This is a history of chieftaincies, tribes, rivalries, land congestion, conflict over land and a repeated pattern of rural violence placed in historical context but also with an eye on the intractability of current politics. The background is set with a quick documenting of early history on the Tambookie frontier of the Eastern Cape of South Africa (take a look at the map of the Tambookie or nort-eastern frontier in circa 1845. The focus switches to the colonial attempts to organize and order the Eastern Frontier of the Cape Province, an area of South Africa much fractured and fought over in frontier wars of the 18th and 19th centuries, when boundaries and borders shifted according to movement by people, a British military presence, land appropriations and seizures, and imposed settlements in the hopes of pacification. READ MORE