Land compensation is by definition about history. The whole process is concerned with redressing the injustices caused by the racist nature of South African society and the racist measures of the South African state between 1913, a couple of years after the foundation of the Union, and 1994, the end of the apartheid era. Claims to land, and thus to compensation, have to be made on the basis of historical events, and indeed the standards of proof required to make a successful claim have been those of historical enquiry, not those of a court of law. In this way, as in others, the new South Africa attempts to redress the inequities of the old.

The problem with such laudable proposals is that history has sometimes developed in too complicated a way for the simple assumptions of the Land Claims Commission to be fulfilled. In this chapter I discuss one such case, that of the upper Kat River valley in the Eastern Cape. This has become one of the last areas of the country in which land claims have still to be settled. The cynic would suggest that part of the reason for this is that many, though by no means all, of the claimants are either whites or people of Khoisan descent. More generally, though, it has to be realised that the history of the valley, in particular the history of land ownership and allocation, has been extraordinarily complex.

The region in question lies in the upper catchment area of the Kat River valley in the Eastern Cape, to the north of Fort Beaufort. Essentially, the valley is a basin cut into the outliers of the Amathole mountains by a number of small streams which come together to form the Kat and the Blinkwater rivers. Just below the confluence of these two streams, the combined river runs through a narrow gorge, known as the Poort, before passing Fort Beaufort on its way to join the Great Fish River, and thence to the sea. In the upper Kat valley, the streams have eroded away a number of relatively broad areas of fertile bottomland, which is surrounded by rough grazing and, higher up, a corona of mist forest.