by Peires, Jeff
After a month’s visit to the frontier, Grey was ready to act. He announced his intentions in a speech to the Cape legislature (March 1855) that must surely rank as one of the finest ever made in South Africa. Even a historian conscious of Grey’s ethnocentric bias cannot but be struck by the soaring idealism of his words and by the transient beauty of his portrait of a South Africa united in harmony and common purpose.
I would rather that we should, with full but humble confidence, accept the duties and responsibilities of our position, that we should admit that we cannot live in immediate contact with any race or portion of our fellow men, whether civilized or uncivilized, neglecting and ignoring our duties towards them, without suffering those evils which form the fitting punishment of our neglect and indifference; that we should feel that if we leave the natives beyond our border ignorant barbarians, shut out from all community of interest with ourselves, they must always remain a race of troublesome marauders, and that, feeling this, we should try to make them a part of ourselves, with a common faith and common interests, useful servants, consumers of our goods, contributors to our revenue; in short, a source of strength and wealth for this colony, such as Providence designed them to be.
We should, I think, use our time of strength, when our generosity cannot be misunderstood, to instruct and civilize – to change inveterate enemies into friends, alike from interest and increased knowledge – destroyers of our stock and produce into consumers of our goods and producers for our markets.10
The references to economic integration with its clear implication of black subordination to white domination will, even in these moving passages, have set warning lights flashing in the minds of many readers. But worse was to come. Grey was a great proponent of colonisation, and he maintained that there was plenty of space in the ‘fertile’ land of British Kaffraria to accommodate 5 000 British ex-soldiers ‘of a class fitted to increase our strength in that country’. Grey’s vision of a future British Kaffraria was very much that of a mixed settlement colony.
Should this plan be carried out, our ultimate frontier defence would be a fertile and populous country, filled with a large population, partly European, partly native; the Europeans, reared in the country, acquainted with its inhabitants, and their mode of warfare; the natives, won by our exertions to Christianity, trained by us in agriculture and in simple arts, possessing property of their own and a stake in the country, accustomed to our laws and aware of their advantages, attached to us from a sense of benefits received, respecting us for our strength and generosity.
The Governor never got the settlers he wanted, not least because his promise of a cottage and an acre of land did not sufficiently appeal to the British ex-soldier. But he was to be given unexpected opportunities to fill British Kaffraria with settlers of another sort, as we shall see.
For the first few months of his administration, Grey busied himself with the more straightforward aspects of his civilisation policy. Public works got off the ground almost immediately. Charles Brownlee, the Ngqika Xhosa Commissioner, was an enthusiast for irrigation and he soon got his men busy cutting water channels, but for the most part the public works consisted of labour on roads through the Amathole Mountains and other hitherto inaccesible parts of Xhosaland. Roadbuilding had a military and strategic relevance beyond its purely economic significance. As Grey boasted to the Colonial Secretary, ‘They have in our pay, and organised by us, completely opened up their country by roads made by their own hands – so that the greater part of it can now be traversed by a Military force in any direction.’11 Even Brownlee’s water courses were not without economic significance, as some of Sandile’s councillors pointed out, saying that to accept irrigation works in the country of their exile was tantamount to recognising that they would never regain their old lands in the Amathole.12
Wages paid were between 6d and 1s per day, depending on the rank by merit of the worker. Average pay for similar labour within the Colony ranged from 2s to 3s 6d per day, and the prosperous Mfengu refused to work for Grey’s low wages. The Xhosa, who were being refused passes to seek work in the Colony, were in no position to complain about the rate of pay. The war and the lungsickness epidemic had impoverished most of the homestead heads, and as soon as word of the ‘public works’ got out, many Xhosa began eagerly to volunteer. Brownlee was soon turning away hundreds of applicants, and the speed of recruitment was limited only by the lack of available white supervisors. Grey was delighted by the success of his scheme, having anticipated a great deal of trouble from the alleged barbarous laziness of the Xhosa. In fact, the Xhosa had always been willing to work in return for adequate incentives. That they were turning out for his public works only because they had no other alternative to destitution never occurred to Grey. He thought it was a sign that they were becoming civilised already.13
Grey’s plans for Xhosa education were not exactly new. Sir Harry Smith had something similar in mind in 1848 when he invited suggestions ‘to inspire in the [Xhosa] a desire to cultivate their lands by ploughing and to induce them to follow habits of industry, the first steps to civilization’.14 Robert Gray, the Bishop of Cape Town, had been advocating industrial schools and hospitals since the late 1840s. Governor Cathcart had supported such proposals but lacked the £1 000 a year he thought necessary. Grey, on the other hand, had £40 000 a year, and he was prepared to spend a large percentage of it on education. He toured the mission stations of the eastern Cape on his first visit to the frontier, accompanied by a Maori evangelist, who assured his awe-struck Xhosa hearers that the Maori had been cannibals until they were saved for civilisation ‘through the Missionaries, and [pointing to Grey] the kindness of this man’.15 Grey himself was optimistic and excited, selecting the sites of the buildings he wanted erected and sketching out the plans for them himself. For the missionaries, long starved of official encouragement, Grey was a Moses and his £40 000 a year manna from heaven. Grey’s major worry was that the existing missions were ‘too bookish’, and, though he was prepared to concede that the main purpose of the missions should remain the training of teachers and evangelists, he was concerned to create industrial schools for the better promotion of his ‘useful servants’ economic policy. Five missions were selected and set to work teaching the Xhosa the ‘more useful mechanical arts’ such as masonry, tailoring, carpentry, shoemaking and waggon-making. Girls were taught needlework and domestic skills. Grey was unusually concerned with female education, not because he was a feminist but because, as a social engineer, he was concerned that his new breed of Europeanised black males should have correctly educated wives and mothers to provide a proper degree of civilisation in the home.16
Grey’s hopes for self-sufficient industrial schools soon degenerated into meaningless hard labour. The ‘pupils’ at one of the schools found that their ‘industrial education’ took the form of three hours’ work a day on the mission farm, while those at another school found that the teacher’s income depended on selling the items which they produced. Except for the Presbyterian Mission at Lovedale, none of the ‘industrial schools’ managed to survive the withdrawal of the British government subsidy in the 1860s.17
Grey also wanted to create an elite school for chiefs’ children in Cape Town, where they might learn to appreciate the extent of Britain’s wealth and power, grow up in a fully ‘civilised’ environment, and become entirely divorced from their own culture and its attendant habits. But none of the chiefs with whom Grey discussed the matter were prepared to consider giving up their children. Not yet.18
Grey’s health programme was perhaps the one unqualified success of his policy, and, as far as the Xhosa were concerned, its one unqualified benefit. The Governor was, of course, aware of the important part played by the Xhosa doctors (amagqirha) in supporting the political authority of the chiefs, and he laid particular stress on their role in accusing witches and confiscating property. Emphasising this aspect but ignoring the very positive role played by Xhosa doctors in
the social, psychological and, indeed, medical spheres, Grey naturally believed that the visible proof of the power of European medicine would concretely demonstrate the material superiority of European science over Xhosa superstition. In Dr JP Fitzgerald, who followed him from New Zealand, Grey possessed a disciple who shared all his high ideals but lacked his deviousness and his egotism. Fitzgerald was soon treating 50 patients a day, examining a total of 6 000 or more in his first ten months. He had been trained in opthalmic surgery, and his cataract operations gave him the reputation among the Xhosa of a man who could restore the sight of the blind. The Xhosa doctors were sufficiently impressed to visit Fitzgerald’s practice, and Fitzgerald himself was sufficiently broad-minded to treat his Xhosa equivalents as fellow practitioners. Inasmuch as the Xhosa were able to swallow Fitzgerald’s medicine without in any way giving up their beliefs in the powers of the Xhosa doctors, the great contest between science and superstition which Grey had envisaged never occurred. On the other hand, Fitzgerald’s personal influence on those Xhosa who worked for him as assistants was profound, and was largely responsible for keeping Ned and Kona, Chief Maqoma’s sons, out of the Cattle-Killing.19
Grey was also eager to alter land tenure arrangements in British Kaffraria in order to introduce ‘individual tenure’ and thus give the Xhosa homestead head a ‘stake in the country’ independent of his chief. Like so many of Grey’s other proposals, this was nothing new and had been implemented already by Governor Cathcart at the instigation of certain missionaries. Measures were initiated among the Mfengu to define private plots and lay them out in villages. But even Grey appreciated the explosive consequences of premature interference in Xhosa land rights and held his fire on the subject for the time being.20
1 Imperial Blue Book 1969 of 1855, Grey’s speech to the Cape parliament, enclosed in G Grey-G Grey, 17 March 1855, p.56.
2 Imperial Blue Book 2096 of 1856, J Maclean-W Liddle, 4 Aug. 1855, p.18.
3 Imperial Blue Book 1969 of 1855, G Grey-G Grey, 22 Dec. 1854, pp.36-8.
4 Grey wrote to Cathcart as early as October 1852, suggesting to him that the schemes he had introduced in New Zealand be applied at the Cape. Du Toit (1954), p.238. For Grey’s first dispatches to the Colonial Office outlining the policies he intended to follow, see Imperial Blue Book 1969 of 1855, Grey-Grey, 22 Dec. 1854, pp. 36-8 and for his speech to the Cape parliament, see Note 16 above.
5 In a comment to the pro-settler Civil Commissioner of Fort Beaufo rt. T Stringfellow-R Godlonton, 3 Dec. 1858, Godlonton Papers, University of the Witwatersrand.
6 Imperial Blue Book 1969 of 1855, G Grey-G Grey, 22 Dec. 1854, pp.36-8.
7 The whole scare was based on the marriage of Sandile, the senior Ngqika Xhosa chief, to a daughter of the Mfengu chief Njokweni, and on some drunken comments made by Njokweni at a beer drink. For a full report on the matter, see the special report by H Calderwood, 22 Jan. 1855, enclosed in Imperial Blue Book 1969 of 1855, G Grey-G Grey, 29 Jan. 1855, pp.42-51.
8 Imperial Blue Book 1969 of 1855, G Grey-G Grey, 22 Dec. 1854, pp.36-8.
9 Rutherford (1961), pp.304, 311.
10 Imperial Blue Book 1969 of 1855, Address to the Legislative Council and the House of Assembly at the Opening of the Second Session of the Colonial Parliament, enclosed in G Grey-G Grey, 17 March 1855, pp. 56-9.
11 GH 23/27 G Grey-H Labouchere, 19 Jan. 1857.
12 Imperial Blue Book 2096 of 1856, C Brownlee-J Maclean, 30 May 1855, p.19.
13 BK 24 J Ayliff-J Maclean, 15 March 1856; BK 70 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 20 May 1855; Grahamstown Journal, 1 March 1856; Imperial Blue Book 1969 of 1855, J Maclean-W Liddle, 26 March 1855, pp.65-6, and 2096 of 1856, G Grey-J Russell, 19 July 1855, p.8.
14 H Smith, quoted in Du Toit (1954), p.233. For a convenient summary of progress in this area during the time of Smith and Cathcart, see Du Toit (1954), Ch. 15. For references to specifically industrial training, see Dodd (1938), Ch. 1.
15 Healdtown (1955), p.12.
16 This point has been well made by Weldon (1984), p.41.
17 Dodd (1938), Ch. 1.
18 J Hodgson (1979), pp.127-8.
19 Fitzgerald’s fascinating correspondence has been preserved in BK 100. For an example, see J Fitzgerald-J Maclean, 6 Dec. 1856.
20 For early moves with regard to land tenure, see Du Toit (1954), pp.105, 262-8. For Grey’s early interest in the subject, see his speech to the Cape parliament (Note 16 above), p.57.
3. CUTTING DOWN THE CHIEFS
Grey knew, and so did everybody else, that his measures concerning health, education and public works could only be effective in the long term, and that the £40 000 a year he had extorted from the British government required tangible results almost immediately. Something needed to be done to reduce visibly the power of the Xhosa chiefs in British Kaffraria, in particular to remove their capacity to launch another frontier war.
This was not going to be easy. It was the assault on Sandile’s chieftainship that had precipitated the War of Mlanjeni, a fact that even Sir Harry Smith realised, for within a week of its outbreak he ordered Commissioner Maclean to inform all those chiefs who had not yet entered the war that he would henceforth allow them to ‘govern their people according to their own laws and customs’. After Smith’s dismissal, Governor Cathcart asked Maclean to repeat these assurances in his name and ‘to express his [Cathcart’s] determination not to interfere with their native laws and customs’. Cathcart viewed Smith’s ‘absurd’ interference with Xhosa custom as the main cause of his downfall, and based his entire administrative policy on the principle of government through the chiefs. When peace was made in March 1853, Cathcart ‘formally stated to [the Xhosa chiefs] that henceforth the chiefs should be allowed to govern their people according to their own laws’. ‘Do not let us revert to the old policy of lowering the chief in the eyes of his people,’ he cautioned Maclean. ‘We must on the contrary support him [the chief] and govern the people through him.’1
So unwilling was Cathcart to upset the chiefs, that he bluntly informed the missionaries that the government would do nothing to help them. Even when Chief Mhala executed some of his followers for witchcraft shortly after the peace of 1853, Cathcart did not flinch.
As to witchcraft and chiefs eating their people up – we really must not attempt to alter the customs of the people unnecessarily, and when we have not the power. Witchcraft was punished in England, and recognized by law as late as the time of James Ist, and even much later, suspected old women were hardly dealt with in England.
We must not get back into the old attempt to weaken the power of the chief, and set up his own people against him, we have seen enough to teach us that this will not do. 2
These principles and these promises, Grey now proceeded to trample underfoot.
Inevitably, relations between Grey and the Xhosa chiefs got off to a bad start. The Ngqika Xhosa longed for the lands they had lost through the War of Mlanjeni, and hoped against hope that they might get them back. Governor Cathcart had promised, at the peace conference, to send on their supplications to Queen Victoria, and although the British treated this as a mere formality, the Xhosa set great store by it. They still remembered that a change of British government policy in 1836 had returned to them the lands they had lost through the Frontier War of 1834-5,3 and they hoped that somehow the miracle might be repeated. Grey naturally brought no such good news, and was thus bound to disappoint Xhosa expectations no matter what he did. Advised by the local officials to avoid the great public meetings in which Sir Harry Smith had so foolishly indulged himself, Grey adopted a policy of never formally meeting with the chiefs as a group. The Ngqika Xhosa chiefs were obliged to wait at a military post for five days to see the Governor as he passed by, and w
hen he eventually did appear he had nothing positive to tell them. Grey declined even to discuss the land issue with the anxious chiefs, pleading his ignorance of the matter, and insisting on receiving their request in writing. The message, sent in Sandile’s name, spoke for all the chiefs.
Sandile says: am I not your child? Why when I am punished am I deprived of my people? Why am I severed from the grave of my father? The inheritance of a chief is not cattle, it is lands and men, saying this, I pray to you my father to whom I have been given. I have no other word. I ask alone for land.4
Far from considering how best to restore the Xhosa to their mountain strongholds, Grey was busy devising a method which would still further break down their resistance. After much thought and enquiry, he correctly identified the material basis of the Xhosa chiefs’ power as the legal fees and fines which they collected in their judicial capacities as arbiters of Xhosa law.5 Not only did this source of private revenue render the chiefs economically independent of colonial pressure but, Grey argued, it encouraged witchcraft accusations by means of which the wealth of the alleged witches passed into the hands of the chiefs and their immediate associates.
No sooner, therefore, does a person grow rich, than he is almost certain to be accused of this offence, and is, at least stripped of all he possesses.
It is impossible that people subjected to such a system can ever advance in civilization, or long persevere in attempting honestly to acquire property, of which they are almost certain ultimately to be stripped at the caprice of the chief and his counsellors.
While it might have been true that witchcraft accusations inhibited the development of a class of small capitalists such as Grey desired to see arising among the Xhosa, it should be remembered that executions for witchcraft, though spectacular, were of comparatively rare occurrence in Xhosaland. There had been only two such occasions in British Kaffraria since the peace of 1853, and whole years might pass by without a single witchcraft death.6 Grey was, as usual, exaggerating for the benefit of the Colonial Secretary in London. The thrust of Grey’s policy was, however, quite in accordance with the principles he had consistently argued since his youthful memorandum of 1840, that no non-European race could ever progress as long as their ancient customs remained in force, and that the imposition of British law was necessary to free the progressive individual from the chains of the precolonial social structure and enable him to adopt the British version of civilisation.