[4] Montgomery Martin.History of the Colonies of the British Empire. London, 1843.
British Immigration Encouraged
The prohibition of the language in official and legal matters was a more important grievance. It arose out of the movement of English-speaking settlers into the country after 1819, when it was found, according to the Census of that year, that there were only 42,000 white people in the whole region. The Colonial Office and Parliament thereupon resolved to encourage colonization, voted $250,000 for the purpose, and, between 1820 and 1821, established some five thousand immigrants of British birth in the Colony. Within a few years about one-eighth of all the Colonists were English-speaking, and it was then decided to issue the order regarding the official use of the one language. It was a very mild copy of the principle which the Dutch had formerly applied to the Huguenots and which the United States has never hesitated to apply to subject races such as the French in Louisiana or the Spaniards and Mexicans elsewhere. It must be remembered also that the white population of the Colony was not at the time larger than that of a third-class English town, and that the statesmen in question were trying to legislate for a future population in which it was naturally supposed the English people would constitute a large majority. The policy did not go far enough, was not drastic enough, to effect the object in view, and may in any case have been a mistake; but in Lower Canada, where the opposite course was taken, the tiny French population of 1774 has developed into nearly two millions of French-speaking people in 1899, and not a small part of the population of the present Dominion think that a great error was made in the liberal practice inaugurated by the Quebec Act. It is hard to satisfy everyone. By 1828 the language arrangement was completed, so far as laws could effect it, but without the autocratic educational regulations which had made the Dutch treatment of the Huguenots so thorough. The policy certainly had an irritating effect upon the Dutch settlers, who promptly refused, as far as possible, to have anything to do with the Government, or the Courts, or the high-class Government schools which had been for some time established throughout the country, and where English was, of course, the language taught.
The Paper Money Policy
The paper money matter was a more complicated affair, and one which the ignorant settlers were naturally unable to comprehend. The monetary system of the Colony was practically an inheritance from the days of Dutch rule. The Company had not been very scrupulous about the security of its paper money, and the succeeding Batavian Government seems to have been utterly unscrupulous. In 1807 Lord Caledon found mercantile transactions in an almost lifeless state, and the currency not only depreciated and contracted, but the subject of usurious charges of all kinds. Every effort was made by him and succeeding Governors to effect a betterment in the mass of half-useless paper which was floating about, and, by 1825, there remained only some three and a half million dollars' worth in nominal value, of which one-third had been created by the British authorities in various attempts to ease the financial situation, while the greater part of the balance was of Dutch origin. Lord Charles Somerset finally took the desperate, but apparently necessary, course of cutting down the currency to three-eighths of its nominal value and making British silver money a legal tender at that rate of exchange. The result was the practical ruin of a number of people and the creation of much discontent; but at the same time the measure placed trade and commerce upon a permanent footing and laid the basis of future monetary safety. For the time, however, it was like the amputation of a limb in the case of an ignorant and unsatisfied patient—producing suffering and discontent without that feeling which a belief in the necessity of the operation and confidence in the skill of the physician would have given.
Other Grievances or Reforms
These were some of the earlier grievances which are claimed to have caused the evolution of Dutch feeling against the British. Others arose between 1826 and 1836, when the Great Trek was inaugurated. In 1828 the Courts were all remodelled upon the English plan, and the existing Dutch system replaced by a Supreme Court, in which the Judges were appointed by the Crown and were to be independent of the Governor. Minor and local matters were in the hands of Civil Commissioners and resident magistrates and justices of the peace in the various scattered communities. The Dutch code, or law, was to be retained, but English forms and customs were to be observed. It is hard to see why this rearrangement and admitted improvement should have added so deeply to the sullen discontent of the Boers or Dutch farmers. In being allowed the retention of their own peculiar laws they were given more than any other country would have granted in those days and at the same time they obtained what French Canada was not to have for years afterwards—an independent Judiciary. The only explanation is the fact that hatred toward the more progressive and liberal Englishman (or English-speaking man) was swelling strongly and surely in the Dutchman's breast, and that every British reform or change had the effect of deepening this sentiment. The reform in the legal system was accompanied by changes in the municipal system of the capital. The antiquated "burgher senate" of Cape Town was abolished, and the Government assumed charge of the municipal and miscellaneous duties performed by that body. The measure was beneficial on the score of efficiency; but, of course, it produced some dissatisfaction amongst the Dutch residents. There were also some disputes in the interior districts as to the necessity of all jurymen understanding English, and this was eventually settled by an ordinance issued in 1831 which defined the qualifications required but omitted any language test. At the same time official salaries were greatly reduced and one of the standing causes of complaint thus removed.
Governor D'Urban's Policy
In 1828 Sir Lowry Cole became Governor and made several legislative experiments in connection with the Hottentots, which were looked upon by the Dutch with open suspicion and dislike. Four years later Sir Benjamin D'Urban succeeded with a policy of extensive retrenchment in expenditures and the inauguration of Legislative and Executive Councils after the style of other Colonial Governments of the time. Some petitions had previously been sent to England asking for representative institutions, but the Colonial Office naturally shrank from giving popular power into the hands of the evidently discontented Dutch settlers—ignorant as they were of all constitutional principles and practices. Moreover, public opinion in England would not then have permitted the grant of any legislative authority which would have limited the right of the Colonial Office, for good or ill, to manage native affairs and protect native interests. The Council of Advice, which had previously existed, was, however, changed into an Executive Council composed of four high local officials, and the new Legislative Council was made up of the Governor, as President, five of the highest officials and five representative Colonists selected by the Governor. But the primary and central object of Sir Benjamin D'Urban's policy was the emancipation of the slaves, and this touched a subject of so much importance as to require the fullest consideration. It was from the early evolution of peculiar and unique racial characteristics in the Dutch farmer that the South African question has been born; but it was from the opposing principles connected with the Dutch and English view, or treatment, of native affairs that the first pronounced phase of that question was produced. All other considerations were subsidiary.
Hottentot Character
At the commencement of British rule in Cape Colony (1806) there were in the country 26,000 persons of European descent, chiefly Dutch; 17,000 Hottentots who wandered around the outskirts of settlement and made a precarious livelihood by raising or stealing cattle; and 29,000 slaves. The Bantu had only occasionally appeared upon the visible horizon to the east and this gathering cloud was not yet a serious subject to the people or their Governors. The yellow-skinned Bushmen had retired from sight and sound of the settlers and were in any case a small and diminishing quantity. The Hottentots were in abject fear of their masters, whether as slaves "tending another's flock upon the fields" which once had been their fathers', or as wandering and homeless vagrants constituting a continuous nuisance to the scattered communities. Apart from their subjection to the Dutch, however, they were a thoughtless, cheerful, good-natured people, ignorant of everything except a little hunting and, in physique and character, were about half-way between the Bantu and the Bushmen. Like the latter they became almost extinct under the recurring attacks of small-pox and the increasing pressure of a white population on the south and the swarming masses of Bantu on the north-east.
Native Tribes
Following the conquest other native elements came into view. Under the earlier Dutch régime Malays from the East Indies had been introduced for purposes of special work and negro slaves from the west coast had been obtained in large numbers. From the union of Hottentots and Malays came a mixed race called "Cape Boys," and from the union of Dutch and Hottentots came the Griquas who afterwards filled a considerable place in local history. From the seventeenth century until the abolition of slavery, in 1834, all the hard and humble work of the community was done by slaves. The Dutch farmer lost all knowledge of menial work and acquired a conviction of personal superiority which became ingrained in his character. Upon his lonely farm he was master of what he surveyed, and even the laws had little real influence or effect upon him. Constant danger from Hottentot inroads and afterwards from the far more serious and deadly Kaffir raids had bred an independence of character which isolation and ignorance deepened into extreme racial narrowness combined with contempt for men of darker colour or alien extraction.
Grievance of the Hottentots
The plowing of ground and fence-building by the Dutch was to the natives a declaration of war upon the rights of Africans—that is, according to the natives themselves, just as the building and mining by the British in the Transvaal is held to be hostile by the Boers who have inherited Hottentot principles with their Hottentot blood. In 1659 Van Riebeck, of Cape Town, wrote to the Governor-General at Batavia that the natives had been in mischief again, that one prisoner spoke "tolerable Dutch," and "being asked why they did us this injury, he declared ... because they saw that we were breaking up the best land and grass, where their cattle were accustomed to graze, trying to establish ourselves everywhere, with houses and farms, as if we were never more to remove, but designed to take, for our permanent occupation, more and more of this Cape Country, which had belonged to them from time immemorial."
Wars with the Natives
Wars with the natives were frequent. The first one with the Hottentots occurred in 1659, and arose out of the natives finding their cattle debarred from accustomed pasture lands. It consisted chiefly in a series of cattle raids and fruitless return expeditions, but was perhaps as annoying as a more real war would have been. The Hottentot tribes could never be found when sought for by the Colonists, and no doubt this mobility on the part of their earliest enemy gave the Dutch settlers lessons from which they profited during the succeeding two hundred years. The last important struggle with this native race was in 1673, and arose out of the destruction by Dutch hunters of antelopes, elephants and other game which were very precious to the Hottentot, and were within the territories of the principal remaining tribe—the Cochoqua. During four years a sort of guerilla war was carried on with Gonnema, the Chief of the clan, and considerable loss of cattle, some loss of life and a great loss of sleep caused to the border settlers before peace was concluded. Their expeditions could never get at Gonnema, although he became eventually tired of living a hunted life in the mountains, moving from hiding-place to hiding-place to escape his pursuers. Gradually, however, the Hottentots disappeared from view, so far as any measure of organized hostility was concerned, and, like the Bushmen, became either wandering pariahs of the veldt or bondsmen in the fields of their fathers.
The Kaffir Wars
A hundred years or more after the war with Gonnema, the Dutch came into collision for the first time with the Bantu, or Kaffirs. During the preceding century this sturdy, vigorous, brave and restless race had spread itself southwest of the Zambesi in all directions, and were now beginning to press ominously upon the tiny fringe of white settlements at the Cape. Wars, already referred to, occurred in 1779 and 1789, and in each case the Dutch Governor endeavored to persuade or compel the Kosas—as this particular division of the Kaffirs was called—to accept the Fish River as the boundary line. But this they would not do with any degree of continuity, and each war was marked by raids south of the River, the capture of cattle, the burning of homes, the murder of settlers and the final driving back of the natives with hastily levied commandos of Dutch Colonists. In 1799, during the years of preliminary British rule, a similar struggle took place with very similar incidents and results. So in 1812 with the fourth Kaffir war, and in 1818 with the fifth contest. But in the two latter British troops had been employed to help the Dutch commandos, as British diplomacy had been used—not very successfully—in order to control the aggressive and quarrelsome Kosas now coming into continuous contact with the equally truculent Colonists.
Missionary Influence
Meanwhile, and during the years preceding the Kaffir war of 1835, a new factor in the general situation had developed in the form of missionary influence, chiefly of the London Missionary Society. Dr. Van der Kemp had come out in 1798 and given himself up, with the most unswerving devotion, to the establishment of a Hottentot mission in the eastern part of the settlement. With other missionaries, who joined him at a later date, he became the guardian of the hapless natives and the natural enemy of the Dutch farmers. To the latter nothing could be more obnoxious than the presence in their midst of men who not only preached to the wandering Bushmen and Hottentots, but treated them as human beings not expressly created for slavery and subjection; and who closely criticised, complained about and reported to headquarters, and finally to the Colonial Office, any arbitrary treatment by the Boers of slaves, or migratory natives, or so-called apprentices. Of course there were two sides to the case which history has developed and which is so important to any adequate conception of the Dutch farmer and his character. To him, through close devotion to the Old Testament and to the peculiarities of its chosen people wandering in the wilderness—of whom he believed his race to be in some sense a prototype—the natives were simply servants raised up by Providence for his especial benefit. They were little better than the surrounding wild animals, and a common inscription over the doors of the Dutch churches, as they slowly spread over the land, was: "Dogs and natives not admitted."
Dutch Prejudices
To the missionary this was not only incomprehensible, but cruel and wicked in the extreme. He did not understand the nature of the Boer as evolved out of conditions of frequent war with environing tribes, and from customs which included slavery, and did not tolerate equality in color, race, or religion. He could not understand a creed of the Boer type—hard, narrow, unsympathetic and essentially selfish. He felt in his own veins the broad sentiment of a sacrificial Christianity, and, in trying to lift up the degraded and light the pathway of life to the darkened eyes of the savage, he frequently failed in comprehension of the reserved, taciturn and bigoted Dutchman. Hence the rivalries which spread from individuals to districts, and were finally transfused into the general Dutch estimate of British Government, and into the relations between the Cape and the Colonial Office and between Dutch and English settlers. Ultimately the missionaries became identified with the British authorities, and Dutch prejudices were intensified by the protection thus given to the natives within their districts; whilst the wilder native tribes outside British limits grew in turn to hate the authorities for the opposite reason afforded by their protection of the Dutch settlers—or their efforts to protect them—against external raids and attack. Thus the Colonial Office, had a double difficulty and a double development on its hands.
RAILROAD NEAR LADYSMITH, VICINITY OF GENERAL WHITE'S BATTLE WITH THE BOERSRAILROAD NEAR LADYSMITH, VICINITY OF GENERAL WHITE'S BATTLE WITH THE BOERS
PRINCIPAL STREET OF PIETERMARITZBURG, CAPITAL OF NATALPRINCIPAL STREET OF PIETERMARITZBURG, CAPITAL OF NATAL
The Hottentots and Bushmen Within the Colony
It was, in any case, no easy matter to manage the Hottentots and Bushmen within the Colony. Up to the time of Lord Caledon's administration (1807-11) they had been allowed to run wild through the region without restraint other than their somewhat chaotic ideas of chieftainship, their innate belief in the natural superiority of any kind of a white man, and the rude justice, or injustice, of the Dutch farmer. Many of them lived as voluntary dependents of the settlers, and constituted a sort of movable slave class which associated with the permanent slaves and were treated much as they were, while retaining the nominal right to transfer their services. Children born of unions between Hottentot women and the imported slaves constituted a body of apprentices whom the farmers had the right to keep for a certain number of years, and who then became free. Practically, however, they were as much slaves as any other black children pertaining to the property. Those of the Hottentots who did not connect themselves with the farmers in any way became rovers and vagrants, who were willing to do almost anything—except steady work—for brandy and tobacco. This was the material selected by Dr. Van der Kemp and other missionaries for reclamation and protection. When the Circuit Courts were instituted in 1811 two of the best known missionaries brought a number of charges against the Boer families on the frontier, accusing them of varied acts of violence and forms of oppression in connection with their slaves and Hottentot servants. A large number of families and a thousand witnesses were involved, and great expenses were incurred by the accused whether they were found innocent or guilty.Charges of CrueltiesNo case of murder was proved, though several were charged. Without going minutely into the result of the charges, it seems evident from our knowledge of the Boer character as it then was, and afterwards proved to be, that cruelties were more than probable. At the same time there is every proof of the utter unreliability of native evidence in any matter involving controversies between white men, or affairs in which his own interests, or fancied interests, appear to be at stake.
The Rev. Dr. Philip
In 1818 Dr. Robert Moffat commenced his long sojourn in South Africa by going out to the far north in what is now Bechuanaland. Two years later one of the most curious figures in Colonial history, the Rev. Dr. Philip, reached Cape Town and took charge of the London Society's Missions. He found the missionaries hampered at every point by Dutch dislike, and under some suspicion also from the Government of the Colony. The latter knew enough of the situation to feel that, beneficent as it was to spread the lessons of Christianity, it was also dangerous to inculcate the principle of absolute racial equality in a mixed population such as that of the Cape. To preach the new dispensation of freedom and equality alike to the haughty Boer and to Malay, slave, and Hottentot, was in perfect harmony with religious enthusiasm and with the growing principles of English conviction; but it was not always politic. The abolition of slavery idea, however, was carrying everything before it at home, and Dr. Philip came out with a feeling in his breast which Thomas Pringle, the South African poet, and afterwards Secretary of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery, so well embodied about this time in the following lines:
"I swear, while life-blood warms my throbbing veins,Still to oppose and thwart with heart and handThy brutalizing sway—till Afric's chainsAre burst, and freedom rules the rescued land—Trampling oppression and his iron rod."
The Narrow Views of the Dutch
He found the Dutch rigidly opposed to him at every point. The great agencies of civilization in such a country as the Cape then was were the magistrates, the missionaries, the schoolmasters and the traders. But the Boer wanted none of them in the full English sense. He accepted the appointment of magistrates, or lauddrosts, but he desired them to be Dutch and to dispense Dutch law. Any religious element outside of the Dutch Reformed Church—which had become the embodiment of his own narrow views and prejudices—was alien and antagonistic, even without missionary interference amongst the natives. Schoolmasters were only good so far as they taught in accord with his crude and very limited ideas of education; while traders were obnoxious as introducing new and disquieting conditions into the loneliness of the veldt and into his relations with the dark-skinned population. Dr. Philip, however, had a plan to work out, and he proceeded with ability and determination to the end. He established himself at Cape Town, and used an influence which came from the strong feeling known to exist in England against slavery and in favor of sympathetic treatment of colored races, to bring about continuous modification in the relations of master and slave. Sometimes he was right and sometimes wrong, but in every case the Government was between two horns of a dilemma—the Colonial Office at home and the Dutch settlers at the Cape. The latter objected to every change in law or regulation; and every interference, no matter how slight, with their living chattels produced one more ember of smouldering hatred. But, in the fourteen years from the time of his arrival until slavery was abolished, Dr. Philip usually carried his point, and by 1834 had the conditions of servitude so moderated that the Abolition Act itself made substantially little difference to the slave.
The Incident of Slaghter's Nek
The history of this period and of the entire relationship of English and Dutch toward each other and toward the natives is the record of a high civilization and wide code of liberty—though with many admitted weaknesses and errors of judgment—coming into contact, and inevitable conflict, with a wild and crude system of life and an intensely ignorant and isolated people. The famous incident of Slaghter's Nek illustrates this fact most thoroughly. In 1814 a Hottentot apprentice, named Booy, complained to the Cradock magistrate that his master, Frederick Bezuidenhout, refused to allow him to leave his service or to remove his few belongings. Instructions were given to investigate the case and it was found that the man's time of service had expired, as he claimed, and that under the law of the Colony he was, and should be, at liberty to leave his master. Bezuidenhout refused, however, to obey the order issued for the man's release, although admitting the facts to be as stated; declared that such interference between him and his Hottentot was a presumptuous invasion of his rights; and defied the authorities by beating the man and sending him with a message to the magistrate that he would treat him in the same manner if he dared to come upon his grounds to touch the property or person of a native. He treated a summons to appear before the District Court and then before the High Court of Justice with equal contempt; and when a small force was sent to bring him under subjection to the law, he retired to a cave, well supplied with food and ammunition, and fired upon his assailants until he was himself shot dead.
A Small Rebellion
The matter would not have been important, except as illustrating the contempt for law and still greater contempt for the natives which had developed amongst the farmers, had it not been for what followed. The brothers and immediate friends of Bezuidenhout attended his funeral and hatched a small rebellion, in which about fifty men joined—the object being an attack upon the Hottentots of the neighborhood. Loyal Boers of the vicinity joined the forces which were at once sent down to suppress the trouble, and all the rebels were captured, with the exception of Jan Bezuidenhout, who refused to surrender and was shot dead. Thirty-nine prisoners were tried by the High Court and six were sentenced to death. Lord Charles Somerset, after a careful investigation of the whole matter, would only mitigate one of the sentences, and five men were therefore hanged for this wild and almost incomprehensible folly.
Consequences of Slaghter's Nek
From the standpoint of to-day the action of the Government seems harsh, and to the Boers the Slaghter's Nek incident is a vivid and continuously quoted illustration of British tyranny and bloodthirstiness. To men on the spot and comprehending the widespread nature of Bezuidenhout's contempt for British power and law and native rights, a lesson may well have appeared necessary and present sternness better than future and more general disregard of law and order. The fact is, that presumption born of mingled ignorance and pride was even then becoming so ingrained in the nature of the Boer as to have rendered some such incident inevitable. And, although the summary policy pursued planted seeds of bitterness which time has failed to eradicate, it certainly averted serious insurrectionary trouble through all the subsequent changes in the law affecting masters and their slaves, or servants, up to the days of the Great Trek.
Continuous Conflict with Surrounding Natives
While the Dutch settlers were thus cultivating in their silent and morose manner the most intense feelings against England and the English because of the policy of amelioration in the condition of colored races—the making of fresh slaves had been forbidden by law in 1808—the British Government and the Colonial authorities were being dragged into continuous conflict, or controversy, with surrounding natives on behalf of, and in defence of, the Dutch Colonists. The latter were absolutely remorseless in their treatment of bordering tribes. Of course they had suffered from raids and were in fear of future raids, but this was hardly a sufficient reason for urging and obtaining in 1811 the forcible expulsion of all the Kaffirs from within the border, and the driving of some twenty thousand men, women and children across the Great Fish River. And this in spite of most pathetic appeals to the Dutch commando, as in the following case: "We are your friends. We have watched your cattle when they were taken away by our countrymen. Our wives have cultivated your gardens. Our children and yours speak the same language."[1] Little wonder that during this and succeeding years many natives hated the English, who had permitted this policy, almost as much as they did the Dutch who had perpetrated it. The fourth Kaffir war had naturally followed, and the fifth had come in 1818 as the result of a British attempt to hold the border intact by endorsing a powerful native chief, without available means to take up the note by force when the chief came under the subjugation of a rival stronger and abler than himself.The Kaffir War of 1835In 1835 occurred the most important of these wars with the Kosas, or Kaffirs—not so much because of its actual events as of the movement amongst the Dutch which it accelerated. The war was interesting, also, apart from the destruction of Boer property and the loss of life which followed. It illustrated those evils of vacillating administration which have caused so much trouble throughout the modern history of South Africa. Lord Charles Somerset's first policy toward the Kosas had been the maintenance of a vacant strip of territory between the Great Fish and the Keiskama Rivers as a sort of buffer against Boer aggression and native raids. His second plan had been the creation of a buffer native state—a sort of early and shadowy edition of the Afghanistan of a later day. The one had failed because of the lack of coherent action or system amongst the native tribes; the second because of their rivalries and the fact of one chief being paramount to-day and another to-morrow. And, in both cases, the Governor lacked money to persuade the recalcitrant, or men to enforce his decisions.
[1] Parliamentary Papers relative to the Cape, 1835, Part I., p. 176
A New Line of Action
Dr. Philip and his party agreed with a portion of this policy. Living five hundred miles from the disturbed frontier; knowing much of the mildness and docility of the Hottentot character, and little of the fiercer and wilder spirit of the Kosa; surrounded by many evidences of Dutch cruelty to the domestic or vagrant colored man, and therefore not disposed to sympathize with the Colonists' real difficulties and sufferings on the border; Dr. Philip supported with ability and earnestness a policy of frontier conciliation instead of coercion. After the conflict of 1835 was over Sir Benjamin D'Urban inaugurated a new line of action. The pressure of the wasting wars of Tshaka and Moselkatze had driven various tribes or remnants of tribes from the north and east down upon the Kosas and into the vicinity of Cape Colony. The Governor therefore took some eighteen thousand Fingoes—as one of these mixed masses of fighting fugitives was called—and established them between the Great Fish and Keiskama Rivers as a new form of the old "buffer" scheme. They and the Kosas hated each other, and he believed that the former would prove a strong British influence upon the frontier. Between the Keiskama and the Keir further to the eastward, certain Kosa clans were proclaimed British subjects, the territory was named the Province of Queen Adelaide, and troops were located at a spot called King Williamstown. But the war had been a bitter one, the natives had been punished for an unprovoked aggression by a somewhat harsh desolation of their country, and the missionary influence at Cape Town saw and seized its opportunity.
Formation of States Ruled by Native Chiefs
Their plan was the formation of states ruled by native chiefs under the guidance and control of missionaries, and from which Europeans not favored by, or favorable to the latter, were to be excluded. It was a very idyllic proposal, and was, of course, based upon an entirely wrong conception of the native character and of the necessity of strong, if not drastic, measures being employed to protect the Colony from the Bantu masses, which were now pressing upon the border tribes in all directions.Dr. Philip Visits LondonTo press these views, however, Dr. Philip visited London with a carefully trained Kosa and a half-breed Hottentot as examples of the wild and gallant races of the east and north, and testified at great length before a Committee of the House of Commons. He was also supported by the evidence of Captain Andries Stockenstrom, a retired Colonial official. The net result of his mission, combined with the English sympathy for colored races which was then at its highest point of expression, and the hardships of the native war just ended, was a victory for the missionary party; a despatch of unmitigated censure from Lord Glenelg, the new Secretary for the Colonies, to the Governor; the public reversal of the latter's policy with the statement that "it rested upon a war in which the original justice was on the side of the conquered, not of the victorious party;" and the still more extraordinary assertion that the Kosas "had a perfect right to endeavor to extort by force that redress which they could not expect otherwise to obtain." British sovereignty was withdrawn from the region beyond the Keiskama, Sir Benjamin D'Urban was recalled, Captain Stockenstrom was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Eastern Cape Colony and shortly afterwards created a baronet, and the whole Colony was thrown into a state of violent commotion.
Sir George Napier's Declaration
Looking back now and placing oneself in the position of a British Minister pledged by duty to protect British subjects, and by the most ordinary rules of policy bound not to encourage or approve the proceedings of an enemy, there appears to be no adequate practical excuse for this line of action. Sir George Napier, who succeeded to the Governorship and went out to carry Lord Glenelg's policy into effect, declared some years afterwards in examination before the House of Commons that: "My own experience and what I saw with my own eyes have confirmed me that I was wrong and Sir Benjamin D'Urban perfectly right." No matter how reckless the Dutch settlers may have been regarding the border natives, there was no justification in policy for such an insensate and ill-timed defence of native invasion. From the standpoint of sentimentality, however, Lord Glenelg had much support in Great Britain as well as amongst the missionaries at the Cape; and there was much of the theoretically beautiful and Christian-like in his conception of the situation. But from the practical point of view of a statesman dealing with diverse races and absolutely different ideals, and responsible, in the first place, for the guardianship of the subjects of the Crown as against irresponsible tribal attacks, the theories and opinions of religious enthusiasts afford poor foundation for such a policy.
Noble Ideals of the British Authorities
At the same time, no one can take the two principles of Government exhibited in the respective incidents of Slaghter's Nek and the results of the sixth Kaffir war without paying an involuntary tribute of admiration to the noble ideal of the British authorities; apart from questions of practical statecraft or wise administration. The Dutch Colonists' principle was the enslavement of the Hottentot; the subjugation of the Kosa within British territory so long as his retention in servitude was safe; the driving of him out of the Colony with ruthless severity when his numbers became considerable; the carrying of fire and slaughter into native regions when war broke out. The policy of succeeding British Governors seems to have been an attempt at compromising between the views of a local missionary party which could see no gleam of good in the Dutch character and the feeling of the latter that all natives were created for the special footstool of a chosen people. The British public, while knowing little of the Dutch farmers beyond their belief in slavery felt very strongly the duty of Great Britain as a guardian of inferior races, and was willing to go so far in defence of an ideal of freedom as to tacitly approve—without probably fully understanding—the extreme development of this policy in the action of Lord Glenelg. The latter was philanthropic, it was Christian-like in a high and cosmopolitan sense, but it was also injurious to the interests of British and Dutch settlers and to the welfare and peace of the Empire. Had a large force of British troops been kept in the Colony to enforce British theories of liberty and high-minded justice, as between natives who knew nothing and could comprehend nothing of either and Boers who would sooner starve than accept the principles thus propounded, the ideal might in the end have been put into praiseworthy practice. As it was the policy of Lord Glenelg helped to promote the Great Trek and to lay the foundation in a territorial sense of that South African question which in its racial connection had now been developing for a couple of centuries.
Abolition of Slavery
The abolition of slavery is one of the landmarks in South African history. The motive for the expenditure of a hundred million of dollars in freeing slaves within the bounds of the British Empire was noble beyond all criticism. The act itself was wise and necessary. But the immense distance of the British Government from the scene in South Africa and the unfortunate ignorance of the Colonial Office, at times, concerning conditions in those far-away regions, produced mistakes in the carrying out of their policy of freedom which created a distinct injustice and made memories which still rankle in the breasts of Dutchmen from the Cape to the Zambesi. The Slave Emancipation Act came into force in Cape Colony on December 1st, 1833, and by the terms of its administration $6,235,000 was apportioned to the Cape proprietors, as against the $15,000,000 at which they had valued their property. The difference was considerable and, as many of the slaves were mortgaged it is apparent that some measure of trouble must have followed even had the whole six million dollars been promptly distributed amongst the farmers. As it was, the period of seven years' apprenticeship originally granted in order to prepare all parties for the inevitable change of condition was shortened to five years, while the money itself was doled out from London after individual proof of claim. The result, through a natural and complete ignorance of procedure amongst the farmers, was the wholesale disposal of claims against the Government for mere trifles and the enrichment of hordes of agents at the expense of the settlers.
A Disastrous Measure
To many this meant ruin. Their source of labour was gone; they could not, or would not, themselves perform manual work; their discontent with the British Government was intensified by a bitter feeling that the missionaries were their sworn enemies and were installed at the ear of the Governor and in the heart of the Colonial Office; their belief in British power was at a minimum owing to weakness in dealing with the Kaffirs; their homes had been harried along the border during many Kaffir wars and sometimes in days of peace; their pleas for a vagrancy law which should restrain wandering Kaffirs or Hottentots while within the Colony had been refused from fear of harshness in its local administration; their whole social system, religious sentiment and racial pride seemed in a state of revolt against existing conditions. At this unfortunate moment another Kaffir war broke out. There had been warning signs of danger along the eastern frontier of the Province, much alarm had been felt and expressed and appeals were sent to Cape Town for protection. Dr. Philip, the political missionary and self-constituted defender of all natives, declared these fears unwarranted, and Sir Benjamin D'Urban, who had just come out as Governor, failed to take any serious measures for defence. The result was that on December 23rd, 1834, 10,000 Kaffirs swept over the frontier, plundered the farms, murdered fifty Europeans within a week and, before the Colony was cleared of them, had wholly, or partially destroyed 806 farm-houses and captured, or destroyed sixty wagons, 5700 horses, 111,000 horned-cattle and 161,000 sheep. This was the final blow to thousands of Dutch settlers. Had they been naturally loyal to British institutions and allegiance, their repeated misfortunes must have produced some discontent, and, as it was, they were said to create an absolutely impossible situation.The Trek CommencesDisregarded by their own slaves, whom they despised and often ill-treated; pillaged by the native tribes, whom they hated with a bitter hatred and oppressed wherever possible; governed by the English, whom they had learned to dislike intensely and to in some measure despise; controlled by rules of administration which they failed to understand and by laws of liberty which aimed at their individual right of control over human chattels, while striving to permeate by education the dense mass of their inherited ignorance; they prepared their caravan-covered wagons, gathered together their household possessions and flocks and herds, and withdrew in thousands from the Colony, and, as they hoped, from British rule.
Qualities and Mode of Life
Such is a brief pen-picture of the immediate and surface causes of the Great Trek. It gives the most favorable view for the emigrant farmer, and constitutes, in various forms, the basis for the belief in foreign countries that the Boers were forced to migrate from Cape Colony by British tyranny or maladministration; that they deserved their independence if ever a people did; and that Great Britain had no right to interfere further with them in the interior. Such an opinion is far from correct. As we have seen in preceding pages, the British Government had made sundry serious mistakes in policy; but they had occurred under conditions of exceptional difficulty and from motives of the highest and best. The Boers, in fact, did not want firm government or free institutions; they desired liberty to do as they liked with their own living chattels and with the natives of the soil. They deliberately cultivated modes of life and thought diametrically opposed to everything the Englishman holds dear, and carefully fanned the smouldering embers of dislike and distrust in their own breasts until they became a flame of active hatred. The development of conditions, therefore, which in Canada or Australia would have produced protests and elicited eventual and satisfactory reforms only served, in South Africa, to intensify individual bitterness, to increase the racial misunderstandings and prejudices, and to hasten the great migration into the interior.
There are some important details to consider in this connection. Many of England's troubles in administering the eastern part of the Colony were due to Boer arrogance and contempt of native rights and property; while the wars which resulted in the destruction of Dutch property, in turn, were natural though regrettable ebullitions of that spirit of revenge which is not always confined to savages. Unwise as Lord Glenelg's despatch to Sir Benjamin D'Urban was, its terms clearly prove this fact. As to the Trek itself, there is a possibility that it would have occurred in any case. The Boers were accustomed to a wandering life in wagons, and, in time, their laagers must inevitably have extended further and further into native territory. The loss of their slaves would have naturally driven parties of the more enterprising and youthful into the vast interior, and the spirit with which they slaughtered natives as readily and as cheerfully as they did wild beasts would have surely established Dutch communities to the north and east without the provocations afforded by missionary charges of cruelty, the Slaghter's Nek incident, the freeing of the slaves, or native raids of retribution across the frontier. The pity of it is that the feeling of hatred toward England and Englishmen was so early in its origin and so deep-seated in its nature that some of these occurrences, which superficial writers give as the undoubted cause of the sentiment, were in reality more like the froth and foam upon the top of a slow-gathering wave of sullen and stubborn resentment against a superior racial civilization.
Troubles with the Natives
The Boers who migrated were chiefly those of the eastern part of the Colony, far away from the seat of Government and almost entirely isolated from communication with English settlers—largely by their own desire. They were accustomed to fighting the natives, and had the authorities allowed them at pleasure to throw off their allegiance and move into the interior in detached bodies, there would have been no end to complications with the native tribes, while a prolonged series of little wars in partial defence of men who were alien in race and thought and policy would have resulted. At this period, too, England still maintained throughout the world the principle that he who is born a British subject is always one, and in South Africa, up to 1836, it was really good policy to prevent isolated Dutch settlements in the native regions. When the migration became too large and too well organized to prevent, later developments made it still necessary to press this claim of allegiance in order to try and control, or check, the new régime of strife and bloodshed which the Boer commandos had established and which threatened both British interests and settlers in Natal. There was much of the picturesque and something of the apparently heroic in this famous migration. Out of Egypt and from the bondage of the Englishmen—who would not let them retain their bondsmen—the Boers went to the number of at least ten thousand, and traversed the vast wilderness stretching through what is now Griqualand East into the Natal of to-day; or else trekked into the regions north of the Orange and Vaal Rivers. The interest and striking features of the migration were undoubted, but the heroism was not at first so clear. As events turned out there was much of danger and death in these determined raids into native territory—conquered and partially cleared of population by the wars of Moselkatze and Tshaka—but at first the contempt of the Boers for all savages, their absolute belief in themselves as a chosen people and in their shotguns as invincible allies, made the movement an apparently simple matter.
Preparations and First Party of Trekkers
In 1836 the Great Trek began. All through the frontier districts sounded the hum of preparation, while the still primitive roads became crowded with large wagons laden with household goods, provisions, ammunition and the families of the men who rode on either side or guarded the droves of cattle and horses and the flocks of sheep and goats which accompanied each caravan. The parties travelling together were usually made up of related families, and were led by one of themselves duly elected to the post and to the title of Commandant. The first party to start was divided into two sections of about fifty individuals each. One section met the not uncommon fate of over-confident invaders in a land of savages, and its members were destroyed with the exception of two children. The other went away up to the north and east, and only a few finally reached the Portuguese settlement at Delagoa Bay alive. Fever and the Tsetse fly had been too much for the expedition.The Second PartyThe second party was a large one under command of an able leader—Hendrik Potgieter. Slowly and carefully he guided his people up to an extensive strip of land lying between the Vet and Vaal Rivers, and of this they took possession. It was not long, however, before Moselkatze, the potent Chief of the Matabele, heard of this invasion of his sphere, and some isolated parties of the farmers were killed by his warriors. Then came the news that a grand attack was to be made and the settlement wiped out. Potgieter at once selected a suitable elevation, made a strong defence with wagons and trees, and with forty men awaited the attack. The result of fierce onslaughts upon such a position by the naked bodies and brandishing spears of a Matabele army was what might have been expected, and 155 corpses of the enemy were finally left outside the laager.
BRITISH COURIER CARRYING THE NEWS OF THE BEGINNING OF WAR TO THE ENGLISH SETTLERSBRITISH COURIER CARRYING THE NEWS OF THE BEGINNING OF WAR TO THE ENGLISH SETTLERS
INSPECTION BY THE COMMANDANT OF THE ASSEMBLED "COMMANDO" IN THE MARKET PLACE OF A DORP. BEGINNING OF THE WAR-BOERS LEAVING PRETORIA FOR THE FRONT.INSPECTION BY THE COMMANDANT OF THE ASSEMBLED "COMMANDO" IN THE MARKET PLACE OF A DORP.BEGINNING OF THE WAR-BOERS LEAVING PRETORIA FOR THE FRONT.
The Third Contingent
Relief came to the party from a third contingent of emigrants under Gerrit Maritz, who soon after joined forces with them, and then the Boers with their characteristic and inborn contempt for the natives organized an expedition of one hundred and seven farmers to attack the nearest kraal of the Chief whose name was a household word of terror amongst alien tribes and a force for unity and fighting power amongst his own people. The commando surprised a large kraal from which both Moselkatze and his Induna happened to be absent, slew at least four hundred warriors, fired the village and returned to camp with nearly seven thousand cattle as trophies of victory. The emigrants then established themselves at a place on the Vet River, which they called Wynburg, and here they were soon joined by other families from Cape Colony, and, notably, by one band with Pieter Retief at its head. The latter was elected Commandant-General, and a skeleton of a constitution, after the Dutch plan, was framed. Instinct, however, with the roving spirit of their people, many of the continually arriving bands would not settle down even at this spot, and hankered after the lowlands and sea-coast of Natal. Pieter Uys, one of the leaders, had visited this region a couple of years before, and was eloquent in praise of its beauty, fertility and delightful climate. The fact that Natal had been partially colonized as early as 1825 by Englishmen, under arrangements with Tshaka; that it was claimed as a British possession, and that, in 1835, the settlers at Durban had petitioned the Imperial Government to take them formally under its protection; does not seem to have greatly concerned the Boers. The only point in question was how Dingaan, who had succeeded Tshaka as head of the Zulus, could be persuaded or coerced into a cession of territory outside the immediate sphere of British settlement on the coast.How they Obtained LandTo this end Retief himself crossed the Drakensberg mountains, paid a visit to Dingaan in what is now Zululand, and found him apparently quite willing that the farmers should settle in Natal. Meantime a second Dutch expedition against the Matabele in the west had been organized, and the result, as told by Dr. Theal, the Cape Town historian,[1] is so typical of Boer methods and character in warfare that no apology is needed for its reproduction here:
[1]The Story of South Africa. By George M. Theal, LL.D. London, 1895.
Ruthless Warfare
"It consisted of one hundred and thirty-five farmers in two divisions, under Hendrik Potgieter and Pieter Uys. Moselkatze was found on the Marikwa, about fifty miles north of Mosega, and he had with him at least twelve thousand warriors, all splendidly trained and as brave as any troops who ever lived. But the advantage of the farmers in their guns and horses was so great that the hundred and thirty-five did not hesitate to attack a force which was to theirs as ninety to one. For nine days the Matabele tried to reach their opponents, but all their efforts were in vain. The farmers were more than once nearly surrounded; still their plans were so perfect that they were never quite entrapped. They had little else but dried meat to live upon, and they had no resting-place but the bare ground with a saddle for a pillow. Only the hardiest of men and horses could have carried on aggressive operations so long. The loss of the Matabele was great, so great that at the end of the nine days Moselkatze gave up the contest and sought only to escape. With his people and his cattle he fled to the north, and in the country beyond the Limpopo commenced to destroy the Mashona tribes as he had destroyed the southern Betshuana. The farmers were too wearied to follow him, and indeed they could not have continued in the field much longer under any circumstances, so they contented themselves by seizing six or seven thousand head of cattle, with which they returned to Wynburg."
Subjugation of Matabele
There seems to have been no particular reason for the expedition except the driving of the Matabele out of a region which the Boers wanted and the making of their own position more secure. It is probable that negotiation would have answered the purpose, as Moselkatze was more amenable to reason than other native potentates had proved to be, and was to some slight extent under the influence of Dr. Moffat. But the emigrant farmers wanted territory, and despised the native owners too much to care about taking time and trouble for its acquisition. Better a bold assault, a speedy and successful slaughter of the enemy, than an ordinary and peaceful but prolonged settlement. The immediate result of this raid was a proclamation issued by Commandant Potgieter in which he declared territory now including the greater part of the Transvaal, a half of the Orange Free State, and the whole of northern Bechuanaland, to belong to the emigrant farmers.Pieter RetiefNot satisfied with this immense acquisition, or annexation of territory, Retief, in the succeeding year (1838) led a large party of Boers over the Drakensberg, and went on himself with about seventy men to Dingaan's capital—Umkungunhlovu, where he claimed the formal cession of that part of Natal which had been previously promised him. The Zulu Chief expressed his approval of the deed which had been drawn up, affixed his mark to it, and then invited the visitors into his own private part of the kraal. Unsuspiciously leaving their guns behind them, the entire party seated themselves, and were then seized, bound and slaughtered by surrounding guards. Immediately afterwards ten thousand Zulus left the kraal, and after a march of eleven days fell upon the nearest Boer encampment at a place since called Weenen, and destroyed men, women, children and slaves. The horrors of that massacre have never been forgotten or forgiven by the Dutch. Had not one young man, sleeping at a distance from the camp, awakened in time to save himself on a swift horse, every Dutch emigrant in Natal must have suffered the same fate. As it was, he succeeded in warning the other scattered parties in time for them to form their simple laagers and to shoot down the attacking Zulus until surrounded, literally, by heaps of dead savages.
War with the Zulus
Immediately upon hearing of the disaster Potgieter and Uys collected every available fighting man and crossed the mountains to the relief of their comrades. The Englishmen of Port Natal, or Durban, also offered their assistance. Finally, a force of 347 Boers rode straight for the Zulu capital, intent only on vengeance. After five days' journey they were, however, drawn into an ambush and lost ten men, including Commandant Uys, and much ammunition and baggage. About the same time seventeen Englishmen, leading fifteen hundred friendly natives, of whom some four hundred were armed with muskets, started out to help the Dutch. A little south of the Tugela River they came upon a Zulu regiment, and were in turn drawn into an ambush on April 17, 1838, which resulted in one of the bloodiest battles ever fought in that region of almost continuous conflict. The little force found itself between the wings of a Zulu army numbering at least 7,000 men and with thousands more coming in during the battle. Three times the Englishmen and their little force beat back the enemy. One division, with four white men and four hundred blacks, did fight its way down the steep bank of the Tugela and across the river. The other division, after battling for hours with the serried masses of savage warriors, was finally overpowered and slaughtered.Natal Overrun by Native SoldiersNatal was now overrun by Dingaan's soldiers, and the remaining Boer families were gathered together in fortified camps, which the Zulu armies could not carry by storm.
Pretorius in Command
In November, 1838, however, a change came over the scene. Andries Pretorius, a Boer leader of great natural skill and characteristic self-confidence, arrived in Natal, was elected to the command of the scattered forces, and speedily succeeded in getting together a compact and mobile little army of 464 men. With prayers and psalms the men rode straight for the place where they expected to find the enemy. Every precaution against surprise or ambush was taken, and wherever they camped they were surrounded with a circle of wagons lashed together; while scouts were maintained continuously in all directions. A vow was made that if victory came to the little troop they would build a church and set apart a yearly thanksgiving day in commemoration. On the 16th of December, Dingaan's army of ten or twelve thousand men attacked their camp on the margin of a stream which has ever since been called Blood River, and for two hours the brave Zulu warriors faced the storm of bullets from that deadly laager. It was useless, however. The guns and artillery of the invaders killed over three thousand of the enemy before they finally broke and fled. Pretorius followed them to the Zulu capital, which Dingaan meantime set on fire, and then tried without success to capture the Zulu Chief, who had fled with some thousands of men to a part of the country where cavalry could not operate. Finally, the commando returned to Natal with some 5,000 head of cattle and the loss of six white men in the entire campaign. Dingaan also returned and rebuilt his capital, while the Dutch founded Pietermatitzburg, erected a church in memory of their victory, and commenced the annual celebration of Dingaan's Day which is still maintained.
Durban Re-occupied by the British
Meanwhile Durban had been re-occupied by a small British force in accordance with a proclamation issued by Sir George Napier, Governor of Cape Colony, and dated November 14, 1838, which declared that it was intended "to put an end to the unwarranted occupation of the territories belonging to the natives by certain emigrants from Cape Colony, being subjects of Her Majesty." No definite interference was effected, however, and a year later the troops were withdrawn in one of the multiform mutations of Colonial Office policy; though Sir George Napier absolutely refused to recognize any right of control over the country by the Boers, and declared in January, 1841, that "Her Majesty could not acknowledge the independence of her own subjects." Despite this Pretorius acted as if he were the head of a free and all-powerful community, and with a degree of autocratic contempt for other races and peoples which was very characteristic. Dingaan, during the year succeeding the battle on the banks of the Blood River, remained passive, and does not appear to have had any aggressive intentions.Invasion of ZululandIn September, 1839, however, the Boers made common cause with a local rebellion raised by his brother Panda, joined the latter in January, 1840, with four hundred men under Pretorius, invaded Zululand and defeated Dingaan with great slaughter. The latter fled to the Delagoa Bay region, and was shortly afterwards murdered, being replaced by Panda as "King of the Zulus" under the terms of a curious proclamation signed by the Boer leader as "Commandant-General of the Right Worshipful Volksraad of the South African Society," and in which he claimed for the farmers the whole of Natal by right of conquest. During this campaign against Dingaan—from which the Dutch farmers received a booty of 40,000 head of cattle—an event occurred for which there is no adequate excuse, and which illustrates the unscrupulous nature of Boer warfare. Dingaan, at one stage of the invasion, tried to come to terms with his enemy, and sent an officer named Tambusa to negotiate for peace. Contrary to all the rules of war, savage or civilized, Pretorius had the envoy arrested, tried by court-martial for an alleged but unproven share in the Umkungunhlovu massacre, and executed.
Republic of Natalia Established
What was called by the Boers the Republic of Natalia, stretching from the Umzimvubu to the Tugela and including a claim to much of modern Zululand, was thus established. The first act of its Government, toward the close of 1840, was to attack a chief named N'Capai, living two hundred miles from the territory of the alleged Republic, and not far from the border of Cape Colony. Without apparent rhyme or reason, the men were slaughtered, their cattle captured, and seventeen young children carried away into slavery. This at last aroused the Colonial Government, and, in turn, the Home authorities. Sir George Napier promptly sent some soldiers into the region to watch events and prevent further aggression upon the natives, announced his intention to resume the military occupation of Natal, and at the same time appealed to the Colonial Office for further aid and instructions. Ultimately it was decided to occupy Natal permanently. But before this was done there had to be some fighting with the irrepressible farmers. A small British force had been sent to defend Durban, but before it reached that place was surprised and almost surrounded by a number of Boers. After fighting for some time the British retired, losing their guns and oxen and some nineteen men. Captain Smith found a new position, strengthened it, and stood a siege at the hands of Pretorius and his six hundred men, until he was relieved on June 25, 1842, by troops from Cape Town, who came to his rescue by sea.
Further Developments
The further developments of the situation were peaceful. Lord Stanley, then Colonial Secretary, wrote a despatch on December 13, 1842, appointing Mr. Cloete as British Commissioner at Durban, and laying down definite and important rules in a new system of administration for the country. Under these instructions the white people were to be called together and given every opportunity for stating the nature of the institutions they desired, although full legislative power was not yet to be granted. "I think it probable," said Lord Stanley, "looking to the nature of the population, that they will desire those institutions to be founded on the Dutch rather than on the English model, and however little some of those institutions may be suited to a more advanced state of civilization, it is the desire of Her Majesty's Government that, in this respect, the contentment of the emigrants, rather than the abstract merits of the institutions, should guide our decision." There were, of course, to be certain limitations in this connection. No distinction or disqualification founded on "color, origin, language or creed," was to be recognized. No "aggression upon natives beyond the Colony" was to be tolerated or sanctioned. Slavery in any shape or form was to be "absolutely unlawful." But the Boers were incorrigible. They would not meet with the British Commissioner or fairly discuss his terms. They would not accept the principle of racial and religious equality under any condition of affairs. They would not accept any restriction upon their right to take whatever territory they liked from the natives outside of Natal and at any time they might feel disposed. They would not endure the principle of negro freedom in this new region any more than in the older Colony at the Cape. Apart from these basic principles of government, practical details also galled them. The establishment of a Land Court to limit and define the possessions of settlers and to give legal rights of ownership to the natives, was especially objectionable, and, by 1847, most of the emigrant farmers had again trekked away to the Orange Free State and the country beyond the Vaal.
British Principles of Government
There seems to have been no valid reason for this movement. The British Government, outside of certain fundamental principles of morality and administration, desired to give the farmers every possible latitude. It had no wish for territorial expansion, and would never have interfered at all if the aggressive policy of the Boers meeting the wild instincts of the Bantu, or Zulus, half-way, had not drenched the region with blood. But the deterioration of the Boer character, or rather the expression of that character in a sphere where it was practically uncontrolled, had assumed a form in which the possession of large tracts of land and the compulsory service of natives appeared as absolute essentials of life, which they had the right to take by force—in the same way as Moselkatze and Tshaka had done previously and with apparently no higher motives than those which had actuated savage chiefs at war with weaker tribes. Moreover, they had failed signally in this first effort at self-government, and the rivalry of leaders like Hendrick Potgieter, Gerrit Maritz and Andries Pretorius had not only helped to prevent the establishment of any form of administration amongst the people capable of levying taxes and compelling obedience to the state, but had made constant raids upon neighboring native tribes appear almost essential to the holding together of the scattered communities in a common bond of conflict and territorial acquisition.
The Trek North of the Vaal River
With the failure to acquire and hold Durban and to rule themselves or the regions of Natal which they had taken from the Zulus ended the first Boer effort to reach the sea and to establish Dutch independent communities in touch with the external world. The bulk of the farmers, as already stated, trekked north of the Orange or the Vaal. Here they found conditions, in 1845-47, which were scarcely less perplexing and troubled than their own had been. Over an area of some 700 miles long and 300 wide was established a Dutch population of about fifteen thousand persons which was constantly at war with the natives, and, as a result of losses in this connection, did not increase greatly in numbers despite the numerous accessions from Cape Colony and Natal. Nominally, and by British theory, they were still British subjects; practically, from the Orange to the Limpopo they were independent communities whom the Colonial Office would have preferred to forget altogether rather than to assert claims over or make demands upon. But their relation of permanent and bitter hostility towards the natives appears to have made absolute British neutrality impossible. Accordingly, in 1843, an effort was made to further isolate the Boers from Cape Colony, and "buffer states" of native or half-breed tribes were established and recognized; much in the same way as in the days of the Kosa tribes on the eastern frontier of the Colony. Then, however, it was for the protection of the Dutch farmers against the natives; now it was for the protection of native and Colonial interests against the turbulent Boers.
Moshesh the Basuto
Moshesh the Basuto was at this time established in much strength upon the borders of the present Orange Free State and in territory now known as Basutoland. He was one of the ablest men produced by the Bantu, or Kaffir, race, and, unlike chiefs of the type of Moselkatze the Matabele or Tshaka the Zulu, did not build his fortunes and his power upon bloodshed and devastation. When the regions afterwards covered by the Dutch republics and Natal were swept by a sanguinary tide of conquest under the leadership of the two chiefs mentioned, Moshesh followed in the wake of the wave of slaughter, gathered together scattered remnants of tribes, conciliated, strengthened and united them until, by almost imperceptible degrees, he had established a strong state around the rock-ribbed heights of Thaba Bosigo—the centre of his kraal and his kingdom. In 1843, therefore, when the British authorities were looking around for some means of restricting the sphere of Boer difficulties and aggressions upon the natives, Moshesh seemed an ideal instrument. He was intensely ambitious to extend and consolidate his power. He was not a savage or barbarous potentate in the sense of Dingaan or his predecessor; and to him the proffered alliance, a small annual subsidy, an extension of recognized territorial rights and supremacy over minor chiefs in contiguous regions, was extremely attractive and easily acceptable. West of his territory lived a tribe of Griquas—a half-breed people of mixed Dutch and Hottentot blood—numbering about two thousand and ruled over by a man named Adam Kok. They were largely influenced by missionaries, and were an inoffensive and, as it turned out, perishing race.Establishment of a Border Native StateWith Kok a similar arrangement of alliance was made, and he was recognized as ruler of all the territory from the Basuto border westward to where Andries Waterboer—another Griqua chief—held sway over the region afterwards dominated by Kimberley and including Modder River and the southern portion of the present Free State. East of Moshesh and the Basuto territory a similar alliance was made with the Pondo Chief, Faku, and thus the girdle, or league of allied states between British territory and the Boers was complete.
Rebellion by the Boers
But the plan did not work out as well as was expected. The racial elements involved were too mutable, the conditions too loose, the Governments too inadequate in strength and prestige, the Dutch too aggressive and hostile in character, to admit of its permanent success. A strong man, backed up continuously with plenty of British troops, might have saved the situation and averted the wars which followed; but continuity of policy for these fluctuating frontiers seems to have never prevailed at either London or Cape Town. The Treaty States did not prevent personal and commercial intercourse between the Boers of the Cape and of the interior. They did not avert further emigration or encourage the return of those who had left the Colony. The Dutch population in Adam Kok's territory did not like being ruled by a half-breed chief, and the greater part of them repudiated the right of Great Britain to support him in this government. Some of the minor native chiefs refused to accept the sovereignty of Moshesh. The first result was a small Boer rebellion against Kok and the defeat of 250 men by some British troops under Colonel Richardson. The second was an entire rearrangement of existing matters by Sir Peregrine Maitland, who had meantime become Governor at the Cape. Kok's sovereignty over the whole region was still acknowledged, but he was limited in government to the portion of it occupied by Griquas; while the whites living in the other section were placed under the supervision or rule of a British officer, who, in 1846, established himself at a small place called Bloemfontein, where some three hundred Boers of a friendly disposition took the oath of allegiance to the Queen. The rest moved north to Wynburg and out of the region thus controlled by Major Warden. With Moshesh much less could be done. He had been far too shrewd to violate directly the terms of his arrangement with Great Britain or to accept any proposals which would seriously alleviate the differences between himself and the bordering tribes or neighboring Boers. Thus the State, which had been strengthened with a view to maintaining peace, now threatened to promote conflict instead, and in this condition matters rested when Sir Harry Smith came out to Cape Town in 1848 as Governor and High Commissioner. Now the events which immediately followed came the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic.