History of the Zulu war and its origin

by Frances Ellen Colenso

On August 5th the mystery with respect to the witnesses Kwa’ Jobe was explained. Deke, Mpupuma, Ntambama, and Njuba, who had come from Zululand, had all been examined, as well as Ncamane, who, when called by the Bishop, had replied that he would only come if called by the Government; and when summoned through the Secretary for Native Affairs, at the Bishop’s request, withdrew or modified important parts of his printed statement. The Bishop had actually no other witness to call, and all his efforts to obtain a number of well-informed and trustworthy eye-witnesses from Zululand, Kwa’ Jobe, and Basutoland, seemed likely to end in a complete fiasco. But on the evening of Thursday, August 5th, a native came to him in the street and said that his name was Maboyi, son of Tole (Matshana’s chief induna, who was killed on the occasion in question), and that he had been sent by Matshana to Mr. Fynn, the superintendent, and Lutshungu, son of Ngoza, the present chief, of the remnant of his former tribe living Kwa’ Jobe, to ask to be allowed to take down to ’Maritzburg as witnesses those men of his who were present on the day of the attempt to seize Matshana. Mr. Fynn said that “He did not refuse the men, but wished to hear a word by a letter coming from the Secretary for Native Affairs—it was not proper that he should hear it from a man of Matshana coming from Zululand,” and sent him off under charge of a policeman to ’Maritzburg, where he was taken to the Secretary for Native Affairs, who said to him: “If Matshana himself had come, this matter might have been properly settled; it won’t be without him!” But the Secretary for Native Affairs said nothing to Maboyi about his going to call the witnesses Kwa’ Jobe; he only asked by whom he had been sent, and when informed, he told him to go home to Zululand, as he had not been summoned and had nothing to do with this affair. Maboyi had reached ’Maritzburg on Monday, August 2nd, the day on which the inquiry began. He saw the Secretary for Native Affairs on Tuesday, and on that day was dismissed as above. Not a word was said to the Bishop about his being brought down in this way under arrest, which fully explained the non-arrival of his witnesses from the location; since, first, their fear of giving witness against a government official, and now the arrest of Maboyi, had spread a kind of panic among them all, and deterred them from coming to give evidence against Mr. John Shepstone—himself a resident magistrate, only lately acting as Secretary for Native Affairs, and the brother of the Secretary for Native Affairs himself—merely in answer to the Bishop’s unofficial summons. Hearing, however, on Thursday from natives that the case was then going on at Government House, Maboyi went up to speak with the Bishop, but arrived when the court had adjourned. He found him out in town, however, just as he was on the point of leaving for Bishopstowe, and was, of course, told to wait and give his evidence. Accordingly, he went to Bishopstowe, and Magema was charged to bring him in for examination on Saturday, the next day of the inquiry. On the way into town for that purpose, Mr. Fynn’s policeman most positively refused to let him stay, and went off ultimately in great wrath, as Maboyi and Magema insisted that he must give his evidence before leaving town to return to Zululand.

On that day, Saturday, August 7th, the Bishop explained the whole affair to the Commissioner, and, having obtained a list of names from Maboyi, requested that a Government messenger might be sent for the men at once, and the Secretary for Native Affairs was instructed to summon them. On Monday, August 9th, the Secretary for Native Affairs replied that he had summoned all these men, except seven, who were already in town, having been called by Mr. John Shepstone, and having been, in fact, under his hands—in charge of his induna Nozitshina—from the very first day of the inquiry. It seemed as if William Ngidi’s statement was really to be verified, and that these men had all succumbed to their fears. On the other hand, among these seven was Matendeyeka, whom William Ngidi “trusted most of all;” and there might be amongst them some who would have the courage to speak out and to describe the facts connected with the arrest of Matshana to the best of their ability. At all events the Bishop resolved to call them, and do his best to bring the truth out of them; and Magema afterwards whispered that he had heard from one of Mr. John’s men, who was present when he spoke with the people (Kwa’ Jobe), that the men there had said: “It was of no use to discuss it beforehand; they would say nothing about what they remembered now; but before the Governor they would speak the plain truth as they knew it.” Accordingly the Bishop called four of these men—Matendeyeka, Faku (son of Tole), Magwaza, Gwazizulu—and they all confirmed the story as told by his other witnesses. He left the other three to be called by Mr. John Shepstone, but he never called them. That these witnesses should have been called by Mr. John Shepstone, as well as by the Bishop, was satisfactory, showing that they were witnesses to whom no objection could be made on the score of character or position in the tribe, or as having been in any way, directly or indirectly, influenced by the Bishop.

But the result was that, as these men were in the hands of the other side from the time they reached until they left ’Maritzburg, the Bishop had never even seen them, or had any communication with them, until they appeared to give their evidence. He was wholly ignorant beforehand of what they would say or what they could say; he knew not whether they would confirm or contradict the story told by his other witnesses; and he knew not on what particular points, if any, they could give special evidence, and was therefore unable to ask the questions which might have elicited such evidence.

By this time (August 8th) the witnesses from Zululand had arrived, from whom the Bishop learned the names of other important witnesses living Kwa’ Jobe, and at his request these also were sent for by Government messengers. Unfortunately, through Maboyi’s arrest, some of the Bishop’s witnesses summoned by the Secretary for Native Affairs arrived too late on the very day (August 21st) on which the evidence was closed, and others a day or two afterwards—twelve altogether—of whom only one could be heard, whom the Bishop had expressly named as a man whose testimony he especially desired to take. Upon the whole, Sir Garnet Wolseley, who began by “leaving entirely in the Bishop’s hands” the difficult and not inexpensive business of “obtaining his witnesses,” summoned ultimately twenty-two of them, of whom, however, four only could be heard by the Commissioner; two (Matshana and Ngijimi) did not come at all; and three, including a most important witness, were called too late to be able to arrive till all was over; while four more out of the seven who had been called by Mr. John Shepstone gave their evidence in support of the Bishop, as doubtless the three others would have done, if Mr. John Shepstone had called them.

In the despatch to the Earl of Carnarvon, already quoted from (note to p. 91), Sir B. Pine remarks: “I think it further my duty to point out to your lordship that much of the evidence adduced by the Bishop in this case has been taken in this way (ex parte, without the safety of publicity, and the opportunity of cross-examination); evidence so taken is peculiarly untrustworthy, for everyone moderately acquainted with the native character is aware that when a question is put to a native, he will intuitively perceive what answer is required, and answer accordingly.” The above is a common but insufficiently supported accusation against the natives, denied by many who are more than “moderately acquainted” with their character; although of course it is the natural tendency of a subservient race in its dealings with its masters, and possible tyrants. But granting for the nonce its truth, it would, in the case of the Matshana inquiry, tell heavily on the Bishop’s side. Sir B. Pine was not present at the private investigation made by the Bishop, to which he alludes in the above sentence, and therefore can be no judge of the “cross-examination,” which the four original witnesses underwent; and they, if they did “intuitively perceive” what answer was required, and “answer accordingly,” must merely have spoken the truth; a truth which, at that early period of his investigations, the Bishop was most reluctantly receiving, and would gladly have had disproved.

The evidence before the court, however, was given under circumstances which, if Sir B. Pine’s account of native witnesses be correct, adds enormously to the value of the fact that out of these twenty-four witnesses, summoned from various quarters, many of them without opportunity of communicating either with the Bishop or with each other, but one[49] failed when it came to the point; and he, a feeble old man, just released from prison (one of the captured tribe), was manifestly in a state of abject alarm at finding himself brought up to witness against the Government whose tender mercies he had so lately experienced, and contradicted before Colonel Colley the greater part of the story which he had originally told the Bishop. This poor creature had been intimidated and threatened by a certain man named Adam, under whose surveillance he lived after being released from gaol, and who actually turned him and his family out at night as a punishment for his having obeyed a summons to Bishopstowe. He was manifestly ready to say anything which would relieve him from the fear of the gaol, which he pleaded to Mr. Shepstone a day or two later; on which occasion he unsaid all he had previously said, having, as he afterwards confessed, been warned by Mr. Shepstone’s policeman Ratsha, who asked him for what purpose he had been summoned by the Bishop, not to speak a word about “Mr. John’s” treatment of Matshana. But, with the best intentions, the man did not succeed in making his story tally entirely with that of Mr. Shepstone’s other witnesses, nor with Mr. Shepstone’s own.

With this one exception the Bishop’s witnesses told the same story in all essential respects. They were men arriving from many different and distant parts of the colony, from Zululand, and from the Free State, who could not possibly have combined to tell the same story in all its details, which, if false, would have been torn to pieces when so many men of different ages and characters were cross-examined by one so thoroughly acquainted with all the real facts of the case as Mr. Shepstone—men who had nothing to expect from the Bishop, but had everything to dread from the Government if proved to have brought a false and foul charge against an officer so highly placed and so powerfully protected; yet not the least impression was made upon the strength of their united evidence.

The case, however, is very different when we turn to Mr. Shepstone’s witnesses. Of these, nine in number (besides the four natives called by both the Bishop and Mr. Shepstone), seven were natives; the other two being the Secretary for Native Affairs and Mr. John Taylor—a son of Mr. John Shepstone’s first wife by her former husband. Mr. Taylor was a lad of nine at the time, but, having been present with his mother and little sister on the occasion of the attack upon Matshana, was summoned as a witness by Mr. Shepstone. His evidence was chiefly important as helping to prove that Matshana’s party had not the concealed weapons which Mr. Shepstone’s chief native witness Nozitshina said were left by them in immense numbers upon the ground; as he stated that he and his sister went over the ground, after the affair was over, and picked up the assegais, “about eight or nine” in number.

But it is important to remark that the very fact of the presence at this meeting of Mrs. Shepstone with her two children, goes far to disprove the account given by Mr. Shepstone in his second “statement,” prepared by him on the occasion of this trial, but which is greatly at variance on some vital points with the narrative written by him on the day after the event, dated March 17th, 1858, for the information of His Excellency the Lieut.-Governor. It seems almost incredible that Mr. John. Shepstone should have, as he says in his second statement, “made up his mind to face almost certain” death, not only for himself and all his men, but for his wife and her two young children, on the grounds that it was “too late to withdraw at this stage” (same report), when at any time since the “day or two previous” (ibid.), when the information in question[50] reached him; according to his account he might have put off the meeting, or at all events have sent his wife and her children to a place of safety. The Secretary for Native Affairs’ evidence could of course be of a merely official character, as he was not present on the occasion. He stated that Mr. John Shepstone’s letters of February 16th and 24th, 1858, asked for by the Bishop, on the subject of the approaching interview with Matshana, could not be found, although they “must have been recently mislaid,” as he himself (the Secretary for Native Affairs) had quoted from one of them in his minute for the Secretary of State in June, 1874. Of Mr. Shepstone’s native witnesses it can only be said that, amongst the seven called by him only, six contradicted themselves and each other to so great an extent as to make their evidence of no value, while the evidence of the seventh was unimportant, and the four witnesses called by both Mr. Shepstone and the Bishop told the same story as did the witnesses of the latter, most unexpectedly to him.

Nevertheless Colonel Colley’s judgment, although convicting Mr. John Shepstone of having enticed the chief Matshana to an interview with the intention of seizing him, was received and acted upon in Natal as an acquittal of that officer. So far was this the case, that, although Lord Carnarvon directed that the Bishop’s costs should be placed upon the colonial estimates, the Legislative Council of the colony refused to pay them on the grounds that they were the costs of the losing party. In his report Colonel Colley gives his opinions as follows: