Boer History1910 in the Union of South Africa: The Act of Union, and the Grahamstown Show
The Act of Union — 31 May 1910
The Act of Union was effected on the 31st of May 1910. That is the date this year has to name. It was hoped that the wars, race hatred, and other political troubles ended with that Act. The hope mattered because the country the Act joined had spent the previous century in frontier war, in the rise and fall of two Boer republics, and in a peace signed only 8 years earlier. Union did not unwrite those years. It was named as the instrument that might close them. [4]
The calendar day was not an accident. 66 years earlier, on another 31st of May, letters patent signed at Westminster had annexed the District of Natal to the Settlement of the Cape of Good Hope. That earlier instrument was itself called an Act of Union, and it was said to have foreshadowed the greater one effected on the 31st of May 1910. The letters patent ran that the district of Natal was annexed to the Cape settlement as a part and portion thereof. Natal thus became a British settlement on the same calendar day the later Union would take. What hung on the parallel was the claim that 1910 completed, on a larger scale, a joining that 1844 had begun between Natal and the Cape. [4]
Even that earlier union did not take effect the day it was signed. A despatch of Lord Stanley to Sir Peregrine Maitland on the 25th of May 1844 set out the essentials: Natal might be separate from the Cape in judicial, financial, and executive matters, but legislative power was to be vested in the governor of the Cape, through whose hands all communications from Natal to the secretary of state were to pass. There was to be a lieutenant-governor, aided by an executive council of 5 members. A single judge was to hold courts at Pietermaritzburg, Port Natal, and Weenen, with appeals to the supreme court in Cape Town. The despatch reached Cape Town in August. The letters patent of the 31st of May must have reached Cape Town in the same season. They were not promulgated by public proclamation until the 21st of August 1845 — 14 months after they had been signed. The delay is why a date on a Westminster parchment and a date in a colonial gazette were not the same thing. The greater Act of 1910 took the same calendar day without that 14-month gap between signing and naming. [4]
The first officers of that Natal government were named in 1845: Martin West, civil commissioner at Grahamstown, as first lieutenant-governor; Advocate H. Cloete as recorder; Donald Moodie as secretary; Theophilus Shepstone as diplomatic agent; and William Harding as crown prosecutor. West reached Port Natal on the 4th of December 1845 and Pietermaritzburg on the 12th. Those names are not 1910 appointments. They are why the 31st of May 1844 could be called an Act of Union at all: it joined Natal to the Cape on paper, and then, more than a year later, put a government in the town. The greater Act of 1910 stood on that same day of the year, 66 years later, over a country that now included not only the Cape and Natal but the two former republics. [4]
8 years before the Act of 1910, to the day, peace between Britain and the two Boer republics — the South African Republic and the Orange Free State — was signed at Vereeniging on the 31st of May 1902. The two republics were gone. The Act of Union did not restore them. It named a single state over the Cape, Natal, and the two colonies that had taken the republics’ place. What hung on the repeated 31st of May was the claim that a date of annexation in 1844, a date of peace in 1902, and a date of Union in 1910 could be read as one sequence: join Natal to the Cape, end the war, then join the whole. [4] [4] [6]
Wars, Race Hatred, and What Union Was Hoped to Close
The hope that Union would end wars and race hatred was not a toast invented in 1910. It was a later judgment on a much older quarrel in the Eastern Province, and on the man who had come to stand at the centre of it. Dr John Philip was the permanent superintendent of the London Missionary Society’s mission in South Africa. He stood forth as the champion of the Khoikhoi, one part of the oppressed population of the Eastern Province. For that championship no one with any sense of justice would do otherwise than commend him. The charge that followed was not that he had defended the Khoikhoi. It was that he had not included, within the sphere of his compassion, those equally oppressed who in those days counted for so little — the white inhabitants. [4]
By partial, exaggerated, and sometimes untrue statements concerning those white inhabitants, Philip gained the confidence of the philanthropic in England. He came eventually to exercise such great influence with the Home Government as to be able, in a large measure, to direct the Colonial Office in regard to South Africa. That is why a missionary superintendent mattered to the later Union. The Colonial Office was the office that sent governors, drew frontiers, and named wars. A man who could direct it in regard to South Africa was not only a champion of one oppressed population. He was a force in the politics that produced the wars and the race hatred Union was later hoped to end. [4]
Before Lord Charles Somerset went to England at the end of 1819, no friction between Philip and the colonial government had commenced. The first rift was correspondence with Sir Rufane Donkin concerning the oppressive conduct which, on the evidence of Mr Read, Colonel Cuyler was alleged to have exercised. That quarrel is not an event of 1910. It is why the Act of Union could be named, 90 years later, as the close of wars and race hatred that had a named beginning in the Eastern Province and a named champion in the missionary superintendent who reached the Colonial Office. [4]
It was difficult, a later look back said, to acquit Philip of being in a large measure responsible, though indirectly, for the wars, race hatred, and other political troubles which it was hoped ended with the Act of Union in 1910. The sentence is a hope, not a proof that they had ended. What hung on it in this year was the political meaning of the 31st of May: Union as a named close to a century of Eastern Province conflict, of republican war, and of the camps that had helped to end that war. Whether the hope would hold was not a fact this calendar could settle. That the hope was attached to this Act, in this year, was the fact. [4]
The Grahamstown Show — Harvest Vale, 1910
A striking object lesson on the wealth which the Albany lands were capable of producing, in return for energy and enterprise, was the exhibit at a recent agricultural show at Grahamstown in 1910. The exhibitor was C. Gardner, of Harvest Vale on the Bushman’s River — a farm adjoining one of the locations of the 1820 settlers. Those settlers had been placed on the Albany lands 90 years earlier as a farming population, and as a barrier on the eastern frontier. Harvest Vale stood next to one of those original locations. The show mattered in the Union year because it was not a museum of 1820. It was a working farm, on that same ground, putting produce on a Grahamstown table in 1910. [4]
Altogether the exhibit consisted of about 240 different products from this farm. Among them were wool, ostrich feathers, varieties of game, and 72 different grasses and fodder plants. There was cotton, flax, chicory, and linseed. Besides the ordinary fruits there were grapes, pineapples, oranges, and naartjies; many varieties of vegetables; dry beans; pumpkins; and maize. The list was not only raw produce. It included the commodities made from those raw products: bacon, biltong, preserves, jams, pickles, liqueurs, cider, and vinegar. A single Albany farm, adjoining an 1820 location, could in 1910 send wool and ostrich feathers, seventy-two grasses, cotton and flax, fruit, vegetables, and the bottled and cured goods made from them, to one show. That is why the exhibit was called an object lesson. [4]
The numbers are why the lesson was pointed. 240 products is not a sample basket. 72 grasses and fodder plants is a pasture inventory, not a florist’s bunch. Wool and ostrich feathers were export staples of the Eastern Cape. Cotton, flax, chicory, and linseed were industrial crops on land that had been granted, in 1820, in small lots so that the settlers would farm rather than run large herds. Bacon, biltong, jam, pickles, liqueur, cider, and vinegar meant the farm was not only growing but processing. What hung on Gardner’s table at Grahamstown was the claim that Albany, 90 years after the locations were marked out, could feed and clothe a large community if industry and determination were applied. [4]
Grahamstown itself had been the starting point when those locations were parcelled out. Abandoned farms nearest that military centre were to be occupied first, then the old line of military posts between Grahamstown and the mouth of the Great Fish River — a country of great fertility and promise, capable of maintaining with industry a large population — and then the country south and south-west of Grahamstown as far as the Bushman’s River, watered by the Kowie, the Kasouga, and the Kareiga. Harvest Vale on the Bushman’s River sat in that last belt. The 1910 show did not re-survey those rivers. It showed what one farm in that belt could put on a table after 90 years. [4]
Albany Unlike the Karoo
The general appearance of Albany was then, as in 1910, one of fertility, needing only industry and determination to make it yield wealth and support a large community. Unlike the flat, arid, and inhospitable Karoo, the ground was covered with grass. Interspersed mimosa trees graced the landscape and gave to most of the country a park-like appearance. In the more rugged regions, hills and wooded kloofs or valleys enhanced the beauty of the scene, though the kloofs had also been the haunts of wild animals of which many of the 1820 strangers had left their native land in dread. The contrast is why Gardner’s 240 products could be read as more than a prize list. They were what that grass, those mimosas, and those kloofs could be made to yield. [4]
The settlers who first saw that country did not see a show table. Government tents were pitched; common and personal property was sorted and placed in safety; and the settlers’ life was begun. The appearance of the country in which their new homes were to be established was, apart from the loneliness, not altogether uninviting, and was rather calculated to arouse in enthusiastic agricultural settlers the desire to commence cultivation at once. That desire is the other half of Gardner’s object lesson. Energy and enterprise were the conditions named in 1910 for the wealth Albany was capable of producing. The 1820 locations had been laid out on the same wager: small grants, agricultural pursuit, a large population on fertile ground. Harvest Vale, adjoining one of those locations, was the wager still being run 90 years later. [4]
The inland journey that brought those settlers from Algoa Bay taught them that South Africa was not one landscape. The waggons ran over open veld, then over steep hills and along bushy paths. From higher ground they saw vast stretches of desolate country bounded by mountains and perhaps covered by impenetrable bush. Albany, when they reached it, was the exception to that desolation: grass instead of the Karoo’s flat drought, mimosa instead of bare earth, kloofs instead of a single empty horizon. The 1910 show at Grahamstown was held in the town that had been the starting point of the locations. Gardner’s farm on the Bushman’s River still sat in the grass, not in the Karoo. What hung on that fact, in the Union year, was that the eastern lands the Act now joined to the former republics were not a single arid interior. They included a park-like belt that could put 240 products on one table. [4]
Lord Charles Somerset, mapping the locations before he handed over to Donkin on the 12th of January 1820, had wanted those grants small so as to encourage agriculture rather than large herds, and so as to form a barrier on the old Zuurveld frontier. The 1910 exhibit did not prove or disprove the barrier. It did prove that a farm on the Bushman’s River, next to an original location, could grow wool, feathers, grass, cotton, fruit, and vegetables, and could turn them into bacon, biltong, jam, and vinegar, in the same year the Act of Union was named. Industry and determination were still the conditions. The grass was still there. [4]
8 Years after Vereeniging
Peace at Vereeniging on the 31st of May 1902 is why the Act of Union could be effected on the same calendar day in 1910 over a country that no longer contained two Boer republics. The chief considerations that led, on the Boer side, to that peace were two. First: that the war policy followed by the British military authorities had led to the total devastation of the territory of both republics, with the burning of places and towns, the destruction of all means of subsistence, and the exhaustion of all resources needful for the maintenance of the families, the existence of the armies, and the continuation of the war. Second: that the placing of the captive families in the concentration camps had led to an unheard-of state of suffering and disease, so that in a comparatively short time about 20000 of their dear ones had died there, and the dreadful prospect had arisen that by continuation of the war their whole race might in that way die out. Those were not later glosses. They were the grounds named on the Boer side when the peace was made. [6]
The camps were not an act of magnanimity on the British side to protect non-combatant Boer families, as Joseph Chamberlain and other British government persons had proclaimed. They were the outcome of the British military aim of bringing the war to a speedy end. From March 1900 the military increasingly set themselves to soften the resistance of the burghers in the field by inflicting suffering on their families. When the destruction of dwellings near the rail achieved little, they, following the methods of General Weyler in Cuba, went over to a policy of total devastation, and then to concentration. The sight of starving women and children in the camps, the British authorities apparently believed, would soon make the burghers beg for peace. That is the second Vereeniging ground in another form: the camps as a weapon, not a shelter. [6]
The later count did not lighten that second ground. 26251 women and children besides 1676 men above 16 — mostly greybeards, 1421 of them old men — died in the camps. Between a quarter and a fifth of those brought to the camps perished during a period of about 8 months, May to December 1901. The Boer generals and fighting burghers did not know that from the end of 1901 the death-rate fell, until against March 1902 it was normal. They knew the months from May to December. They knew the children. The fear that if no end were made to the camps the whole Afrikaner people would die out was the fear they carried to Vereeniging. [6]
8 years later the Act of Union took the same 31st of May. It did not reopen the two grounds. It stood over them. The first ground was still the burned places and the exhausted resources of both former republics. The second was still about 20000 dear ones dead in the camps, confirmed by the later count of 26251 women and children and 1676 men above 16. What hung on Union, named as the hoped-for end of wars and race hatred, was that it was being named over a peace those two grounds had made. The date made the sequence visible. The death-rate made the cost visible. [6] [4]
26251 Dead, and the Hope that Union Would End the Troubles
The concentration-camp system answered the purpose for which the British military authorities introduced it. It brought the war to a favourable end for Great Britain. To obtain that immediate advantage, however, Great Britain inflicted irreparable damage on itself. In its history the concentration-camp system would always shine — as Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman put it — as an offence against civilization, as a military mistake, and as a political disaster. He was the Liberal leader who had told the House of Commons that the orders British officers and men had to carry out were extremely barbarous. The three terms were not a later decoration. They were the judgment a British parliamentary leader put on the camps while the war they served was still the war of his own country. [6]
That damage was not only to Britain’s name and fame among the other great powers. It kindled in the heart of the Afrikaner a fire of bitterness. If all the grief, insult, and bitterness the Afrikaner had suffered in his whole history should long have been forgotten, that fire would still flame. The military object was served: resistance in the field was softened, and Vereeniging was signed on the 31st of May 1902. The political disaster Campbell-Bannerman named was that the same camps that ended the war left a people who would not forget how it had been ended. 26251 women and children and 1676 men above 16 were the count of that ending. [6]
The Act of Union in 1910 was the political name later attached to the hope that wars, race hatred, and other political troubles had somewhere to end. Campbell-Bannerman’s three terms — an offence against civilization, a military mistake, and a political disaster — were the British parliamentary names for the camps that had helped to make the peace the Act stood over. The hope did not erase the death-rate. 26251 women and children and 1676 men above 16 remained the count of how that peace had been made. [4] [6]
Whether the fire of bitterness would be quenched by an Act on the 31st of May was not a question the death-rate could unask. The camps had done what they were built to do. They had also done what Campbell-Bannerman said they would always shine as. Union was the name 1910 put on the hope that the wars and the race hatred would end there. The 26251 and the 1676 remained the count under that hope. [6] [4]