Browsing by Author "Links, Calumet"

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    The economic impact of the Khoe on the north-eastern frontier of the Cape Colony
    (2021-12) Links, Calumet; Fourie, Johan; Von Fintel, Dieter; Green, Erik; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences. Dept. of Economics.
    ENGLISH SUMMARY : The role played by the Khoe in early Cape colonial economy remains largely unaccounted for in Economic History. The two exceptions are Fourie and Green’s The missing people: accounting for the productivity of indigenous populations in Cape Colonial History (2015) and La Croix’s The Khoikhoi population, 1652-1780: a review of the evidence and two new estimates (2018). This omission is significant since the Khoe formed the cornerstone of the Cape frontier pastoral economy. This thesis investigates the role Khoe labourers, both coerced and free, played in shaping the nort-heastern economy of the Cape Colony in the period 1787-1828. I also illuminate the devastating impact that frontier closure had on Khoe society. The study starts by investigating the substitutability of slave labour. Chapter One questions the substitutability of slave labour through a longitudinal study of the Graaff-Reinet district, located on the eastern frontier of the colony. I calculate the Hicksian elasticity of complementarity coefficients for each year of a 22-year combination of cross-sectional tax data sets (1805–1828) in order to test whether slave labour was substitutable for other forms of labour. I find that slave labour, indigenous labour, and settler family labour were not substitutable over this period, which lends credence to the finding that slave and family labour were two different inputs in agricultural production. I argue that the non-substitutability of slave labour was largely a result of the settlers’ need to obtain labourers with location-specific skills such as the Khoe, and that slaves may have served a purpose other than being a source of unskilled labour - such as providing artisan skills or acting as collateral. In Chapter Two I investigate the relationship between coercion and productivity in this pastoral setting. I find a positive relationship between loosening coercion and effort, and argue that as legislative protection against the mistreatment of the Khoe was promulgated into law, Khoe labourers decreased their levels of effort. This finding leads me to conclude that even in pastoralism, where effort is hard to observe and quantify, less coercion leads to decreased levels of effort. Chapter Three investigates the general theoretical argument that women historically broke free of traditional gender roles as a result of the fact that they held an advantage over men in animal husbandry. Working Khoe women on the north-eastern frontier of the Cape Colony present the perfect subjects to test this claim. Both Graaff-Reinet and Tulbagh districts were major meat and crop producers for the colonial centre at Cape Town, and relied heavily on indentured Khoe female labour. By using a pooled Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression I find that the presence of indigenous Khoe women on farms had no significant positive effect on sheep and cattle holdings for either of the two districts above that of Khoe men. As a consequence, I argue that Khoe women’s actual competitive advantage lay in home-based production. In the fourth and last chapter, I argue for the importance of incorporating family structure in inequality estimations. This is particularly important for inequality studies in Africa. When calculating the various inequality metrics, contemporary studies, regardless of the setting or context, assume either a conventional western household, or that resources are simply divided on a per capita basis. This study argues that kinship networks matter for the study of inequality in African societies. Households in economic distress often join those of relatives or other kin in order to mitigate the impact of extreme poverty. When studying the level of wealth inequality among the Khoe of Swellendam district in 1825, it is clear that frontier closure impoverished a significant portion of this community which, in order to reduce the impact of destitution, made use of extended kinship networks.