by Peires, Jeff
8 Merriman (1957), p.224.
9 Ibid., pp.52, 116, 152. MS 15 899/1, Cory Library, the Register of Baptisms and Marriages of the Methodist Church in Grahamstown, mentions the baptism of a ‘Kaffir’ (that is, a Xhosa as distinct from a Mfengu) named Goliat on 26 Sept. 1841, which seems just about right. There is no record of a marriage between a Wilhelm Goliat and a Mfengu woman named Sarah in this volume. A Karel Gola or Goliat is mentioned in the volume as being married in the Magistrate’s Court in December 1836.
10 Merriman (1957), 52, 62, 70-2, 77, 108, 112, 117, 120-1, 123.
11 Ibid., p.65.
12 Ibid., pp.93, 123.
13 Ibid., p.106.
14 Ibid., p.127. Archdeacon Merriman does not mention his wife but since his eldest son was only nine years old at the time, it is difficult to see who else he might have meant. Mrs Merriman was consistently hostile to her husband’s inclinations and she frustrated his sincere desire to become a missionary himself. Ibid., p.214.
15 One of Merriman’s acquaintances in the western Cape wrote in a memoir that Wilhelm was ‘the same that became famous as the witchdoctor who instigated his tribe to rise in the war, I think, of 1849’. J Baker, ‘Some personal recollections of the late Bishop Merriman,’ Cape Church Monthly, IV (1896). Mrs Merriman responded with two letters, asking Baker to correct this ‘misstatement’. MS 16, 690, GDA 284-5, Cory Library, Mrs J Merriman-J Baker, 20, 30 Oct. 1896. Baker did of course get the details wrong (not surprisingly, 40 years on, and considering that he had never lived in the eastern Cape). The correspondence is, however, exceptionally interesting for the extra light it sheds on Wilhelm’s character, and, contrary to Mrs Merriman’s expectations, it confirms rather than refutes the hypothesis that Wilhelm was Mhlakaza. The Merrimans were away in England throughout the period of the Cattle-Killing. I owe these references to Dr Mandy Goedhals’s impeccable research on the life and work of NJ Merriman. See M Goedhals (1984).
16 Merriman (1957), p.205-6, states Wilhelm found the orphan ‘near his hut [in Grahamstown] a homeless wanderer’. In Cape Parliamentary Paper G 38 of 1858, ‘Deposition made by Nonquase, a Kafir Prophetess’, Nongqawuse states only that ‘Umhlakaza was my uncle … My father’s name was Umhlanhla, of Kreli’s tribe. He died when I was very young.’ As we shall see, Grey doctored everything he had published and would have suppressed any embarrassing items. The deposition is certainly injected with inferences conducive to Grey’s theory of a chiefs’ plot to make war on the Colony (see Chapter 7 below for a full discussion). Nevertheless, there is no reason to doubt this particular statement, which contradicts Merriman’s implication that the orphan arrived at Wilhelm’s place by accident. On the other hand, Wilhelm was not staying anywhere near the Waterkloof and one may legitimately ask whether the orphan did not deliberately make its way to him. (We know that Mhlakaza’s sister lived near him from BK 14 ‘Examination, before the Chief Commissioner of Unqula, brother of Nombanda’.)
One must state frankly that there is no more than a chance that Nongqawuse was the orphan of the Waterkloof. Nevertheless the impact of the orphan’s experiences would have surely been felt by all in Wilhelm/Mhlakaza’s household.
CHAPTER 2 – Crooked like a Snake
CHAPTER 2
Crooked like a Snake
1. THE ARTFUL DODGER OF GOVERNORS
‘To those who have studied [Sir George Grey],’ wrote one eminent historian of New Zealand, ‘his conduct is a never-failing source of astonishment. Such a mixture of greatness and pettiness, breadth of intellect and dishonesty, is rarely met with.’1 Grey was indeed a giant among colonial Governors, and comparison with any of the clapped-out ex-soldiers who had previously governed the Cape only makes him seem more gigantic still. A man of great intellectual distinction himself, Grey counted some of the foremost minds of Victorian England as his personal friends, among them Carlyle, Darwin, Lyell the geologist, and Babbage, the inventor of computing. His own interests included botany, zoology, entomology, geology, linguistics and folklore, and he patronised and befriended men of science, besides making small but significant contributions to human knowledge in all these fields. He was an avid collector of books and found time, even in the midst of acute political crises, to collect Xhosa grammars and medieval manuscripts, creating one of the finest libraries of the Victorian age.2 Few other colonial Governors shared his interest in the cultures of the conquered peoples of the British Empire, or his conviction that all men were inherently equal. A regular church-goer and an ostentatious reader of the Bible,3 Grey was the intimate of bishops and the patron of missionaries. Education and health care were among his public passions, and wherever he went he established and endowed schools and hospitals for indigenous people. In South Africa especially, Grey’s reputation still rides high. For the old Cape liberals as well as for more recent analysts, Grey’s governorship was a lost Golden Age, a glorious period in which a wise and humane Governor briefly demonstrated the value and the possibility of harmonious racial integration.4
But there was a dark, even a sinister side to Grey’s personality. The Governor was driven by what Professor Dalton, the New Zealand historian, has called a ‘ruthless egotism to which he would sacrifice anything and anybody’.5 Beneath the polished veneer of charm and intelligence, there lurked a deeply insecure personality, which was selfish, vindictive and almost paranoid. Grey dreamed of absolute power and seriously maintained that despotism was the best possible system of colonial government. He shared the Victorian tendency to divide men into two categories, heroes and ordinary mortals. ‘To find your ablest man and then give him power, and obey him’ was regarded by many Victorians as ‘the highest act of wisdom which a nation can be capable of’. Or, as Grey’s friend and admirer, Thomas Carlyle, phrased it, ‘if people will not behave well, put collars round their necks. Find a hero and let them be his slaves’.6
Grey identified himself at once as a hero, but it was no easy matter to secure a dictatorship in Victorian England. He turned therefore to the obscure British colonies of the southern hemisphere, where he found fresh fields to dominate and to exercise his absolute sway. Once established as a colonial Governor, Grey stopped at nothing to remove the least check or restraint on his absolute power. His public letters and dispatches were monuments of prevarication and deceit, exalting himself, traducing others and threatening the Colonial Office with war and bloodshed if he did not have his way. He destroyed his European rivals with lies and smears, and his non-European victims with court martials, transportations, summary justice and even, as we shall see, mass starvation. For all his rhetorical concern for the welfare of indigenous peoples, no Governor did more to break the independence and steal the land of the Maori and the Xhosa than Sir George Grey.
Despite his peculiar genius, Grey should not be seen as an extraordinary individual who grabbed History by the scruff of the neck and moulded it according to his own desires. He was a great colonial Governor, but his greatness lay in his ability to implement successfully the established objectives of early Victorian imperialism: to extend the territories of the British Empire and found colonies of settlement for its surplus population, while at the same time paying lip service to the moral commitments which the Victorians had inherited from the anti-slavery movement. Grey’s despotic inclinations and paranoid obsessions would certainly have involved him in failure and ridicule had he remained in England as a politician or an army officer. But as a colonial Governor, these very same personality disorders fuelled his extraordinary capacity for crushing and subjugating indigenous peoples, while loudly and sincerely proclaiming that he was doing so in their own best interests.
The young Grey burst upon an unsuspecting world in a suitably spectacular and inauspicious manner. His pregnant mother was sitting idly on the verandah of her hotel in Lisbon one spring day in 1812 when she overheard two army officers saying that her h
usband, George Grey senior, had been killed in the storming of Badajoz. The shock sent her into labour, bringing on the premature birth of her first child, the future Sir George. Mrs Grey remarried, and the young George grew up in the house of his stepfather, a baronet turned clergyman at Bodiam, near the Royal Military College of Sandhurst. Here he imbibed the values and attitudes of the English minor gentry and acquired the social connections so necessary to upward mobility within the aristocratic upper strata of English society.
Like many other young men of good social standing but limited means, Grey entered Sandhurst as a ‘gentleman cadet’. He was commissioned at the age of 17 and posted to Ireland, where he spent the next six years enforcing English laws against the resistance of an increasingly rebellious Irish peasantry. Grey’s Irish experiences made an indelible impression on him. He seems to have realised that there was no way of alleviating the sufferings of the poor within the confines of the British Isles without challenging the hidebound and oppressive social system of which he himself was a product and a defender. He began to see emigration as the solution to Britain’s chronic problems, and he turned his attention to the yet uncolonised lands of the southern hemisphere as a possible site for the creation of a new and better society. With the approval and financial support of the Colonial Secretary, Grey embarked in 1836 on an expedition to explore the hitherto unknown corner of far northwestern Australia.
It was a fiasco from the very beginning. Their first day ashore, the party found no water, collapsed from sunstroke, nearly got lost, and narrowly escaped being killed by Australian aborigines. On the fourteenth day Grey himself was speared three times and developed a severe abcess in his wounded hip, which he kept at bay with laudanum until his deteriorating health brought the expedition to a premature end. Grey was to complain of this wound all his life, blaming it for the severe bouts of depression which totally incapacitated him from time to time, and giving rise to some historical speculation that his extraordinary patterns of behaviour were inspired to some extent by opium or some other drug.7
The failure of his first expedition did nothing to dampen Grey’s fierce desire to rise from obscurity and achieve something for his country and for himself. Ten months later, he set sail a second time for northwestern Australia. With incredible shortsightedness, he landed his expedition on an island which turned out to have no water. After a month of fruitless shuttling between the islands and the mainland, the expedition began to face the very real possibility of death by exposure and starvation. Grey insisted on attempting the journey home by sea, but his boats were dashed to pieces, stranding the party nearly 500 kilometres from Perth. After a week of slow progress, Grey decided to leave his weaker companions to their own devices and push on as fast as he could. He reached Perth a fortnight later, but it was another 25 days before the last of the stragglers was rescued. Fortunately for Grey’s reputation, only one man had actually died.
Grey had thus mismanaged two expeditions, abandoned his subordinates, and decisively failed to found the new colony of which he had dreamed. Nevertheless, it was not difficult for him to pass himself off as an intrepid explorer. He had named ten rivers and discovered two new mountain ranges, clashed with aborigines and reported on their customs, besides collecting numerous specimens of hitherto unknown shrimps, shellfish, butterflies and insects. His carefully written Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-Western Australia became an instant classic of Australiana.8
Grey was offered a temporary position as magistrate at Albany in Western Australia. Here he married Lucy Spencer, the daughter of his predecessor, and acquired some practical experience of governing Australian aborigines. His ideas on the proper line of policy to be pursued towards aboriginal peoples by colonial governments were fast maturing, and he took advantage of the long sea voyage back to England to write these up in a memorandum. As these ideas were to form the basis of Grey’s future policies in New Zealand and at the Cape, it is necessary to pause in our narrative and look at them in some detail.9
Grey began by attacking the premise on which all official colonial policy towards indigenous peoples had hitherto been based, namely that ‘so long as they only exercised their own customs upon themselves … they should be allowed to do so with impunity’. Leaving the ‘natives’ to indulge in their ‘barbarous’ customs was well meant, Grey thought, but it was a mistake. He professed great respect for the natural capabilities of the aborigines. ‘They are as apt and intelligent as any other race of men I am acquainted with,’ he wrote. ‘They are subject to the same affections, appetites and passions as other men.’ And yet, in spite of this natural aptitude, they remained sunk in barbarism and savagery. Grey thought that the reason for this was that those aborigines who wished to adopt English civilisation were trapped by the laws and customs imposed on them by the barbarous older generation.
To believe that man in a savage state is endowed with freedom of thought or action is erroneous in the highest degree. He is in reality subjected to complex laws, which not only deprive him of all free agency of thought, but, at the same time, by allowing no scope whatever for the development of intellect, benevolence or any other great moral qualification, they necessarily bind him down in a hopeless state of barbarism, from which it is impossible for man to emerge, so long as he is enthralled by these customs …
Grey had no doubt that any aborigine given the freedom of choice would choose the British version of civilisation rather than his own. He could see no saving grace whatsoever in the indigenous cultures of the Polynesian and African peoples he encountered. Although he made very real contributions to the study of Maori linguistics and folklore, Grey had nothing but contempt for his subject matter. Maori traditions were ‘puerile’ and Maori religion was ‘absurd’. He estimated that savage customs had caused the deaths of no fewer than four million Maori, not counting the victims of infanticides and witch-beliefs. The only reason for studying such worthless cultures, he maintained, was to communicate more effectively with the Maori chiefs and to destroy the illusion that the intellectual systems of barbarous races were in some way worthy of respect.10
Instead of tolerating the savage customs which kept their adherents bound in eternal thrall, Grey argued, colonial Governors should push ahead as fast as possible with the imposition of English law in the place of the ‘bloodthirsty’ aboriginal law. The cause of civilisation would be further advanced by establishing native schools and by providing aborigines with well-paid employment on public roads. Aborigines who, by their labour, proved themselves ‘serviceable members of the community’ should be given grants of land on individual tenure. Aborigines should not, however, be allowed to congregate together and keep up their old bad habits, but should be scattered and distributed all over settler country.
Grey’s ideas were very much in keeping with the Utilitarian spirit of the early Victorian age. Utilitarianism owed something to the Evangelical Christian doctrine that human nature was intrinsically the same in all races, but it exalted government and law above religion and education as the main engine of social improvement.11 For many years, the Utilitarian school of political economy had been attacking the policies of the English East India Company which ruled India. Writers such as Jeremy Bentham and James Mill argued that by freeing the individual Indian from the tyranny of Indian customs and Indian government and giving free scope to the interplay of labour and capital, British law might stir Indian society out of its centuries-old stagnation and set it moving along the road of progress. During the administration of Lord William Bentinck (1828-35), the British government in India embarked on an extensive campaign to suppress Indian customs, introduce English legal procedures into Indian courts, and impose English language and education into areas where Sanskrit and Islamic learning had hitherto been tolerated.
Grey’s ideas were more attuned to contemporary thinking than the philanthropic attitudes of the Colonial Office which still sought to protect indigenous peoples by
keeping them strictly separate from intrusive settlers. By 1840, however, it was apparent even to Sir James Stephen, the philanthropically minded Permanent Secretary at the Colonial Office, that this policy of segregation was not viable, and that colonists and aborigines alike were tearing down the frail barriers which kept them apart, involving the British government in expensive wars which it did not want.12 Grey’s approach came as a welcome escape from the Colonial Office dilemma of reconciling its conflicting obligations to settlers and indigenous peoples. Far from being antagonistic, Grey maintained, the interests of settlers and indigenes were in fact complementary, so long as the latter were given the opportunity of acquiring the skills and education necessary to survival as equals. Far from trying vainly to segregate the conflicting races, the Colonial Office should throw all its efforts into trying to amalgamate them as quickly as possible. Not only did Grey thus conjure up a picture of progress and harmony particularly pleasing to the Victorian taste for order and rationality, but he couched it in the humanitarian terms most likely to appeal to the old veterans of the anti-slavery crusade. Through the good offices of an old patron, Grey was introduced to Sir James Stephen at the Colonial Office. He turned on his magical charm and, at the exceptionally youthful age of 28, found himself appointed Governor of South Australia.
This is not the place to enter into a lengthy discussion of Grey’s governorships of South Australia (1841-5) and New Zealand (1845-54). Suffice it to say that his reputed successes were achieved by a lethal combination of brute force and barefaced lies. The Maoris of New Zealand suffered most. Through Grey’s agency, they lost six million acres of the disputed North Island and all South Island’s thirty million acres. Other victims included Henry Williams, a saintly missionary, and Charles Sturt, the discoverer of South Australia. Grey was a fake humanitarian and a fake explorer who did not relish being shown up by the real thing.