Qualla: British Kaffraria

British Kaffraria: Introduction

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit I created the map, based partly on the source map: Eastern frontier of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope from Algoa Bay to the Great Kei river, which appears opposite page 620 of ‘The autobiography of Lieutenant-general Sir Harry Smith’ by G.C.B. Bart, Chapter xlviii, published 1903, as part of the online Build a Book initiative. JMK 11:03, 26 December 2007 (UTC), CC BY-SA 4.0. The name itself tells you who wrote the history. "Kaffraria" derives from the Arabic word kafir -- "non-believer" -- a term Arab traders applied to non-Muslim peoples along the East African coast, which European colonizers then adopted as a racial slur for Black southern Africans. When the British carved out a colony between the Keiskamma and Great Kei rivers in the Eastern Cape in 1847, they called it British Kaffraria. The Xhosa people who had lived there for centuries already had names for this land. The British did not ask what they were.

Read more: British Kaffraria on Qualla

Image: I created the map, based partly on the source map: Eastern frontier of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope from Algoa Bay to the Great Kei river, which appears opposite page 620 of ‘The autobiography of Lieutenant-general Sir Harry Smith’ by G.C.B. Bart, Chapter xlviii, published 1903, as part of the online Build a Book initiative. JMK 11:03, 26 December 2007 (UTC) | CC BY-SA 4.0

British Kaffraria: Before the Lines Were Drawn

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit I created the map, based partly on the source map: Eastern frontier of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope from Algoa Bay to the Great Kei river, which appears opposite page 620 of ‘The autobiography of Lieutenant-general Sir Harry Smith’ by G.C.B. Bart, Chapter xlviii, published 1903, as part of the online Build a Book initiative. JMK 11:03, 26 December 2007 (UTC), CC BY-SA 4.0. Long before colonial cartography reached the Eastern Cape, this territory had its own history of habitation and change. The Khoisan -- hunter-gatherers and herders -- were the earliest known inhabitants. Over centuries, Bantu-speaking peoples migrated southward, crossing the Kei ...

Read more: British Kaffraria on Qualla

British Kaffraria: Nine Wars for the Same Ground

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit H. R (Hugh Robinson), Public domain. The territory's colonial story is one of compulsive annexation. The British first seized it in the 1830s, naming it Queen Adelaide's Province after the wife of King William IV. When word reached London, the Colonial Office balked -- Lord Glenelg, Secretary of State for the Coloni...

Read more: British Kaffraria on Qualla

Image: H. R (Hugh Robinson) | Public domain

British Kaffraria: The Cattle Killing and Its Aftermath

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit I created the map, based partly on the source map: Eastern frontier of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope from Algoa Bay to the Great Kei river, which appears opposite page 620 of ‘The autobiography of Lieutenant-general Sir Harry Smith’ by G.C.B. Bart, Chapter xlviii, published 1903, as part of the online Build a Book initiative. JMK 11:03, 26 December 2007 (UTC), CC BY-SA 4.0. What finally broke Xhosa resistance in British Kaffraria was not another war but a catastrophe from within. In 1856, a young Xhosa prophetess named Nongqawuse told her people that if they killed their cattle and destroyed their crops, their ancestors would rise, the British would...

Read more: British Kaffraria on Qualla

British Kaffraria: Echoes Into the Twentieth Century

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Ccfjg assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. British Kaffraria's boundaries did not disappear when the colony was formally dissolved. They resurfaced, like a palimpsest, under apartheid. The same general territory was reconstituted as the Ciskei, one of South Africa's nominally independent Bantustans -- a supposed homeland ...

Read more: British Kaffraria on Qualla

Image: No machine-readable author provided. Ccfjg assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0