A bow wave of European expansion from the Cape Colony reached northward to the Orange River in the late eighteenth century, pushing before it displaced and dispossessed Khoe pastoralists. These communities fell under the depredations of frontier settlers who were effectively beyond the reach of colonial control in a largely lawless zone where cattle raiding served to feed the Cape market. Khoe on the margins of settler society became increasingly accustomed to European ways: Dutch was widely spoken, and horses, firearms and other innovations were quickly adopted. A degree of literacy and nominal Christianity accompanied these changes, although European settlers were generally hostile to the presence of missionaries among the Khoe, where acculturated communities earned the sobriquet Orlam, or people knowledgeable in European ways. Khoe living beyond the Orange River learned to fear these increasingly adept raiders, whom they knew as the “hat wearers”.

Here, we follow the migration of the Orlam northwards, skirting the eastern interior to the central highlands, where missionary activity, trade and mining set in train further developments which had profound consequences in this region. In a sense, the Orlam were travelling backwards in time: the panarchial interaction of indigenous and settler society was much further advanced in the Cape, so that when Orlam raiders eventually reached the Namib Desert and fell upon pastoral communities there, the people they preyed on were in a situation quite similar to their own, but a generation before. As with other regional-scale examples of historical economic integration, there is both a chronological and a chorological aspect to the changing fortunes of Khoe-speaking pastoralists during the last two centuries. The first part of this chapter deals with the northward expansion of the Orlam, and the second with its consequences both in the interior and on the Namib Desert coast.

The rapid spread of European settlement in the Cape Colony initiated a collapse or release Ω phase in the Khoe pastoral economy. Their displacement across the Orange River and beyond the boundaries of the colony is characterized by a fundamental re-organization α phase associated with the emergence of a new social order under Orlam control. This chapter shows that the rapid expansion r phase of the Orlam and the emergence of powerful warlords among the Afrikaner clan and later under Hendrik ǃNanseb Witbooi, represents a significant adaptive development in the pastoral and political economy of the region.