gatherers (San) and from indigenous pastoralists (Khoikhoi) who had lost
their livestock. During the 1770s, indigenous bands attacked burgher
property over a wide front from bases in the Sneeuwberg Mountains north
of Graaff-Reinet. Large commandos, including subjected indigenous pas-
toralists as well as burghers, retaliated, treating their prey as vermin. In
1774, a commando of 300 men claimed to have killed 503 people; between
1786 and 1795, 2,430 were reported killed. By the end of the century, the
indigenous hunting and herding peoples of the western part of South Africa
had ceased to offer large-scale resistance.
With their roots in the society of Cape Town and the arable southwest,
the trekboers were never a self-sufficient society. They were accustomed to
using coerced slave and indigenous labor. Many continued to own slaves-
in 1773, over half the burghers in Swellendam owned at least one slave. But
as they moved deeper and deeper into the interior and edged more and
more of the indigenous herders out of control of the land, they drew many
of them into their service. The subjected pastoralists had precisely the skills
that the trekboers required. For the right to continue to liveon the land and
to pasture a few livestock of their own,"they herded the invaders' cattle and