---
title: "The Amandelboom Basters’ forgotten Northern Frontier story: A 19th-century tragedy"
description: "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."
type: "OpinionNewsArticle"
publisher: "Daily Maverick"
site: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za"
section: "Opinionistas"
author: "Steven Robins"
author_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/author/stevenrobins/"
canonical_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2026-09-14-the-amandelboom-basters-forgotten-northern-frontier-story-a-19th-century-tragedy/"
published: "2026-09-14T21:59:41"
lang: "en-ZA"
word_count: 1687
---

# 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.

By Steven Robins · Published 14 September 2026, 23:59 SAST

## Content

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.

### Reclaiming the past

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](https://rocs.org.za/), 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. Instead, it is a complicated story that raises all sorts of troubling questions and ethical challenges.

In the early decades of the 19th century, increasing pressure of overgrazing and drought in the Cape Colony resulted in Baster and Boer pastoralists moving into this area beyond the colonial border. By the 1860s the Basters’ access to their communal pastures was increasingly threatened by trekboers and colonial land policies that ultimately resulted in their displacement. Crown Land laws of this period required Amandelboom Basters to pay for land surveying and registration, which they could not afford. Rather than be turned into landless farmworkers, they trekked to Rehoboth where they established their own Christian settlement.

You will not find anything about this Great Trek from Amandelboom to Rehoboth in school history books, museums or tourist brochures. For that history you will need to consult Dr Herbst’s (2004) Stellenbosch University PhD thesis. Herbst begins his account in 1845 with the establishment of the Rhenish mission in Amandelboom (now Williston) and ends in 1868 with the abandonment of the mission, and the trek of its Baster congregants to German South West Africa. Herbst, who grew up in Williston, wrote his thesis in Afrikaans and never published it. As a result, his dissertation has had minimal public exposure. Although historians Nigel Penn (1995) and Martin Legassick (2010) have written extensively about the Northern Frontier as a culturally diverse, contested and interstitial space where friends and foes were not always defined by “race”, the history of Amandelboom is far less written about or known.

Another source for this forgotten history is the landscape itself. You can find material traces of this buried past inscribed in the stone-domed [corbelled houses](https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2023-03-29-house-of-rock-corbelled-igloos-in-the-karoo/) and 19th-century rock engravings at Grootfontein farm some 40km northeast of Williston. Grootfontein, the original site of the Rhenish Mission Station, has been [studied](https://search.informit.org/doi/abs/10.3316/INFORMIT.188994246098375) by University of Cape Town archaeologists Vuyiswa Lupuwana and Simon Hall (2019). They interpret these stone corbelled houses and rock engravings as evidence that Baster pastoralists inhabited both Victorian Christian and Khoi identities. The engravings include depictions of ox wagons, Victorian dress, European-style domestic architecture and images of Khoi initiation rituals and rainbulls. What these images of Victorian dress and corbelled houses suggest is that these nomadic pastoralists aspired to a modern Christian lifestyle of dignity, respectability and acceptance as subjects of the British Crown. But this was not to be because of the rigid racial hierarchies and discrimination of colonial rule.

### Understanding a tragedy

The story of the two-decade-long Amandelboom mission can be understood as a tragedy of ambiguous belonging that culminated in Baster exclusion and displacement. From this perspective, the tragedy was that Basters had voluntarily assimilated into a modern Christian identity with the belief that this would help them secure protection from the British Crown. Taking on this identity involved wearing modern dress, bible reading, paying tax, carrying firearms and participating in Boer Commando massacres against the San. In their strivings to secure a better position within the racial hierarchy of the white colonial order, the Basters participated in acts of colonial collaboration and Commando violence that failed them in the end. Ultimately, they came no closer to being accepted within the white colonial social order. A similar situation unfolded in German South West Africa in the early 1900s when the Rehoboth Basters sided with the genocidal German forces against the Nama and Herero.

The other aspect of this tragedy concerns the institutional blind spots and shortcomings of the Rhenish missionaries that the Amandelboom Basters enlisted. Based on four months of intensive research in the Rhenish Mission Society Archives in Barmen, Germany, Herbst concluded that the Basters did not invite the missionaries to Amandelboom in 1845 solely for their spiritual teachings. Instead, the invitation was part of a pragmatic strategy aimed at navigating a violent and hostile colonial frontier where Afrikaner trekboers with the large herds were increasingly intruding onto the Basters’ vital water fountains and communal pastures. It was hoped that the missionaries would be effective mediators, brokers and advocates on their behalf and help them acquire protection from the British Crown. As it turned out, the Rhenish missionaries were ill-equipped for this task.

Herbst writes that by privileging spiritual concerns, the missionaries totally underestimated the impact of local ecological and political circumstances on the mission. Instead, the missionaries were bent on turning the Amandelboom pastoralists into a sedentary Christian community of cultivators and artisans along the lines of the Rhenish model of Christian settlement in the Wupper Valley of Germany. This determination was reinforced by the successful establishment in the 1830s of small-scale agricultural and shoe and tannery industries at the Rhenish mission at Wuppertal in the Western Cape. However, the Amandelboom missionaries failed to grasp the influence of the agroecological conditions of the Karoo drylands. Their German model of sedentary settlements of cultivators and small-scale industry was unworkable in the drought-prone Karoo. By contrast, the indigenous practice of nomadic pastoralism that they denigrated as “aimless wandering” was ecologically appropriate for this arid region.

The missionaries’ fixation on spiritual matters also meant that they did not have the political and strategic savviness to negotiate the escalating conflicts between white trekboer and Baster pastoralists over water points and communal pastures. They were also unable to address another sharp line of division that had begun to surface. Since the early decades of the 19th century, a class of merino wool farmers from the Beaufort West district were increasingly competing with pastoralists over access to water and land. These commercial wool farmers, and those within the colonial state who represented the interests of a growing wool export industry, lobbied for the introduction of private property laws and the enclosure of the communal rangelands. The culmination of this pressure was the passing of the 1865 Crown Lands Act. Later, the Fencing Act of 1883, and the introduction of technologies of fencing, windmills and boreholes ensured that modern livestock and wool farming would replace nomadic pastoralism ([Archer 2000](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233668258_Technology_and_Ecology_in_the_Karoo_A_Century_of_Windmills_Wire_and_Changing_Farming_Practice); [Beinart 2003](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227468073_The_Rise_of_Conservation_in_South_Africa_Settlers_Livestock_and_the_Environment_1770-1950); [Van Siddert 2002](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-african-history/article/abs/holding-the-line-the-rural-enclosure-movement-in-the-cape-colony-c-18651910/5CCD7D903C263DD4ABD0AC6BD95B0424)).

In the mid-1860s, the missionaries had stood by helplessly as the Basters lost access to their water points and grazing lands due to competition with other pastoralists as well as colonial land laws. It was this that led the Basters to decide to defend their autonomy by trekking to Rehoboth where, in 1872, they established a modern Christian ethno-state with a representative Baster council and constitution.

Herbst concludes in his doctoral thesis that the Basters were both devout Christians and astute pragmatists. They had invited the Rhenish missionaries because they believed they could help them negotiate inclusion and belonging as subjects of the British Crown. In many respects, the relationship between the Basters and the Rhenish missionaries mirrors the historical experiences of the Griquas, the Basotho under Moshoeshoe and the Batswana under Khama III. In each of these cases, missionaries were enlisted by indigenous communities as part of what the historian [Paul Landau (2010)](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/popular-politics-in-the-history-of-south-africa-14001948/49188266E92D3201369405487AA83B8F) analyses as a pragmatic politics of belonging, inclusion and protection. Landau notes that precolonial and 19th-century southern African politics was not defined by fixed ethnic or tribal affiliations, but instead was shaped and mediated by shifting traditions of strategic and pragmatic mobilisation, alliance and amalgamation.

The tragedy of this story is that even though these nomadic pastoralists aspired to modern Christian respectability and acceptance as subjects of the British Crown, and even though they collaborated with Boer Commandos in San massacres, they were abandoned by both the missionaries and colonial authorities who failed to protect them. This 19th-century Northern Frontier history, which blurs the lines between victims and perpetrators, is important to engage with precisely because of the challenges it poses for reclaiming cultural heritage. **DM**