I HAVE to say that I feel almost ashamed of the headings given to these initiatory chapters of my book as I certainly am not qualified to write a history of South Africa. Nor, were I able to do so, could it be done in a few pages. And, again, it has already been done and that so recently that there is not as yet need for further work of the kind. But it is not possible to make intelligible the present condition of any land without some reference to its antecedents. And as it is my object to give my reader an idea of the country as I saw it I am obliged to tell something of what I myself found it necessary to learn before I could understand that which I heard and saw. When I left England I had some notion more or less correct as to Hottentots, Bushmen, Kafirs, and Zulus. Since that my mind has gradually become permeated with Basutos, Griquas, Bechuanas, Amapondos, Suazies, Gaikas, Galekas, and various other native races,—who are supposed to have disturbed our serenity in South Africa, but whose serenity we must also have disturbed very much,—till it has become impossible to look at the picture without realizing something of the identity of those people. I do not expect to bring any readers to do that. I perhaps have been filling my mind with the subject for as many months as the ordinary reader will take hours in turning over these pages. But still I must ask him to go back a little with me, or, as I go on, I shall find myself writing as though I presumed that things were known to him, as to which if he have learned much, it may be unnecessary that he should look at my book at all.
The English began their work with considerable success. The Dutch laws were retained, but were executed with mitigated severity; a large military force was maintained in the Colony, numbering from four to five thousand men, which of course created a ready market for the produce of the country; and there was a Governor with almost royal appanages and a salary of £12,000 a year,—as much probably, when the change in the value of money is considered, as the Governor-General of India has now. Men might sell and buy as they pleased, and the intolerable strictness of Dutch colonial rule was abated. Whatever Dutch patriotism might say, the English with their money were no doubt very welcome at first, and especially at or in the neighbourhood of Capetown. We are told that Lord Caledon, who was the first regular Governor after the return of the English, was very popular. But troubles soon came, and we at once hear the dreaded name of Kafir.[2]
In 1811 the Dutch Boers had stretched themselves as far east as the country round Graff Reynet,—for which I must refer my reader to the map. Between the Dutch and the Kafirs a neutral district had been established in the vain hope of maintaining limits. Over this district the Kafirs came plundering,—no doubt thinking that they were exercising themselves in the legitimate and patriotic defence of their own land. The Dutch inhabitants of course called for Government aid, and such aid was forthcoming. An officer sent to report on the matter recommended that all the Kafirs should be expelled from the Colony, and that the district called the Zuurveld,—a district which by treaty had been left to the Kafirs,—should be divided among white farmers. “This,” says the chronicler, “was hardly in accordance with the agreement with Ngquika, but necessity has no law.” The man whose name has thus been imperfectly reduced to letters was the Kafir chieftain of that ilk, and is the same as the word Gaika now used for a tribe of British subjects. Necessity we all know has no law. But what is necessity? A man must die. A man, generally, must work or go to the wall. But need a man establish himself as a farmer on another man’s land? The reader will understand that I do not deny the necessity;—but that I feel myself to be arrested when I hear it asserted as sufficient excuse.
The Dutch never raised a question as to the necessity. The English have in latter days continually raised the question, but have so acted that they have been able to argue as sufferers while they have been the aggressors. On this occasion the necessity was allowed. A force was sent, and a gallant Dutch magistrate, one Stockenstroom, who trusted himself among the Kafirs, was, with his followers, murdered by them. Then came the first Kafir war. We are told that no quarter was given by the white men, no prisoners taken;—that all were slaughtered, till the people were driven backwards and eastwards across the Great Fish river. This, the first Kafir war, took place in 1811.
The next and quickly succeeding trouble was of another kind. There have been the two great troubles;—the contests between the white men and the savages, and then the contests between the settled colonists and those who have ever been seceding or “trekking” backwards from the settlements. These latter have been generally, though by no means exclusively, Dutchmen; and it is of them we speak when we talk of the South African up-country Boers. These men, among other habits of their time, had of course been used to slavery;—and though the slavery of the Colony had never been of its nature cruel, it had of course been open to cruelty. Laws were made for the protection of slaves, and these laws were unpalatable to the Boer who wished to live in what he called freedom,—“to do what he liked with his own,” according to the Duke of Newcastle,—“to do what he dam pleased,” as the American of the South used to say. A certain Dutchman named Bezuidenhout refused to obey the law, and hence there arose a fight between a party of Dutch who swore that they would die to a man rather than submit, and the armed British authorities. The originator of the rebellion was shot down. The Dutch invited the Kafirs to join them; but the Kafir chief declared that as sparks were flying about, he would like to wait and see which way the wind blew. But the battle went on, and of course the rebels were beaten. There then followed an act of justice combined with vengeance. The leaders were tried and six men were condemned to be hanged. That may have been right;—but their friends and relatives were condemned to see them executed. That must have been wrong, and in the result was most unfortunate. Five of the six were hanged,—while thirty others had to stand by and see. The place of execution was called Slagter’s Nek, a name long remembered by the retreating Dutch Boers. But they were hanged,—not simply once, but twice over. The apparatus, overweighted with the number, broke down when the poor wretches dropped from the platform. They were half killed by the ropes, but gradually struggled back to life. Then there arose prayers that they might now at least be spared;—and force was attempted, but in vain. The British officer had to see that they were hanged, and hanged they were a second time, after the interval of many hours spent in constructing a second gallows. They were all Dutchmen, and the Dutch implacable Boer has said ever since that he cannot forget Slagter’s Nek. It was the followers and friends of these men who trekked away northwards and eastwards till after many a bloody battle with the natives they at last came to Natal.
From this time the Colony went on with a repetition of those two troubles,—war with the Kafirs and disturbances with other native races, and an ever-increasing disposition on the part of the European Colonists to go backwards so that they might live after their own fashion and not be forced to treat either slaves or natives according to humanitarian laws. While this was going on the customary attempts were made to civilize and improve both the colonists and the natives. Schools, libraries, and public gardens were founded, and missionaries settled themselves among the Kafirs and other coloured people. The public institutions were not very good, nor were the missionaries very wise;—but some good was done. The Governors who were sent out were of course various in calibre. Lord Charles Somerset, who reigned for nearly twelve consecutive years, is said to have been very arbitrary; but the Colony prospered in spite of Kafir wars. From time to time further additions were made to our territories, always of course at the expense of the native races. In 1819 the Kafirs were driven back behind the Keiskamma River; where is the region now called British Kafraria,—which was then allowed to be Kafirs’ land. Since that they have been compressed behind the Kei River, where lies what is now called Kafraria Proper. Whether it will continue “proper” to the Kafirs is hardly now matter of doubt. I may say that a considerable portion of it has been already annexed.
In 1820 it was determined to people the districts from which the natives had last been driven by English emigrants. The fertility of the land and the salubrity of the climate had been so loudly praised that there was no difficulty in procuring volunteers for the purpose. The applications from intending emigrants were numerous, and from these four thousand were selected, and sent out at the expense of Government to Algoa Bay;—where is Port Elizabeth, about four hundred miles east of Capetown. Hence have sprung the inhabitants of the Eastern Province, which is as English as the Western Province is Dutch. And hence has come that desire for separation,—for division into an Eastern and a Western Colony, which for a long time distracted the Colonial Authorities both at home and abroad. The English there have prospered better than their old Dutch neighbours,—at any rate as far as commerce is concerned. The business done in Algoa Bay is of a more lively and prosperous kind than that transacted at Capetown. Hence have arisen jealousies, and it may easily be understood that when the question of Colonial Parliaments arose, the English at Algoa Bay thought it beneath them to be carried off, for the purpose of making laws, to Capetown.
It was from the coming of these people that the English language began to prevail in the Colony. Until 1825 all public business was done in Dutch. Proceedings in the law courts were carried on in that language even later than that,—and it was not till 1828 that the despatches of Government were sent out in English. The language of social and commercial life can never be altered by edicts, but gradually, from this time the English began to be found the most convenient. Now it is general everywhere in the Colony, though of course Dutch is still spoken by the descendants of the Dutch among themselves: and church services in the Lutheran churches are performed in Dutch. It will probably take another century to expel the language. In 1825 the despotism of the Governors was lessened by the appointment of a Council of seven, which may be regarded as the first infant step towards Parliamentary institutions; and in 1828 the old Dutch courts of Landdrosts and Neemraden were abolished, and resident magistrates and justices were appointed.
But in the same year a much greater measure was accomplished. A very small minority of liberal-minded men in the Colony, headed by Dr. Philip, the missionary, bestirred themselves on behalf of the Hottentots, who were in a condition very little superior to that of absolute slavery. The question was stirred in England, and was taken up by Mr. Buxton, who gave notice of a motion in the House of Commons on the subject. But the Secretary of State for the Colonies was beforehand with Mr. Buxton, and declared in the House that the Government would grant all that was demanded. The Hottentots were put on precisely the same footing as the Europeans,—very much to the disgust of the Colonists in general and of the rulers of the Colony. So much was this understood at home, and so determined was the Home Government that the colonial feeling on the matter should not prevail, that a clause was added to the enactment declaring that it should not be competent for any future Colonial Government to rescind its provisions.
To argue as to the wisdom and humanity of such a measure now would be futile. The question has so far settled itself that no one dreams of supposing that a man’s social rights should be influenced by colour or race. But these Dutchmen and Englishmen knew very well that a Hottentot could not be made to be equal in intelligence or moral sense to a European, and they should I think be pardoned for the ill will with which they accepted the change. And this becomes the more clear to us when we remember that slavery was at the time still an institution of the country, and that the slaves, who were an imported people from the Straits and the Guinea Coast, were at any rate equal in intelligence to the Hottentots.
Six years afterwards, in 1834, slavery itself was abolished in all lands subject to the British flag,—and this created even a greater animosity among the Dutch than the enactments in favour of the Hottentots. Perhaps no one thing has so strongly tended to alienate the Boer from us as this measure and the way in which it was carried out. In the first place the institution of slavery recommended itself entirely to the Dutch mind. Taking him altogether we shall own that he was not a cruel slave owner; but he was one to whom slavery of itself was in no way repugnant. That he as the master should have a command of labour seemed to him to be only natural. To throw away this command for the sake of putting the slave into a condition which,—as the Dutchman thought,—would be worse for the slave himself was to him an absurdity. He regarded the matter as we regard the doctrine of equality. The very humanitarianism of it was to him a disgusting pretence. The same feeling exists still. It strikes one at every corner in the Colony. A ready mode to comfort, wealth, and general prosperity was, as the Dutchman thinks,—and also some who are not Dutch,—absolutely thrown away. Then came the question of compensation. Some of us are old enough to remember the difficulty in distributing the twenty millions which were voted for the slave owners. The slaves of the Cape Colony were numbered at 35,745, and were valued at £3,000,000. The amount of money which was allowed for them was £1,200,000. But even this was paid in such a manner that much of it fell into the hands of fraudulent agents before it reached the Boer. There was delay and the orders for the money were negotiated at a great discount. The sum expected dwindled down to so paltry a sum that some of the farmers refused to accept what was due to them. Then there was further trekking away from a land which in the minds of the emigrants was so abominably mismanaged. But the slaves fell into the body of the coloured population without any distinction, and were added of course to the free labour of the country. The ordinary labourer in all countries earns so little more than board lodging and clothes for himself and his children, and it is so indispensable a necessity on the slave owner to provide board lodgings and clothes for his slaves, that the loss of slaves, when all owners lose them together, ought not to impoverish any one. There may be local circumstances, as there were in Jamaica, which upset the working of this rule. In the Cape Colony there were no such circumstances; and it seems that those who remained and accepted the law were not impoverished. There can be no doubt, however, that the inhabitants of the Colony generally were disgusted. The measure was brought into effect in 1838, an apprenticeship of four years having been allowed.
But we must go back for a moment to the Kafir war of 1835,—the third Kafir war, for there was a second, of which as being less material I have spared the reader any special mention. Of all our Kafir wars this was probably the most bitter. There had been continual contests, in all of which the Kafirs had undoubtedly thought themselves to be ill used, but in all of which the evils inflicted upon them had been perpetrated in punishment and reprisal for thefts of cattle. The Kafir thefts were in comparison small but were often repeated. Then the Europeans sent out what were called “Commandos,”—which consisted of an armed levy of mounted men intent upon seizing cattle by way of restitution. The reader of the histories of the period is compelled to think that the unfortunate cattle were always being driven backwards and forwards over the borders. During the period, however, more than once cattle were restored by the colonists to the Kafirs which were supposed to have been taken from them in excess of just demands. In December 1834 this state of things was brought to a crisis by an attempt which was made by a party of Europeans to recover some stolen horses. Some cattle were seized, and others were voluntarily surrendered, but the result was that in December a large body of Kafirs invaded the European lands, and massacred the farmers to their hearts’ content. They overran the border country to the number of ten or twelve thousand, and then returned, carrying with them an immense booty. It all reads as a story out of Livy, in which the Volsci will devastate the Roman pastures and then return with their prey to one of their own cities. The reader is sure that the Romans are going to get the best of it at last;—but in the meantime the Roman people are nearly ruined.
Sir Benjamin D’Urban was then Governor, and he took strong and ultimately successful steps to punish the Kafirs. I have not space here to tell how Hintsa, the Kafir chief, was shot down as he was attempting to escape from the British whom he had undertaken to guide through his country, or how the Kafirs were at last driven to sue for peace and to surrender the sovereignty of their country. The war was not only bloody, but ruinous to thousands. The cattle were of course destroyed, so that no one was enriched. Ill blood, of which the effects still remain, was engendered. Three hundred thousand pounds were spent by the British. But at last the Kafirs were supposed to have been conquered, and Sir Benjamin D’Urban supposed to be triumphant.
The triumph, however, to Sir Benjamin D’Urban was not long-lived. At this time Lord Glenelg was Secretary of State for the Colonies in England, and Lord Glenelg was a man subject to what I may perhaps not improperly call the influences of Exeter Hall. When the full report of the Kafir war reached him a certain party at home had been loud in expressions of pity and perhaps of admiration for the South African races. Hottentots and Kafirs had been taken home,—or at any rate a Hottentot and a Kafir,—and had been much admired. No doubt Lord Glenelg gave his best attention to the reports sent to him;—no doubt he consulted those around him;—certainly without doubt he acted in accordance with his conscience and with a full appreciation of the greatness of the responsibility resting upon him;—but I think he acted with very bad judgment. He utterly repudiated what Sir Benjamin D’Urban had done, and asserted that the Kafirs had had “ample justification” for the late war. He declared in his despatch that “they had a perfect right to hazard the experiment of extorting by force that redress which they could not expect otherwise to obtain,” and he caused to be returned to the Kafirs the land from which they had been driven,—which land has since that again become a part of the British Colony. There was a correspondence in which Sir B. D’Urban supported his own views,—but this ended in the withdrawal of the Governor in 1838, Lord Glenelg declaring that he was willing to take upon himself the full responsibility of what he had done, and of all that might come from it.
I think I am justified in saying that since that time public opinion has decided against Lord Glenelg, and has attributed to his mistake the further Kafir wars of 1846 and 1850. It is often very difficult in the beginning of such quarrels to say who is in the right, the Savage or the civilized invader of the country. The Savage does not understand the laws as to promises, treaties, and mutual compacts which we endeavour to impose upon him, and we on the other hand are determined to live upon his land whether our doing so be just or unjust. In such a condition of things we,—meaning the civilized intruders,—are obliged to defend our position. We cannot consent to have our throats cut when we have taken the land, because our title to possession is faulty. If ever a Governor was bound to interfere for the military defence of his people, Sir Benjamin D’Urban was so bound. If ever a Savage was taken red-handed in treachery, Hintsa was so taken, and was so shot down. The full carrying out of Lord Glenelg’s views would have required us to give back all the country to the Hottentots, to compensate the Dutch for our interference, and to go back to Europe. Surely no man was ever so sorely punished for the adequate performance of a most painful public duty as Sir Benjamin D’Urban.
In 1838 slavery was abolished;—and as one of the consequences of that abolition, the Dutch farmers again receded. Their lands were occupied by the English and Scotch who followed them, and in the hands of these men the growth of wool began to prevail. Merino sheep were introduced, and wool became the most important production of the colony.
During the whole of this period the practice was continued by the old-fashioned farmers of receding from their farms in quest of new lands in which they might live without interference. The Colony in spite of Kafirs had prospered under English rule, whilst the Dutch farmers had no doubt enjoyed the progress as well as their English neighbours. Their condition was infinitely more free than it had ever been under Dutch rule, and very much more comfortable. But still they were dissatisfied. British ideas as to Hottentots and Kafirs and British ideas as to slavery were in their eyes absurd, unmanly and disagreeable. And therefore they went away across the Orange River; but we shall be able to deal better with their further journeyings when we come to speak of the colony of Natal, of the Orange Free State, and of the Transvaal Republic.
In 1846 came another Kafir war, called the war of the axe,[3] which lasted to the end of 1847. This too grew out of a small incident. A Kafir prisoner was rescued and taken into Kafir land, and the Kafirs would not give him up when he was demanded by the Authorities. It seems that whenever any slight act of rebellion on their parts was successful, the whole tribe and the neighbouring tribes would be so elated as to think that now had come the time for absolutely subduing the white strangers. They were at last beaten and starved into submission, but at a terrible cost; and it seems to have been acknowledged at home that Lord Glenelg had been wrong. Sir Harry Smith was sent out, and he again extended the Colony to the Kei River, leaving the district between that and the Keiskamma as a British home for Kafirs, under the name of British Kafraria.
In 1849, when Earl Grey was at the Colonial Office, an attempt was made to induce the Cape Colony to receive convicts, and a ship laden with such a freight was sent to Table Bay. But they were never landed. With an indomitable resolution which had about it much that was heroic the inhabitants resolved that the convicts should not be allowed to set foot on the soil of South Africa. The Governor, acting under orders from home, no doubt was all powerful, and there was a military force at hand quite sufficient to enforce the Governor’s orders. Nothing could have prevented the landing of the men had the Governor persevered. But the inhabitants of the place agreed among themselves that if the convicts were landed they should not be fed. No stores of any kind were to be sold to any one concerned should the convicts once be put on shore. The remedy then seemed to be rebellious and has since been called ridiculous;—but it was successful, and the convicts were taken away. For four wretched months the ship with its miserable freight lay in the bay, but not a man was landed. No such freight had ever been brought to the Cape before since the coming of a party of criminals from the Dutch East India possessions, who were sold as slaves,—and no such attempt has been made since. Those who know anything of the history of our Australian Colonies are aware that there is nothing to which the British Colonist has so strong an objection as the presence of a convict from the mother country. Whatever the mother country may send let it not send her declared rascaldom. The use of a Colony as a prison is no doubt in accordance with the Dutch theory that the paramount object of the outlying settlement is the welfare of the parent state,—but it is not at all compatible with the existing British idea that the paramount object is the well-being of the Colonists themselves. It seems hard upon England that with all her territories she can find no spot of ground for the reception of her thieves and outcasts,—that she, with all her population, sending out her honest folks over the whole world, should be obliged to keep her too numerous rascals at home. But it seems that where the population is which creates the crime, there the criminals must remain. The Colonies certainly will not receive them.
Then came the fifth Kafir war, which of all these wars was the bloodiest. It began in 1850, and seems to have been instigated by a Kafir prophet. It would be impossible in a short sketch such as this to give any individual interest to these struggles of the natives against their invaders. Through them all we see an attempt, made at any rate by the British rulers of the land, to bind these people by the joint strength of treaties and good offices. “If you will only do as we bid you, you shall be better off than ever you were. We will not hurt you, and the land will be enough for both of us.” That is what we have said all along with a clear intention of keeping our word. But it has been necessary, if we were to live in the land at all, that we should bind them to keep their word whether they did or did not understand what it was to which they pledged themselves. Lord Glenelg’s theory required that the British holders of the land should recognise and respect the weakness of the Savage without using the strength of his own civilization. Colonization in such a country on such terms is impossible. He may have had abstract justice on his side. On that point I say nothing here. But if so, and if Great Britain is bound to reconcile her conduct to the rules which such justice requires, then she must abandon the peculiar task which seems to have been allotted to her, of peopling the world with a civilized race. In 1850 the fifth Kafir war arose, and the inhabitants of one advanced military village after another were murdered. This went on for nearly two years and a half, but was at last suppressed by dint of hard fighting. It cost Great Britain upwards of two millions of money, with the lives of about four hundred fighting men. This was the last of the Kafir wars,—up to that of 1877, if that is to be called a Kafir war.
After that, in 1857, occurred what seems to be the most remarkable and most unintelligible of all the events known to us in Kafir history. At this time Sir George Grey was Governor of the Colony,—a most remarkable man, who had been Governor of South Australia and of New Zealand, who had been once recalled from his office of Governor at the Cape and then restored, who was sent back to New Zealand as Governor in the hottest of the Maori warfare, and who now lives in that Colony and is at this moment,—the beginning of 1878,—singularly enough Prime Minister in the dependency in which he has twice been the Queen’s vicegerent. Whatever he may be, or may have been, in New Zealand, he certainly left behind him at the Cape of Good Hope a very great reputation. There can be no doubt that of all our South African Governors he was the most popular,—and probably the most high-handed. In his time there came up a prophecy among the Kafirs that they were to be restored to all their pristine glories and possessions not by living aid, but by the dead. Their old warriors would return to them from the distant world, and they themselves would all become young, beautiful, and invincible. But great faith was needed. They would find fat cattle in large caves numerous as their hearts might desire; and rich fields of flowing corn would spring up for them as food was required. Only they must kill all their own cattle, and destroy all their own grain, and must refrain from sowing a seed. This they did with perfect faith, and all Kafirdom was well nigh starved to death. The English and Dutch around them did what they could for their relief;—had indeed done what they could to prevent the self-immolation; but the more that the white men interfered the more confirmed were the black men in their faith. It is said that 50,000 of them perished of hunger. Since that day there has been no considerable Kafir war, and the spirit of the race has been broken.
Whence came the prophecy? There is a maxim among lawyers that the criminal is to be looked for among those who have profited by the crime. That we the British holders of the South African soil, and we only, were helped on in our work by this catastrophe is certain. No such prophecy,—nothing like to it,—ever came up among the Kafirs before. They have ever been a superstitious people, given to witchcraft and much afraid of witches. But till this fatal day they were never tempted to believe that the dead would come back to them, or to look for other food than what the earth gave them by its natural increase. It is more than probable that the prophecy ripened in the brain of an imaginative and strong-minded Anglo-Saxon. This occurred in 1857 when the terrible exigences of the Indian Mutiny had taken almost every redcoat from the Cape to the Peninsula. Had the Kafirs tried their old method of warfare at such a period it might have gone very hard indeed with the Dutch and English farmers of the Eastern Province.
During the last twenty years of our government there have been but two incidents in Colonial life to which I need refer in this summary,—and both of them will receive their own share of separate attention in the following chapters. These two are the finding of the Diamond Fields, and the commencement of responsible government at the Cape Colony.
In 1867 a diamond was found in the hands of a child at the south side of the Orange River. Near to this place the Vaal runs into the Orange, and it is in the angle between the two that the diamonds have been found. This particular diamond went through various hands and was at last sold to Sir Philip Wodehouse, the Governor, for £500. As was natural, a stream of seekers after precious stones soon flowed in upon the country, some to enrich themselves, and many to become utterly ruined in the struggle. The most manifest effect on the Colony, as it has always been in regions in which gold has been found, has been the great increase in consumption. It is not the diamonds or the gold which enrich the country in which the workings of Nature have placed her hidden treasures, but the food which the diggers eat, and the clothes which the diggers wear, and, I fear, the brandy which the diggers drink. Houses are built; and a population which flows in for a temporary purpose gradually becomes permanent.
In 1872 responsible government was commenced at Capetown with a Legislative Council and House of Assembly, with full powers of passing laws and ruling the country by its maj