Anthologies of documents are much less common than they used to be, perhaps because the internet makes it so easy for researchers to find sources of all descriptions. The downside of that access is that we miss guidance from reliable scholars steeped in the literature of their fields. Think how much historians of South Africa owe to Thomas Karis and Gwendolen Carter for their multivolume collection From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882–1964.Footnote ¹ In the volume under review here, Robert Ross illuminates an earlier period in a compendium which will be useful to both professionals and students.

The title, as is so often the case with publishers, promises more than the book delivers. Pages two to five contain excerpts from three documents dating from 1777, 1798, and 1799, all composed by European observers. The last nineteen pages include eight documents dating from 1861–79. The core of the book is centred on the Kat River District during the eventful years 1829–56. The drama opens with the people's jubilation at Ordinance 50's promise of a Cape Colony free from racial oppression. It closes with a failed rebellion, dispossession, and subjection to a government in the service of white settlers.

A veteran scholar like Ross is well aware of the pitfalls of the term Khoesan, which he uses so contemporary readers will know about whom he is writing. The people who generated these documents reveal a keen sense of a shared identity, though they sometimes speak of themselves as part of the ‘Hottentot nation’, sometimes as ‘the Hottentot, Bastard, and other mixed races of the colony’, or simply as ‘people of colour’. They likewise cherish a lively memory of their historical trajectory from proprietors of all the land to bonded labourers. A parallel narrative concerns their passage from heathen to Christian. The narratives intersect dramatically in the years 1828–38, when their struggle became an object of intense interest for British humanitarians and evangelicals, culminating in the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aborigines (British Possessions). The unmediated testimony of their representatives and their speeches to packed houses at London's Exeter Hall are remarkable for their clear-eyed statement of grievances. They also represent, as Ross remarks, ‘an attempt to call in the bargain which the Khoekhoe had made with the . . . missionaries, that the pay-off for conversion and the remodelling of Khoe life along evangelical Christian lines would be recognition of their civil rights’ (59).

From that moment in the international spotlight, cracks and fissures appear. While the people of the Kat River settlement presented a united front against the use of vagrancy acts as a settler subterfuge to regain control of their labour, some attempted to present themselves as more respectable and loyal than their fellows. Advocates of temperance expressed resentment at the drinkers for bringing the whole community into disrepute. Soldiers who had served time and again in frontier wars regarded themselves as specially deserving. None of this moved the British settlers at Grahamstown, who ‘found the prosperity and respectability of the Kat River Khoekhoe an existential threat’; they preferred drunkards to ‘intelligent, articulate Khoekhoe, who on occasion saved the British Army from military catastrophe’ (92). The defining catastrophic split between ‘loyalists’ and rebels arrived in 1850. The crisis came, misleadingly, to be known as the Kat River Rebellion (1850–1) due to the minority of Khoe who joined the Xhosa side in one of the Cape Colony's many frontier wars.

Ross has, through decades of research, thoroughly mastered the intricacies of this complex affair. The present book gives him an opportunity to make Khoe voices heard in all their varied and discordant notes. Among the invaluable features of the book are his introductions and explications that enable even newcomers to grasp the larger context of each document. Many readers will find the book a useful adjunct to the better-known documentation produced by the 1820 settlers and their apologists.