[46] Three women and two children only have been allowed to join him.
[47] Which did not prevent their being of the utmost importance in considering the case of the chief under trial at the time the statements were made.
[48] Sir B. Pine complains in his despatch, December 31st, 1874, of the “intolerable injustice” of charges being made against Mr. J. Shepstone, upon evidence taken by the Bishop ex parte, without the safety of publicity and the opportunity of cross-examination. Yet Sir Garnet Wolseley refused to allow publicity or searching cross-examination by experienced advocates.
[49] One of the original four.
[50] Mr. Shepstone says in his second report that a day or two previous to the meeting with Matshana, he had received information to the effect that the chief’s intentions were to put him and his people to death at the expected interview, and all the efforts made by Mr. Shepstone and his witnesses were to prove, first, the murderous intentions of Matshana; and, secondly, that nevertheless Mr. Shepstone had no counter-plans for violence, and did not fire upon the people.
[51] Author’s italics.
[52] Rather by the determination of their rulers to preserve their land from Boer encroachments.
[53] Sand River Treaty.—“Evidence was adduced that the Transvaal Boers, who, by the Sand River Convention, and in consideration of the independence which that convention assured to them, had solemnly pledged themselves to this country (England) not to reintroduce slavery into their Republic, had been in the habit of capturing, buying, selling, and holding in forced servitude, African children, called by the cant name of ‘black ivory,’ murdering the fathers, and driving off the mothers; that this slave trade was carried on with the sanction of the subordinate Transvaal authorities, and that the President did actually imprison and threaten to ruin by State prosecution a fellow-countryman who brought it to the notice of the English authority—an authority which, if it had not the power to prevent, had at any rate a treaty right to denounce it. This and more was done, sometimes in a barbarous way, under an assumed divine authority to exterminate those who resisted them. So much was established by Dutch and German evidence. But it was supplemented and carried farther by the evidence of natives as to their own sufferings, and of English officers as to that general notoriety which used to be called publica fama.”—From an article by Lord Blachford in The Nineteenth Century Review, August 1879, p. 265.
[54] A native chief.
[55] Written in October, 1879.