Louis Anthing, baptised Lodewijk Karel Antonij, was born in Venlo, the Netherlands, on 3 May 1829, within a family of German provenance. His father and grandfather were high-ranking officers in the Dutch army and fought in the Napoleonic wars. In 1816, Lieutenant General Heinrich Wilhelm Anthing was appointed military commander of the colony of Batavia (today’s Java). His son, Johann Philipp, followed him as his aide-de-camp. When their ship made the customary stop at Cape Town, Johann Philipp married Charlotte Gottliebe Liesching, one of the numerous children of the German doctor, pharmacist and enslaver Friederich Liesching. The family returned to Europe in 1818 where Johann Phillip’s military career made steady progress. He was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel in 1830 but left the army two years later after suffering a psychotic episode. He died near Cologne in 1833.
Five years later, Charlotte and her children returned to the Cape. Louis, who was then nine years old, may have been educated in the school opened in 1842 by the Dutch educator Antoine Changuion. He may also have found a paternal figure in PB Borcherds, a genial and avuncular person of Dutch extraction who had served in the administration since before the British took over the Colony. Borcherds was an abolitionist, and in 1801 had accompanied an expedition that had close and peaceful contact with the |xam bands of the Kareeberge. He later wrote in fairly positive terms about the people with whom he interacted then, and Louis may have heard from him stories about these encounters, and also descriptions of the haunting and peculiar beauty of the Karoo landscape, perhaps planting the seed of his desire to know the interior and its inhabitants he showed in his mature years.
After several unsuccessful attempts to secure a position in the civil service, in 1850 Anthing was appointed second clerk at the office of the Master of the Supreme Court. The year before, he had gained visibility by publicly embracing a moderate position during the Anti-Convict agitation that shattered and transformed the Colony at the time. This appears to have attracted the attention of the then governor, Sir Harry Smith. Anthing’s progress in the service was swift, and in 1859 he became civil commissioner and resident magistrate of the recently created division of Namaqualand, whose seat was at Springbokfontein.
It was there that, in September 1861, he met Jacob Flink, a man brought to him under the accusation of having murdered a woman in Blydeverwacht, a mission town in today’s southeastern Namibia. During the preparatory examination Flink told Anthing that many of his people, including several relatives, had been killed by farmers. Anthing considered it his duty to make further enquiries and questioned Flink about these alleged crimes. Ou Booi, another Bushman, corroborated what Flink had said, and spoke of further atrocities.
Anthing sent the depositions of the two men to the Attorney General, William Porter, who decided that “a series of … most inhuman murders has been committed” and that “a full judicial investigation” was in order so he could prosecute those involved. With the assent of the acting Governor, Porter sent Anthing to Bushmanland, telling him he considered it “a fortunate thing for the ends of justice” that this task fell “to the lot of a Magistrate of your zeal, ability, and thorough independence”.
Anthing was not thrilled at the prospect of undertaking such a task but he had no alternative. From the start he tried to obtain clear instructions about what he was supposed to do and not do in Bushmanland, but these materialised only months later. By then he had been forced to take some decisions on his own, after realizing that what was happening around him was, as he described it in one of his reports, “the systematic destruction of a race of men” which was being conducted “as if it were a necessary transaction in the business of colonial life” This formulation closely resembles the legal definition of the crime that in 1944 was designated with the neologism ‘genocide’. The perpetrators were farmers from the Colony, both European and Baster. Anthing formed his view of the situation by examining traders, farmers and, of course, the |xam themselves, many of whom were employed by the farmers as serfs. Regarding those who still roamed the veld, he believed that many of them had been killed, and that at the time of writing only a few hundred were still alive and required urgent protection.
The magistrate took pains to state clearly the causes of the thefts blamed on the |xam, contradicting many time-honoured stereotypes about them. He stated that they were driven to stock theft because the farmers had deprived them of their means of subsistence, exterminating the game, appropriating the waterholes and destroying with their herds the grass and other plant foods on which their subsistence depended.
Anthing succeeded in stopping the atrocities, not before issuing “notice warning all persons taking part in any such commando that they would render themselves liable to the utmost penalty of the law”. When the much-awaited communication from the Colonial Office arrived, the governor, Philip Wodehouse, told Anthing that, in the light of what he had reported “the objects to be aimed at are, not so much the prosecution of past offences, or crimes, as the protection of the remaining Bushmen, and the devising of measures for preventing future irregularities and troubles”. These measures, the governor agreed, included “the appointment of a Magistrate”. Wodehouse also expressed his approval of Anthing’s “resolution to remain” in Bushmanland. Anthing’s interpretation (not an unreasonable one) of these words as giving the go ahead to create a magistracy in Kenhardt led him to incur in a series of heavy expenses that his superiors considered they had never sanctioned.
Anthing was then ordered to return to Springbokfontein but considered this was a mistake and proceed to Cape Town, where he arrived in February 1863, accompanied by four |xam adults and two children, the latter as prisoners to the be tried by the Supreme Court for having shot with arrows two Baster herders. The acting Attorney General who had temporarily replaced Porter, the more conservative PJ Denyssen, declined to prosecute. Anthing wrote an incriminating report on the situation in Bushmanland, but the colonial legislature declined to approve the creation of a magistracy there. The massacres, however, appear to have been checked by his actions while in the territory.
At this juncture, Anthing’s intention was to return to Namaqualand, being “anxious”, he told the government in February 1863, “to do what may be in my power, and to do so far as my private resources will admit of, for the Bushman people”. The government, however, had other plans for him. In June, following orders, he headed for Kenhardt to close the provisional establishment he had opened there. Once in the territory he realized that a severe drought had put the |xam in a desperate situation and many were starving. Using, as he explained later to the government, his “own savings and the contributions of friends”, he opened a trading post aimed at keeping alive as many people as possible until the summer springbok migration allowed them to survive on their own.
When Anthing’s leave of absence ended in May or June 1864, new surprises awaited him. For one thing, he was notified that he had been appointed as civil commissioner and resident magistrate of Cradock, a town more than a thousand kilometres east of Springbokfontein. Shortly afterwards, a group of farmers and traders in the Kenhardt area channelled through the MP for Calvinia, George St George Boyes, a complaint against him accusing him of illicit trade during the period when he had opened a trading post in Kenhardt to assist the |xam. Anthing fended easily the absurd accusations, but in September 1864 a detour to Genadendal to try to interest the missionaries there to establish a station in Bushmanland led him to miss the deadline to submit the accounts of his Bushmanland expedition, causing him great trouble with his superiors and leading eventually to the suspension of his salary. In addition to this, the uncongenial climate and working space at Cradock affected his health, and he may have suffered also a clinical depression. Eventually, in November 1865, he had no option but to submit his resignation after 16 years in the civil service.
In the late 1860s Anthing lived for a time in different parts of eastern Bushmanland, and later he moved to what today is Namibia, trying, unsuccessfully, to earn a living there as a trader. Having returned to the Colony in the mid-1870s, he lived for a while in Cape Town, and for most of the 1880s he resided in Kimberley, where he worked as a minor clerk in the administration, earning a fraction of what he had made two decades before. In the 1890s he resided in or near Cape Town, apparently already retired. Connected to the wealthy Hiddingh family by the marriage of his sister Dorothea Wilhelmina Christina to one of its members, he clearly did not have financial troubles after his retirement. In 1895 he travelled to Europe with one of his Hiddingh nephews, Jonas Michiel, who was on his way to San Remo and Nice to marry a member of an aristocratic French family. He never returned to South Africa and died in Nice, France, on 12 August 1902.