Heaven’s Command

by Jan Morris

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  Among the first people to feel the effects were the Afrikaners of South Africa.1 They were an intensely religious people themselves. A mixture of Dutch, Flemish, German and French Huguenot stock, they had first emigrated to the Cape in the seventeenth century, to farm there under the rule of the Dutch East India Company, and they had established in that delectable country a society altogether their own. They were almost paranoically independent. They wanted to be alone. They asked nothing of government, and offered nothing in return. Bold, bloody-minded, sanctimonious outdoor people, they wanted only freedom to wander where they liked, establish their farms as they pleased, worship their own God and mind their own business. With their great creaking ox-wagons and their herds of long-horned cattle, their plump wives in poke bonnets and their rangy dogs behind, they had long ago become indigenous to Africa, and adopted some of its values. The local Hottentots they enslaved, the local bushmen they virtually exterminated, the fierce and magnificent tribes of the African interior they kept at bay by force of arms. The Boers were a very lonely people, but they did not mind. They had virtually cut their ties with Europe, they spoke a bastard Dutch of their own, and they were sufficient unto themselves.

  They worshipped a severe Calvinist version of the Christian God. He was a God of absolutes. His commandments were inflexible. He had ordained for ever the hierarchy of the stars and planets, the ordering of the seasons, the place in the world of men and women, beasts and birds. He was a literal God, who had revealed his truths once and for all in the infallible text of the Old Testament. He was a God who had decreed, if only implicitly, that every Boer farmer was his own master, with a right to his own African farm, and absolute leave to exploit the black peoples of the continent as his own conscience allowed.

  There were Boers in the Cape peninsula who lived exquisitely, in lovely oak-sheltered towns like Stellenbosch or Paarl, in wide-stoeped homesteads of the wine valleys, or fine old houses, with floors of red tile and furniture of stink-wood, among the gardens of Cape Town. The most Afrikaner of the Afrikaners, though, lived with Jehovah on the Great Karroo, the high dry plateau which lay to the north-east. These were the frontier Boers, the Volk quintessential, who considered themselves an elect within an elect, and embodied all their divine privileges in the conception of lekker lewe—‘the sweet life’, to be lived in lands wide enough to exclude the smoke of the next man’s chimney, with a sufficiency of stock, no interference from busybody authority, and obedient black men round the back of the house.

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  In 1815 these grand but disputatious peasants (for like most dogmatists they were always squabbling) had become unlikely subjects of the British Crown. The British had retained the Cape of Good Hope, which they had captured in the wars, as a way-station on the route to India, and they had settled at Cape Town in the easy confidence of victory. They soon established a governing class of English gentry, with a leavening of Dutch burghers left behind by the previous regime. Cape Town became a genial blend of the Dutch and the English Georgian styles, with fragrant gardens running up the slopes of Table Mountain, and avenues of oaks and camphors, and well-proportioned offices of Government arising around the old Dutch castle. Along the coast, too, English settlements took root: Grahamstown, the frontier town, 500 miles to the north-east, elegantly disposed around its garrison church, or Port Elizabeth upon Algoa Bay, guarded by its little stone fort and overlooked by the memorial to its eponymous patroness Elizabeth Donkin—‘to the memory of one of the most perfect of human beings, who has given her name to the town below’.

  India was the reason for the English presence, and India never seemed far away. There were the ships, of course, always swinging around the Cape, or putting into the base at Simonstown for victualling or refurbishment. There was the faintly Indianified manner of English life. And there was a constant shifting society of Britons from India—Hindus, as the Boers called them, as against Kapenaars. Many officers from India spent their leave at the Cape—it did not count as home leave, so that they need not sacrifice their overseas allowances. Some retired to the Cape, a happy compromise between the swelter of India and the mist of England, and some came to recuperate from the fevers of Calcutta and the plains: the spa at Caledon, east of Cape Town, depended almost entirely upon the Indian trade, and was always full of worn-out Collectors, faded memsahibs and debilitated majors of the Bengal Army—who, resting among its springs and rubber-trees, and looking across the gentle plain to the mauve cool mountains beyond, must sometimes have wished they had never set eyes on Malabar or Madras.1 The Anglo-Indians often brought their own servants with them, and with these turbanned or shawled domestics at their heels, browned themselves by the Indian sun they would parade through the esplanade gardens of the Cape, to remind the watching burghers and wondering Hottentots that they were subjects now of a wider sovereignty.

  No society could be more alien to the inbred and unimaginative community of the Boers, and almost from the start the British and the Afrikaners distrusted each other. The Boers thought the British stiff-necked, snobbish and interfering, and called them rooineks, rednecks.1 The British thought the Boers ignorant, ungainly and often queer. At first, though, there seemed no conflict of interest. The Boers were essentially pastoralists, landsmen, whose eyes turned instinctively to the open grasslands of the interior. The British were interested in South Africa only as a staging-post to the east, and the little wars which they found themselves obliged to fight against the African tribes along their frontiers were intended only to keep the Cape safe and stable. As late as the 1840s only one surfaced road led out of Cape Town, for strategically the British did not need to extend their authority inland—the smaller and tighter their footholds on the coast, the better. They were not much attracted, anyway, by the high veld of the interior: ‘a worn-out and emaciated country’, John Howison thought it in 1830, ‘its mountains, without soil or verdure, resemble skeletons, and its unwatered plains … are like an animal body in which circulation has ceased from disease or exhaustion’. Only a handful of wandering artisans or adventurers, mostly Scots or Irish, had penetrated the Karroo to live among the frontier Boers.

  It was idealism that changed all this. Sooner or later it was inevitable that English evangelicalism, with its emphasis on the welfare of the coloured peoples, would come into conflict with the dour fundamentalism of the Boers. Disturbing rumours reached London about Afrikaner mistreatment of the Hottentots, and by the 1820s the London Missionary Society had gone sternly into action. Its chief representative in South Africa, the Reverend John Philip, was vociferous in defence of native rights, and outspokenly critical of Afrikaner attitudes. The English newspapers took up the cause, successive English Governments were prodded into action, and before long the more extreme of the Boers began to feel themselves threatened—not in their persons, for from the start they had enjoyed equal rights with Englishmen, but in their way of life.

  In 1828 they were horrified to be confronted by an ordinance declaring black men and white to be, ‘in the most full and ample manner’, equal before the law. In 1833 they were stunned to learn that, by a decision of the English Parliament 4,000 miles away in London, slavery in South Africa was banned. They were told that black people had a right to the possession of land, something which struck at the very roots of the Boer philosophy. They were told that Hottentots had a right to travel where they pleased, without passes. They were warned that they must not take the punishment of Kaffirs into their own hands, as they had with every success for 200 years, but must make a complaint through a magistrate. Their own opinions, they considered, were distorted or disregarded, and wherever they turned they found, in league with the blacks, in conspiracy with the local authorities, influential in London and honoured among the barbarous black chiefs of Kaffirland, the ubiquitous Mr Philip and his clerics, those earnest instruments of the imperial instinct.

  All this was too much for the frontier Boers. It seemed to them that not merely the legal or constitutiona
l, but actually the natural order of things was being deliberately disrupted. How was a man to keep order on his farm, if he could not flog a recalcitrant employee? How could the murderous black warriors of the frontier zones, represented by the English missionaries as no more than misunderstood innocents, be kept at bay? How could the divine hierarchy itself be maintained, if Ham was the equal of Shem? The Boers felt betrayed, but worse still, perhaps, they felt despised. So free, so bold, in many ways so generous, now they felt themselves treated as inferiors, half-Europeans, backwoodsmen, by the sanctimonious representatives of the new British order. Unlimited land, cheap obedient labour, security from blacks and whites alike—these were essentials of the lekker lewe‚ and all three the British Empire seemed determined to deny them.

  So it came about that in the late years of the 1830s the Boers, the first refugees of Victoria’s empire, undertook the hegira of their race, the Great Trek—a mass migration of frontier people, perhaps 10,000 souls, out of the eastern Cape into the unexploited high veld of the interior, where they could pick their own land and be themselves. They were escaping in fact from the modern world, with all its new notions of equality and reason, but on the face of it they were simply trying to get away from the British. They were early victims of that latent British aptitude for interference which was presently to find subjects, and make enemies, from Canada to Bengal.

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  The Boers of the Great Trek—the Voortrekkers, as they were ever after to be known—made for the Orange River, the eastern frontier of the colony. Once across it, they would be free. They moved for the most part independently, in small wagon groups, commanded by craggy elders and guarded by mounted riflemen: but though their exodus was spread over several years, they did move to a general plan. It was based upon the reports of secret reconnaissance parties, and it was propagated among the Volk by word of mouth. They would rendezvous, in their shambled scattered way, at the foot of the Drakcnsberg Mountains, in territory claimed only by black Africans, and there they would decide where their final destination was to be.

  They were very experienced frontiersmen, and they travelled with a loose-limbed expertise. We see their high-wheeled trek wagons plunging through rivers and over ravines, the long ox-teams slipping and rearing, the driver with his immense hide whip cracking above his head, the black servants straining with ropes on the back wheels. We see them camped in laager within the circle of their wagons. The men in their wide-brimmed hats are smoking long pipes beneath awnings, or lie fast asleep upon the ground. The women are imperturbably suckling their children, mending their clothes, or preparing heroic Boer meals of game, eggs and violent coffee. Hens scrabble among the propped rifles and powder horns, a tame gazelle, perhaps, softly wanders among the carts, and in the distance the black men separately squat and gossip beside their fires. It is a truly Biblical scene, and the trekker Boers were searching quite consciously for a Promised Land. They moved in a spirit of revelation, as though pillars of fire were leading them (and one unusually ecstatic group, coming across a verdant spring in the remoter veld, assumed it to be the source of the River Nile, and named it Nilstrom). They were penetrating country almost unknown to white people—up through the scrub of the Karroo into the brilliant immensities of the high veld, which seemed to extend limitlessly into the heart of Africa, which smelt of herbs and heather, and over whose silences the stars hung at night with a clarity unimaginable to the distant philanthropists of Empire.

  There were few black people to harass them. The only real opposition came from the warlike Matabele tribe, whom the Boer commandos, loose in the saddle and quick with the elephant gun, smartly defeated in a battle at Vegkop, well over the Orange River, killing 400 warriors and capturing 7,000 cattle. More often the trekkers quarrelled among themselves, for there were all sorts on this epic. Some were rich men, with household possessions piled high in their wagons. Others had nothing but their horses, guns and hands. Few could read or write, fewer still had any experience of administration or leadership, nearly all were people of fractious individuality, exceedingly difficult to control. The story of the Great Trek, for all its poignant grandeur, is a story of endless bickerings, political rivalries and even religious antagonisms. The trekkers mostly-travelled in groups of a dozen wagons or so, with ten or twelve fighting men, twenty or thirty black servants and a rag-tag tail of cattle, horses, sheep and goats. It was only in 1834 and 1835 that a sporadic movement of families and friends developed into a migration; and only in 1837 that the main body of the Voortrekkers, some 3,000 men and women, assembled at their rendezvous at Thaba Nchu, at the foot of the Drakensberg on the borders of Basutoland.1

  Now they began to think of themselves as a State. They were the Maatschappij‚ the Company of Emigrant South Africans, self-constituted in reaction to the British Empire, and from their leaders, so often at each other’s throats, they chose a Captain General. Piet Retief at 56 was more sophisticated than most of his contemporaries. He was of Huguenot stock, had grown up in the wine country around Stellenbosch, had lived in Cape Town and was a born wanderer, destined never to settle. He it was who gave the Great Trek its manifesto. Like most such declarations, it was meant to be read between the lines.2 ‘As we desire to stand high in the estimation of our brethren,’ it said, ‘be it known inter alia that we are resolved, wherever we go, that we will uphold the just principle of liberty; but whilst we will take care that no one shall be in a state of slavery, it is our determination to maintain such regulations as may suppress crime and preserve proper relations between master and servant…. We will not molest any people, nor deprive them of the smallest property; but, if attacked, we shall consider ourselves fully justified in defending our persons and effects to the utmost of our ability….’

  There one hears, perhaps for the first time, the authentic voice of Afrikaner self-justification: the flattened cadences, slightly petulant, with which for a century or more the Boers were to plead their grievances and their cause—a peasant voice, uneducated and unsubtle, but more determined and more courageous than the British would usually suppose. Retief and his colleagues, in their laager beneath the Drakensberg, went on to establish the structure of the State. They determined its name—not New Eden, as had been suggested, but the Free Province of New Holland in South Africa. They adopted a constitution, with a Governor, a Council of Policy and a Court. They decreed that all members of the Volk must take an oath of loyalty: defaulters would be excommunicated, denied civic privileges and perhaps declared Enemies of the People. In a spirit of exaltation only intermittently marred by feuds and jealousies, the great body of the Voortrekkers, in the summer of 1837, thankfully beyond the reach of the British Empire, prepared to seize and settle for ever their Israel in the north.

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  To the south of them lay the coastline of the eastern Cape, now intermittently settled for some 500 miles by British colonists. It is difficult to imagine a society more different from the nomad encampments of the Voortrekkers: yet each was a frontier community in its way, and while the Voortrekkers debate their future with psalms and recriminations away in the empty veld, let us leave them for a while with their impending destiny, and descend the escarpment of the Little Karroo to visit the very British coastal village of Knysna—to point not a moral, as both sides might claim, but only a contrast.

  A track led there out of the foothills, dropping through wooded gorges and tortuous passes, between splendid thickets of stinkwood and white pear, to a point where suddenly between the trees one saw a small streak of pure white substance, trapped apparently in a defile among the hills. It looked like a line of snow, or a patch of brilliant white sand, but it was really the Indian Ocean, perpetually foaming between the high looming headlands that were called Knysna Heads. Nowhere on the whole African coast was more exhilarating. The surf was tremendous. The rocks were black and bold. Gulls swirled in the wind, cormorants dived recklessly into whirlpools, spray hung on the air, and all day long tides echoed, sucking and reverberating, again
st the black masses of the headland.

  Inside the Heads there lay a lagoon. Around it the British had established a settlement, and had already transplanted to that savage place their own habits and values. The Royal Navy maintained a station at Knysna, but the tone of the hamlet was set by its principal landowner and first citizen, George Rex Esquire, who lived in gentlemanly style in the manor house of Melkhout Kraal. All the scattered farms that looked down upon the Knysna lagoon, black-thatched and white-plastered at the forest’s edge, formed part of Mr Rex’s estate, and around his presence, and the rent-books of his busy factor, the whole heirarchy of Englishness was assembled upon this distant frontier.

  The country was wild—elephants still visited the lagoon shore—but the village was ordered and discreet. Its dust streets were rolled and watered, its houses were neatly thatched, and on a convenient corner stood the St George’s Tavern (landlord Tom Horn, lately of Bristol). The social order was self-evident. At the bottom were the coloured labourers, so recently released from slavery. Then came the few local Boers, who talked only a sort of pidgin English, and who lived as woodcutters in the forest, or foremen on the farms. Then there were the small tenant farmers; the captains of the Kynsna-based ships, Scotsmen and Irishmen chiefly and powerful drinkers; the local tradesmen and merchants, the apothecary, the chandlers; and there were the grander gentlemen settlers, the Barringtons, the Duthies, the Nelsons, the Sutherlands, the Botterills, or the widow Fauconnier and her children, in whose parlour, in the absence of a church, the Reverend Charles Bull used to take Sunday services, and Captain Duthie, Justice of the Peace, held his periodic courts.