A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  In 1820, British politics changed the destiny of the Cape Colony. The chancellor of the Exchequer had persuaded Parliament to vote £50,000 to transport settlers from the British Isles to the region and set them up as agricultural farmers on lots of about one hundred acres. This unusual grant was a political decision in response to unemployment and social unrest in Britain. Historian Jeffrey Peires calls it a “political manoeuvre by a Tory Government, desperate to demonstrate public concern for the unemployed in order to stave off pressures for more radical reform.”48 The Colonial Office in London administered the grant, choosing nearly four thousand men, women, and children from among eighty thousand applicants. They reached their destination in 1820, accompanied by another thousand who came at their own expense. The immigrants were a mixture of people from England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Most were from the lower middle classes—neither very rich nor very poor. The majority had no farming experience at all but were urban artisans.49

  The 1820 Settlers, as they became known, did not prosper as the government intended. The soil of the area west of the Fish River where they were located was ill-suited to intensive agriculture. Within a few years more than half of them had abandoned their lots and became merchants and artisans in the military post at Grahamstown, or in the settlement on Algoa Bay called Port Elizabeth, or in other colonial villages. Others took to trading with the African farming communities beyond the frontier—a practice that became legal in 1828. Some who stayed on the land eventually prospered by increasing the size of their holdings and producing wool for the market with merino sheep.50 What the 1820 Settlers did not realize was that the British government had placed them on land claimed by Africans—Xhosa communities who had been the victims of white aggression in the clearances of 1811—12 and 1817—19.

  The 1820 Settlers and subsequent immigrants from Britain introduced further complexity into an already complicated colonial society. With their different language, traditions, religious affiliations, and experiences, they were culturally distinct from the earlier settlers. They were the first white immigrants who did not assimilate with them. Deep into the twentieth century, except among the elite of the southwestern part of the colony, social mixing was rare and intermarriages were few. The British immigrants expressed the distinction by calling the earlier settlers Boers, meaning farmers, and the term came to have derogatory overtones. During the Dutch period, Dutch-speakers themselves had begun to use the word Afrikaner, alongside Christian and European. We shall employ the word Afrikaner, which gradually gained in popularity and became the universally recognized label in the twentieth century.

  White South Africans thus acquired an ethnic problem analogous to the Anglo-French problem of Canada. But the demographic proportions were—and have remained—decisively different. In the colonies that became Canada, British settlers soon outnumbered the French Canadians. In greater South Africa, Afrikaners have always formed at least 5 5 percent of the white population.

  There was another difference between the two cases. In Canada, the Whites became overwhelmingly more numerous than the native population at an early stage, whereas in South Africa the white population never amounted to more than about 20 percent of the total. This disparity mitigated the tensions between the white communities. Although they were expressly forbidden to own slaves, the British settlers, like the Afrikaners, had an interest in acquiring and controlling indigenous labor. Like many Afrikaners, too, they experienced the insecurity of life in an exposed frontier zone that Africans considered to be their rightful property. The result was that the British settlers became involved in intermittent warfare, defending and expanding their territory (1834,1846,1850). The racism that was part of nineteenth-century British culture became accentuated by their experiences in their new milieu.51

  In Great Britain, meanwhile, the dislocations of the industrial revolution were giving rise to reform impulses that had a strong impact on British politics. The reform movement was essentially a middle-class movement with both moral and material roots. It was linked with progressive capitalism influenced by the market ideas of Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, and with evangelical religion, which was prominent among the nonestablishment Protestants, especially the Wesleyan-Methodists. Its thrust was directed at reducing political corruption, which had become endemic during the eighteenth century; eliminating the curbs on trade that had been created by the” dense network of mercantilist monopolies; and freeing the labor market from its prein-dustrial constraints. Hence, the struggle for parliamentary reform, leading to the Act of 1832, which increased the number of voters and reduced inequalities among the electoral divisions; the battle for the reduction of protective tariffs, culminating in the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846; and the agitation first to put an end to the slave trade, then to “ameliorate” the institution of slavery, and finally to outlaw it.52

  When Parliament banned British participation in the slave trade in 1807, it deprived the Cape colonial farmers of their customary influx of fresh supplies of labor. They responded by increasing the work load of their slaves and by agitating for greater control of the services of the indigenous Khoikhoi people. After the Napoleonic Wars, however, critics were revealing and denouncing the excesses of plantation slavery in the British West Indies, and businessmen who suffered from competition from the products of the slave estates joined in the attacks. In response, the British government tried to gain leverage over the behavior of slaveowners and to eliminate their worst abuses of power. In 1823 it ordered Governor Somerset to apply to the Cape Colony a law it had imposed on Trinidad, prescribing minimum standards of food and clothing and maximum hours of work and punishments. Somerset grudgingly consented; sympathizing as he did with the slave-owning class, however, he turned a blind eye when the local administrators—landdrosts, heemraden, and veldkornets, composed almost to a man of slave owners—gave no more than token enforcement of the law. Faced with similar obstruction in the Caribbean, the British government tightened the requirements and devised effective reporting procedures in successive orders to the governors of the Cape Colony as well as the British West Indies.53

  By the late 1820s, laws limited the right of owners to punish their slaves and ordered them to record punishments in special books for inspection by local officials. There was also a Guardian of Slaves (renamed Protector of Slaves in 1830), who was responsible for administering the amelioration program. Although these regulations, too, were incompletely enforced, they undermined the authority system. Slave owners resented the unwonted interference in their customary powers, and slaves became restless and receptive to rumors that local officials and farmers were blocking fundamental change. The only substantial slave revolt in the history of the Cape Colony took place in 1808, the year after the abolition of the slave trade. Over three hundred slaves and Khoikhoi from the grain-producing area north of Cape Town marched on the Cape peninsula but were easily defeated by the militia on the outskirts of town. In 1825 a slave named Galant created another stir. Galant had repeatedly but unavailingly tried to persuade the landdrost at Worcester, sixty miles northeast of Cape Town, to stop his owner, Willem van der Merwe, from flogging him. Eventually, “when the freedom of the slaves I had so frequently heard of came into my head,” Galant mobilized his fellow slaves and Khoi servants. They seized some guns and ammunition, took over the farmstead, and killed van der Merwe, as well as his wife, who had hidden, in vain, in the brick oven. However* a commando quickly crushed the rebels.54

  In 1833, the reformed British Parliament abandoned the attempt to ameliorate the institution of slavery and passed a law emancipating the slaves in the British Empire and providing some compensation for the slave owners’ loss of property. After a transitional period during which the former slaves were apprenticed to their former owners, they became legally free in 1838. By that time, the concept of freedom had been given a new meaning in the Cape Colony as a result of a struggle concerning the Khoikhoi.

  During the reac
tionary period after 1807, the colonial government systematically defined the status of the “Hottentots” for the first time. In 1809, the governor issued a proclamation that sought to safeguard them against such abuses as wage deductions and withholdings but also applied legal constraints that had previously been used to control slaves. A “Hottentot” was to have a fixed “place of abode,” registered at the landdrost’s office, from which he was not to move without a pass signed by his employer, veldkornet, or landdrost. Three years later, a further proclamation provided that a Khoikhoi child who had been maintained by his parents’ employer up to the age of eight years should be apprenticed to him for a further ten years—a provision that had the effect of binding the parents, too. Because few Khoikhoi still possessed land inside the colony and because the mission stations and the Cape Regiment had places for only a small proportion of the Khoikhoi population, these laws bound most of them to compulsory servitude to white landowners.55

  Whereas the British antislavery movement was directed primarily at the Caribbean islands and only secondarily at the Cape, evangelical missionaries had been generating a radical critique of the status of the Khoikhoi. The first missionaries to the Khoikhoi were German Moravians who worked briefly at Genadendal, forty miles east of Stellenbosch, between 1737 and 1743 and refounded that mission in 1792. The Moravians concentrated on improving the material conditions of their charges rather than on trying to influence the structure of the colonial society. It was the London Missionary Society (LMS)—a new, interdenominational organization, predominantly Congregational—that brought into the heart of the Cape Colony a radical evangelicalism, which the historian Andrew Ross defines as “the belief that social and political issues were central to the concerns of a Christian.” Doctor J. T. van der Kemp, a former lieutenant in the Dutch dragoons, went to South Africa as an LMS missionary in 1797, married a young Khoikhoi woman with whom he had four children, and founded a mission he called Bethelsdorp near Algoa Bay (modern Port Elizabeth) in the disputed eastern frontier zone in 1803. Bethelsdorp was a haven for Khoikhoi who left the white farms. There, van der Kemp discovered and denounced the exploitation that they were suffering at the hands of white farmers and officials. Van der Kemp died in 1811. His colleague James Read survived him but was unable to sustain many of the charges he brought against individual farmers before the colonial circuit court in 1812.

  In 1819, a far more effective and equally radical personality appeared on the scene. John Philip, a director of the LMS, was sent to the Cape by his fellow directors to supervise the work of the mission in South Africa. The son of a Scottish handloom weaver, Philip projected into the South African situation his experience of life in Scotland during a period when the condition of skilled workers was improving. Education, Christianity, and freedom from preindustrial constraints were a recipe for welfare for all South Africans, Boers and British, slaves and Khoikhoi. As a radical evangelical, Philip was committed to fighting for the liberation of oppressed classes.56 He identified initially with the cause of the British settlers, chairing a committee that assisted distressed colonists and joining in their criticisms of Governor Somerset. But in 1821 he found correspondence at Bethelsdorp that convinced him that the circuit court had been wrong in throwing out most of the charges against the farmers. He also discovered that the local landdrost, Jacob Cuyler, had used his office both to acquire land and Khoikhoi labor and to obstruct justice.57

  Having failed to obtain local redress, in 1826 Philip went to England, where he lobbied the Anti-Slavery Society with the argument that the fate of the Khoikhoi “was bound up with the fate of the slaves” and wrote a long, passionate polemic, exposing the injustices experienced by the Khoikhoi. “I found them,” he wrote in the Preface to his Researches in South Africa, “in the most oppressed condition of any people under any civilized government known to us upon earth. . . . The Hottentot has a right to a fair price for his labour; to an exemption from cruelty and oppression; to choose the place of his abode, and to enjoy the society of his children; and no one can deprive him of those rights without violating the laws of nature and of nations.”58 Philip’s mission was fruitful. On July 15, 1828, the House of Commons passed a motion that the colonial government was to be told to “secure to all the natives of South Africa, the same freedom and protection as are enjoyed by other free people of that Colony whether English or Dutch.”59

  That motion proved to be redundant. Seeing the writing on the wall, the Cape governor had consulted Landdrost Andries Stockenstrom, whose Swedish father had come to the Cape Colony in the service of the Dutch and who was sympathetic to the Khoikhoi cause. On July 17, 1828, the governor promulgated Ordinance 50, which repealed the previous Khoikhoi legislation and made “Hottentots and other free people of colour” equal before the law with Whites. The 50th Ordinance met with strident protests from Afrikaners and British settlers, and a Vagrancy Ordinance was drafted that would have turned the clock back by compelling the Khoikhoi, and also the former slaves at the end of their period of apprenticeship, “to earn an honest livelihood.” Before he left England, however, Philip had ensured that the 50th Ordinance should not be amended without British consent. The British government accordingly disallowed the draft Vagrancy Ordinance, and on emancipation the slaves stepped into the legal status won by the Khoikhoi in 1828.60

  The freedom acquired by the Khoikhoi and the former slaves, however, was limited. The 50th Ordinance freed them from overtly discriminatory legislation; it did nothing to assist them to overcome their poverty, which was the result of the entrenched domination of the economy by the white population. In a preindustrial and predominantly rural context, land ownership is an essential basis for individual and group autonomy. By 1828, Whites were the legal owners of nearly all the productive land in the colony, and the emancipated Khoikhoi—and, later on, the emancipated slaves—had few alternatives but to continue to work for white people.

  One option was service in the Cape Regiment. Khoikhoi units had formed part of the Dutch garrison in the Cape peninsula, fighting courageously against the British invaders in 1795 and again in 1806. Khoikhoi also participated regularly in commandos against hunter-gatherers. The British continued both practices. In 1799, a Khoikhoi detachment took part in the suppression of the Afrikaner rebellion in the eastern frontier zone. After 1806, the Gape Regiment—later known as the Cape Mounted Rifles—with white officers and Khoikhoi other ranks to the level of sergeant, fought, and fought well, in all the frontier wars against Africans and in several skirmishes against Afrikaners, until it was disbanded in 1870. The regiment’s enrollment varied between two hundred and eight hundred. The conditions of service were not good enough to make it popular among the Khoikhoi, and white farmers always opposed and often obstructed recruiting them on the grounds that it deprived Whites of labor.61

  Another option was residence on a mission station. By the 1830s, seven such institutions in the colony were catering for Khoikhoi—five Moravian and two LMS. Each station comprised up to ten thousand acres and provided homes for up to twelve hundred people. In material terms, the most successful was Genadendal, which the Moravians conducted in a strong paternalist spirit. The LMS missionaries were less demanding and their stations were less prosperous. The location of Bethelsdorp, moreover, was ill-chosen. It had no arable land and the able-bodied inhabitants were obliged to go out to work while using the station as their base. John Philip improved the condition of the LMS stations in the 1820s, supervising the construction of substantial buildings and watercourses.

  In spite of doctrinal differences, both societies provided their charges with some insulation from the civil society and some training in skills of value to them in making the transition to colonial life. Even so, they were constrained by their own lack of financial resources, as well as by the power of the colonial society in which they were embedded. As Richard Elphick and V. C. Malherbe put it: “Mission life gave a few Khoikhoi a measure of financial independence, but the shortage of suitable land
on the overcrowded stations meant that most remained poor with no option but to hire themselves periodically to the farmers, or to enlist in the Regiment.”62

  For the people of Khoikhoi and slave antecedents, these options were palliatives rather than cures. Although they were not technically enslaved, lacking land and political power, most of them were effectively enserfed to the white colonists. In the Cape Colony, the white settlers had repeatedly demonstrated a determination to achieve and maintain a near monopoly of the productive land. In 1799, for example, the Dutch authorities had granted land on the Gamtoos River in the frontier zone to a band of Khoikhoi under David Stuurman; but in 1809, when Stuurman refused to surrender two Khoikhoi whose employer had not allowed them to leave his farm although they had completed their contracts, Landdrost Cuyler seized Stuurman by deceit and had him condemned to work in irons on Robben Island for the rest of his life. Stuurman’s settlement was broken up and Cuyler obtained the land as his personal possession.63

  That was a precedent for what happened on a larger scale after 182.8. In 1829, Andries Stockenstrom, who had been promoted to the rank of commissioner-general of the eastern part of the colony, set aside about four hundred square miles of fertile land that had formerly been occupied by Xhosa, on the upper reaches of the Kat River as a settlement for Khoikhoi. At first things went well. By 1833, there were 2,114 settlers—Khoikhoi and people of mixed descent. They owned 2,444 head of cattle, 4,996 sheep, and 250 horses and produced wheat, barley, and fruit. They had dug fifty-five irrigation channels and built a dozen stone houses as well as wattle-and-daub cottages.64

  However, Xhosa farmers raided their livestock from across the border and filtered back into the area with or without their permission, and they were joined by groups of Mfengu—Africans who had fled southward from the expanding Zulu empire. The settlement also bore the brunt of the frontier wars of 1834-35, 1846-47, and 1850-53. In the first two of those wars, the Kat River Khoikhoi provided loyal and courageous service to the colony. In 1847, for example, the British commanding general said that nine hundred of the one thousand male adults in the settlement were on active service, compared with “not more than three per cent of the adult population ... of any other Division of the Colony.”65 On each occasion, the Khoikhoi of the Kat River lost most of their livestock, their crops were destroyed, and many of their houses were burnt down.