The Koup before the grants

The district in the Dutch East India Company's own minutes, from the Swartberg being taken as a jurisdictional wall in 1770 to more than a hundred places standing abandoned in 1791. The Koup is named, given an officer, bounded by rivers and emptied, all before the grants of 1841 that this record otherwise begins with.

The loan places of this district became property on 15 April 1841. The Company that granted them in the first place kept minutes for a hundred and forty years before that, and the Koup is in them.

Not often, and never as a settled district. It enters those minutes the way a frontier enters the papers of a government that is not sure what it has: as a mountain convenient for drawing a line, then as a posting for an officer, then as a list of names, and finally as a stretch of country the Council was told stood empty.

A mountain used as a wall

On 13 February 1770 the Council of Policy settled a question of jurisdiction by reaching for the nearest large object. Farms on the southern side of the Swartberg would answer to Swellendam, and the people living in the Camdebo would answer to the landdrost of Stellenbosch.

The wording is plain enough: "de aan de Zuijd zijde van voorsz: berg geleegene plaatsen onder Swellendam Sullen behooren".

Five years later the same Council looked back on that decision and described the mountain as having been taken "als tot de Scheijdsmuur", as the dividing wall. Nobody had surveyed anything. A mountain range was serving as the border of the colony's administration because it was there and because it was obvious.

That is the first thing the Company's records say about this ground. Not who lived on it. Which side of the mountain it was on.

An officer behind the Koup

On 17 May 1774 the Council appointed veldkorporaals for the outlying country, and the list is worth reading in full for the geography it assumes:

David Schalk van der Merwe, in 't Camdebo's veld. Adriaan van Jaarsveld Albertsz, op den Sneeuwberg. Charl Marais, onder langs den Sneeuwberg. Jacob de Clercq, In 't nieuwe veld agter de Coup. Nicolaas van der Merwe, in 't bockeveld agter den Witsenberg.

In 't nieuwe veld agter de Coup. The Nuweveld behind the Koup, and a man named to command in it.

This is the district under its own name, three years before the trekboers are usually said to have come over the Swartberg to the water at De Claar Stroom, and sixty-seven years before the grants. The Koup was not empty and it was not unknown. It was somewhere the Company thought needed a corporal.

The spelling is why the name is easy to miss. The clerks wrote Coup, and the forms the district answers to now, Koup and Gouph, are nowhere in the Company's minutes at all.

The men behind Bruijnshoogte

The following year the frontier wrote to Cape Town, and on 11 July 1775 the Council spent most of a day on it.

A heemraad had been sent to inspect the grazing places "in 't Camdebo en omtrent de bruijns hoogte leggende Veeplaatsen", and he went with a specific instruction. There was a standing order from the government "van zig niet agter de Bruijns hoogte ter needer te zetten", not to settle beyond Bruijnshoogte, and he was to find out whether it was being kept.

It was not. He found nine households over the line with their families and their stock: Lowies Nel, Jacobus Potgieter, Frans Labuschagne, Willem Prinslo the elder, Hendrik Krieger, Claas Prinslo the younger, Hannes and Hendrik Kloppers, and Jan Nortje the elder. They told him they had had no choice, and had gone "weegens gebrek ter bekooming van goede plaatsen", for want of places good enough to live on, in grazing and in water.

Then he set down who had settled on and against the Sneeuwberg: Pieter Nel, Jan Coetser the elder, four Bothas, Hilligert Muller, Cornelis Besuijdenhout wijnandsz, and Jan Oosthuijsen d'oude and Jan Oosthuijsen de jonge. An elder and a younger of the same name, which in this period almost always means a father and his son.

The next question he put to them is the one that turns a list into a situation. The latest boundary between Stellenbosch and Swellendam had left these people inside the Stellenbosch district, so why had they not registered there? Nearly all of them answered that they had wanted to for a long time, and had asked Swellendam for the attestations that would let them transfer. Swellendam had refused. Coert Grobbelaar and Cornelis Besuijdenhout said they had been refused twice.

So they were living on one magistracy's ground and held on another's books, by the second magistracy's own choice.

The settlers' own petition is quoted inside the resolution, and it is the only place in these records where the people of the frontier speak in their own voice. They did not want to be moved. They asked to keep the places they were on "van d' E: Comp:n in leening", in loan from the Company, and they pleaded that they had very little:

veele deeser Ingeseetene agter de bruijnshoogte leggende Personen geen hondert Schapen en Vijftig beesten zijn bezittende

Many of the inhabitants behind Bruijnshoogte did not own a hundred sheep and fifty cattle. The Council gave them their boundaries, pushing the limits of Stellenbosch and Swellendam out to the Fish River and the Bosjesmans River.

The Sneeuwberg is not this district, and there is a witness of the period to say where it is. Anders Sparrman was travelling the interior that same season, and he places the range without fuss: the Sneeuwbergen "lie to the north of Camdebo". That is some two hundred kilometres north-east of the Koup.

It was settled country by then. Sparrman found the lower slopes "inhabited the year throughout", with the colonists coming down into the Camdeboo plains when the winters on the high ground turned severe. Neither of the towns a reader would locate it by had been founded: the drostdy of Graaff-Reinet came eleven years after this roll, and Murraysburg eighty. The country was named for its mountains and its veld, and that is how these men were placed on it.

So they were on the northern frontier and not in the Koup. Their interest here is that they were on the road that led to it: the same generation, the same kind of holding, the same petition.

What the mapmaker was told

Sparrman published his map of the colony in 1779, drawn from those travels of 1775 and 1776. It was the first serious attempt to show the interior, and it reaches a long way past where he had been.

Between the Rogge Veld and Cango it letters Kau Veld. North-east of that, between the Kau Veld and the Camdebo Veld, it letters Anthon Veld. Both sit on the country along this district's northern side.

Both names are in his book as well, once, and what he says about them is the point. Describing the Camdeboo, which he never reached, he sets down the two ways a traveller could come from there to the Cape: "From the information and accounts that were given me, I have laid down in my map two different roads… The north road is said to go to Anthon-veld, Kau-veld, and Bokke-veld."

Is said to go. He was told. He had meant to visit the Sneeuwberg and the Camdeboo and gave it up when sickness went through the horses, so the whole northern half of that map is other people's knowledge, written down by a Swede and engraved in Stockholm. Neither name is in the Company's minutes across the hundred and forty years they run, where every Anthon is a man and never a place.

Kau is a plausible way to write the name the clerks wrote as Coup, and on his road it falls between the Camdeboo and the Bokkeveld, which is where the Koup lies. That is worth noticing and not worth claiming. not yet verified

What the sheet does show plainly is how fast the paper was catching up. The maps made from Kolbe's and Valentyn's accounts a generation earlier fill this same country with the names of Khoi groups: Hessequas, Attaquas, Cabuquas, Sussiquas, Gauris, Odiquas. They show no Dutch grazing districts inland at all, and the interior behind the coastal ranges is largely blank. Fifty years on, Sparrman's has Rogge Veld, Kau Veld, Camdebo Veld and Sneeuwbergen, and the Khoi names have thinned away. The country had not changed in that time. Who was writing it down had.

What a household was worth

Jan Oosthuijsen d'oude was dead by the last day of March 1780, when his widow gave in a list of what he left. She signed herself Ana Boota, and the clerk wrote at the top of the page: "Ana Boota wedewe van Jan Oosthuijse de oude ik heb mijn goed alle met regt late opschrijve van twee gloofbaare mensche".

Fifty cattle. Three hundred and eighteen sheep. A half-worn wagon, a chest, two pots, a meal sieve, a butter cask, a churn, four forks, four plates, a mattress, a blanket, a kettle. A pair of silver buckles and a pair of silver cuff buttons, and a plough beam. Against it, a debt of 65 rixdollars for shop goods.

There is no house on the list, no loan place named, and nobody enslaved. It is the whole estate of a man who had been on the frontier for years, and it fits in a paragraph.

The neighbour who made his mark at the foot of it was Cornelis Besuijdenhout, whose name stands immediately before the two Oosthuijsens on the 1775 roll.

Twelve years later, in September 1792, the same kind of document was drawn up for Johanna Petronella Oosthuijsen, who had married the farmer Rudolph Johannes Brits and left six children between one and twelve years old. Her estate opens with what her father's did not have: "Een opstal staande op de lenings plaats gen:t de Groote Dam geleegen agter de Sneeuwbergen", valued at 333 rixdollars. Forty-one trek oxen, seventeen hundred breeding sheep, two half-worn wagons, six firearms, and two millstones with their spindle.

Two generations, twelve years apart, on the same frontier. The second one had a house.

A line drawn by rivers

By 1786 the Company had stopped using the mountain as a wall and started using water.

On 19 July that year the Council established the drostdy of Graaff-Reinet and defined what it covered. The western limit ran down the Klein Leeuwen Rivier from its source in the Nuweveld mountains to where it joins "de Gumka ofte grote Leeuwe Rivier", then down that river to the Swartberg, then along the north-eastern side of the mountain as far as the Brakke Rivier, and from there by the Gamtoos to the sea. In the east it ran by the Tarka and the Baviaans rivers to the Great Fish.

Read it slowly and it is a description of this country from the outside. The Gamka is named as the Great Leeu, one river under two names. The Swartberg is no longer a wall but a flank to be followed. And the line stops at a Brakke Rivier, somewhere along the mountain's northern side.

Six years later a burgher named Johannes Jacobus Swanepoel petitioned the Council about a grazing place he had taken "in Leening" from the Company in March 1790, "zeekere Veeplaats genaamd de Brakke Fontein gel: agter de Swarte berg". He was fourteen months behind on the recognition money and wanted the debt struck off and the place recorded as abandoned. He signed with a cross.

Which Brakke Fontein, and where, is not established. The petition was referred to the landdrost of Graaff-Reinet as the officer in whose district it lay, and there is no farm of that name in the Prince Albert division today. not yet verified

Standing empty

On 31 August 1791 the Council was given a figure.

'er wel hondert en meer plaatsen verlaten en onbewoond zijn weegens de onveiligheid der Bosjesmans, zoo als 't gansche nieuwe veld de Coup een gedeelte van de Sneeuwbergen de Tarka

More than a hundred places abandoned and unoccupied. The whole Nuweveld, the Koup, part of the Sneeuberge, the Tarka. The same document describes a knecht with eight armed men and a flock of wethers being held on the public road at the Chamka, the Gamka, for two days.

The word the clerks use is Bosjesmans, and the people it refers to are the /Xam, whose country this had been before any of it was lent to anybody. What the Council was recording as a security problem was the far end of a war it had been prosecuting through the commando system for thirty years. Sparrman, travelling that same decade, set down what the commandos did in a single sentence and did not soften it: the bosjesmen, he wrote, are "pursued and exterminated like the wild beasts, whose manners they have assumed. Others of them again are kept alive, and made slaves of."

The hundred empty farms are one side of that. The other side is not in these minutes, because the Company's clerks were not writing it down.

So the seventeen years between the corporal and the count run one way. In 1774 the Koup is a posting. In 1791 it is on a list of country nobody is living in.

Then 1841

The Company gave up the Cape four years after that count, and what happened to this ground between the abandonment of the 1790s and the surveys of the 1830s is not in the records gathered here.

What can be said is that the grants of 15 April 1841 were not the beginning anybody later took them for. They were the moment a district that had already been named, bounded, occupied, emptied and reoccupied was finally written down as property. The oldest loan place in the district, Kweekvallei, had been taken by Zacharias and Dina de Beer seventy-nine years before that day, in 1762.

The Oosthuizens are not in any of these documents on this ground. As far as the records gathered here go, the family was still two hundred kilometres to the north-east in the 1770s, and the two Jan Oosthuijsens of the Sneeuwberg roll were on a different frontier in a different district. The Koup was being administered, occupied and abandoned by other people while they were doing the same somewhere else.

Research notes

The research behind this page, kept separate from it: dated working notes, open questions, and what is not yet settled.