British governors framed Xhosa as barbarous to justify pushing them back

Evidence

Lord Somerset, British governor of the Cape across the period, instituted a policy of insistent anglicization, as much to downplay the cultural influence of the Dutch as to stave off the paranoid threats of degeneration as a result of native mixture or “pollution.” Subsequent governors through much of the nineteenth century – D’Urban, Maitland, Smith – considered the Xhosa “inherently barbarous” (terms explicitly invoked by D’Urban), untrustworthy, prone to pillage and theft. They were consequently to be pushed further and further back, beyond the expanding boundaries of the British Cape. Here, then, segregation’s incipient initiation, its emergent imaginary. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1409

Categorization

• XREF: Another racialized group constructed as a threat (pillage, untrustworthiness) whose removal is justified — evidence toward generalizing threatened-privilege framing across identities. — connects to: Governors justified expelling the Xhosa by labeling them inherently barbarous. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1409