by Peires, Jeff
20 GH 8/49 J Maclean-J Jackson, 30 Oct. 1856.
21 BK 71 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 1 May 1857; BK 82 H Vigne-J Maclean, 1 Feb. 1857; Brownlee (1916), p.134; GH 8/49 F Reeve-J Maclean, 9 Nov. 1856; BK 71 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 25 Jan. 1857; BK 81 J Gawler-J Maclean, 17 Nov. 1856.
22 T Soga-R Bogue, 10 Aug. 1857, UPC Mission Record, Dec. 1857, See also, GH 8/30 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 7 Dec. 1856; GH 8/30 J Maclean-G Grey, 3 Nov. 1856,
23 GH 8/30 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 7 Dec. 1856; CO 2949 J Warner-R Southey, 7 April 1857; J Goldswain (1946-9), 2, pp. 192-3.
24 See Peires (1981) Ch. 3, where this view of precolonial Xhosa society is argued at length.
25 A Kropf and R Godfrey (1915), p.230. Gqoba, ‘Isizathu’, Part 2, refers to the phrase as having been used by Nongqawuse herself.
26 HH Dugmore, ‘Rev. HH Dugmore’s Papers’, in J Maclean (1858) p.38.
27 Rutherford (1961), pp.330-4.
28 GH 8/25 R Niven-J Maclean, 17 Jan. 1854.
29 Kropf and Godfrey (1915), pp.402-3.
30 A-I Berglund (1976), p.162.
31 SEK Mqhayi, Ityala lamaWele, (Lovedale: Mission Press, n.d.), p.113. Another example of ‘softness’ in this sense is supplied by the unbeliever Gxabagxaba, who eventually agreed to kill his cattle saying, ‘that the wealth and cattle which he possessed were obtained from [Sarhili] and his father, Hintsa, but as they were now determined to deprive him of all he had, he could do nothing but yield. He would kill his cattle in compliance with the orders of his chief, and not because he believed in the announcement made by the prophets.’ This ‘softness’ cost Gxabagxaba his reason, and he died insane shortly thereafter. Brownlee (1916), pp.157-8.
32 South African Library, Cape Town, Uncatalogued Manuscripts, Rough Notes on Kafir habits, customs etc., presented to Sir George Grey by JC Warner, 1859.
33 GH 20/2/1 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 25 Aug. 1856; GH 8/49 J Maclean-G Grey, 10 July 1856; MS 7666, Cory Library, B Ross-J Ross, 9 Aug. 1856.
34 BK 83 H Vigne-J Maclean, 27 Feb. 1857; BK 86 F Reeve-J Maclean, 27 Nov. 1856; GH 8/31 R Hawkes-J Maclean, 17 March 1857; CO 2949 J Warner-R Southey, 2 June 1857.
35 This figure is calculated from the ‘Population Returns for British Kaffraria,’ enclosed in Maclean, (1858). It is derived from the difference in male population between January 1857 (the height of the cattle-killing) and December 1857 (by which time most of the believers had left their homes in search of food.) The seven chiefdoms in question are those of Sandile, Mhala, Phatho, Maqoma, Botomane, Xhoxho and Feni. Figures from the other chiefdoms, which experienced an influx of refugees from the core believer districts, were not considered. The precise figure for those who remained is 16,6%, but this would include the believing chiefs and their close associates, as well as believers who found refuge on mission stations.
36 Kropf and Godfrey, (1915), pp.122-3.
37 Gqoba, ‘Isizatu,’ Part 2, 2 April, 1888.
38 J Backhouse, (1844), p.211. For more on Soga, see Peires (1981), p.108.
39 J Lewis, ‘The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry: a Critique and Reassessment,’ Journal of South African Studies, 11 (Oct. 1984), p.4.
40 Merriman (1957), pp.98-9. The praises are printed in WB Rubusana (1906), pp.270-1. Translated with the help of DLP Yali-Manisi.
41 T van der Kemp, Transactions of the London Missionary Society, 1, (1804), p.438.
42 Rubusana (1906), p.275. Translated with the help of DLP Yali-Manisi.
43 ‘Nzulu Lwazi,’ ‘UTyala Nteyi,’ Umteteli waBantu, 22 Nov. 1930; GH 8/31 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 4 Jan. 1857. The ‘indigent adherents’ mentioned by Brownlee had possessed four head of cattle, and were not therefore as indigent as all that.
44 Interview with M Torha, Ngede Location, Kentani District, 24 Aug. 1983; Interview with M Soga (note 78 above).
45 There is a list of Sandile’s headmen ranked according to status in BK 70 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 4 Sept. 1856. Of the 28 second-class headmen, six can be firmly identified as unbelievers, and only three as believers. The figure of 5-10% is calculated as follows: According to the 1857 returns, there were 14 000 adults in Sandile’s chiefdom in January 1857. If we assume that 47,7% of these were males (this figure is calculated from the eleven chiefdoms in which male:female ratios are known), this would give us a figure of 6 681 adult males. There were only 798 males left by December 1857 (11,95% of the January total), including Chiefs Sandile and Dondashe and other believers. Elsewhere, (BK 71 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 11 Aug. 1857) Brownlee refers to 250 (3,7% of 6 681) unbelievers in his district.
46 GH 8/29 J Gawler-J Maclean, 14 Aug. 1856; GH 18/6 J Gawler-J Maclean, 15 Aug. 1856; Acc. 793 J Gawler-J Maclean, 14 July, 29 Oct 1856.
47 T Soga (1983), pp.48-9; GH 8/41 JC Kayser-J Maclean, 20 June 1860; GH 8/49 R Tainton-J Maclean, 29 Dec. 1856; Brownlee (1916), p. 158; Personal communication from Mr MVS Balfour of Idutywa, a descendant of Makaphela.
48 This was the usual argument of the unbelievers according to oral tradition. Interviews with Tshisela (note 83) and Anta (note 87).
49 BK 81 J Gawler-J Maclean, 4 Dec. 1856.
CHAPTER 6 – The Apotheosis of Major Gawler
CHAPTER 6
The Apotheosis of Major Gawler
1. A DISCIPLE OF COLONEL EYRE
If it is true, as some maintain, that action is a combination of theory and practice, then in British Kaffraria in 1857 the theory was Governor Grey’s but the practice was Major Gawler’s. Alternatively, one might say that the ends were conceptualised by Grey but the means were devised by Gawler. Grey’s theory was born of abstract reflection in his quiet, book-lined study, while Gawler’s practice was forged in the gritty tension of his magistrate’s offices at Waterloo Huts, near the Great Place of Chief Mhala. If we wish to understand the astonishingly brutal reaction of the colonial authorities to the Cattle-Killing, we have to retrace our steps to January 1856 and the arrival of a young officer at the lair of an old chief.
The young officer was Major John Cox Gawler, born in 1830 to an old and honourable military family.1 His great-grandfather, also John Gawler, stormed the Heights of Abraham with General Wolfe in 1759 and features in West’s famous portrait of the dying hero. His grandfather, Samuel Gawler, was killed at Mysore during the British conquest of India. His father, George Gawler, was wounded in the Peninsular War and led a company at the battle of Waterloo. In 1838 George Gawler was appointed Governor of South Australia, the chaotic finances of which were further confused by his massive and unauthorised expenditures. His term of office, however, was brought prematurely to an end by the secret denunciations of a military officer whom he had once hospitably entertained. This was none other than the young George Grey.
John Cox Gawler was born at Derby and educated at Rugby and Kings College, London. When a youth of 17, he volunteered as a special constable to police the Chartist demonstration in the City of London and spent several happy weeks of anticipation, making bullets with the help of his sisters. In 1849, he was commissioned an ensign in his grandfather’s regiment, the 73rd, which was stationed at the Cape when the War of Mlanjeni broke out. The 73rd soon developed the reputation of the toughest regiment on the Eastern Frontier, and its commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Eyre, has already been singled out as the man whose energetic and merciless tactics won the war for Britain. We do not know too much about Gawler’s part in these events, but he must have witnessed the ruthless and callous acts – the whippings, the burnings, the lootings, the casual executions, the bodies hung in the trees – which were Eyre’s hallmark as a soldier. He almost certainly participated in the massacre of Sotho civilians which the 73rd perpetrated north of the Orange Riv
er in 1852, and he played a leading part in saving the British forces from humiliation at the battle of Berea when he led the company which stormed a virtually inaccessible mountain and caught the victorious Sotho by surprise. Gawler ever paid tribute to the memory of Colonel Eyre and, as we shall see, he proved himself a worthy disciple: brave, energetic, tough to the point of brutality, and supremely convinced of the innate superiority of the British officer to his ‘barbarian’ opponent.2
When the War of Mlanjeni was over, Gawler was appointed Field Adjutant in Natal, but he did not stay there long. He had married the daughter of Canon Judge of Simonstown, and through this Anglican connection he was offered the position of resident magistrate in British Kaffraria. It is not certain whether Grey realised that he was appointing the son of his old acquaintance, but Gawler made it quite clear that he had no intention of being beholden in any way. He refused to thank the Governor for his appointment, as custom required, and he passed through Cape Town on his way to the frontier without so much as sending Grey his card. He stirred up an immense amount of trouble in the gossipy atmosphere of the King William’s Town officers’ mess by reporting the private conversations of Reverend Allen and Captain Espinasse to Chief Commissioner Maclean. Few can have lamented his departure for his small and isolated station near the Great Place of Mhala, son of Ndlambe, the second-ranking chief in British Kaffraria.3
Mhala was often called by his praise name, A! Mbodla! – Wildcat! – and rarely was a salutation more appropriate, for his was a solitary nature which preferred the shadows to the open spaces, hard to pin down and ferocious when cornered. Chief Commissioner Maclean described him as ‘a shrewd man, and very crafty’, and Archdeacon Merriman called him ‘the craftiest and most hardened chief in [Xhosaland]’. His intellectual abilities were widely renowned among the Xhosa and the expression ‘Hayi! Ubulumko bukaMbodla! Asinokuba bukhulu’ (‘Ah, the wisdom of Mbodla! There is nothing else so great’) achieved a literally proverbial status.4
In fact, Mhala’s deservedly great reputation was based not so much on breadth of knowledge or depth of insight as on his ability to anticipate and outwit opponents whose resources and natural advantages were far greater than his own. He was not born a great chief, being the son of a lesser wife, but had intrigued his way into it partly through discrediting the most qualified heir on a charge of witchcraft and partly through getting his father’s councillors to recognise that he had been ‘given gifts of chieftainship, which were not given to the other sons of his father’.5 The Mhala style of wheedling and flattery, of promises and evasions, of never refusing to obey a command but never obeying it either, bamboozled and frustrated a long succession of colonial officials, notably Sir Harry Smith, who wrote of him:
He never quailed in the slightest as all the others did, under my most violent animadversions. He gave me more trouble to render obedient than all the other chiefs. Still he respected me and I him …6
Never the best judge of character, Sir Harry was perhaps influenced by Mhala’s decision to rename his Right-Hand Son ‘Smith’ in the Governor’s honour. He renamed his Great Son ‘Makinana’ after Mackinnon, the first Chief Commissioner of British Kaffraria.
Mhala’s political style extended also to the field of military operations. He was an inveterate enemy of the Colony and the settlers, having grown up west of Grahamstown in the days when the lands of his father Ndlambe stretched almost to Port Elizabeth. He was old enough to remember the catastrophic defeat of the Fourth Frontier War (1811-2) and the death of three brothers in the battle of Grahamstown during the Fifth (1818-9). Mhala’s hostility did not abate when he assumed the Ndlambe chieftainship in 1828, but his relatively flat and open territory did not permit the sort of sustained guerrilla warfare which Maqoma and his brother Ngqika chiefs waged in the forested and inaccessible Amathole mountain ranges. Mhala’s strategy in the Sixth (1834-5) and Seventh (1846-7) Frontier Wars was one of pretended neutrality, remaining technically at peace but sending out raiding parties, supplying the Xhosa fighters in the mountains and sheltering their women, children and cattle. Once and only once did Mhala come out into the open, an exception to his normal behaviour which he was greatly to regret. He was asked to join in an attack on Fort Peddie, which would have necessitated his marching during daylight hours. ‘I am the wildcat,’ Mhala protested, ‘a thing which walks by night.’ Accused of cowardice, he eventually gave way against his better judgement.7 The British cavalry caught the Ndlambe army on the plains of the Gwangqa and 500 Xhosa perished in the biggest Xhosa military disaster for nearly 30 years. Mhala lost two brothers killed virtually before his eyes in the very bush where he, too, was hiding. In the War of Mlanjeni, therefore, he resumed his old method of malevolent neutrality, aiding and abetting the Ngqika Xhosa every way he could short of open warfare. Although his duplicity was recognised by Maclean and Governor Cathcart, they had enough on their hands without a shooting war near the strategic port of East London and so, despite the ranting of the settler press, Mhala ended the war in full possession of his territory and his cattle.
Mhala did not, of course, enjoy living under the colonial government, but up until the initiation of Grey’s new policies, he had managed fairly well. His immediate superior was Maclean, resident at Fort Murray 40 kilometres away. As we have seen, in the days before Grey’s governorship Maclean had been most reluctant to interfere with the prerogatives of chieftainship, believing as he did that Smith’s deposition of Sandile was the main cause of the War of Mlanjeni. William Greenstock, the Anglican missionary at St Luke’s in Mhala’s territory, was sympathetic to the Xhosa and inclined to support the chief’s authority.
Mhala rightly feared that the introduction of a resident magistrate would interfere with his freedom of action but after some procrastination he agreed to receive one on the understanding that he would get a cash income in compensation for the loss of criminal fines and court fees.8 He expected to pick his own magistrate, from among the Tainton family, simple Christians of humble origins who had lived among the Xhosa for many years and were unlikely to adopt a high-handed tone or manner. Moreover, by naming his own magistrate, Mhala was emphasising the conditional nature of his acceptance: if he asked for a magistrate, then by implication he could have him removed.
One can only imagine Mhala’s displeasure when Maclean arrived in November 1855 with Gawler in tow, and announced that this was the chief’s new magistrate. The Chief Commissioner lost no time in disabusing Mhala of the idea that this was a voluntary agreement between equals. Mhala had ‘accepted the whole of the Governor’s terms’, said Maclean, and he had lost the right to pick and choose. If Mhala insisted, he would submit Mhala’s request for another magistrate to Grey, but Gawler would remain at nearby St Luke’s until the matter was finally decided. Mhala raised objections to this, too, but when Maclean asked him pointedly whether he was ordering them out, Mhala decided that he dared not venture so direct an insult. ‘I agree to the magistrate sitting at the [mission] station until the reply is received from the Governor,’ he said, adding in a more conciliatory fashion, ‘I have no personal dislike to the Gentleman, the only thing is he is new to me.’
Predictably enough, Grey refused to consider Mhala’s request and, in January 1856, Gawler was formally installed as Mhala’s magistrate.9 For three months outward peace prevailed in Mhala’s district as chief and magistrate felt their way towards a better understanding of the politics of the new situation. Then, in April 1856, the tension finally exploded over the issue of the councillors’ salaries.
The only attraction of Grey’s system, as far as the chiefs were concerned, was the payment of cash salaries. In Mhala’s case, this amounted to £96 per annum. The value of such a guaranteed income lay less in the number of consumer goods it could purchase than in its function as a means of patronage for the chief. But the whole purpose of the new system was to undermine the control of the chief over the more enterprising of his commoner councillors. The c
olonial administration could not prevent the chiefs from doing what they liked with their own personal stipends but it could force the more important councillors to look to the government rather than the chiefs for their incomes. This point was so central to Grey’s strategy and so repugnant to the chiefs that it had been glossed over during the initial discussions. Even Brownlee did not fully understand it, and he continued to give Sandile the councillors’ salaries to allocate as he pleased. On the first occasion that payments were made in the Ndlambe chiefdom, Mhala too was permitted to name the councillors he wanted paid.10
By April 1856, Gawler was sufficiently established to challenge Mhala on this point. Acting on Maclean’s specific instructions, Gawler informed Mhala that he need not assemble his councillors for their monthly payment. He, Gawler, would pay councillors of his own selection privately and in his own time.11 It is not clear whether Mhala misunderstood this instruction or whether he simply chose to misunderstand it, but when payday came around the chief had assembled 120 or so junior chiefs and councillors at Gawler’s office.
‘We have come for the money,’ Mhala said, naming ten men whom he wanted paid. ‘I am glad to see all your faces,’ responded Gawler, ‘but am sorry you have come to be disappointed. I told [Mhala] the last time that I should send for those I wish to pay.’ ‘Pay these men,’ Mhala insisted, ‘because they are here and it is far for them to come again.’ Gawler refused. ‘I have paid the only two that I intend to pay,’ he said. ‘It is your fault bringing them so far. I told you last time that I had my orders and if I want any of these I will send for them.’