‘An Unprecedented but Significant Atrocity’: A Window into the War of the Axe, 1846–1847

In March 1846, on the Cape Colony's eastern frontier, during a daring rescue of a Xhosa prisoner, the Khoikhoi man shackled to him was killed when the prisoner's rescuers hacked off his hand. On the Xhosa chiefs’ refusal to surrender the ‘murderers’, war was declared. This article examines the etiology of the incident and the ensuing war, taking into account the frontier's micropolitics, with its web of relations between Xhosa chiefs, diplomatic agents, governors and the military, suggesting that, inter alia, dispossession and the fear of genocide drove the incident and the war.