Christian Groepe

Field Commandant Christian Jacobus Groepe (1789–1886) was a military leader of the Khoi people of Kat River, Cape Colony, in the nineteenth century.

Christian Groepe was the mixed-race son of Maria and Heinrich Grupe. His mother was a freed slave of Cape ancestry, and his father was a farm labourer of German ancestry.

While he kept strong connections with German family and friends, he also seems to have identified primarily with the local Khoikhoi people, possibly through his mother's influence. He is first recorded as a wealthy Khoikhoi businessman, land-owner and community leader among the Gonaqua Khoi people of the Kat River Settlements, near the Eastern Cape frontier. Kat River was a large, successful and predominantly Khoi region of the Cape, that subsisted more or less autonomously. Aside from the Afrikaans-speaking Gonaqua Khoi, the settlement had also attracted large numbers of other Khoi, Xhosa and mixed-race groups of the Cape.

In 1834, the Surveyor General of the Cape Colony, W.F.Hertzog, recorded a "Christiaan Groepe" as being a wealthy, highly educated and "respectable" Khoi, who had originally arrived from Baviaans River with a large number of followers, and had settled them in the central "Tamboekiesvallei" area of Kat River. The Kat River Khoi, situated near the frontier and renowned as excellent marksmen, were frequently and gratuitously recruited by the Cape Colony in its frontier wars with the neighboring Xhosa.

Commandant Groepe fought in the frontier wars alongside , John Molteno and Andries Botha. In the Amatola War they led the local Cape Commandos that - vastly outnumbered - defeated Sandile's gunmen and fought their way into the Amatola fastnesses.

They then rode deep into the Xhosa heartland of the Transkei and met Sarhili, the paramount Chief of all the Xhosa, to negotiate a peace treaty. All this while, the British Imperial Troops had largely retreated to their forts further west.

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