'The fact so often disputed by the black man': Khoekhoe citizenship at the Cape in the early to mid nineteenth century

There was considerable debate throughout the early nineteenth century over the legal status and, by extension, the citizenship rights of the Khoekhoe in the Cape Colony. Successive regimes between the 1790s and 1828 (the Dutch East India Company, the British government, the Batavian government and the British again) all accorded a different legal status to the Khoekhoe and San than was granted to whites. In 1828, as part of a wider project of economic liberalization, the British eliminated legal distinctions between white and non-white inhabitants of the Cape Colony, even as it tried to deny settlement rights to Africans from neighbouring regions who came into the colony to work. A complex network of discriminatory local custom nonetheless continued to affect the daily interaction of white and Khoekhoe. Tensions came to a head in the early 1850s when the Cape both confronted the aftermath of a Khoekhoe rebellion and grappled with the issue of whether the newly-granted franchise should be race-blind. This paper examines contemporary debates over what criteria should be used to determine citizenship, with particular attention to the tension between the commitment of white British settlers influenced by liberalism to equality under the law, and the varying criteria for group membership used in practice, in the aftermath of the de facto enslavement of Khoekhoe children and farm workers.