Ward 2 Development Forum

Money and Land

Properties3
descriptionHow money came to the valley, and how it became tied to owning land. From the gift and barter of the San and Khoekhoe, through cattle traded for copper and tobacco, rented farms, paper money, and banks lending against property, to the land questions of today.
tagstheme/heritage, theme/trancraa, lang/en
aliasesHow money came to the valley, Geld en grond

9 min read

For most of the valley’s human history there was no money here, and nobody owned land. The San held that no one person owned the land and everyone had the right to use it [IC]. The Khoekhoe held land as a group, and measured wealth in cattle [IC]. Money arrived with the Dutch East India Company in 1652. Over the next two hundred years it became tied, step by step, to a new idea: that land could be measured, owned, sold, and borrowed against. This page traces that change. The trading functions it describes each have a page of their own.

What the letters in square brackets mean

Facts on this page are followed by a tag that shows where they come from.

  • [IC] Independently Corroborated. Confirmed by at least two sources that do not depend on each other, or by an official record.
  • [MS] Mission-Sourced. Comes from the institution’s own records, histories, or statements, or from one community’s own sources. It has not been checked against sources that do not depend on them.
  • [TBV] To Be Verified. Seems likely, but nobody has confirmed it yet.

Reading this page

The Markets pages follow the M of the TIME model: exchange at a price. The facts carry tags. The comparisons with San and Khoekhoe ways of holding land, and the reading of what the changes meant, are the Forum’s interpretation.

Before money

The San lived by hunting and gathering, and moved between campsites so that the land would not be worn out [IC]. Each group belonged to a territory, which the Ju/’hoansi San of the Kalahari call the n!ore: “the place that the people lived, came from and belonged” [IC]. The land was not property. No individual owned it, and everyone had the right to use it [IC]. Among the Kalahari San, the anthropologist Polly Wiessner described hxaro, a system of gift exchange between partners that spread risk and gave people the right to visit and use each other’s land in hard times [IC]. How the Soaqua of this valley exchanged goods was not recorded, and the Kalahari practices may or may not have held here [TBV].

The Khoekhoe measured wealth in cattle and sheep [IC]. Their land was held by the group as a whole, and nobody could divide it up for themselves [IC]. A group’s claim rested on its use of water sources: it was the first user of its springs and rivers, and others needed its permission to graze there [IC]. Cattle could be given, lent, and exchanged, and they did much of what money does elsewhere [TBV]. Khoekhoe traders also carried goods far into the interior [IC].

In both ways of life, people belonged to the land more than the land belonged to them.

Barter (1488 to 1713)

Portuguese sailors described large Khoekhoe herds at the Cape in 1488 [IC]. From 1652 the company needed meat for its ships, and traded for Khoekhoe cattle and sheep with iron, copper, beads, tobacco, and brandy [IC]. The company tried to keep this trade to itself [TBV]. In the Overberg, the Chainoqua and Hessequa were its largest suppliers from 1662 to 1713 [IC]. The trade drew cattle out of Khoekhoe hands faster than herds could grow, while colonists took the grazing land and water [IC]. See The Cattle Trade.

Land becomes property (1657 to 1854)

The company never recognised Khoekhoe or San land as property [IC]. From 1657 it granted colonists freehold farms near Cape Town [IC]. In 1714 it began letting large “loan farms” in the interior, for a yearly fee paid in money [IC]. In 1813 Governor Cradock turned loan farms into surveyed farms held for ever on a yearly quitrent, which could be inherited and sold [IC]. Land that had been grazed by the valley’s people for centuries became a numbered, mapped, saleable thing. See Land as Property, and Loan Farms and Quitrent for the difference between the two systems.

The farm Weltevreden, where Greyton now stands, went through this whole process: a loan farm in 1791, a grant in 1793, sold on in 1795, 1839, and 1846, and divided into freehold plots for sale in 1854 [IC].

Money and credit (1652 to 1861)

The company kept its accounts in guilders and rixdollars, but coins were always scarce at the Cape [IC]. In 1782 it began printing paper rixdollars [IC]. In 1793 it opened a lending bank, the Bank van Leening, which lent money at 5% a year against property and gold [IC]. From then on, owning land meant being able to borrow.

Under British rule the paper rixdollar fell in value, from 4 shillings in 1806 to 1 shilling and 6 pence when it was fixed in 1825 [IC]. British sterling became the Cape’s official money on 1 January 1826 [IC].

Enslaved people had also been treated as property that could be mortgaged [IC]. When slavery ended, the British government paid slaveholders compensation, and the money helped fund a property boom and new banks at the Cape [IC]. The people who had been enslaved received nothing [IC]. Local banks followed in the Overberg: the Swellendam Bank in 1852 and the Caledon Agricultural Bank in 1861 [TBV]. See Money and Banks.

The mission economy

At Baviaanskloof, Georg Schmidt paid for work in supplies, with no money involved [IC]. After 1792 the mission grew a mixed economy of gardens, crafts, and wage work [MS]. Genadendal knives were sold across the Cape [MS]. Many residents worked for wages on the surrounding farms [TBV]. In the early 1800s Khoe workers on colonial farms were paid mostly in kind, above all in sheep, and the share paid in cash grew year by year [IC].

Mission residents were given plots to build on and gardens to work, but the land was not theirs to own [MS]. In 1858 it was granted to the Moravian Church in trust for them [MS], and in 1909 a new law confirmed that they could live on it but not own it [IC]. Without title deeds, they could not sell their land or borrow against it [TBV]. See The Mission Economy.

Two villages, two ways of holding land

By the 1850s the valley held two ways of holding land side by side. In Genadendal and the mission villages, land was held in trust for residents who could use it but not own it [IC]. In Greyton, founded in 1854, land was sold as freehold plots, with title deeds, water rights, and grazing rights on a shared commonage [IC]. Greyton’s histories say the plots were open to buyers of any race [TBV].

A century later, the Group Areas Act used the market in land against the people it removed. Coloured families in Greyton were forced to sell their plots and move to Heuwelkroon, probably between 1968 and 1974 [TBV]. Owning land had not protected them.

The questions that remain

The questions of money and land are still open in the valley. The land of Farm 39 is still held in trust, and the process to transfer it has not been completed since it began in 2002 [IC]. Theewaterskloof Municipality’s Financial Recovery Plan of 2025 reports that many residents of Genadendal hold that the land does not belong to the municipality, and that Genadendal accounts for about a fifth of the municipality’s outstanding debt [IC]. See TRANCRAA and Farm 39.

The Forum’s long-term goal proposes a BioConomy, in which more of what the valley has stays in the valley, including water in the ground and healthy soil [MS]. In the terms of this page, it asks whether money and markets can be made to serve the kind of care for land that the valley’s first peoples practised. See Our Long-Term Goal and What Began Here.

Timeline

DateWhat happened
Before 1652Land held by groups, and owned by no one; wealth in cattle; exchange by gift and barter [IC]
1652The company arrives, and barters for cattle with metal, beads, tobacco, and brandy [IC]
1657First freehold farms granted to colonists [IC]
1662 to 1713The Chainoqua and Hessequa are the colony’s largest cattle suppliers [IC]
1714Loan farms introduced, for a yearly fee in money [IC]
1738Schmidt pays for work at Baviaanskloof in supplies [IC]
1782The first paper money at the Cape [IC]
1791 to 1793Weltevreden held as a loan farm, then granted [IC]
1793The Bank van Leening lends against property [IC]
1801 to 1810Khoe wages shift from sheep and goods towards cash [IC]
1813Cradock turns loan farms into quitrent property [IC]
1825 to 1826The rixdollar is fixed at 1s 6d, and sterling becomes the official money [IC]
1834 to 1838Slavery ends. Slaveholders are paid compensation, and freed people receive nothing [IC]
1852 and 1861Local banks open at Swellendam and Caledon [TBV]
1854Greyton’s plots are sold as freehold [IC]
1858Genadendal’s land is granted to the Moravian Church in trust for residents [MS]
1909Mission residents are denied ownership of mission land [IC]
Late 1960s to early 1970sColoured families are forced to sell their Greyton plots [TBV]
1998TRANCRAA provides for the transfer of Farm 39 [IC]

What is still open

  • How the Soaqua and the valley’s Khoekhoe exchanged goods before the colony.
  • When coins and notes first came into everyday use at Genadendal, and what residents were paid in.
  • What Weltevreden, and Greyton’s first plots, sold for.
  • How the lack of title deeds on Farm 39 affected residents’ ability to borrow, in their own experience.

References

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