THEWHITEINVADERS
Beyond the trekboers north and northeast from the Cape lived people of
diverse origins: displaced indigenous pastoralists
and hunter-gatherers,
escaped African and Asian slaves, burghers of white parentage who had
committed
crimes, and men and women of mixed ethnic descent. Like
many trekboers, these people lived by hunting as much as stock farming.
Like the trekboers, too, they were loosely linked with the Cape by trade,
bartering
sheep, cattle, and ivory in return for arms, ammunition,
and
other imported commodities. Forming fluid communities, they were pen-
etrating and destabilizing the indigenous pastoral and rnixed farming so-
cieties beyond the Orange River. By the end of the eighteenth century, some
were becoming organized as chiefdoms. At first they called themselves
Bastaards, but, under missionary influence, they were becoming known as
Griquas.U
In the east the situation was still more complex. By the 1770s, the
foremost eastern trekboers had reached the vicinities of Algoa Bay and
Graaff-Reinet, where there were valleys with good soils and sufficient rain
for extensive agriculture as well as stock farming. This desirable land was
already part of the long-disputed
frontier zone between indigenous pas-
toralists and Bantu-speaking