Volume 40, Number 1 & 2 · January 14, 1993
A Betrayed People
By J.M. Coetzee
Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa's Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People
by Noël Mostert
Knopf, 1,355 pp., $35.00
In 1797 a young Englishman, John Barrow, traveled five hundred miles from Cape Town to the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony on an assignment to report to the British Crown on the territory it had acquired, sight unseen, from the Dutch. A man of the European Enlightenment, an eagerminded amateur scientist, naturalist, and geographer, Barrow visited the kraal of the twenty-year-old Xhosa chief Ngqika and was much taken with what he saw. 'No nation on earth…produces so fine a race of men,' he wrote. Raised on the simplest of diets, living vigorous outdoor lives, unashamedly naked, free of the vices of civilization, the Xhosa were the very embodiment of the noble savage; whereas the Dutch colonists, isolated from Europe, seemed only to have degenerated. If the Xhosa were to be given the benefits of science, Barrow saw every prospect that they would become an ornament to the Crown, as long as they could be protected from the encroachments of the colonists.
Review, 4027 words
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