DE KAFFERS AAN DE ZUIDKUST VAN AFRIKA

door Lodewyk Alberti

Ridder der Koninklijke Orde van de Unie en Major bij den Generalen Staf der Koninglijke Hollandsche Armee ; voormals Landdrost van het Distrikt Uitenhage en Militair Commandant van het Fort Frederik, aan de Kaap de goede Hoop

Met Platen en Kaarten

First Edition: viii, (iv), 260, (i errata) pages, hand coloured folding plan of Algoa Bay as frontispiece, 2 hand coloured plates, half calf with red leather title label on the spine, marbled boards - the leather and paper are rubbed and worn, sprinkled page edges, contents bright, a very good copy.

Mendelssohn (Sydney) South African Bibliography, volume 1, pages 17/18, ‘The work was originally written in German, then translated into Dutch, and subsequently into French. The author accompanied General J. W. Janssens when he proceeded to the Cape as Governor of the Colony under the Batavian Republic, in 1802. He was a captain in the Fifth Battalion of the “Corps de Waldeck," and in the following spring was sent to Fort Frederick in Algoa Bay, where he took the direction of affairs relating to the Kaffirs and Hottentots, and acted as landrost. He gives a full account of the natives, including chapters on the situation and climate of Kaffraria, and on the education, language, occupations, and ailments of the various tribes, together with remarks on their form of government, manner of conducting their warfare, relations with the Cape Colony, and many other interesting matters. There is also a description of the peculiar traits of character of the chief, Gaika.  The work is illustrated with coloured engravings and a plan of Algoa Bay.’

Huigen (Siegfried) Knowledge and Colonialism:Eighteenth-century Travellers in South Africa, Brill, Leiden.Boston, 2009, pages 192/3, 'Ludwig Alberti was born in the German county of Waldeck in 1768. He came to the Netherlands in 1784 as lieutenant of a regiment of Waldecker mercenaries and left for the Cape in 1802 as commander of a company of Waldeckers. In 1803 he and a small number of troops were posted far from Cape Town, at Fort Frederick, on the site of the present-day Port Elizabeth. In October of that year Alberti became commander of the fort and in February 1804 ‘landdrost’ (district administrator) of the newly proclaimed district of Uitenhage as well. Here he stayed until the Cape Colony was reoccupied by the English in 1806.

'Alberti’s book is unique in more than one respect. It is the oldest ethnographic description of the ‘Kaffers’, as the Xhosas were generally known at the time, the first Dutch ethnographic monograph and also the only practical application of the ethnographic questionnaire of Joseph-Marie Degérando (or De Gérando; 1772–1842), the Considérations sur  les diverses méthodes a suivre dans l’observation des peuples sauvages (A consideration of the different methods to be followed in the observation of savage peoples) (1800). This questionnaire occupies an important position in the history of French anthropology as the earliest attempt to lay a theoretical basis for ethnographic descriptions. Lastly, De Kaffers aan de Zuidkust van Afrika is a very early example of applied anthropology in the sense of ethnography intended to serve administrative purposes within a colonial context.'