Boer History1877 in South Africa: Shepstone, Kreli, Sandile, and Oba
The 12th of April — South African Republic 1877
The South African Republic still sat Pretoria when the year opened. Thomas François Burgers had taken the presidential oaths there on the 1st of July 1872. The year’s business at Pretoria was not another election, and it was not a volksraad term. It was whether that republic would still be a recognised state by winter. Theophilus Shepstone had started, in 1876, on a mission called friendly, with Lord Carnarvon’s written authority in his pocket for incorporating the republic with the British Empire. What hung on this calendar was whether that paper would be used. [7]
On the 12th of April 1877 the South African Republic was proclaimed British territory. That sentence is the year’s first fact at Pretoria. The proclamation did not wait for a Cape statute, and it did not wait for a new war on the Vaal. It took the state whose capital was Pretoria and named it British ground. Burgers’s oaths of 1872 had been the oaths of an independent president. After the 12th of April those oaths no longer described the government that sat the town. What the day recorded was the incorporation itself. The year before had recorded only the start of the mission. [3] [7]
Carnarvon was the secretary of state whose name stood on the authority Shepstone carried north. Shepstone was the Natal officer who had for years spoken to chiefs as the lieutenant-governor’s man, and who had gone to Pretoria without announcing the incorporation from the housetops. The intended seizure of the diamond fields in 1871 had not been advertised in advance either. The 12th of April belonged to that manner of proceeding: a mission that travelled as a friend, and a proclamation that ended the republic as a state. Natal still collected a hut tax through chiefs under a British lieutenant-governor. Pretoria had sat a volksraad and an elected president. After this day Pretoria sat under the flag the mission had brought. [3] [7]
The proclamation mattered because it was not a farm title, and it was not a border beacon. It was the legal end of the republic north of the Vaal. Investigation on the ground followed soon afterwards, because Europe had spent years arguing what kind of state this was. The 12th of April did not itself free anyone. It opened the country to officers who could walk the farms and the kraals and see what the charges had been worth. That is why the date is the hinge of the year at Pretoria, and why the next question was not who sat the presidency, but what the investigators found. [3]
Not a single slave was set free — Republic 1877
For years a subject much discussed in Europe as well as in South Africa had been the existence of slavery in the republic. Charges against the burghers of reducing weak and helpless black people to servitude were numerous and boldly stated on one side, and were indignantly denied on the other. The laws were clearly opposed to slavery. That went for nothing, the critics said, because in a time of anarchy law is a dead letter. There was overwhelming evidence that black people were transferred openly from one individual to another. There were the strongest assertions from men of undoubted integrity that there was no slavery. To people in Europe it seemed impossible that both should be true, and the opinion generally held was that the farmers of the interior were certainly slaveholders. What hung on the investigation after the 12th of April was whether that opinion would survive contact with the country itself. [3]
Soon after the proclamation, investigation was made. Not a single slave was set free, because there was not one in the country. In the very heart of the territory kraals of black people were found in as prosperous a condition as in any part of South Africa. It was ascertained that these people had always lived in peace with the white inhabitants, and that they had no complaints to make. That finding mattered because it was not a burgher pamphlet, and it was not a missionary letter. It was what officers found after the republic had been taken, when they had the power to free anyone held as a slave and found no one to free. [3]
Quite as strong was the evidence of numbers. In 1877 there were at the lowest estimate 6 times as many black people living in a state of semi-independence within the borders of the South African Republic as there had been on the same ground 40 years before. People do not move onto ground whose occupiers they believe will enslave them. The increase was the fact that had to be set beside the European picture of 1864, when the same charges were already current and harder to test from abroad. Semi-independence inside the borders meant kraals living under their own heads, not a uniform labour force on every farm. That is what the count recorded, and why the count belonged to this year and not to the older argument. [3]
The people whom the missionary party termed slaves the farmers termed apprentices. The great majority — probably 19 out of every 20 — were children made prisoners in the wars the tribes were constantly waging with each other. In older days the conquering tribe had put all of the conquered to death except the girls and a few boys useful as carriers. More recently they had become less inhuman, having found that for smaller children they could obtain beads and other merchandise. With tribes on the republic’s border ready to sell captives, and with the Betshuana prepared to dispose of the children of their hereditary slaves, a few adventurous Europeans embarked in that traffic. Waggon-loads of children were brought into the republic, apprenticed for a term of years to the first holder, and the deeds of apprenticeship could afterwards be transferred before a landdrost. That was the slavery of the South African Republic. Its equivalent had been found a few years earlier in the Cape Colony, when negroes taken in slave-ships by British cruisers were apprenticed to individuals. There would have been danger in the system if the demand for apprentices had been greater, because tribes might then have attacked each other on purpose to obtain captives for sale. The demand was very limited. A herd boy might be worth something more than his food, clothing, and a few head of cattle given to him when the term expired; no other class of raw labour was. The question whether those children were better left with the destroyers of their parents, or better serving 10 or 15 years with white people and then settling as freemen with a little property, was answered according to the bias of the individual. What 1877 added was not a new law on apprentices. It was the finding that, when the country was opened and searched, there was not a slave to set free. [3]
Cetewayo and the peril written before 1877 — Zululand 1877
Statements that for some years before 1877 the South African Republic was in imminent peril of being invaded by the Zulus, that in such a case the Europeans would certainly have been exterminated, and that Cetewayo was only kept in restraint by the influence of the government of Natal, had been so often written and repeated in England that they were accepted there as incontrovertible truths. Those sentences were not a new Zulu campaign in this calendar. They were the English story under which the annexation of the 12th of April could be read as a rescue. What hung on them in 1877 was whether Pretoria had been taken from a state about to be destroyed, or from a state whose farmers did not share that fear. [3]
Cetewayo was the real ruler of the Zulu tribe, though his father Panda remained its nominal head. The part of the republic that bordered on Zululand was the district of Utrecht. His white neighbours knew that he was gifted with great intelligence, and that he was crafty and cruel in a very high degree. They knew the full extent of his power. They were aware that all the mountain tribes in South Africa combined — all the people of Moshesh, of Magadu and his associates, and of Sekukuni, who in 1860 had succeeded his father Sekwati as head of the Bapedi — could not stand in fair fight in open field against half of his trained regiments. That comparison is why his name carried weight in England. A king who could beat the mountain tribes in the open could, on paper, walk into Utrecht. [3]
The farmers of the republic feared an encounter with him less than with any one of those mountain tribes. The conditions of warfare would be entirely reversed. The mountain people — fighting only behind stone walls in almost inaccessible positions, swooping down upon lonely farm-houses, and plundering and murdering where no opposition could be offered — could wear out the patience and the strength of a burgher commando. The Zulu army would be met in a few desperate engagements, when the farmers would take good care to be well entrenched, and the issue would not be doubtful. That distinction is why a Zulu invasion and a Pedi or Basuto war were not the same danger. Cetewayo’s regiments were the larger force. The mountain raid was the one that could not be brought to a battle. [3]
The farmers, at any rate, never feared the result of a Zulu invasion, nor admitted that the influence of the Natal government upon Cetewayo was greater than their own. To each he professed warm attachment, and in both cases with an entire absence of sincerity. By representatives of each he was formally installed as great chief of the Zulus, but he and his people attached not the slightest value to either ceremony. That is why the English story of Natal holding him back, and of Pretoria about to be exterminated, did not describe the republic as the burghers knew it. What 1877 did with that story was to annex the state anyway. The 12th of April did not wait for a Zulu army on the Utrecht line. It took the republic on other grounds, while the older sentences about imminent peril still ran in England as if they were the reason. [3]
Kreli at war with the colony — Transkei 1877
East of the Kei the year’s colonial business was not a new governor at Capetown. It was war with Kreli, the Gcaleka paramount, the man who ranked first among the Xhosa houses. He was the chief the colony had driven out of the country that had been his tribe’s principal abode for several generations. On the night of the 25th of February 1858, after Sir George Grey had resolved to put it out of his power to do more harm, a strong detachment of the frontier armed and mounted police under Commandant Currie forced him, with all his remaining people, across the Bashee into Bomvanaland, where the chief Moni gave him a small tract to live on. The police kept the district between the Kei and the Bashee until 1865, when Kreli was permitted to return and occupy a portion of it along the coast. That return is why he was again a neighbour of the colony when 1877 opened, sitting coastal Gcaleka ground and not a refugee kraal at Moni’s. [3]
In 1877–8 he was again at war with the colony, and was driven once more into Bomvanaland. The war that opened this year was therefore not a first collision with a unknown chief. It was the same Gcaleka house, back on a coastal strip the police had held for 7 years after 1858, taking up arms again. What hung on that choice was the coastal occupation granted in 1865. A paramount allowed home along the Kei-Bashee coast was, by going to war, putting that home back at risk of another expulsion across the Bashee. The colony’s object was not a new treaty of friendship. It was to meet the Gcaleka paramount in the field for the second time in a generation. [3]
Barbarian as the colonial records called him, Kreli possessed many good qualities. He was brave in the field, of a generous disposition, and was not devoid even of chivalrous feelings. Tall, erect, splendidly formed, there was no handsomer man in appearance in all the Xhosa country than he. He was deeply versed in the traditionary lore of his tribe, and ready to impart that knowledge. Those facts belong on this page because the war of 1877 was not fought against a petty raider. It was fought against the Gcaleka paramount, the man who still stood first in rank, and whose person the colony already knew from the expulsion of 1858 and the return of 1865. [3]
The high commissioner in 1858 had intimated to him that if he persisted in instigating the Rarabe clans to their destruction he would be punished, but he had declined to take warning. Even in the time of his greatest distress he had not ceased inciting others. That older stubbornness is the context for this year’s war. A chief who had lost the Kei-Bashee country once, and had been allowed a coastal portion back, went to war with the colony again. What 1877 opened on the Transkei was therefore the second driving of Kreli toward Moni’s country — not because a new house had risen, but because the old paramount had taken the field. [3]
Sandile joined Kreli — Gaika location 1877
Sandile was the principal chief of the Gaikas, who ranked next to Kreli in the tribe. He had not slaughtered the whole of his cattle when the cattle-killing of 1856–57 took place, though he was greatly impoverished and had lost most of his people. He was allowed to retain part of the location assigned to him by Sir George Cathcart, but his power was much diminished, as his magistrate, from being a mere assessor, was now made supreme in judicial matters. He continued to draw a monthly allowance from government as before. That is who sat the Gaika location when Kreli went to war: a paramount of the western house, on an allowance, under a magistrate who already heard the cases. [3]
Not only was his intellect feeble, but he was physically weak, and one of his legs was withered. He had 10 wives, and only 7 sons and the same number of daughters. Four of the wives in the right-hand house — Nofasi, Nojaji, Noselem, and Benzela — were childless, a very unusual circumstance in Xhosa families. His great wife, Nopasi, had 2 daughters but no son. To provide an heir she adopted Gonya, the eldest son of Nokwazi, the wife next in rank in the great house. The clan would not acknowledge Gonya as qualified to succeed, because he was never circumcised, having been educated at the Zonnebloem institution in the Christian faith. He was baptized Edmund, and was long engaged as interpreter and clerk in a magistrate’s office. That household is why the Gaika succession already sat between a Christian clerk and a clan that still required circumcision. It is also why Sandile’s own authority, feeble in body and in intellect, was not the old unchecked chieftainship when this year’s war began. [3]
Sandile’s clan grew rapidly under British rule. That growth is the fact that makes his next choice intelligible. A house that had recovered people on a reduced location, under a magistrate and an allowance, was not a remnant waiting to be absorbed. It was a clan strong enough to take the field. He joined Kreli in the war of 1877–8. The joining mattered because it turned a Gcaleka war east of the Kei into a war that also had the principal Gaika chief in it. The colony then faced not only the paramount who had come home along the coast in 1865, but the western house that ranked next to him. [3]
His principal counsellor, a grand old man named Tyala, had done his utmost without avail to prevent the cattle-killing and the almost equally insane war 20 years later. That counsel is why this year’s choice was not taken in ignorance inside the Gaika house. Tyala had seen one destruction, and he named this war as another. Sandile joined Kreli anyway. What 1877 recorded on the Gaika location was therefore not a magistrate’s case, and not an allowance stopped. It was the principal Gaika chief taking the Gcaleka paramount’s part, against the man who had tried to hold him back. [3]
Tini Maqoma and Anta — Colony 1877
Maqoma, the most intelligent of all the Rarabe chiefs, brave in the field and exceedingly capable as a guerrilla leader, though addicted to drunkenness, had died on Robben Island on the 9th of September 1873, at an advanced age. He had been sent back to the island in November 1871 after a return in May 1869 under a promise of good behaviour. His son Tini some years later purchased a farm in the Waterkloof, which he had assisted to hold so tenaciously in 1851 and 1852, and gathered the remnant of the clan together there. That purchase is why a Maqoma house still had a ground of its own when this year opened: not the old location, but a farm on the kloof the father had defended. [3]
With increasing strength Tini became increasingly hostile to the government. In the war of 1877–8 he threw in his lot with Kreli and Sandile. The joining mattered because it put the Waterkloof remnant into the same war as the Gcaleka paramount and the principal Gaika chief. A farm bought on the scene of 1851 was not a pledge of quiet. It became the base from which Maqoma’s son took the field with the two houses that ranked above him. What hung on that choice was the corporate life of the remnant Tini had gathered. The war he joined was the war that would end that clan as a body. [3]
Anta had sunk into almost utter insignificance after the cattle-killing. He was allowed to remain in the Gaika location, and by 1877 his clan gathered some little strength again. That recovery is the year’s fact on his ground. A house written off as nothing after 1857 had people enough, twenty years later, to matter. The location that still held Sandile under a magistrate also held Anta, no longer negligible. What the count of 1877 showed there was not prosperity of the kind found in the republic’s kraals. It was a small Gaika clan getting back just enough strength to make a choice. [3]
Then Anta’s clan joined Sandile. Two Gaika houses — the principal chief and the man who had almost disappeared — took the same side as Kreli in the war that opened this year. Tini, from the Waterkloof farm, made a third. The colony therefore met, besides the Gcaleka paramount, a Gaika combination that ran from Sandile’s location through Anta’s recovered following to Maqoma’s son on the kloof. What 1877 recorded in those three names was not a new location assigned, and not a new allowance. It was the moment at which houses that had lived under British rule since the cattle-killing put themselves into Kreli’s war. [3]
Oba when the war of 1877 broke out — Colony 1877
Oba was a Gaika chief of another kind. He was the son of Tyali and the grandson of Ngqika. He had suffered less than any other Gaika chief from Umhlakaza’s delusion. He had shown such courage in the preceding war that his people gave him a new name, Ngonyama — the lion — by which he was afterwards generally known. Good natured, witty, and generous, he would have been an ideal Xhosa chief if he had abstained from strong drink. He remained in the Gaika location until 1874, when he purchased 2 large farms on the western bank of the Keiskama and moved to them with a considerable following. He still drew the allowance of 7 pounds a month which Sir George Grey had given him. That is why, when this year opened, Oba was not a location chief under Sandile’s magistrate alone. He was a landowner on the colonial bank of the Keiskama, with Grey’s 7 pounds still paid. [3]
Then came long drought and cattle sickness, and the clan became so poor that the last instalments of the purchase price of the ground could not be met. That poverty is the condition in which the war found him. The 2 farms of 1874 were not yet paid off. A following that had crossed the Keiskama as a chief’s people now sat mortgaged ground in a bad season. What hung on the drought was not yet a sale in execution. It was whether a Gaika house on the colonial bank, short of cattle and short of money, would follow Sandile to war or stay where it had bought. [3]
When the war of 1877 broke out, a colonial diplomatic agent was sent to Oba, and for nearly 5 months lived with no other society than the people of his clan. They were the most conservative of all the Xhosa in their habits, and those among them who were advanced in years had taken part in the older frontier wars. They were living near the junction of the Tyumie and the Keiskama, where Botumane’s kraal had stood from 1829 to 1833. The nearest neighbours were Imidange on one side and Gunukwebes on the other. Cattle-stealing from the European farmers beyond their limits was rife, and no subject was more frequently discussed. That five-month residence is why Oba’s war is recorded as a diplomatic charge, not as a joining of Kreli. The government sent a man to sit with this clan at the river junction, and the clan was still there to be sat with. [3]
Oba placed himself and his people entirely at the disposal of that agent. The government later recognised the good conduct. He did not follow Sandile. He did not throw in his lot with Kreli. A Gaika chief on mortgaged farms, in drought, with Grey’s 7 pounds still coming, kept his following out of the combination that Tini and Anta joined. What 1877 recorded at the Tyumie–Keiskama junction was therefore the other Gaika choice: a conservative clan under Ngonyama, talking cattle-theft with a colonial agent for nearly 5 months, while the war Kreli had opened ran without them. [3]