Assarting in the History of South Africa From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Assarting is the act of clearing forested lands for use in agriculture or other purposes. Assarting involves completely rooting up all trees — the total extirpation of the forested area. For the want of a better term I will use the word assarting. This is the natural result of population explosion where the higher population requires more land area. Other uses are the need for roads and land for agricultural use. We may refer to this as the necessary use of ground. But man also loves to play and for that much land space is cleared of forest trees and shrubs. However, in areas where there is a recognition of the sustainable use and reuse of land for agriculture and measures are developed to enable the continual use of land for indefinite periods of time. Individuals and governments have come to realize that man has a need to spend time in areas untouched by man’s needs for lumber and crop processing. For this, some sections have been set aside to provide for that means. This includes the facilities and animal life for hunting. A better knowledge of man’s requirements came too view these areas as vital for the sustenance of a good and healthy living of all even if not everybody makes actual use of these reserves. IN THE YEAR 1652 THE DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANY (DEIC) founded a refreshment or victualing station for its cargo ships sailing from Europe to India to obtain spices and other commodities for its markets in Europe. What began as a refreshment station soon developed into a small community of mainly Dutch, West German and French Huguenots families who emigrated to the Cape and established farms to share in the market which began as a refreshment station. Some of these became stock farmers and needed to adapt to a mainly nomadic way of life. They explored further to the north and the east for pasture lands and during the year 1752 made the first contact with the black Xhosa tribes who, from North Africa made their way in a south-easterly direction over many hundreds, if not thousands of years. Their history and the driving forces that took them diagonally across this continent remains enigmatic and can only be patched together from artifacts and of how much retold tradition seem to make sense. This contact between the predominantly Dutch migrants and the Xhosas took place in 1752 in what is today the Knysna region. Here were two irreconcilable cultures that met and that led to many clashes over which belong to whom. The Dutch stock farmers knew enough about farming with produce on a sustainable way. Their cattle were also looked upon by the Xhosas as worthy of obtaining. For them, the way of settling disputes was the use of violence. And if direct face to face contact became evidently a very risky way of sorting out these differences, they would revert to the nightly banding together of groups to go and attack the unprepared white farmers, destroying by fire what was fixed and killing any who may dare to ward off these attacks. Both cattle and crops were seized and carried off. One of the great forces that kept these black migrants on the move was their way of assarting. A very wasteful method still in use in many parts of the world was and is to remove all trees and shrubs, often by burning. Even as recently as in 1982 a friend of mine and I went to the Ivuna River, a tributary of the Black Umfolozi River. We parked our one ton pick-ups or bakkies near the edge of the river and walked a distance of well over one kilometre to where he had discovered this patch which the locals there were assarting. For our interest we asked if we may have the trunks of the wild olive and the tamboti (an extremely hard and somewhat oily timbre, yielding one of the most beautiful furniture wood), trees that they had burnt down by packing a fire at the base of the trees that had to be removed. Permission was granted and the work to saw these into lengths that could be loaded into the bakkies was hard and tough. But the efforts we used to move these manually down the dry river is something that required super human effort! The fact is; firstly that we had a use for that wood. They were happy to use the thinner branches to hedge in their huts. Such hedging was akin to having heavy metal bars which could withstand the effects of rusting. Once the piece was cleared they would commence planting their crops. The soil provided good nutrients for a few years before it became time to move on. This is why the hilly country of KwaZulu Natal is generally so barren today that where the nature reserves such as the nearby Umfolozi and Hluhluwe reserves stands out with its lush growth and plenty animal life. It was from these two reserves that the Kruger National Park was restocked with rhinos during the early fifties of the twentieth century. Yes, the rhinoceros in all the parks where they have thrived since the white man started taking responsibility for them are now again being threatened, for, so it seems, many Orientals face depletion without the use of rhino horns. But, as an introduction to a better understanding of our history and the much hated “apartheid”, the meeting of the two cultures at the middle South-Cape in 1752 cannot be underestimated. The launching of a refreshment station in 1652 together with the resultant mainly Dutch Europeans there and from there spreading inland to meet head-on with the savage Xhosas one hundred years later, were seminal to the present mutual distrust and the African Nation Congress (ANC)’s tacit approval of the wholesale slaughter of white, especially Afrikaans farmers who are still managing the soil in a sustainable way. They didnt forget and now it is up to you, the present generation to have the necessary insight. Just more than a half century after this, another presence took control of the Cape Colony. They were the British! The British governors and other deciding factors, very important in this perhaps the greatest venom from Briton, was the launching of a so-called missionary society called the London Missionary society (LMS) in 1795 sent men to the colony to foment mutual hate and wanton aggression. Their role in causing mutual distrust, frontier wars and the loss of life and property can never be grasped! If anybody today has access to documentation on this period I will be too grateful if copies of such can be made available. There is another general election next year and the ANC will strive to gain a two thirds majority while the DA will continue to use as its election slogan the dead and rotten apartheid. Democracy has failed everywhere in the world and here the ANC hopes for the majority which will allow it to do away with democracy officially!
Posted on: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 19:16:25 +0000
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