by Peires, Jeff
The colonial authorities, on the other hand, now came to distrust the missions which they viewed as Trojan horses through which the exiled Xhosa might re-enter the districts set aside for white occupation. Maclean was particularly hostile to missions, which he accused of ‘indiscriminate benevolence’, and he fretted over the possibility that they might serve as potential rallying points for the scattered Xhosa.17 Even Grey, who softened some of Maclean’s harsher decisions, opposed the blanket relief for children which the missions were striving to provide.
I am not satisfied of the prudence of taking all their children into schools at certain localities thus almost necessitating the return of the parents to these parts, and certainly giving them great inducements to remain there instead of betaking themselves to an honest mode of livelihood.18
The easiest way to put down the missions was to deny them financial aid. Mission resources were genuinely unequal to the expense of relief, and from June 1857 they began turning away starving children whom they were unable to feed.19 In refusing government funds to the Anglican Church, Grey made it clear that he disapproved of some of their missionaries, particularly William Greenstock who had carried messages for Mhala behind Gawler’s back. Greenstock’s mission of St Luke’s was, moreover, an obstacle to the settlement of whites in Mhala’s country. St Luke’s was closed down, and its converts packed off to a new site under the care of a former convict chaplain, who embezzled its money and oppressed its converts but did not mind informing on Mhala.20
Missionaries like HT Waters, who distinguished himself by his ‘somewhat severe discipline and very active employment’,21 were able to continue on their stations, but were soon confronted with difficulties relating to their newly acquired non-Christian residents. Before the Cattle-Killing, all the residents had been more or less inclined towards Christianity and willingly obedient to the discipline of the station. But those who came out of necessity were not nearly as obedient, and they were moreover determined to observe traditional rituals which the missionaries regarded as immoral. Many of these were expelled from the stations, among them the noted Gcaleka unbeliever Ngubo, who had thrashed Nongqawuse and called her a fake. From 1860 onwards, the missions launched an offensive against ‘heathenish practices and customs’ such as polygamy, circumcision and female initiation. This backfired badly on the Church as the Bishop of Grahamstown later admitted. ‘Injudicious meddling in family matters, and the turning off of whole families ... from Mission lands … is among the many causes why the progress of Christianity has been retarded in this country.’22 Indeed it was. The net result of a decade’s mission was to inspire the Gcaleka Xhosa with ‘an inveterate hatred to the Gospel’. One of the former refugees told Tiyo Soga ten years later that ‘of all sounds, that which grates most upon my ears is a church bell; I have been sickened with it in the past and I care not although I never hear it again’.23
The Cattle-Killing also enabled Grey to revive his pet project of a ‘Kaffir College’ in Cape Town. He had proposed just such a school to the Xhosa chiefs in 1855, but none of them were prepared to consider parting with their children. On the eve of the Great Disappointment, Sarhili had declined to send away one of his favourite daughters. ‘No! No!’ the King had cried, ‘She is the child of my bosom. I cannot part with her.’ Grey’s interest in the scheme was unwittingly rekindled by Sandile in April 1857, when he asked Commissioner Brownlee to take care of three of his children. Maclean reacted sharply to the prospect of feeding Sandile’s children at government expense, and issued Brownlee with the following specific orders:
I have forwarded your letter to His Excellency and until I hear his reply, I have to request you will not receive any more [of Sandile’s] children … I request to be informed whether Sandilli is prepared to hand over his children to Government to be educated and of course removed, for I see no other condition open for them.24
Grey was fascinated by this correspondence, and minuted, ‘I am anxious to have these children sent to me to take care of.’
From that moment, the pressure was on Sandile to give up his children to the government. But the chief refused to send them away, though he was quite willing to have them educated in Brownlee’s house. Grey continued to press for Xhosa children, and in October 1857, he was rewarded with a couple brought in by Mjuza, the son of Nxele. Mjuza was hopeful that the Governor would appoint him in Mhala’s place, and, besides, he was under the impression that the children would be sent to England. ‘Tell Victoria that these are my bones,’ he said, indicating his own son, ‘and she must take care of them and look after me too.’25
Still Sandile refused his consent. He told Tiyo Soga, the Xhosa missionary, that he had spent five days at the Anglican mission watching the school there and that he did not approve of it at all. He wanted his children educated at the Presbyterian mission which Soga was about to establish near his Great Place.26 But in the fury of February 1858, with most of his brother chiefs arrested and an expedition fitting out to attack Sarhili, Sandile felt that he could no longer resist. His Great Son Gonya, his eldest daughter Emma, and 17 of his councillors’ children were dispatched to Cape Town in May. Several more Xhosa children followed in the succeeding months, including the sons of Mhala, Phatho, Anta, and Kama, and several grandchildren of Magoma.27
The purpose of Grey’s Kaffir College in Cape Town (later renamed Zonnebloem) was to transform its pupils into black Englishmen.28 The boys were dressed in flannel shirts and moleskin trousers, and the girls wore dresses and aprons. But although their education in English, reading and arithmetic was not neglected, they were subjected to Grey’s emphasis on the ‘discipline of honest industry’. The children spent half the day working at trades such as carpentry and dressmaking, though they drew the line at agricultural labour. They were kept in almost total isolation, having little contact with the outside world beyond their regular attendance at church on Sundays. As the years passed by and Zonnebloem lost its novelty value, its buildings decayed and its sanitary facilities deteriorated to an ‘appalling’ extent. The pupils contracted tuberculosis at an alarming rate (20 per cent actually died of it in 1868), and the flow of volunteers dried up.
Sandile was so affected by a seeing a photograph of his absent children that he conquered his fear of the sea and, in 1861, asked to be allowed to visit them in Cape Town.29 Grey agreed, ‘to give Sandilli confidence in himself, and in the kindness of the English people’ and to witness for himself ‘the greatness and the power of Great Britain’.30 Far from being convinced that civilisation was in any way desirable, Sandile returned even more determined to uphold Xhosa customs. He attempted to withdraw his daughter Emma from Zonnebloem for the purpose of arranging her marriage, but the Bishop of Cape Town refused to let her go.31 Eventually, a compromise was arranged whereby Emma would marry Qeya, the heir-apparent to the Thembu throne, by Christian rites. This marriage, too, fell through because the Thembu people were not prepared to allow their future King to marry a convert. To prevent his second daughter, Victoria, from falling into the same trap as her sister, Sandile removed her from Tiyo Soga’s church at Mgwali.32 On the colonial side, Grey’s successor barred any further enrolment of girls from Zonnebloem. As for Emma, she seemed bound for the eminently Christian life of a spinster mission teacher, but saved herself from this respectable fate by commencing an affair with a married man. Expelled from the mission, she lived happily ever afterwards, bearing her heathen husband five happily illiterate and non-Christian children.
Grey’s dream of a self-reproducing black upper-class elite was thus frustrated. Not only that, but those Xhosa who did graduate from Zonnebloem or its sister institution in Grahamstown found it very difficult to make a place for themselves in nineteenth-century South Africa. Gonya, Sandile’s Great Son and prospective successor, was rejected by most of his people because he had not been circumcised. On the other hand, white prejudice would not tolerate the employment of ‘educated natives’ in white are
as. Far from taking a lead in the making of a new South Africa, as Grey had hoped, the unhappy graduates settled down in an uncomfortable and anomalous niche as ‘native teachers’ or court interpreters.33
Nor did they become British patriots. Far from recoiling in disgust at their heathen forebears, the students at Zonnebloem regarded Maqoma as quite the equal of the Duke of Wellington and repeatedly petitioned for the release of their imprisoned parents and grandparents. When the last of the Xhosa chiefs were released from Robben Island in 1869, their offspring followed them home. In 1880, College graduates Gonya Sandile and Kondile Mhala returned to the Western Province to complete their education, but not at Zonnebloem. On the Island.
Though Sir George Grey failed to win the hearts and minds of the Xhosa people, he was completely successful with their bodies. A total of 29 142 Xhosa registered for service in the Colony by the end of 1857, and an equal number must have passed through unregistered.34 By the end of 1858, such labour-hungry districts as Graaff-Reinet and Beaufort West were completely saturated, and the employers of the Western Province were beginning to weigh up the social costs of a continuing Xhosa immigration (‘they will murder us and drive us into the sea’).35 By the time the first labourers returned to Xhosaland, they found their old homesteads crammed into tiny villages or expropriated for white farms. Grey boasted that he had brought peace to Xhosaland. It was the same peace which Rome brought to Carthage.
1 King William’s Town Gazette, 16 May 1857, 2 Jan. 1858; CO 2949 J Warner-R Southey, 18 Feb. 1857.
2 BK 89 Memorandum of information communicated, 25 April 1857; GH 8/50 H Waters-J Maclean, 7 July 1857.
3 King William’s Town Gazette 17 Jan., 4 April 1857; Cape Argus, 21 Jan. 1857.
4 Interview with M Ngovane, Majonga Location, Willowvale District, 15 Nov. 1975; Kropf-Godfrey (1915), p.100.
5 MIC 172/2, Cory Library, USPG Archive, Journal of W Greenstock, 6 April 1859; CO 2951 R Southey-R Rawson, 31 Dec. 1857; BK 24 (?)-J. Maclean, 30 March 1857; BK 86 F Reeve-J Maclean, 5 Sept. 1857.
6 BK 71 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 18 May 1857.
7 BK 2 J Miller-J Maclean, 2 Sept. 1858; BK 2 Information received from a trustworthy native, 24 Aug. 1858.
8 BK 2 Report of a spy, 16 Oct. 1858; BK 89 Secret information, 2 Feb. 185[8].
9 BK 3 JC Warner-Capt. Smyth, 12 April 1859; Theal (1877), p.288.
10 King William’s Town Gazette, 17 Oct. 1857.
11 See Maclean’s comments on GH 8/32 Schedule 494, 17 Sept. 1857.
12 BK 114 Circular to special magistrates, 1 Oct. 1857.
13 BK 114 Circular, 16 Oct. 1857.
14 GH 8/34 Schedule 25, 22 Feb. 1858.
15 Goedhals (1979), p.46.
16 MIC 172/2, Cory Library, USPG Archives, Journal of HT Waters, Reel 8, 9 Jan. 1858. See also the case of Mhala [Ch. 7/4].
17 GH 8/32 J Maclean-F Travers, 5 July 1857; Goedhals (1979), p.82; BK 2 G Grey-H Cotterill, 8 Feb. 1858; GH 8/50 J Maclean-G Grey, 17 Sept. 1857.
18 GH 30/12 G Grey-H Cotterill, 7 July 1857.
19 GH 8/32 H Kayser-H Lucas, 18 June 1857; Goedhals (1979), p.44; GH 8/32 W Greenstock-J Gawler, 26 June 1857.
20 MIC 172/2, Cory Library, USPG Archives, Reel 2, H Cotterill-Bullock, 9 June, 7 Aug. 1857; MS 16713/3 H Cotterill-H Kitton, 18 Jan. 1859; Goedhals (1979), p.32; GH 20/2/1 C Lange-J Maclean, 9 March 1858.
21 MIC 172/2, Cory Library, USPG Archives, Reel 2, H Cotterill-USPG, 21 Jan. 1858.
22 BK 382 Schedule 52, 29 Aug. 1861; Goedhals (1979), p.108; Chalmers (1878), pp.263-8.
23 Chalmers (1878), pp.373, 392, 395.
24 GH 8/31 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 11 April 1857; GH 8/50 J Maclean-C Brownlee, 13 April 1857.
25 GH 8/50 J Gawler-J Maclean, 27 Oct. 1857.
26 MSB 139, South African Library, Cumming Papers, Item 17, Diary, 14 Sept. 1857.
27 For a list of the chief’s children who went with the main party in February 1858, see GH 8/39 J Maclean-G Grey, 15 Aug. 1859. For an indication that some chiefs gave their consent voluntarily, see BK 82 M Kayser-J. Maclean, 2 March 1858.
28 This section is based on J Hodgson (1979). 1 am aware that there are other dimensions to the Kaffir/Zonnebloem College story, especially with regard to the role of Bishop R Gray, but constraints of space and structure prevent me from entering more fully into the matter.
29 GH 8/35 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 9 Aug. 1858. It is clear from this letter that the idea of visiting Cape Town originated with Sandile himself and not with Grey or Brownlee.
30 Soga (1983), p.85. There is an account of Sandile’s visit to Cape Town in Hodgson (1980).
31 For Emma Sandile, Hodgson (1987).
32 Brownlee (1916), pp.252-4.
33 Theal (1876), Vol. 2, p.59; Goedhals (1979), p.142.
34 GH 8/30 Schedule 372, 29 Dec. 1856; GH 8/31 Schedule 378, 10 Jan. 1857; GH 8/34 Schedule 6, 18 Jan. 1858; LG 410 J Warner-R Southey, 11 Sept. 1857.
35 Comment of Mr Blanckenburg, one of Cape Town’s city commissioners, South African Commercial Advertiser, 1 Oct. 1857. The Xhosa immigration to the Western Province and the colonial reaction to it is a vast subject which cannot be dealt with here.
CHAPTER 9 – Under Our Thumb
CHAPTER 9
Under Our Thumb
1. THE FADANA PATROL
In the open plains between the Drakensberg and the northern border of Sarhili’s territory lay the Thembu kingdom. The Cattle-Killing movement in Thembuland has not featured prominently in these pages, partly because of lack of information and partly because the circumstances there were somewhat different: Thembuland was outside British Kaffraria and hence beyond the immediate purview of Grey and Maclean. Since Thembuland lay north and east of Xhosaland, it was shielded from the full impact of colonialism by the Xhosa kingdom, which provided it with a sort of protective barrier. The Thembu King and most of his subordinate chiefs regarded the colonial government as valuable allies in their historical rivalry with the more powerful Xhosa, and had consistently if passively supported the colonial side during the many frontier wars of the nineteenth century.
But the Tshatshu and the Ndungwana Thembu, who bore the brunt of settler expansionism from the northeastern Cape, shared most of the attitudes of the Xhosa to their south. The Tshatshu had lost both their lands and their chief, Maphasa, during the War of Mlanjeni, and Qwesha, chief of the Ndungwana, was deprived of his chieftainship by his son Darhala and the pro-colonial faction of his chiefdom. Their country was given out to settlers as the new district of Queenstown and they themselves were resettled in the so-called ‘Tambookie Location’ under the supervision of Agent JC Warner. It was among these dispossessed and relocated Thembu that the Cattle-Killing took deepest root. Despite all the efforts of the chiefs, the missionaries and the colonial authorities, about one third of the Thembu living in the ‘Tambookie Location’ killed their cattle and over half failed to plant.1
The leader of the Thembu believers was Chief Fadana, who had been Regent of the Thembu kingdom betwen 1830 and 1840, but whose political star had long since waned. Fadana had been chased into the ‘Tambookie Location’ along with all his neighbours after the War of Mlanjeni. He was living the quiet life of a minor chief, head of about 20 homesteads, when Nongqawuse’s prophecies were heard in Thembuland.2 Fadana was a relation by marriage of the strongly believing Maqoma, and he was moreover a diviner and magician of some repute. He was joined by Qwesha and some of his sons, who wished to recover the power they had lost to Darhala after 1853. Yeliswa, the widow of Maphasa, wavered but ultimately obeyed the order to kill. ‘Umhlakaza spoke with God,’ she said, ‘
therefore we must believe him.’3 All the other Thembu chiefs came down firmly against the movement, most crucially the Regent Joyi, who visited the ‘Tambookie Location’ at Agent Warner’s suggestion to lend his weight to the struggle against the prophecies. He was still there after the Great Disappointment, when the repentant Thembu believers cast themselves on his mercy:
Your children have fallen; the cattle are dead; but now we see your [Joyi’s] face we shall live and not die. We have been listening to a lie; we have been led astray by falsehood, and have got bewildered in a black mist …
Mercy! Mercy! Mercy! Your children have not so far gone astray that they may not be recovered; they have not all fallen; many have been wise enough not to listen to these lies; and many who have listened have only done so with one ear; the cattle are not all dead, and there is still a little corn left for our children to eat. Mercy! Mercy! Mercy! We are your children. Finish us, but remember that we are your children!4
