54. The late king Panda allowed several European missionaries to settle in Zululand. Cetywayo also allowed them to stay in the country, but during the last two years some of the natives living on the mission stations were killed without trial, or form of trial, and others were terrified, and thus the missionaries have, most of them, been obliged to abandon their stations; and the High Commissioner desires that all those missionaries who, until the last year, lived in the Zulu country and occupied stations, as also the natives belonging to the stations, be allowed to return and occupy their stations. He desires also that all missionaries be allowed to teach, as in Panda’s time, and that no Zulu shall be punished for listening to them. If any Zulu wishes, of his own choice, to listen to the missionary he is free to do so. If any native living on a mission station does wrong, he will be liable to punishment, but he must be tried first.
55. If any case of dispute occurs in which any of the missionaries, or in which any European is concerned, such dispute should be heard by the king in public and in the presence of the British resident; and no sentence of expulsion from Zululand shall be carried out until it has been communicated by the king to the Resident, and until it has been approved by the Resident.
56. These are the words of her Majesty’s High Commissioner, which the Lieutenant Governor of Natal sends to the Zulu king and the chief men of the nation, and for the whole Zulu nation,
57. These are the conditions which her Majesty’s High Commissioner, in the name of the British government, considers necessary for the establishment of a satisfactory state of things in the Zulu country, and for the peace and safety of the adjoining countries. Let, therefore, the king and the chief men of the nation consider them, and let them give their answer regarding them within thirty days from the day on which this communication is made to the Zulu representatives, in order that her Majesty’s High Commissioner may then know if the king and the great council agree to the words which are here given, and will give effect to these conditions, which are necessary both for the peace and safety of the Queen’s subjects and allies and also for the safety and welfare of the Zulu people, to which the Queen’s government wishes well.
(Signed)
Henry Bulwer,
Lieutenant Governor.
John Dunn’s Letter.
To the Aborigines Protection Society—
I beg to write, for the information of your honorable Society, and state that I am an Englishman by birth, and have been a resident of the Zulu country, and living among the Zulus, for the last twenty years, and I can confidently say that there is no white man in this part of South Africa so fitted to judge of their feelings towards the English race as I am.
I would not now address your honorable Society if it were not that I have noticed a very strong, wrong and arbitrary feeling gaining ground against the Zulu nation on the side of the white population in this part of South Africa. A strong feeling of color and jealousy I cannot understand, unless it is on account of the independency of the Zulu race, a feeling taken up without any just cause, and that feeling is now on the verge of breaking out on the pretext of a false claim of land boundary; a claim pretended to being upheld for the Dutch Boers, who are no friends of the English race, and are well known in this part of South Africa for their encroaching propensities on any land belonging to the natives of this country, to evade English laws, on the pretext of getting permission to graze cattle, on the grass becoming scarce on their own farms, and afterwards claiming the land. A claim in which the Natal government have always upheld the Zulus, and now, since the annexation of the Transvaal (in 1877), the head of the government there, who professed to side with the Zulus while he was in Natal, has now turned round and claimed for the Dutch a country thickly inhabited by the Zulus.