The Wedding Feast War The Final Tragedy of the Xhosa People
Keith Smith
Frontline Books, London
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Contents List of Maps and Illustrations vii Genealogical Tables ix Acknowledgements xiii Abbreviations xvi Author’s Note xvii Preface to the Second Edition xviii Introduction 1 Part I: The Cape Colony to 1877
1 Dutch Settlement to 1806 2 The British Colony to 1834 3 The British Colony, 1835 to 1847 4 The British Colony, 1847 to 1877
13 35 57 79
Part II: The Ninth Frontier War 5 A Spark in the Tinderbox 6 The Transkei Campaign 7 A Crisis of Government 8 Civil War in the Colony 9 A War in Earnest 10 Thesiger’s War
105 128 156 179 193 215
Epilogue 241 Notes 248 Bibliography 273 Index 280
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Introduction Of the nine Kafir Wars during 1799–1877, the history of the 9th war of 1877/78 is less generally known than that of previous wars. Dr A.W. Burton, Rhodes University, November 1967
There are few published works which deal with the last of the South African frontier wars, fought in 1877–78, and none which covers it in detail. A book which supposedly deals with all nine of these wars, but spends only a few pages on the last, is The Kaffir Wars 1779–1877, by A.J. Smithers. His decision to use 1877 as the cut-off date for this work is baffling, to say the least, and his discussion of the Ninth War is brief and unsatisfactory. A work with a similar objective is John Milton’s The Edges of War. His treatment of the Ninth War is more extensive but is curiously truncated in a number of places. An epic work which narrates the history of the Cape from its first days, Noël Mostert’s Frontiers, also describes all of the wars except the Ninth, which is inexplicably relegated to only a few pages in the epilogue. The only other secondary work of which I am aware, Philip Gon’s The Road to Isandlwana, covers the war from the limited perspective of the 24th Regiment’s campaign, and the last third of the book describes the early stages of the Zulu War. The lack of a published comprehensive study of this important war is the more surprising because it set the final seal on the relegation of the majority Xhosa Africans, who inhabited the Eastern Cape, to the position of lowly workers for the colonists. This work, written after extensive research in British and South African archives, is an attempt to rectify the omission. When setting out on this project, it became necessary to convey details of earlier wars so as to explain what had gone before and thus provide continuity in the work. Furthermore, it quickly became apparent that it was essential to do more than merely introduce the Xhosa leaders who took part in the Ninth War. Their forebears were almost as important as were the chiefs in 1878 in explaining the forces which were brought to bear upon them. The need to understand the evolving relationship between black and white seemed quite naturally to suggest a general explanation, albeit in brief, of the development of the colony from its birth in 1652. It has evolved, therefore, into the story of
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the African equivalent of the Hundred Years War, the first war between the Xhosa and the colonists taking place in 1799 and the last finishing in 1878. The work is divided into two parts. The first, consisting of the first four chapters, briefly covers the history of the Cape from first settlement, through the first eight Frontier Wars, to the middle of the 1870s. The second part, consisting of the remaining six chapters, deals exclusively with the Ninth War. The Ninth War itself falls naturally into two time periods: the first, between August 1877 and 4 March 1878, was waged under the command of Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Cunynghame, and the second, from thence to its conclusion on 12 June 1878, under the command of LieutenantGeneral (local rank) the Hon. Frederic Thesiger. Thesiger was elevated to the peerage as the second Baron Chelmsford on the death of his father in October 1878, but to avoid any confusion he is referred to throughout this work as General Thesiger. The Cunynghame period was riven with disputes between the governor and high commissioner, Sir Henry Bartle Edward Frere and the prime minister of the colony of the Cape of Good Hope, John Charles Molteno, and his cabinet, so that the command of the colonial, as opposed to imperial, forces was constantly under debate. The second period began after the resolution of the Molteno issue and thus all troops – colonial, African and imperial – were firmly under the command of General Thesiger, as that officer made plain in his first despatch.1 We might here briefly consider what the Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey described as ‘the tyranny of distance’, used as the title of his work.2 In the mid-nineteenth century, official correspondence between the Cape and London, and vice versa, could take six weeks or longer to reach its destination and this inevitably caused problems when decisions were urgently required. This situation would not improve until the advent of the telegraph in 1874, when a cable was laid between Brazil and Europe via Madeira. The improvement was not greatly significant even then, however, because communications were still required to travel from the Cape to Madeira by ship before being telegraphed to London. It was not until late in 1879 that a telegraphic link was established between Durban and London, via Zanzibar and Aden. The first direct transmission between Cape Town and London did not occur until 1883.3 Another difficulty faced by governors of the Cape was the changing faces of those to whom they reported: often a letter would be addressed to one minster, only to be answered three or more months later by another. This was largely due to the fact that the ruling political parties in the House of Commons came and went with elections, and with them their ministers.
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Introduction 3 Furthermore, specific ministers of state might also change during the life of a single government. Sir George Grey (who served as governor at the Cape from 1854 to 1861) described this idiosyncratic mechanism quite concisely in a letter to Colonial Secretary Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton in July 1859: I can only make the general remark that, during the five years which have elapsed since I was appointed to my present office, there have been at least seven Secretaries of State for the Colonial Department, each of whom held different views upon some important points of policy connected with this country. It was impossible that I could, in turn, have agreed in opinion with each of them; and it would have been often difficult, instantly, so to modify proceedings which I had taken in accordance with what I knew to be the wishes of one Secretary of State as to make them entirely accord with the views of each of his successors as they rapidly followed one another.4
Those readers who are familiar with the Zulu War fought in 1879 will already know the names of the imperial units engaged here, notably the 1st Battalion of the 24th Regiment (2nd Warwickshire) under its commanding officer Colonel Richard Thomas Glyn. In a very unusual posting, the 2nd Battalion joined its brother during the course of the war. Many of Glyn’s officers’ names will also be recognisable, although their ranks might differ, among them Major Henry Burmester Pulleine, Captain Russell Upcher, Lieutenant Teignmouth Melvill and Lieutenant Nevill J.A. Coghill. Officers of the 1/24th also founded a number of colonial infantry and mounted units, including Pulleine’s Rangers (or ‘Lambs’, as they were derisively called) and Lieutenant Fred Carrington’s Horse, the predecessor of the Frontier Light Horse. The 90th Regiment also arrived in South Africa during this time, bringing with it another Zulu War luminary, Brevet Colonel Evelyn Wood, VC. Here too was Brevet Major Redvers Buller, 60th Regiment (The King’s Royal Rifle Corps), soon to become the fearsome warrior leading his beloved Frontier Light Horse. Among those who served during the war as leaders of the colonial African forces were such Zulu War figures as Rupert Lonsdale, who would later com mand the 3rd Regiment of the Natal Native Contingent (NNC) at Isandlwana, William Nettleton, future commandant of a battalion of the NNC and Friedrich Schermbrucker, later to serve with Evelyn Wood in Natal. The casual reader might assume that when the Dutch first took possession of the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 it was devoid of humankind, the nearest
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being still in the process of extending their presence from the north, and were then still only at the Great Kei River well to the north-east. This is far from the reality: the area of the Cape teemed with indigenous people. We must therefore begin by describing the different Africans who were resident in South Africa at that time.
The San or Bushmen Ancient stone hand axes found on the veld clearly demonstrate that men lived at the Cape more than one hundred thousand years ago. The later Stone Age people who lived around twenty thousand years ago are generally considered to be the ancestors of the San, the earliest known inhabitants of the Cape region, who came to be known to white people as ‘Bushmen’. ‘San’ was not a name they applied to themselves – they had none – it was given to them by another indigenous people and means ‘aborigine’. They were elusive hunter-gathering nomads who shunned agriculture and the ownership of stock of any kind, preferring to hunt game where it could be found, and supplementing their meagre meat diet with fish, wild fruits and roots. They were, in short, the most primitive of the peoples of South Africa and were thus the most threatened by any encroachment on their territories by either white or black intruders.5
The Khoikhoi About two thousand years ago, the Khoikhoi (a word meaning ‘men of men’) moved from modern Botswana into the Cape. Their lifestyle was very similar to that of the San but they also owned fat-tailed sheep and long-horned cattle. They moved with their herds into the best pastures, eventually driving the San into refuge areas such as mountain ranges or desert. The Khoikhoi were known to the white men by the disparaging name ‘Hottentot’ and it was they who had coined the name ‘San’ for the Bushmen. These people originally descended from the San but, while continuing their nomadic way of life, this moiety chose instead to assume the role of herdsmen to cattle, goats and sheep. Some San helped the Khoikhoi with their animals and thus became pastoralists themselves. Similarly, Khoikhoi who lost their animals during droughts or other misadventure adopted the life of the San. Both Khoikhoi and San are thought to have lived between the Great Fish and Mzimvubu rivers long before the arrival of the southern Nguni.6
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Introduction 5
The Xhosa Far to the north-east was a more numerous people who, by virtue of their expanding population and the relatively inhospitable nature of the interior of central South Africa, were slowly edging down through the eastern margins of the continent in the only directions open to them: south and then west. These were a race known as the Bantu, a name with unfortunate connotations today but which was derived from their own word abaNtu, meaning ‘people’, and in the plural form umuNtu, meaning ‘man’. The name was first applied to these people in 1862 by the German ethnologist W.H.I. Bleek. They were as advanced as any then in sub-Saharan Africa, with skills in animal husbandry, simple agriculture and elementary iron working.7 Bryant tells us that the Bantu were made up of three distinct ‘families’ called Suthu, Tonga and Nguni, labels which he himself applied in his work on the origins of the Zulu people.8 Each of these families spoke its own variant of the Bantu language, although across the three groups the similarities of their vocabulary were striking. It is with the Nguni that we are most interested here. The Southern Nguni was not a single entity but rather consisted of many clans who mixed, traded and fought with each other, as well as with the Khoikhoi and San. Over time, certain of these clans began to predominate and coalesce into the larger groups that we now recognise as the Mpondo, Mpondomise, Thembu, Bomvana and Xhosa. Both Khoikhoi and Nguni placed a great deal of importance on cattle and had similar social structures. Some chiefs married San women and employed San men as rain-makers and diviners. Nguni refugees were often assimilated into Khoikhoi chiefdoms and certain Khoikhoi clans became incorporated into Nguni chiefdoms. The most numerous of the Southern Nguni, who eventually reached the Great Kei River in the seventeenth century, were the amaXhosa.9 By this time they had also evolved into several different clans, but all were related in the distant past. It is sufficient to note here that the Xhosa, in common with other Nguni people mentioned above, shared much of their language and could understand each other. Many of the ‘clicks’ in the Southern Nguni languages were the result of their contact with the San and the Khoikhoi. The word ‘Xhosa’ itself comes from the Khoikhoi word ‘to destroy’.10
The Mixing of the Races The miscegenation of the three races now living in close proximity was inevitable. Thus some Khoikhoi and San cohabited to create a mixed-race
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people known as Khoisan. Similarly, the Khoikhoi and the Xhosa interbred to produce new groups, most of whom chose to consider themselves as Xhosa. The Khoikhoi Gqunukhwebe chiefdom, which had settled between the Bushmans and Fish rivers by 1760, emerged in this fashion. It must also be noted that the Khoikhoi who came into confrontation with the advancing Xhosa, though generally not intermarrying, chose to live among their conquerors and eventually called themselves Xhosa. In this way the area became a great melting pot of people of different racial origins. This, then, sets the scene and places the principal aboriginal people in their proper context.
The Structure of Nguni Society We should next turn briefly to a subject which may be the cause of some confusion to those who know little about the nomenclature used to identify groups and subgroups of Nguni people. The names given to these groups were mostly, but not entirely, patronymics, supposedly being those of the first chief of a group. The propagation of separate Zulu chiefdoms is described comprehensively by Jeff Guy and it applied equally to other Nguni people, including the Xhosa.11 The process is covered here in a manner sufficient merely to explain how these groups often obtained their names. Their polygamous society was founded upon the basic building block of the umuzi (plural imizi), or ‘homestead’, which consisted of several beehive huts around a central cattle pen, the whole being surrounded by a crude wooden fence to keep nocturnal carnivores out and the livestock in. Guy states that: These imizi were of different sizes, according to an individual’s status and wealth, but it has been estimated that 90 per cent of them were commoners’ homesteads consisting of a man (the homestead-head, umnumzana), two or three wives, their offspring, cattle and smallstock, grazing and agricultural land. The men worked with the livestock, the women in agriculture, the two fundamental branches of production and there was a clear sexual division of labour in the many supporting tasks. The wives were ranked and housed separately within the homestead.12
Close to the homestead were the gardens where the women grew their produce: grains, pumpkins, melons and sweet potatoes. All around them were the extensive lands where their cattle grazed under the watchful eyes of the young men and boys of the homestead.
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Introduction 7 The local chief controlled a number of homesteads, which made up his chiefdom. Although, in principle, everything belonged to the chief, in reality the relationship between him and his subjects was finely balanced. A chief did not have absolute political or legal power: if his tenure was too authoritarian his people simply walked away and associated themselves with another chief. He was also curbed to a large extent by the advice of his councillors. Xhosa chiefs were bound to each other by ties of marriage as well as political and military alliances. The chiefs, in their turn, answered to a principal chief of one of the two major Xhosa groups to which he belonged. The first major chief was the Paramount Chief of the Gcaleka Xhosa – that is, he was the supreme chief of all the Xhosa and the paramountcy descended through his line. The second, and subsidiary, chief was known as the Sovereign Chief of the Rharhabe Xhosa, a very large sub-family and, again, the sovereignty descended through his line. An examination of the genealogical tables will explain these matters better than words, but what they will not explain is the relationship between them. While the words ‘paramount’, ‘sovereign’ and ‘supreme’ have been used above, the reader will soon learn that these words were little more than niceties because the two chiefs could exercise little control over subordinates in areas other than their own, any more than could the lowest sub-chief. As Mostert explains: ‘[Sarhili’s] was an hereditary position whose only claim upon other chiefdoms was deference and respect. His sovereignty was institutional, not absolute.’13 The same applied to Sandile of the Rharhabe, to an even lesser extent. The most notable feature of Xhosa culture was that cattle were central to their lives. Cattle were the external representation of wealth, because they provided the wherewithal for life: milk and meat for food, and hides for clothing, shields and other useful purposes. They also furnished the means of acquiring wives since women were given in marriage for a negotiated number of cattle, a tradition called lobola. This practice was not the demeaning transaction that it might be thought today. It should be seen, rather, as an insurance policy for the new wife because if the marriage was not successful and she returned to her family, she had her lobola on which to fall back. The major element associated with cattle was land, because it was required to provide the animals with fodder. And a simple plot of grass was not enough. In simple terms, grazing areas in South Africa may be classified as either sweet or sour veldt. Sweet veldt provides nutritious material even when it is mature. On the other hand, sour veldt is nutritious only during the growing season. Thus, if the local land grows only sour veldt, then the farmer is
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required to move his stock to alternative grazing which provides continuing nutrition. Thus while the sweetveld allowed for a longer grazing season, people in the highlands or sourveld areas had to move their cattle to lower altitudes as the nutritive value of the grass declined in the dry season. This led to the practice of transhumance, the cyclical movement of cattle from one pasture to another as the seasons progressed. It is clear, therefore, that larger areas of pasturage were required for the good management of cattle than might at first be thought. Although land ownership was a concept foreign to the indigenous people, their right to pasturage was very much accepted, and vigorously protected. Access to adequate pasturage was, therefore, the second most precious commodity after cattle. With the chief ’s acquisition of cattle, and then one or more wives, the umuzi grew, since each wife was given her own huts within the compound. Similarly, adult sons were also allocated their own huts, and so the umuzi grew still further. The sons of the chief established their own separate homestead either when they married or when the umnumzana died, beginning the process again, eventually leading to the formation of a clan descended from a single male progenitor. The clan was known by the name of this man so that, for example, the founder of the Xhosa people was a distant, possibly mythical, ancestor named Xhosa. On the question of polygamy, a practice much reviled by the missionaries, it should be stated that this was not considered essential but was simply the ambition of the African male because it was an indicator of his status in society. It is certainly true that most men had but a single wife, re-marrying only after the current wife passed away. But the higher a man rose in the hierarchy, and as his wealth in cattle increased, so he might then take more wives. Relationships in Nguni, and thus Xhosa, society were governed by two principles. The first of these was exogamy, because it ensured that the gene pools of the small clans remained open by forbidding marriage between members of the same extended family. This is really no different to the rules operating in modern society. For this same reason, Xhosa chiefs and headmen sought wives among the Thembu, also an Nguni people. Inheritance was quite unlike the western custom of primogeniture, or inheritance by the first-born male, but was by the ‘chief son’. When a chief married, his first wife was known as the first wife of the Right Hand House, because she was given a hut on the right-hand side of that of the chief. Other wives would then take other houses on the right, in diminishing order of precedence. Eventually, however, the chief would declare one of his wives to be his Chief Wife and she was given a hut on the left-hand side of
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Introduction 9 the chief ’s, thus founding the Left Hand or Great House.14 Even though wives of the Right Hand House may already have borne the chief sons, it was the first son of the Great Wife who inherited the chiefdom, even though he was perhaps many years younger than the first-born son. This custom, it will be readily perceived, could lead to envy and bad feelings. Such disharmony often led to conflict between the chief ’s sons.15 It is a discord which will recur as our story progresses.
Xhosa Warfare What is most surprising about the Ninth War is the great area of country over which it was fought, stretching from the Great Fish River in the southwest to the Mbashe River in the north-east, across which lay Pondoland. This is a distance of more than 210 kilometres, or 130 miles. The fighting corridor was rarely less than 100 kilometres (62 miles) deep from the coast, giving a war zone of some 21,000 square kilometres. The usual modus operandi of Xhosa warfare was based upon that practised by their forebears during the previous century of fighting with the Dutch and British colonists. Only rarely did they come together to fight a setpiece battle. It was largely a guerrilla war, in which the Africans struck at isolated farms and outposts or groups of men on the march, doing their bloody work and then fading back into the fastness of the bush. This was utterly unlike anything the British had encountered before, being used to formal European pitched battles, and it took some time for them to find a way of dealing with these will-o’-the-wisp tactics. The Xhosa were canny fighters who had great respect for British arms but little for the men who carried them. When one flies into an airport such as East London today, it is particularly worthwhile to look at the courses of the rivers which thread the landscape below. It will be observed that they are lined on both banks with heavy bush. The bigger the river, the wider the mantle of bush on its banks, sometimes as much as a kilometre on either side; in the case of the Great Fish River, the bush may extend for several kilometres. This bush was virtually impenetrable, consisting of trees, bushes and vines which grew in wild profusion. In places, elephant, buffalo and other large animals had made permanent tracks and it was along these that both sides were able to traverse the undergrowth. For the British soldier it was a dank, dark place where at any moment he might feel the burning agony of an iron spear head as it was thrust into him as he passed by a Xhosa ambuscade. At best, he might meet one of the animals which had made the path he was following.
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This was also a war in which the British took advantage of the availability of Africans keen to fight on their side against the Xhosa. These consisted principally of the Mfengu, only recently released from the economic shackles which had bound them in servitude to the Xhosa, and now anxious to demonstrate their hatred of their erstwhile masters in the most practical fashion.
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