The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  The first major episode of African resistance came in October 1836 when an Ndebele army of about 6,000 men attacked Hendrik Potgieter’s party of thirty-five trekkers at Vegkop, just south of the Vaal. Warned in advance of Mzilikazi’s approaching forces, the trekkers lashed together their wagons in a circle to form a laager, with thorny branches filling gaps in the perimeter. The outcome was decisive. Not a single Ndebele managed to break into the circle of wagons. Though two trekkers died, Boer musket-fire left hundreds of Ndebele dead. A missionary who witnessed the return of Mzilikazi’s battered amabutho recorded that ‘there was nothing but lamentation heard in the land for weeks on account of those slain in battle’.

  In January 1837, strengthened by new trekboer arrivals from the Cape, Potgieter led a commando across the Vaal River to retaliate against Mzilikazi, destroying an Ndebele settlement at Mosega. The dominance that Mzilikazi had exerted over the highveld for more than a decade was effectively broken. Many of the Tswana clans he had subdued turned against him, intent on regaining control of their land. Mzilikazi withdrew to the lower Marico valley, but in November 1837, another Boer commando, together with Griqua and Rolong auxiliaries, pursued him there. Seeking safer pastures, he led his people across the Limpopo, setting up a new kingdom on the edge of the Matopo hills.

  The defeats inflicted on Mzilikazi encouraged increasing numbers of disaffected Cape burghers and their followers to try their luck across the Orange River drifts. By the middle of 1837 a total of about 2,000 emigrants were based in large encampments between the Orange and Vaal rivers. Among the new arrivals was Piet Retief, author of the ‘Manifesto’ published in the Graham’s Town Journal, at the head of a party of a hundred wagons.

  Along with several other emigrant leaders, Retief set his sights on the hinterland of Port Natal. Retief reached the Drakensberg passes in October 1837. Leaving his main party in laager, he took fifteen men down the escarpment heading for Port Natal, 200 miles away, intending first to confer with white traders there and then to venture to Dingane’s capital at uMgungundlovu to seek his permission to settle on the periphery of the Zulu kingdom, south of the Tugela River.

  The trading post at Port Natal by now included about forty whites. They had endeavoured to improve their makeshift settlement by laying out a proper street plan and allotting land for public functions. They had also decided to change the name of the settlement to D’Urban, in honour of the governor of the Cape Colony, in the hope that it might help them win British recognition. But the British government remained determined not to add to its territorial responsibilities.

  Retief was given a warm welcome by the traders, who saw the trekkers as potential allies able to counter the power of the Zulu kingdom. Assured of their support, Retief sent a letter to Dingane explaining that the trekkers wished to live in peace with the Zulus but he also referred ominously to Mzilikazi’s recent defeat at the hands of Boer commandos.

  Thus when Retief and his party of fifteen Boers arrived in uMgungundlovu in November, Dingane was already suspicious of their real intentions. Dingane’s sense of alarm only increased during their discussions. Using words of clear intimidation, Retief continued to point to the fate of Mzilikazi: ‘The great Book of God teaches us that kings who conducted themselves as Umsilikazi does are severely punished, and that it is not granted to them to live or reign long.’

  In order to stall negotiations, Dingane asked Retief, as a sign of goodwill, to capture for him a herd of Zulu cattle stolen by the Tlokwa chief Sekonyela and taken to his headquarters in the Caledon River valley. Retief duly agreed and returned to Durban. Ignoring a warning from Francis Owen, a British missionary at uMgungundlovu, that Dingane was not to be trusted, Retief sent messages to his followers waiting at the Drakensberg passes that their promised land below the escarpment was soon to be granted to them. Unaware of the danger, hundreds of trekkers began the perilous descent in their wagons and set up camps along the upper Tugela River and its tributaries. When their arrival was reported to Dingane, he took it as confirmation of a Boer invasion.

  In December, Retief led a commando back over the Drakensberg, took Sekonyela hostage, gained possession of the stolen cattle, then returned to his laager in January 1838 and sent a letter to Dingane telling him of the success of his expedition. Against the advice of other emigrant leaders, Retief decided to head to uMgungundlovu to conclude negotiations with a large, well-armed commando, confident that it would help persuade Dingane to give him permission to settle south of the Tugela. It was a fateful miscalculation.

  Accompanied by sixty-nine trekkers and thirty servants, Retief reached uMgungundlovu on 2 February. The following morning, the Boers put on a display of horsemanship, charging each other in mock combat, firing from the saddle. The Zulus, in turn, responded with war dances and military manoeuvres. In discussions with Dingane, Retief once again dwelt on the Boer victory over Mzilikazi and boasted of how he had dealt with Sekonyela.

  Concealing his anger at Retief’s contemptuous manner and the threat he posed, Dingane ostensibly agreed to accept white settlement. On 4 February, he was said to have put his mark on a document that Retief had drafted ceding him all land between the Tugela and Mzimvubu rivers. But after consulting his inner council of advisers, he gave orders for the murder of Retief’s entire party.

  On 6 February, as they prepared to depart in buoyant mood, the Boers and their servants were invited to take their leave of Dingane in the great cattle enclosure and to attend a farewell dance there. They suspected no treachery and agreed to pile their firearms at the entrance of the enclosure. As two regiments of warriors danced around them, Dingane suddenly clapped his hands and shouted: ‘Bulalai abaThakathi!’ – ‘Kill the wizards!’ The visitors were seized, beaten senseless and dragged off to an execution ground. Retief was the last to die, forced to witness his comrades being finished off, before he too was clubbed to death.

  A few hours later, Dingane sent out three regiments to attack Boer families scattered along the banks of the Bloukrans and Bushman’s rivers. Launching a night attack on 17 February, they killed 281 white men, women and children and 250 servants and captured about 35,000 cattle and sheep. The border lands became engulfed in running battles. Retreating into laagers, Boer families held on in perilous conditions. Durban’s white community joined the Boers. In retaliation, the Zulus sacked the settlement, destroying houses and slaughtering domestic animals.

  The tide of war turned when Andries Pretorius, an experienced commando leader from the Graaff-Reinet district, took command, enforcing tougher discipline on the trekkers and instilling in them the idea that they belonged to a chosen people called on to do God’s work. In December, Pretorius advanced deep into Zulu territory towards the main Zulu army, reaching the Ncome River on 15 December, constructing a laager of sixty-four wagons on a spit of land on the west bank. The force defending the laager consisted of 468 trekkers and three settlers from Durban with a contingent of about 120 black auxiliaries. Against them came an army of 12,000 Zulus, launching wave after wave of attacks. The commando lost not a single man. The Zulu lost more than 3,000 and eventually retreated.

  In the aftermath of the battle of Blood River, as the victorious Boers called it, the Zulu kingdom was rent apart. Amid growing dissension among the royal elite, Dingane’s half-brother, Mpande, fearing for his safety, fled southwards across the Tugela River with 17,000 followers and 25,000 cattle and settled temporarily a few miles north of Durban. It was an event so fraught with repercussions that it became known to the Zulus as ‘the breaking of the rope that held the nation together’. A Boer delegation went to visit him, accompanied by a French naturalist, Adulphe Delegorgue. In his account of the meeting, Delegorgue wrote admiringly of Mpande’s royal bearing: ‘a well-shaped head borne upon a superb body, shining and stout’; ‘brilliant black eyes’; ‘a high square forehead’; and ‘a ready smile expressive of quick comprehension’. And he contrasted it with the appearance of the Boers. ‘The comparison which I was at leisure to
make, was to the complete disadvantage of the farmers who surrounded him: great, gangling, long-limbed fellows, with clumsy gestures, awkward bearing, dull faces, faltering speech, gaping mouths, men made to drive oxen and to hold converse with them.’

  The outcome of the meeting was that Mpande and the Boers agreed on a plan to oust Dingane and install Mpande as king. In January 1839, Mpande’s army, reinforced by a Boer commando of 300 horsemen, advanced into Zululand, defeated Dingane’s forces and sent him fleeing northwards. He was killed shortly afterwards in the Lebombo mountains by the Swazi.

  Left to their own devices, the Boers consolidated their position south of the Tugela, carving out huge farms wherever good pasture and water were to be found. They established headquarters on the banks of the Msunduze River, naming it Pietermaritzburg in honour of the emigrant leaders, Piet Retief and Gert Maritz. They drew up a constitution, elected a volksraad (people’s council) of twenty-four men with executive and legislative powers and in 1839 hoisted the flag of the Republic of Natalia. Citizenship was confined to Dutch-speaking people of European descent who had quit the Cape Colony to found an independent republic. By 1842, the trekker community in Natalia had reached 6,000 men, women and children.

  The Republic of Natalia lasted for little more than three years. Its politicians continually squabbled. It lacked both revenue and administrative experience. The constitution itself had been drafted mainly by Jacobus Boshof, a young clerk on leave from Graaff-Reinet. He was subsequently appointed both landdrost of Pietermaritzburg and president of the Volksraad. Farmers also found difficulty in acquiring labour. Zulus and other local Nguni refused to work for them. Children were seized instead. Returning from the expedition against Dingane, every member of the Boer commando was authorised to seize four Zulu children to use as ‘apprentices’. Forced labour was a common practice. In a bid to intimidate neighbouring chiefdoms, Pretorius led a commando raid south of the Mzimkulu River in 1840, killing thirty people, abducting seventeen children for distribution as apprentices and making off with some 3,000 cattle. The impact of Boer depredations spread ever wider. Faced with an influx of Zulu migrants from the north, the Volksraad proposed a mass expulsion of Africans to the south to land belonging to the Mpondo kingdom.

  Reports of these activities in Natalia propelled the British authorities in the Cape to intervene. Britain had no strategic interest in Natal other than to prevent the port at Durban from falling into the hands of a rival European power. It was also wary of the cost of having to administer yet more territory. But British officials were alarmed by the amount of disruption the Boers were causing. They were further prompted by appeals for British protection from the Mpondo king, Faku. Missionaries were active in urging intervention. In 1842, the Cape government sent a force of 250 men to take possession of Durban. After a brief attempt at resistance, the Volksraad agreed to submit to British annexation. But when it became clear that the British authorities would not permit ‘any distinction of colour, origin, language or creed’, most of the trekkers streamed back across the Drakensberg to link up with other Boer groups that had remained on the highveld.

  For more than ten years, small groups of Boer emigrants scattered across the highveld vied with African chiefdoms to establish their own statelets. The entire region became an arena of disputes, conflicts, raids and counter-raids. In an endeavour to maintain some sort of stability along the Cape’s northern frontier, a succession of British governors was gradually drawn into the maelstrom. Their main objective was to establish a series of client states across the border that would bring a measure of law and order to the region. In a treaty signed in 1834, the Cape Colony had accorded due recognition to the Griqua kaptyn, Andries Waterboer, as an independent chief and agreed to pay him a salary of £100 a year for protecting the colonial frontier, warning of possible attacks and sending back fugitives. A similar treaty was signed in 1843 with another Griqua leader, Adam Kok, who had established a statelet based on Philippolis, a mission station to the east of Waterboer’s territory. The British also made an agreement in 1843 with the BaSotho leader Moshoeshoe, accepting his claim to be overlord of most of the lesser African chiefdoms north of the Caledon River.

  In 1846, the Cape government dispatched a British army officer, Major Henry Warden, across the border, appointing him as ‘Resident’ with the task of sorting out intractable disputes over land ownership. Warden established a suitable base at a farm called Bloem Fontein, once used by the German fugitive Jan Bloem and his group of Kora raiders. But Warden’s efforts were soon overtaken by another British initiative.

  In 1848, a new British governor, Sir Harry Smith, fresh from military victories in India, adopted a far more aggressive approach. Without consultation, he announced his intention to annex the entire area between the Orange and Vaal rivers. The area included not only numerous emigrant groups but nearly all of Moshoeshoe’s land. According to Smith, annexation was needed for the ‘protection and preservation of the just and hereditary rights of all the Native Chiefs’ and ‘the rule and government of Her Majesty’s subjects, their interests and welfare’.

  The emigrant leader, Andries Pretorius, had no intention of accepting Smith’s arbitrary plan. From his base north of the Vaal River, he organised a Boer commando to turf the British resident, Major Warden, out of Bloem Fontein. Relishing the opportunity for a fight, Smith retaliated with a force of British troops and Griqua auxiliaries, defeating Pretorius in a short, sharp battle at Boomplaats and forcing him to retreat northwards. Smith duly proclaimed his new territory the ‘Orange River Sovereignty’.

  Smith’s triumph, however, was short-lived. Alarmed at the cost of trying to maintain order on the highveld, the British government decided to withdraw. In a letter to Smith in September 1851, the colonial secretary wrote: ‘I have to instruct you to adopt the earliest and most decisive measures in your power for putting an end to any expenses to be incurred in the Orange River Sovereignty.’ Shortly afterwards, Smith was recalled. In January 1852, two British officials met Pretorius at Sand River and negotiated an agreement granting independence to ‘the Emigrant Farmers’ in the territory north of the Vaal River – the Transvaal, or the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek, as it was later called. In exchange for a promise that there would be no slavery in the Transvaal, Britain disclaimed all prior alliances with ‘coloured nations’ there. Two years later, in Bloemfontein, British officials similarly recognised the independence of the Orange Free State. Reporting on the event, the London Times observed cynically that the new state inherited three cannon, together with ‘tables, chairs, desks, shelves, inkstands, green baize, safes . . . freely sacrificed in the cause of peace’.

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  THE MISSIONARIES’ ROAD

  By the mid-nineteenth century, southern Africa had become a jumble of British colonies, Boer republics and African chiefdoms, a troublesome region with few prospects and of little interest to the outside world. Clashes and conflicts over land were endemic. Amid the turmoil, the remaining bands of San hunter-gatherers were driven further and further from their hunting grounds into the inaccessible fastnesses of the Drakensberg. Some of the last images that San artists painted were of San men fleeing from armed horsemen while shamans called upon ancient beliefs and rituals to combat this threat to their survival.

  The only stable state was the Cape Colony. It boasted by now some fifty towns but almost all were still small centres in rural areas with no more than 10,000 residents. Only Cape Town had a population reaching 30,000. The colony had also laid the foundations of a modern business economy, establishing banks, insurance companies, wholesale houses and chambers of commerce; a few manufacturing industries had also taken root. But the colony’s main economic activity remained pastoral farming and self-subsistence agriculture. Wine producers had prospered from the link to Britain until Britain had terminated their preferential tariff in 1831. Ivory exports too fell away as elephant herds, once common as far south as the Cape peninsula, were hunted virtually to extinction. When ele
phant hunting in the Cape Colony was eventually banned in 1830, only two small herds were left in the eastern Cape, one hidden deep in the Knysna forest, the other in Addo bush country. Out of a Cape herd once estimated at 25,000, no more than a few hundred survived. With the spread of merino sheep farming in the 1830s, wool production became increasingly important; by 1850, wool accounted for more than half of the Cape’s exports. But the colony lacked infrastructure and domestic capital for further development. Railway-building ground to a halt seventy miles from Cape Town for lack of money. In most of the interior, transport and communications were by horse and ox-wagon over rough roads, impassable after heavy rains.

  The two white communities of the colony tended to occupy different spheres, preferring to keep their own company. The English-speaking minority, numbering less than 50,000, congregated in towns and villages and worked as civil servants, merchants, traders and artisans. They formed their own literary societies, went to their own churches, even in remote dorps, and played their own games. A count of English and Scottish residents in the town of Swellendam included: all the shopkeepers except two; the most senior shop assistants; the magistrate; the doctor; the postmaster; the attorneys; all the teachers except a few assistants; the bank manager and his clerks; the policemen; the Anglican and Wesleyan ministers and even the Dutch Reformed Church predikant. British colonists continued to look ultimately to Britain for economic, military and cultural support. Regular steamship services linked them to Britain. More than 80 per cent of the colony’s external trade was carried by British ships to British ports.

  The Afrikaner community, numbering about 130,000, was still coming to terms with the impact of British rule. A small elite, well educated and prosperous, moved at ease in English circles, familiar with intermarriage, seeing themselves as ‘the loyal Dutch’ or the ‘Queen’s Afrikaners’. Some held high positions in the administration and the judiciary. The great majority were farmers, accustomed to enduring hard conditions. They were renowned for their hospitality, their liking for coffee and brandy, and for the men’s incessant habit of chewing tobacco. But most had little or no formal education. It was calculated that more than two-thirds could not understand English, the language of government, commerce and government schools.