by Peires, Jeff
The effect on the believers was remarkable, considering the number of disappointments they had already suffered, and is indicative of the extent of their desperation. Many who had found employment or a safe refuge returned to the destitution and starvation of their deserted homesteads. They busied themselves building huge new kraals to receive the cattle that were to rise, burning patches for gardens that would automatically fill with maize and pumpkins, digging pits for corn and cleaning threshing floors.4 Confirmed believers like Mhala, Maqoma and Sandile plunged with renewed frenzy into cattle-killing, slaughtering in many cases the very cattle which they had with difficulty extorted from their subjects. The cattle of Sandile’s nephew Feni, which he had carefully preserved in spite of the prophecies, fell victim to lungsickness, and the young chief began to slaughter the survivors with all the zeal of a recent convert.5 Mhala insisted that he did not wish ‘to see a head of cattle in the country’ and forced many former faithful and believing councillors, including his brother Nowawe, to flee to Gawler’s police camp. His Great Son Makinana, always an unbeliever but nevertheless devotedly loyal to his father, fled to a mission station with his remaining five cattle. I never killed of my own free will, he told Mhala, I had hoped your eyes were open.6
Mhala’s eyes, so long and so tightly closed, opened at last after the June disappointment, but there was little left in the country to gladden his sight. The cattle were all slaughtered. The believers were either dead or gone. The unbelievers had rejected their old chief with contempt, and had joined forces with his mortal foe, Gawler, at the police camp on the Tshabo. Deprived now even of his hopes, Mhala threw himself on the mercy of his enemies.
[Mhala told the Bishop of Grahamstown] that they had been deceived by the false words of a female; that she had told them that they were soon to see again their ancestors, their fathers and mothers, their wives and friends, who had died, that their desire to see them was so strong that this had caused them to fall into error …
Tell [the Governor] that you have seen me, that Umhala was a great chief, but now he is fallen, from having been deceived, through a desire of seeing those that were dead, and he begs the Government to help him.7
Unfortunately for Mhala and all the other devoted believers, this final renunciation came much too late, not only for their crops and their cattle, but for the colonial government as well. In the last stages of the Cattle-Killing, many of the starving believers had committed thefts and petty crimes, and these had the effect of setting them up for Governor Grey’s final solution.
Believing chiefs attempted to stop unbelievers taking their cattle out of their districts. Hungry believers raided the gardens of the missions and the unbelievers in order to keep themselves alive. Believers-turned-highwaymen stalked the convoys of goods on the main thoroughfares, especially the road from King William’s Town to East London, and their regretful chiefs had neither the will nor the ability to stop them.8 Minor chiefs not under the immediate surveillance of the colonial government – Tola, Gunuza and the turbulent Qasana – organised large-scale raiding parties of mounted men which openly attacked the herds of unbelievers in Anta’s country and the neighbourhood of Hangman’s Bush. Qasana’s men murdered Captain Ohlssen of the German Legion, sparking off full-scale riots between Xhosa and Germans in the port of East London.9
Of all the thieves then active the most energetic was Nqono, a follower of Qasana. Then in his early fifties, Nqono stood all of six foot seven inches tall and had escaped from colonial convict gangs on three separate occasions. Late in June 1857, Nqono stole three cattle from some Mfengu in the Crown Reserve and, according to his custom, retired to his hiding place in Mhala’s district to eat them. Fusani, a neighbouring councillor in the pay of Gawler, informed the magistrate and late that night a patrol of Gawler’s police surrounded Nqono and called on him to surrender. The thief seized his weapons and attempted to charge his way through the encirclement, but they shot him dead. Less than a week later, a party of men from Maqoma’s chiefdom surprised Fusani’s homestead and killed the informer in revenge for the part he had played in Nqono’s death. Gawler’s police were anxious to retaliate against Maqoma, and Gawler was right behind them. ‘I do not think I shall interfere,’ he wrote, and he himself advocated a night attack on Maqoma and on those who had killed Fusani. The political implications of such a raid induced Maclean to forbid it.10
But that was the last time that the muzzle was applied to Gawler and his police. Gawler was a tough man, and so were his top lieutenants, Tawa the son of Xayimpi and Jan Bushman, a former Kat River rebel who committed such unspeakable acts in Gawler’s service that he dared not remain in Xhosaland after his master had left it. Other policeman were turncoats, such as Mhala’s son Mtshatsheni, who played as violent a part in putting down the believers as they had formerly played in persuading them to kill their cattle. Gawler was a great believer in the sjambok, and ‘he flogged so freely that [his police] were known by their backs’.11 Across the bleak landscape of Mhala’s devastated and largely abandoned country, and far beyond it, galloped the brutalised police of Major Gawler, leaving in their wake the smoke of smashed, looted and burning homesteads. Triumphant and unrestrained, Gawler’s police emulated the scorched-earth policies which Gawler’s hero, Colonel Eyre, had pioneered during the War of Mlanjeni. This time, however, the enemy were not bands of armed warriors openly in the field, but the few wretched and starving believers who still attempted to cling to life in a country which Governor Grey had earmarked for white settlement.
Writing of the period some ten years later, Commissioner Brownlee said:
I freely admit that during the disorders and excitement attending the cattle killing we did many things which would not be justifiable under ordinary circumstances and which if judged by the standard of peacable times would be proved faulty and antagonistic to law. In 1857 I have done things which I could not do now … I do not now ask you to judge of the acts of 1857 by the law of 1867.12
Brownlee was writing in support of an unbeliever named Mbilini, whose cattle were confiscated by Gawler’s police. Brownlee’s correspondent, the Thembu Agent JC Warner, opposed giving compensation to Mbilini for being ‘eaten up by Gawler during the time when the law of “might” was considered “right”’. There were ‘scores’ of such cases, said Warner,
And if Umbilini gets compensation you may prepare a long purse; for all sorts of unjust and outrageous things were perpetrated in those days of disorganisation … I am of opinion that Umbilini deserved to be eaten up as much as any that were eaten up in those days of necessary severity and drum-head court martial.
‘Antagonistic to law’, ‘the law of might was considered right’, ‘all sorts of unjust and outrageous things’, ‘necessary severity and drum-head court martial’: the reader is startled by such phrases from the pens of high-ranking colonial officials. What was the secret history of those terrible days of 1857, blandly described in the colonial records as a period of relief and reconstruction? Was it starvation alone which drove tens of thousands of hungry believers forever from their homes and their livelihoods? The records draw a discreet veil of silence over Gawler’s six-month rule of fear, broken only occasionally by the terse official protests of neighbouring magistrates. Magistrate Hawkes, another tough soldier, complained about Gawler’s police operating in his district without his authorisation. Magistrate Lucas passed on the complaints of Maqoma’s family that his Great Place had been looted by the police when they came to arrest one of the residents, and stated further that ‘frequent complaints have been made to me by [Nggika Xhosa] that they have been plundered by Major Gawler’s police’. Magistrate Vigne enclosed a list of eight homesteads in his district ‘robbed and burnt by the police of Major Gawler’, and gave details of one old man of known good character robbed ‘even of his blanket’. Six weeks later, Vigne protested again to Maclean concerning Gawler’s police and threatened to resign.
If you
approve of all these acts which are in my opinion defeating justice and degrading the office of magistrate into one I have no wish to fulfil the duties of, I trust you will inform me. Things are daily happening that I neither have conscience nor inclination for – and as I have no control over them and little chance of redress, I must beg you to allow me to confine my duties to Jali’s tribe.13
The most complete description we have of Gawler’s method comes from a case which had nothing whatsoever to do with the Cattle-Killing.14 The statement of a nine-year-old Mfengu boy persuaded Gawler that a certain woman had been murdered by Sibunu, a resident of Peelton mission station. Acting on this suspicion, a party of 40 armed police invaded Peelton towards the end of December 1857 and dragged Sibunu from his dwelling, without allowing him time to dress. They slapped him repeatedly on the face, and Mhala’s son Mtshatsheni, formerly the great believer, hit him four times with a stick. They put a thong around his neck and dragged him violently about, then took his cattle off, saying, ‘What kind of school people are you to murder so many people, you will be transported!’ His wife was beaten and trampled on, so much so that the next day she vomited blood. In all this time, Sibunu was not charged nor asked to make a statement.
The next day a potential witness named Kese was taken off to Gawler’s headquarters.
Major Gawler then said, the Missionary has bribed you to deny any knowledge of the case, say what has he given you. I denied the charge when Major Gawler jumped up and struck me thrice with his hand on my face and called for a stick. He ordered a riem [thong] to be put round my neck, and taken away a prisoner and tied to a pillar of a hut.
Some days after I was taken down to the river and met some police there who stated they were ordered to take me aside and interrogate me. They then added, ‘What did the missionary do at your place. He must have gone to warn you what to say.’ I held to my former statement. I was then taken to the kraal … All the police surrounded me saying ‘Why will you die by hiding what the Missionary said to you, you will be transported with Sibunu. Say did he give you a cow or money?’
When the missionary, Kayser, approached Gawler about the case, the magistrate ‘left his office in a rage, charging me with incivility and adding he was not responsible to me’, after which ‘a head policeman shamefully abused me, shaking his sambok at me’. The matter was only resolved when Kayser found the alleged victim still alive, and took her to Gawler to prove to him that she had not been murdered.
Gawler’s methods were approved, if not actually encouraged, by Maclean for the simple reason that they worked. The other magistrates likewise put in for police forces of their own, partly to suppress robbery and partly, one suspects, to keep Gawler’s police out of their districts. Brownlee, Vigne and Lucas all established police forces paid for from the salaries of believing councillors struck off the payroll, though the solidly pro-government chiefs Kama, Toyise and Siwani were not affected.15 British soldiers were not suited to the kind of policing Maclean had in mind; Xhosa police were ‘much cheaper and more efficient for the work here’. ‘With such a police,’ Maclean wrote, ‘Mr Brownlee might keep order and accustom the people to the idea of European rule in earnest.’16
Late in September 1857, Gawler’s police, ‘in a playful humour’, visited Nonkosi’s homestead on the Mpongo river. They found the bodies of a woman and three children dead from starvation. They found the crippled old doctor, Nonkosi’s father, half-dead ‘and he died of fright when they brought him outside the hut’. Or so they said. Then they found Nonkosi herself and they brought her back with them to Major Gawler.17
1 BK 71 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 4 May 1857; GH 8/32 Schedule 455, 1 June 1857; King William’s Town Gazette, 7 March 1857.
2 BK 89 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 1 April 1857.
3 GH 8/32 Anon-J Maclean, 27 May 1857.
4 BK 71 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 28 May 1857; BK 80 R Hawkes-J Maclean, 17 June 1857; Acc 793 J Gawler-J Maclean, 10 June 1857.
5 BK 71 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 1, 18 May 1857.
6 BK 81 J Gawler-J Maclean, 5 June 1857.
7 Church Chronicle, 4 (Grahamstown: 1883), p.68.
8 BK 81 J Gawler-J Maclean, 20 June 1857; BK 82 H Lucas-J Maclean, 21 April 1857; Acc 793 J Gawler-J Maclean, 21 April 1857; BK 83 H Vigne-J. Maclean, 24 Aug. 1857; GH 8/32 H Vigne-J Maclean, 30 July 1857; GH 8/50 J Maclean-G Grey, 4 May, 21 June 1857.
9 BK 71 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 3 July 1857; BK 81 J Gawler-J Maclean, 15 July 1857; Cory Library, Diary of Clerk to Chief Commissioner, Fort Murray, 9, 11 April 1857; GH 8/32 L Traherne-J Maclean, 4 May 1857; GH 8/50, 4 May 1857.
10 GH 8/32 Memo enclosed in Schedule 474, 23 July 1857; GH 8/32 J Gawler-J Maclean, 10 July 1857.
11 DB Hook, With Sword and Statute, 2nd edition (Cape Town: Juta, 1907), p.139. BK 96 J Gawler-Lieut. Governor, 22 April 1863; GH 8/34 Schedule 9, 26 Jan.1858.
12 CO 3122 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 24 Jan. 1867; CO 3122 J Warner-R Southey, 1 Feb. 1867.
13 BK 81 J Gawler-J Maclean, 10 Dec. 1856; BK 81 J Gawler-R Hawkes, 18 Dec. 1856; BK 83 H Vigne-J Maclean, 1 Dec. 1857, 21 Jan. 1858.
14 GH 8/34 Schedule 9, 26 Jan. 1858.
15 BK 83 H Vigne-J Maclean, 3 Oct. 1857; GH 8/32 Schedule 467, 3 Sept. 1857; BK 71 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 17 Oct. 1857; BK 82 H Lucas-J Maclean, 3 Oct. 1857.
16 GH 8/32 J Maclean-G Grey, 3 Sept. 1857.
17 Acc 793 J Gawler-J Maclean, 22 Sept. 1857. Rev. Greenstock noted that Kulwana was pulled at the last minute from his blazing hut. He did not die immediately, but perished of starvation ‘gnawing at grass’ with no one to dig roots for him. MIC 172/2, Cory Library, Reel 1, W Greenstock Journal, 22 Sept. 1857. I have preferred Gawler’s version to Greenstock’s because I can see no reason why Gawler should have invented it. The story about Kulwana trying to eat grass seems to have been hearsay.
CHAPTER 7 – The Chiefs’ Plot
CHAPTER 7
The Chiefs’ Plot
1. ‘THE LATE GREAT PLOT’
It is time to return to Governor Sir George Grey. As we have seen, the role of the colonial authorities throughout the Cattle-Killing was one of reacting to crises rather than setting the pace, of waiting on events rather than dictating their course. The only two initiatives taken by Grey, the introduction of paid headmen and the cruise of the Geyser, had succeeded only in strengthening the believers’ cause. Grey, moreover, had signally failed to support the unbelievers in the hour of their greatest need, at a time when strong support might well have brought the waverers round to unbelief and thus minimised the impact of the delusion. Any successes the colonial administration had thus far achieved were due to the personal qualities of magistrates such as Gawler and Brownlee, and owed little to the central direction of Grey or Maclean. It is possible that Grey had even begun to feel ineffectual, and that this prompted a recurrence of his mysterious illness during his visit to the frontier in October 1856.1
Yet Grey’s hour was to come. His great strength as a colonial governor lay not in the immediate details, which he ignored and frequently bungled, but in the breadth of his vision and the fixity of his purpose. The tumult in British Kaffraria between May 1856 and June 1857 deflected him not one whit from the original prescription for the future of the province which he had laid before the Cape Parliament in 1855. It was still his intention to destroy the stubborn independence of the Xhosa nation by breaking the political and judicial powers of its chiefs, by encouraging its commoners to abandon their communal and pastoral ethos in favour of wage labour, and by disrupting its territorial integrity through the settlement of whites in British Kaffraria and of Xhosa in the Cape Colony. None of these aims had changed on account of the Cattle-Killing. The only change was that starvation and disorder made it possible to pursue these aims further and faster than anyone, including Gr
ey himself, had yet contemplated.
It was an important part of Grey’s style that every one of his meanest, most underhand and most ruthless actions was subsumed under the name of some high ideal. His initial onslaught on the Xhosa way of life was justified in the name of ‘civilising’ the Xhosa. His brutal persecution of the wretched and helpless survivors of the Cattle-Killing was justified in the name of the ‘chiefs’ plot’.
The nub of the ‘chiefs’ plot’ hypothesis, as expounded by Grey himself, was that ‘the conduct of the [Xhosa] nation resulted [not from a ‘superstitious delusion’ but] from a deep laid political scheme to involve the Government in war, and to bring … a host of desperate enemies upon us’. Moshoeshoe, the king of Lesotho, and Sarhili had cold-bloodedly combined to drive the credulous but peaceable Xhosa into a war they did not want. Mhlakaza was ‘merely a secondary instrument in the hands of the Great Chiefs working on the superstition and ignorance of the people’. Sarhili was alleged to have given the true reasons for the Cattle-Killing as follows:
That it was his intention to make war with the English, and that he killed his cattle so as to have none to guard, and more men available to fight, that he did not see the use of cultivating as the crops would only be cut down by the troops, and that the cattle of the white people and [Thembu] would furnish them with food when fighting.2
By now the reader will know enough about the Xhosa and the Cattle-Killing to dismiss this explanation. It should be clear enough that cattle-killing was the logical response, in Xhosa terms, to lungsickness, military defeat and other signs of witchcraft, and that starvation, far from rendering the Xhosa desperate to fight, weakened and divided them as never before. It would be a waste of effort to refute the ‘chiefs’ plot’ theory item by item – I have set out the argument in full elsewhere3 – but it is necessary to say something about it because all the brutal and heartless policies of Grey and Maclean were justified and explained in terms of it. The question we need to answer is not whether the ‘chiefs’ plot’ actually existed, but how and why Grey and Maclean came to propagate it.