THEWHITEINVADERS
virtually all the agricultural farmers were also raising cattle and sheep, at
least as a sideline. Some colonists-younger
sons of farmers and others
who lacked sufficient land and capital for successful agriculture-were
already living exclusively as pastoralists and hunters. The slave economy
excluded them from other occupations. Throughout the eighteenth cen-
tury, extensive pastoral farming, with hunting as a sideline, absorbed the
bulk of the increase in the white population. These white pastoralists
became known as trekboers-semi-migrant
farmers.
The environment fa~ored the trekboers. Although vast areas of arid land
lay beyond the mountain escarpment, there were, also areas that were
suitable for sheep and cattle, where a person could rnake a start with
relatively little capital. The indigenous pastoralists, who called themselves
Khoikhoi, demoralized by the collapse of their communities in the vicinity
of the Cape peninsula and, after 1712, devastated by smallpox, were un-
able to prevent the colonists from getting access to the streams and the
springs and from gradually establishing control of the land. The result was
a process of dispersal of whites from the agricultural colony: northward