The Dutch and the Natives.
[Sidenote: Hottentot Character]
At the commencement of British rule in Cape Colony (1806) there were in
the country 26,000 persons of European descent, chiefly Dutch; 17,000
Hottentots who wandered around the outskirts of settlement and made a
precarious livelihood by raising or stealing cattle; and 29,000 slaves.
The Bantu had only occasionally appeared upon the visible horizon to
the east and this gathering cloud was not yet a serious subject to the
people or their Governors. The yellow-skinned Bushmen had retired from
sight and sound of the settlers and were in any case a small and
diminishing quantity. The Hottentots were in abject fear of their
masters, whether as slaves "tending another's flock upon the fields"
which once had been their fathers', or as wandering and homeless
vagrants constituting a continuous nuisance to the scattered
communities. Apart from their subjection to the Dutch, however, they
were a thoughtless, cheerful, good-natured people, ignorant of
everything except a little hunting and, in physique and character, were
about half-way between the Bantu and the Bushmen. Like the latter they
became almost extinct under the recurring attacks of small-pox and the
increasing pressure of a white population on the south and the swarming
masses of Bantu on the north-east.
[Sidenote: Native Tribes]
Following the conquest other native elements came into view. Under the
earlier Dutch régime Malays from the East Indies had been introduced
for purposes of special work and negro slaves from the west coast had
been obtained in large numbers. From the union of Hottentots and
Malays came a mixed race called "Cape Boys," and from the union of
Dutch and Hottentots came the Griquas who afterwards filled a
considerable place in local history. From the seventeenth century
until the abolition of slavery, in 1834, all the hard and humble work
of the community was done by slaves. The Dutch farmer lost all
knowledge of menial work and acquired a conviction of personal
superiority which became ingrained in his character. Upon his lonely
farm he was master of what he surveyed, and even the laws had little
real influence or effect upon him. Constant danger from Hottentot
inroads and afterwards from the far more serious and deadly Kaffir
raids had bred an independence of character which isolation and
ignorance deepened into extreme racial narrowness combined with
contempt for men of darker colour or alien extraction.
[Sidenote: Grievance of the Hottentots]
The plowing of ground and fence-building by the Dutch was to the
natives a declaration of war upon the rights of Africans--that is,
according to the natives themselves, just as the building and mining by
the British in the Transvaal is held to be hostile by the Boers who
have inherited Hottentot principles with their Hottentot blood. In
1659 Van Riebeck, of Cape Town, wrote to the Governor-General at
Batavia that the natives had been in mischief again, that one prisoner
spoke "tolerable Dutch," and "being asked why they did us this injury,
he declared ... because they saw that we were breaking up the best land
and grass, where their cattle were accustomed to graze, trying to
establish ourselves everywhere, with houses and farms, as if we were
never more to remove, but designed to take, for our permanent
occupation, more and more of this Cape Country, which had belonged to
them from time immemorial."
[Sidenote: Wars with the Natives]
Wars with the natives were frequent. The first one with the Hottentots
occurred in 1659, and arose out of the natives finding their cattle
debarred from accustomed pasture lands. It consisted chiefly in a
series of cattle raids and fruitless return expeditions, but was
perhaps as annoying as a more real war would have been. The Hottentot
tribes could never be found when sought for by the Colonists, and no
doubt this mobility on the part of their earliest enemy gave the Dutch
settlers lessons from which they profited during the succeeding two
hundred years. The last important struggle with this native race was
in 1673, and arose out of the destruction by Dutch hunters of
antelopes, elephants and other game which were very precious to the
Hottentot, and were within the territories of the principal remaining
tribe--the Cochoqua. During four years a sort of guerilla war was
carried on with Gonnema, the Chief of the clan, and considerable loss
of cattle, some loss of life and a great loss of sleep caused to the
border settlers before peace was concluded. Their expeditions could
never get at Gonnema, although he became eventually tired of living a
hunted life in the mountains, moving from hiding-place to hiding-place
to escape his pursuers. Gradually, however, the Hottentots disappeared
from view, so far as any measure of organized hostility was concerned,
and, like the Bushmen, became either wandering pariahs of the veldt or
bondsmen in the fields of their fathers.
[Sidenote: The Kaffir Wars]
A hundred years or more after the war with Gonnema, the Dutch came into
collision for the first time with the Bantu, or Kaffirs. During the
preceding century this sturdy, vigorous, brave and restless race had
spread itself southwest of the Zambesi in all directions, and were now
beginning to press ominously upon the tiny fringe of white settlements
at the Cape. Wars, already referred to, occurred in 1779 and 1789, and
in each case the Dutch Governor endeavored to persuade or compel the
Kosas--as this particular division of the Kaffirs was called--to accept
the Fish River as the boundary line. But this they would not do with
any degree of continuity, and each war was marked by raids south of the
River, the capture of cattle, the burning of homes, the murder of
settlers and the final driving back of the natives with hastily levied
commandos of Dutch Colonists. In 1799, during the years of preliminary
British rule, a similar struggle took place with very similar incidents
and results. So in 1812 with the fourth Kaffir war, and in 1818 with
the fifth contest. But in the two latter British troops had been
employed to help the Dutch commandos, as British diplomacy had been
used--not very successfully--in order to control the aggressive and
quarrelsome Kosas now coming into continuous contact with the equally
truculent Colonists.
[Sidenote: Missionary Influence]
Meanwhile, and during the years preceding the Kaffir war of 1835, a new
factor in the general situation had developed in the form of missionary
influence, chiefly of the London Missionary Society. Dr. Van der Kemp
had come out in 1798 and given himself up, with the most unswerving
devotion, to the establishment of a Hottentot mission in the eastern
part of the settlement. With other missionaries, who joined him at a
later date, he became the guardian of the hapless natives and the
natural enemy of the Dutch farmers. To the latter nothing could be
more obnoxious than the presence in their midst of men who not only
preached to the wandering Bushmen and Hottentots, but treated them as
human beings not expressly created for slavery and subjection; and who
closely criticised, complained about and reported to headquarters, and
finally to the Colonial Office, any arbitrary treatment by the Boers of
slaves, or migratory natives, or so-called apprentices. Of course
there were two sides to the case which history has developed and which
is so important to any adequate conception of the Dutch farmer and his
character. To him, through close devotion to the Old Testament and to
the peculiarities of its chosen people wandering in the wilderness--of
whom he believed his race to be in some sense a prototype--the natives
were simply servants raised up by Providence for his especial benefit.
They were little better than the surrounding wild animals, and a common
inscription over the doors of the Dutch churches, as they slowly spread
over the land, was: "Dogs and natives not admitted."
[Sidenote: Dutch Prejudices]
To the missionary this was not only incomprehensible, but cruel and
wicked in the extreme. He did not understand the nature of the Boer as
evolved out of conditions of frequent war with environing tribes, and
from customs which included slavery, and did not tolerate equality in
color, race, or religion. He could not understand a creed of the Boer
type--hard, narrow, unsympathetic and essentially selfish. He felt in
his own veins the broad sentiment of a sacrificial Christianity, and,
in trying to lift up the degraded and light the pathway of life to the
darkened eyes of the savage, he frequently failed in comprehension of
the reserved, taciturn and bigoted Dutchman. Hence the rivalries which
spread from individuals to districts, and were finally transfused into
the general Dutch estimate of British Government, and into the
relations between the Cape and the Colonial Office and between Dutch
and English settlers. Ultimately the missionaries became identified
with the British authorities, and Dutch prejudices were intensified by
the protection thus given to the natives within their districts; whilst
the wilder native tribes outside British limits grew in turn to hate
the authorities for the opposite reason afforded by their protection of
the Dutch settlers--or their efforts to protect them--against external
raids and attack. Thus the Colonial Office, had a double difficulty
and a double development on its hands.
[Illustration: RAILROAD NEAR LADYSMITH, VICINITY OF GENERAL WHITE'S
BATTLE WITH THE BOERS]
[Illustration: PRINCIPAL STREET OF PIETERMARITZBURG, CAPITAL OF NATAL]
[Sidenote: The Hottentots and Bushmen Within the Colony]
It was, in any case, no easy matter to manage the Hottentots and
Bushmen within the Colony. Up to the time of Lord Caledon's
administration (1807-11) they had been allowed to run wild through the
region without restraint other than their somewhat chaotic ideas of
chieftainship, their innate belief in the natural superiority of any
kind of a white man, and the rude justice, or injustice, of the Dutch
farmer. Many of them lived as voluntary dependents of the settlers,
and constituted a sort of movable slave class which associated with the
permanent slaves and were treated much as they were, while retaining
the nominal right to transfer their services. Children born of unions
between Hottentot women and the imported slaves constituted a body of
apprentices whom the farmers had the right to keep for a certain number
of years, and who then became free. Practically, however, they were as
much slaves as any other black children pertaining to the property.
Those of the Hottentots who did not connect themselves with the farmers
in any way became rovers and vagrants, who were willing to do almost
anything--except steady work--for brandy and tobacco. This was the
material selected by Dr. Van der Kemp and other missionaries for
reclamation and protection. When the Circuit Courts were instituted in
1811 two of the best known missionaries brought a number of charges
against the Boer families on the frontier, accusing them of varied acts
of violence and forms of oppression in connection with their slaves and
Hottentot servants. A large number of families and a thousand
witnesses were involved, and great expenses were incurred by the
accused whether they were found innocent or guilty. [Sidenote: Charges
of Cruelties] No case of murder was proved, though several were
charged. Without going minutely into the result of the charges, it
seems evident from our knowledge of the Boer character as it then was,
and afterwards proved to be, that cruelties were more than probable.
At the same time there is every proof of the utter unreliability of
native evidence in any matter involving controversies between white
men, or affairs in which his own interests, or fancied interests,
appear to be at stake.
[Sidenote: The Rev. Dr. Philip]
In 1818 Dr. Robert Moffat commenced his long sojourn in South Africa by
going out to the far north in what is now Bechuanaland. Two years
later one of the most curious figures in Colonial history, the Rev. Dr.
Philip, reached Cape Town and took charge of the London Society's
Missions. He found the missionaries hampered at every point by Dutch
dislike, and under some suspicion also from the Government of the
Colony. The latter knew enough of the situation to feel that,
beneficent as it was to spread the lessons of Christianity, it was also
dangerous to inculcate the principle of absolute racial equality in a
mixed population such as that of the Cape. To preach the new
dispensation of freedom and equality alike to the haughty Boer and to
Malay, slave, and Hottentot, was in perfect harmony with religious
enthusiasm and with the growing principles of English conviction; but
it was not always politic. The abolition of slavery idea, however, was
carrying everything before it at home, and Dr. Philip came out with a
feeling in his breast which Thomas Pringle, the South African poet, and
afterwards Secretary of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery, so
well embodied about this time in the following lines:
"I swear, while life-blood warms my throbbing veins,
Still to oppose and thwart with heart and hand
Thy brutalizing sway--till Afric's chains
Are burst, and freedom rules the rescued land--
Trampling oppression and his iron rod."
[Sidenote: The Narrow Views of the Dutch]
He found the Dutch rigidly opposed to him at every point. The great
agencies of civilization in such a country as the Cape then was were
the magistrates, the missionaries, the schoolmasters and the traders.
But the Boer wanted none of them in the full English sense. He
accepted the appointment of magistrates, or lauddrosts, but he desired
them to be Dutch and to dispense Dutch law. Any religious element
outside of the Dutch Reformed Church--which had become the embodiment
of his own narrow views and prejudices--was alien and antagonistic,
even without missionary interference amongst the natives.
Schoolmasters were only good so far as they taught in accord with his
crude and very limited ideas of education; while traders were obnoxious
as introducing new and disquieting conditions into the loneliness of
the veldt and into his relations with the dark-skinned population. Dr.
Philip, however, had a plan to work out, and he proceeded with ability
and determination to the end. He established himself at Cape Town, and
used an influence which came from the strong feeling known to exist in
England against slavery and in favor of sympathetic treatment of
colored races, to bring about continuous modification in the relations
of master and slave. Sometimes he was right and sometimes wrong, but
in every case the Government was between two horns of a dilemma--the
Colonial Office at home and the Dutch settlers at the Cape. The latter
objected to every change in law or regulation; and every interference,
no matter how slight, with their living chattels produced one more
ember of smouldering hatred. But, in the fourteen years from the time
of his arrival until slavery was abolished, Dr. Philip usually carried
his point, and by 1834 had the conditions of servitude so moderated
that the Abolition Act itself made substantially little difference to
the slave.
[Sidenote: The Incident of Slaghter's Nek]
The history of this period and of the entire relationship of English
and Dutch toward each other and toward the natives is the record of a
high civilization and wide code of liberty--though with many admitted
weaknesses and errors of judgment--coming into contact, and inevitable
conflict, with a wild and crude system of life and an intensely
ignorant and isolated people. The famous incident of Slaghter's Nek
illustrates this fact most thoroughly. In 1814 a Hottentot apprentice,
named Booy, complained to the Cradock magistrate that his master,
Frederick Bezuidenhout, refused to allow him to leave his service or to
remove his few belongings. Instructions were given to investigate the
case and it was found that the man's time of service had expired, as he
claimed, and that under the law of the Colony he was, and should be, at
liberty to leave his master. Bezuidenhout refused, however, to obey
the order issued for the man's release, although admitting the facts to
be as stated; declared that such interference between him and his
Hottentot was a presumptuous invasion of his rights; and defied the
authorities by beating the man and sending him with a message to the
magistrate that he would treat him in the same manner if he dared to
come upon his grounds to touch the property or person of a native. He
treated a summons to appear before the District Court and then before
the High Court of Justice with equal contempt; and when a small force
was sent to bring him under subjection to the law, he retired to a
cave, well supplied with food and ammunition, and fired upon his
assailants until he was himself shot dead.
[Sidenote: A Small Rebellion]
The matter would not have been important, except as illustrating the
contempt for law and still greater contempt for the natives which had
developed amongst the farmers, had it not been for what followed. The
brothers and immediate friends of Bezuidenhout attended his funeral and
hatched a small rebellion, in which about fifty men joined--the object
being an attack upon the Hottentots of the neighborhood. Loyal Boers
of the vicinity joined the forces which were at once sent down to
suppress the trouble, and all the rebels were captured, with the
exception of Jan Bezuidenhout, who refused to surrender and was shot
dead. Thirty-nine prisoners were tried by the High Court and six were
sentenced to death. Lord Charles Somerset, after a careful
investigation of the whole matter, would only mitigate one of the
sentences, and five men were therefore hanged for this wild and almost
incomprehensible folly.
[Sidenote: Consequences of Slaghter's Nek]
From the standpoint of to-day the action of the Government seems harsh,
and to the Boers the Slaghter's Nek incident is a vivid and
continuously quoted illustration of British tyranny and
bloodthirstiness. To men on the spot and comprehending the widespread
nature of Bezuidenhout's contempt for British power and law and native
rights, a lesson may well have appeared necessary and present sternness
better than future and more general disregard of law and order. The
fact is, that presumption born of mingled ignorance and pride was even
then becoming so ingrained in the nature of the Boer as to have
rendered some such incident inevitable. And, although the summary
policy pursued planted seeds of bitterness which time has failed to
eradicate, it certainly averted serious insurrectionary trouble through
all the subsequent changes in the law affecting masters and their
slaves, or servants, up to the days of the Great Trek.
[Sidenote: Continuous Conflict with Surrounding Natives]
While the Dutch settlers were thus cultivating in their silent and
morose manner the most intense feelings against England and the English
because of the policy of amelioration in the condition of colored
races--the making of fresh slaves had been forbidden by law in
1808--the British Government and the Colonial authorities were being
dragged into continuous conflict, or controversy, with surrounding
natives on behalf of, and in defence of, the Dutch Colonists. The
latter were absolutely remorseless in their treatment of bordering
tribes. Of course they had suffered from raids and were in fear of
future raids, but this was hardly a sufficient reason for urging and
obtaining in 1811 the forcible expulsion of all the Kaffirs from within
the border, and the driving of some twenty thousand men, women and
children across the Great Fish River. And this in spite of most
pathetic appeals to the Dutch commando, as in the following case: "We
are your friends. We have watched your cattle when they were taken
away by our countrymen. Our wives have cultivated your gardens. Our
children and yours speak the same language."[1] Little wonder that
during this and succeeding years many natives hated the English, who
had permitted this policy, almost as much as they did the Dutch who had
perpetrated it. The fourth Kaffir war had naturally followed, and the
fifth had come in 1818 as the result of a British attempt to hold the
border intact by endorsing a powerful native chief, without available
means to take up the note by force when the chief came under the
subjugation of a rival stronger and abler than himself. [Sidenote: The
Kaffir War of 1835] In 1835 occurred the most important of these wars
with the Kosas, or Kaffirs--not so much because of its actual events as
of the movement amongst the Dutch which it accelerated. The war was
interesting, also, apart from the destruction of Boer property and the
loss of life which followed. It illustrated those evils of vacillating
administration which have caused so much trouble throughout the modern
history of South Africa. Lord Charles Somerset's first policy toward
the Kosas had been the maintenance of a vacant strip of territory
between the Great Fish and the Keiskama Rivers as a sort of buffer
against Boer aggression and native raids. His second plan had been the
creation of a buffer native state--a sort of early and shadowy edition
of the Afghanistan of a later day. The one had failed because of the
lack of coherent action or system amongst the native tribes; the second
because of their rivalries and the fact of one chief being paramount
to-day and another to-morrow. And, in both cases, the Governor lacked
money to persuade the recalcitrant, or men to enforce his decisions.
[1] Parliamentary Papers relative to the Cape, 1835, Part I., p. 176
[Sidenote: A New Line of Action]
Dr. Philip and his party agreed with a portion of this policy. Living
five hundred miles from the disturbed frontier; knowing much of the
mildness and docility of the Hottentot character, and little of the
fiercer and wilder spirit of the Kosa; surrounded by many evidences of
Dutch cruelty to the domestic or vagrant colored man, and therefore not
disposed to sympathize with the Colonists' real difficulties and
sufferings on the border; Dr. Philip supported with ability and
earnestness a policy of frontier conciliation instead of coercion.
After the conflict of 1835 was over Sir Benjamin D'Urban inaugurated a
new line of action. The pressure of the wasting wars of Tshaka and
Moselkatze had driven various tribes or remnants of tribes from the
north and east down upon the Kosas and into the vicinity of Cape
Colony. The Governor therefore took some eighteen thousand Fingoes--as
one of these mixed masses of fighting fugitives was called--and
established them between the Great Fish and Keiskama Rivers as a new
form of the old "buffer" scheme. They and the Kosas hated each other,
and he believed that the former would prove a strong British influence
upon the frontier. Between the Keiskama and the Keir further to the
eastward, certain Kosa clans were proclaimed British subjects, the
territory was named the Province of Queen Adelaide, and troops were
located at a spot called King Williamstown. But the war had been a
bitter one, the natives had been punished for an unprovoked aggression
by a somewhat harsh desolation of their country, and the missionary
influence at Cape Town saw and seized its opportunity.
[Sidenote: Formation of States Ruled by Native Chiefs]
Their plan was the formation of states ruled by native chiefs under the
guidance and control of missionaries, and from which Europeans not
favored by, or favorable to the latter, were to be excluded. It was a
very idyllic proposal, and was, of course, based upon an entirely wrong
conception of the native character and of the necessity of strong, if
not drastic, measures being employed to protect the Colony from the
Bantu masses, which were now pressing upon the border tribes in all
directions. [Sidenote: Dr. Philip Visits London] To press these views,
however, Dr. Philip visited London with a carefully trained Kosa and a
half-breed Hottentot as examples of the wild and gallant races of the
east and north, and testified at great length before a Committee of the
House of Commons. He was also supported by the evidence of Captain
Andries Stockenstrom, a retired Colonial official. The net result of
his mission, combined with the English sympathy for colored races which
was then at its highest point of expression, and the hardships of the
native war just ended, was a victory for the missionary party; a
despatch of unmitigated censure from Lord Glenelg, the new Secretary
for the Colonies, to the Governor; the public reversal of the latter's
policy with the statement that "it rested upon a war in which the
original justice was on the side of the conquered, not of the
victorious party;" and the still more extraordinary assertion that the
Kosas "had a perfect right to endeavor to extort by force that redress
which they could not expect otherwise to obtain." British sovereignty
was withdrawn from the region beyond the Keiskama, Sir Benjamin D'Urban
was recalled, Captain Stockenstrom was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of
Eastern Cape Colony and shortly afterwards created a baronet, and the
whole Colony was thrown into a state of violent commotion.
[Sidenote: Sir George Napier's Declaration]
Looking back now and placing oneself in the position of a British
Minister pledged by duty to protect British subjects, and by the most
ordinary rules of policy bound not to encourage or approve the
proceedings of an enemy, there appears to be no adequate practical
excuse for this line of action. Sir George Napier, who succeeded to
the Governorship and went out to carry Lord Glenelg's policy into
effect, declared some years afterwards in examination before the House
of Commons that: "My own experience and what I saw with my own eyes
have confirmed me that I was wrong and Sir Benjamin D'Urban perfectly
right." No matter how reckless the Dutch settlers may have been
regarding the border natives, there was no justification in policy for
such an insensate and ill-timed defence of native invasion. From the
standpoint of sentimentality, however, Lord Glenelg had much support in
Great Britain as well as amongst the missionaries at the Cape; and
there was much of the theoretically beautiful and Christian-like in his
conception of the situation. But from the practical point of view of a
statesman dealing with diverse races and absolutely different ideals,
and responsible, in the first place, for the guardianship of the
subjects of the Crown as against irresponsible tribal attacks, the
theories and opinions of religious enthusiasts afford poor foundation
for such a policy.
[Sidenote: Noble Ideals of the British Authorities]
At the same time, no one can take the two principles of Government
exhibited in the respective incidents of Slaghter's Nek and the results
of the sixth Kaffir war without paying an involuntary tribute of
admiration to the noble ideal of the British authorities; apart from
questions of practical statecraft or wise administration. The Dutch
Colonists' principle was the enslavement of the Hottentot; the
subjugation of the Kosa within British territory so long as his
retention in servitude was safe; the driving of him out of the Colony
with ruthless severity when his numbers became considerable; the
carrying of fire and slaughter into native regions when war broke out.
The policy of succeeding British Governors seems to have been an
attempt at compromising between the views of a local missionary party
which could see no gleam of good in the Dutch character and the feeling
of the latter that all natives were created for the special footstool
of a chosen people. The British public, while knowing little of the
Dutch farmers beyond their belief in slavery felt very strongly the
duty of Great Britain as a guardian of inferior races, and was willing
to go so far in defence of an ideal of freedom as to tacitly
approve--without probably fully understanding--the extreme development
of this policy in the action of Lord Glenelg. The latter was
philanthropic, it was Christian-like in a high and cosmopolitan sense,
but it was also injurious to the interests of British and Dutch
settlers and to the welfare and peace of the Empire. Had a large force
of British troops been kept in the Colony to enforce British theories
of liberty and high-minded justice, as between natives who knew nothing
and could comprehend nothing of either and Boers who would sooner
starve than accept the principles thus propounded, the ideal might in
the end have been put into praiseworthy practice. As it was the policy
of Lord Glenelg helped to promote the Great Trek and to lay the
foundation in a territorial sense of that South African question which
in its racial connection had now been developing for a couple of
centuries.