Oorlam (Orlaam, Orlam, Oorlams, Orlams, Orlamse Hottentot) is an ethnic name for a category of largely Khoikhoi-descended people in what is now Namibia, including groups named Witbooi and Amraal (after the surnames of leaders), and Bersheba and Bethanie (after placenames). Unlike the indigenous Khoikhoi Nama people, who had lived in Namaqualand for centuries, Oorlam communities migrated into Namaqualand from farther south in the Cape Colony beginning in the late 18th century. They came partly to escape Dutch colonial conscription, partly for raiding and trade, and partly for herding lands.[1] Some of them retained links to Oorlam communities in or closer to the borders of the Cape Colony, such as that led by the outlaw Jager Afrikaner and his son Jonker Afrikaner in the Transgariep. In the face of gradual Boer expansion and then large scale Boer migrations away from British rule at the Cape, Jonker Afrikaner later brought his people into Namaqualand in the mid-19th century, becoming a formidable force for Oorlam domination over the Nama and against the Bantu-speaking Herero for a period.[2]
Emerging from populations of Khoikhoi servants raised on Boer farms, many of them having been orphaned and captured in Dutch commando raids, Oorlams primarily spoke a version of Dutch or proto-Afrikaans and were much influenced by Boer colonial ways of life, including technological adoption of horses and guns, European-style clothing, and Christian religion.[3]
Notes
- ^ J. D. Omer-Cooper, History of Southern Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1987), 263; Nigel Penn, "Drosters of the Bokkeveld and the Roggeveld, 1770-1800," in Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier, ed. Elizabeth A. Eldredge and Fred Morton (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994), 42; Martin Legassick, "The Northern Frontier to ca. 1840: The rise and decline of the Griqua people," in The Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1840, ed. Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan U. Press, 1988), 373-74.
- ^ Omer-Cooper, 263-64.
- ^ Legassick, 368-69; Penn, 42.
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