by Peires, Jeff
The Cattle-Killing was born partly out of Xhosa frustration at colonial domination and partly out of the hope awakened by the news that the Russians had beaten the English. Nongqawuse’s promise of a perfect world in which ‘no one would ever lead a troubled life’ could hardly have accommodated a continued settler presence in Xhosaland. Among the many predictions that circulated at the time was one to the effect that the English, like all other evil things, would be swept away in the great storm which would precede the resurrection of the dead. It was said, at times, that the whites were doomed because they were responsible for the death of the Son of God. Such anti-white statements were naturally exaggerated among the settler community and played an important part in the genesis of the ‘chiefs’ plot’ myth.
Nevertheless, one should not ignore the brief interlude following the First Disappointment (October 1856), when short-lived and ineffectual attempts were made to persuade the whites, too, to kill their cattle. It was said then that ‘the people who have arrived have not come to make war on the white man, but to bring about a happy state of things to all’, and this phrase seems to sum up the essentially optimistic orientation of the Cattle-Killing movement. It was not predominantly negative or hostile towards anything or anybody, but a movement driven by positive expectations, obliterating the evil past and looking towards a better future. The worst outbreaks of anti-white sentiment always occurred during the periods of disappointment. During the periods of hopeful expectation, the Xhosa always greeted their white visitors with a happy indifference (Chapter 4/1, 4).3
What was the role of Sir George Grey in all this?
Almost all Xhosa today hold Sir George Grey personally responsible for the Cattle-Killing, believing that in some way he manipulated Nongqawuse into prophesying as she did. This interpretation is very old and probably dates as far back as the Cattle-Killing period itself.4 SEK Mqhayi (d. 1945), the greatest of Xhosa historians, believed it, and the late Chief Ndumiso Bhotomane, in his time the leading Xhosa oral historian and himself the son of one of Sarhili’s close advisers, repeated the story to me in 1975.
I have looked very closely into all the surviving documents, including the private correspondence between Grey and his chief subordinate Maclean,5 and must state unequivocally that there is no documentary evidence whatsoever in support of this view. It is true – as I have frequently pointed out – that Grey was an exceptionally secretive and deceitful man, and that, barring a miracle, we shall never know exactly what really happened down there at the Gxarha. Clearly, many people are going to continue to believe that Grey was solely responsible for the whole thing. I am not going to quarrel with them. But I will say that anyone who thinks that blaming Grey absolves the Xhosa believers of their own part in this greatest of all Xhosa historical disasters is depriving himself of history’s greatest gift: the opportunity of learning from the mistakes of the past.
Admirers of Grey cannot, however, complain or wonder if the Xhosa blame him for their misfortunes. His new system of administration, which broke the promises of the preceding Governor, was an important contributory factor. The threatening and bullying attitude which he adopted during the lifetime of the movement only strengthened the resolve of the believers, and the laughable disasters which befell his ship, the Geyser, encouraged them at a time when their faith was wavering (Chapter 4). After the Cattle-Killing was over, Grey did his best to turn this human tragedy to the political and economic profit of the Cape Colony. Instead of making food freely available to the hungry, he utilised the desperate starvation of the people to engineer their mass exodus via the colonial labour market, while filling their former lands with white settlers. Attempts by the Xhosa to find work independently of Grey’s labour machine were countered by transportation, and the feeble efforts of the Kaffir Relief Committee to provide genuine charity were crushed (Chapter 8). On the pretence of the ‘chiefs’ plot,’ petty charges were trumped up against the leading chiefs, who were tried by military courts and packed off to Robben Island (Chapter 7). Sarhili and his starving people were hounded out of their country, though Grey knew very well through his private spies that the Xhosa King was helpless and submissive (Chapter 9/2). The unbelievers, who had borne the brunt of the struggle against Nongqawuse, were confined to small villages and loaded with hut tax (Chapter 9/3). By such means, a ‘white corridor’ stretching from East London to Queenstown was carved out of lands which had formerly been entirely Xhosa.
Even if Grey did not initiate the Cattle-Killing, he bears the responsibility for turning it into an irrevocable catastrophe.
But wasn’t Grey a great friend of the black man?
Grey’s reputation as a liberal depends largely on the fact that in his view non-European peoples like the Xhosa and the Maori were not ‘irreclaimable savages’ but ‘as apt and intelligent as any race of men’. Whereas other Governors had been primarily concerned to erect military barriers shutting the Xhosa out of the Cape Colony, Grey wished, in his famous phrase, ‘to make them a part of ourselves, with a common faith and common interests’ (Chapter 2/2). The visionary language and the grand visible symbols (hospitals, schools, etc.) with which Grey cloaked his objectives should not blind us to the fact that the role which he envisaged for blacks in his new South Africa was essentially a subordinate one, as the continuation of the above phrase – ‘useful servants, consumers of our goods, contributors to our revenue’ – makes plain. Implicit in Grey’s elevated ideals of civilisation and Christianity was an unthinking dismissal of Xhosa culture and religion as wholly valueless. It is unlikely that the Xhosa viewed Grey, with his declared aim of destroying their legal, political and economic systems, as a better friend than Cathcart, who had conceded them the right to live according to their own laws and customs.
One should, in any case, beware of placing too much emphasis on Grey as an individual. He was first and foremost a colonial Governor, and like all colonial Governors his primary aim was to serve the British Empire, which in British Kaffraria meant to subjugate the Xhosa. Grey’s policies were pretty much the same as Sir Harry Smith’s, and even Cathcart’s concessions were little more than a tactical retreat. In a very real sense, Grey’s governorship was nothing more than the next logical step in the extension of British colonial domination of South Africa. We cannot imagine that the end result of the Cattle-Killing – the incorporation of Xhosaland into British South Africa – would have been very different, even if the individuals named Grey and Nongqawuse had never existed.
Grey’s distinguishing feature as a colonial Governor was not his liberalism, but his extraordinary opportunism and ruthlessness. Whereas other colonial Governors were handicapped by the official rule book and by some sort of concern for the opinions of others, Grey was bound by no such scruples. As a young man of modest means, he had identified Australasia as a land of opportunity waiting for a great man, like himself, to set his stamp upon it. Inspired perhaps by Carlyle’s vision of the hero, he aspired to an absolute dictatorship which he viewed as the just entitlement of his superior abilities. In his quest for absolute power he did not hesitate to lie, cheat and slander whoever stood in his way. Indigenous peoples like the Maori and the Xhosa were trampled down for convenient and imaginary treacheries and conspiracies. Grey’s own behaviour, as described in this book and in the New Zealand literature, is the surest witness we have against him (Chapter 2/1-2).
What were the results of the Cattle-Killing?
The results of the Cattle-Killing are difficult to quantify. The only really reliable figure that we have is that the Xhosa population of British Kaffraria dropped by two thirds between January and December of 1857, from 105 000 to 37 500, and then again by another third to reach a low point of 25 916 by the end of 1858.6 How many of these actually died is hard to say. Charles Brownlee estimated that an average of four persons had died per homestead by the end of September 1857, which would give us just over 15 000 dead in British Kaffraria alone. If we add in es
timates for Sarhili’s Gcaleka Xhosa and for the Thembu believers, and adjust fractionally upwards for deaths after September, we get a figure of 35 000. This is a very conservative estimate. The Cape Argus, quoting unnamed well-informed sources, published a figure of 50 000 and Bishop Gray of Cape Town suggested 40 000. This last estimate cannot be very far from the truth. Upwards of 150 000 more Xhosa were displaced, as many by Grey’s attack on Sarhili in 1858 as by the Cattle-Killing itself. Cattle mortality figures are even more vague, but Brownlee’s estimate of 400 000 slaughtered by January 1857 fits in well with what else we know, and is probably a conservative estimate of total cattle loss if we count in deaths from lungsickness as well.
Another measure of the disaster is the extent of land lost by the Xhosa. This amounted to more than 600 000 acres, not counting the land lost in the Crown Reserve following the War of Mlanjeni.7 Map 5 tells its own story. Chiefs Mhala, Phatho and Maqoma lost all their lands, thus clearing the way for white settlement in the hinterland of East London. Sarhili was driven out of the whole of his territory and, although he was eventually (1865) allowed to reoccupy part of it, two thirds of the total was alienated permanently. Even in those areas, such as the chiefdoms of Sandile, Anta and Kama, where the unbelievers held sway, the amount of land effectively at their disposal was greatly curtailed by Grey’s policy of concentrating them into villages. As more and more Xhosa returned home from their spell of forced labour in the Colony, so these tiny allocations became increasingly unable to support them and the whole of what is now the Ciskei degenerated into a vast rural slum and migrant labour pool.
British Kaffraria was transformed from an exclusively Xhosa territory ruled by Xhosa chiefs through Xhosa laws into a mixed territory populated by both blacks and whites. At the same time, most of the white towns of the eastern and midland Cape, from Somerset East to Beaufort West and beyond, acquired for the first time a substantial permanent black population. The ‘whitening’ of British Kaffraria and the ‘blackening’ of the Cape Colony eliminated the need to keep the two distinct. Once Kaffraria had ceased to be an alien and defiant territory held down by force, it was easily absorbed into the Colony as the districts of East London, King William’s Town and Stutterheim (1866).
The impact on the Xhosa themselves is difficult to express in words. Their national, cultural and economic integrity, long penetrated and undermined by colonial pressure, finally collapsed. Sandile and some other traditionalist remnants clung on grimly to what remained of the old precolonial way of life, but they became increasingly irrelevant not only to the colonial authorities, but to the mass of the Xhosa population immersed in a world of which the chiefs and their cohorts knew nothing. When Sandile rose for the last time in the 1877 Frontier War, the occasion was of emotional significance only. Ethnically based resistance had long ceased to be a realistic strategy on the Eastern Frontier.
The majority of Xhosa accepted that the catastrophe of Nongqawuse was irreversible, and they took their places in the schools of Alice and the docks of Port Elizabeth to work out a new destiny inside the belly of the colonial beast. Grey had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams in turning them into ‘useful servants, consumers of our goods, contributors to our revenue’, and it was as an oppressed class within Cape society that they took up the continuing struggle for liberation. Independent Xhosaland was dead; Nongqawuse and Sir George Grey had irrevocably transformed the Xhosa nation into South Africans.
Is it likely that we shall ever know more about the Cattle-Killing?
This book is based on private and official papers, on interviews with elderly and knowledgeable Xhosa, and on a wide range of English and Xhosa books and newspapers. The reader is referred to the bibliography for further details. But one cannot read every newspaper and one cannot interview every elderly person. It is altogether possible that further research will bring further information to light, though I doubt that we shall ever learn more about the inner history of the prophetic circle at the Gxarha River.
Even if no further information can be obtained, it must be possible to write histories of Nongqawuse from other perspectives than mine. It is now 130 years since these dark and tragic events, and this book is the first detailed and informed account ever written on the subject. Let us hope that we do not have to wait another 130 years for the next.
1 Interview with B Donga, Sigidi Location, Idutywa District, 1 Sept. 1983.
2 All quotations and information in this chapter are fully cited on their first appearance in this book.
3 For an example, see BK 70 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 19 Oct. 1856.
4 Burton (1950), p.70; ‘Nzulu Lwazi’ (SEK Mqhayi), Umteteli waBantu, 5 Sept. 1931.
5 The private correspondence of Grey and Maclean may be found in the Cape Archives, Volumes GH 8/48-8/50.
6 These figures exclude the Mfengu population of the Crown Reserve, from which the Xhosa were strictly excluded, and the infinitesimal Xhosa populations of the white towns of East London and King William’s Town. See the official population returns for British Kaffraria in Maclean (1858) and GH 8/38.
Brownlee’s estimate of four dead per homestead (BK 71 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 1 Oct. 1857) multiplied by the number of homesteads in British Kaffraria per census in Maclean (1858) gives a total 15 368. The population of Sarhili’s Gcalekaland was usually estimated as roughly equal to that of British Kaffraria. Maclean (1858), p.151. According to the King William’s Town Gazette, 2 May 1857, mortality in Sarhili’s country was even higher than that in British Kaffraria. I have estimated Fadana’s Thembu believers at 10 per cent of British Kaffraria, a figure which tallies with the estimated 300-400 fighting men at his disposal. CO 2949 W Currie-R Southey, 24 July 1857.
The displacement figure was arrived at by subtracting the number of estimated dead from the total population lost by British Kaffraria (53 000) and adding the total population of Sarhili’s country (90 000 after subtracting the estimated dead). If one adds in the Thembu believers and those who moved around inside British Kaffraria (for example, those who took shelter at the missions or with unbelieving relatives) the total should easily top 150 000.
Brownlee’s estimate of 400 000 cattle killed is in GH 8/49 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 7 Jan. 1857. This is quite compatible with the figure of 130 300 dead of lungsickness and slaughtering up to the end of July 1856, at the very beginning of the movement. Imperial Blue Book 2352 of 1857, G Grey-H Labouchere, 3 Oct. 1856, p.35.
Bishop Gray’s figure is quoted in Saunders (1978), p.11; the Cape Argus estimate appeared on 3 March 1858.
7 The figure of 600 000 is derived by multiplying 300+ white farms by 2 000 acres each. See Note 10 in Chapter 11 below.
CHAPTER 11 – And Last
CHAPTER 11
And Last
The great three-decker novels of the Victorian era often used to end with a chapter summarising what became of the principal characters in the story: their marriages, their subsequent careers, their eventual deaths. This history is not, unfortunately, a fiction but, having lived so long with these characters, I cannot bear to leave them without saying a few words as to their ultimate fate. Perhaps less sentimental readers will find these last pages interesting as a sort of biographical collage representing the remainder of the nineteenth century, by means of which some of the more important consequences of the Cattle-Killing may be more clearly perceived.
None of Sir George Grey’s harsh and brutal measures with regard to the Xhosa raised an official eyebrow in London. Forced labour, arbitrary court-martial, unprovoked invasion and land theft on an unprecedented scale: all these were greeted by the Colonial Office with polite applause, as the apt and just measures of a man who truly understood the native mind. But Grey’s other policies, the ones dealing with Imperial and settler matters that had a call on the heart of the Colonial Office and the purse of the Treasury, deeply embarrassed his
superiors in London. Grey spent Imperial money with careless abandon. He disregarded direct orders as if they did not exist. When he was caught out in double dealing, he did not shrink from outright lies to justify his position. The affair of the German military settlers, whom Grey brought out to people the land he stole from the Xhosa, may serve as an example. The German settlement was an unmitigated disaster. The small plots allotted to the Germans were too small for settler-style farms, and the rough, undisciplined ex-soldiers were not prepared to work like Kaffirs, for other people or even for themselves. Their discontent was so obvious and so dangerous that Grey was forced to put them back on full army pay, which infuriated the War Office and removed any work incentive the Germans might previously have had. Most of them spent their entire incomes getting drunk until the next payday.1 Rather than cutting back on so unsuccessful an experiment, Grey decided that the answer to the problem was yet more German settlers, and he contracted with a private firm, Cesar Godeffroy & Son of Hamburg, to send him 4 000 more immigrants at a minimum cost of £50 000. The Colonial Secretary in London was horrified by this extravagant and useless proposal, and sent Grey direct and unequivocal orders to stop the scheme immediately. Grey continued with his arrangements regardless, claiming that his deal with Godeffroy’s had been finalised before he received these instructions. This was a downright lie. Some snappy detective work at the Colonial Office revealed that Grey had received the crucial dispatch on 27 July 1857, more than three weeks before he signed the contract with Godeffroy. Yet so great was the respect of the Colonial Office for the skill with which Grey had handled the Xhosa that they decided to grin and bear his little disobedience.2
Grey’s pattern of behaviour in this matter was repeated over and over again. He failed to send Britain the troops it needed to deal with the Indian Mutiny. He failed to render proper accounts for the £40 000 a year he spent civilising the Xhosa. He failed to publish the constitution which would have freed British Kaffraria from martial law. He insisted on appointing his own nominee as Attorney General, when he knew that the Colonial Office had another candidate. He even engaged the War Office in a long and ludicrous feud over expenditure on soldiers’ boots.