Estcourt is a town in the uThukela District of KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa. The main economic activity is farming with large bacon and processed food factories situated around the town. The N3 freeway passes close to the town, linking it to the rest of South Africa.
Estcourt is located at the confluence of the Bushmans and the Little Bushmans River. It is also on the main Durban – Johannesburg railway line some 160 km north of Durban and 25 km south of the Tugela River crossing. In earlier years the main road, later to become the N3, passed through the town. The town itself is 1196 m above sea level and lies in the hilly country that dominates most of the Natal Midlands. The Drakensberg lies some 40 km to the west of the town.
The earliest identifiable inhabitants of the Estcourt area were the bushmen, a hunter-gather people, though rock engravings dating from four different iron age periods have been found on the farm Hattingsvlakte. The bushmen had been displaced by the Bantu people, a pastoral people and in particular the Zulu, a tribe that traced its origins as a separate nation to the early eighteenth century. The bushmen had sought sanctuary in the foothills of the Drakensberg. In the early nineteenth century the Zulu king Shaka used the weapon of Mfecane (genocide) to build his empire. Thus, when the white settlers first arrived in the Estcourt area, the land appeared to be almost uninhabited.
The first recorded settlement in the Estcourt area was in 1838 when a group of Voortrekkers encamped on the banks of the Bushmans River in anticipation of securing land right from Dingane kaSenzangakhona, the Zulu king. The negotiator, Piet Retief, and his party were murdered by Dingane on 10 February 1838 and in the small hours of the following morning attacks, since known as the Weenen massacre, were launched on the Voortrekker encampments along the Bloukrans River, the Bushmans River and the Mooi River. After a Voortrekker retaliation at the Battle of Blood River, Dingane was deposed and his place taken by Mpande. Panda seceded the land south of the Tugela River to the settlers which included the area that was to become Estcourt. The Voortrekkers set up the Natalia Republic, but after the Battle of Congella in 1842, they abandoned their settlements and moved into the interior, leaving Natalia to the British who established the Colony of Natal. Thus Natal acquired an English-speaking rather than an Afrikaans-speaking settler community and Estcourt, being so close to the Tugela River become a frontier outpost.
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