Boer History1875 in South Africa: Barkly, Umhala, Kama, and the Census
Umhala of the 10th of April — Colony 1875
Sir Henry Barkly governed the Cape Colony and held Her Majesty’s high commission when the year opened. He had taken the oaths at Capetown on the 31st of December 1870. The year’s colonial business on the eastern locations was not a change of governor, and it was not a new frontier war. It was whether Umhala, a Ndlambe chief whose power was gone from 1864, would die as a man of note, or as a name the locations no longer used. [3]
Umhala headed a Ndlambe house — one of the Xhosa lines that sat the eastern locations after the frontier wars, under the name of Ndlambe, rival to the Rarabe house of Ngqika. After the cattle-killing that Umhlakaza preached in 1856 and 1857, no chief had been more active in carrying out those orders. He even threatened with death members of his own family who would not waste their substance, and would have carried the threat out if they had not fled. That zeal is why his name still mattered in 1875: the death recorded this year was the end of a house that had helped empty its own kraals. [3]
When the delusion broke, his career was crime and misery. With a few adherents he tried to live by robbery, moving from place to place so often and so quietly that for a time his pursuers lost him. A black policeman took him at last. He was tried and sentenced to imprisonment on Robben Island, where he arrived on the 28th of October 1858 and where he was held 5 years. The man who tracked the son of Ndlambe to his lair and arrested him was Umjuza, the son of Makana. At that same time Umjuza was carefully preserving his father’s personal property, in the firm belief that Makana would soon appear to lead his people. He hunted Umhala down all the same, because Umkayi had been his chief. That arrest mattered because it was not a colonial patrol that closed Umhala’s robber years: it was a man of Makana’s house, serving a Ndlambe loyalty, who delivered him to the island. [3]
In 1864 Umhala returned to the eastern locations, but his power was gone. Thereafter his name was seldom heard. On the 10th of April 1875 he died. It was not as if a man of note had passed out of the world. The people seemed almost to have forgotten him. The large tract Sir George Cathcart had assigned to him was confiscated by Sir George Grey. Some of the people left on it were removed beyond the Kei, and in August 1858 were located by Major Gawler on the right bank of the Bashee, in what is now the district of Idutywa. They were 1750 in number, young and old, distributed among 8 kraals under the captains Smith, Sigidi, Stokwe, and Zabela. They and the Fingos at Butterworth were the only Bantu allowed to reside in the territory between the Kei and the Bashee before 1865. What the 10th of April recorded was not a chief still sitting Cathcart’s tract. It was a death the locations had prepared by 11 years of silence, on ground Grey had taken and Gawler had emptied toward the Bashee. [3]
Kama, and William Shaw Kama — Colony 1875
The other death on the eastern locations this year was of a chief who had done the opposite of Umhala. Kama was a Gunukwebe chief — head of a Xhosa house that sat among the old eastern locations — and a Christian. He did all that he could to oppose the cattle-killing. While Umhala threatened his own family into wasting their herds, Kama kept his people from the prophet’s order. That refusal is why his clan, not Umhala’s, was the house that still had people around it when this calendar opened. [3]
He saw his clan grow from the smallest to the largest of those locations, with his people prospering about him, until in 1875 he died. His son William Shaw Kama then became chief. He had been educated for the Christian ministry, but had not entered it, because his friends represented that he could be of greater service as a layman. The succession was therefore not a missionary appointment. It was a chief’s son, trained for the pulpit, taking his father’s place on the location because the friends of the house wanted a lay head and not another ordained man. What hung on that choice was the largest of the old eastern clans: whether it would sit under a Christian minister, or under a Christian’s son who remained a layman. [3]
The clan remained largely heathen. From the very fact of their having resisted their chief’s wishes so long, many families among them were more hardened against the doctrines of Christianity than almost any others in the country. Kama’s work against the cattle-killing had saved the herds. It had not made the location a Christian congregation. William Shaw Kama took a people who had grown under a Christian chief and who still, in large part, would not take the chief’s faith. That is why the succession of 1875 was not the close of a conversion. It was the transfer of a large clan that had prospered by refusing Umhlakaza, and that still refused the church. [3]
Kama’s growth had a ruined half-brother behind it. Pato was utterly ruined in the famine. Those of his people who did not perish either joined Kama or dispersed in the colony. For an offence he committed he was banished to Robben Island, where he arrived on the 13th of March 1858, and after his return found himself forgotten. His allowance from government supported him until he passed away almost unnoticed. The Imidushane chief Siwani set his face steadily against the same mania, saved his people, and incorporated nearly 1000 fugitives; they still lived on the location Cathcart had assigned to him. His half-brother Siyolo, sentenced to death after his surrender to Colonel Maclean in October 1852, commuted by Cathcart to banishment to the Cape peninsula for life, was allowed in May 1869 to return, and found himself without importance. What the Gunukwebe location had this year was not Kama still sitting the largest clan, and not Pato restored. It was William Shaw Kama in his father’s place, on a roll that Pato’s remnant and Siwani’s saved people had helped to fill. [3]
The Cape census — Colony 1875
The Colony also counted. The census returns of the Cape Colony for 1875 gave a Bantu population of 287639 souls. Of these, 5181 were returned without their ages specified. Of the remainder, 78963 were males over 15 years of age, 75373 were females over 15, and 128122 were children of both sexes under 15. The proportion of children under 15 to females over 15 was as 169.98 to 100. That return was the year’s colonial number: not an estimate from a removal, and not a count of one clan, but a census of the people of that race then living under Cape government. [3]
High as those figures were, they could only be taken as the rate of increase under the least favourable circumstances. The census included an undue proportion of those who had adopted Christianity and European customs, nearly all who had attained the highest positions, the whole of the degraded residents on the town locations, and the great majority of the drunkards of the race. A census taken almost anywhere else in south-eastern Africa would have shown a larger proportion of children under 15 to females over that age. Wherever clans in the native territories had been accurately numbered — as when they were removed and fed by the government — the lowest proportion was 195 children to 100 females over 15. The Cape return of 169.98 was therefore not the highest rate in the country. It was the rate inside the Colony, on a roll that mixed the prosperous, the converted, and the town poor. [3]
The same pages set that Cape proportion against other counts of children to women, so that the 1875 figure would not sit without a scale. In England and Wales the census of 1881 gave children under 15 to females over 15 as 110.17 to 100. In the Dominion of Canada the same year the proportion was 124.73 to 100. Among people of European descent in the United States it was 130.76 to 100. The mean of the Australasian colonies was 150.76 to 100. The Cape Bantu return of 169.98 stood above all of those. What hung on the comparison was not a claim that the Colony had counted every clan between the Limpopo and the sea. It was that even the least favourable colonial roll showed more children, against 100 women over 15, than England, Canada, the United States, or the Australasian mean. [3]
That number sat on emptied ground. In the cattle-killing year the people in the territory adjoining the colony, with King William’s Town at its centre, fell from 104721 to 37229 of both sexes and all ages. The magistrate Captain Richard Taylor supplied food there to 28892 individuals, who were sent into the colony once they had strength to travel and allotted to farmers who applied for them as rough servants. The lowest computation of those who perished on both sides of the Kei was 25000; ordinary calculations gave double that number. In 1857 alone 1413 people arrested when trying to steal were sent by sea to Capetown. 18 years later the Cape census put 287639 Bantu souls on the colonial roll, with children under 15 already more numerous than the men over that age, and more numerous than the women. The count mattered because the eastern locations Umhala had helped to empty, and that Kama’s people had refused to empty, were no longer a famine remnant. They were a counted population, larger in children than in adults, under the same governor who still sat Capetown. [3] [3]