Buysdorp in the sources
Buysdorp is a village of the Buys community in the Makhado municipality, on land of about 11,000 hectares that President Paul Kruger granted to the Buys family in 1888 and that they have kept. It lies at the foot of the Soutpansberg.
What the sources say
Place and land. Wikipedia describes it as a rural community about 14 km from Vivo on the road to Louis Trichardt (Makhado), named after Coenraad de Buys; it says the 1888 grant of 11,000 hectares was “for services rendered to the Transvaal Republic”, that the community is relatively self-sufficient because of its own water supply and subsistence farming, maintains its own roads, and has remained comparatively insular. It also gives a figure of about 300 people living there, with perhaps a few thousand more counted as belonging to it by law, a figure that comes from the same Wikipedia article on Coenraad de Buys and is not dated.
Identity and governance. Michael de Jongh’s 2004 article, as its abstract says, treats Buysdorp as a place repeatedly shaped by individuals, events and struggles, with identity politics, contested land and local government as its themes. Wikipedia’s Coenraad de Buys article, which appears to summarise de Jongh, says the community built its own structures of local government over the decades; that these fitted comfortably with the pre-1994 state and not with the post-1994 democracy; and that the community’s history of interaction and intermarriage with its neighbours has led it to stress its status as autochthonous in defining its ethnicity and its “moral geography”. We do not know how this has developed since 2004.
Earlier station. In the 1860s the Buys lived near the Dutch Reformed station of Goedgedacht and Schoemansdal, and Nemudzivhadi speaks of “the Buys settlement in the west” in 1883; we cannot say how that area relates to today’s Buysdorp. See Buys community, Goedgedacht and Michael Buys.
Overview article
The community’s history is drawn together in The Buys people of the Soutpansberg: an overview.
Cautions
This page rests on one short, uncited encyclopedia article, the abstract of one article, and passing mentions elsewhere. We have not seen the grant document, a map, or anything the community has written. The 1888 date and size are as the two sources give them. The Buys people are described in the sources by outsiders: a missionary in 1866 to 1890, a Venda historian in 1998, an anthropologist in 2004 and an unsigned encyclopedia entry. The older sources use words for them and for Africans in general that we do not repeat, and we have found no history written by the community itself.
Izithakazelo and totem
We have found no confirmed totem or praise poem for this page. If you belong to the Buys community and wish to share your family’s history, we would like to record it, with your permission and credited to you.
Sources and further reading
- Wikipedia: Buysdorp (a short article with no inline citations)
- Michael de Jongh, “The Buysdorp conundrum: constructing and articulating community and identity in Soutpansberg, Limpopo Province”, Anthropology Southern Africa 27(3-4), pp. 86 to 91 (we read only the publisher’s abstract page)
- Mphaya Henry Nemudzivhadi, “The attempts by Makhado to revive the Venda kingdom, 1864-1895”, PhD thesis, Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education (1998); open access at the North-West University repository (a scanned copy; we read it by OCR, and page numbers cited are the thesis’s printed numbers)
See also Michael Buys, Buys community, Coenraad de Buys, Buysdorp, Stephanus Hofmeyr and Schoemansdal.
Do you belong to the Buys community? Tell us what your family says about its history, and we will add it, credited to you. Share what you know or WhatsApp 065 138 8213.