TRULY SOUTH AFRICAN, frontier legend Coenraad de Buys and his descendants

206pp., b/w & colour illus., paperback, Watermark Press, No Place, 2024

ISBN: 9781037004568

Coenraad de Buys (1761-1821) was born on a farm in the Langkloof. His father was Jan de Buys, the second generation descendent of French Huguenots Jean du Buis and Sara Jacobs. He lived a nomadic life and was known as a cattle raider. In the early 1780s he lived on a farm in the Zuurveld with a woman of Khoe and slave descent, Maria van der Horst, with whom he had seven children. Later he lived in the homestead of the Xhosa monarch Ngqika and was the lover of Ngqika's mother, Yese. He also took a Thembu wife, Elizabeth, and had many children with her. He was one of a number of white people who sided with the Xhosa during the frontier wars against the Boers and then the British. By the time of his death, the de Buys clan of multi-ethnic offspring were spread across South Africa.

Michael de Jongh is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of South Africa. His books include Roots and Routes: the karretjie people of the Great Karoo; A Forgotten First People - the Southern Cape Hessequa; The Forgotten Front - untold stories of the Anglo-Boer War in the Karoo, and The Land Speaks. He lives in Plettenberg Bay.