Slave Rebellion, Xhosa Resistance, and White Settler Revolt in Cape Colony

When the British recovered Cape Colony from the Dutch in 1806, they still had sharp memories of Chungwa’s Xhosa rebellion of 1799 in the Zuurveld. Fearing further resistance from the Xhosa, a young officer, Colonel Richard Collins, was sent out in 1808 to explore the Xhosa land to the north and the east of Cape Colony’s frontiers. He spent several months engaged on this task.

Chungwa was now old and ill, but Collins made contact with Ndlambe and other Xhosa chiefs, notably Ngqika and Hintsa. Ndlambe was a man in his seventies, a Xhosa ruler since 1782, described by a contemporary as a ‘perfect specimen of a powerful chief of the olden times, before intercourse with the colonists’. He had long challenged his rival Chungwa for supremacy in the Zuurveld, and had fought and negotiated on the frontier with Dutch settlers long before the British arrived. He was to live on until 1828.

Collins reported back to the governor in August 1809, and his recommendations were forthright: the Xhosa in the Zuurveld, a territory later renamed the district of Albany, should be forcibly expelled, and plots of their land should be offered to European settlers. The Xhosa could be pushed across the Great Fish River, and allowed to live further east. When his report was first delivered, the British Empire was short of troops: some had been diverted to seize the River Plate; others were occupied in holding down India and in planning for campaigns in the Indian Ocean; still others were fighting against Napoleon in Spain. With the start of the Peninsula campaign in 1808, imperial resources were stretched to breaking-point. There were no soldiers to spare for frontier service in South Africa. The ‘forcible expulsion’ favoured by Collins would have to wait its turn.

Like many territories in the Empire, Cape Colony relied on slave labour for its workforce. When the British regained control of the colony in 1806, they found a country with 30,000 black slaves and perhaps 50,000 Khoi-Khoi, or Hottentots. There were thousands of Xhosa on the frontier, and only about 26,000 white settlers. All these groups were to rebel against the British at one time or another over the next hundred years, but the first to seek their freedom were the slaves.

The slaves at the Cape came from different parts of the world. Those known as ‘Malay slaves’ were Muslims, shipped in from all over the Indian Ocean - a legacy of Dutch rule. Indeed many of their forebears had arrived at the Cape as political prisoners from elsewhere in the Dutch Empire. Slaves from Africa had been brought to the Cape by the British during their earlier occupation, between 1795 and 1802. Of the fifty or so slaves brought to court after the rebellion in 1808, eighteen came from the Cape itself, seventeen from Mozambique, three from Madagascar, and one each from Mauritius, Ceylon, Malabar, Bengal, Timor, Batavia, Java and Bali.

The British parliament had voted to abolish the slave trade in March 1807, and in July the youthful British governor of the Cape, Du Pre Alexander, Earl of Caledon, proposed to free the 250 slaves who worked for the government. His proposal was a clear indication that the situation of the wider slave population might soon change, and slaves began to wake up and take notice - although the message must have been confusing, since a fresh shipment of slaves arrived at Cape Town in December.

Two slaves and two Irishmen combined together in October 1808 to organise a slave rebellion. A Muslim slave from Mauritius called Louis, described later in court as ‘the chief and ringleader of the insurgents’, was joined by James Hooper, an Irish labourer recently arrived in the colony. Hooper rented a room in Louis’s house in Cape Town, and claimed that since there were no slaves in Ireland, the same situation should prevail at the Cape. The two of them went on to team up with Abraham, a slave born locally.

The three men formed a secret group to organise a slave revolt, designed to spark an end to slavery. They were joined later by Michael Kelly, a sailor and a countryman of Hooper’s. Their plan, according to the subsequent court account, ‘was to incite as much as possible the slaves in the interior to insurrection and rebellion’. Then, ‘having assembled and armed them with such arms as were to be procured in the country’, they were to march to Cape Town to seize the first military post. They planned to send a letter to the governor to demand freedom for the slaves, and if this was not forthcoming they would ‘make themselves masters of the Magazines, to storm and force the Prison, release the prisoners, and fight for the liberty of the slaves’1

Louis from Mauritius was a slave who worked independently around the town. He paid a rent to his owner, and was sufficiently light-skinned to pass as white. His wife was a free woman. With Hooper and Abraham, he sought out potential recruits for their conspiracy, and they soon heard that slaves at a Dutch farm in the Swartland, north of Cape Town, were likely candidates. Hooper and Abraham visited the farm in early October, and found the slaves willing to join their proposed rebellion. Returning to Cape Town, they encountered Kelly, and persuaded him to take part in their plot.

Later that month, the four organisers returned to the Swartland farm to unleash their rebellion. Louis was to be the ‘Governor or Chief of the Blacks’, while Hooper was ‘to obtain a high position under him’. The operation began well enough. They arrived in a hired wagon, with Louis wearing full-dress military uniform, with gold epaulets and a sword. The Dutch farmer was away from home, and Kelly, who spoke some Dutch, explained to his wife that Louis was a Spanish captain. The woman was sufficiently impressed to invite the four men in for dinner, and pressed them to stay the night.

On the following morning, they persuaded ten of the slaves working on the farm to join them, and they moved on to other settlements in the neighbourhood, travelling in their own hired wagon and in a second one commandeered from the farm. They gave out a simple message (according to the court account): the British governor had ordered all slaves to proceed to Cape Town to be set free, and had declared that all white men should be made prisoner. Many slaves joined in with alacrity, and spread the news. Farms were occupied, wagons and carts were seized, guns and ammunition were taken, and wine was freely distributed. Several white farmers were seized and humiliated, and one farmer’s wife was raped.

Although much drink was taken, several hundred slaves marched off to Cape Town in separate groups. The plan was bold and imaginative, if ill-prepared. Long before the slaves reached town, the authorities were alerted and the cavalry sent out. Three days after the slaves set off, they were surrounded and seized. More than 300 were arrested, and fifty brought to trial in Cape Town in December.

The court’s judgment was typically harsh, with some sixteen rebel slaves sentenced to be hanged and quartered, ‘the said quarters to be exposed upon stakes at the gibbets outside the town’. A further twenty-two were to be flogged, ‘to be tied to a stake and severally scourged with rods on their bare backs’ The others were to be sent to the prison on Robben Island.

Yet the British governor was uncertain of the reaction within the slave community, and he recommended leniency. Only five rebels were hanged eventually, but fifty were flogged and sent to Robben Island. Louis, Hooper and Abraham, as the principal organisers, were among those hanged, but Kelly was reprieved. The remaining rebels were ordered to watch the executions before being returned to their masters’ farms.

Another two decades were to pass before the slaves’ dream of freedom was realised - an event that triggered off the Great Trek and a fresh twist to the history of South Africa. For many of the settlers of Dutch origin, the British decision to abolish slavery in 1833 was the final straw, and between 1835 and 1837 perhaps as many as 5,000 of them moved out of Cape Colony across the Orange River, to set up an independent state of their own - the Orange Free State. Within twenty years, a further 20,000 had followed them, taking their slaves with them.

A new and more severe military governor arrived at the Cape in 1811. General Sir John Cradock, last heard of creating the conditions for the sepoy rebellion at Vellore in 1806, had extensive imperial experience, for he had served in senior positions in the West Indies and Ireland, as well as in India and the Iberian Peninsula. In Spain, where his talents were considered inadequate, he was replaced by Wellington. Cradock studied Colonel Collins’s report of the situation in the Zuurveld, and swiftly requested that it should be implemented forthwith. The Xhosa were to be rounded up and driven out of the Zuurveld. Martial law was proclaimed along the frontier.

Lack of troops was no longer an argument for inaction. The British could deploy the Khoi-Khoi regiment of Hottentot soldiers inherited from the Dutch, sometimes known as the Cape Corps, and their commander at Cape Town, Colonel John Graham, was put in charge of a small extermination force. His campaign began on Christmas Day. He marched out to the east with his Khoi-Khoi contingent, a handful of British soldiers and a few commando units formed by Dutch settlers. His principal weapons were fire and famine. He had chosen ‘the season of the corn being on the ground’, he explained later, ‘in order that if the Kaffirs would not keep their promise of going away, we might the more severely punish them for their many crimes by destroying it’2

Ndlambe, the oldest surviving Xhosa chief in the Zuurveld, encountered Graham’s troops at the end of December. Shaking his spear, he shouted out his defiance in famous words: ‘This country is mine; I won it in war, and shall maintain it.’ Now he faced a British force intent on expelling his people from the frontier zone. He reiterated his claim to the land and disappeared into the bush, leaving his men to maintain a steady resistance. Several white settlers were killed, and for a moment the two forces seemed evenly matched.

A week later the tide turned against the Xhosa. Ndlambe had retreated, while Chungwa lay ill and dying, and was killed in cold blood while sleeping. Under the rules of martial law, Colonel Graham’s orders were explicit: any male Xhosa seen out in the open was to be shot, and women were also killed.3

By the middle of January, Ndlambe’s people had been forced out of the Zuurveld and across the Great Fish River. Colonel Graham’s scorched-earth policy now began in earnest. ‘Two parties of one hundred men each were sent to destroy the gardens, and burn the villages’, wrote Lieutenant Hart on 17 January, reflecting on the prosperity of the area the soldiers had been called upon to obliterate. ‘The gardens here are very large and numerous, and here also are the best garden pumpkins and the largest Indian corn I have ever seen. . . some of the pumpkins are five and a half feet round, and the corn ten feet high.’ On the following day, Hart recorded, 300 men ‘went early to destroy gardens and huts, taking with them 600 oxen to trample down the corn and vegetables’.

A Hottentot (Khoi-Khoi), a Hottentot Woman; a Kaffre (Xhosa), a Kaffre Woman. Four head-and-shoulder vignettes engraved by Samuel Daniell, 1804.

Many weeks were spent in this way, the soldiers ensuring that the Xhosa would never return to the land they had once made so prosperous. The British commander was entirely frank about his purpose. ‘The only way of getting rid of them’, Colonel Graham told a correspondent,

Is by depriving them of the means of subsistence and continually harassing them, for which purpose the whole force is constantly employed in destroying prodigious quantities of Indian corn and millet which they have planted. . . taking from them the few cattle which they conceal in the woods with great address, and shooting every man who can be found.

‘This is detestable work’, he added thoughtfully; ‘we are forced to hunt them like wild beasts’ Graham’s task was finished in March 1812. He had completed the first great ‘removal’ in the history of the British occupation of South Africa, driving some 20,000 Xhosa across the Fish River. Hundreds were killed in the process, and thousands of cattle seized.

Although Chungwa had been killed, Ndlambe escaped across the river to fight another day.

Ndlambe’s nephew Ngqika (sometimes Gaika) was left behind to make peace with the British. A younger man, then barely thirty, he was to become their stooge Xhosa chief, working with them as he had once briefly worked with the Dutch in 1803. The Dutch, like the British, had nothing but praise for their African collaborators, describing Ngqika as ‘one of the handsomest men that can be seen, even among the Caffres uncommonly tall, with strong limbs and very fine features’; ‘there is in his whole appearance something that at once speaks the king, although there was nothing in his dress to distinguish him, except some rows of white beads which he wore round his neck. . . His countenance is expressive of the utmost benevolence and selfconfidence.’ 4

Ngqika had thrown in his lot with the British, and was obliged to work under their command. Yet his role was never easy. Orders were given that any Xhosa remaining in the Zuurveld without a document bearing his signature would be shot on sight.

The Zuurveld was lost to the Xhosa for all time. Its idyllic landscape was described by John Campbell from the London Missionary Society, who travelled through it a year after Graham’s extermination campaign had ended. The countryside is ‘beautiful in the extreme’, he wrote, ‘much resembling a nobleman’s park in England’. Yet he detected the harsh reality behind the surface appeal, for its slopes were still covered with the abandoned gardens of the Xhosa. ‘The skeletons of many of their houses remained, and some tobacco was still growing, but all their cornfields were destroyed. . . not a living soul, but stillness reigns.’

Xhosa bitterness at being driven from their land was never wholly assuaged in later years. One of the old Dutch settlers, Andries Stockenstrom, recorded in his autobiography the views of those who had survived. After the war of 1811-12, he wrote, no honest man would deny that the Xhosa, if sure of success, would rise to a man ‘and cut the throat of every white male and female whom they could overtake - as a measure partly of policy and partly of revenge’.5 To celebrate Colonel Graham’s success, the British named a new settlement in the Zuurveld in his honour. Grahamstown survives to this day.

A group of Dutch settlers in Cape Colony, unhappy with British rule, organised a rebellion in 1815. One of the causes of the rebellion, a pale replay of the Dutch resistance to British rule in 1795 and 1799, was the British use of the Khoi-Khoi to police the frontiers of the colony - an imperial strategy that gave offence to many old Dutch settlers. Their rebellion was crushed at what became known as ‘the battle at Slachter’s Nek’, in which Khoi-Khoi soldiers participated.

Recognising that they would have to ally themselves with the Xhosa if they were to achieve their aim of throwing out the British, some of the rebels paid a visit to Ngqika’s kraal to ask for his support. They offered him the old Xhosa territory of the Zuurveld, seized by the British in 1811, if he would agree to collaborate. The British were threatened with a white settler revolt, organised in league with the Africans, but fortunately for them, Ngqika remained loyal.

The rebellion was sparked off by the death of Frederick Bezuidenhout, a Dutch farmer charged with maltreating his Khoi-Khoi workers, who was killed by a British military unit while resisting arrest. Johannes, his brother, vowed to avenge Frederick’s death, declaring that he would drive the British out of South Africa. He secured the support of Hendrik Prinsloo, the farmer son of Martinus Prinsloo, a prime mover of the settler rebellion of 1799. Hendrik had considerable influence in the province, and the chief participants in the rebellion were either close neighbours or members of his extended family, including his brother-in-law Theunis de Klerk.

A British officer at Grahamstown, made aware of the settlers’ plans and of their contacts with Ngqika, took swift action. He sent soldiers to arrest Prinsloo and detain him at his farm. The rebels secured some settler support, but their overtures to Ngqika had an adverse effect on other Dutch settlers in the region. Many chose to support the British authorities rather than accept an alliance with the Xhosa.

Eventually a group of sixty rebels, led by Johannes Bezuidenhout in Prinsloo’s enforced absence, assembled at Slachter’s Nek, on a ridge overlooking the Little Fish River. Their immediate plan was to release Prinsloo from detention, though some had wider ambitions. One of the settlers, probably Bezuidenhout, made a formal oath: ‘I swear by God Almighty never to rest till I have driven the oppressors of my nation from this land.’

No battle occurred at Slachter’s Nek, for most of the rebels surrendered when faced by a superior British force led by Colonel Jacob Cuyler, by origin an ‘Empire Loyalist’ born in Albany in America. A handful of them escaped and fled to the territory of the Xhosa, but Bezuidenhout was killed. In December, Colonel Cuyler presided over a Special Court at Uitenhage, where forty-seven rebels were put on trial. Six of them, including Prinsloo, were found guilty of rebellion and sentenced to death. Five death sentences were upheld by the governor, General Lord Charles Somerset, as a warning to the settlers against further rebellion. Other rebels were exiled, but required to attend the executions before they left.

Colonel Cuyler presided over the execution of the flve men, but the operation was so grossly bungled that Slachter’s Nek and its gruesome aftermath entered into the folklore of the white settlers in Africa. The scaffold collapsed at the first attempt, and had to be rebuilt before the executions could finally take place.6 The memory of this frightful event was to be resurrected on many subsequent occasions in the later history of South Africa, notably during the Boer War nearly one hundred years later.