South Africa; vol I.

by Anthony Trollope

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.