Among the Headless Hordes: Missionaries, Outlaws and Logics of Landscape in the Wittebergen Native Reserve, c. 1850–1871

This article offers an archaeological perspective on the Wittebergen Native Reserve, not through excavated remains, but by exploring how historical perceptions of a landscape related to experiences of authority, tenure, mobility and security. It examines how (mis-)perceptions of land (its productivity and availability) helped missionaries to formulate settlement projects to create stable communities of sedentary agriculturist labourers. Wittebergen was one such project, also proposed as a ‘buffer’ between Moshoeshoe I and potential allies to the south. I then discuss alternative experiences of Wittebergen: as a node in a network of sites employed by mobile cattle raiders in the southern Maloti–Drakensberg, and as implicated in actions coded by white observers as ‘disorderly’. Wittebergen thus figures in experiences of landscape that emphasise mobility and authority. Where these logics of landscape met, they had tangible consequences: certain forms of land use were interpreted as vacancies, justifying colonial seizure; fields, mountains and homesteads became the terms of debates linking tenancy with safety and lawlessness; and aspects of the landscape were modified to address threats to the reserve’s security, real or imagined. This article thus signposts how material–cultural traces discerned through archaeological perspectives provide direct statements by communities marginalised in written or oral historical texts.