Ever since the great Xhosa resistance war of 1835-36, the white settlers in Cape Colony had been forbidden by the government to move into Xhosa land to the east of the territory; but a decade later, driven by the high world price for wool, the settlers again raised a clamour for fresh land. A new governor at the Cape, General Sir Peregrine Maitland - a veteran of Waterloo, Madras, and Canada - announced a policy of expansion into the contested and Xhosa-occupied frontier zone in September 1844. Survey parties similar to those in New Zealand and Australia moved in, backed by the settlers and protected by the construction of new forts, creating a permanent military presence. ‘Is it just’, asked John Mitford Bowker, a settler at Grahamstown, ‘that a few thousands of ruthless worthless savages are to sit like a nightmare upon a land that would support millions of civilised men happily?’
The Xhosa were well aware that the surveyors and soldiers would soon be followed by settlers. Their leader in the 1840s was Sandile, a man in his twenties with a pronounced limp. Successor to Ngqika and half-brother of Maqoma, Sandile perceived the need for action. Coming upon a surveyors’ camp in January 1846, at Block Drift, east of the Keiskammer River, he ordered the mapping party to leave. His request alarmed the officer in charge, who summoned reinforcements from Fort Beaufort, but accepted a temporary truce. The British surveyors and soldiers withdrew, to return in April with a larger force - and to meet an unexpected defeat.
In April 1846, Xhosa forces attacked the British column invading their territory in the Amatolas mountains, in Hintsa’s former territory between the Keiskammer and Kei rivers. They forced it to retreat: the soldiers abandoned their kit and a long trail of wagons was set on fire. The subsequent conflict - referred to by imperial historians as the ‘war of the axe’ and by the Xhosa as the ‘war of the boundary’ - was the worst humiliation suffered by the British in South Africa up to that time.1
The British could not defend the surveyors in Xhosa territory without making war on their ancient frontier enemy, and they soon found a pretext. A Xhosa worker had been detained at Fort Beaufort in March, charged with stealing an axe - an otherwise trifling event; a group of Xhosa rescued him on the road to Grahamstown as he was being taken for trial. Outraged by this incident, Colonel John Hare, long the governor of the eastern province, declared his intention to invade Xhosa territory to exact punishment. He had 1,000 regular soldiers at his command, as well as Khoi-Khoi troops enrolled in the Cape Mounted Rifles. The Xhosa forces numbered more than 12,000.
Governor Maitland supported Hare’s move and travelled up to Grahamstown to take personal charge of the campaign, commanding the largest military force ever assembled by the British in South Africa, with 14,000 men in arms. Some 3,000 were British regular soldiers, and, as one young private recorded, they ‘looked on the commencement of this war as the beginning of a glorious succession of picnic parties’ Yet as they moved into the Amatolas hills, camping at Burnshill, they were surprised to be confronted not with assegais but with rifle Are. ‘It’s a new thing for me’, noted Bowker, the Grahamstown settler, ‘to be running on foot, before Kaffirs mounted on horseback, and the balls whistling like hail about me.’ For the Arst time in the long history of their defence of their land, the Xhosa had Arearms, provided by gun-runners operating on behalf of merchants in Grahamstown.
A huge Xhosa force pursued the retreating British, streaming across the colony on a wide front. They burned farms and mission stations, and even threatened Grahamstown, with its garrison of inexperienced soldiers shipped in from Ceylon. The Xhosa gave warning that they would not stop until they had ‘driven out the last Englishman at the point of the Cape’.
General Maitland declared martial law, soon in force throughout the colony, but the Xhosa continued their sweeping advance, securing another humiliating British retreat from a settlement outside Fort Peddie. The commander was arrested and sent for court martial. The Xhosa attacked the fort again in May, capturing much cattle, but this was the summit of their achievement. The British brought up artillery and prevented them from seizing the fort.
The Xhosa fought a rearguard action for several months, eventually adopting a policy of non-resistance and then patching up an impermanent peace. Sandile reluctantly handed over the man who had stolen the axe - the notional excuse for the war - and Maitland informed London of the stalemate: ‘We are at this moment neither at war or at peace, nor is there even a deAned truce between us; but no hostilities take place.’2
Many local observers considered this to be a victory for the Xhosa. Richard Birt, a missionary, noted that ‘the Caffres have not been humbled by anything our force had done, and they are as unsubdued as at the commencement of hostilities. . . their loss by actual war. . . is not sufficient to remove from their minds the idea that we have had the worst of it.’3
In the wake of this debacle, the British officers and politicians associated with the war were forced out of office. Colonel Hare resigned, dying on board ship shortly after leaving the Cape; General Maitland was prematurely retired in January 1847 and sent back to London. He died in 1854.
In September 1847, the Xhosa were faced with a fresh British military offensive after another insignificant frontier incident - the theft of some goats - again provoked a war. On this occasion, Sandile was himself under threat: the British invaded the Amatolas to seize him in his home.
The Xhosa were confronted with a new opponent that year. Maitland’s replacement was General Sir Henry Pottinger, the veteran of Indian wars who had made his reputation in Hong Kong, the Punjab and Baluchistan. Pottinger arrived in Cape Town in January with plenipotentiary powers as ‘High Commissioner’ He was required by Earl Grey, the colonial secretary in London, to ‘settle and adjust’ the affairs of the territories ‘adjacent or contiguous to the Eastern and Northern border’ of Cape Colony, and he was further instructed to promote ‘the good order, civilisation and moral and religious instructions of the tribes’.
With his experience of the system of indirect rule introduced into India, Pottinger envisaged incorporating the Xhosa into the Empire by allowing the chiefs to remain in command with the assistance of a British political agent. He was contemptuous of white settler society at the Cape, and declared that he had never seen such extensive corruption and idleness, ‘even in an Indian native state’ His immediate task was to re-launch the war against Sandile, perceived as the single most recalcitrant chief. Sandile’s supporters would be reduced to submission ‘by devastating their country, destroying their kraals, crops and cattle, and letting them finally understand that, cost what it may, they must be humbled and subdued’.
The Xhosa were faced with a three-pronged British offensive in the Amatolas in September, with General Sir George Berkeley, another Waterloo veteran, as the new commander-in-chief. Among his officers was Henry Somerset, the old frontier expert. The strategy was ruthless: the homes of the Xhosa were burned and their cattle seized. Sir John Hall, the army’s medical officer, noted that ‘this system of cattle stealing and hut burning is a disgrace to the age we live in, and, if the savages retaliate hereafter, no one can blame them, after the example of pillage and destruction that has been set them by the army on the present occasion’4
The war was brought to an end by a typical act of British perfidy. Sandile was prevailed upon to consider negotiations at the British camp, and in October, believing that this was possible, he agreed to travel under escort to King William’s Town. Yet instead of attending a meeting to discuss peace terms, he was promptly sent on to Grahamstown and imprisoned. ‘A miserable starving chief has surrendered’, Andries Stockenstrom, the old frontier hand, wrote to Grey in London, ‘and we are as elated as if the battle of Waterloo had been fought and won again.’5 Sandile regarded his involuntary imprisonment as an act of gross treachery, declaring sadly that he would never again trust the word of a white man.
Sandile was taken from his prison in December 1847 and brought before the new governor, sent out to replace Pottinger. The new ruler of Cape Colony was none other than General Sir Harry Smith, recently appointed Baronet of Aliwal on the Sutlej, for his successful campaign against the Sikhs in the Punjab. Smith had had long experience of the Xhosa frontier, having fought there in the 1830s. Now he was back on his old territory, with a new agenda.
‘Who is the great chief of the Xhosa?’ Sandile was asked by Smith.
‘Sarili’, replied Sandile, referring to the man who had become the paramount chief in 1835, after Hintsa had been murdered while in Smith’s charge.
‘No’, said Smith. ‘I am your Paramount Chief, and the Kaffirs are my dogs. I am come to punish you for your misdoings and treachery. You may approach my foot and kiss it, but not until you repent the past will I allow you to touch my hand.’ To show his magnanimity, Smith ordered Sandile’s release.
A week earlier, the new ruler had landed at Algoa Bay (Port Elizabeth) and seen his old Xhosa adversary, Maqoma, standing in the welcoming crowd. Maqoma had come forward to shake Smith’s hand, but the governor had other ideas. Maqoma was forced to get down on the ground, and the governor put his foot on his neck, saying, ‘This is to teach you that I have come to teach Kaffirland that I am chief and master here, and this is the way I shall treat the enemies of the Queen of England.’
This charming encounter - a form of imperial greeting possibly brought to Africa from India - was to be endlessly repeated throughout the rest of the century, storing up wells of fury among those subject to such humiliation. ‘I always thought you were a great man until this day’, was Maqoma’s icy reply when he got to his feet, and, according to oral legend, he had a further remark for Smith. ‘You are a dog, and so you behave like a dog. This thing was not sent by Victoria who knows that I am of royal blood like herself.’6
Finally, at King William’s Town, the frontier chiefs and thousands of Xhosa took part in a dramatic ceremony staged by Smith. Sandile was there, but Maqoma was absent. Smith declared himself to be the supreme chief, the Inkosi Inkhulu, and each African chief was summoned forward in turn to kiss his boot and stirrup. The chiefs listened to the governor as he tore up the treaty of 1835, which the Xhosa still held to, and shouted, ‘No more treaties!’, before announcing the formal annexation of the Xhosa land between the Fish and Keiskammer rivers as an integral part of Cape Colony apt for white settlement. The Xhosa would be shepherded into the land further east, between the Keiskammer and the Kei, in a territory to be called ‘British Kaffraria’, the region that Benjamin D’Urban in the 1830s had named ‘Queen Adelaide’s Land’ British Kaffraria was to be constructed as a purely military colony, to be ruled under the harsh and arbitrary terms of martial law, and the Xhosa chiefs were required to swear allegiance to Queen Victoria. Their land was lost forever.
The Xhosa were not alone. In August 1848 it was the turn of the rebel Boers living beyond the Orange River to come under British attack at Boomplatz, southwest of Bloemfontein. Led by Andries Pretorius, the Boers sought to oppose the British annexation of the land they had settled during the years since the ‘Great Trek’ out of Cape Colony in 1836. Fresh from the creation of Kaffraria, Harry Smith declared that this Boer-occupied land between the Orange and Vaal rivers should also be British, calling it the ‘Orange River Sovereignty’. It would in future be open for settlement by British and Boer settlers from Cape Colony. Pretorius’s Boer army was defeated by British forces in August at Boomplatz, and retreated across the Vaal, where Pretorius set up the independent republic of the Transvaal. This was eventually recognised by the British in 1852, and Pretorius died the following year.
Six years after Boomplatz, the Boer settlers in the new Orange River Sovereignty campaigned for self-rule. The British, faced with such powerful opposition, decided to abandon the territory to the Boers. Sir George Clerk, a special commissioner sent from England, formerly the governor of Bombay, signed the Convention of Bloemfontein, and the ‘Orange Free State’ was finally created as an independent Boer Republic.
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