Boer History1879 in South Africa: Tsolo, Qumbu, and Hlobane
Tsolo and Qumbu annexed — Pondomise 1879
The Pondomise were not a new people on the colonial map in 1879. They were the inland neighbours of the Pondos, living east of the Umtata, some 40 or 50 miles from the sea. Five generations earlier the tribe had split into two sections. From that date those sections had been almost constantly at war with each other and with all their neighbours. War with the Pondos was the ordinary state of things, not a rare raid. That is why two remnant chiefs had come to the Cape in 1873, and why this year’s fact is not another petition. It is that Tsolo and Qumbu were annexed to the Cape Colony. [3] [3]
In 1873 the chiefs Umhlonhlo and Umditshwa, then the heads of the remnants of the two sections, asked to be taken under the protection of the Cape Colony. They were in danger of being destroyed by the Pondos. The request was granted. Magistrates were stationed with them. Their own laws and customs were not rewritten. They were required to pay only a very light hut tax. Protection of that kind is not a district on a colonial roll. It is a magistrate sitting with a remnant, the hut tax light, the custom left standing, and the Colony’s name between those remnants and the Pondo house that had been their ordinary enemy for five generations. [3]
That Pondo danger was not invented in 1873 to dress a petition. Feuds and battles among Pondos, Bacas, Pondomise, Xesibes, Hlangwenis, and the rest had been the ordinary life of that belt of country for years. With the Pondomise and the Xesibes, war with the Pondos remained the normal condition. The Pondos occupied the country between the Umtamvuna and the Umtata, from the sea to the boundary of Griqualand East. They were, when this year is read, the only independent tribe south of Natal. Umqikela was the highest chief in rank of that ruling house. The house was itself divided into two sections, and those again into numerous clans, many of them almost independent. A remnant that asked Cape protection in 1873 was asking to be shielded from that neighbour, not from a stranger across the ocean. [3] [3]
What 1879 did was to turn that protection into colonial ground. Tsolo and Qumbu were annexed to the Cape Colony. The majority of the Pondomise thereafter resided in those two districts. A few were scattered about other colonial territory. Some clans remained in Pondoland. Annexation is why this heading is not 1873 written again. A magistrate and a light hut tax had left the remnants under their own law. A district name put them on the Cape roll. What hung on the annexation was whether Umhlonhlo’s section and Umditshwa’s section still sat as protected remnants, or as people of two Cape districts. They sat as people of Tsolo and Qumbu. [3]
Pondoland itself was not taken. The Umtamvuna–Umtata country, from the sea to Griqualand East, still sat under Umqikela’s house. The only independent tribe south of Natal was still that Pondo house, not the Pondomise remnants who had asked for the Cape name six years earlier. That contrast is the point of the year on this side of the Kei and the Umtata. The inland remnants became Cape districts. The coastal Pondo polity did not. Clans of the Pondomise that still lived in Pondoland lived there as people inside an independent neighbour, not as people of Tsolo or Qumbu. [3]
Whether those remnants, once under a district name, would later try to throw the Colony’s authority off, is not this year’s business. This year’s business was the annexation. Protection in 1873 had stationed magistrates without rewriting Pondomise law. Annexation in 1879 put Tsolo and Qumbu on the Cape list. The two sections had not made peace with one another by asking together in 1873, and they did not become one people by being mapped as two districts. What changed was the title under which the Cape sat on that ground. A light hut-tax protection became a colonial annexation, while Pondoland remained the independent belt between Natal and the Umtata. [3]
Another son of Commandant Uys killed at Hlobane — 28 March 1879
The Zulu fact of 1879 was not another printed message from Cetewayo to Natal. It was war with him. Cetewayo was Panda’s son. In ability Panda had stood far below either of his brothers, and almost immeasurably below this son in later years. The year before, Cetewayo’s messages to the Natal government had been published, and an investigation had sat on the Utrecht line. Those papers showed how he had played Natal against the republic. They did not close the file. This year’s file is the war itself, and the death that English readers were told to remember from it. [3] [3]
Who died at Hlobane on the 28th of March 1879 was another son of Commandant Pieter Lavras Uys. The source that records the death does not give that son his own name. It records the manner of it, and the house he belonged to, and the war it belonged to. Englishmen, it said, would remember how bravely he had conducted himself in the war with Cetewayo, and the manner of his death at Hlobane. That sentence is the year’s dated Zulu fact. A Uys was killed in the Zulu war on the 28th of March, as a Uys had been killed in the Zulu war on the 11th of April 1838. [3]
The father had gone against Dingaan in April 1838, after Retief was dead and Maritz sat the lagers in Natal. Neither Hendrik Potgieter nor Pieter Uys would serve under Maritz, nor would one of those two serve under the other. They rode anyway, acting in concert, each with control of his own following. Between them they had 347 men. Dingaan could bring into the field at least a hundred times that number, trained to despise death in battle, disciplined to move in concert, and armed with the stabbing assegai. For five days the march was unopposed. The country looked abandoned. On the 11th of April they came in sight of a division of the Zulu army, attacked, and were drawn into an ambuscade. [3]
Two parallel ranges of hills stood in front of them, with a long defile between. The Zulus appeared to retreat. Uys’s division was in advance. In the narrowest part of the gorge they found themselves surrounded, so hemmed in that they could not fall back rapidly after firing and then load and charge again — the method that had served them against Moselekatse. Potgieter’s horses became almost unmanageable from the din of Zulu shields. There was one course open. They directed all their fire upon one mass of the enemy, shot a path, and rode through it. They left their led horses, baggage, and spare ammunition behind. The farmers’ loss was 10 men: Pieter Lavras Uys, Dirk Cornelis Uys, Joseph Kruger, Frans Labuschagne, David Malan, Jacobus Malan, Jan Malan, Louis Nel, Pieter Nel, and Theunis Nel. The commandant was assisting a wounded comrade when he received a stab from an assegai. As he fell he called to his followers to leave him and fight their way out, for he must die. Dirk Cornelis Uys, a boy of 15, was some distance off. He saw his father on the ground and a Zulu in the act of stabbing him. He turned his horse and rode to help, and could only die at his side. [3]
Forty-one years later another son of that same commandant was in the field against Cetewayo. The 28th of March 1879 is his date, and Hlobane is the place. The interval is not a curiosity added to an old casualty list. It is why the death belongs to this calendar and not to 1838. The house that lost the father and the boy of 15 in Dingaan’s defile lost another son in Cetewayo’s war, on a named hill, on a named day. What hung on Hlobane for a Cape or Natal reader was not a new surname. It was that the Zulu war of this year reached a family already written into the first Zulu war, and killed there a man whose bravery the print of the time said Englishmen would remember. [3]
Cetewayo’s white neighbours had long known the scale of his power. All the mountain tribes combined — the people of Moshesh, of Magadu and his associates, and of Sekukuni — could not stand in fair fight in open field against half of his trained regiments. The farmers of the republic had still feared an encounter with him less than with any one of those mountain peoples, because a Zulu army, they thought, would be met in a few desperate engagements, with the burghers well entrenched, and the issue not doubtful. Hlobane is that war arriving, not as a sentence in a Natal message, and not as an English story about Pretoria about to be exterminated, but as a named fight in which a son of Uys was killed. The Utrecht papers of 1878 and the messages of 1878 had shown the quarrel. The 28th of March showed the cost, in the same family that had paid on the 11th of April 1838. [3] [3]