Gonaqua

The Gonaqua, whose name means borderers, were a Khoekhoe people of the southeastern Cape, living in the coastal belt between the Cape Colony and the Xhosa kingdoms. They descended from an old mixing of Khoekhoe pastoralists and Xhosa-speaking farmers long before European arrival, occupying a middle ground between the two worlds and sometimes treated as outsiders by neighbouring Bantu communities.

In the frontier wars of the late eighteenth century they suffered raids from both sides and eventually sought British protection at the Cape. Many Gonaqua clans had by then already been drawn into the Xhosa nation.

Under King Tshiwo between 1670 and 1702 the displaced eastern-coast Khoekhoe chiefdoms, Gonaqua among them, were formed into the Gqunukhwebe chiefdom stretching from the Buffalo River to Zwaartkops, which thereafter fought and made treaties as part of the Xhosa confederacy.