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UNDEFEATED AMBITION IN AN UNSYMPATHETIC EMPIRE: THE KAT RIVER SETTLEMENT IN THE CAPE COLONY, 1853-1872 by Katie Carline Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia August 2015 © Copyright by Katie Carline, 2015 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES..…………………………………………………………………….………..v ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………..……….vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS……………………………………………………………………vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………..……viii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………1 1.1 HUMANITARIANISM AND THE ORIGINS OF THE KAT RIVER SETTLEMENT IN THE 1830S………………………………….…………….. 2 1.2 THE KAT RIVER PROJECT: LAND, CHRISTIANITY, EDUCATION, AND RESPECTABILITY ………………………………………………12 1.3 OF REVELATION AND REVISION: THE KAT RIVER AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF MISSIONS IN SOUTH AFRICA……………………………16 1.4 THE AIM AND SCOPE OF THIS PROJECT…………………………………….…21 CHAPTER 2: “DEATH AT ONCE WOULD BE PREFERABLE TO THE CONTINUED PERSECUTION WE ENDURE”: THE KAT RIVER REBELLION AND ITS AFTERMATH…………………………………………………………………….…..27 2.1 THE COURSE OF THE REBELLION………………………………………….…..28 2.2 LOCAL MOTIVATIONS FOR REBELLION………………………………….……30 2.3 THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT OF THE REBELLION…………..…….…..34 2.4 REBELS……………………………………………………………………….….….38 2.5 LOYALISTS ………………………………………………………………..……….43 2.6 THE AFTERMATH OF THE REBELLION AND THE END OF LIBERAL HUMANITARIANISM……………………………………………….……..48 CHAPTER 3: “WE NOW UNDERSTAND THE CHRISTIANITY OF MONEY”: THE VOLUNTARY PRINCIPLE AND ITS USES IN THE KAT RIVER…………………..…62 ii 3.1 PEASANT PRODUCERS OR PIOUS PAUPERS? THE KAT RIVER SETTLEMENT C.1855-1870 IN THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE EASTERN CAPE……………………………………………………….……………….63 3.2 “THE VOLUNTARY PRINCIPLE IS I BELIEVE OF DEVINE APPOINTMENT”: THE KAT RIVER IN THE WORLD OF BRITISH MISSIONARY ACTIVITY, C.1855-1870…………………………………….…………69 3.3 USES OF THE VOLUNTARY PRINCIPLE: COMMERCIAL AND LAND-OWNING CONGREGATIONS……………………………..……………….….75 3.4 USES OF THE VOLUNTARY PRINCIPLE: EDUCATION AND ECCLESIASTICAL CAREERING……………………………………………….….….90 3.5 ARIE VAN ROOYEN AND THE RIGHTS OF A VOLUNTARY CHURCH………99 3.6 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………….….104 CHAPTER 4: “WE KNOW OUR OWN CIRCUMSTANCES AND WHAT WILL BE FOR THE TEMPORAL AND SPIRITUAL WELFARE OF THE FINGOE PEOPLE”: CHANGING ETHNIC IDENTITIES AND THE EXPANSION OF THE KAT RIVER PROJECT ……………………………………………………………….…106 4.1 FINGO CONVERSIONS AND THE EXPANSION OF THE KAT RIVER PROJECT……………………………………………………………………………….108 4.2 “ONE OF THE GRANARIES OF THE COUNTRY”: AGRICULTURE AND RESPECTABILITY AT OXKRAAL…………………………………………….119 4.3 THE “PECULIAR PRESTIGE” OF THE LMS AND ITS USES DURING THE “FINGO EXODUS”………………………………………………..….127 4.4. “THE CHILD WAS KNOWN TO US WHEN HE WAS A BOY”: THE READ FAMILY IN THE KAT RIVER……………………………………….…..137 4.5 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………..142 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION: “THIS GROUND WAS WASHED CLEAN BY BLOOD”.……………………………………………………………………………….143 5.1 THE KAT RIVER SETTLEMENT IN THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF IDENTITY AND RESISTANCE………………………………………………..…144 iv 5.2 THE END OF THE LMS IN THE KAT RIVER SETTLEMENT…………………147 5.3 THE KAT RIVER AND KHOESAN IDENTITY IN MODERN SOUTH AFRICA……….………………………………………………………………….…….153 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………161 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1 The Kat River Settlement in the Eastern Cape, c.1829-1866…………………….5 Figure 1.2 The Internal Divisions of the Settlement, c.1850…………………………………7 Figure 4.1 The Eastern Cape after the “Fingo Exodus”, c.1866…………..………………113 v ABSTRACT The Kat River Settlement, established in South Africa’s eastern Cape in 1829, became a place where Khoesan Christians built an independent outpost of respectable colonial society. The Settlement lost official and missionary support after the residents’ rebellion of 1850-53, and scholars treat this episode as the end of the Kat River project. But this diminution of outside support did not cause Kat River residents to relinquish their aspirations. In the two decades after the rebellion, they responded to bleak economic prospects and supporters’ apathy by using church institutions to claim equality with British congregations, protect their economic interests, pursue education, and incorporate new communities into the Kat River project. These efforts reveal how Khoesan people combatted their disadvantages in a colonial state and participated in imperial networks of Christianity. Examining Kat River after 1853 demonstrates how the Settlement’s ideals endured and continue to inform contemporary Coloured cultural politics. vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS USED CO Colonial Office Records, Cape Archives Repository LMS London Missionary Society LMS-SA Incoming Correspondence from South Africa, London Missionary Society Records, Council for World Mission Archives SACA South African Commercial Advertiser vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project could not have been completed without the help and forbearance of many people. My supervisor, Dr. Phil Zachernuk, posed insightful questions and offered suggestions that allowed me to imagine new possibilities for research and puzzle out the implications of my arguments. I am also grateful for the input of my thesis examiners, Dr. Gary Kynoch and Dr. Amal Ghazal. Dr. Robert Ross, of the University of Leiden, kindly shared his transcriptions of documents from the Cape Archives. Finally, I am thankful for my classmates and friends, my parents, siblings, and Nick Baker, who commiserated, encouraged, and celebrated with me throughout this process. viii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In 1829, several thousand Khoesan people move to the Kat River Settlement on the eastern border of the Cape Colony, which had been set apart for them by governmental and missionary supporters as a “refuge,” in the expectation that they would use the land to become “civilized” and “respectable,” and so assimilate into settler colonial society. Although the Kat River was not specifically a missionary project, the idea of the Settlement and many of the people who moved there were associated with the London Missionary Society (LMS), an organization run by Congregational churches in Britain. The Kat River Settlement, which encompassed approximately 800 square kilometres of a valley in the eastern Cape, has been studied frequently in South African history, both because its initial project of racial assimilation hints at a different path that South African history might have taken, and because the rebellion which happened there in 1850 provides both rare and dramatic documentation of African political consciousness in nineteenth-century colonial South Africa and a marker of the turn towards a segregationist state. However, most of the extant scholarship on the Settlement stops at 1853, when the rebellion was crushed, Khoesan Christians lost the support of their former philanthropist friends, and it became apparent that the original goals of the Settlement would not be achieved. Historians have not yet asked how Khoesan Christians in the Kat River, the people who had invested the most in the idea of the Settlement, responded to their changed situation after the rebellion. This thesis is a study of what happened in the Kat River after 1853. Using correspondence from LMS missionaries and their Khoesan congregants, this thesis argues that 1 after the rebellion, people in the Kat River continued to pursue the original goals of the Settlement while adapting to changing politics in the eastern Cape and changing ideas in the world of missionary Christianity. They accomplished this through creative use of LMS church institutions, despite the apathy of the colonial officials and former supporters across the empire. Liberal Humanitarianism and the Origins of the Kat River Settlement in the 1830s The Kat River Settlement originated at a specific moment in local colonial and imperial politics. From the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 to the emancipation of slaves in colonial territories in the 1830s, British imperial politics had a distinct humanitarian flavour, in the sense that officials and public activists believed that colonial governments should protect and ameliorate the condition of people whose lands had been taken, especially in Australia and the Cape Colony, by increasingly large waves of settlers from Britain.1 The term humanitarian does not mean that early nineteenth-century British colonial rule was necessarily just or benevolent, simply that it was couched in a specific vocabulary which spoke of preserving national honour by recognizing the equal humanity of conquered indigenous people, and the necessity of incorporating them into a civilized society.2 In the Cape Colony, this meant passing protective 1 Fae Dussart and Alan Lester, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines Across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1-6. 2 Dussart and Lester, Colonization and the Origins, 7-24; Elizabeth Elbourne, “The Sin of the Settler: The 1835-36 Select Committee on Aborigines and Debates on Virtue and Conquest in the Early Nineteenth-Century British White Settler Empire,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4 (2003). 2 legislation on working rights and property ownership for freed slaves and indigenous Khoesan people, as well as providing education and encouraging conversion to Christianity.3 In the Cape Colony, the liberal humanitarian agenda was promoted by an informal network of administrators, politicians, and missionaries. Probably the most famous member of this network was John Philip, the