Boer History1876 in South Africa: Stockenstrom, Shepstone, Makiwane, and Chase
Judge Stockenstrom of the 16th of March — Griqualand West 1876
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 business on the diamond fields was not a change of governor, and it was not a Cape statute taking the camps as a colonial district. The Cape Parliament had refused, in 1872, to adopt the annexation bill Barkly introduced. Griqualand West therefore still sat as a crown colony, under the high commissioner, on a title that ran back to a cession taken in 1871 from Nicholas Waterboer, son of Andries. What hung on this calendar was whether a court sitting on that ground would find that Waterboer had ever owned it. [3]
A land court of Griqualand West had been specially constituted to investigate and decide disputes about the ownership of ground. After hearing evidence continuously for several months, Judge Stockenstrom delivered, on the 16th of March 1876, an elaborate judgment upon the various classes of claims to land in what was then the crown colony. The cession of 1871 had been taken by the high commissioner from Nicholas Waterboer of the territory containing the diamond fields. The evidence before the court was conclusive that Waterboer had no right whatever to that part of the country. The judgment entered deeply into the history of the Griqua people. It filled 16 columns of the Diamond News and Griqualand West Government Gazette. That length mattered because the finding was not a short order on one farm. It was a public judgment, printed at the fields, on the title under which Britain had sat the camps for 5 years. [3]
The same judgment reached the Griqua claims to the territory north of the Modder river and south of the Vaal. That belt was the dry diggings and the river diggings over which President Brand had come to Capetown in January 1871, and over which Barkly had proclaimed British supremacy on the 21st of October 1871. The court was not asked to decide whether diamonds had been found. It was asked who had owned the ground before the flags went up. Stockenstrom’s answer, after months of witnesses, was that Waterboer’s name did not cover it. What the 16th of March recorded was therefore not a new mine, and not a new governor. It was a finding that the cession used to take the fields had been taken from a captain who had no right to give them. [3]
Griqualand West remained a separate government after that day, as it had been since the commission of the 8th of December 1871 named Barkly its governor. The Cape houses had not taken it in 1872. They had not taken it since. The land court could strip Waterboer’s title without making the camps a Cape district. That is why the judgment of 1876 still left two questions standing: what Britain owed the Free State, whose courts had sat the dry diggings before the proclamation, and whether Capetown would ever take the territory as its own. The 16 columns answered the first half of the title question. They did not annex the fields to the Colony. [3]
Waterboer, Brand, and the 90000 Pounds — Diamond Fields 1876
The Free State had never accepted the proclamation of the 27th of October 1871 over the Campbell grounds west of the Vaal, where rich diamond mines had also been found. Brand’s government claimed those grounds by a purchase in 1861 from the general agent of the Griqua captain Adam Kok. Repeated negotiations with Nicholas Waterboer had not settled that claim. The volksraad at Bloemfontein had protested formally against British supremacy there, and against the high commissioner’s proceedings, and had committed its rights to the judgment of Providence. That protest still stood when Stockenstrom sat. The land court of 1876 was the first British tribunal on the fields to hear the ownership question at length. [3]
After long investigation and examination of witnesses, the court decided that Waterboer never had any rights there. The British government then offered the Free State 90000 pounds as compensation. The volksraad accepted the offer. The sum mattered because it was not a purchase of a new farm, and not a fine on a chief. It was London paying Bloemfontein for ground the high commissioner had proclaimed, after a court sitting in the crown colony had found that the Griqua captain used as the legal cover had never owned it. Brand’s republic remained a recognised state. What it gave up, by taking the money, was the claim to sit courts on the diamond ground itself. [3]
Incorporation of the territory with the Cape Colony still lay ahead. The houses that had refused Barkly’s bill in 1872 had not yet voted to take the camps as a colonial charge. Kimberley’s instruction of the 24th of January 1871 still bound the high commissioner not to annex ground the Cape could not govern and defend unaided. The 90000 pounds therefore closed the Free State’s title without opening a Cape statute. What hung on the acceptance was the quieting of Brand’s claim, on paper and in the volksraad, while Griqualand West went on as a crown colony under the same governor who still sat Capetown. The diamond fields of 1876 were British by a court finding and a payment, not yet by an act of the Cape Parliament. [3]
Elijah Makiwane at Macfarlan — Colony 1876
East of the Keiskama the year’s colonial change was not a new war. It was a mission station changing hands. Macfarlan, belonging to the Free Church of Scotland, stood within a short distance of Gwali. Gwali had been the oldest station among the Xhosa, founded in 1820 by Brownlee for the colonial government. Gaika had promised that it should be considered a sanctuary. It had been abandoned in earlier wars, and in the rising that opened at Christmas 1850 it sheltered the women and children from Auckland until they could leave. In February 1852 the station was of necessity abandoned, and it has never since been occupied. Macfarlan was the house that remained in that valley. [3]
Macfarlan had been founded for the benefit of the Fingos who were located in the valley after the expulsion of the Xhosa. For many years it was occupied by the reverend Alexander McDiarmid. Since 1876 it has been under the care of the reverend Elijah Makiwane, an African ordained clergyman of much talent and industry. The succession mattered because the station that replaced Gwali was no longer in a European missionary’s hands. It was in the hands of an ordained African, on ground given to the Fingos after the Xhosa had been driven from the valley. What 1876 recorded at Macfarlan was not the refounding of Gwali. Gwali stayed empty. It was a Fingo station, of the Free Church of Scotland, passing to a black minister. [3]
That change sat on emptied ground. In the first three days of the 1850 rising, 84 lives were sacrificed on the Keiskama and the Tyumie. Auckland’s women reached Gwali nearly naked, in great distress, and half famished, having been over 30 hours without food. The sanctuary held them, and then the sanctuary itself was given up. A generation later the Free Church still worked the neighbouring station, and the man named to it was not sent out from Scotland to replace McDiarmid. He was an African already ordained. The Tyumie valley of 1876 therefore had two facts at once: Gwali still waste, and Macfarlan under Makiwane. [3]
The Natal hut tax of 14 shillings — Natal 1876
Natal’s black administration had been built on a different rule from the Cape’s. In the Cape the object of the government was to reduce the power of the chiefs. In Natal the object was to support them. Each chief ruled his own followers according to Bantu law, and the lieutenant-governor for the time being was the paramount or supreme chief over the whole community, regarded as a single tribe composed of numerous clans. He could not command the devotion that the hereditary paramount chief of every Bantu tribe enjoys, but his authority was respected by all. That is why a tax could be collected through the chiefs without a Cape-style magistracy over every kraal. Theophilus Shepstone sat that office. [3]
Under this system he could collect the trifling hut tax of 7 shillings a year — not raised to 14 shillings until 1876 — just as the paramount chief of a tribe can make a collection for his maintenance, though not fixed in amount, periodically from his people. There was no objection on their part to pay this, which seemed to them quite reasonable. The doubling in 1876 was therefore not a new kind of charge. It was the same hut tax, still taken as a chief’s collection, raised from 7 shillings to 14. What hung on the new figure was the maintenance of the Natal government from the locations, at twice the old rate, without abandoning the fiction that the lieutenant-governor was collecting as a paramount chief. [3]
He could also call out men to perform public work, just as a Bantu chief can require his subjects to till his gardens. This also was in accordance with their views as to their duty, though in later years it became objectionable because men were only called out from the locations and the mission reserves, and those living on farms belonging to private individuals were allowed to escape. In Natal this did not press heavily, except that the chief of a clan through whom the requisition was made sometimes selected only men who were not in his favour. There was a rule that one man should be sent for every 11 huts, so that a large proportion of the men fit for labour were never engaged making roads at any one time, and compared with the same system as enforced by the Bantu chiefs in Basutoland it was not at all oppressive. The tax of 14 shillings sat on that same machine: chiefs, locations, and a labour call of one man in 11 huts. [3]
The people from whom the doubled tax was taken were not a small remnant. In 1857 it was estimated that there were in Natal, in round numbers, 150000 Bantu inhabitants. The number was constantly increasing by the influx of refugees from Zululand and Pondoland, as well as by the very large excess of births over deaths. The imperial authorities were still extremely reluctant to colonise that part of South Africa, and wished to avoid the expense of a strong garrison. Without power to enforce any law that might not be approved by the mass of the people in the country, the administration secured its supremacy by working upon the jealousies of the different clans, and dealt with them through the chiefs. The 14 shillings of 1876 was that policy priced higher. It was not a Cape census, and it was not a new code. It was the old Natal hut tax, doubled, on a population that had been growing since the estimate of 150000. [3]
Shepstone starts for Pretoria — South African Republic 1876
The same Theophilus Shepstone who had long sat Natal’s native office started, in 1876, on a mission to Pretoria. The mission was called friendly. He did not announce that he carried in his pocket Lord Carnarvon’s fiat for the incorporation of the valuable territories of the South African Republic with the British Empire. Pretoria was the seat of that republic. Thomas François Burgers had taken the oaths there on the 1st of July 1872. What hung on Shepstone’s starting was not a border raid, and not a Natal hut-tax ordinance. It was whether the republic whose president still sat Pretoria would be taken into the Empire by a mission that travelled as a friend. [7]
The comparison drawn at the time was with other British moves that had not been advertised in advance. The intended seizure and annexation of the diamond fields in 1871 was not previously announced to the world. Shepstone’s journey belonged to that manner of proceeding: a public language of friendship, and a written authority in the pocket for incorporation. Carnarvon was the secretary of state whose name stood on that authority. Shepstone was the Natal officer who had for years spoken to chiefs as the lieutenant-governor’s man, and who now went north with a colonial-office brief. The year did not record the incorporation itself. It recorded the start. [7]
Natal and the republic were not the same government. Natal collected 14 shillings a hut through chiefs under a British lieutenant-governor. Pretoria sat a volksraad and a president who had been elected. Shepstone’s usefulness on the road north was that he already knew how to deal with African polities from Natal, and that London could send him without declaring war. Barkly still held the high commission at Capetown. Carnarvon’s fiat did not need a Cape statute, and it did not need Stockenstrom’s land court. It needed a man on the road to Pretoria, in 1876, with the incorporation of the republic already written as the object of the journey. [3] [7]
John Centlivres Chase of 1876 — Colony 1876
The Colony also buried an 1820 settler this year. John Centlivres Chase had proved a failure as a farmer or agriculturist. He was not long in finding his place in the public life of the country, for which his education, ability, and uprightness qualified him. He practised as a notary public. Long before the inquiries that later used his name, he commenced to collect evidence and information on all matters connected with the Eastern Province. He was one of the very last men who would associate themselves with anything dishonourable, much less with a conspiracy against the life and honour of anyone. That character is why his death in 1876 was the close of a public career, not of a quiet farm. [4]
In 1847 he became secretary to government and then civil commissioner of the newly established district of Albert, in which he founded the present town of Aliwal North. Afterwards he was promoted to the civil commissionership of Uitenhage. In 1864 he was returned to Parliament as member for Port Elizabeth. In 1869 he was elected to the Legislative Council, with the well-deserved title of Honourable. He died in 1876, aged 70. The offices explain the name: Albert, Aliwal North, Uitenhage, Port Elizabeth, and the Council were the posts by which an 1820 settler who could not farm had sat the eastern districts for 29 years after 1847. [4]
Aliwal North still stood on the Orange, the town he had laid out from Albert’s drostdy. Port Elizabeth still sent a member. The Legislative Council still used the style Honourable for a man elected to it. What 1876 took away was not those places. It was the settler who had moved from a failed farm to the notary’s office, and from the notary’s office to the civil commissionerships and the houses. He was 70. The eastern districts he had served since 1847 did not lose a chief, and they did not lose a governor. They lost the Honourable who had founded Aliwal North and who had sat Port Elizabeth and the Council until this year. [4]