Once he arrived in the Cape, however, he implemented and adapted a version of his Probation System to suit local conditions. By using Cape convicts instead of transported felons, he won acclaim for creating an institution that seemingly both punished and reformed criminals while also economically constructing much-needed roads, passes and harbours. In many ways, Montagu’s convict system is his most important legacy to the Cape and a direct result of his experience in Van Diemen’s Land. Without the networks of empire and the exchange of administrative expertise between colonies, there would not have been an efficient convict system in the Cape. Although the very idea of a penal system may be embarrassing to certain sensitivities, and the connections between the goals of carceral regimes and imperial or colonising projects are obvious, the fact that penal reform, convict transportation and the utilisation of unfree labour after the abolition of slavery were major issues in the nineteenth-century British Empire cannot be ignored. Through his energetic work at the heart of these problems, Montagu’s proposals and solutions became of central importance and, through his initiatives, he displayed how experiments in one colony could be adapted successfully to another.24
Ironically, it was his very success in creating a functioning convict system in the Cape – which initially won him the praise of the non-convict section of Cape society – that encouraged the British government to propose shifting the transportation of British convicts from Australia to the Cape. This idea was anathema to public opinion in the Cape, largely because many there already knew, via the networks of imperial communications, that free settlers in New South Wales were opposed to the further transportation of convicts and were ashamed of the ‘convict stain’. Montagu always stated quite clearly that he had not requested and did not support the British government’s decision to send British and Irish convicts to the Cape. His pronouncements at the time, and the documentation available to historians, clearly support this. If any blame is to be attached to anyone, it ought to be to Sir Harry Smith for giving the British government the impression that the Cape would not object to the arrival of transported convicts. But once the ‘popular party’, or the ‘ultras’, as they were called, decided to boycott the government and resort to expressions of public violence to voice their protests, Montagu ‘formed square’ with his fellow Waterloo veteran and determined to assert the government’s authority.25
The reasons for Montagu’s unpopularity in the Cape, then, are not that he installed a convict system there but that he was perceived to have supported the government during the Anti-Convict Association agitation and in subsequent debates concerning the granting of representative government. Who were ‘the popular party’? A historian critical of Montagu explained that the leadership of this party may be broadly equated with ‘local’ financial or commercial interests.26 These ‘locals’ saw themselves as being in opposition to ‘Conservative’ collaborators with the imperial regime who allegedly represented wealthy merchants with foreign or British financial interests. In the small world of Cape politics, battles were fought over the deployment of public funding, and the popular party was particularly jealous and suspicious of Montagu’s control of the public purse. For them, Montagu’s plans to develop harbours and to spend money on the breakwater were measures designed to favour the wealthy merchants. They would have preferred railway constructions, and yet, perversely, they begrudged the money that Montagu spent on roads (one-sixth of the Cape’s total annual revenue), arguing that roads served interests other than their own. The roads, in fact, were designed to bring agricultural products to the Cape Town market, but even this did not please the Cape Town municipality, since Montagu repealed the law that required farmers to pay a tax on their produce to the municipal market.
Political issues were discussed in the local press. By the time Montagu arrived in the Cape, the battle for freedom of the press had been won and the result was, according to Governor George Napier, ‘the worst conducted and most interested and base of any public journals in the whole world’.27 Montagu and the government were thus a constant target for this ‘violently partisan and unscrupulous’ press, led by the outspoken liberal John Fairbairn. Although the Anti-Convict Association succeeded in preventing the convict transportation ship Neptune from discharging its cargo of ticket-of-leave Irishmen in the Cape, for the popular party the battle was only half won. They now had to secure representative government with a low franchise qualification, and they saw Montagu as being opposed to this because he controlled the existing Cape government and its nominated and conservative Legislative Council.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the British government was in favour of representative government for its colonies, largely because it was believed that this would be a cheaper, less contentious means of keeping control. Contrary to popular beliefs, Montagu favoured a low franchise for the lower house of the proposed House of Assembly (£25 of property per annum) as long as there was a high property qualification for the Upper House (£2 000 of unencumbered property). In common with more liberal and humanitarian opinion-makers, he feared that if the ‘popular’ majority of the settlers gained political control of the assemblies, they would use power to oppress the coloured and African populations of the colony. Crucially, however, he thought that the displays of violence and disloyalty by the popular party during the Anti-Convict agitation suggested that the Cape was not yet ready for representative government. He sought to delay debate on the subject until a more appropriate time. Montagu also argued, once the Eighth Frontier War (1850–53) had begun, that the government’s priority was to win the war rather than to grant the franchise.
Believing Montagu to be a patron of the Conservative faction, the popular party was determined to expose him as being a corrupt beneficiary of it and an abuser of his office. The implication was that he was running a version of the ‘Arthur Faction’ or ‘Family Compact’ in the Cape. It was not just contemporaries who believed this but also modern historians. According to one, Montagu used his control over the colony’s finances to ‘further his own interests and ambitions. He awarded jobs to the colonists with influential British connections and to those with wealth who favoured the “Conservative” view of government; he used the revenue to embark on ambitious public works, chiefly road buildings; and he tried to employ convict labour in a way which would enhance his reputation at home.’28 So far, there is no suggestion that Montagu personally benefited financially from any of this. The evidence, in fact, suggests otherwise. Even Fairbairn acknowledged bitterly that Montagu would not meet his own qualifications for the Upper House.
It is true that both of Montagu’s sons had jobs in the Cape government, but this hardly counted as nepotism, or a family compact, in the context of the times. The Cape was a more expensive place to live than Van Diemen’s Land, and Montagu found it particularly so because he was obliged to do a great deal of entertaining by virtue of being the de facto governor. Because he had had to leave Van Diemen’s Land precipitately, he had needed to sell his properties there and in Port Phillip at the worst possible time, incurring losses that amounted to over £21 000. He struggled financially throughout his years in the Cape and frequently asked for salary raises. Eventually he obtained a salary of £1 500 and later of £2 000 per annum, but he spent £1 300 of this in paying back his Australian debts, which included £4 300 to Arthur. By the time Montagu died, he had paid off his debts but was not able to leave enough to provide for his widow.
Despite evidence of Montagu’s personal lack of wealth, another historian has accused him of being a war profiteer who benefited from the frontier wars by making illegal withdrawals from the commissariat chest and by using the Central Roads Board as ‘his private piggy bank’. The suggestion is that these ‘fiddles’ somehow went into Montagu’s personal account.29 It seems more likely, however, that even if some of these measures were irregular, they only involved the skilful shuffling of money from one departmental account into another (from the commissariat to public works in times
of peace, and vice versa in times of war). If so, Montagu was meeting the exigencies of a financial crisis in funding by taking measures to ensure that money flowed to where it was most needed – such as to the military struggle on the frontier in 1850 – and not into his private pockets. Ultimately, however, then as now, it was the perception that Montagu represented a corrupt, conservative oligarchy that was more important to his critics than who he really was himself. His was a style of government that was out of place in the new empire, where the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land would become the settler colony of Tasmania, and the Cape would progress from being a pro-consular despotism to enjoying, for a while at least, a non-racial, low-qualification franchise.
The pressures of overwork and unpopularity finally caught up with Montagu, and he suffered a complete breakdown in his health. His medical advisers told him that he had to choose between rest and paralysis. On 2 May 1852, he sailed for England to recuperate. Tellingly, in belated recognition of his impossible workload, the British government appointed a lieutenant governor to do some of the work that Montagu had been doing on behalf of the governor while acting as colonial secretary. Though he survived for more than a year longer under the ministrations of Drs Squibb and Bright (who diagnosed him with congestion of the brain) and continued to advise the home government about Cape issues, he ‘enjoyed not a single day’s perfect health after returning to England’30 and died on 4 November 1853 after contracting a severe case of influenza. Among those who bore his coffin to his grave at Brompton Cemetery were Sir Peregrine Maitland (a former governor of the Cape) and Major Arthur, who was a relation of his old ‘uncle’ George Arthur. The Bishop of Cape Town officiated at the funeral. It may be appropriate to allow another Cape governor and veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, Sir George Napier, to have the last word: ‘When I had the honour of being Governor and Commander in Chief of that colony, Mr Montagu served in his present capacity under me, and I can truly state that a more active, independent and able public servant I never met with – his honour and integrity are unimpeachable, and his character and conduct as a gentleman perfect.’31
Further reading
Montagu was represented sympathetically in two early assessments: W.A. Newman, Biographical Memoir of John Montagu (Cape Town: A.S. Robertson, 1855), and J.J. Breitenbach, ‘The Development of the Secretaryship to the Government at the Cape of Good Hope Under John Montagu, 1845–1852’, Archives Year Book for South African History, Twenty-Second Year, Vol. II, 1960. Most Australian historians paint him as a villain, as does Jeff Peires in ‘“The Expenditure of a Million of British Sovereigns in this Otherwise Miserable Place”: Frontier Wars, Public Debt and the Cape’s Non-racial Constitution’, Theoria 63 (147), No. 2, June 2016, pp. 24–43. A more balanced Australian account can be found in Craig R. Joel, A Tale of Ambition and Unrealised Hope: John Montagu and Sir John Franklin (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2011). For more details on Montagu’s convict system, see Nigel Penn, ‘“Close and Merciful Watchfulness”: The Origins and Nature of John Montagu’s Convict System in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Cape Colony’, Cultural and Social History 5 (4), 2008, pp. 465–80.
Isaiah Bud-M’belle: Sportsman, interpreter, spokesman
Brian Willan
* * *
The American Virginia Jubilee Singers, by all accounts, took South Africa by storm during their several visits to the subcontinent in the 1890s. Led by the charismatic Orpheus McAdoo, who was born a slave in North Carolina, their music captivated audiences, black and white. Even Paul Kruger, president of the still independent South African Republic, was reported to have been overcome by emotion by their rendering of ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen’. For black South Africans, though, it was their message of educational upliftment and advancement, and their example of black achievement, that was particularly inspiring. McAdoo found himself inundated with requests for help from young black South Africans who were eager to get to America for the further education they could not find at home.
Among them, when the Jubilee Singers visited Colesberg in the Karoo in August 1890, was a young man by the name of Isaiah Bud-M’belle,1 then just twenty years old. He approached McAdoo with a request for a scholarship to enable him to pursue his education at the Hampton Institute in Virginia. Unable to help directly, McAdoo advised him to write to the principal of the institute. When he did so, he explained that he was ‘a coloured young man – a Fingo by nationality’, that he had qualified as a teacher and was applying ‘because here in South Africa a coloured man gets no sound education but merely elementary’.
‘I can assure you,’ he concluded, ‘by admitting and giving me scholarship there – the thanks I could give – no words can express.’2
Already, Bud-M’belle had displayed a keen interest in education, so it was no surprise, given the lack of opportunities in South Africa, that he should have seen America as his passport to a better future. He had been through the Healdtown Institution, one of the leading secondary schools open to black South Africans, and he had achieved the best teaching certificate it was possible for him to get. Now he was teaching at the local mission school in Colesberg. So far as education was concerned, he had got as far as he could.
There would be no scholarship to the United States, however. Instead, Bud-M’belle resolved to educate himself, to achieve the qualifications he needed to make his way in a colonial society that he believed held out the possibility of progress and advancement – even if you had black skin. Private study was the only route open to him. He therefore set about demonstrating what he, a black South African, could do, in the face of the prejudice and the barriers, formal and informal, that stood in his way. It was a turning point in what would be a remarkable life.
Two years later, after studying privately in the required subjects, Bud-M’belle did what no other black South African had done before: he entered the Cape Civil Service examinations, which was the normal route, if you were white, male and sufficiently educated, to a comfortable and fulfilling life in the upper echelons of the Cape Civil Service. In keeping with the colony’s 1853 non-racial Constitution, and an ethos that held some sway in government and legal circles, these examinations were open to black and white alike. It was clear, though, that if you were black (or a woman), you could expect a different career path, however well you performed in the examinations.
Isaiah Bud-M’belle was determined, however. In December 1892, having had his application accepted, he travelled to Grahamstown to sit the examinations and passed with flying colours. He came twenty-third out of forty-two successful candidates, his performance marred only by a weakness in arithmetic, the only paper in which he failed to reach the required pass mark. When the results were published, his performance attracted considerable publicity. He was the first African to achieve this feat, and it was considered a triumph for ‘native education’ and encouragement for others who may have wished to follow in his path.
His success did not lead immediately to the kind of job he might have expected. In October 1893, though, he resigned from his teaching job, hopeful that the experience he had already acquired as a court interpreter would lead to a permanent position. His entrée had come from a visit of the Eastern Circuit Court to Colesberg in 1891 and its need for a temporary court interpreter. Bud-M’belle was on hand to help. He made a good impression on the two judges (Justices Lawrence and Solomon) and gained further experience when he filled in temporarily for another court interpreter when visiting Kimberley over Christmas in 1892. A brief spell as a valet in private service with an English barrister living in Burgersdorp followed. In the middle of 1894, however, there came an offer of what must have seemed an ideal job: interpreter to the Griqualand West High Court and clerk to the magistrate’s court in Kimberley. He began on 1 June 1894. Two years after that, he was placed on the fixed establishment.
To be a court interpreter was to occupy a crucial role in the legal system of the Cape Colony. The fate of an accused person in court could hang
on the correct translation of their words or those of witnesses giving statements or being cross-examined. A high level of proficiency and absolute integrity on the part of the court interpreter were vital. The subject was debated in the columns of Imvo Zabantsundu, a Xhosa-language newspaper, whose readers often criticised the use of poorly qualified white men in the role. Black court interpreters, it was believed, could make a special contribution to the institutional life of the colony by virtue of their familiarity with their own languages, unmatched by all but a handful of whites. Upon them depended the proper functioning of the judicial system, and this provided them access to one of the institutions they valued most highly: the courts of law. Good court interpreters could thus make a practical reality of the Cape judiciary’s claim to give equal treatment to every individual, black and white. When this interpreting was done, as in Bud-M’belle’s case, in the High Court rather than in a magistrate’s court, the burden of responsibility was all the greater.
Bud-M’belle was clearly well up to the job. He was fluent in at least six languages, having grown up in the Burgersdorp and Herschel districts, where both Sotho and Nguni languages were spoken. He took a special pride in obtaining formal certificates, adding separate qualifications in Sesotho and Setswana, and the highest level of proficiency in Dutch, to those languages that formed part of the Civil Service examinations that he had taken in 1892 (English, Dutch and Xhosa). He had a particular expertise in Xhosa, or Kafir as it was still called, and a few years later he compiled a book entitled Kafir Scholar’s Companion, published by the Lovedale Press in 1903. Even before this, he was considered the finest court interpreter of the day, and his services were much in demand. Mr Justice Lange, for example, who knew him very well, commended his ‘remarkable skills and ability’ in English, Dutch and African languages, as well as his ‘patient and considerate demeanour towards witnesses under examination’, and he thought Bud-M’belle was the best court interpreter he had come across.3 He would officiate at a number of important cases – such as the trial of the Tswana chief Kgosi Galeshewe and his fellow ‘rebels’ following their capture during the Langeberg rebellion in the northern Cape area of Griqualand West in 1896. He was adept at keeping his feelings to himself: absolute impartiality was required.
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