by Peires, Jeff
To emphasise the formality of the proposal and the sincerity of his words, Sarhili insisted on signing the paper himself, and all his brothers and Great Councillors did the same. Crouch himself added, ‘My opinion is that Kreli is so entirely subdued, that His Excellency may exact any terms he pleases, and Kreli will submit to them.’
But Grey did not reply, and when Sarhili sent another message the same month, again with Crouch, Grey did not reply to that message either. In January 1858, alarmed by news of the arrests of his brother chiefs, Sarhili sent an official messenger named Possi to King William’s Town to beg forgiveness from Maclean personally, and to find out whether the government intended to arrest him too.17 Sarhili’s state of mind during those troubled months is well expressed in one of his unanswered messages to the Governor, sent through Waters:
The chief Krili has been here today and with tears begged me to write to your Excellency for assistance in his present great need. He remembers your letter to him advising him not to kill his cattle and not to throw away his corn – he is sorrowful for having neglected that advice and for having followed that of Umhlakaza. He hopes Your Excellency will deal kindly by him … that you will make him your friend again, and not leave him to perish on the mountains. He has offended you in destroying his own, he has not thrown an assegai at the Governor. He looks to Your Excellency for a few milch cows, and seed for his gardens, so that he may keep life in his children: for himself, he wishes the dead to call for him, for he has sinned greatly.18
Such words might have moved a heart of stone. But Grey’s heart was made of stronger stuff.
Far from extending the hand of friendship and forgiveness, Grey made up his mind to ‘punish’ Sarhili by invading his country. No crime that the Governor and his administration committed against the starving Xhosa people – not the raiding and plundering of believers by Gawler’s police, not the kangaroo courts and the transportations by sea, not even the closing of the Kaffir Relief House and the hounding of thousands of famished people into slave-like forced labour – was quite as black as the ruthless and brutal expulsion of Sarhili and his people from their homes and lands, for no other reason than to turn their beautiful country into a Colony of white settlement. Sarhili and his people did not live in British territory as the Xhosa of British Kaffraria did. They had not, as Fadana had, raised an open standard of revolt. They had not harmed anyone but themselves in their vain strivings after an impossible dream.
Grey justified his attack on Sarhili by claiming that the Xhosa King was planning an attack on the Cape Colony.19 He informed the Cape Parliament that in the light of information just received ‘the matter now became one of life and death to the Colony’.20 Yet the information in question stated, in part, that Sarhili was starving and had only 100 men with him. Even more misleading was Grey’s statement to the Colonial Secretary in London.
No sooner does he [Sarhili] find out we are pressed for troops in India than he again begins the same system [of plotting] … I cannot send enough troops to India with such a thorn in my flesh.21
The truth of the matter was that, far from meditating an attack on the Colony, Sarhili was desperately seeking peace and reconciliation. Grey’s trusted spy and agent, John Crouch, had already advised him that the Xhosa King would submit to any terms Grey proposed and, in November 1857, Crouch sent in the following unequivocal estimate of Sarhili’s military strength.
My opinion is that Kreli cannot recover his power, and although he is reconciled with unbelievers, not able to do mischief … You have him in your power to do as you like with him … You could take his whole country with a force of 100 men – for the whole of his country is nearly desolate. 100 cows would buy all their guns – they even offer powder for corn. You can dictate any terms to him … He will be beat if he crosses the Bashee, for I am quite sure he can’t muster more than 500 men. They can’t mount more than 200.22
Chief Commissioner Maclean concurred entirely with this estimate and stated, ‘I doubt whether Kreli can, in the present deserted state of his country, do more than make the occasional foray.’
And yet, despite being in possession of such precise information concerning Sarhili’s actual military strength, Grey did not scruple to make the quite unsubstantiated assertion that the Xhosa King could bring 24 000 warriors into the field. In the letter just quoted, Crouch went on to make some helpful suggestions concerning where and when Sarhili might be made a prisoner. Clearly, it was the colonial Governor who was plotting against the Xhosa King and not the other way around. As clearly, it was the temptation presented by Sarhili’s weakness rather than the threat posed by his strength which led the Governor to invade the Xhosa King’s territory.
Ever since the Fadana commando, Commandant Currie and Agent Warner had been pressing the government to attack Sarhili, although in truth Grey needed no urging.23 He was an ardent imperialist and colonialist, who had stripped the Maoris of their land in New Zealand to make way for white settlers and had long desired to do the same in southern Africa. Although he never expressed the idea in so many words, he believed it was the right and the duty of white European civilisation to swallow up the rest of the world and remould it in the white European image. His vision of a united and integrated South Africa was one in which the political independence and social structure of the black nations were shattered and the majority of their people relocated as labourers in the Cape Colony, while white settlers moved in and occupied the lands thus vacated. ‘You cannot maintain your frontier in a state of prosperity and advancement if that frontier abuts upon a barbarous race,’ he wrote in 1860, looking forward to the time when Thembuland, Mpondoland and all the other independent black states along the Cape coast were annexed. ‘Natal must thus become our real frontier.’24 This was written three years after the Cattle-Killing, but it is worth noting that as early as April 1857 – before the Indian Mutiny, before Fadana’s raids, long before the so-called ‘revelations’ of Nonkosi and Nkwintsha, Grey was telling the Cape Parliament of his plans to establish a white settlement in ‘Kaffraria Proper’, Sarhili’s country:
I hope … I may be able to devise means which will not only enable the Government to fill up the vacant portions of British Kaffraria with a European population sufficiently large to maintain itself … but which will also enable it to establish a European settlement in Kaffraria Proper, sufficiently strong to control and keep in check those tribes beyond the Kei.25
A second reason for Grey’s attack on Sarhili lay in the increasing criticism which he was receiving from his superiors in London. In his determination to remodel British Kaffraria, the Governor had brazenly disregarded Colonial Office and War Office instructions, and even told the occasional outright lie. He had failed to promulgate letters patent which would have granted British Kaffraria a constitution, preferring to keep the territory under his own unfettered control through the exercise of martial law. He had failed to render accounts showing what he had done with the £40 000 a year subsidy which he had extorted from the British Parliament. He had refused to send the regiments required by the War Office to quell the Indian Mutiny. He had kept the German Legion on full pay, instead of retiring them on half pay as he had been commanded to do. And he had placed an order for 500 more German immigrants from a private commercial establishment in Hamburg several days after receiving a letter from the Colonial Secretary expressly forbidding him to do any such thing. Any one of these offences was sufficient in itself to warrant his recall.26 In order to justify his extravagant behaviour – in particular his refusal to cut the pay of the German Legion or to send the required regiments to India – he required a crisis. Grey had, as usual, many excuses for his strange behaviour, but the central theme of all of these was that his various actions had been motivated by the need to prevent another Frontier War. Only Governor Grey’s wise foresight had saved the Cape from the monstrous conspiracy hatched by Sarhili and his cohorts.
Grey needed
Sarhili as an enemy more than he wanted him as a friend. How could Grey seize Sarhili’s country and justify his own self-willed disobedience to the Secretaries of State if he admitted the truth, that the Xhosa power was broken and that all the Xhosa King wanted was submission, reconciliation and a little help? How else could Grey rationalise the trials, the expulsions, the shootings, the transportations, the labour contracts and all the other unnecessary acts which amounted to the persecution of a starving and helpless people? How could he defend all this, even to his own conscience, if not in terms of the wickedness of Sarhili?
The decision to invade Sarhili’s territory bears all the hallmarks of a Grey initiative. He arrived in King William’s Town towards the end of January, and less than a week later, without any preliminaries, he sent Sarhili a note through the Thembu agent informing him that ‘I [Grey] do not choose to have him for a neighbour and shall certainly punish him if I can.’ A combined force of Frontier Armed and Mounted Police and citizen volunteers under Commandant Currie, fresh from their triumph over Fadana, entered Sarhili’s country from its northeastern corner near the Hohita. Currie’s troops swept the country as far as the Ebb and Flow Drift on the Mbashe River, where they met 300 of Gawler’s police coming from Mhala’s country via Butterworth. Meanwhile Joyi’s Thembu, at Grey’s invitation, launched a fresh attack on the remnants of the Gcaleka army which they had been engaging for several months. Their orders were to capture Sarhili ‘or drive him so far away that he would never be heard of again’.27
‘Never was there such an easy conquest,’ wrote Gawler. ‘Caesar’s are a joke to it.’28 He was proud of the way his police did their duty, inspired by ‘good feeling and a judicious application of the sjambok’. The only problem Currie experienced besides the rain was the difficulty of keeping pace with the fleeing Xhosa. ‘So precipitate was their retreat that with forced night and day marches, it was as much as my best horses could do to come up with [Sarhili’s] rear, in order to capture as many cattle as would serve for immediate use … No determined opposition was anywhere offered.’ By 25 February, almost all the surviving Xhosa had crossed the Mbashe into the territory of Moni, chief of the Bomvana people. Despite their difficulties, Currie’s men succeeded in shooting at least 83 Xhosa and capturing 500 head of cattle – ‘a great number considering the impoverished state of the country’, bragged Currie, seemingly unaware of how his own pen condemned him. Gawler bagged 70 cattle, not counting calves, and all but four of Sarhili’s horses.
None of the volunteers who participated in that infamous commando have left a detailed account of the crimes that were committed against a starving and defenceless population. Even Maclean was disturbed by the ‘several cruelties’ that were committed, and he never enumerated them on paper.29 With a little imagination, however, the reader may try and fill in the blanks. First, the scene: the abandoned dwellings, the empty cattle kraals, the untilled fields, and scattered, burned-out heaps of cattle bones. Next, the survivors: small knots of pathetic believers, living on roots and berries, all the grand expectations of the past reduced to the simple hope that they might hang on to life until the harvest in two months’ time. Now imagine, if you can, the sound of horses and the sight of the Frontier Armed and Mounted Police advancing over the horizon …
Those unwilling to use their imaginations will have to settle for the two accounts of the expedition that we do have. The first is from one of the volunteers, who related with obvious relish the summary execution of two alleged ‘spies’ who were caught ‘hiding’ in the road.30 His detachment then captured some 90 cattle, mainly cows and calves, and, not content with stealing these, tracked down their owners too. ‘In we dashed,’ the anonymous volunteer recalled nostalgically. ‘It was tremendous hard work, the bush being so thick and in about half an hour 22 out of 26 fat Kaffirs were killed and stretched out at our feet.’ It is the language of the chase, and the author seems to have forgotten that he was hunting not deer but human beings. That the volunteers viewed the entire enterprise as a spot of fun is evident from our only other source of information, a liberal land surveyor then based in Queenstown:
I have seen several of the Queens Town Burghers who were on this expedition – and the accounts they give, and, I am sorry to say, gloat over, are enough to make one’s blood run cold. If a man with a black skin was seen he was immediately ‘bowled over’. On one occasion two unfortunate friendly [Xhosa] were sent to examine a bush. Five or six of the hunted sprang out and tried to escape – they were unarmed – the commando fired and by mistake shot their two allies – one was killed, the other severely wounded.
If a [Xhosa] was seen running away – although alone and unarmed, a party of five or six were sent after him on horseback and he was generally shot. The [Xhosa] were always unprepared and in almost every single instance unarmed. The commando on horseback could hardly come up to them they fled so fast and still some scores were killed. Commandant Currie has not given the whole history of this second Glencoe. His men are the terror of the Eastern districts. They are deserters – discharged soldiers and scamps of all descriptions – a daring but unprincipled lot. The young farmers who were called out to join this expedition gloat over the massacres they have taken part in. They acknowledge that the (Xhosal never fought but were picked off as they ran – they shot men as they would bucks – and boast how one who was a great distance off, or in difficult ground was knocked over by a good shot.
Sir George Grey has cleared the country and added to the prestige of our name. How? By attacking men unarmed and unprepared and shooting them down whether they resisted or not …31
By comparison with the human dimension, the other details of the expedition fade into insignificance. Gawler’s detachment stopped off at the Gxarha, which was abandoned except for 17 human skulls, one of them presumably Mhlakaza’s. He then linked up with Currie at the Mbashe, where they halted according to their instructions, though Currie was strongly tempted to go further ‘as we could still see plenty of cattle in Moni’s country’. Gawler sent Moni, the chief of the Bomvana, a message telling him that the government had nothing against him ‘but wished to see what sort of neighbour he would make’. He also demanded the prophetess Nongqawuse, whom Nxito had brought into Bomvanaland. Moni was only too pleased to comply, saying, ‘he would be glad to get rid of her as they were afraid of her’. There was now ‘little or nothing for us to do but destroy gardens’, wrote Currie, and he and Gawler began to squabble over who had the right to command the expedition. By the end of March, Gawler was ready to leave. ‘Times are very dull,’ he informed Maclean. He would make one final sweep below Butterworth and then, as a last hurrah, ‘pass through Umhala’s country with fire and sword’ on his way home.32
From the Kei to the Mbashe and from the Hohita to the sea, Sarhili’s country was now virtually deserted, apart from the new colonial headquarters at Idutywa. The few remaining cattle of the Gcaleka Xhosa had been captured by their merciless enemies, and their dwellings and carefully tended gardens wantonly destroyed. Sarhili himself, with a strong bodyguard, took refuge in the dense forests of Cwebe, just east of the Mbashe River mouth. He did not care what the government did, he said, for he would never be found alive. To his suffering people, he addressed the following message which has since passed into oral tradition.
Learn to satisfy your hunger on the acacia thorn tree. For you are the people of a chief who is hated.33
1 MS 3337, Cory Library, J Ross-J Laing, 9 March 1857.
2 MIC 172/2, Cory Libray, USPG Archives, Reel 1, H Waters-R Gray, 10 March 1857.
3 Ibid., H Waters-R Gray, 10 April 1857; CO 2949 J Warner-R Southey, 18 Feb. 1857; GH 8/32 Anon (Thembuland)-J Maclean, 27 May 1857.
4 BK 89 Memo of information communicated, 25 April 1857.
5 King William’s Town Gazette, 2 May 1858.
6 GH 8/31 Memo of information, 26 April 1857.
&n
bsp; 7 CH 8/32 Anon (Thembuland)-J. Maclean, 27 May 1857; BK 71 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 18 May 1857.
8 GH 8/50 J Maclean-G Grey, 31 Aug. 1857. Tsimbi’s attendant, Lingo, continued preaching cattle-killing, but without much success.
9 GH 8/32 Schedule 474, 23 July 1857; GH 8/50 Information received 28 Sept. 1850; GH 20/2/1 J Crouch-J Maclean, 22 June 1857; GH 8/33 J Crouch-J Maclean, 16 Oct. 1857.
10 MIC 172/2, Cory Library, USPG Archives, H Waters-R Gray, 10 April 1857.
11 TB Soga (n.d.), p.165; GH 8/33 J Crouch-J Maclean, 9 Nov. 1857.
12 MIC 172/2, Cory Library, USPG Archives, Reel 1, Journal of H Waters, 5 Dec. 1857; C Brownlee (1916), pp. 140, 157-8.
13 GH 8/50 Information communicated by Nyila, 28 Sept. 1857; GH 8/33 J Crouch-J Maclean, 16 Oct, 1857; GH 20/2/1 J Crouch-J Maclean, 22 June 1857; GH 8/32 Information … by Mr Crouch, 21 July 1857; BK 89 Statement of Possi, 2 Feb. [1858]; GH 8/50 H Waters-J Maclean, 7 July 1857.
14 Church Chronicle (Grahamstown), Vol. 4 (1883), p.61.
15 GH 8/50 H Waters-J Maclean, 7 July 1857, and marginal notes.