Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  It was a view enthusiastically shared by Macartney’s successor as governor of the Cape Colony. ‘This country is improving fast,’ wrote the former war secretary and old colonial hand Sir George Yonge when he took over from Macartney in 1799. In a series of memos sent back to Henry Dundas, Yonge urged Cape Town’s retention on commercial as well as military grounds. ‘Of the Importance of this Colony I need say nothing to you, but it grows in its every hour. It is and will become the Centre of Commerce with India, America, and Europe.’ Indeed, ‘there is not a Dominion of the Crown abroad that will be of the Value of this Colony to the Mother Country by the employment of its shipping and seamen, and by the Vent of its Manufactures … I know very well this has been represented as an useless Colony, and even a heavy Burthen, and a Place not worth retaining … the Assertion is false, and I assert that whoever has the Cape is Master of the Commerce of India.’ Contrary to Macartney’s plans, he urged Dundas not to push the colony off to the East India Company – ‘which would be the most unwise, and I do not scruple to add, the most Dangerous Thing in the World. For the Example of American Independence teaches a Lesson on this Subject, which is against giving such great Means into the Hands of Distant Colonies to resist, or deny the Power or Rights of the Crown.’53

  But London’s imperial power-brokers were more inclined to Macartney’s scepticism about the Cape’s merits. Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 led Admiralty strategists to put the claims of Malta above those of Cape Town, whilst some officers were so convinced of the Royal Navy’s might to think the Cape ‘a superfluous security’. What was more, the fall of Pitt’s ministry in 1801 had led to the departure of Henry Dundas from government and, with him, the loss of the Cape’s ablest defender. Lord Hobart, the new secretary for war and colonies, was markedly less enthusiastic. ‘He could explicitly declare that he had scarcely ever met with one person who did not consider the Cape a burden rather than an advantage to this country … the expense of it had been enormous, its revenue did not pay its civil establishment, it was a peculiarly expensive station for ships.’ Nelson himself was more damning. ‘He had himself been there, and he considered it merely a tavern on the passage, which served to call at and thence often to delay the voyage. When the Dutch had it you could buy a cabbage there for twopence, but since it had been in our hands a shilling was obliged to be paid for a cabbage.’54 (Sauerkraut was one of the more effective, if not popular, remedies for combating scurvy.)

  General Sir David Baird leads the Highlanders into combat at the Battle of Blaauwberg. A view of the Cape of Good Hope. The Battle previous to the Surrender, 8 January 1806, coloured aquatint by J. Clark and J. Hamble after William Marshall Craig, published by Edward Orme (1806).

  So at the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, which produced a temporary truce between Britain and revolutionary France, the Cape Colony was handed back to Holland (then named the Batavian Republic). At the Castle of Good Hope, the commander of British forces, Lieutenant-General Francis Dundas (no relation), read out the terms of the Treaty. ‘These are to signify to all the Inhabitants of this colony of every description and to all others who have taken the Oath of Allegiance to His Britannic Majesty, that from the day above mentioned they are absolved from the said Oath and return under the subjection of the Batavian Government.’

  But within a year the Amiens peace was shredded, and in May 1803 Britain and France were back at war. Suddenly, the strategic significance of the Cape Colony was appreciated again and its abandonment keenly felt. In July 1805 there were growing reports of a French fleet ready to sweep into Table Bay. William Pitt, who had been in Downing Street when the French tried to invade Ireland in 1798, was now back in power and could not wait: fleets were despatched from Cork and Falmouth carrying 6,650 troops and ordered to rendezvous at Madeira, where Commodore Sir Home Popham took command. They sailed for another 120 days before anchoring in the roadstead off Robben Island. On 6 January 1806, after two days of pitching and tossing in Table Bay, General Sir David Baird led the Highlanders of the 71st, 72nd and 93rd Regiments ashore to recapture the colony. The second British invasion of the Cape was no repeat of 1795’s parade, but involved a treacherous landing, with the drowning of forty-one soldiers amid the crashing surf of Losperd’s Bay, some 30 kilometres north of Cape Town. There was then an arduous trek, dragging cannons through the South African bush, before Dutch troops, under the command of Lieutenant-General J. W. Janssens, were confronted at the Battle of Blaauwberg. Over 500 casualties mounted up over the day, but in the end British military professionalism saw off the Dutch army of German mercenaries, Frenchmen, slaves and volunteer militia. Overnight, Baird pushed on towards Cape Town for a final confrontation with the Batavian forces. But Colonel Von Prophalow, commander of the Cape Town garrison, opted for surrender rather than slaughter and sent a white flag of truce out to the encircling British troops; the thick walls of the Castle of Good Hope managed to escape trial by cannonball.

  On 11 January 1806, after new articles of Capitulation were signed at Papendorp, General Baird announced that, ‘being in complete possession of the Town and principal Places, I am fully entitled to consider the whole of this Settlement as completely subject to His Majesty’s Authority’. He was also adamant that any guerrilla resistance was futile. ‘I wish lastly to point out to the whole Settlement the inevitable misery they must endure from a protracted state of warfare in the bosom of the Colony. Let them for a moment reflect on the uninterrupted state of prosperity they enjoyed a few years ago under the British Flag.’55 The Union flag was fluttering again over Cape Castle – as it would do for the next 120 years.

  ASSUMING A CHARACTER

  Despite its obvious colonial affinities, the Cape turned out to be a surprisingly complex colony for the British to manage. ‘As yet the people of the Cape are only about to assume a character,’ thought Robert Semple. ‘They are neither English, nor French, nor Dutch. Nor do they form an original class as Africans, but a singular mixture of all together, which has not as yet acquired a consistence, and is therefore almost impossible to be exactly represented.’56 For all their shared northern European inheritance, the British found it difficult to make much headway with the Dutch and German settler communities who made up the Afrikaans-speaking population. Establishing terms of surrender and settlement was one thing, but reaching a shared social and cultural accommodation with the ‘Cape Dutch’ proved a more arduous task. Yes, they could be governed under the rule of law, and the Cape bureaucracy was able to make the initial transition to British administration without too many tantrums, but at heart the British did not take to the Dutch Afrikaners (a term, which gained usage from the early 1700s, to describe succeeding generations of Cape Dutch who started to speak the creole language of Afrikaans). ‘Almost without exception … you may observe the greatest coldness and indifference; and perfect apathy, mixed with a most inordinate share of pride, pervade all ranks of the Africanes,’ was the view of the British author Richard Fisher. ‘To Englishmen they appear an unsocial, inhospitable, and boorish race, and their actions entirely guided by mercenary and interested motives,’ agreed Robert Percival. The narrow, money-grubbing commercialism of the Cape Dutch was a familiar complaint. ‘Every man at the Cape is a merchant in some way or other; the whole study of the inhabitants being to make money, and they contrive to do so in numberless ways.’ According to Robert Semple, ‘Their ideas are almost entirely commercial; their general conversation is of buying and selling, and the best friends will sell to each other, and with a view of gain. No sooner are two or three met together, especially females, than the words dear, cheap, rix-dollars, so many schalins per ell, etc. are sure to strike the ear.’57 As such, any display of religious piety was regarded as a sham. ‘Their pretensions to religion are very slender; and, whatever little there is of it is principally among the female sex,’ thought Fisher. Semple was even more damning. ‘They go to church at the stated hours; they dress in black on sacramental days; they sing; they stand up and they sit down w
ith the utmost propriety; but they do not seem to perceive the admirable adaptation of the precepts of Christianity to every situation of common life.’58

  This was part of a broader critique of the vulgarity of the Afrikaners. Even the European Dutch were shocked at their uncouth laziness. ‘The men, who are freemen of the town, are seldom seen abroad: they are generally at home, in an undress, and spend their time in smoking tobacco, and in loitering up and down the house,’ complained Johan Stavorinus. ‘After dinner, they take a nap, according to the Indian fashion [i.e., undressing fully], and in the evening they play a game at cards. They are not addicted to reading, and are, consequently, very ignorant.’ Whilst the cities of the Dutch Republic – Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Delft – were renowned across the world for their culture and refinement, the Afrikaners were dismissed as boorish philistines. ‘Few have any taste for reading, and none for the cultivation of the fine arts,’ wrote John Barrow. ‘They have no kind of public amusements except occasional balls … Money-matters and merchandize engross the whole conversation.’ Worst of all, they went to bed early. Whilst the British regarded colonial life as an ever-ready excuse for excessive drinking and late suppers, the Dutch conclaves of Cape Town would begin to echo to the sound of ‘Welt e rusten’ (May you rest well) from around 9 p.m. Perhaps what sent them to sleep so readily was the heavy cuisine. ‘The manner of dressing and cooking [meat] is highly disgusting to an Englishman’s palate, being so full of grease, so indifferently and dirtily dressed,’ complained Percival. ‘Though the meat may be good in itself, it is spoiled to us in the cooking, being soaked in stinking grease, or rank oily butter, or oil made from the fat of the sheep’s tail.’ Wellesley was forced to sit through many a dinner in his honour hosted by the Dutch community, with cow’s heel, tripe, macaroni, boiled calf’s head and finally, ‘a Tureen of Bird’s Nest Soup … a mess of the most aromatic nastiness I ever tasted’.59

  Leavening the boredom were the ‘pretty, lively, and good-humoured’ ladies of the Cape. John Barrow explained approvingly that the ‘Dutch Frows’ ‘are generally of a small delicate form, below the middle size, of easy and unaffected manners, well dressed and fond of social intercourse’. Jemima Kindersley’s description was a little double-edged. In contrast to the ‘constitutional dullness’ of the Dutch men, ‘the women are more active: delicacy is not the characteristic of Dutch females, but they are decent, plump, healthy and cheerful’.60

  But the Dutch residents – as well as the descendants of French Protestant Huguenot exiles and German and Danish merchants – were only one part of Cape Town’s multicultural make-up. As we have seen, the European population of the Cape Colony was always outnumbered by both indigenous Africans and migrants from the East Indies. Then came the West African crewmen and Lascars (south Asian seamen) from the Royal Navy, a growing number of Irish and Scottish immigrants, as well as poorer British soldiers from the Highlands and northern England who ended up staying. All these helped to swell the city population to over 16,000 by the early 1800s. ‘The town is composed of so many different nations,’ the American missionary George Champion wrote in astonishment, ‘Dutchmen, Englishmen, Germans, Scotch, Malays, Malagesh etc. and of so many different sects, Episcopalians, Dissenters, Wesleyans, Scotch, Dutch Reformed, Lutheran, Catholics, Unitarians, infidels, Mahometans, Pagans, that no general description will answer.’61 British officials had no problem in embracing this cosmopolitan ethos. In contrast to the religious absolutism of the Victorian missionaries and governors of nineteenth-century Africa, the Georgian frame of mind was altogether more tolerant of both religious and racial diversity. And the skyline of Cape Town soon started to reflect the city’s role as a place of interaction and exchange between the multiple elements of the British Empire.

  Islam arrived in the Cape via the Indian Ocean slave routes, with Muslims among the thousands transplanted to the colony from the Dutch East Indies. Around one-third of slaves imported from Madagascar and East Africa were either practising Muslims or familiar with Islamic culture. What was more, many slaves converted to Islam at the Cape Colony, having quite understandably connected their own bondage with the Christian hypocrisy of their masters. ‘Mahometanism is greatly on the increase in Cape-Town,’ reported a worried John Campbell of the Missionary Society, called to South Africa to protect the souls of the British army in 1815. ‘They have, I believe, five mosques, where they assemble for their worship. About twenty free Mahometans club together, and rent a large house, to which they invite poor ignorant slaves to gain them over to the party.’ Not afraid to confront heterodoxy wherever it surfaced, Campbell ventured into a mosque. ‘The place was small – the floor was covered with green baize, on which sat about a hundred men, chiefly slaves, Malays, and Madagascars. All of them wore clean white robes, made in the fashion of shirts, and white pantaloons, with white cotton cloths spread before them, on which they prostrated themselves.’62 Campbell was right to highlight the strength of Islam. By the 1830s, there were 6,000 Muslims in Cape Town, served by a range of mosques, prayer rooms and madrasses. Campbell was probably unaware that the existence of the Cape Town mosques and the open practice of Islam were partly products of British rule. With no centre for assembly and with prayer forced to take place in the open, ‘in the stone quarries at the head of the town, in 1797 Macartney had agreed to the establishment of a Muslim place of worship. This became the Auwal, South Africa’s first official mosque. Its teachings were drawn from the Muslim Shafi’i tradition, reflecting the East Indies (or Indonesian) make-up of its worshippers, whilst its first imam was an influential Moluccan priest, the Dutch political prisoner and theologian imam Abdullah ibn Qadi Abd al-Salam. Indeed, Dutch attempts to silence political protest in Indonesia by exiling troublesome clerics to Cape Town was an important component in the growth of Islam in South Africa. Today, Friday prayers continue at the Auwal on Dorp Street in the beautiful, edgy, low-rise ‘Cape Malay’ Bo-Kaap district of Cape Town – the historic home of free blacks, coloureds and slaves in the city. The prayer site is now joined by a further ten mosques in the Bo-Kaap neighbourhood, whose minarets puncture the skyline at the foot of Table Mountain and provide a physical expression of the ‘rainbow’ diversity of Cape Town’s heritage.

  As well as a commitment to religious tolerance, the British were equally keen to disassociate themselves from the Dutch use of slavery. The gallows and the rack were publicly destroyed as the British announced an end to torture and a new policy of paternalistic ‘benevolence’ towards the indigenous and enslaved peoples. ‘On hearing that the abolition of the rack and torture was likely to take place, he [the hangman] waited upon the chief magistrate to know whether it was the fashion among the English to break on the wheel. A few days later he was found hanging in his room,’ according to John Barrow.63 After centuries of slave-trading and murder, after the brutality of Bridgetown’s Cage and the atrocities of the sugar plantations, a new conception of Britain as an ‘Empire of Liberty’, dedicated to the furtherance of human freedom, was just starting to dawn. In 1807 the British abolished the trade in slaves across its imperial possessions, and in the Cape Colony the administration was keen to publicize its emancipation credentials. In 1809 a ‘Hottentot Code’ was enacted in order to prevent Dutch landowners from enslaving what remained of the Khoekhoe people and to mitigate some of the abuses still meted out to them on the farmsteads.64 The Slave Lodge was abolished and the building turned into the Cape’s Supreme Court (‘in the process, the Lodge was stripped of its slave history,’ as the museum puts it). Then the Royal Navy raiding parties on ‘illegal’ slavers in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans began. ‘A slave ship containing many slaves from Madagascar and Mozambique, was lately captured by one of our cruisers,’ the missionary John Campbell recorded approvingly. ‘The slaves were landed at Cape Town, and apprenticed to masters for 14 years, who are bound by agreement to treat them well, to teach them a trade, and to instruct them in reading and in the principles of the Christian religion.’65 This ‘apprentice
ship system’ – a mode of indentured labour – would continue even beyond the official abolition of slavery within the British Empire in 1834. In Cape Town the practice of enforced apprenticeships lasted until the late 1830s, but that did not stop the British presenting their rule in Cape Town as a beacon of civilization in contrast to that of the barbaric Dutch. At the beginning of British rule there genuinely was a conviction that this cosmopolitan port city would be governed on very different principles from those of their exploitative and abusive colonial predecessors.

  For after the 1806 recapture of Cape Town it seemed certain that British rule would now extend into the future. The need to operate a safe commercial and military passage to India, to square off the French strategic threat, and to have a secure station for the Royal Navy (which moved from Table Bay to Simon’s Bay in 1813) all necessitated a permanent presence at the Cape of Good Hope. As a result, the British colonial footprint began to spread across Cape Town. At its peak, in around 1810, the Cape garrison contained almost 6,500 soldiers, giving it a larger military capacity than either Gibraltar or Malta. In response, the cityscape of Cape Town, after over a decade of invasionary fear and to-and-fro warfare, was transformed into a mountainside of batteries, forts, towers, lighthouses, magazines and barracks – all set alongside the great castle itself. There was, for instance, the Chevone battery, which had, ‘level with the sea, one great tier of guns, and farther back, but more elevated, another range, with a flanking redoubt at each end, to enfilade both edges of the shore. This battery is capable of greatly annoying ships standing into the bay, immediately on their rounding Green Point.’ Five hundred metres along stood the Amsterdam battery, ‘with a rampart round it, and bomb proof … It is capable of containing at least two hundred troops, in the ranges of barracks and store houses in the body of the work.’66