This book is a fairly natural spin-off from the work which I had long done on the history of the Kat River, and so the acknowledgements that I made in my book The Borders of Race in Colonial South Africa are equally applicable here. In particular, I would like to thank Candy Malherbe for a number of transcripts of texts, and also Fiona Vernal and Alan Lester for helping me obtain an electronic text of Stoffels's testimony before the Select Committee on Aborigines. Above all, I would like to thank Katie Carline for transcripts of the post-1853 material from the London Missionary Society (Council for World Mission) archives. She and Nigel Worden both read drafts of the introduction, to its great benefit

As ever, I am dependent on archivists and librarians, as are most historians. In this case I have to thank, above all, those of the Africa-Studiecentrum in Leiden, especially Ella Verkaik, Monique Kromhout, Gerard van de Bruinhorst and Jos Damen; the Western Cape Archives Depot, which I still fondly know as the Cape Archives, especially Erika le Roux and Jaco van der Merwe; and the Special Collections Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

There are two people to whom I need to pay special thanks. The first is John Iliffe. I belong to that tribe of historians of Africa for whom the unqualified mention of ‘John’ can only mean one person. For over forty years, he has been giving me encouragement and help. Specifically, one evening in the autumn of 2012, at the foot of E staircase, New Court, St John's College, when I gently mooted the possibility of compiling this anthology, his enthusiasm convinced me that it was a worthwhile project. It is with great pleasure, and true humility, that I dedicate this book to him. I hope he thinks it worthwhile.

The second person I wish to thank specifically is Janneke Jansen. Without her encouragement, her help and her love, my life would be so much poorer. But she knows that.