by Peires, Jeff
But none of these indiscretions bothered the Governor’s superiors half as much as Grey’s attempts to resume British sovereignty over the Orange Free State, which the Colonial Office had given up with much relief in 1854. Grey made it clear soon after he arrived that he thought this was a mistake, and the war which erupted in 1858 between Moshoeshoe’s Sotho and the Free State Boers, far from frightening him off, only confirmed his opinion. When the Free State, defeated by Moshoeshoe and thoroughly unable to defend itself any further, indicated an interest in rejoining the Cape, Grey immediately brought the matter before the colonial Parliament in defiance of his instructions from London. Bulwer-Lytton, the Colonial Secretary, was tired of Grey’s continual disobedience and ordered him recalled. Not only the Xhosa, but the Thembu, the Mpondo and all the other Xhosa-speaking peoples rejoiced at his departure ‘to a man’, for they realised that he aimed to steal the land and the independence of every black nation in the neighbourhood of the Cape.3
To Grey’s surprise, he was greeted in London by the news that his old friend, the Duke of Newcastle, had taken over the Colonial Office and reinstated him in the Governorship he had lost. It was a glorious vindication for Grey, but it was also the high watermark of his career for, on the long voyage back to the Cape, nemesis struck him from a wholly unexpected source. His wife, Lady Lucy Grey, commenced an ardent flirtation with their fellow passenger, Admiral Henry Keppel. Estranged from her husband ever since his callous indifference to the loss of their only child way back in the Australian days, Lady Lucy attached herself to the dashing admiral, in her own words, ‘like a creeping plant, clinging to a support that was unable to bear the strain’.4 She sent him a note, asking him to unblock the interleading door between their cabins so that she could come to him in the night. This note was intercepted by Grey, who went quite mad with fury. He threatened to kill his wife or, alternatively, to kill himself. Lady Grey was disembarked at Rio, and remained separated from her husband for the next 36 years.
Most men might have been glad to hush up such an incident, but with Grey pride took second place to revenge. Even though he himself had been unfaithful on numerous occasions and once even kept a mistress in the house, he trumpeted his wrongs all over Cape society and the world at large, little caring how much this served to prolong and aggravate the scandal. He set spies on Lady Grey in London, he sold the house she lived in, and eventually he intercepted another letter from Keppel, which he sent on to the Colonial Secretary in the hope that it would ruin the admiral’s career. He spent the remainder of his Cape governorship quite inactive from rage, pursuing his grand schemes for more annexations in the Free State and Natal half-heartedly if at all. An old missionary acquaintance, who met him by chance, was quite astonished when Grey greeted him by name: ‘Otherwise I should not have discovered [recognised] him at all, I fear – as I had not done till he spoke – so broken down – so unlike himself.’5
Anxious to end the Governor’s pursuit of Admiral Keppel, the Colonial Secretary offered Grey a second spell as Governor of New Zealand, where the Maori King movement now challenged British sovereignty over most of the North Island.6 For a brief period, the old Grey flickered to life again. He proposed new self-governing institutions for the Maoris to pre-empt the King movement, and he instigated the invasion of the Maori territory of Waikato, complete with the usual Grey apparatus of false accusations, wholesale land confiscations and arbitrary court-martials. But Grey’s spell was broken beyond repair. The Maoris were thoroughly disillusioned with British rule, and Grey was the last Governor on earth that they were prepared to trust.
Once the legend of his personal influence over the Maoris was exposed as a myth, Grey had nothing new to offer. The Dr Jekyll in him weakened, and the Mr Hyde burst ever more vigorously forth. His hands trembled, he lost his nerve, and he chickened out of important meetings with Maori chiefs. Most of his energy was consumed in endless petty bickering with his generals and his ministers, and the periods of inactivity and depression caused by his ‘wound’ multiplied in frequency and intensity. While New Zealand sank ever deeper into debt and civil war, Grey occupied his time plotting and scheming to outwit a colonial politician or get a general dismissed. The Colonial Office’s disillusionment was slow in coming, but when it finally arrived, it was total and absolute. Only the fact that his term of office was nearly up saved him from the disgrace of a recall and, as it was, his replacement was sent out a few months early. On the express instructions of the relevant minister, the Colonial Office declined to send Grey the customary note of thanks, or even to admit that he had ‘done his utmost’ to promote the interests of New Zealand. ‘I don’t think [he] is likely to be re-employed,’ was the Colonial Secretary’s only comment on Grey’s 25 years of devoted service.7
After a brief spell in England during which he agitated on the Irish land question, stood unsuccessfully for Parliament and utterly failed to find another job, Grey returned to New Zealand. He transformed his home at Kawau Island into a strange, living, fantasy world of exotic plants and animals. Peacocks, kookaburras and Chinese pheasants mixed with monkeys, wallabies, springbok and kangaroos against a background of cork, walnut, breadfruit, pomegranate and red gum trees, while New Zealand pohutukawa flourished alongside Brazilian palms, Indian deodars, Cape silver ferns and and Fijian spider lilies. Grey’s favourite trick with visitors was to take them out into this jungle, provoke a wild bull to charge them, and then shoot it plumb between the eyes.8
In 1874 a quirk of New Zealand politics summoned Grey from this fantastic retreat to defend the provincial rights of Auckland against the powers of the New Zealand central government. Grey found this a convenient platform for his accumulated grievances against the English landed aristocracy and their New Zealand counterparts. For five years he enjoyed an amazing Indian summer, including two years as Prime Minister, during which he stomped the country denouncing big landowners and corrupt businessmen, and advocating radical land taxes and universal manhood suffrage. Alas for Grey! He was born to dictate only to helpless, conquered Third World peoples, and he found he was unable to deal with fellow white settlers over whom he was granted neither the power to decree nor the might to coerce. He gave way, as usual, to petty jealousy and intrigues which culminated in his being dumped by his own supporters and confined to the back benches.
There he continued, partly as a prophet but mostly as a harmless joke until his eighty-second year when, driven by a whim to see his beloved Queen Victoria once more before she died, he returned to England. He saw Her Majesty as he wished, but, totally unexpectedly, Lady Grey declared it her duty to return to him after 36 years of blissful separation, and descended on his small hotel in South Kensington. She was most put out, however, to discover how little money he still had left, and had to be hustled off to Bournemouth by friends. Grey never quite recovered from her visit, but died peacefully in her absence in September 1898, aged 86 years.9
It devolved upon Chief Commissioner John Maclean to put the finishing touches to the new British Kaffraria. We have already seen how the lands of Mhala, Maqoma, Phatho and the other unbelievers had been confiscated, and the unbelievers moved into villages to facilitate administration, taxation and white settlement. The lands thus made available were surveyed into 317 white farms of about 2 000 acres each. The white population increased sixfold (from 949 to 5388) in the two years of the Cattle-Killing, while the black population declined by nearly two thirds (105 000 to 38500) during the same period. While this did not exactly equalise the racial mixture of the region to the extent that Grey had hoped, it did increase the white population from less than 1 per cent to a healthy 12,5 per cent.10 Some sections of the district were kept open for government use, or for purchase by the anticipated class of Xhosa peasants in lots of between 10 and 80 acres. Grey wished to charge £1 an acre for land in British Kaffraria, a hefty price in view of the fact that established farms in the Cape Colony sold at less than half that amount, while unimproved la
nd in the Colony was available at from two to four shillings an acre. Since white farmers were not interested in buying such expensive properties,11 Grey was forced to virtually give it away to them at a quitrent of £2 per annum for 1 000 acres.
Potential black farmers were given no such concessions, however, but were required to pay the original £1 an acre. Even though there was much enthusiasm among both Xhosa and Mfengu for individual properties of this type, very few of them – mainly government interpreters and other salaried employees – were able to afford it.12 Grey had, perhaps, achieved his ambition of creating a ‘mixed community’ in British Kaffraria, but economically speaking it was no contest. The majority of blacks were concentrated in villages with miserable little four-acre plots, except for a tiny privileged minority who owned smallholdings of not more than 80 acres. The white settlers, on the other hand, received huge farms of 2 000 or so acres of better land, at a nominal rental and, literally, no capital outlay at all.13 One consequence of this was that the most prosperous section of the community (the white farmers) paid virtually nothing into the Kaffrarian treasury, and the government’s income depended on the ‘hut tax’ of ten shillings per annum, which the downtrodden Xhosa (and Mfengu) were forced to contribute towards the costs of this unequal administration.14
Maclean had very little difficulty squeezing the people into villages or extorting their hut tax, but he dreaded the day when the Xhosa chiefs would be released from their island prison. ‘I look forward with much apprehension to the time when the sentences passed on the [Xhosa] chiefs now confined in Robben Island shall have expired,’ he confided to Grey. ‘I fear they will find that in their absence their country has been divided amongst Europeans, and their tribes dispersed.’ He suggested that the captive chiefs be outlawed for life, or, alternatively, that he be given sweeping and arbitrary powers over all Xhosa in British Kaffraria. Both Grey and his successor, Governor Wodehouse, resisted these demands, which they knew to be unnecessary. By the time that they were released from prison, the Xhosa chiefs were old and broken men, and the material basis of their former power was gone forever.
Nevertheless, Maclean was not taking any chances. He quite illegally told Phatho, the first of the chiefs to return, that if he ever attempted to rally his subjects round him, he would be sent back to Cape Town. Phatho pleaded ‘that he had no wish to establish a chieftainship for himself … but that he wished that a location … should be laid out for his people’. Maclean replied in the most emphatic manner ‘that it was a decided point that his [Phatho’s] people should never be together again’, and he again threatened the chief with a return to exile. He reminded Phatho that he was an old man who could not expect to live much longer, and advised him ‘as a friend’ to spend his few remaining years in peace and quietness.15
Maclean himself did not have much longer to live, though he did not know it. Some time in 1861 a gun went off by accident a little too near his right temple, and he began to suffer from acute neuralgia worsening into fits which rendered him wholly incapable. When, in 1864, it was decided to incorporate British Kaffraria into the Cape Colony, Maclean became something of an embarrassment and he was shipped off to be Lieutenant-Governor of Natal. There his condition deteriorated, as his old friend Gawler explained.
[For five days, Maclean had been having a fit every 20 minutes.] During the intervals, he was perfectly rational and would do business though latterly much exhausted. At the end of the five days, the intervals diminished during 24 hours to a quarter of an hour, ten minutes, five, four, three, two, one, and then passed off into one continued one in which he lay for some hours with nothing but a quivering over his body, his eyes fixed and hands clenched.16
Maclean survived, but his left side was now completely paralysed. He strove to perform his official duties, but his mind would not answer the call of his will. When they brought him back from Natal to his little seaside cottage near Cove Rock, where the prophet Nxele had attempted to raise the dead in 1818, they discovered that he had completely mismanaged his finances and was hopelessly in debt. His sons were ‘fine young fellows’ and spoke Xhosa fluently, but he had paid so little attention to their education that they could scarcely read or write. Within a short five years, the Chief Commissioner had fallen from the heights of dictatorship to a state of utter physical, mental and financial destitution. He lingered on until 1874, then died almost forgotten by the British Kaffraria he had done so much to shape.
Charles Brownlee inherited Maclean’s mantle as the European who best understood the ‘native mind’, and when the Cape attained Responsible Government, he was the natural choice as its first Minister of Native Affairs.17 Brownlee was a great advocate of ‘civilising the Xhosa’, and he looked on Grey’s system of 1856 as the basis of Cape racial policy. But he paid surprisingly little attention to British Kaffraria and was content to leave Sandile and all his other Xhosa friends to the care of his drunken former clerk. Most of Brownlee’s energies were devoted to bringing the benefits of Cape government to the independent black nations east of the Kei and, one by one, the Thembu, the Bhaca and the Mpondomise signed away their freedom and accepted colonial magistrates and colonial control. One indirect effect of these changes was the encirclement of Sarhili and his diehard Gcaleka Xhosa who, unsurprisingly, were not inclined to volunteer for colonial domination. Partly due to Brownlee’s mismanagement, clashes between Sarhili and the Colony’s Mfengu clients finally escalated into the Ninth Frontier War (1877-8), and further bungling by Brownlee resulted in the involvement of Sandile and the Ngqika Xhosa on the side of their King. This discredited Brownlee in the eyes of his ministerial colleagues and Governor Frere, who called him ‘fatally deficient’ in nerve, promptitude and judgement.18
Although Brownlee undoubtedly was, as we have stressed, a humane man with a genuine liking for individual Xhosa, his paternalist conviction that he knew what was best for the black man led him into measures which were as harsh and dictatorial as those of Maclean and Grey. Thus he personally ordered all the Ngqika Xhosa into transKeian exile at the end of the Ninth Frontier War. He advised Sir Bartle Frere in his disastrous Natal policies, and he personally carried the unacceptable ultimatum to King Cetshwayo which provoked the Zulu War of 1879. As chief magistrate of East Griqualand, his last official post, he unwillingly assisted in the disarmament policies which led to the transKeian rebellions of 1880, and he consistently urged the subjugation of the Mpondo, the last independent black people on the southeastern coast of Africa.
Around the middle of the 1870s, Brownlee became afflicted by a rodent ulcer of the face which slowly ate away his nose. He visited London to seek medical assistance on a number of occasions, but even the famous surgeon, Sir Joseph Lister, was unable to effect a cure. He died at King William’s Town in 1890.
Most of Grey’s magistrates fought in the Indian Mutiny, but none of them did anything of note. George Colley, the first magistrate of the transKei, and Eustace Robertson, the magistrate with Anta, saw service in the Red River Rebellion led by the half-crazed Louis Riel, the prophet of the French-Canadian metis. Colley was killed by the Transvaal Boers at Majuba in 1881, and Frederick Reeve, the magistrate with Kama, fell in Sri Lanka in 1869. The health of Sir Walter Currie, the dashing commandant of the Frontier Armed and Mounted Police, collapsed after his campaign against the Korannas near Upington in 1878, and he returned to Grahamstown to find himself a bankrupt and his beautiful mansion of Oatlands sold over his head. Herbert Vigne, the magistrate with Phatho, was appointed Commissioner of the Crown Reserve but fell from grace on account of his polygamous relationships with a daughter of Stokwe and a granddaughter of Phatho. Dr Fitzgerald pottered about the great Native Hospital he built in King William’s Town until he finally retired to Ramsgate in 1890.19
Major Gawler was appointed deputy adjutant-general to the troops in India, and commanded an expedition to Sikkim in 1861. He returned to South Africa in 1863 and spent a couple of years as military
secretary in Grahamstown before returning to England. In 1872, he was appointed Keeper of the Crown Jewels at the Tower of London, a post which apparently left him too much time for reflection, for the middle-aged Gawler became an ardent millenarian and a leading exponent of the British Israel movement. The British, he believed, were descendants via the Scythians of the Israelite tribe of Dan, and the British Empire was God’s successor to ancient Israel.
Surely among the nations … there is no people or race in whom this wonderful doctrine of election is so specially manifest … as our own … Thanks be to God, the sun never sets on the British Empire; and wherever the British flag flies, the Gospel of Christ is preached; and the Word of God is sent out from our island home in the language of every nation under heaven …
Israel we know to be a chosen race, but how comes it that, in this more blessed dispensation, the ark of the Covenant – now the testimony of Jesus – is, to speak soberly and practically, in the almost exclusive keeping of the British nation.20
In works such as The Two Olive Trees and Our Scythian Ancestors, Gawler painstakingly examined Greek and Hebrew texts, and proved by means of abstruse mathematical calculations from the dimensions of the tabernacles in the Biblical wilderness that the apocalyptical struggle between good (Britain) and evil (Russia) had commenced in the Middle East in 1875, and would continue until ‘great Babylon’ would ‘come into rememberance before God’, and ‘Communism, Nihilism, infidelity and Popery’ were obliterated. In addition to these eschatological speculations, Gawler wrote a pamphlet on military tactics and a book on his expedition to Sikkim. But of Nongqawuse, the real-life prophetess whom he had captured and who had lived in his house for several months, he never wrote a single word.
