by Peires, Jeff
Even more repulsive was his treatment of Te Rauparaha, a powerful but neutral Maori chief, whom Grey accused – again falsely – of conspiring to kill settlers and rape white women. Te Rauparaha was released only after his subjects agreed to surrender three million acres for white settlement. Other Maoris were not so lucky. One Christian convert was tried and shot by court martial without benefit of defence counsel, and his companions were illegally transported to Australia. All these little tricks – conspiracy theory, false accusation, court martial and wholesale transportation – became part of Grey’s stock-in-trade, and were utilised by him in South Africa.
Admittedly, Grey’s policy in New Zealand included more constructive measures such as schools, hospitals, and public works. And, in contrast to his policy at the Cape, he refrained from interfering too aggressively with Maori chiefs or Maori law. But neither Grey’s aggression nor his restraint really succeeded, and, even before his departure, some of the more perceptive Maori chiefs began to canvass the idea of a Maori king who would unite the Maori people to resist white encroachment.
Grey was aware of this movement but took care to conceal the information from his successor and from the Colonial Office in London. He ‘was anxious to wind up his governorship in a blaze of glory,’ writes the historian Alan Ward, ‘and bombarded London with despatches, compounded of purblind optimism and deliberate deceit, about the progress of the amalgamation policy’. The Colonial Office was completely taken in. They credited Grey with a ‘singular ability in dealing with the savage races’ and they rewarded him with a knighthood and the governorship of the Cape of Good Hope.13
As we have seen, Grey was not nearly as unique as he liked to pretend. His ideas of imposing British law, breaking the power of the chiefs and civilising the natives through the intellectual discipline of hard work were not in fact very different from those which had brought disaster and disgrace to Sir Harry Smith. That Grey succeeded where Smith failed was due not to any special virtues but to Grey’s peculiarly serviceable personality defects. Grey was an authoritarian, even dictatorial individual, so convinced of the superiority of his own judgement that he was ruthless to the point of vindictiveness in pursuit of his goals. His contempt for truth and his habit of sending lying and self-serving dispatches designed to present his behaviour in the best possible light confused the Colonial Office and make it extremely difficult even now to get at the facts. As one New Zealand historian has put it:
Grey set forth on a policy of trickery and deceit. So difficult is it to find one important subject about which Grey did not lie or, the most favourable view, which he did not misrepresent, that the impact of Grey must be judged from what he did and not what he said he did. Grey was untruthful from the moment he arrived [in New Zealand], and so practised in this art that it is difficult to believe that he had ever been otherwise … In short he lied when misrepresentation appeared to suit his immediate ends … the Colonial Office always gave him the benefit of any doubt. In this way … he earned himself, in London, a brilliant reputation that time has scarcely dimmed.14
Grey built his entire reputation on the lie that the interests of the settlers and the indigenous peoples could be rendered complementary and harmonious. When dealing with the natural Maori opposition to the colonial attempt to steal their land and ram civilisation down their throats, Grey resorted to scapegoatiing and conspiracy theory, as his treatment of Te Rauparaha clearly shows. Whereas other lesser Governors bogged down in a morass of contradictions, Grey was supremely indifferent to all practical and moral difficulties. For all his grand talk of civilisation and benefiting the native, he never hesitated to go for the jugular.
It is possible to see Grey’s addiction to conspiracy theory as the natural refuge of his deeply insecure and highly self-righteous personality when faced with the unpleasant consequences of his own actions. But those who suffered at the Governor’s hands had a less charitable explanation. One New Zealand politician called him ‘the Artful Dodger of Governors’. The Maori compared him to a ‘rat that burrows underground out of sight, and would come up in their midst when and where they least expected’. One of the Sturt family wrote that the Maori said of Grey, ‘Guv’ner, when him want something, him no go straight like a bird, him always go crooked like a snake.’15 The story must be apocryphal, for there are no snakes in New Zealand. Nevertheless it accurately sums up Sir George Grey’s peculiar style of colonial government.
1 Sinclair (1961), p.33. The standard biography, that of Rutherford (1961) is detailed and helpful but bends over backwards to present Grey in a favourable light. The early biographies, Rees (1892), Milne (1899) and Henderson (1907), are frankly idolatrous. One must turn to the specialist studies of periods in New Zealand’s history for a more critical view. See especially Dalton (1967), Wards (1968) and Ward (1974). Australian historians such as Clark (1973) are even more critical.
2 Rutherford (1961), p.303; Thornton (1983).
3 For example, Milne (1899), p.57; Rutherford (1961), p.276.
4 For example, Merriman (1969), p.63; Stanford (1958), pp.102-3; Brookes (1974), pp.25-8.
5 Dalton (1967), p.259.
6 For Grey’s reference to Carlyle, see Rutherford (1961), p.283, and for his close friendship with Carlyle and his fellow hero-worshipper, Froude, see Milne (1899). For an excellent discussion of hero-worship in Victorian England, see Houghton (1957), Ch. 12, from which the quotations cited have been taken. In fairness to Grey, it should be said that he did not share Carlyle’s racist views, and that most of his ideas were taken from Utilitarians such as Bentham and JS Mill, who were anathema to the Romantic Carlyle. But on the subject of the absolute rule of the ablest man, there can be no doubt of Grey’s standpoint.
7 The main direct evidence bearing on this point is Grey’s advice to a subordinate in New Zealand, ‘Whenever you feel downhearted in your work, a little medicine would always set you right.’ Gorst (1908), p.226. The rest is conjecture, based on Grey’s clearly erratic behaviour.
8 Rutherford (1961), Ch. 2; Australian Dictionary of Biography (1966), pp.476-80.
9 Imperial Blue Book 311 of 1841, pp.43-7.
10 Grey (1841), pp.217-8; Grey (1855), pp.xii-xiii. Thornton (1983), pp.86-7, argues that Grey sought a clue to the nature of creation through his ethnological researches. But he does not mention the introduction to Grey (1855), nor has he come to terms with Grey’s practice as opposed to Grey’s rhetoric.
11 The link between Grey and Utilitarianism is fascinating and the resemblance between Grey’s personality and that of the Victorian reformer Edwin Chadwick is startling, but these details cannot be explored here. On India, see the admirable work by E Stokes (1959).
12 Ward (1974), pp.34, 62.
13 Ward (1974), pp.89-90.
14 Wards (1968), p.391.
15 Australian Dictionary of Biography (1966), p.479; Gorst (1908), p.168; Waterhouse (1984), p.6.
2. CHANGING ENEMIES INTO FRIENDS
Blessed with great gifts but cursed with an obsessive self-pride, Sir George Grey exploded on the South African scene, half Superman and half Devil. If an Elizabethan dramatist had written the life of Grey as a variation on the theme of Faust – and no comparison could be more appropriate – the Governor’s administration of the Cape would have appeared as Act Four, the magnificent victory just prior to the tragic denouement of Act Five. For Grey’s entire career as a Governor was played out on the brink of an abyss, and the same extraordinary qualities which secured his success in South Africa wrought his downfall in the years which followed. But no man who lived through Grey’s South African triumphs could possibly have suspected that the Governor’s magic charm would ever fail.
Sir George Grey was a great Imperialist. His ambitions stretched beyond the narrow confines of the Cape Colon
y to embrace South Africa as a whole, which he aimed to make ‘a real power, which may hereafter bless and influence large portions of this vast continent’.1 He sought to add the Boer Republics and the independent black states of the subcontinent to the existing British dependencies, and he patronised David Livingstone’s expeditions in search of fresh fields to conquer. But Grey was not so shallow as to conceptualise such a new colony purely in territorial terms, nor did he think that such a domain could be created purely by military means. Grey’s talk was always of spreading ‘civilisation’, by which he meant more than just the conquest of new territories, the subjugation of indigenous inhabitants and the capture of natural resources. By the spread of ‘civilisation’, Grey meant the amalgamation of the disparate Boer and African societies into a single integrated whole, modelled on Victorian Britain – English by culture, Christian by religion and capitalist by economic structure.
The ‘civilising’ of British Kaffraria was the critical first stage of Grey’s whole grandiose plan. Although the Xhosa inhabitants of British Kaffraria were the only African people in South Africa under the direct administration of Britain, they were still, in a very real sense, independent of it. The Xhosa were militarily defeated, they had lost their best land, their best cattle and their best young men. Their economy had become dependent on colonial markets and their world-view had become clouded by mission Christianity. And yet, in spite of all this or even, paradoxically, because of it, the Xhosa remained an identifiably distinct nation, socially, economically and politically distinct from the Cape Colony and in no way subsumed by it. Defeated though they had been in the War of Mlanjeni, they had at least forced Sir George Cathcart to reverse those measures of Sir Harry Smith which had been designed to integrate them into the colonial system. This continuing self-sufficiency was recognised by Chief Commissioner Maclean when he wrote, in 1855:
The [Xhosa] contented like the North American Indian with his barbarous state, and apathetic as to improvement, has in addition to these other characteristics, that he clings tenaciously to his old customs and habits, is proud of his race, which he considers pure and superior to others, is therefore eminently national, is suspicious, and holds aloof from others; and while considering the white man as a means of obtaining certain articles which the despised industry of the latter supplies would yet prefer their absence.2
It was arms and ammunition and nothing else which kept British Kaffraria British. Take away colonial military power, and British Kaffraria would instantly have reverted to Xhosaland again. True, some of its inhabitants might profess Christianity, and most of them might depend more or less on colonial products, but the underlying political and economic integrity of the precolonial Xhosa social formation was still intact, right up to the time of Sir George Grey. To this extent, Grey was quite correct in terming the situation on the Cape’s eastern frontier at the time of his arrival as nothing better than an ‘armed truce’.3 It was the Governor’s task to smash the organic structure of Xhosa society and integrate its remnants into the brave new colonial world.
Grey’s South African policies were conceived long before he arrived at the Cape and clearly stated within three weeks of his arrival (December 1854).4 They were, predictably, an amplification of the principles he had enunciated as a young explorer and then tried to implement in New Zealand. Starting from the assumption that ‘human nature was not confined to the whites’5 and that the interests of Xhosa and settlers were complementary and not antagonistic, he proposed a complete blueprint for the harmonious amalgamation of the conflicting peoples of South Africa. The Xhosa should not be segregated from the white colonists and left to manage their own affairs as best they could. This was only storing up trouble for the future, since as long as the Xhosa lived in a state of ‘barbarism’, they would inevitably remain hostile towards the Cape Colony and European civilisation generally. Instead, Grey proposed to extend his influence peacefully by schools, by hospitals, by public works, by new institutions of government, ‘and thus to change by degrees our at present unconquered and apparently unreclaimable foes into friends who may have common interests with ourselves’.6
South Africa was not New Zealand, however, and the policies which Grey had worked with some success in one colonial setting were bound to fail in the other. This had nothing to do with the cultural differences between Maori and Xhosa, and everything to do with the respective exposure of the two peoples to colonial pressure. British rule in New Zealand was less than ten years old when Grey arrived, and the Maori people, on the whole, still looked to the British government for protection against the land hunger of the New Zealand Company. Grey was able to exploit this Maori goodwill, and he managed to achieve many of his aims, including land purchase and the extension of British law, through the help of those Maori chiefs whose friendship he had won. This close personal association with individual Maoris tempered Grey’s iconoclastic zeal and lent him discretion with regard to many established Maori customs and practices.
The Xhosa, on the other hand, had grown up in the shadow of British colonialism. They hated it and they had fought against it as long as they could. They did not attach much importance to the distinction between British settlers and the British government, which had deprived them of most of their best land in the years between 1812 and 1853. When Grey arrived, the Xhosa were just emerging from the catastrophic defeat of the War of Mlanjeni which dwarfed in death and starvation anything the Maori had yet experienced. The only thing which the Xhosa had salvaged from the wreck of Mlanjeni was the right to govern themselves according to their own laws, and it was precisely this right which Grey was now proposing to withdraw. It would have been beyond the scope of any diplomacy to persuade the Xhosa to renounce their remaining privileges voluntarily, but Grey did not even have the opportunity to exert his famous personal magnetism on the Xhosa chiefs. Through no fault of his own, he was based in Cape Town, more than 1 000 kilometres away from British Kaffraria, and his occasional visits to the frontier could not possibly create close relationships of the kind he had enjoyed with the friendly Maori chiefs who buzzed around his home in Auckland. Far more isolated from the Xhosa than he had ever been from the Maori, Grey applied his ‘civilisation’ policy with a rigour untempered by sympathetic restraint.
But back in December 1854, none of this was yet apparent. Grey’s major concern was not so much deciding on a course of action – as we have seen, that was all preconceived – but in finding the means of paying the bill for the expensive measures which he contemplated. In all probability he had hoped to winkle the necessary funds out of the Cape Colony’s legislature, but when he arrived in Cape Town he found that a much better opportunity had presented itself.
Ever since their victory in the War of Mlanjeni, the minds of the settlers and the colonial administration had been greatly exercised by the problem of the Mfengu people. The Mfengu had fought alongside the colonists during the frontier wars and had been rewarded with some of the best land taken from the Xhosa. Many settlers were deeply aggrieved by this and they were further offended by the Mfengu belief that, as loyal subjects of Queen Victoria, they were entitled to equal rights with their white fellow citizens. Governor Cathcart had admired the Mfengu and advanced their cause, but once Cathcart had departed anti-Mfengu agitation reached rabid proportions in the eastern Cape, where it took the typical frontier form of a war scare.7 Rumours of a supposed Mfengu-Xhosa alliance panicked the commander of the colonial troops, Sir James Jackson, a doddering old veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who had served alongside Grey’s father long before the Governor was even born.
Ever receptive to conspiracy theories, especially when they served his purpose, Grey enthusiastically embraced these rumours of a ‘Fingo alliance’ against the Colony. He dashed off a letter to the Colonial Office in London in which he greatly exaggerated the threat of a frontier war and pointed out that the last one had cost the British taxpayer more than one million pounds. Never fear, Grey continu
ed, he had a plan which would prevent the war but it needed to be put into effect immediately. It involved putting the Xhosa to labour on public works, establishing schools and hospitals for their benefit and introducing new forms of administration into British Kaffraria. It would only cost £40 000 a year, and since the matter was so urgent and £40 000 was such a small sum by comparison with £1 000,000, Grey felt he should just go ahead and spend the money immediately, leaving the Colonial Office to cope with the small detail of getting the funds approved by Parliament.8
The ‘Fingo alliance’ war scare could not have suited Grey better if he had engineered it himself. He continued to harp on the danger of war until the money was safely in his treasury. As Professor Rutherford put it, the war scare lasted two months longer in Grey’s dispatches than it did in the Colony itself. In time to come, Grey’s habit of predicting war and bloodshed if he did not get his way became something of a joke in the Colonial Office, but in 1854 they were still mesmerised by Grey’s image as a man uniquely able to deal with natives. Even Sir William Molesworth, who was more cynical than the rest, conceded that there could be little harm in allowing Grey to try out his scheme.9
