A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  37. K. Jordaan, “The Origins of the Afrikaners and Their Language, 1652–1720: A Study in Miscegenation and Creole,” Race 15:4 (1974): 461–95; M. F. Valkoff, New Light on Afrikaans and “Malayo-Portuguese” (Louvain, 1972), and Studies in Portuguese and Creole, with Special Reference to South Africa (Johannesburg, 1966).

  38. Jeffrey Peires, “The British and the Cape, 1814–1834,” in Shaping.

  39. C. G. W. Schumann, Structural Changes and Business Cycles in South Africa, 1806–1936 (Westminster, 1938), pt. 1.

  40. W. M. Macmillan, The Cape Colour Question (London, 1927); Andrew Ross, John Philip (1775–1851): Missions, Race, and Politics in South Africa (Aberdeen, 1986).

  41. J. S. Galbraith, Reluctant Empire (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1963); A. G. L. Shaw, ed., Great Britain and the Colonies, 1815–1865 (London, 1970).

  42. Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981).

  43. Peires, “British and Cape,” in Shaping.

  44. William Freund, “The Cape under the Transitional Governments, 1795–1814,” in Shaping.

  45. The Record: or, A Series of Papers Relative to the Condition and Treatment of the Native Tribes of South Africa, ed. Donald Moodie (reprint, Amsterdam, 1960), pt. 5:17–19.

  46. Donald Maclennan, A Proper Degree of Terror (Johannesburg, 1986), frontispiece.

  47. Ibid., chap. 3.

  48. Peires, “British and Cape,” 474.

  49. M. D. Nash, Bailie’s Party of 1820 Settlers (Cape Town, 1982).

  50. G. E. Cory, The Rise of South Africa, vol. 2 (London, 1913); Thomas Pringle, Narrative of a Residence in South Africa (London, 1835); The Chronicle of Jeremiah Goldswain, ed. Una Long, 2 vols. (Cape Town, 1946, 1949).

  51. For example, see John Mitford Bowker, Speeches, Letters and Selections from Important Papers (Grahamstown, 1864; reprint, Cape Town, 1962), and R. Godlonton, A Narrative of the Irruption of the Kaffir Hordes . . . 1834–1835 (Graham’s Town, 1855; reprint, Cape Town, 1965).

  52. Bill Freund, The Making of Contemporary Africa (Bloomington, 1984), chap. 4; Galbraith, Reluctant Empire; B. Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism (Cambridge, 1970).

  53. Armstrong and Worden, “The Slaves”; Mary Isobel Rayner, “Wine and Slaves: The Failure of an Export Economy and the Ending of Slavery in the Cape Colony, South Africa, 1806–1834” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1986).

  54. R. Ross, Cape of Torments, 109.

  55. J. S. Marais, The Cape Coloured People, 1652–1937, 2d ed. (Johannesburg, 1957); Macmillan, Cape Colour Question; Susan Newton-King, “The Labour Market of the Cape Colony, 1807–28,” in Economy and Society, 171–207.

  56. A. Ross, Philip, chaps. 1–2. Philip is a controversial figure in South African historiography. As Ross’s biography demonstrates, he has been underrated both by conservative white South African historians and by Marxist historians.

  57. Ibid., chaps. 3–4.

  58. John Philip, Researches in South Africa, 2 vols. (London, 1828; reprint, New York, 1969), 1:xxv, xxvi.

  59. A. Ross, Philip, 109.

  60. Marais, Cape Coloured People, chap. 5.

  61. Ibid., 131–34; Maclennan, Terror, chap. 4.

  62. Elphick and Malherbe, “Khoisan.”

  63. Maclennan, Terror, 52–53.

  64. Marais, Cape Coloured People, 223.

  65. Ibid., 229.

  66. Ibid., 233.

  67. Ibid., 231–45; Tony Kirk, “The Cape Economy and the Expropriation of the Kat River Settlement, 1846–53,” in Economy and Society, 226–46.

  68. Peter Burroughs, “Colonial Self-Government,” in British Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, ed. C. C. Eldridge (London, 1984), 58. See also Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850–1970 (London, 1975), 1–26.

  69. Stanley Trapido, “The Origins of the Cape Franchise Qualifications of 1853,” Journal of African History 5:1 (1964): 37–54; Marais, Cape Coloured People, 208–15.

  70. Marais, Cape Coloured People, 199–208.

  71. A. Ross, Philip, 215–28.

  72. Union of South Africa, Report of Commission of Inquiry regarding the Cape Coloured Population of the Union, U.G. 54–1937 (Pretoria, 1937).

  73. D. Hobart Houghton and Jenifer Dagut, Source Material on the South African Economy: 1860–1970, vol. 1: 1860–1899 (Cape Town, 1972), 32.

  74. Van Duin and Ross, Economy of the Cape Colony, 88.

  75. Houghton and Dagut, Source Material, 1:14–19, 133.

  76. Leonard Thompson, “The Strange Career of Slagtersnek,” in Political Mythology of Apartheid, 105–43.

  77. Eric A. Walker, The Great Trek, 5th ed. (London, 1965).

  78. Leslie C. Duly, British Land Policy at the Cape, 1795–1844 (Durham, N.C., 1968).

  79. C. F. J. Muller, Die oorsprong van die Groot Trek (Cape Town and Johannesburg, 1974).

  80. G. W. Eybers, Select Constitutional Documents Illustrating South African History, 1795–1910 (London, 1918), 143–45.

  Chapter 3: African Wars and White Invaders

  1. Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981), pt. 2, “Guns and Conquests.”

  2. Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson, The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven, 1981); Leonard Thompson, “The Southern African Frontier in Comparative Perspective,” in Essays on Frontiers in World History, ed. George Wolfskill and Stanley Palmer (College Station, Tex., 1983).

  3. J. B. Peires, The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of Their Independence (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1981); Monica Wilson, “Cooperation and Conflict: The Eastern Cape Frontier,” The Oxford History of South Africa, ed. Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1969, 1971), 1:233–71; W. M. Macmillan, Bantu, Boer and Briton: The Making of the South African Native Problem (London, 1929), 2d ed. (Oxford, 1963); J. S. Galbraith, Reluctant Empire: British Policy on the South African Frontier, 1834–1854 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1963); John Henderson Soga, The Ama-Xosa: Life and Customs (London, 1931); Colin Bundy, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979), 1–64; David Hammond-Tooke, “The ‘Other Side’ of Frontier History: A Model of Cape Nguni Political Process,” African Societies in Southern Africa: Historical Studies, ed. Leonard Thompson (London, 1969), 230–58. Les Switzer, Power and Resistance in an African Society: The Ciskei Xhosa and the Making of South Africa (Madison, Wis., 1993); Noel Mostert, Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People (New York, 1992).

  4. Donald Maclennan, A Proper Degree of Terror (Johannesburg, 1986); Hermann Giliomee, “The Eastern Frontier, 1770–1812,” in The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840, ed. Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (Cape Town and Middletown, Conn., 1989), 421–71.

  5. Peires, House of Phalo, 58–63, 135–45.

  6. Richard A. Moyer, “The Mfengu, Self-Defense and the Cape Frontier,” in Beyond the Cape Frontier, ed. Christopher Saunders and Robin Derricourt (London, 1974), 101–26; Bundy, Rise and Fall, 32–44. It has been argued that the Mfengu were not refugees from the Zulu kingdom, but impoverished Xhosa; the evidence is not convincing. See Switzer, Power and Resistance, 58–60.

  7. Peires, House of Phalo, 145–50; Macmillan, Bantu, Boer and Briton, 106–53; Galbraith, Reluctant Empire, 98–122. R. Godlonton, A Narrative of the Irruption of the Kaffir Hordes into the Eastern Province of the Cape of Good Hope, 1834–1835 (Graham’s Town, 1835; reprint, Cape Town, 1965), is a contemporary settler account.

  8. Macmillan, Bantu, Boer and Briton, 154–93.

  9. Peires, House of Phalo, 109–34; Macmillan, Bantu, Boer and Briton, 239–305; Galbraith, Reluctant Empire, 123–50.

  10. Peires, House of Phalo, 150–58.

  11. George McCall Theal, History of South Africa from 1795 to 1872, 4th ed., 5 vols. (London, 1927), 3:62. This
anecdote may not be accurate.

  12. Johannes Meintjes, Sandile: The Fall of the Xhosa Nation (Cape Town, 1971), 205.

  13. Ibid., 202–30.

  14. J. Rutherford, Sir George Grey: A Study in Colonial Government (London, 1961).

  15. J. B. Peires, “‘Soft’ Believers and ‘Hard’ Unbelievers in the Xhosa Cattle-Killing,” Journal of African History 27:3 (1986): 443–61, and “The Central Beliefs of the Xhosa Cattle-Killing,” Journal of African History 28:1 (1987): 43–63. Also Switzer, Power and Resistance, 65–75, and J. B. Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856–57 (Johannesburg, Bloomington, Ind., and London, 1989).

  16. Peires, “Central Beliefs,” 56. On the cattle-killing see also Wilson, “Cooperation and Conflict,” 256–60; Meintjes, Sandile, 240–63; and Charles Pacalt Brownlee, Reminiscences of Kafir Life and History, 2d ed. (Lovedale, 1916; reprint with Introduction by Christopher Saunders, Pietermaritzburg, 1977). Brownlee, the son of a missionary, was British commissioner to the Ngqika Xhosa at the time of the cattle-killing.

  17. William W. Gqoba, “The Cause of the Cattle-Killing at the Nongqawuse Period,” in A. C. Jordan, Towards an African Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973), 70–71. This is the most authentic African version we have; Gqoba, a Xhosa, was living at the time.

  18. Ibid., 73.

  19. Peires, “‘Soft’ Believers.”

  20. Brownlee, “Reminiscences,” 140.

  21. Peires, “‘Soft’ Believers,” 454, 456, 460.

  22. Peires, “Central Beliefs,” 43; Rutherford, Grey, 368.

  23. Rutherford, Grey, 360–70.

  24. John A. Chalmers, Tiyo Soga: A Page of South African Mission Work (Edinburgh, 1878), 249.

  25. J. D. Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath (Evanston, Ill., 1966); Leonard Thompson, “The Zulu Kingdom” and “The Difaqane and Its Aftermath, 1822–36,” in The Oxford History of South Africa, 1:336–64, 391–405; Donald R. Morris, The Washing of the Spears: A History of the Rise of the Zulu Kingdom under Shaka and Its Fall in the Zulu War of 1879 (New York, 1965); Paul Maylam, A History of the African People of South Africa (New York, 1986), 54–63. See also n. 6, above.

  26. J. B. Mcl. Daniel, “A Geographical Study of Pre-Shakan Zululand,” South African Geographical Journal 55:1 (1973): 23–31; Jeff Guy, “Ecological Factors in the Rise of Shaka and the Zulu Kingdom,” in Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa, ed. S. Marks and A. Atmore (London, 1980), 102–19; Martin Hall, The Changing Past: Farmers, Kings, and Traders in Southern Africa, 200–1860 (Cape Town, 1987), 124–28, and “Settlement Patterns in the Iron Age of Zululand,” Cambridge Monographs in African Archaeology 5 (1981): 139–78.

  27. Charles Ballard, “Economic Distress, Social Transformation and the Drought Factor in South African History, 1800–1830: With Particular Reference to the Societies of Natal and Zululand” (manuscript, 1986).

  28. Guy, “Ecological Factors.”

  29. Lugunza, in The James Stuart Archive of Recorded Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighboring Peoples, ed. C. de B. Webb and J. B. Wright, 3 vols. (Pietermaritzburg, 1976, 1979, 1981), 1:342.

  30. Baleka, in Stuart Archive, 1:8.

  31. Two white traders wrote accounts of their visits to Shaka: Nathaniel Isaacs, Travels and Adventure in Eastern Africa, 2 vols. (London, 1836; new ed., Cape Town, 1935–36), and Henry Francis Fynn, The Diary of Henry Francis Fynn, ed. J. Stuart and D. Mck. Malcolm (Pietermaritzburg, 1950). Isaacs stressed the sensational, brutal aspects of Shaka’s behavior; Fynn was more reliable, but his original manuscript was lost, and he wrote the surviving manuscript from memory many years later. There are additional documents in John Bird, The Annals of Natal: 1495 to 1845, 2 vols. (Pietermaritzburg, 1888) 1:60–71, 73–93, 95–124. The oral evidence collected by James Stuart, a Natal civil servant, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been skillfully edited in The James Stuart Archive.

  32. Alan Smith, “The Trade of Delagoa Bay as a Factor in Nguni Politics, 1780–1835,” in African Societies in Southern Africa, 171–90; P. L. Bonner, “The Dynamics of Late Eighteenth Century Northern Nguni Society: Some Hypotheses,” in Before and After Shaka: Papers in Nguni History, ed. J. Peires (Grahamstown, 1981), 74–81.

  33. Julian Cobbing expounded his thesis in “The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mblompo,” Journal of African History 29:3 (1988): 487–519, and in a series of unpublished seminar papers, including “The Case against the Mfecane” (University of the Witwatersrand, 1984), “Grasping the Nettle: The Slave Trade and the Early Zulu” (University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1990), and “Ousting the Mfecane” (colloquium on the Mfecane aftermath, University of the Witwatersrand, September 6–9, 1991). Published responses include Elizabeth A. Eldredge, “Sources of Conflict in Southern Africa, ca. 1800–1830: The ‘Mfecane’ Reconsidered,” Journal of African History 33:1 (1992): 1–35; Carolyn Anne Hamilton, “‘The Character and Objects of Chaka’: A Reconsideration of the Making of Shaka as ‘Mfecane’ Motor,” ibid., 37–63; J. D. Omer-Cooper, “Has the Mfecane a Future? A Response to the Cobbing Critique,” Journal of Southern African Studies 19:2 (1993), 273–94; J. B. Peires, “Paradigm Deleted: The Materialist Interpretation of the Mfecane,” ibid., 295–313; Elizabeth A. Eldredge, “Slaving across the Cape Frontier,” and “Delagoa Bay and the Hinterland in the Early Nineteenth Century: Politics, Trade, Slaves, and Slave Raiding,” in Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier, ed. Elizabeth Eldredge and Fred Morton (Madison, Wis., 1994), 93–166.

  34. Hamilton, “‘Character and Objects of Chaka,’” 59. Besides the works listed in note 31, see A. F. Gardiner, Narrative of a Journey to the Zoolu Country in South Africa (London, 1836), and The Diary of the Rev. Francis Owen, M.A., Missionary with Dingaan in 1837–38 (Cape Town, 1926).

  35. Thomas Arbousset, Missionary Excursion, ed. and trans. David Ambrose and Albert Brutsch (Morija, Lesotho, 1991), 68–69. Also, Thomas Arbousset and F. Daumas, Narrative of an Exploratory Tour to the North-East of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope (Cape Town, 1846; new ed., Cape Town, 1948); William F. Lye, ed., Andrew Smith’s Journal of His Expedition into the Interior of South Africa, 1834–36 (Cape Town, 1975).

  36. R. Kent Rasmussen, Migrant Kingdom (London, 1978), and Omer-Cooper, Zulu Aftermath, 129–55.

  37. Omer-Cooper, Zulu Aftermath, 49–85, 115–28.

  38. Leonard Thompson, Survival in Two Worlds: Moshoeshoe of Lesotho, 1786–1868 (Oxford, 1975), quotation on 161. See also Elizabeth Eldredge, A South African Kingdom: The Pursuit of Security in Nineteenth-Century Lesotho (New York, 1993).

  39. Thomas Mokopu Mofolo (1875–1948), Chaka (Morija, Lesotho, 1925); Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje (1876–1932), Mhudi (Lovedale, 1930); Mazisi Kunene, Emperor Shaka the Great (London, 1979). There are many later editions of Mofolo and Plaatje. Kunene, writing in the shadow of apartheid, dedicated his poem “to all the heroes and heroines of the African continent and all her children who shall make her name great.”

  40. C. F. J. Muller, “The Period of the Great Trek, 1834–1854,” in Five Hundred Years: A History of South Africa, ed. C. F. J. Muller (Pretoria and Cape Town, 1969), 122–56; Leonard Thompson in Oxford History of South Africa, 1:352–64, 405–34; Eric A. Walker, The Great Trek (London, 1938).

  41. G. W. Eybers, Select Constitutional Documents Illustrating South African History, 1795–1910 (London, 1918), 144–45.

  42. Bird, Annals of Natal, 1:459.

  43. Rasmussen, Migrant Kingdom.

  44. Walker, Trek, 133–47.

  45. Ibid., 147–65. Francis Owen, an Anglican missionary, was at Dingane’s headquarters when the Retief party was massacred (The Diary of the Rev. Francis Owen, ed. G. Cory [Cape Town, 1926]). It is possible that no such treaty existed.

  46. Official reports of the battle by Pretorius and his secretary, South African Archival Records: Notule van die Natalse Volksraad, 1838–45, ed. J. H. Breytenbach (Cape To
wn, n.d. [ca. 1958]), 270–73, 282–85, 290, 293–94, with inaccurate translations in Bird, Annals of Natal, 1:453–58. Critique in Leonard Thompson, The Political Mythology of Apartheid (New Haven and London, 1985), 144–54.

  47. The emigrants considered they spoke Dutch. In fact, their spoken language was already closer to modern Afrikaans.

  48. A. J. du Plessis, “Die Republiek Natalia,” in Archives Year Book for South African History (1942): 1; Walker, Great Trek, 206–33.

  49. Du Plessis, “Republiek Natalia”; J. A. I. Agar-Hamilton, The Native Policy of the Voortrekkers, 1836–1858 (Cape Town, 1928).

  50. On British policy toward the emigrants, see Galbraith, Reluctant Empire, and W. P. Morrell, British Colonial Policy in the Age of Peel and Russell (Oxford, 1930).

  51. Bird, 2:146.

  52. F. J. Potgieter, “Die vestiging van die Blanke in Transvaal, 1837–66,” in Archives Year Book (1958): 2; Roger Wagner, “Zoutpansberg: The Dynamics of a Hunting Frontier, 1848–67,” in Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa, 313–49.

  53. Robert Ross, Adam Kok’s Griquas (Cambridge, 1976); William Lye, “The Distribution of the Sotho Peoples after the Difaqane,” in African Societies in Southern Africa, 190–206; Thompson, Moshoeshoe. See also Elizabeth Eldredge, “Slave Raiding across the Cape Frontier,” in Slavery in South Africa, 93–126.

  54. J. du Plessis, A History of Christian Missions in South Africa (reprint, Cape Town, 1965).

  55. Galbraith, Reluctant Empire, 176–241.

  56. J. F. Midgley, “The Orange River Sovereignty,” in Archives Year Book (1949): 2; Thompson, Moshoeshoe, 140–54.

  57. Thompson, Moshoeshoe, 163.

  58. Eybers, Select Constitutional Documents, 359.

  59. Ibid., 282–83.

  60. Galbraith, Reluctant Empire, 242–76.

  61. Leonard Thompson, in Oxford History of South Africa, 1:373–90; Maylam, History of the African People, 83–90; E. H. Brookes and C. de B. Webb, A History of Natal (Pietermaritzburg, 1965).

  62. A. F. Hattersley, Portrait of a Colony (Cambridge, 1940), and The British Settlement of Natal (Cambridge, 1950).