Gabriel Buys in the sources
Gabriel Buys was a son of Coenraad de Buys and elder brother of Michael Buys, one of the three brothers whom Michael de Jongh’s abstract names as central to the founding of the Buys community. He was in the Soutpansberg by 1836, was the Boers’ “superintendent” over Africans there, and died by poisoning, according to Michael, before the missionary McKidd arrived. Not to be confused with the Gabriel Buys who was killed in 1883.
What the sources say
A son of Coenraad. Michael Buys named his father’s children by Mzilikazi’s sister as Doris, Gabriel, Michael, Jan and Baba (Hofmeyr, p. 7); A. E. Schoeman’s 1933 thesis on Coenraad de Buys gives the same list. See Doris Buys, Michael Buys and Coenraad de Buys.
1836. Schoeman writes, citing Louis Trichardt’s diary, that Trichardt “came across Doris and Gabriel in the Soutpansberg” in 1836 and that Gabriel took a message to Lourenço Marques for him; Trichardt’s party were also met by people of the Boer leader Tronkhorst. The Buys sons, she adds, acted as interpreters for travellers like Harris and Smith, none of whom mention their ancestry (thesis, ch. 7 notes). The Voortrekker party arrived at the site of Schoemansdal on 3 November 1836 according to Wikipedia (see Schoemansdal). Nemudzivhadi says the sons Gabriel and Michael were left “among the Venda” when Coenrad disappeared (p. 6).
Michael’s account of him. Michael told Hofmeyr that when the family’s trek broke up, Gabriel went back with him and Dorha to the Bamangwato country, then left after three or four years because of the wars, taking followers to the Phoughola country; that he then heard of Doris and went to look for him; and that after trouble at the Crocodile River the brothers were driven about until, at Ohrigstad, the brothers separated and Gabriel came to the Soutpansberg (pp. 9, 12 to 13). Michael’s own arrival there was “just when the Boers came back from the commando against Mzilikazi”, by which time Gabriel was “a kind of Superintendent over the Kaffers”. The Whites were not on good terms with him, but he was a great friend of the old commandant Hendrik Potgieter, who on his death left him a wagon and a box of gunpowder. Gabriel was poisoned by Africans, and Michael succeeded him in the office (p. 13). Nemudzivhadi’s description of the Buys clan as the Boers’ tribute collectors under A. H. Potgieter and Schoeman fits this (p. 63; see Buys community).
His children. After the deaths of Dorha and Gabriel, Michael took in all their children and cared for them; Hofmeyr says some of them were left with white pastors for Christian teaching and did not return (p. 14). A daughter of “the late Gabriel Buis” lived for a time at Hofmeyr’s station and, when he returned from the Colony, was among the children taken away by their mothers (ch. 7). Michael’s son Andries told Hofmeyr that “an uncle, Gabriel Buijs” was buried across the Soutpansberg and that, shortly before McKidd’s arrival, the whole community under Michael went to his grave before an elephant hunt hoping for a good hunt, a practice Hofmeyr calls worship (ch. 8); we give no details of the place or the rites.
A leads note. A heritage report that we could not open, quoted in a search summary, says Doris and Gabriël lived in the Soutpansberg and, after trouble with the Venda, fled to Buiskop near present Bela-Bela; that conflicts with Hofmeyr’s account of Gabriel’s death in the Soutpansberg, and we do not rely on it. The later evangelist Gabriel Buys is on his own page.
Overview article
See The Buys people of the Soutpansberg: an overview for the family as a whole.
Cautions
All dates are missing for Gabriel’s life apart from 1836. Hofmeyr’s and Schoeman’s statements about who stayed where after the trek differ: Michael says Doris stayed on the river and later lived at Ohrigstad, while Trichardt’s diary puts Doris and Gabriel together in the Soutpansberg in 1836. “Dorha” and “Doris” may be confused in Hofmeyr’s remark that Michael took in the children of Dorha and Gabriel; Michael’s own account keeps them apart. Our sources on the family are a missionary’s transcription of an old man’s memory (1866 to 1890), a Venda historian’s thesis and a 1933 master’s thesis; the first and last use words for Africans that we do not repeat, and none of them is by the family.
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), in Dutch; read in the Internet Archive scan (page numbers below are the book’s, as marked in the scan’s text)
- Agatha Elizabeth Schoeman, “Coenraad de Buys”, MA thesis, University of Pretoria (1933), chapter 7 and notes; open access, a poor typescript scan that we read by its machine text
- 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)
- 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)
See also Gabriel Buys, Doris Buys, Michael Buys, Buys community, Coenraad de Buys and Stephanus Hofmeyr.
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