Your petitioners, therefore, approach your Honourable House most humbly and most hopefully, and pray that it may please your Honourable House to inquire into your petitioners’ case, and if it so please your Honourable House to permit your petitioners to plead their cause at the bar of your Honourable House, by a deputation of three chiefs whom your petitioners have chosen as their spokesmen, and to grant generally such relief to your petitioners as your Honourable House may deem meet, and in duty bound will ever pray.
Jonathan Molapo,
Chief of the Leribe District.
Mokhethi Moshesh,
Hadiyana Mosheshoe,
(And 896 others).
Basutoland, March 14, 1882.
Protest Against Annexation Presented by President Burgers To Sir Theophilus Shepstone on April 12th, 1877.
Whereas I, Thomas Francois Burgers, State President of the South African Republic, have received a despatch (dated the 9th inst.) from her British Majesty’s Special Commissioner, Sir Theophilus Shepstone, informing me that his Excellency has resolved, in the name of her Majesty’s government, to bring the South African Republic by annexation under the authority of the British crown; and whereas I have not the power to draw the sword with good success for the defence of the independence of this state against a superior power like that of England, and moreover feel totally disinclined, in consideration of the welfare of the whole of South Africa, to involve its white inhabitants in a disastrous war by any hostile action on my part, without having employed beforehand all means to secure the rights of the people in a peaceful way: Therefore, I do hereby, in the name and by authority of the government and the people of the South African Republic, solemnly protest against the intended annexation.
Given under my hand and under the seal of the state, at the government office at Pretoria, on this the 11th day of April, in the year 1877.