The Trekkers - Liberators Or Oppressors.
To understand history correctly we must be able to compare different events, therefore expanding our knowledge and giving us a better understanding of what happened. Through this we start to see the reason behind why things happened. In the comparison I"ll be making we will truly be able to find out the "wrong doer" between the Trekkers and South African tribal communities, because in both cases which I will be reviewing very similar things happened, and if these conflicts are explored correctly a higher level of understanding will come about. An understanding that cannot be acquired by reading through text books and studying it, but rather an understanding that can only come from being placed in the shoes of those affected by these situations at the time at which they occurred. Since we cannot go back in time, the only way to truly understand what really happened would be to make a comparison, as I mentioned earlier, which will highlight key points of importance.
The conflict that occurred along the Cape Eastern Frontier was between the Trekkers and the Xhosa. Some say that this conflict was inevitable, but was it really? The main reason for this conflict was the different attitudes to land that that the Trekkers and Xhosa had. The Trekkers saw land as being something with a numeric value that could be bought and sold, whereas the Xhosa saw land as something that you deserved and to them it had no value in terms of money, they also believed in communal tenure. Both parties had expansionism tendencies and they found the other party moving into land that they desired to control as their own. The trekkers found that the Xhosa were not an easy people to take over as they had found in the case of the San and the Khoi. In 1806 when the British took over control of the colony permanently the Xhosa found themselves on the losing side. The British decided that the Xhosa were to be forced out of areas that Trekkers had settled in.
