Transkei traders: glimpses of a bygone era

Being a trader in the verdant hills of the old Transkei had a romance, not to mention a fragrance, all of its own, recalls Graham Jooste.

- Graham Jooste

The Transkei (‘Beyond the Kei River’) was the first of apartheid South Africa’s Bantustans. Declared a ‘homeland’ for the Xhosa people, with Umtata (now Mthatha) its capital, it was given nominal autonomy by Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in 1963. In 1976 it was declared independent of South Africa, the only country that acknowledged it as a legal entity. It became part of the Eastern Cape in 1994.

Long before the Europeans arrived, the region was divided into kingdoms, each ruled by its own king around whose ‘Great Place’ his subjects settled.

The population density was low and the people were self-sufficient. There was no need for commerce or trade with the world, whether westward beyond the Kei River or eastward towards the Zulu kingdom. There were no towns or villages in the Western sense. Most importantly, there was only one culture, and strangers who settled in the region were integrated into that culture.

Contact with the colonists, in contrast, brought about slow but steady social change.

As early as 1660, Jan van Riebeeck, the Dutch governor of the Cape, sent a ship to the Kei area to investigate the potential for trade with the local inhabitants, but it was unable to send parties ashore for exploration purposes. In 1752, August Beutler, an ensign employed by the Dutch East India Company, headed an official expedition from Cape Town to assess the economic potential of the land across the Kei.

Some 40 years later, Joachim van Reenen led another official expedition, ostensibly in search of survivors from the ill-fated Grosvenor, which had sunk off the Lusikisiki coast.