Botumane in the sources
Botumane (Botomane) is named, with Maqoma and Tyali, in Wikipedia’s account of the force that entered the Cape Colony in December 1834 at the start of the Sixth Frontier War. Soga names a Botomane as chief of the imiDange, one of the older Xhosa clans, in an earlier, undated border war.
What the sources say
Two wars? Soga lists, among the clans fighting in a border war that he does not date in the passage we read (it follows his account of Somerset’s agreement with the Gaikas, so probably 1818 to 1819), “the Imi-Dange under Botomane”, and remarks that, except for the clans of Maqoma, Tyali and Mhala, they were not Rharhabe or Gaika clans but of the older Xhosa stock (p. 190). Wikipedia’s article on Hintsa kaKhawuta names Botumane with Maqoma and Tyali among the Rharhabe chiefs who led the invasion of December 1834, the start of the Sixth Frontier War. Whether this is one man across fifteen years or two men of one name we cannot say. See Dange, Maqoma and Tyali.
Parentage. A search summary earlier suggested he was a son of Ngqika; Soga’s identification of him as chief of the Dange, an older Xhosa clan, does not support that, and we do not repeat it. Soga’s genealogical table, which we read only in a garbled scan, appears to set the name Botomane in the Dange family’s later generations.
Cautions
The two sources differ in how they classify him (a Rharhabe chief in Wikipedia’s list, a Dange chief in Soga) and may not mean the same man. We have no dates of birth or death and no account of his later career in the sources we read. Soga was a Xhosa-born mission doctor and historian who wrote in 1930 from tribal informants and the older colonial histories; his tables are partly garbled in the machine-read text, and he often says that a clan’s place in the genealogy is uncertain.
Izithakazelo and totem
We found no Botumane praise poem or totem. If your family carries the name and recites praises, we would like to record them, with your permission and credited to you.
Sources and further reading
- J. H. Soga, The South-Eastern Bantu (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1930); read in the Internet Archive text, with machine-read tables (page numbers below are as the running heads gave them)
- Wikipedia: Hintsa kaKhawuta (the Sixth Frontier War section)
Do you belong to the Botumane? Tell us your izithakazelo and what elders say about the family’s history, and we will add it, credited to you. Share what you know or WhatsApp 065 138 8213.