The Amandelboom Basters’ forgotten Northern Frontier story: A 19th-century tragedy

The history of Amandelboom, now Williston, in the Northern Cape does not easily lend itself to a straightforward heritage narrative of victims and villains. Instead, it is a complicated story that raises all sorts of troubling questions and ethical challenges.

Professor Steven Robins is with the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, University of Stellenbosch.

During one of my first visits to the small Karoo town of Williston, Elsa van Schalkwyk, the local town historian, alerted me to a forgotten history of the Northern Cape frontier involving the “Basters” of mixed Khoi and European ancestry who lived at the German Rhenish mission in Amandelboom (renamed Williston in 1883) for much of the 19th century. The Amandelboom Basters were a prosperous and independent livestock-owning community who were pushed off their land in the late 1860s and decided to trek more than 1,000km northwards to Rehoboth in what is now Namibia.

While doing research for my book Letters of Stone I made the startling discovery that in 1908, the year the Nama and Herero genocide ended, the Rehoboth Baster community had been measured and photographed by the German physical anthropologist Eugen Fischer, who later became Hitler’s most senior racial scientist. Fischer’s career as a leading international eugenics scientist soared after he published his ethnography on the Rehoboth Basters in 1913. From 1928 to 1942, Fischer was the director of Berlin’s notorious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. During World War 2 the Institute had received eye specimens and blood samples from Auschwitz from one of its postdoctoral researchers, Dr Josef Mengele. These strange and disturbing historical entanglements had made me even more curious about the little-known history of this forgotten frontier town.

There are, of course, many forgotten histories in South Africa. There are also many attempts to reclaim buried pasts through grassroots heritage initiatives. One such initiative is taking place on Heritage Day in Williston and includes activities such as indigenous games, potjiekos, dermbraai and a roosterbrood competition. Those who attend will also be able to see 19th-century rock engravings on a nearby farm where the Amandelboom pastoralists once lived. Not much is known in the town about these rock engravings or the herders who inscribed the landscape with these impressive images.

ROCS , a local NGO based in Williston’s Coloured township of Amandelboom, is using this year’s Heritage Day to engage with this forgotten history. As Reggie Nutt, the founder of ROCS, told me: “Knowing where your people come from is vital in a community like Amandelboom, which has massive unemployment, poverty, substance abuse and a sense of hopelessness and despair amongst many youth.” But the history of Amandelboom does not easily lend itself to a straightforward heritage narrative of victims and villains.