Coenraad de Buys in the sources
Coenraad de Buys (1761 to about 1821) was a Cape frontiersman of Huguenot descent who left the colony in the early nineteenth century, travelled north into Botswana and the Limpopo valley with a large mixed-descent family, and disappeared; his sons Gabriel, Michael and Doris founded the Buys community of the Soutpansberg. The detailed stories about him come from his descendants’ memory and from a novel, and are uncertain.
What the sources say
Descent and early life. Wikipedia gives his lineage from the Huguenot Jean de Bus of Calais, who arrived at the Cape on 25 April 1688, and his birth in 1761 on the farm Wagenboomrivier, with his father Jan De Buys on De Ezeljacht. It calls him a remarkable frontier figure of enormous presence and says that around 1813 he moved to the Gariep with an extended family and allies of Khoi, Oorlam, Baster and Xhosa people; and that by 1818 he was in Limpopo, trading with the Sotho-Tswana. These details are uncited.
His sons’ account. His son Michael, speaking to Hofmeyr in the 1860s, called his father a white farmer of the Beaufort West district, with earlier children Piet and Dorha by a lightly coloured woman; a later wife, said to be a sister of Mzilikazi, was the mother of Doris, Gabriel, Michael, Jan and Baba; the family, pursued by Cape policemen, crossed the Orange River, wandered through the Sotho and Tswana country and reached the Limpopo, where the mother died of yellow fever and the father left his sons in the night and was never seen again; he was told he later married again and had a son and a daughter, who married a Portuguese man (pp. 6 to 9; see Michael Buys). Wikipedia says the wife who died was Elizabeth and that he undertook a last journey to Mozambique after asking his sons to wait at the Limpopo; his remains were never found. Michael de Jongh’s abstract calls Elizabeth a sister or niece of Mzilikazi; Wikipedia’s article elsewhere describes her as Thembu. We give both.
In the Venda story. Nemudzivhadi writes that Coenrad Buys fled from justice in the Cape Colony, married a Black girl, and after her death on the Vhembe River “disappeared”, leaving his sons Gabriel and Michael among the Venda (pp. 6 to 7). See Buys community.
Fiction. Buysdorp is named for him, and Wikipedia notes that Sarah Millin’s fictional account of his life called him the “King of the Bastards”; the book is fiction, and the word is a period term we do not use.
His children in Schoeman’s 1933 thesis
A. E. Schoeman’s 1933 master’s thesis on Coenraad de Buys, which covers his life only to about 1828, names the children of his union with the sister of Mzilikazi as Doris, Gabriel, Jan, Baba and Michael, as Michael told it; says that Baba, a convert in the care of an American missionary near Kuruman, acted as interpreter for the traveller Harris with Mzilikazi in 1836; and, citing Louis Trichardt’s diary, that Trichardt met Doris and Gabriel in the Soutpansberg that year. See Gabriel Buys and Doris Buys.
Overview article
His sons and their descendants are set out in The Buys people of the Soutpansberg: an overview.
Cautions
Almost nothing about Coenraad de Buys is documented in a primary source we have seen; the Hofmeyr text is his son’s memory as told in old age; the Wikipedia article contains long narrative passages without citations (including the stories of his childhood and his later quarrels), which we do not repeat. His death year of 1821 is Wikipedia’s; Hofmeyr’s account has no date. 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
- Stefanus Hofmeyr, Twintig jaren in Zoutpansberg (Cape Town: J. H. Rose, 1890), chapters 2 and 8, in Dutch; read in the Internet Archive scan (page numbers below are the book’s, as marked in the scan’s text)
- Wikipedia: Coenraad de Buys (a long article; parts are narrative and uncited)
- 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.
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