by Peires, Jeff
4. GO TO JAIL
The prison at Alice where Maqoma was confined before his trial was described by an observer as nothing more than an unventilated ‘den’, directly comparable to the Black Hole of Calcutta. The verminous prison at Queenstown, originally a stables meant for five or six horses, held up to 90 Xhosa, male and female together, packed so closely that they slept at night in a crouching position with their knees cramped up to their chins. But the prison at King William’s Town, where most of the convicts and transportees started their journey to the Western Province, was the worst of all. The cell where the majority of male prisoners were kept was dominated by a large tub serving as a toilet, ‘half filled with urine and faeces, the smell from which was intolerable’. Within the narrow confines of this 8 by 5 metre cell, anything from 40 to 84 Xhosa prisoners were sometimes shackled together on the cold, damp flagstones. Because of the unnatural foods which they had been eating, many of the prisoners were afflicted by dysentry and diarrhoea, and they were constantly battling their way to and from the tub, necessarily accompanied by the other men to whom they were shackled. The British Kaffrarian doctors pronounced that in the hot and crowded conditions of the cell, the ‘effluvia’ from the large tub were actually poisonous. At least 15 Xhosa died there within three months.1
Early in February 1858, while the Governor himself was in King William’s Town, 21 prisoners led by the chiefs Tola, Qasana and Xhoxho escaped from this black hole.2 About eight o’clock at night, the sentry heard the Xhosa prisoners laughing and a drunken white soldier named Hooper, imprisoned with them, shouting for help. When he went in to see what was happening, his candle was blown out and the prisoners, including Hooper, made a run for it across the yard and crashed through the rickety prison gate. One was shot dead and most of the others were soon recaptured, including Sandile’s brother Xhoxho, who was caught by Commissioner Brownlee pathetically haunting the bushes around his old Great Place. Chiefs Tola and Qasana and their sons got away to Sarhili’s deserted country which they roamed, in their own words, like ‘wolves’, preying on passers-by and killing anyone who looked like an informer.3
Qasana was never caught but after nearly a year of this hole-in-the-corner existence, Tola’s hiding place was betrayed to Magistrate Colley at Idutywa, who assembled 60 men to apprehend him. Tola’s men beat off the first party of police, who fled as soon as their ammunition was exhausted, but when reinforcements arrived most of the outlaws ran away. Tola and his sons, however, chose to stand and fight to the end. Wounded in three places, the chief nevertheless refused to surrender and, pulling a spear out of his body, he was killed in the very act of charging the police. Colley ordered his body hung up on a thorn bush near the waggon road. Tola only began to kill his cattle in the month before the Great Disappointment but he died still a firm believer. As WW Gqoba informs us, ‘Tola fought so bravely with his sons, because he believed that he and his family would be rising from the dead in the near future.’4
The majority of Xhosa transported or contracted to labour in the Western Province travelled by ship. Their fear of the sea had a material as well as superstitious basis. Matthew Jennings, magistrate of the port of East London, was so pressed by ‘natives flooding in daily’ that he lost no opportunity to ship every Xhosa whom he considered strong enough to make the journey.5 Many were put on board in a ‘pitiable condition’. Five died on the Phoenix, and three on the Pintado, while 16 more died in Cape Town from the after-effects of their voyage. The master of the Alice Smith was fined £10 for unspecified ‘cruelty’ towards the unfortunate Xhosa on board his ship. Matters came to a head after the Superintendent of Convicts in Cape Town complained of the conditions on the Munster Lass. The Xhosa were fed ‘rice unfit to eat’ and ‘salt junk not half-boiled’. They slept on the stone ballast that the ship was carrying and most of the children arrived in a ‘shocking state of emaciation’ and not expected to live. The owners of the Munster Lass professed themselves unable to understand how such conditions came about, though they did admit that the ‘general character’ of its captain was ‘far from satisfactory’. Once again, the historian can only ask the reader to use the bare elements of the official record – the harsh living conditions, the dissolute captain, the starving and terrified people – to reconstruct in his or her own imagination the full story of that horrific voyage.
The Superintendent of Convicts and the other Cape officials who complained would deserve more credit if one did not suspect that their objections were grounded in reluctance to assume responsibility at the other end. The Superintendent complained of being forced to care for so many ‘old worn-out men’ and so many women with ‘encumbrances’, namely children. Employers did not want them. In fact, Xhosa above the age of 25 were not really ‘in demand’ in the Western Province.6
Most of the Xhosa transportees were held in the magazine of the old Amsterdam Battery, a large Dutch fortification which used to stand near the harbour at Table Bay.7 They were kept under strict discipline and drilled for 20 minutes each morning and five minutes each night. They were compelled to wash, to make their beds and to wear European-style clothes, which many resisted at first. During the day, they worked on the harbour or digging in the new Botanical Gardens at Kirstenbosch. Their food was adequate, and the Superintendent enjoyed patronising them with little gifts of tobacco and medicine. All in all, their living conditions were almost certainly better than those of the Xhosa auctioned off by James Hart in Graaff-Reinet. Nevertheless, they were not happy. Unlike the contract labourers who had ‘volunteered’ for service in the Western Province, they did not have their families with them and they did not get paid. Even worse, most of them had never been told how much longer they were bound to stay in Cape Town. ‘We therefore thought it was the intention to keep us prisoners for ever,’ said Holo, one of Sandile’s councillors.8
Two days after Tola and Qasana broke out of King William’s Town jail, the prisoners at the Amsterdam Battery made a bid for freedom.9 They cut through the wooden gate which separated their cell from the yard, and, scrambling up the wall, dispersed along the ramparts of the old fort. One or two of them jumped the guard at the gate, and released the rest. But where were they to go? Twenty-two were captured next day, hiding under the overhanging rocks on the slopes of Devil’s Peak. One of these was completely blind and had been escorted all the way by his friends. Eight were caught the following day, and three more by local farmers two days after that. Six of them were caught in Prince Albert, but they overpowered their captors and took their guns. Three – Pike, Nfamana and Ziki – actually made it back to Xhosaland, an epic journey which deserved a happier ending. They were all recaptured and sent back to Cape Town with increased sentences.10
This mass breakout was not the first escape from the Amsterdam Battery. Five men got away in November 1857, and one of them, through travelling along the coast and living on wild berries, got home to Xhosaland over two months later. But so sad and desolate was British Kaffraria that he no longer wished to stay there. He found his wife and they returned together to the Amsterdam Battery. For a Xhosa, there was no escape from Grey’s new South Africa.11
1 PR 3624, Cory Library, Letterbook of Dr J Fitzgerald, Report on the state of the gaol in King William’s Town, 15 March 1858; GH 22/9 (?)-Civil Commissioner, Alice, 8 Nov. 1858; University of the Witwatersrand Library, Fairbairn Papers, JA Fairbairn-J Fairbairn, 26 April 1858.
2 GH 8/34 Schedule 17, 4 Feb. 1858.
3 BK 89 Statement by Jonas, 18 Dec. 1858; BK 14 Memo by G Pomeroy-Colley, 11 Nov. 1858.
4 WW Gqoba, ‘Isizathu’, Part 2, Isigidimi, 2 April 1888; BK 71 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 12 Dec. 1856, Queenstown Free Press, 19 Jan. 1859; 8/50 Statement by Umrweke, 22 Dec. 1858; GH 8/36 G Colley-J Maclean, 24 Dec. 1856.
5 CO 690 M Jennings-J Maclean, 7 Nov. 1857; CO 690 [Owner of the Munster Lass]-M. Jennings, 7 Nov. 1857; CO 692 C Piers-Colonial Secretary 28, 31
Oct. 1857; Cape Argus, 8,15 June 1858.
6 CO 692 C Piers-Colonial Secretary, 28, 30 Sept., 31 Oct. 1857.
7 Cape Argus, 6 April 1858.
8 CO 715 Statement of Holo, 27 Feb. 1858.
9 Cape Argus, 6, 10, 13 Feb. 1857.
10 CH 28/73 J Maclean-G Grey, 5 April 1858; BK 386 J Maclean-C Piers, 28 Jan. 1858; 1/KWT (unsorted, old no. 1213) R Taylor-J Maclean, 26 Jan. 1859; King William’s Town Gazette, 10 April 1858.
11 Cape Argus, 8 May 1858.
5. THE ISLAND
‘Esiqithini’ is a Xhosa word meaning quite simply ‘on the island’. No particular island is indicated but it would be difficult to find a Xhosa person who did not know exactly which island is meant. Even in English, the phrase ‘the Island’ has only one meaning for most South Africans. Robben Island, that pleasantly named home of seals, has burned itself into the collective conscience of us all. The author Mtutuzeli Matshoba recently called it ‘the holy of holies’, a place consecrated by the self-sacrifice of its victims. It was here that the Xhosa chiefs convicted by Grey’s special courts were imprisoned.
Robben Island was known to Europeans for its valuable seal skins long before the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck in 1652.1 When local Khoi drove off the cattle of the Dutch East India Company, Van Riebeeck fed his soldiers on Robben Island penguin eggs. The first colonial officials were sent to the Island merely to breed sheep and rock rabbits for meat. It was only in 1658 that Robben Island discovered its true destiny, when South Africa’s first political prisoners – Khoi leaders known to us only as Harry, Boubo and Jan Cou – were transported there.
The Dutch valued Robben Island as a prison not only because the prisoners found it difficult to escape, but because it concealed the terrible conditions under which the convicts lived, and the dreadful punishments they suffered. Convicted prisoners were often sentenced to whippings with the cat-’o-nine-tails, to branding and pinching with red-hot irons and to the chopping off of hands. Hard labour could mean up to 25 years quarrying stone and burning lime, working and sleeping all the while in irons and chains.
The British conquest of the Cape (1806) eliminated most of these cruel punishments, but it did not change the essential function of Robben Island as a remote place where those who defied the colonial system could be dumped and forgotten. It was only in the 1840s, when an energetic official named John Montagu became Colonial Secretary, that the situation was altered. Montagu saw that hard-labour convicts could serve the colonial economy more effectively by building roads, harbours and transport infrastructure than by toiling away unproductively on the Island. Thus, in 1844, the regular convicts left the Island for hard labour at ‘convict stations’ throughout the Colony.
Their place on the Island was taken by lepers, lunatics, the destitute and chronically sick: social outcasts who had previously been accommodated on the Cape mainland at ‘a very heavy annual expense’. Hundreds of physically and mentally crippled people were moved to the Island’s old cells and jails. The male lunatics were set to work in the stone quarries – because hard work was thought to calm them down. Little attempt was made to rehabilitate these social discards. Lepers (a category which included syphilitics and skin cancer victims) and lunatics mingled with each other, the peaceful with the violent and the hopeful with the hopeless. They rarely saw friends or family, and they had very little chance of ever getting out again. When the Xhosa chiefs arrived in 1858, the Island was little better than a junkyard for the Colony’s unwanted human beings.
They travelled in chains.2 Fadana’s were so heavy that they rubbed right through his skin. Maqoma’s were ‘heavy enough for a ship’s cable’, but he did not notice them. He was expecting to see Sir George Grey, hoping not only that the Governor would reverse his sentence, but that he would return the land Maqoma had lost in the War of Mlanjeni. Sadly for Maqoma’s high hopes, Grey was not interested in meeting his victims. After some weeks in Cape Town jails, the Xhosa chiefs were moved to Robben Island.
Table Bay once swarmed with whales, and in 1806 a Mr John Murray was permitted to open a small whaling station at a sheltered inlet to the north of the main village of Robben Island, which became known as Murray’s Bay. In 1820, the prophet Nxele and 30 comrades stole one of Murray’s boats and, even though they were all drowned in their attempt to escape, the authorities were sufficiently alarmed to force Murray to close down his business. It was at Murray’s Bay, described by a visitor as ‘one of the bleakest and most wretched spots on the face of the earth’, that the Xhosa chiefs were settled.
Dwellings in the usual Xhosa style, but covered with tarpaulins instead of reeds, were erected for them.3 They received adequate food and tobacco but were denied the comfort of liquor. Siyolo and Maqoma were accompanied by their wives. Phatho’s wife arrived in Cape Town, but the old chief was bedridden in Somerset Hospital and released shortly thereafter. The wives of Mhala and Xhoxho flatly refused to join their husbands. The letters of the exiles contain pathetic requests for news of distant homes and children. Clearly, the prisoners suffered most from a lack of human warmth. One of the young chiefs made love to a leper woman. They were detected in a field, and the young man was sentenced to solitary confinement on half rations.4
Boredom and meaninglessness were the main enemies of the Xhosa prisoners. They hunted after a fashion, catching hares and Cape pheasants. Siyolo, who had arrived earlier than the others, was allowed to herd a flock of goats. But then the nurses complained that he disturbed them by driving his goats along the main street, and he was forced to sell most of them. In 1863, Governor Wodehouse gave the prisoners four cows. But the pasturage on the Island was so poor that the cows gave no milk at all for the first six months and within two years all but one were dead.5
The prisoners made repeated but vain appeals to be released. One problem was that only Dilima spoke any English. When he was released in 1865, the isolation of the others was complete. They were forced to submit quietly to the abuse of white lunatics. A visitor described the encounter between Xhoxho and one of these:
[The lunatic’s] eye first fell on the unhappy Xoxo, who seemed to cower before him … [Xhoxho], feeling that his presence was not further welcome, pointed to his brow, and whispered quietly that our friend was ‘bayan malkop.’
[Then Dilima entered the room.] The lunatic poured forth on him a pitiless pelting storm of insults. Ultimately he stood erect immediately in front of Delima, and raising his head, stuck out his lips … Delima, no way frightened, simply imitated with exactness, the actions of the lunatic.6
Gradually, the chiefs found themselves joined by other Xhosa. Tyuli, transported for theft, contracted leprosy in Cape Town and was shipped over to the Island. Zidon served out his sentence, but was afflicted with an ulcer and could not return home. Signanda went blind. Nkohla lost an arm. All these helpless invalids joined the small Xhosa community at Murray’s Bay.
No doubt the chiefs did what they could to resist. On one occasion, Siyolo beat a hospital attendant unconscious with a knobkierie, and there are further obscure references in the official papers to his repeated ‘misconduct’. The wives of Siyolo and Maqoma smuggled messages back to Xhosaland. Hope often gave way to black despair. One of the invalids tried to slit his throat. Maqoma vented his rage on the Island officials whom he blamed for his continuing imprisonment. His wife, Katyi, falling sick refused medicine, telling the doctor, ‘No, my heart is sore. I want to die.’7
One by one, the Xhosa chiefs served out their sentences. In 1869 the last prisoners, Maqoma, Siyolo and Xhoxho, were released. On their return home, they found their lands lost and their people scattered. They were forbidden to own land or to summon their followers. Maqoma, in extreme old age, refused to abide by the regulations imposed on him. Twice in 1871, with no aim in defiance but defiance itself, he left his appointed place of residence and returned to his old lands near Fort Beaufor
t and the Waterkloof. He was easily captured and, on the second occasion, he was summarily returned to the Island without a hearing or a trial.8 This time he was alone, utterly alone. He never saw a visitor and there was no one else on the Island who spoke any Xhosa. Even the goats which he had formerly kept were dead. When in September 1873 he started sinking after 18 months of solitude, the Island authorities sent for a companion and interpreter. But it was too late. This most brilliant of Xhosa warriors cried bitterly, according to the Anglican chaplain who witnessed his last moments, before he passed away ‘of old age and dejection, at being here alone – no wife, or child, or attendant’.9
Four years later, the last Frontier War broke out. The sons of Maqoma, Mhala and Sandile were among the first of the next generation to take their places on Robben Island.
1 On the early history of Robben Island, S de Villiers, Robben Island (Cape Town: Struik, 1971).
2 Cape Argus, 19 Dec. 1857; Hodgson (1980).
3 The best description of the Xhosa chiefs is ‘A visit to Robben Island,’ Part 2, Cape Monthly Magazine, 6 (1859). Also see CO 715, CO 724, CO 742, CO 779, CO 814.
4 A number of letters have been preserved in GH 17/3 and CH 17/4, for example GH 17/3 Delima-Governor, 23 March 1865. For Mhala’s wives, GH 8/39, Schedule 68, 27 June 1859. For the leper woman, CO 779 J Minto-Colonial Office, 26 Aug. 1861.