A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  Unlike the British 1820 Settlers, the Kat River people eventually became the victims of racism and official hostility. By 1847, Stockenstrom was out of office, and in that year the colonial government appointed T. J. Biddulph as magistrate in Kat River. Biddulph was an 1820 Settler and so was his successor, J. H. Bowker. Both held their subjects in utter contempt, calling them inferiors and wastrels and their settlement “the abode of idleness and imposture.”66 When some Khoikhoi managed to make a living by felling timber and taking it to market, Biddulph killed their business by quadrupling the license fee on timber. Not surprisingly, during the 1850-53 frontier war some of the Kat River people, including men like Andries Botha who had led loyal Khoikhoi forces in the previous wars with distinction, sided with the Xhosa. Thereafter, the government yielded to the clamor among the British immigrants for the opening up of the fertile Kat River valley to white settlement. Whites began to pour into the area. With official support and relatively easy access to capital, they gradually edged the Khoikhoi people out of their landholdings.67

  As the collapse of the Kat River settlement shows, the land issue was intimately bound up with the question of political power. By the mid-nineteenth century, Great Britain was making its final breaks with its mercantilist heritage. The protective tariff on grain went in 1846, and with it the very idea of running a formal empire as a closed economy. In that heyday of British industrial power, British businessmen, confident in their capacity to outproduce, out-trade, and out-finance foreigners, were questioning the rationale for colonial dependency. Why should their tax money go to administering and policing overseas territories, when their inhabitants would choose to import British manufactures for their needs and to seek British markets for their produce, even if formal political ties were lacking? Businessmen did not govern England; but the Whig faction of the landed aristocracy and gentry who still controlled the British political system met them halfway. Their approach to the coloniaí question “was fashioned, not by a calculated appraisal of economic interests, but by a desire to give British communities overseas the fullest possible control over their internal affairs that circumstances permitted.”68

  This approach was echoed by British colonists in North America, Australia, and New Zealand, who were involved in various conflicts with their metropolitan officials and nominated councils. Accordingly, by midcen-tury the British government was devolving increased power to those settler communities. Canada, whose elective assemblies dated back to 1791, set the pace, advancing from locally elected legislative bodies (”representative government”) toward legislative control over the executive (”responsible government”). Australia and New Zealand followed suit. In all those cases, the settlers outnumbered the aborigines and nearly all of them came from Britain.

  How was the Cape Colony to fit into the imperial picture? Was it to be treated as another Canada? Or like India, where the British government of the mid-nineteenth century had no intention of creating elective institutions, since the Indian people vastly outnumbered the tiny pockets of white settlers? Hesitatingly, Britain opted for the Canadian model. Inside the colony, 1820 Settlers, alienated by Somerset’s autocracy and confident that they could handle their racial problems more effectively than British governors, initiated the demand for “British institutions.” The British government made the first cautious concessions in 1825 and 1834, first obliging the governor to act in consultation with a council composed of the other senior officials, and then increasing the power of the council and enlarging it to include a number of nominated colonists as well as officials. The effects were shown in the Masters and Servants Ordinance of 1841, which began to undermine the 50th Ordinance. Even so, colonists were not satisfied with this constitutional arrangement, which left great power in the hands of officials responsible to London. It broke down completely in 1849, when a British attempt to offload a shipload of British convicts on the Cape Colony evoked a rare response of indignant cooperation between all sections of the white population—British and Afrikaner, western and eastern, rich and poor. The government was obliged to yield. The Cape did not follow the Australian colonies into becoming a dumping ground for British convicts.

  By then, the British government had already asked the local officials to suggest a constitutional framework for representative institutions. As consultations continued at the Cape, the anticonvict coalition fell apart, and ethnic, racial, and class cleavages took over. The ethnic cleavage impelled the leading British merchants, professional people, and farmers, who had the wealth but not the numbers, to opt for high property qualifications for the franchise and for membership in parliament; Afrikaners, who had superior numbers but were mostly quite poor, preferred low qualifications. The racial cleavage prompted many white colonists, both British and Afrikaner, to desire high qualifications, whereas a few influential white liberals, such as Andries Stockenstrom, the former landdrost, and John Fair-bairn, editor of the Cape Town Commercial Advertiser, favored qualifications that would bring some of the Khoikhoi and former slaves into the political system.

  When the final draft was prepared at the Cape for submission to London, Acting Governor Charles Darling and Attorney-General William Porter opted for a liberal solution. In 1853 the British government thus provided the Cape Colony with a bicameral parliament empowered to legislate on domestic matters subject to a British veto, while the executive branch continued to be filled by officials responsible to London. The parliamentary franchise was open to any male adult inhabitant, irrespective of race or ethnicity, who occupied property valued at £2 5 or who earned either a salary of £50 or a salary of £25 if board and lodging were provided.69

  In principle, this constitution was a victory for the liberal point of view. It was, indeed, significant that the principle of nonracialism was incorporated in the constitution. In practice, however, Cape politics were always dominated by the white population. Handicapped by poverty and by white control of the press and of the machinery to register voters and conduct elections, people who were not white never amounted to more than 15 percent of the colonial electorate and never produced a member of the colonial parliament. Their impotence was soon demonstrated. In 1856, the Cape parliament passed the Masters and Servants Act, which made breach of contract a criminal offense and obliged magistrates to impose imprisonment without the option of a fine on workers who refused to work or used insulting language to employers.70

  The British government raised no questions about this act. By 1856, the tide of philanthropism had receded in Britain. Indeed, in responding to the evangelical pressures during the previous decades, the British government had never contemplated transforming the underlying structure of colonial society. Slavery was to end and the Khoikhoi were to be freed from the most blatant abuses, but the white colonists were to continue to have the use of their labor. The most advanced evangelicals of the day, including John Philip, did not look much further. Philip, like other Europeans of his time, did not believe that Khoikhoi would ever be the economic and social equals of Whites. With his doctrine of moral and material improvement, moreover, he was looking to a free market to produce a humane outcome. The notion that the state itself should actively assist the subordinate classes to achieve prosperity and substantial equality was not in his repertoire.71 After emancipation in the Cape Colony, as later in the United States, the forms were the forms of freedom, but the facts were still the facts of exploitation.

  Emancipation gave the Khoikhoi and the former slaves the same legal status, and officials soon began to refer to them comprehensively as the Cape Coloured People. The term has stuck. In twentieth-century South Africa, the Coloured People became one of the four main racial categories recognized by the South African government, as distinct from the ruling class, which was deemed to be White; from the Bantu-speaking Africans, who formed the majority of the population; and from Asians, who had begun to be imported from India to Natal as indentured laborers in the 1860s.

  In fact, biological and cultural differences
among the Coloured People were immense. Those who lived in Cape Town had a long tradition of urban life. Most were of slave origin, and they included a cohesive Muslim community. As we have seen, the Cape Town slaves had been able to acquire skills as artisans (builders, carpenters, smiths, tailors, and cobblers), as well as domestic servants and laborers. The greater the distance from the town, the larger the proportion of Khoikhoi among the Coloured People and the more severe their subjection. By 1870, the traditional culture and social networks of the Khoikhoi had been destroyed by the process of conquest and subjection. Scattered as they were in small groups under white control, they had no means of contesting the new order.

  Under favorable circumstances, the people who became known as Coloured People might have been expected to merge socially and biologically with the Afrikaners. There had always been considerable cohabitation across the color line, and the Afrikaner community had incorporated many individuals of mixed descent. Afrikaner race consciousness, however, was strong enough to limit that process. In 1857, social pressures caused the synod of the Dutch Reformed church of the colony to authorize the separation of Coloured from white congregations, which led to the creation of a distinct and subordinate mission church for Coloured People. By 1861, moreover, Coloured children were effectively banned from the public schools. Those who received any formal education did so in mission institutions, which transmitted little secular knowledge. In spite of the non-racial terminology of the 1853 constitution, the white rulers of the Cape Colony were treating the Coloured People as a distinct and inferior community, dependent on white employers.72

  The first official census of the Cape Colony (which was subject to a large margin of error) was taken in 1865, on the eve of the mineral discoveries that would transform the entire Southern African region. The population was reported to comprise about 180,000 “Europeans,” 200,000 “Hottentots” and “Others” (that is, Coloured People), and 100,000 “Kafirs”—people of African farming stock who were becoming the main labor force in the eastern districts.73

  With a few breaks, the colonial economy had been expanding continually since the time of van Riebeeck. Contrary to earlier views, which accepted burgher polemics against the Dutch East India Company at face value, Peter van Duin and Robert Ross have shown that this was true throughout the Dutch period: “All major sectors of the Cape’s agrarian economy, namely the production of wheat and wine and the ranching of sheep and cattle, underwent continual, if relatively gradual expansion . . . in response to a steady expansion of the market, both external and, particularly, local.”74

  Expansion continued under the British. After 1820, the pastoral districts became the source of a large production of wool from merino sheep imported by British officers. Between 1860 and 1869, wool accounted for 73 percent of all exports from the colony. The economic infrastructure also became more complex. After a pause following the 1820 settlement, British immigration resumed with government assistance. The colonial government also improved the roads, inaugurated a postal and a telegraph service, and started to build a railway from Cape Town to Stellenbosch and down the Cape peninsula to Wynberg. Two banks, incorporated in London, amalgamated many of the small, local banks that had sprung up since the 1820s and established branches throughout the region. Foreign trade was dominated by Great Britain. In 1865, Britain provided 80 percent of the imports, which were valued at £2,103,000, and absorbed 85 percent of the exports, which were valued at £2,218,000. The colony was still essentially rural. The largest towns were Cape Town, with 28,000 inhabitants, and Port Elizabeth with 9,00o.75 There was also a widespread network of small towns—local markets and merchant centers.

  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the legal practices of the Dutch, notably the institution of slavery, had led to the development of a racial order. Under the British, the racial order had adapted to the transition from formal slavery to formal freedom. In the coming century the racial order would also survive and adapt to the advent of industrialization and urbanization—-a striking example of the durability of deeprooted social structures.

  Even so, many Afrikaners, especially those in the eastern districts, found it difficult to accept these and other changes. In 1815, when a few impoverished trekboers had fomented a rebellion, the substantial farmers had joined with the British forces in suppressing them.76 During the 1830s, however, anti-British feeling was widespread among all classes of eastern Afrikaners, and by 1840 some six thousand men, women, and children—about 9 percent of the total white population of the Colony—had left their homes with their wagons, cattle, sheep, and all movable property. They took with them perhaps five thousand Coloured’servants, most of whom were of Khoikhoi descent, though some were former slaves who had become apprentices in 1834. The Afrikaner migrants—later known as voortrekkers (pioneers)—were escaping from an alien government whose policies they had come to detest and hoping to find some Promised Land where they might make their own arrangements with one another, with their servants, and with the other inhabitants.77

  Since 1806, the world the Afrikaners had known had been transformed. Their customary vent for population increase by expansion was blocked by Africans in the east and by the aridity of the land in the north. In 1813, moreover, the government stopped letting people occupy land in the old easy way, by paying a nominal fee for the use of six thousand acres. Instead, a quitrent system, intended to promote more intensive farming practices, made land ownership more legally secure but more expensive.78

  Under the British regime, the autonomy that the farmers had enjoyed under the Dutch East India Company was ending. Whereas the company’s colonial state had been extremely weak beyond the vicinity of Cape Town and Stellenbosch, the British gradually asserted control over the entire colony, and in so doing emphasized British culture and institutions. From 1811 on, judges of the colonial court went annually on circuit to the various district headquarters to hear criminal as well as civil cases. The pace of administrative change quickened after the arrival of the 1820 Settlers, who pressed for anglicization. Previously, the British had preserved the Dutch system of district administration, under landdrosts appointed by the central government and heemraden and veldkornets drawn from the farming population. By 1834, the powers of the veldkornets had been curtailed, and the landdrosts and heemraden had been replaced by magistrates without local affiliations. In place of the amateur (and sometimes corrupt) bench of Dutch officials, moreover, the government appointed qualified lawyers from Britain to the Court of Justice and introduced British legal procedures.

  There were also cultural changes. The government continued to support the Dutch Reformed church but asserted supervision over it. Moreover, although English was a foreign language for the Afrikaner population, by the 183os it alone was authorized for use in government offices, law courts, and public schools.

  It was in this changing institutional and cultural environment that Afrikaners experienced the dislocations that were inevitable short-term consequences of emancipation. Initially, many newly emancipated Khoikhoi and slaves left the farms, hoping to enjoy their freedom. Some crowded into the mission stations, others squatted on Crown lands or moved to the towns and villages, and for a time, many roamed the countryside, trying to live by pilfering. As a result, white farmers were not only short of labor but also the victims of social unrest; hence their demand for a law against vagrancy and their disgust when the British government disallowed it.

  Afrikaners experienced further setbacks. Many who lived near the Xhosa frontier lost livestock and other property during the invasion of December 1834 and were outraged in 1836, when London reversed the postwar plans of the governor to annex more land from the Africans and make it available for white settlement. Many former slave owners were disappointed financially when they learned that the British government was providing as compensation only about one-third of the assessed value of their slaves. Moreover, claims had to be proved in London, with the result that agents purchased the claims at a redu
ced rate and the owners eventually received no more than one-fifth of their slaves’ assessed value.

  Many of these changes affected farmers in the western as well as the eastern districts. Indeed, far more slaves were held in the west than the east. Nevertheless, although eastern farmers had used far more Khoikhoi than slave laborers, most of them had possessed at least one slave, and they rather than the westerners were most deeply affected by the other events. The west was a more stable region. Its white population was more sedentary and more fully integrated into the market economy. Under the British, many substantial townsmen and wine and grain farmers became involved in the social life emanating from government house, whereas eastern Afrikaners of all classes were alienated from the British regime and regarded it as responsible for all their misfortunes. As a result, nearly all the Afrikaners who left the colony were easterners. About one quarter of the Afrikaner inhabitants of the eastern districts took part in the remarkable exodus that historians call the Great Trek.79

  Piet Retief, one of the emigrant leaders, informed the Grahamstown Journal that they were leaving because of “the turbulent and dishonest conduct of vagrants,” because of the losses they had sustained through the emancipation of their slaves, and because of “the plunder which we have endured from the Caffres and other coloured classes.” He added a complaint of the sort that would recur again and again, down to the late twentieth century: “We complain of the unjustifiable odium which has been cast upon us by interested and dishonest persons, under the cloak of religion [that is, the missionaries], whose testimony is believed in England, to the exclusion of all evidence in our favour; and we can foresee, as a result of this prejudice, nothing but the total ruin of our country.”80