There is a temptation to approach Noël Mostert’s Frontiers (1993) circumspectly, as you would the Grand Canyon or the Great Pyramid of Giza. It’s monumental – 1,292 pages, not counting index and notes ‒ and frankly imposing, a doorstopper to stop the largest door. The story it tells is of vast proportions too. Do not, however, be unnerved. This is a book which for originality, historical depth and sheer narrative richness has been compared to Gibbon ‒ and it deserves the comparison. It also deserves a great many readers.
Do those last sentences sound like something extracted from the jacket copy? Maybe a bit hyped? They might, because as editor of the book I wrote the jacket copy for it in the first place. But I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I praised Frontiers then only in order to sell it, and that I am now inclined to back away. On the contrary. Having spent a couple of weeks reading it all the way through again, my admiration for what Mostert achieved is greater than ever.
Frontiers started out as a much smaller book, intended to deal primarily with one of the most shocking and tragic episodes of the nineteenth century, the mass starvation and death of the Xhosa people. The Xhosa, South Africa’s most populous and sophisticated group, had made the terrible mistake of listening to the teachings of native prophets and in consequence committed a sort of national suicide. In researching these mysterious events, however, it soon became apparent to Mostert that to do justice to his subject he would need to move back in time. His idea of what the book should be grew and grew, stretching further and further back into South African history and even prehistory.
I don’t mind admitting that, as his editor, this expansion of the project made me nervous ‒ I had signed Frontiers on the strength of his earlier splendid (but normal-sized) book Supership
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Subscribe now or Sign inThere is a temptation to approach Noël Mostert’s Frontiers (1993) circumspectly, as you would the Grand Canyon or the Great Pyramid of Giza. It’s monumental – 1,292 pages, not counting index and notes ‒ and frankly imposing, a doorstopper to stop the largest door. The story it tells is of vast proportions too. Do not, however, be unnerved. This is a book which for originality, historical depth and sheer narrative richness has been compared to Gibbon ‒ and it deserves the comparison. It also deserves a great many readers.
Do those last sentences sound like something extracted from the jacket copy? Maybe a bit hyped? They might, because as editor of the book I wrote the jacket copy for it in the first place. But I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I praised Frontiers then only in order to sell it, and that I am now inclined to back away. On the contrary. Having spent a couple of weeks reading it all the way through again, my admiration for what Mostert achieved is greater than ever. Frontiers started out as a much smaller book, intended to deal primarily with one of the most shocking and tragic episodes of the nineteenth century, the mass starvation and death of the Xhosa people. The Xhosa, South Africa’s most populous and sophisticated group, had made the terrible mistake of listening to the teachings of native prophets and in consequence committed a sort of national suicide. In researching these mysterious events, however, it soon became apparent to Mostert that to do justice to his subject he would need to move back in time. His idea of what the book should be grew and grew, stretching further and further back into South African history and even prehistory. I don’t mind admitting that, as his editor, this expansion of the project made me nervous ‒ I had signed Frontiers on the strength of his earlier splendid (but normal-sized) book Supership and hadn’t bargained for a monster. Mostert, I know, was unsettled too. Still, one thing I have learned in a career of shepherding books into existence is that you probably shouldn’t challenge either the author’s conception of a book or the degree of detail he chooses to bring into it, providing he knows what he wants and is in control. Mostert, clearly, knew what he wanted and was in control of his material. The resulting book is nothing less than a full-scale account of the collision between two worlds, white European and black African, over the course of centuries. It is a wonderfully complicated tale including everything from set-piece battles to moving evocations of life in the deserts and forests before the coming of settlers, from the quiet heroism of a few missionaries like James Read to the bombast of an important colonial bureaucrat like Sir Harry Smith, in Mostert’s words ‘one of the most extraordinary personalities of all, dashing, vain, self-glorifying, reckless, somewhat mad, and often ludicrous, as well as silly’. And along with the exceptional characters come many small visions that stick in the mind: a trekboer family moving in an ox-drawn wagon across the flat, empty Karoo with all their belongings and animals, at the pace of the slowest ‒ the chickens; or dead bodies in the aftermath of an attack, with their insides neatly scooped out by vultures, leaving only dry skin and skeletons. There is nothing bloodless about Mostert. Some reviewers of Frontiers, dazed by its length, claimed that the first two or three hundred pages could have been omitted. I can see their point, but I wouldn’t go along with it. These chapters cover the long period from the first arrival of Bantu-speaking blacks in South Africa up to the minuscule colony of Dutchmen starving on the meat of penguins beneath the shadow of Table Mountain. There is wonderful stuff here, about the Age of Exploration, about the nature of the aboriginal cultures that occupied the land before the white invaders, about the first bemused contacts between blacks and shipwrecked Europeans. Nothing, in fact, is really superfluous: in the wild independence of the rural Dutch Boers we see the inevitable pressure for more land, and the seeds of apartheid; in the initial mild resistance of the Xhosa the beginning agony of their destruction. The British took over the Cape from the Dutch in 1797 for purely strategic reasons. Curiously, given the wars that would be fought over it ‒ no less than eight, progressively more violent, over the course of a century ‒ nobody much wanted it. (Even Nelson couldn’t see any point in possessing the place.) It indeed soon proved itself a nuisance. For the British government the colony was a constant drain on the Exchequer, with a seemingly endless series of elderly Waterloo veterans sent out as governors who constantly demanded more troops. For the troops themselves, absurdly arrayed in full battle kit including scarlet coats and pipe-clay straps even while struggling through the stifling bush, South Africa offered little but discomfort or worse. As for the settlers shipped out from England to occupy seized territory, their lot was fear ‒ fear of the climate, of the wildlife and especially of the natives, whose deeply loved homeland was being stolen. Frontiers succeeds brilliantly in showing how the interwoven forces ‒ the increasingly disaffected Boers, the settlers, the colonial administration, the distant London government, the missionaries ‒ shaped the events of nineteenth-century South Africa and led to doom for the original inhabitants. Some, particularly the Khoikhoi (pastoral nomads once called Hottentots), the first to fall, became virtual slaves to white farmers or conscript fighters. The Xhosa, on the other hand, clung to their ancestral traditions and their lands, but to less and less avail. Lied to, betrayed in broken treaties, they were gradually forced to yield land and turn to bitterness. It is difficult to argue with Mostert’s sad sympathy for them. The colonial government, nearly always in the hands of British military men, had no strategy but repeated clumsy assaults by troops untrained for bush warfare. Such attacks, when they failed – as they usually did – frequently degenerated into a policy of scorched earth, leaving expanses of burnt kraals and ravaged fields. The Xhosa fought back when they could, at first with shields and assegais, eventually with muskets. It took many years and many casualties for the British to learn guerrilla warfare. Instead there were ventures like the typically mismanaged one, splendidly described by Mostert, that took place in 1851 in the heart of Xhosa country when the British tried to clear warriors from a rugged mountain valley called the Waterkloof. Week after week ill-equipped soldiers struggled up and down the undergrowth-choked ravines of what they called Mount Misery in desperate heat, seldom finding their quarry and instead suffering constant ambush. Meanwhile, in fatuous dispatches, the British commanders were claiming victory. Ultimately, of course, the Xhosa didn’t have a chance. Pleas to London had eventually brought the colonial government more regular troops, providing Governor Sir Harry Smith with an opportunity for a more effective campaign. Though he had once remarked that ‘humanity shudders’ at the tactics he chose to use, he then embarked on a deliberate ‘starving-out system’. This had been, as Mostert notes, ‘the strategy of desperation’ in every war since 1812. And in this case, it worked. By 1856 ‘the frontier Xhosa were in a severe state of spiritual, political and economic crisis . . . A heavy fatalism had settled upon them . . .’ Their most cherished lands were gone; they were economically up against the wall. At this point the story reaches its terrible climax. In some of the book’s finest and most affecting writing, Mostert describes how the strange predictions of an unlikely prophet, a young girl named Nongqawuse, merged with current events and the deepest Xhosa traditions to create a lethal new gospel. Cattle were already dying from a lung disease accidentally introduced from Europe; there were rumours that the Russians – since they were already fighting the British in the Crimea – might come to the Xhosa’s aid. Word spread that the Xhosa’s long agony could end and the lost lands be restored, if only everyone took several painful steps: all the cattle – the principal source of Xhosa wealth – had to be killed; standing grain and all stored food be destroyed; and all sowing and cultivation be stopped. Then, on a certain morning, signalled by two suns rising, so-called ‘new people’ would rise from the sea in a grand resurrection and drive the British out of South Africa for good. Nearly all the Xhosa obeyed, however reluctantly. ‘From this commitment,’ Mostert writes, ‘there began to unfold what is probably the greatest self-inflicted immolation of a people in all history, the saddest and most overwhelming of all South Africa’s many human tragedies.’ For a time, joy and eager anticipation reigned among the Believers, convinced that deliverance was at hand. But as each appointed date came and went, month after month, doubt spread. At first, failure was blamed on the sceptics who refused to kill their cattle. By the end of 1856, however, it was inescapably plain that the prophecy was wrong. The Xhosa were left with nothing but dead cattle and empty storage bins; overfed vultures circled overhead. ‘The stench of a feast had become that of a famine.’ Estimates of the dead ranged up to 40,000, with thousands more driven west into Cape Colony in search of work, only to die there. Some Xhosa survived. But the entire tribal structure was shattered, never to recover. Most of the chiefs ended in chains, imprisoned on Robben Island, a century later the place where Nelson Mandela, himself a Xhosa, would be held. The pain and anger lived on, to play a shaping role in the troubles besetting South Africa even today. For bringing us an understanding of this, if nothing else, Frontiers deserves its epic scale.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 53 © Charles Elliott 2017
About the contributor
Charles Elliott is an American editor and the author of several (much smaller) books.