THE INTERACTION BETWEEN THE MISSIONARIES OF THE CAPE EASTERN FRONTIER AND THE COLONIAL AUTHORITIES IN THE ERA OF SIR GEORGE GREY, 1854 - 1861. Constance Gail Weldon Pietermaritzburg, December 1984* Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Historical Studies, University of Natal, 1984. CONTENTS Page Abstract i List of Abbreviations vi Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 2 Sir George Grey and his ’civili­ zing mission’ 16 Chapter 3 The missionaries and Grey 1854-6 55 Chapter 4 The Cattle Killing 1856/7 99 Chanter 5 The Aftermath of the Cattle Killing (till 1860s) 137 Chapter 6 Conclusion 174 Appendix A Principal mission stations on the frontier 227 Appendix B Wesleyan Methodist and Church of Scotland Missionaries 228 Appendix C List of magistrates and chiefs 229 Appendix D Biographical Notes 230 Select Bibliography 233 List of photographs and maps Between pages 1. Sir George Grey - Governor 15/16 2. Map showing Cape eastern frontier and principal military posts 32/33 3. Map showing the principal frontier mission stations 54/55 4. Photographs showing Lovedale trade departments 78/79 5. Map showing British Kaffraria and principal chiefs 98/99 6. Sir George Grey - 'Romantic Imperialist' 143/144 7. Sir George Grey - civilian 225/226 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge with thanks the financial assistance rendered by the Human Sciences Research Council towards the costs of this research. Opinions expressed or conclusions arrived at are those of the author and are not to be regarded as those of the Human Sciences Research Council. I would also like to thank my supervisor, Prof. J. Benyon, whose guidance and criticism helped greatly in the preparation of this thesis. Furthermore, I would like to express my thanks to Biddy Greene, who gave me invaluable assistance in proofreading the manuscript. I wish also to acknowledge my gratitude to the staffs of the various libraries and archives which I consulted. Finally, in compliance with the regulations of the .. University of Natal, I declare that this whole thesis, unless specifically stated to the contrary in the text, is my own original work. ABSTRACT In the work of radical historians and in Xhosa tradition the Cattle Killing has become the supreme example of the deliberately destructive impact of a colonial governor, helped by missionaries, on the Black peoples of the eastern frontier of the Cape. This figure of con­ troversy, Sir George Grey, was Governor of the Cape and High Commissioner from 1854-1861. As a civilian, he sought to pacify the Xhosa through 'civilization1 and education. To do this he enlisted the help of the frontier missionaries, who themselves desired a stable Xhosa society to aid their work. The result, it has been alleged, was the final demise of effective Xhosa resistance to the encroachment of imperial forces and white settler society. By the early 1850s the work of the missionaries on the frontier was at an all-time low. And so they certainly did hope that Grey's plans, of which the extension of education was part, would provide a long-sought break­ through for them. But this, in turn, has led to the accusation that the missionaries acted merely as mer­ cenary imperial agents and as a 'collaborating group' ii for the extension of colonial authority over the Xhosa, rather than for the benefit of their would- be converts. Because of the nature of the allega­ tions, it seemed a significant historical exercise to investigate more closely the nature and extent of the links which the missionaries did in fact forge with Sir George Grey. It must be admitted that Grey's frontier plans, together with the steady erosion of traditional society over the years, economic distress in the mid-1850s, and the Cattle Killing dealt a death­ blow to effective Xhosa resistance to colonial en­ croachment. Radical historians have blamed Grey and the missionaries of deliberately engineering the Cattle Killing for their own Machiavellian purposes. There is not enough evidence to convict Grey on this charge, but certainly his actions, or lack of them, during the crisis suggest that once the Cattle Killing had started he deliberately allowed it to develop to the point where the Xhosa could be more easily subordinated. It can not, with any justifi­ cation, be said that the missionaries had a part either in instigating or maintaining the crisis, iii though they were not slow to hope for some advantage from it in the shape of a more receptive Xhosa nation driven by adversity to 'humble themselves before God1 and accept conversion. The Xhosa were deeply divided over Nongqawuse's prophecy - which was a fact that tended to work very much to Grey's advantage. He also used the crisis to break the chiefs who survived the disaster and to evict Sarhili from his ancestral land in Kaffraria Proper. On what seems to have been fabricated evidence, Grey accused Sarhili, together with Moshoe- shoe, of plotting the Cattle Killing to force the Xhosa into war with the Colony. Far from this being the case, the Cattle Killing should rather be regarded both as a millenarian movement and as a feature of a so-called 'closing' frontier. Grey had hoped to use the crisis to extend his 'civi­ lizing' plans to Kaffraria Proper; but though his expulsion of Sarhili to beyond the Mbashe River pre­ pared the way, he did not receive official sanction to go ahead with his plans. This, together with other setbacks to his plans, may well have led Grey to accept a transfer to New Zealand in 1861, sooner IV than had been expected. It has been suggested that the Cattle Killing resulted in an unprecedented advance by the missionaries, but detailed investigation of their records has shown this to be untrue. The influence attributed to the missionaries has, thus, been somewhat overrated and their links with Grey, who was essentially a man of independent and arbitrary action, exaggerated. Although their converts were few, missionaries did, however, foster far-reaching changes in traditional society. One of the most notable was the growth of peasant communities around the stations, which supplied a viable alternative to wage labour in the pre-capitalist colonial society. They also contri­ buted to the stratification of Xhosa society and to the creation of an educated elite which would become leaders in a new industrial situation of contracting options. Grey was Governor at a time when the frontier was in the process of closing. A study of his era is, V thus, relevant not only in terms of the relationship between the missionaries and the personality embodying the authority of the colonial state - and their consequent combined impact on Xhosa history but also in terms of more general frontier studies. vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS o o ■ • Colonial Office Records, Public Record Office, Kew. B.K. British Kaffraria Records, Cape Archives Br. Pari. Papers British Parliamentary Papers, Irish University Press. WMMS Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society Archives, London. Grey Coll. Grey Collection, South African Library, Cape Town. SOAS School for Oriental and African Studies, London. NOTE ON SPELLING Throughout the thesis the modern spelling for Xhosa names has been followed. -1 - CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION As a frontier zone, the present Eastern Cape has received much attention from historians, beginning with settler historians like Cory, passing through liberal writers such as W.M. MacMillan, to the modern radical historians who have recently been offering new interpretations of frontier processes. Until these revisionist writings appeared, much attention had been given to the white settler tradi­ tion though, with the closing of the frontier, black Africans were drawn inexorably into colonial society and became inextricably bound up with that society, both economically and politically. According to these historians, as class attitudes among the white settlers hardened into race attitudes and economic imperatives increased the need for cheap labour, both the economic and political options were deliberately closed for frontier blacks. Within this context and in addition to the tradition attributed to white settlers and their descendents by Liberal historians, the Eastern Cape was to produce a second 'independent* -2- tradition - that of mounting black reaction and resis­ tance to the closing of these options. In the early years, the leaders of this resistance movement were men of the stature of J.T. Jabavu and his son Davidson Don. With these men, and others, the eastern Cape became, in fact, the seed-bed of African Nationalism and Black Consciousness. The new generation of leaders in the wider South African context, reacting to a new industrial situation and apartheid, were men like Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko. If there was, and is, a common denominator for these men, it was the fact that they had all received a mission education. The leading figures in the early African National Congress (ANC) were drawn from a small elite of highly educated Africans whose Chris­ tian mission backgrounds were a source of their liberal 'bourgeois' aspirations. Their main goal was the maintenance of the Cape non-racial franchise and its extension to the other provinces; while later generation of leaders were, to some extent, inspired by the myth of Cape Liberalism. But, in spite of this impetus given to African Nationa­ lism by mission education, a real and deep anger has -3- fomented among Africans against the missionaries and their work. In the Eastern Cape it is linked to the still almost painful reality of that tragic event of 1856/7 - the great Xhosa Cattle Killing. Even over a hundred years later, the pain of it at times is as fresh as it was then.