The work of Robert Ross has a special place in the historiography of Southern Africa. His work challenges a powerful determinist or teleological tendency that sees racist apartheid society as the unavoidable outcome of the past. Robert Ross also identifies sources from below that could have led to a different outcome in this latest book on the Kat River Settlement – a settlement that showed the possibility of an African population developing a prosperous peasant economy. The Khoekhoe, the main ethnic group in the settlement, were traditionally adept at keeping livestock, but an intricate irrigation system was crucial to the agricultural practices they developed in the valley. Towards the end, when life in the valley became too dangerous, they became foresters. The Khoekhoe settlement was strongly linked to the Bethelsdorp mission of van der Kemp and Read, a main protagonist of the book. Thus the settlement embodied the nineteenth-century ideal of progress fuelled by missionary zeal. However, the origin of the settlement lay in more opportunistic considerations: ‘Its avowed purpose was to act as a breastwork against further Xhosa attack in the event of renewed conflict between the colony and the ama-Xhosa’ (p. 91). Ultimately, the Xhosa wars led to the destruction of this autonomous, relatively wealthy peasant society. However, the main forces behind the destruction of the Kat River Settlement were the racism and short-term economic interests of the East Cape British settlers. The framework of this story is therefore the general colonial history of the Cape.

The book is full of nuanced analyses of ethnic identities. Its narrative illustrates the possibility of cooperation across races and the fluidity of ethnic markers in an emerging South Africa. Ethnicity is important: the Kat River settlers, comprising both Khoekhoe and a mixed-race, partly Xhosa population, were, for example, divided in their reaction to a proposed vagrancy law. However, the story is more one of a continuous social construction of racial identities than of a stultified racial and tribal society, and there was certainly movement between the Khoekhoe and Xhosa groups. While borders are a main theme in this book, Ross stresses ‘that borders are not merely places of separation, but also places of osmosis’ (p. 93). This is exemplified in an iconic central figure in this story: Herman Matroos, the son of an escaped slave who fought with the British in the War of the Axe, which pitched Xhosa against settlers. Thereafter, he became a major non-Khoekhoe settler in the valley. He married an umXhosa and was later given the Xhosa praisename Ngxukumeshe. In the final rebellion against British rule that destroyed the settlement, he fought with the Xhosa.

The book is therefore valuable for people interested in race and ethnicity in Southern Africa. Its greatest value in this respect may be in the merciless analysis of British racism in the Eastern Cape: ‘The reasons for the prejudice of the Britons went beyond the inherent racism of their nineteenth century compatriots throughout the world … They believed or at least wanted to believe, both that the black race would melt away in the face of the white and that Britons had been brought to the Cape, in particular the Eastern Cape, by divine providence’ (p. 134). To this reader, the book documents particularly well how racism is rooted in jealousy and resentment. British settlers were not particularly successful farmers and therefore jealous of the land occupied by the Khoekhoe. There was more immediate financial gain for them in supplying British troops and therefore they had an interest in war.

The force of jealousy emerges powerfully in the account of T. J. Biddulph, who was appointed superintendent of the Kat River Settlement in 1847. He was a bankrupt farmer and depicted the settlement as a messy agricultural failure due to the Khoekhoes’ laziness and indolence. Yet the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. The new governor, Sir Harry Smith, exclaimed in 1847 while visiting the settlement and seeing the first harvest after the War of the Axe: ‘If this is a failure then the whole world is a failure!’ (p. 172). Biddulph was sacked, but this did not lead to an improvement in the situation. Racism triumphed when the Khoekhoe were given no time to recover after war had destroyed their livelihoods and driven them into commando duties serving the settlers. The result was that many turned against the British government and most of them joined the Xhosa in a rebellion that meant the end for the settlement.

This review unavoidably simplifies the complications in this very nuanced book. I have, however, tried to bring out how the book may be a major inspiration for historians as well as social scientists to look at Southern Africa. Robert Ross has a sharp eye for agency. We meet in the book a number of figures, such as Herman Matroos, James Read and Sir Andries Stockenstrom, who defy easy categorization, and they reveal the intricate patterns involved in the social construction of reality. Such considerations are, however, secondary in recommending this book: it is a masterpiece and a good read.