Tools & tillage: a journal on the history of the implements of cultivation and other agricultural processes (3.1976/1979)

THE CULTURE HISTORICAL
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE XHOSA SPADE

By
O. F. Raum

Among African agricultural tools the Xhosa
spade occupies a special position. The earliest
report on Xhosa tools is by the survivors of
the Nossa Senhora de Belem, wrecked on the
Southeast coast of the Cape in June 1635.
Among the inhabitants concerned “the
women do all the work, planting and tilling
the earth with sticks to prepare it for the grain”
- millet and maize (Wilson 1959, 171 quoting
Mackeurtan). Among other crops are men-
tioned beans, melons, gourds and sugar cane
(Schapera 131). In his tour of the Cape in 1778
Governor van Plettenberg noted “het land
bearbeyden zy (de Kaffers) met korte houte
stocken of schoppen (spade, spadoon) welke
zy zonder ordre met pampoenen, water-
lemoenen, erwten en koorn bezaayen”
(Godee Molesbergen IV, 49). A decade later,
F. von Winkelmann an officer in the Wiirt-
temberg regiment, serving at the Cape, ob-
served: “Sie haben ein 4-5 Fuss langes, oft
auch kiirzeres Stuck Holz, pfahlartig gestal-
tet, womit das Erdreich muhsam umgegraben
wird” (Godee Molesbergen IV, 72). Some
years previously survivors of the wreck of the
Grosvenor (1782) had reported that the
women prepare the fields for seed, scratching
the earth rather than digging it with wooden
pick-axes (Carter & van Reenen 78). The term
pick-axes is puzzling and M. Wilson (1959)
renders it with “hoes”; it may have been a
knee-timber tool (A. M. L. Robinson).
It was Barrow, an official of the British
Admirality travelling the Eastern Cape in the

company of the landdrost Bresler of Graaf
Reinet in 1797, who first described the tool I
want to discuss. He noted in a deserted
(Kaffir) homestead near the Keiskama River
“among the implements of husbandry keeries
and small wooden spades in the gardens”
(Barrow I, 222). Capt. L. Alberti, of the Wal-
deck Regiment at the Cape and adjutant of
Governor-General Janssens during the Bata-
vian rule there (1802-06), writes (Alberti
1810, ii2f; 1968, 46): “The digging is done
with a spade made from one piece, with a
blade at either end of a common handle”. He
mentions that “gierst, boekwiet (perhaps
panicum and sorghum), water melons and to-
bacco” were cultivated. In 1827 Rev. J.
Brownlee of the London Missionary Society,
who had turned government agent at Tyumie
near Chief Ngqika’s residence, stated that
“the only implement (used in Xhosa
agriculture) is a sort of spade, made not unlike
the broad end of an oar” (Brownlee I, 452).
The crops listed by him are millet (Sorghum
holcus), maize, kidney beans, pumpkins and
water melons. Some years later J. Goldswain,
a British soldier and later settler, reported:
“the women had nothing more than wooden
spades” for tilling and sowing (Goldswain
102). Their form is illustrated by him as a
two-bladed tool with almost no handle be-
tween the blades (fig. 1), and this tool was
about three feet (c. 92 cm) long. This tool was
still observed in the Eighth Kaffir war
(1850-53), for T. Baines reports on 1 ith Dec.