Colonisation by military conquest entails an element of moral regression on the part of the invader, and thereafter cocnsistently complicates any simple-minded notions of what might qualify as ‘progress’. In a situation in which two colonial powers foregoing most ethical considerations had, without consulting the party principally affected, agreed to the wholesale appropriation of African labour at exploitative rates in exchange for rail traffic to a port city that otherwise might not stand up to open capitalist competition, the past and the present were not that easily divided.

All South Africans, but more especially those who owned and own the coal- and gold-mining industries, need to acknowledge that much of the country’s past prosperity, wealth and relatively advanced infrastructure were built on the backs of black labour pushed and pulled out of colonial Mozambique.

By 1835, when the city of Port Elizabeth handled £80 000 of export produce, it is estimated that about £50 000 to £60 000 of the goods were obtained by Xhosa people.

Bundy’s research notes that the suppression of the black commercial agriculture went beyond the raid on the land. Custom duties were stacked against black farmers, thus reducing the margin on their earnings. Purchase of land by black people was also made to be very difficult. But did these black commercial farmers have names and who were they? The rest of this chapter selects some individuals to provide visibility to those who prospered during changing socio-economic circumstances.

Black people could buy land at £1 an acre and they could buy farms from white farmers. Many Africans had adopted the plough and advanced methods of cultivation that missionaries wanted to instil. Tini Maqoma, the son of the Xhosa warrior Maqoma, outperformed his white neighbours in cultivation. He produced maize and grain that was in contrast to the ‘white man’s weed’. In 1876, one of the sons of Chief Stokwe bought a farm containing Fort Willshire for £1 800 as part of a strategy to get back the land.