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KING WILLIAM’S TOWN / QONCE
Province/state: Eastern Cape (previously Cape Province/Cape Colony/British Kaffraria).
District council: Amatola District Council (until 1978 King William’s Town Division; then Divisional Council of Kaffraria).
Additions: Bisho, Zwelitsha (1995)
Incorporated: into Buffalo City, 2000.

King William’s Town

The town did not have a coat of arms. However, it did have a circular seal device, adopted in the days of the Colony of Kaffraria.

The seal is a landscape of the countryside around the town as it would have appeared in the 1820s, with the Amatola mountain range in the background.

The name Amatola (or, as it is written in modern isiXhosa, Amathole) means “bullocks”, and refers to the jumbled appearance of the mountains in the eyes of the cattle-loving amaXhosa, who see them as leaping like bullocks.

The beehive-shaped huts are typical of the type of houses built by the amaXhosa at the time the town was founded.

However, in later decades it became the norm to build huts with upright walls (round or with right-angled corners) instead. The beehive shape is still to be found in KwaZulu-Natal, leading one to conclude (falsely) that this shape is uncharacteristic of the Xhosa culture.

The palm tree is something of an anomaly. Palm trees are to be found on the banks of the Buffalo River, as well as along other rivers in the vicinity (especially nearer the coast), but the free-standing, tall palm illustrated would seem to be a fancy on the part of the illustrator.

In addition to the name “Borough of King William’s Town” the seal is inscribed “Eqonce malicume” meaning “May Qonce flourish”.

Qonce, meaning “buffalo”, is the isiXhosa name firstly of the Buffalo River which runs through the town (and reaches the sea at the East London harbour), and by extension also of the town and the surrounding district.

The buffalo here intended is the Cape buffalo, Syncerus caffer, which is found in the arms of East London.

The expression “Eqonce malicume” contains two different clicks characteristic of the isiNguni language, one of them twice.

The click spelt with the letter Q is made by the tongue being pulled back from the palate at the front of the mouth, above the incisors. The one spelt C is made with the tongue initially against the incisors themselves.

About the town:
The permanent settlement on this spot began in 1825 when the missionary John Brownlee established the Buffalo Mission Station near the homestead of the minor chief Dyani Tshatshu[1] (the site of the chief’s home has been part of the town for well over 150 years).

Brownlee was at the time attached to the London Missionary Society, but later served under the Glasgow Missionary Society.

In 1835 Governor Sir Benjamin d’Urban named the settlement after the reigning British sovereign, William IV, and in ’36, at the end of the Sixth Frontier War, made it the military headquarters of his new creation, the Province of Queen Adelaide (named for King William’s consort, who had been baptised Adelheid). This was an entity east of the Fish River which, the Governor intended, would be an instrument through which the amaXhosa would be introduced to civilisation.

(King William was the last British sovereign who was also King of Hannover [or Hanover, as it was spelt in Britain], a kingdom in northern Germany covering most of the territory of the present-day Land Niedersachsen.)

However, the Secretary for the Colonies in London chose instead to abandon the Province of Queen Adelaide and leave it in the hands of the amaXhosa.

It was Governor Sir Harry Smith who again raised King William’s Town to the status of a capital when in 1847 he proclaimed the Colony of British Kaffraria, part of his settlement after the Seventh Frontier War.

The town, still under military rule, was visited on 13 August 1860 by Prince Alfred, second son of Queen Victoria (who was later Duke of Edinburgh and afterwards reigning Duke of Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha). The prince, who was 16 years old at the time and a midshipman in the Royal Navy, toured extensively in the Cape Colony at this time.

A consequence of Prince Alfred’s visit was that in 1861, King William’s Town was given civil rule and the status of borough. Although the term borough was also used in the Colony of Natal, it was unique to King William’s Town in Kaffraria and, when that colony was absorbed into the Cape Colony in 1866, unique also in the Cape.

A survey was conducted in 1872 for the construction of a railway linking King William’s Town, East London and Queenstown.

The first sod was turned in August ’73, but despite appeals from the people of King William’s Town, it was not on the direct route, being linked with a 17 km branch line from Blaney Junction.

Construction actually only began the following January. The first train reached Blaney in May 1876, and the first train to complete the 54 km from East London to King William’s Town arrived only in December.

Further construction was hampered by the Eighth Frontier War, and Queenstown was only connected in May 1880. King William’s Town ceased to have branch line status only much later when it was connected to Cookhouse on the line from Port Elizabeth to Colesberg.

German-speaking settlers from a legion originally raised in Britain for service in the Crimean War were settled on the Border (as the region covering East London, King William’s Town and Stutterheim came to be known) in 1856. Many villages with German names were established, many of which would eventually disappear when the farms were purchased by the South African Government in the 1970s for incorporation into Ciskei.

The town remained the administrative headquarters of Kaffraria even after the annexation of that colony. In later years the “native reserves” of what had been Kaffraria came to be termed the Ciskei.

Only shortly before the “independence” of the Republic of Ciskei was its administration moved first to Zwelitsha, the black township outside King William’s Town to the west, and then to a newly built Ciskeian capital, named Bisho, on the northern outskirts of King William’s Town.

King William’s Town itself, however, remained part of South Africa and of the Cape Province – the divided community so created being a testimony to the obsession for separation that characterised apartheid South Africa.

The Borough Council of King William’s Town marked the birth on 21 June 1982 of Prince William of Wales (son of Charles, Prince of Wales, and the former Lady Diana Spencer) by sending the royal infant’s parents a congratulatory message which looked forward to the reign of King William V.

The municipal elections of 1995 saw both Zwelitsha and Bisho added (quite logically, following the end of apartheid) to King William’s Town. In 2000 the combined town became, together with East London, part of the Buffalo City Municipality.

Names of the town:
The town’s formal name in English, as well as in Afrikaans, has always been King William’s Town (only in jest does one speak of “Koning Willemstad”), although in common parlance this is shortened to “King”.

The name is sometimes spelt as one word, Kingwilliamstown, but this is not favoured in the Eastern Cape. This form has been used by Cape Town newspapers, and at times on road signs. In contrast, Eastern Cape newspapers spell the naval base on the Cape Peninsula’s False Bay coast as Simonstown, whereas Cape newspapers prefer Simon’s Town.

Its Xhosa name, Qonce, predates the mission settlement, but despite its use in the town seal, it was not a formal name for the town until 1994, when isiXhosa became an official language in South Africa.



[1] Dyani Tshatshu’s conversion to Christianity was the sole fruit of Dr Johannes van der Kemp’s mission to the kraal of Rharhabe paramount Ngqika in 1799-1800.

His name occurs in colonial records as Jan Tzatzoe, and is especially noted for his 1836 visit to London to testify before the House of Commons Committee on Aborigines.

When a head of household died, his homestead or kraal was burnt and abandoned (not to be built on again), so the presence of the site of Dyani Tshatshu’s homestead within the town cannot be seen as a colonial intrusion on the ancestral property rights of his family.


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  • Illustration from a cigarette card issued in the 1930s by the United Tobacco Companies (South). Historical notes from the Standard Encyclopædia of Southern Africa (Nasou), among other sources.


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    Comments, queries: Mike Oettle