The seasons are shifting and it made me think about the way climate has affected historical stories.  I recently did a little chat about it, if you missed it, there is a link below, however, that aside, it did get me keen to expand a little on the subject for you.

The scope of my thinking is 60 000 years and how we in the Eastern Cape could be seen as a climate frontier. A frontier in this sense being a place where different climate systems meet, overlap, and pull in different directions, so nothing ever quite settles into a steady pattern. It’s a bit unpredictable. And the Eastern Cape sits right in that kind of space.

Stand anywhere across this region near Makhanda and the land appears calm. A vision which belies the dramatic history of the land. Today when you see fields, farms, and homesteads it suggests permanence and ownership. But looking backward over time, this landscape has never truly been fixed. Or as easy on life as it can appear.

The first people to live in this frontier arrived tens of thousands of years ago, these were Stone Age hunter-gatherers, ancestors of later San communities. For them, the land was not something you claimed and owned.

There were no fences and no cultivated fields marking territory. People moved with the seasons, following game, gathering edible plants, and returning to water sources they knew could sustain life.

Archaeological evidence shows that communities came back again and again, but they did not stay permanently. And the reason is simple, the climate would not allow it. When rains were good, animals thrived and food was plentiful. When drought returned, survival meant moving on.

Their movement wasn’t aimless wandering. It was knowledge passed on generation to generation. I can almost see an individual standing clothed in an Antelope loin cloth with digging tool in hand and bow and arrow slung over the shoulder – watching the land, reading the weather. Knowing when to stay and when to move on.

Imagine that for tens of thousands of years mobility remained the dominant adaptation. Until only a short time ago, about two thousand years, life on the frontier began to change in a noticeable way.

The people of the land were no longer living only from what they hunted or gathered, Khoisan herders arrived with sheep and cattle, and suddenly wealth could move with you instead of being tied to one place. Livestock changed everything. If conditions worsened in one area, people could simply move their herds to better grazing. Of which as we know the frontier offered. At this time land tenure centred on grazing access, not cultivation.

They would make camp here with a cattle kraal made from thorn branches and grass huts surrounding it. The kraal was the heart of the settlement because livestock were wealth, status, and survival. When climate changed, they moved with it, packing up easy to carry structures and moving to better grazing.

The climate discouraged fixed agriculture for them with the unpredictable rainfall making large-scale cropping risky.

Pastoralism at this time in our history refined mobility without abandoning it.

From around the twelfth century onwards, Nguni-speaking communities, including emerging Xhosa chiefdoms, began moving into the river systems of the Eastern Cape. Bringing with them a new way of living, combining livestock and agriculture as we understand it today.

Cattle still sat at the centre of life because they represented wealth, status, marriage alliances, spiritual connection, and indeed, political power. The difference here is that they were not singularly reliant on grazing. Farming became just as vital to survival. The frontier landscape made this possible with its moist river valleys and the better-watered slopes allowing the growth of crops like sorghum, millet, pumpkins, and beans, and later maize, when of course rains were good. The farming was never random. Crops were planted with an understanding of seasonal rainfall and local conditions learned through generations.

Their settlements reflected that knowledge of the land with homesteads placed close to fertile soils and dependable water, while fields were worked during good seasons. At the same time, cattle ranged across wider communal grazing lands under the authority of chiefs. If pasture failed or rainfall shifted, communities could move within recognised territorial areas rather than remain tied to a single spot.

This was not fixed farming in the European sense of permanent fields and immovable farms. Settlements were made up of umzi, one family with generations living together in a cluster of huts surrounding a cattle kraal.  Rather than these forming dense villages, homesteads were scattered across the landscape, positioned near fields, grazing, and water.

Crops provided daily food security. Cattle provided wealth and a safety net when harvests failed. Together, agriculture and pastoralism formed a balanced strategy for living on a frontier shaped by its changing weather.

When Dutch-speaking trekboers pushed east out of the Cape Colony in the late eighteenth century, they were not stepping into empty land. They entered a frontier already shaped by generations of grazing, movement, and cultivation. Like the communities before them, trekboer families lived by their livestock. Cattle and sheep were their security. But they were also looking for good farming ground.

In the western Cape, wheat farming had driven the economy, and many settlers arrived here expecting to recreate that same agricultural world. The frontier quickly taught them otherwise.

Rainfall as we know through stories of centuries before, was unpredictable. The seasons did not follow the neat Mediterranean pattern they knew further west. Some years were generous, others failed completely. Large-scale grain farming proved far less reliable than expected. So settlers adapted, slowly and sometimes reluctantly.

Stock farming remained central, while crops were planted where conditions allowed, usually along rivers or in fertile pockets of soil. Early farms were not yet the fixed agricultural estates we imagine today. They operated more like extended grazing spaces.

 Families moved with their animals when pasture declined, testing which crops might survive local conditions. It worked more like a mobile livestock operation with experimental farming attached to it.

Early trekboer farms on the frontier were vast on paper, but surprisingly lightly used in practice. Colonial authorities granted huge “loan farms” that stretched across thousands of hectares, but only a small portion of that land was ever actively worked on. In reality, these farms were mainly grazing territory, with families settling close to water while the wider land remained open for livestock.

Over this period the environment remained broadly constant while human strategies for survival and wealth evolved.

Hunter-gatherers moved with ecological rhythms. Khoisan pastoralists managed grazing landscapes. Nguni societies combined cattle and crops in flexible agro-pastoral systems. Trekboers pursued grazing and experimental farming. Colonial settlers imposed fixed agriculture and surveyed ownership.

Each system represented a new attempt to answer the same environmental challenge – how to secure food, wealth, and stability in a climate defined by variability.