Incwadi Yami; or, twenty years' personal experience in South Africa

by J. W. Matthews

The high commissioner was furious and would have liked to tell the honorable the house of assembly, his notions of the sense of honor possessed by M. L. A’s. who were in the majority. But scolding would not mend matters, and he therefore restrained himself from speaking out as he would liked to have done.

His excellency’s dispatches to the secretary of state for the colonies had inspired the imperial minister with confidence that the Fields would be readily taken over by the Colony, but when he found that was not to be he was no less furious than Sir Henry himself.

The adverse vote of the Cape legislature threw the onus of governing the Fields on the high commissioner himself; his correspondence with the president of the Free State was not only voluminous but provoked retorts from his honor which were not pleasant nor easy of reply, and personalities and loss of temper ensued; in fact the antagonism between these high officials was almost unprecedented, and existed for a considerable time.

The Boers of the Free State and all the Dutch in the Colony as well as in the Fields were in sympathy with the president, and they accused the high commissioner and the secretary of state for the colonies of having shamefully robbed the Free State of the territory for the sake of its diamonds. This charge, I may add, was believed in by a great many beside the Dutch, and it was asserted by some of the most influential journals in England that the home government would never have thought of setting up Waterboer’s claim to the territory in dispute had not diamonds been found to exist in it. This, however, was altogether untrue, for Sir Philip Wodehouse at the time when he was engaged in interviewing the British Kaffrarian annexation delegates at Aliwal North, who were opposed to the proposed absorption of their country by the Cape, was in correspondence with the president on the same subject, and complaining that the Boers of the Free State were encroaching upon Waterboer’s territory, and accused that state of having extended its boundaries beyond those marked out when the sovereignty was abandoned.

Moreover, long before any diamonds were discovered, Mr. David Arnott, the agent of Waterboer, had sent numberless protests to the Free State government respecting the Boer encroachments, and at a conference which had taken place on the same subject had produced evidence which he held to be more than sufficient to prove that Waterboer’s claim was incontestable.

On the 17th of July, 1871, the Colesberg Kopje, now the Kimberley mine, was discovered, and in November of the same year the whole of the diggings, without regard to title, were proclaimed to be under British rule. This was supposed to have been done in order to enable Sir Henry Barkly to perfect his arrangements for bringing about annexation during the session of parliament in 1872. His excellency little knew then how he was to be sold when the parliament met, but he afterward discovered, as we have seen, with how capricious and unreliable a house of representatives he had to deal.

The manner of proclaiming British rule was unique, to say the least of it. The commissioners who were still in power, and a good many not in power, were in a state of mental fever about the hoisting “the flag that braves” and proclaiming British rule. It was all very well for Sir Henry to instruct the commissioners to proclaim British rule, but who was to read the proclamation.

The Dutch in the Fields “swore with an oath or something as good,” that they would not be “brought under the British yoke,” as they called it, and threatened to take arms and “deluge the Fields with blood” if their state was deprived of the governing powers over the dry diggings. The English on the Fields contrasted the proportions of the Dutch and English populations, and the long odds against the latter if the Dutch should show fight. The most timid were sure that the Dutch would rise to a man, and the lives and property of the English would be sacrificed; and if the truth be told many an English colonist then in these diggings would as soon have seen the Free State as the English flag flying over them, and no wonder, seeing that imperial rule had been in several instances the cause of disaster to South Africa. It is hard sometimes for colonists to remain loyal and true to their nationality when they are treated with contumely, distrusted and scoffed at by the chief and subordinates of the imperial colonial department, as has occurred more than once in this colony.

However, the morning of the 17th of November broke upon the diamond fields—the day on which the Fields from Klipdrift to the Modder River, the whole area on which diamond diggings had been established, was to be proclaimed British. John Campbell, Esq., in his plaids and buckles, a model Highlander from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, slipped out of his office door, and with his colleagues was driven in a cart to the margin of the Colesberg Kopje. This illustrious commissioner, however, was not the man to “bell the cat;” that duty was taken upon himself by the late J.C. Thompson, then crown prosecutor and commissioner. The official car was surrounded by vehicles filled with loyals, loyals on horseback and loyals on foot, and Mr. Thompson read the proclamation from the scroll, which he unfolded and then nailed up to a hoarding close by. There had been a government Gazette published, but its place of publication had not as yet been moved to the dry diggings from Klipdrift, but whether the proclamation was gazetted or not I have never yet been able to discover, for when Mr. G. W. Murray asked for it, when he was a member of the legislative council, he was told by the government that the files had been lost!

Mr. Thompson, after nailing up a copy or the original proclamation, no one knew which, drove off in the triumphal British car to Du Toit’s Pan, followed by a long procession of horsemen and vehicles, amidst the shouts of the street mob and the melodious strains of an extemporized band, which, in honor of the occasion, was playing a colorable imitation of “The Campbells are coming.”