Reformulating identities: British settlers in early nineteenth-century south Africa

This paper examines the formation of a colonial identity among settlers fro m the British Isles who were relocated to the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony in 1820. It suggests that material aspirations united certain of the settlers in a political programme, and thus began the erosion of imported class (and other) divisions. However, it argues that their establishment as a capitalist colonial class is an insufficient explanation for their const ruction of a shared and emotive British settler identity. The settlers modi fied their inherited discourses of class, race, gender and nationality in o rder to forge solidarity, and the imperative for solidarity derived not so much from their mutual desire for accumulation, but from a corresponding co llective insecurity. Not only were settlers afraid of Khoikhoi labour rebel lion and Xhosa reprisals for land loss; they also feared abandonment by a s eemingly unsympathetic metropole. Their aggressive capitalist endeavour, an d collective fear of its destabilizing consequences, were two sides of the same coin, informing the development of a unifying social identity. The pap er goes on to consider the mechanisms through which that identity was susta ined, including acts of landscape representation, the textual generation of collective memory and the practice of communally binding, quotidian, gende red routines.