Among the Headless Hordes: Missionaries, Outlaws and Logics of Landscape in the Wittebergen Native Reserve, c. 1850-1871

Abstract

This article offers an archaeological perspective on the Wittebergen Native Reserve, not through excavated remains, but by exploring how historical perceptions of a landscape related to experiences of authority, tenure, mobility and security. It examines how (mis-)perceptions of land (its productivity and availability) helped missionaries to formulate settlement projects to create stable communities of sedentary agriculturist labourers. Wittebergen was one such project, also proposed as a 'buffer' between Moshoeshoe I and potential allies to the south. I then discuss alternative experiences of Wittebergen: as a node in a network of sites employed by mobile cattle raiders in the southern Maloti-Drakensberg, and as implicated in actions coded by white observers as 'disorderly'. Wittebergen thus figures in experiences of landscape that emphasise mobility and authority. Where these logics of landscape met, they had tangible consequences: certain forms of land use were interpreted as...