Heaven’s Command

by Jan Morris

  And at the top was Mr Rex, who had personally approved all the original settlers. Rex lived like a polite English gentleman-farmer upon a large scale, but rumour suggested that he was something rather more: and what capped the ineffable Englishness of his village, and made it so unutterably alien to the harsh republicanism of the Voortrek laagers over the mountains, was the fact that, if what one heard was true, the Squire of Knysna was the natural son of George III—Queen Victoria’s uncle. Nobody knew for sure, but just the suggestion was enough to ensure for him a feudal respect. Officialdom was fulsome in its gratitude, when Mr Rex erected an obelisk, or donated a site for a parish church. His labourers and artisans were gratified by his every condescension, his tenants were honoured by his briefest visit, curtseys and raised hats followed him down the village street: for this little microcosm of the English way even reproduced that trust in the divine grace of monarchs which was at once the equivalent and the antithesis of the Boer belief in the divine privileges of themselves.

  How the Voortrekkers would have loathed it! How smug it would have seemed to them, how patronizing, how impious too! Knysna was a demonstration of all they most resented in the imperial presence: like suburbia to an old-school gypsy, perhaps, or barracks life to a guerrilla.1

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  But they were far away from George Rex and his kind. In the flank of the Drakensberg they discussed their next moves. Some decided they would stay where they were, in the country between the Orange and the Vaal rivers. Some thought they would cross the Vaal, to settle in the high grasslands of the Gatstrand and the Witwatersrand. But Piet Retief had his mind upon Natal, the glorious green country on the coast, lush, forested, watered, warm in the bitterest winter, in the summer freshened by breezes off the sea or the high mountains that bounded it inland. In October, 1837, he rode ahead with a party of horsemen and, passing through a pass in the Drakensberg, saw this paradise for the first time: there it lay below the mountains, green and warm, with palms and bananas, heavenly wild flowers of the tropics, magnificent forests of yellow-wood and tambuti, and far in the distance beyond the downlands and the coastal plain, the blue line of the Indian Ocean. ‘The most beautiful land,’ wrote Retief, ‘I have ever seen in Africa.’

  Surely it was Israel. Few Europeans lived in it, and few Africans either, while the British Empire had specifically declined to annex it. Its only suzerain was King Dingaan of the Zulus, and he did not live there himself, but claimed it merely as buffer territory to his Kingdom of Zululand farther north. With this capricious but formidable barbarian Retief, riding down through the foothills with 14 men and four wagons, accordingly opened negotiations.

  Dingaan lived in some state. The name of his royal kraal, Umgungundhlovu, meant The Secret Plot of the Elephant, and commemorated Dingaan’s assassination of his half-brother Shaka, the greatest of Zulu kings. It was a city of thatched beehive houses above a stream. Behind it the humped wilderness of Zululand stretched away to the north, a terrific empty country of dry hills and green river-beds, speckled only with the villages of the Zulu pastoralists. The nearest European settlement to the east was the Portuguese colony of Delagoa Bay, a thousand miles away: the nearest to the west was Grahamstown, far across the wasteland of the Transkei. The Zulus, a highly organized fighting people, lived in a condition of terrible isolation, having slaughtered most of their nearer neighbours.

  The King loved display. He surrounded himself with plump women, jesters and dwarfs. He liked to show off his famous glutton Menyosi, who could eat a whole goat in a single meal. His palace was a great mud hut, its floor rubbed with fat to make it shine, its reed roof beautifully woven, and around it stood hundreds of huts in circular groups: huts for the wives and concubines of the king, huts for the young warriors of the bodyguard, huts for the royal weapons. A large cattle-kraal stood ostentatiously near the palace, the wealth of the Zulus being expressed in cows, and behind it the lazy circling of vultures marked the Hill of Execution, which was littered with human bones and scavenged by hyaenas.

  Retief was courteously received. Warriors danced for him, marvellous in beads and ostrich feathers, with great skin shields brandished high, and plumes bobbing above their heads, and trained red oxen moving in rhythm with their gestures. Dingaan himself, bald, greased and resplendent in red, white and black, welcomed him graciously from his throne at the gate of the cattle kraal. Their talks were brief and to the point. Retief wanted simply to settle his people in the unoccupied territory of Natal, and Dingaan almost immediately concurred. The Boers could settle there, but only if they first performed a service for Dingaan: reclaim from the Basuto chieftain Sikonyela, in the mountains, a number of Zulu cattle he had lately stolen. When they had brought these beasts back to Umgungundhlovu, preferably with Sikonyela too, then the Boers could move into Natal.

  Retief was delighted, and the Boers rode back in high spirits to the Voortrekker encampments beside the Drakensberg. The news preceded them, and the Afrikaners, quoting psalms, texts and prophecies, in-spanned at once and hastened impulsively through the passes, helter-skelter down the escarpment into Natal, until there were a thousand wagons, perhaps 4,000 Boers, prematurely encamped around the headwaters of the Tugela within Dingaan’s putative territory. There the first citizen was born upon the soil of New Holland, and the Voortrekkers felt that the worst of their hardships were over.

  It did not take Retief long to perform his commission. With fifty burghers and ten of Dingaan’s Zulus he moved swiftly into the Basuto country, enticed Sikonyela into his camp, kidnapped him and held him prisoner until all the 700 stolen cattle were handed over. A week later Retief set off, with a commando of seventy volunteers and thirty coloured servants, to claim his reward from Dingaan. By now rumours had reached the Voortrekkers that the Zulu king might be less friendly than he seemed. He had been alarmed by the Boer victory at Vegkop—he resented the impetuous entry of the trekkers into Natal—he really had no intention at all of allowing the Boers to settle in his territory—he was blood-crazed and treacherous to the core. (‘Who can fight with thee?’ his warriors used to intone before him, dancing ferociously for hours at a time. ‘No king can fight with thee. They that carry firearms cannot fight with thee.’)

  But Retief and his men rode boldly back to Umgungundhlovu, and found themselves respectfully welcomed again. There were dances and parades once more. The King talked at length about this and that. Zulu impis marched and counter-marched, beating their war-drums. After three days of mixed entertainment and discussion, Dingaan announced that all was settled, and he signed with his mark a deed granting to the Boers—‘the Dutch Emigrant South Africans’—all the land between the Tugela and the Umzimvubu rivers, ‘and from the sea to the north as far as the land may be useful and in my possession’. Natal was theirs, ‘for their everlasting property’. Retief and his lieutenants, leaving their weapons outside, entered the central kraal to seal the concord with a libation of African beer, while the dancers tossed and whirled in celebration around them, and the drums beat wildly.

  They drank: and as they did so Dingaan, rising terribly to his feet in black and feathered splendour, cried ‘Bulala ama Tagati!’—‘Kill the wizards!’ Instantly the warriors and the dancers fell upon the Boers. They dragged them to the Hill of Execution, and there, binding their hands and feet with hide thongs, they beat their heads in with clubs and drove wooden spikes, as thick as a man’s arm, from their anuses through their chests. Retief was the last to die: they forced him to watch the sufferings of his comrades, and then they cut his heart and liver out, and buried them symbolically beneath the track that led across the river into Natal—‘the road of the farmers’, as Dingaan contemptuously called it.

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  Down on the coast, though most of the Voortrekkers did not realize it, a British colony of sorts was already established, by the precarious consent of the Zulus. Port Natal had no sanction from London, and Retief had assumed that it would easily be absorbed into the Free Province of New Holland—its only imp
erial representative was a retired Royal Navy officer, now an Anglican missionary, who had been given powers of magistracy by the Governor of the Cape.

  It was a drab little settlement. Except for a couple of stores its buildings were only mud huts, scattered in the coastal scrub. Its citizens were mostly dubious adventurers, half-African of habit—ivory traders or hunters, who dressed in a mixture of European and Zulu dress, who lived with native wives, and who were sometimes honoured as chiefs themselves by their rabble of native and half-caste followers. The Fynn family, for example, who were half-castes themselves, had loyal sub-tribes of their own—Frank Fynn was chief of the iziNkhumbi, Charles governed the iziNgolweni, Henry the Nsimbini. Such people spent half their time in the bush, hunting elephants, trading beads or firearms for hides, meat and ivory, and at home they still lived like nomads, in home-made clothes and boots, surrounded by dogs, skins, guns and carcasses, with miscellaneous Africans wandering in and out, or squatting at their doorways. There was no fort in Port Natal, no policeman, no church: though the Zulus had in theory ceded the little port and its coastline to the Queen of England, they did not regard the cession very seriously, and the Queen herself had doubtless never heard of it.

  Captain Gardiner, R.N. (retd.), loyal and devout, had a difficult time of it, for he was not much loved by his disreputable neighbours at the port. Once he had briefly persuaded them to constitute themselves a town—to be named Durban in honour of the Cape Governor, Sir Benjamin D’Urban—and to petition the Government to declare it a British colony: but when this initiative was spurned by London, Gardiner was left without power, without prestige and without assistants. He was rebuffed in all his attempts to bring order to the community, whose members thought him too goody-goody by half, and in the end he gave up, and withdrew disenchanted from Africa to devote himself to good works in Patagonia.1 The settlers were relieved to see him go: if he was a true representative of British sovereignty, they thought, on the whole they would prefer the authority of the Boers—who, though they might be equally inclined to quote Ezekiel or invoke the Great Incomprehensible Being, at least understood the ethos of the frontier and the veld.

  But the news that the Voortrekkers had entered Natal from the north gave to Port Natal a new meaning. In the British view the Voortrekkers were renegades from the imperial authority: by the Cape of Good Hope Punishment Act of 1836 the British Empire had claimed jurisdiction over all British subjects south of the 25th parallel—which ran hundreds of miles to the north. Her Majesty’s Government were accordingly perturbed to hear that these particular subjects were now stirring up trouble and establishing pretensions among the native peoples so far along the coast. The nearest imperial forces were at Grahamstown, and the notion of such uncouth Calvinists butchering Basutos or subverting honest Zulu kings was profoundly disquieting to Whitehall. So it was that on November 14, 1838, Sir George Napier, Governor of Cape Colony, announced after all the annexation to the British Empire of Port Natal—‘in consequence of the disturbed state of the Native tribes in the territories adjacent to that part, arising in a great degree from the unwarranted occupation of parts of those territories by certain emigrants from this colony, being Her Majesty’s subjects, and the probabilities that those disturbances will continue and increase’.

  Two weeks later a British warship appeared off the little port, and a force of soldiers disembarked. The Union Jack was run up, and a hundred Highlanders of the 72nd Regiment of Foot established themselves in a fort specially erected for the occasion, and naturally named after Queen Victoria.1

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  The Boers were bent first on revenge against the blacks. After the massacre at Umgungundhlovu the Zulu regiments, sweeping across Natal, had attacked the scattered Boer encampments on the upper Tugela, killing 500 people, wounding hundreds more, driving off thousands of cattle, and plunging the Volk into chaos. Impis marched here and there, Boer commandos were ambushed, and even Britons found themselves embroiled—a missionary travelling through Natal in March, 1838, met a body of 400 Zulus, bellowing a monotonous war-song, led by a solitary Englishman with an ostrich feather in his straw hat and an elephant gun covered with a panther skin on his shoulder.

  Some of the trekkers decided that this could not be Zion after all, and moved away to the north into the mountains. Many more moved deeper into Natal, some settling in the lee of the mountains, some trekking south-east along the line of the Tugela, some striking for the coast. Now a written constitution was drawn up for the Natal Republic, and a capital was laid out at Pietermaritzburg, some fifty miles north-west of Port Natal. But it remained to settle the score of Umgungundhlovu. In November, just as the 72nd ran up the flag above Durban Bay, Andries Pretorius, one of the most respected and resourceful of the commando leaders, assumed the office of Head Commandant and prepared to fall upon Dingaan. ‘O Lord, defer not and do’, the elders prayed before his commandos left, ‘defer not, for thy name’s sake’: and in return Pretorius and his men swore that if God gave them victory over Dingaan, they would build a church in His honour to commemorate the day—‘we shall observe the day and the date as an anniversary in each year … and we shall tell our children that they must take part with us in this for a remembrance even for our posterity.’

  So they crossed the Tugela, 400 angry horsemen of God, and rode direct for Umgungundhlovu. On Saturday, December 15, they halted to keep the morrow’s Sabbath on the banks of the Ncome River. They set up their laager, they mounted their three guns, and when dawn came on the Sunday they found that squatting silently upon their heels around them, thousands upon thousands in concentric circles, the feathered Zulu warriors waited. ‘Do not let us go to them,’ said Pretorius, ‘let them come to us’: and so the sun rose with the Zulus still and silent outside the laager, and the Boers singing solemn hymns within.

  When daylight came the Zulus attacked, rattling their assegais against their shields to make a noise like falling rain, and hurling themselves in their hundreds upon the laager. They had scarcely a hope. The Boers, impregnably ensconced behind their wagons, decimated them with rapid fire. For hours the Zulus repeatedly charged, each time they were cruelly repulsed, until at last the Boers sprang from their wagons, let loose their commandos and rode into the impis, shooting the warriors down as they ran, driving them into the river, or slaughtering them as they crouched among the reeds of the river bank. It was like a terrible dream of war. ‘Nothing remains in my memory,’ wrote one of the Boers afterwards, ‘except shouting and tumult and lamentation, and a sea of black faces.’ Only three Boers were wounded in the battle, but at least 3,000 Zulus died. They lay on the ground ‘like pumpkins on a fertile piece of garden land’, and so stained the passing river with crimson that it was called Blood River ever afterwards.

  The Boers rode on to Dingaan’s kraal elated, but they found it abandoned. Not a soul was there. They plundered it, destroyed what was left, and reverently examining the remains on the Hill of Execution, discovered Piet Retief’s knapsack. In it, unharmed, was Dingaan’s deed of cession, granting the whole territory of Natal into the possession of the Volk.

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  They built the church they had vowed, in their shanty-capital of Pietermaritzburg, and for ever after they honoured Dingaan’s Day as they had sworn.1 Now the Republic of Natalia was born. A Volksraad met in formal assembly, and for a time the Voortrekkers seemed to have achieved their Promised Land—‘I will rejoice, I will divide Shekhem and mete out the valley of Succoth.’ Every trekker, it was decreed, was entitled to two farms, and every burgher could take his complaints direct to the elected leaders of the people in the Volksraad. But it was all fruitless. The British Empire, from whose cloying rectitude they had so painfully escaped, could not permit it, and all their sacrifices and hardships, all the horrors of Umgungundhovu and Blood River, came to nothing in the end.

  At first the Boers tolerated the presence of the British at Durban, as Port Natal now called itself. The commander there, Captain Henry Jervis, was concerned chiefl
y to restore peace to Natal, and he it was who brought Pretorius and Dingaan to terms—unforgiving terms, for Dingaan was forced to withdraw his power far to the north, to the Black Umfulosi River, thus ceding to the Voortrekkers not merely the whole of Natal, but half Zululand too. But once peace was restored and their ascendancy established, the Boers determined that the British must go. They did not recognize the suzerainty of the Crown, they did not need British protection, and they were determined that the Cape Government should not extend its foothold in Natal. They sent Jervis a formal protest at his presence there, recalling in emotive detail the purposes and miseries of their trek—their departure from the Cape ‘insulted, ridiculed and degraded’, their struggles with barbarian tribes with no knowledge of the Great Incomprehensible, their sufferings at the hands of the murderer Dingaan. Now, they said, they were resolved to be their own masters. If British immigrants landed at Durban they would be treated as enemies of the State, and if they were backed by imperial forces the Natal Republic would go to war.

  Unexpectedly the British did withdraw their forces, and it momentarily seemed that the Empire might even recognize the independence of the Republic. But it was only cat and mouse. In September, 1840, the Volksraad wrote to Napier asking that it might ‘graciously please Her Majesty to acknowledge and declare us a free and independent people’: but even as this disarming prayer reached the imperial authorities in London, so there filtered through to the Colonial Office and the evangelical lobby ugly reports of the Republic’s racial policies. It seemed that the Boers still kept slaves, and bullied local chieftains, and in no way honoured the principles of humanitarian imperialism. Besides, the structure of Government, without a Briton at the helm, seemed to be breaking down. Within their Promised Land the trekkers went their own ways incorrigibly. They disregarded their own land laws, they refused to settle where they were told to settle, they squabbled with each other incessantly. Thousands of natives, pouring into Natal to squat on old kraal-sites, threatened security and defeated all efforts to segregate the races. An American trading ship had arrived at Durban and was doing brisk business with the Boers, an intolerable invasion of British mercantile preserves: and perhaps most important of all, coal had been discovered in Natal, and might prove, as was recognized at once in London, ‘of the utmost importance to steam navigation in the