Salt Collection and Hunting Permits and Loan Farm Applications
Taxation as developed under the Dutch East India Company has been described as arbitrary, irregular and carelessly applied. The methods followed to collect revenue for the administration of the Cape settlement were roughly in accordance with contemporaneous practice elsewhere, but there were peculiarities. For example, a customs tariff was imposed in 1678, not so much to produce revenue as to counteract evasion of the Company’s trade monopoly. The monopolies covered salt-taxes and hunting. These monopolies produced a revenue of large proportions in 1794. Transfer duties on immovable property were introduced in 1686 and revised in 1793, the yield in 1794 being 50 000 guilders. Export duties were levied on wine, brandy, wheat, barley, peas, beans, ox-hides and ivory. From 174 all occupiers of loan farms were liable to pay a tithe, or one-tenth of the harvest.
Land in the interior was not purchased, but simply occupied by farmers, who paid an annual recognition fee of 24 rix-dollars to the Company for the right to farm it. As a result of this “loan-farm” system, which remained in force for more than a century, the farmers never became the legal owners of their farms, which were 6,330 acres and larger in extent; but after 1731 quitrent farms were also granted, in order to afford greater stability. Few, however, availed themselves of this, because after is years the quitrent could be withdrawn instead of being renewed for another is years. In 1743 another half-hearted effort was made to give the farmer more security; a loan farm could then be changed to a freehold loan farm or perpetual loan farm, but this was confined to farms of only about 120 acres.
All the farmers in the interior were stock-farmers, and all of them farmed with mutton sheep and Afrikander cattle. The flocks and herds were tended by herdsmen during the day and kept in thorn-branch enclosures at night to protect them against beasts of prey. This practice soon resulted in the trampling and overgrazing of large tracts of land. As soon as the grazing became too poor or water too scarce the general practice was simply to load the ox-wagons and trek farther inland in search of new pastures. The farmers never became tied down to any particular farm, nor did the typical stock-farmer ever bring about any lasting improvements on the land farmed by him; the only areas cultivated were small pieces of land round springs, and here gardens were laid out and tobacco, and sometimes wheat, grown on a small scale. Stock-farming became a way of life instead of an economic enterprise.
All stock-farmers were also hunters, and they spent much time on hunting-trips, from which they derived a good income, as there was a ready market for ivory, ostrich-feathers, skins, horns, and even salted hippopotamus fat, at the Cape. The farmers usually made a trip to Cape Town by ox-wagon over rough roads and mountain passes once every year, to deliver these products and their slaughter stock. It was only at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th cent. that travelling butcher’s men began to go across country to buy up slaughter stock from the farmers. During the 18th century there were no marketing possibilities in the interior. Prices. and market conditions in Cape Town were very strongly affected by the number of ships calling at the port, and in time of war, when convoys put in more regularly, trade flourished. The farmers bartered their produce at the Cape for clothing, coffee, sugar, ammunition and implements. From an early stage they bought their wagons in Paarl, where there was a flourishing wagon-building industry.
Example of Loan Farms Database entry.
