The Buys people of the Soutpansberg: an overview

The Buys community of the Soutpansberg are a group of families who trace themselves to the frontiersman Coenraad de Buys and to three of his sons, Gabriel, Michael and Doris. From the 1830s they lived between the Venda kingdom and the Boer settlement at Schoemansdal, served the Boers as intermediaries and tribute collectors, became the first congregation of the Dutch Reformed mission, and in 1888 were granted the land that is now Buysdorp. This article draws our Buys pages together into one account; nearly everything in it was written by outsiders, and we say so where it matters.

The story

Origins: the story the family told. Wikipedia gives Coenraad de Buys (1761 to about 1821) a Huguenot descent and a Cape frontier life that took him, with a large mixed following, north of the Orange river by about 1813 and into the Limpopo country by 1818; those details are uncited (see Coenraad de Buys). The fullest account of the family’s own memory is Michael Buys’s, which the missionary Stefanus Hofmeyr wrote down and printed in 1866 and 1867. Michael said his father, a white farmer from the Beaufort West district, had children by an earlier union (Piet and Dorha) and then took a wife, whom Michael was told was a sister of Mzilikazi, and had by her Doris, Gabriel, Michael, Jan and Baba; that Cape policemen pursued the family to the Orange river; that they wandered through the Sotho and Tswana country to the Limpopo, where the mother died of yellow fever; and that the father left in the night and was never seen again (Hofmeyr, pp. 6 to 9). Hofmeyr adds that he found Michael’s baptism in an old register at Swellendam, which does not agree with Michael’s own “upper country” (pp. 6 to 8). A. E. Schoeman’s 1933 thesis, covering Coenraad’s life to about 1828, lists the same children.

Arrival: two timelines. The sources do not agree about when the sons reached the Soutpansberg. Schoeman, citing Louis Trichardt’s diary, says Trichardt met Doris and Gabriel there in 1836, and that Gabriel carried a message for him to Lourenço Marques. Michael’s story is different: Doris and Jan wanted to stay on the Limpopo, Michael, Gabriel and Dorha went back to the Bamangwato country, and the brothers were later driven about until they reached Ohrigstad, where Doris stayed and died, while Gabriel came to the Soutpansberg; Michael followed on hearing his brothers were there, arriving “just when the Boers came back from the commando against Mzilikazi”, to find Gabriel “a kind of Superintendent over the Kaffers” and a friend of the old commandant Hendrik Potgieter (Hofmeyr, pp. 9 to 13; see Gabriel Buys, Doris Buys and Michael Buys). Ohrigstad was founded in 1845, so Michael’s order of events cannot be placed in 1836. M. H. Nemudzivhadi, writing from the Venda side, says the “Coloured Buys family” had settled at Mara between 1820 and 1825, descended from a Coenrad Buys who fled justice at the Cape and whose sons Gabriel and Michael were left “among the Venda” (pp. 6 to 7). We give all three timelines and do not reconcile them.

With the Venda. Nemudzivhadi says relations between the Buys and the Venda king Ramabulana were amicable, and that because they knew the Venda language the Buys served as intermediaries when the Boers settled at Thivhalalwe in 1848 and some later became tax collectors (pp. 6 to 7). He reports speculation that, while Ramabulana sheltered at Mount Rida after Ramavhoya drove him out, a link with Louis Trichardt ran through “Doors Buys, who had accompanied him there and with whom he was on good terms”, and M. M. Motenda’s statement that Ramabulana sent Buys to Potchefstroom to ask for help (p. 13). He rejects, as unlikely in Makhado’s time, an account by E. Mudau that Ramabulana asked the “Buys volk” to help in a war between the Vhasenzi and the Vhadau of Tshakhuma (pp. 44 to 45). See Ramabulana.

Under the Boers: opgaaf and intermediaries. Under Potgieter and Schoeman the Buys were entrusted with collecting opgaaf, the tribute the Boers demanded from Africans; Nemudzivhadi says Michael could not manage so large an area, so that Schoeman appointed João Albasini on 9 June 1859, and that for the Venda payment to Michael Buys, Albasini and the field cornets meant that these officials were usurping the king’s authority (pp. 63, 65; see Tribute, land and the Boer state in the Soutpansberg, 1855 to 1898). In August 1865 Hofmeyr wrote that Michael had been used as an intermediary between the Boers and the chief Madzhie but could do nothing. At the Welgevonden meeting of 21 July 1868 the Buys community attended alongside the Tsonga and Davhana when President Pretorius agreed an alliance against Makhado (p. 108; see The Soutpansberg war, 1863 to 1869).

The first mission congregation. The Dutch Reformed Church’s first Soutpansberg station, Goedgedacht, grew out of a request from the Buys. Michael told Hofmeyr that the farmer Cornelis Lottering first told him of the missionary Alexander McKidd, that he asked the visiting President for a missionary, and that “many Whites hated and mocked me” for it (Hofmeyr, pp. 13 to 14). McKidd came in 1863 and Hofmeyr in 1865 (Nemudzivhadi, p. 128). Nemudzivhadi adds that Hofmeyr did not confine himself to the Buys but worked among the Venda too, and that Michael advised Makhado to accept a missionary because the area needed a trustworthy white man to deal with the traders, which is how Hofmeyr came to stay at Kranspoort (pp. 128 to 129; see Stephanus Hofmeyr and Kranspoort). Hofmeyr’s own judgment, which we give as his, was that Michael was not spiritually eager: Michael told him he saw no hope of being anything but a heathen himself, but wanted his children not to fall as low as he and his brothers had (pp. 14 to 15).

Michael’s household. After his brothers Dorha and Gabriel died, Michael took in all their children; Hofmeyr says he gave some to white pastors for Christian instruction, one to a Ds. Smits of Rustenburg, who would not return the boy in 1867, and that he forbade the young to take more than one wife and wanted them to marry among themselves (pp. 14 to 15). In 1868 Hofmeyr recorded Michael saying of his brothers: “My brothers threw away the Word and kept their guns; had they thrown away the guns and kept the Word, we would not have fallen so low” (ch. 8; our translation from the Dutch). Hofmeyr also describes the Buys growing poorer as the elephants became scarce and the hunts failed, and some of the young leaving for the diamond fields (chs 2 and 4).

The 1880s in the Spelonken. Some Buys lived in the north-west, near Makhado’s border. In February 1883, when Makhado’s army attacked Nthabalala and Begwa’s kraal, Nemudzivhadi writes that Commandant Vorster went to rescue Doors Buys, “trapped in the Spelonken with his family”, and that the Boer and Tsonga force freed the Buys, whose headquarters Makhado’s army had surrounded; the schans built afterwards was guarded by ten local Boers, eight Buys and 600 Tsonga, and the wagon road to the Buys settlement was called Buis-paden (pp. 153 to 155). We do not know whether this Doors is the Doris of the 1830s; fifty years apart, they are probably two men. The Reformed church’s evangelists in the Spelonken also included Buys men: Petrus Buijs at Rehoboth in the Little Spelonken, where, in a letter of late 1886, Hofmeyr says he baptised ten adults and eight children, and Gabriel Buys, who went to the Banyai with Petrus and others in June 1883 and was killed in August of that year after being persuaded to join a Boer veldkornet’s cattle raid (see Gabriel Buys, evangelist to the Banyai).

A movement away from Goedgedacht, 1885 to 1886. In a letter of 1885 Hofmeyr wrote of “a movement among the Buys, through which a large part of them are leaving here”, led, to his sorrow, by Andries Buijs, who had worked with him for many years; the Rev. Muller of George visited and spoke with Andries and Simon Buijs, and Hofmeyr found it too painful to say more (ch. 19). In a letter late in 1886 he says they were still on their stand at the “Screkalala” river (a name we cannot match with certainty), that things were not going well for them, that there was no school for the children, and that old Michael’s eyesight was too poor to read but he seemed to have “the most spiritual life” in him (ch. 20, p. 308). We have no Buys account of why they left.

The land, 1888. Michael de Jongh’s 2004 article, as its abstract and Wikipedia’s summary of it say, records that Coenraad de Buys had nine recorded children, of whom Gabriël, Michael and Doris were decisive in founding the community in the foothills of the Soutpansberg, and that in 1888 President Kruger granted about 11,000 hectares to the Buys people as a reward for services to the Boers and the Transvaal Republic (see Buysdorp). Wikipedia describes the village as about 14 km from Vivo on the road to Louis Trichardt (Makhado), relatively self-sufficient from its own water and farming, and comparatively insular; it says the community built its own local government over the decades, which fitted the pre-1994 state and not the post-1994 one, and that it stresses its status as autochthonous in defining its ethnicity and its “moral geography”. We do not know how this has developed since 2004.

A note on names. The sons’ names vary between sources (Doris, Doors, Dorha, Dorka; Gabriel and Michael; Jan, Baba and Piet), and Hofmeyr’s Dutch spells the family Buijs. The older sources use words for the Buys and for Africans that we do not repeat. Sarah Millin’s novel about Coenraad called him “King of the Bastards”, and the book is fiction. See Buys community.

Cautions

This overview is a synthesis of pages on this site and of two main sources, both by outsiders: Hofmeyr’s 1890 book, in which the Buys are described by a missionary who is warm toward Michael but often condescending, and Nemudzivhadi’s 1998 thesis on Makhado, in which they are a minor group. Michael’s own account is the family’s memory told in old age and written down by Hofmeyr; his statements about his father and the journey cannot be checked, and some conflict with Schoeman’s 1933 reading of Trichardt’s diary. We found no history written by the Buys community, and have read only the abstract of de Jongh’s article and a short Wikipedia entry that has no inline citations. We make no statement about who belongs to the community today or how it governs itself. Some Hofmeyr passages are from letters reprinted without dates, and our page numbers for his later chapters are approximate.

Sources and further reading

Stefanus Hofmeyr, Twintig jaren in Zoutpansberg (Cape Town: J. H. Rose, 1890), in Dutch; read in the Internet Archive scan
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; read by OCR, printed page numbers cited)
A. E. Schoeman, master’s thesis on Coenraad de Buys (1933), as reported on our Coenraad de Buys page
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 (publisher’s abstract page only), and Wikipedia’s articles on Buysdorp and Coenraad de Buys

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