{
  "id": 7391931,
  "title": "The Amandelboom Basters’ forgotten Northern Frontier story: A 19th-century tragedy",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/14/the-amandelboom-basters-forgotten-northern-frontier-story-a-19th",
  "topic": "science",
  "section": "Science",
  "published": "2026-09-14T20:32:04.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Daily Maverick",
    "slug": "daily-maverick",
    "url": "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2026-09-14-the-amandelboom-basters-forgotten-northern-frontier-story-a-19th-century-tragedy/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "The history of Amandelboom, now Williston, in the Northern Cape is a complex tale that defies a simple narrative of victims and villains. Professor Steven Robins, a sociologist and anthropologist from the University of Stellenbosch, first learned about this forgotten history from Elsa van Schalkwyk, a local historian. The Amandelboom Basters, a prosperous and self-sufficient community of mixed Khoi and European ancestry, lived in Amandelboom (renamed Williston in 1883) for most of the 19th century. These Basters were skilled pastoralists who owned large herds of livestock.\n\nIn the late 1860s, the Basters were forced off their land due to overgrazing and severe drought in the Cape Colony. As they were unable to afford the costs of land surveying and registration required by colonial land laws, they opted to trek over 1,000 km northwards to Rehoboth, Namibia. This mass migration occurred just as the Nama and Herero genocide was coming to an end in 1908. In that same year, the Rehoboth Baster community was measured and photographed by German physical anthropologist Eugen Fischer, who later became one of Hitler's top racial scientists. Fischer's research on the Rehoboth Basters was published in 1913, and he later headed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics from 1928 to 1942, during which time he received human specimens and blood samples from Auschwitz.\n\nThe story of the Amandelboom Basters serves as a tragic reminder of the ambiguous belonging and exclusion faced by these individuals due to rigid racial hierarchies and discrimination within colonial rule. It is essential for the people of Amandelboom to understand their past in order to reclaim their history and find hope amidst the current struggles of unemployment, poverty, and substance abuse among the youth.",
  "summary": "The history of Amandelboom, now Williston, in the Northern Cape does not easily lend itself to a straightforward heritage narrative of victims and villains. Instead, it is a complicated story that raises all sorts of troubling questions and ethical challenges.",
  "key_points": [
    "Amandelboom Basters were prosperous 19th-century community in Northern Cape.",
    "Forced to migrate 1,000 km north due to overgrazing and drought in 1860s.",
    "Rehoboth Baster community studied by Eugen Fischer, Hitler's racial scientist."
  ],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}