes committed and blood spilt on the north-eastern border of the Cape Colony in the half-century after 1776, more specifically the extirpation and degradation to the condition of slaves or bondsmen of the San. The administrative district of Graaff-Reinet was created in 1786 out of the eastern extremities of two older districts, Stellenbosch and Swellendam, administered from the south and south-west and with its undefined northern border shading into ‘Bushman country’. Graaff-Reinet’s frontier breastwork of poorer settlers were the areas of greatest settler labour hunger and coercion, and whose Khoisan population was largely derived from, and supplemented by, recently enslaved San.
