by Peires, Jeff
Although the Kaffir Relief Committee did not share the government view of distress as mostly native exaggerations, and although it was founded expressly without the permission of Governor Grey and Commissioner Maclean (most opportunely out of town when the first meeting was held),6 it nevertheless exerted itself to the utmost to win the approval of the colonial authorities. Its opening statement made that clear.
Care is being taken that the succour be so directed as in no wise to interfere with that system of support of which the Government has assumed the responsibility … The primary object of the Committee will be to supplement the action of Government, by placing within the sphere of Government influence and assistance a class of people who might otherwise never live to come within its reach … The Committee will strengthen the hands of the Government in the wise endeavour it is making so to use the existing crisis as to secure the permanent advantage not only of the needy objects of its sympathy, but also of the whole of South Africa.7
The Kaffir Relief Committee defined its field of operations very narrowly in order to avoid obstructing government plans. Its main task was to accommodate the overflow from the Native Hospital, persons who, while not actually afflicted by any specific disease, were nevertheless dying of starvation. Since such people were unable to eat the usual government ration of bread and meat, they were fed more digestible foods and sheltered until they were strong enough to be sent into labour service. The Committee also originally intended to search the neighbouring roads and bushes for the dying, but dropped this plan when they found that they could not even care for all those Xhosa already in King William’s Town.
The Kaffir Relief House consisted of five pensioners’ cottages, accommodating about 100 people. Consideration was given to building Xhosa huts as well, but this was rejected for fear that it would encourage ‘vagabondage’. ‘Inmates’, as the Committee called them, were admitted only after referral by the Native Hospital. Lady volunteers came down twice a day to feed the children sago and arrowroot. Gentlemen supervised the preparation of meat-flavoured soup, thickened with rice and barley in a huge outdoor boiler. The menu was modelled on the charitable kitchens of the Crimean War, but most of the grains and vegetables required were unavailable or too expensive. At 11 o’clock, Dr Wilmans came down from the hospital with new applicants, and inspected the inmates. At 12 o’clock, the police arrived to take those certified fit off to the magistrate to sign their labour contracts. Some mothers of sick children were allowed to remain, but were fully utilised cutting wood, cleaning pots, fetching water or smearing floors ‘so that no able-bodied are idle’.8 There can be no doubt that the Kaffir Relief Committee lived up to its promise to Commissioner Maclean:
In no instance will an able-bodied person be permitted to receive relief, or one who had been restored to a state which enables him to earn a livelihood be continued as a recipient of charity.9
Town begging was put down by the distribution of ‘mendicity tickets’ to the charitably disposed. A ‘mendicity ticket’ entitled the recipient to one free meal at the Kaffir Relief House – and brought him or her within the ambit of the relief/rations/labour contract circuit operating in King William’s Town.
1 GH 30/12 G Grey-H Cotterill, 4 June 1857; GH 22/9 H Cotterill-G Grey, 1 Sept. 1857.
2 GH 8/32 J Maclean-F Travers, 5 July 1857.
3 King William’s Town Gazette, 18, 25 July 1857.
4 GH 8/32 H Lucas-J Maclean, 13 June 1857; GH 8/32 H Kayser-H Lucas, 18 June 1857; GH 8/32 J Ayliff-J Maclean, 15, 25 June 1857; J Brownlee-J Maclean, 26 June 1857; GH 8/32 Dr Wilmans-J Fitzgerald, 2 July 1857.
5 GH 8/32 J Fitzgerald-J Maclean, 30 Aug. 1857.
6 The Kaffir Relief Committee later claimed that they had been unable to contact Maclean at his coastal cottage. Maclean responded that it would have been easy for them to get in touch with him if they had tried. This time it is probably Maclean who was telling the truth. The Kaffir Relief Committee were rightly nervous of Maclean, and quite conceivably used his temporary absence as an excuse for failing to consult him.
7 Kaffir Relief Committee advertisement, King William’s Town Gazette, 18 July 1857.
8 There is a detailed description of the Relief Houses in S Douglas-R Roberts, 12 Aug. 1857, published in the Grahamstown Journal, 22 Aug. 1857.
9 GH 8/32 Kaffir Relief Committee-J Maclean, 3 Aug. 1857.
4. PRIVATE BENEVOLENCE IS NOT REQUISITE
Despite the frantic efforts of the Kaffir Relief Committee to secure the good graces of the authorities, Governor Grey and Commissioner Maclean were disturbed by this new development. By acting first and asking permission later, the Committee had caught them unawares. They were unable to frame a response which would instantly squash the Committee’s relief measures. Maclean informed the Committee that its proposals ‘were not in my opinion calculated to interfere with the plans of the Government’. He permitted the use of the pensioners’ cottages, reminded the Committee that the demand for labour was greater than the supply, and warned it to relieve only those Xhosa about to proceed to labour service.1
Grey, however, was not prepared to leave it at that. He opened his attack on the Kaffir Relief Committee by refusing to print its appeal in the Government Gazette,2 and then set out to subvert the two most important local committees established outside King William’s Town to raise funds for the Relief House. In Grahamstown, local officials obstructed the Committee’s appeal by making it known ‘that Government is prepared to render to the natives all the assistance they require, and as a consequence of course, that private benevolence is not requisite’. Such unofficial hints were enough to deter the charity of the Grahamstown branch, which stalled on transferring the relief funds collected, informing Stair Douglas in King William’s Town that it required further information.3
In Cape Town, the Bishop and the Attorney General informed the local philanthropists that it would be better to entrust their charitable money to Chief Commissioner Maclean. They stressed that the government was itself perfectly capable of relieving all the truly destitute. The problem was that the Xhosa were ‘a very difficult people to deal with’. They wanted to be supported in idleness and they had no desire for work. Profitable employment was readily available for hundreds of Xhosa but they were not coming forward. The Attorney General rattled off a great deal more of this humbug, but at least one of his statements was sincere. ‘It is impossible in British Kaffraria to separate private charity from public policy,’ he said. Grey and his executive council were worried that the activities of the Kaffir Relief Committee threatened their plans. Clearly, it had to be eliminated.4
The first intimation the Committee had of this intention was the letter from its Grahamstown branch asking for more details of its activities. In his reply, Stair Douglas expressed his surprise at the Grahamstown officials’ contention that private benevolence was not required. The government, he wrote, undertook no relief work as such beyond the issue of rations to those departing for labour in the Colony. The magistrate had no shelter but the jail, and the rations he issued would kill the majority of the starving. Anticipating the objection that his committee abetted the idlers and the won’t-works, Douglas proudly pointed out that ‘Our Relief House is in fact an Immigration Depot which keeps people together till the Magistrate be ready to send them on.’5
At the same time the members of the Relief Committee wrote to Maclean in the hope that he would reiterate, perhaps publicly, his earlier statement that the measures of the Committee did not interfere with those of the government.6 They were disappointed. Not only did Maclean make no such statement, but he bitterly attacked the Committee for ‘misrepresenting’ the relief measures of the government which were, in his opinion, perfectly adequate to meet the demands of the situation. He strongly implied that if there were any cases of unrelieved distress, it was the fault of the Kaffir R
elief Committee itself for attracting the starving to King William’s Town. Deliberately mistaking the purpose of the Committee’s letter – which was not an appeal for funds but a request for government approval – Maclean concluded by stating in the bluntest possible manner that the Committee would get no assistance whatsoever from the public funds.7
The most influential newspaper in the Eastern Province, the Grahamstown Journal, turned against the Committee the very next day. Up to this point it had maintained a mildly favourable attitude, but now, making up for lost time, it drew a distinction between ‘feelings and sympathies’ on the one hand, and ‘sense and reason’ on the other. The trouble was that the Colony’s ‘reason and calculation had been utterly overborne in the presence of the deep distress and starving misery of the human sufferers’. The schemes of the Kaffir Relief Committee would lead to an increase in the price of food, and to a falling off of white immigration. Even worse, ‘every [Xhosa] then that is saved from starvation … is just one more enemy fattened and rendered effective at our expense. We cannot hope that gratitude will quench a single spark of that enmity.’ The temptations of relief would draw large masses of starving wretches into the Colony. Even if ‘prudential motives’ could not eliminate the impulses of those hell-bent on charity, the Journal hoped that they might guide the flow. Charitable funds should all be placed under government control.8
The Kaffir Relief Committee stood its ground as well as it could. Surrounded as they were by the horror all around them, its members could not understand why they were being attacked so vehemently.
The dead were around the Town, and the dying were in the streets. It was a fact to which no eye here was blind, that whatever preparation had been made, and whatever exertions were in progress, they had not sufficed to meet these cases, men, women and children were dying notwithstanding them – It was a sad thing to live in the presence of so much misery, to have witnessed it idly would have been wicked.9
The Committee proved without any difficulty that the number of Xhosa in the streets of King William’s Town had declined since the commencement of its work, and that the notion of thousands streaming into town on account of the Relief House was nonsense. Dr Fitzgerald vouched for the fact that all those treated in the Relief House were truly destitute and urgently in need of care.10
But Grey was implacable. On 25 August 1857, he wrote a deliberately insulting dispatch on Kaffir Relief, addressed to the Lieutenant Governor.11 The document is a superb example of Grey’s distinctive style of invective: vicious, exaggerated and recklessly untruthful. It began with the usual government claims that its relief measures were being misrepresented. The starving Xhosa had not forsaken their original intention of destroying the Colony, and should be treated with caution. Then followed the well-worn argument about indiscriminate charity attracting destitute masses to King William’s Town, the imagined invasion now reaching epic proportions.
It should be remembered that large numbers of Zulu’s from Panda’s country are at the present moment pressing into Natal, through which country they filter into Kaffraria, whence, if care be not taken, we shall draw them down upon our own border, and again bring streams of new coloured races into that very territory which His Excellency was hoping to have filled up with a European population.
Who but the sagacious Governor Grey could have appreciated the powerful attraction of Kaffir Relief House soup? It would have been a great marvel, as one observer put it, ‘if the Zulu will come through the rich corn lands of Natal to the vast graveyard of King Williams Town’.12
With pitiful optimism, the Kaffir Relief Committee attempted to persuade the Governor that he had misunderstood their intentions. Stair Douglas responded to the published attack by writing directly to the Governor, enclosing the Committee’s correspondence with Maclean.13 Dr Fitzgerald wrote another long letter to Maclean demonstrating the extent of the starvation and the usefulness of the Relief Committee.14 A correspondent signing himself ‘ABC’ wrote to the Grahamstown Journal, exposing the inadequacy of the relief afforded by Magistrate Reeve at Middledrift and showing that a starving Xhosa on the King William’s Town/Fort Beaufort road could expect only one meal in eight days.15 A public meeting of the Grahamstown Relief Committee rejected the Catholic Bishop’s suggestion that they turn over their subscriptions to the Governor, and supported instead Bishop Cotterill’s motion to carry on regardless.16
This resistance only increased Grey’s resolve to destroy the Kaffir Relief Committee. His exalted position as Governor enabled him to slap down the individual members of the Committee without ever bothering to respond to their honest representations. The Bishop of Grahamstown was curtly informed that Grey was ‘too busy’ to add to his published letter on Kaffir Relief.17 The magistrate of King William’s Town was denounced by Maclean as a ‘complete tool’ of the Committee and reprimanded for showing an official document to one of its members.18 Dr Fitzgerald was reproached for giving his old patron the Governor ‘considerable pain’ by his misrepresentations, and he humbly begged forgiveness, asking Grey to remember ‘that I am human and subject to all defects’.19
Stair Douglas was the only Committee member to go down with all guns still firing. Maclean was sure that Douglas was trying to blacken his name in order to succeed him as Chief Commissioner. ‘Mr Stair Douglas is a candidate for civil employment in this Colony,’ he confided privately to Grey.20 He further believed that Douglas was the mysterious ‘ABC’ who had exposed the deficiencies of the government relief operation at Middledrift.21 Douglas’s response to Grey’s published letter on Kaffir Relief further infuriated the authorities by asserting that the Committee’s duty to God was higher than their duty to the government. But it also gave Grey the opportunity of crushing the Committee.
Since Grey had criticised the Kaffir Relief Committee in public, Douglas probably assumed that he was entitled to respond directly. But in terms of the formal etiquette of the day, all letters written in British Kaffraria were required to pass through the hands of Chief Commissioner Maclean. Douglas wrote directly to Grey, a breach of official procedure which gave the Governor the opening he required. He returned Douglas’s letter without comment, leaving it to Maclean to deliver the coup de grâce.
As an officer in Her Majesty’s Colonial Service at Mauritius, you must have well known that this was the line of proceeding which the rules of the Public Service required you to follow – and that it is His Excellency’s intention to make your breach of that rule, that ground of complaint against you to Her Majesty’s Government, and at the same time to complain to them of the misrepresentations regarding the proceedings of the Government which you have made in the public prints, and which have had a mischievous and embarrassing effect.22
The Kaffir Relief Committee, in whose name Douglas had written the offending letter, was stunned. With ruin and official disgrace staring them in the face, Stair Douglas and the other ‘official’ members of the Committee, mostly army officers, resigned. The shocked rump of the Committee voted to dissolve itself.23 There were a few kicks of protest. The Methodist minister refused to participate in the government’s relief programme until it withdrew its ‘slurs’ on the Committee.24 There was some thought of publishing the Kaffir Relief correspondence in full, but Grey stopped this by drawing up yet another vicious memorandum accusing the Committee of various further crimes, most notably Anglican domination.25 Stair Douglas sailed for England to defend himself in person. Grey refused his request for details of the accusations to be brought against him, saying that he was too busy dealing with the Indian Mutiny crisis, but that he would attend to the matter ‘when I have the time’.26 He never did, and Stair Douglas must have greatly puzzled the Colonial Office in his attempts to defend himself against charges which had never been brought. In any case, it hardly mattered. The Kaffir Relief Committee was dead.
Grey and Maclean adhered closely to the principles of ‘true charity’ as generally understood i
n Victorian Britain. They distinguished between ‘real distress’ on the one hand, and mere ‘want’ which did not deserve ‘gratuitous relief’ or ‘indiscriminate benevolence’. The acid test of candidates for relief was whether or not they were ‘unable to work’. At a stretch this might include those who were unable to travel long distances on foot, but, by and large, only the ‘young and infirm already found deserted by their friends’ qualified for the category of ‘real distress’, and even these were to be sent on their way as soon as possible.27 ‘Everything is being done by Government in meeting the wants of the people,’ Maclean assured Sandile, ‘the destitute are fed, and labour is provided for all who are able or willing to work.’28
Maclean acknowledged that great destitution and distress prevailed and that ‘many pitiable sights’ were to be seen. But that was the Xhosa’s own fault, for refusing the government’s generous offers of labour contracts. Many gullible observers were misled by Xhosa exaggerations, and were too easily fooled by the mere appearance of starvation. Magistrate Reeve of Middledrift, whose relief operation had been severely criticised in the Grahamstown Journal, exposed these welfare scroungers in a dispatch which drew Grey’s particular approval.29 Some of these ungrateful people had deceived Captain Reeve into accommodating them in the prisoners’ hut and feeding them at government expense! Alerted by such deceptions, Reeve’s police had begun searching relief applicants, and had found that many of them had ‘considerable sums of money’ concealed about them. One ‘very miserable looking [Xhosa] … from the man’s appearance I should have said he was a starving man’ … was in fact possessed of a tin box containing nine golden sovereigns. The moral was clear: the emaciated Xhosa on your doorstep was in all probability a rather wealthy man – he was starving to death only in order to elicit sympathy and avoid an honest day’s work! Many of the deaths had occurred only because the government ration was too generous.30 Many Xhosa had died out of sheer stubbornness, Maclean insisted. ‘The vast majority of cases [of dead Xhosa] would not accept the relief so freely proferred to them.’31
