Boer History1885 in South Africa: Tembuland Annexed, the Native Circular, and Molitsane
Tembuland annexed to the Cape — 1885
In 1885 the chief magistracy of Tembuland was annexed to the Cape Colony. That annexation is this year’s fact on the eastern side of the Kei. The people who occupied it were the Abatembu, known to the colonists as Tembus. They sat next to the Pondos on the south-west, between that independent coastal belt and the Xhosa country farther west. Dalindyebo was the representative of the ruling family. What hung on the year’s wording was not a new tribe on a map. It was whether that magistracy now sat inside the colony, under a Cape name, instead of as a neighbour beyond the roll. [3]
Glen Grey was not the piece taken this year. A tract west of the Indwe had been reserved for Tembu use more than 30 years earlier. In 1852 and 1853 that ground, later called the Glen Grey location, was set apart; Nonesi was invited to occupy it with her people, and J. C. Warner was placed there as the government’s man. By 1885 Glen Grey had been colonial ground for more than 30 years. The Tembu also had offshoots in other localities. Annexation this year is the chief magistracy itself, not that older location west of the Indwe. A reader who only knows Glen Grey still needs the distinction. One was a reserve already inside the colony. The other was the magistracy now written onto the Cape list. [3] [3]
The tribe had not had a quiet generation. Since 1835 some of its sections had taken part in every war waged against the Cape Colony. That is why annexation in 1885 is not the first colonial dealing with the Tembu, and not a ceremony over a people who had stood aside. It is the year the Cape put the magistracy on its own roll after half a century of those wars. The Tembus were similar in custom to the Xhosa, except that the Xhosa had a small mixture of Khoikhoi blood. Their own antiquaries held that the two tribes were originally one people. Some named a chief from whom both ruling houses descended; others would not carry the genealogy beyond Tembu himself. From Tembu the line was agreed: through Bomoyi, Hala, and the rest to Vusani, also called Ngubencuka from the hyena-skin robe he wore, and on through Gangelizwe to Dalindyebo. The man named on the Cape’s new magistracy was that house’s present head, not a magistrate invented for the year. [3] [3]
The neighbours explain what was taken and what was not. East of the Tembu, the Pondos were still the only independent tribe south of Natal. They occupied the country between the Umtamvuna and the Umtata, from the sea to the boundary of Griqualand East. Umqikela was the highest chief in rank of that ruling house. Inland of them, the Pondomise remnants already sat in Tsolo and Qumbu, annexed in 1879. Westward, the Xhosa were scattered over the frontier districts, the lower Transkei, and Elliotdale in Tembuland itself. Sarili, called Kreli by Europeans, was the present head of that ruling family. So the Cape in 1885 took the Tembu magistracy while Pondoland remained independent, while Tsolo and Qumbu were already colonial, and while a Xhosa population still sat inside Tembuland at Elliotdale. [3]
Seamen wrecked from the Stavenisse had already placed the Tembu on this coast, south-west of the Pondos, long before a Cape magistracy existed. They had been well treated there. That old itinerary is why Tembuland in 1885 is not an empty name. It is the same people, under Dalindyebo, now written as a chief magistracy of the Cape Colony. Glen Grey stayed the older colonial location west of the Indwe. Pondoland stayed outside. What hung on the annexation was the title under which the Cape sat on Tembu ground. [3]
The native-department circular — early 1885
Early in 1885 a circular went out from the native department of the Cape government. It was sent to the officers in the native territories. Copies went also to missionaries and leading traders, with a request that they help the inquiry. The next question on the file was the average duration of life of the Bantu compared with the European. There were no statistics on which to base a calculation. That is why the circular was issued. What hung on it was not a new statute. It was whether the Cape, having put magistrates into those territories, could say why the numbers were rising and who lived longer. [3]
The inquiry sat on top of figures already in hand. The Cape census of 1875 had counted 287639 Bantu in the colony. Ages were missing for 5181. Of the rest, 78963 were males over 15, 75373 females over 15, and 128122 children under 15. The proportion of children under 15 to females over 15 was 169.98 to 100. Those figures were treated as the least favourable case, because the census mixed in town locations, drunkards, and people who had taken European custom. Where clans in the native territories had been accurately numbered — as when they were moved and fed by the government — the lowest proportion found in a considerable number of cases was 195 children to 100 females over 15. England and Wales in 1881 stood at 110.17 to 100; Canada at 124.73; Europeans in the United States at 130.76; the Australasian colonies at 150.76; African-descended people in the United States at 172.28. From the Limpopo to the sea the Bantu population was said to have more than trebled by natural increase in 50 years. The circular of 1885 is the Cape asking its own men on the ground what that rise meant. [3]
The returns were voluminous. Condensed, they ran as follows. Question 1 asked the cause of the great increase in recent years. The replies were almost uniform in language and entirely uniform in effect: the controlling power of the civilised governments. Early marriage, polygamy, constitutional vigour, freedom from heritable disease, and the absence of care as to provision for children were still at work, except in the small section that had embraced Christianity. The ancient checks had been removed. Tribal wars and feuds, which had formerly destroyed great numbers, had been prevented. Executions on charges of witchcraft had been suppressed. Food was surer: the plough grew more corn; in drought people could obtain food for labour or in exchange for property; better roads and traffic could send supplies where they were wanted. That is the officers’ answer to why the numbers rose after the Cape and its neighbours put force between clan and clan. [3]
Question 2 asked which race attained the greater average age, and on what calculations. Nearly all the old and experienced magistrates, missionaries, and traders answered that the average life of the native was longer than that of the European. They based that on the large number still living who remembered and had taken part in the battle of Amalinde in 1818, the flight of the Fingos from Natal in 1821 and 1822, the wars of Moselekatse and the depopulation of the later South African Republic and Orange Free State from 1821 to 1830, the defeat of the Amangwane in 1828, and other events of more than 50 years before. A native of 50 did not look older than a European of 40. Prolonged observation put native health above European. Four of the youngest magistrates abstained, having made no observations. Two magistrates and one trader thought the averages about the same. One magistrate, one missionary, and two traders thought the European must live longer, being better fed and less exposed. The circular did not settle the point. It recorded that the men with the longest service on those stations thought the African lived longer, and that they pointed to living witnesses of 1818 and the 1820s as the proof. [3]
Later questions asked what might check the increase, at what age women married, and how many children were born. Most writers thought the present rate could not last: the food the country could grow without manure and irrigation would run out, and care would postpone marriage. Fingo girls in European service were already sometimes left unmarried until 20. Marriage might follow the puberty ceremony, usually about 13. Among Betshuana and Basuto the average was put as low as 14 or 15; along the coast 16 or 17; on some mission stations 18 or 19. For the tribes south of the Limpopo the guess was between 15 and 16. On births, five small returns gave 379 births and 125 deaths. Tables covering 393 wives or widows of monogamists, mostly professing Christians, showed 2223 children — 5.65 to each woman. Tables covering 591 wives or widows of polygamists showed 3298 children — 5.58 to each woman. Of the polygamists’ children 73 per cent were still living; of the monogamists’ 67 per cent. Chest disease on mission stations, and children less robust under changed living, were given as the reason. The numbers were too small to treat as more than approximate. What hung on those tables in 1885 was the Cape’s first collected answer to its own circular, not a census of the territories. [3]
The last questions on the circular asked why decrepit and mixed-parentage children were seldom seen, and what difference of age between husband and wife did to the number of children. The answers were that few frail children were born; in older times such children were destroyed by filling the mouth with earth; now they were commonly neglected, or said to be lost, and generally disappeared early, except on mission stations. Albinos were suffered to live. Mixed-parentage children were seldom found except where people had become semi-civilised, or where shipwrecked or renegade white men had been adopted into a clan. Difference of age was said to have no effect: old men often married girls, and nearly every uncivilised married woman had a lover as well as a husband. All the returns agreed that unrestrained drink would not only cut the birth-rate but destroy the race, and that in the purely native territories the sale of spirits was still forbidden by law, so drunkenness had not yet told on the numbers. That is the substance of the 1885 circular as condensed from the officers, missionaries, and traders. The Cape had asked. The returns had come in. [3]
Molitsane of the Bataung dies — October 1885
In October 1885 Molitsane died. He was chief of the Bataung, the strong clan that in 1837 had placed itself in vassalage to Moshesh and had been located at Mekuatling. That date is why this year’s death is not the arrival of a new name. It is the end of a man who had sat as Moshesh’s vassal for 48 years. Moshesh was the Basuto paramount, called the chief of the mountain from his stronghold of Thaba Bosigo. After the expulsion of Moselekatse and the overthrow of Dingaan, people had streamed in to him: individuals, families, even small clans of broken tribes. Molitsane’s Bataung were the strong clan in that intake. [3]
He had been for years a noted warrior. He had taken a large share in the plunder of several Barolong clans. The missionaries knew him as a man capable of assuming the most varied characters, and of being equally insincere in all. In 1837 he was already in middle age. He then lived until October 1885. A middle-aged warrior in the year he bent the knee to Moshesh was an old man when he died. What hung on that span was the Bataung file itself: the same chief who had plundered the Barolong, then taken Moshesh’s name, then sat through the Free State wars, was still the name on the clan until this October. [3]
With that clan the reverend Mr. Daumas, of the Paris evangelical society, took up his residence. A French station on a warrior’s ground is why Mekuatling is not only a cattle post in the Caledon country. It is where a missionary sat with the Bataung while their chief lived out the nearly 50 years of his vassalage. Opposite Thaba Bosigo, along the Orange, Morosi was becoming formidable in the same years, with Tembu refugees and San added to the Baphuti. Molitsane’s death does not rewrite that map. It closes the Bataung side of it. [3]
The later file is why a reader who never opened 1837 still knows who died. Molitsane was the Bataung chief who struck Winburg in January 1866, who was named with Letsie and Moperi when they asked to become Free State subjects, who openly objected at Korokoro to the Aliwal arrangement, and who then left Mekuatling — the ground he had occupied since 1837 — for Makwai’s vacated district, while his sons remained in the Koranaberg. That is the man who dies in October 1885. The clan that had taken a prominent part in the country’s affairs from the day it bent to Moshesh lost the chief who had led it through that whole span. [3] [3]
What hung on October 1885 was therefore a death, not a migration. The Bataung remained Moshesh’s people at the place the Paris society had occupied with them. The warrior who had taken every character, and who had been equally insincere in all of them in the missionaries’ judgment, was no longer the man to whom those characters belonged. He had come to Mekuatling in middle age in 1837. He died in October 1885. [3]