At the Fireside Read online

  When we visited the hotel recently the guests in Room 10, Charlotte’s favourite haunt, if you will pardon the pun, woke up during the night when their taps were mysteriously turned on, but Clive’s wife Lyn reassured them it could have been worse: two weeks earlier, she said, a group of anglers had arrived for a fishing weekend and one of them had also had an encounter with Charlotte – ‘after his taps were turned on for the fourth time he sought refuge in a mate’s room!’

  And so today ‘Notties’ carries on its good work after well over a century of entertaining all comers. The atmosphere resonates with laughter and the clinking of glasses – whether real or a distant echo from the past. Who knows?

  The Eastern Cape – the Final Demise

  THE EASTERN CAPE –

  THE FINAL DEMISE

  Here we cover part of the history of this country that I believe has been erroneously recorded. It covers the virtual destruction of the Xhosa nation. I will tell you my interpretation of the facts, and I will leave you to draw your own conclusions as to the reasons for its demise.

  Since 1811 the Xhosas of the Eastern Cape had fought and staved off imperial expansionism, and in 1854 the stage was set for their ultimate demise as an independent nation. Various governors from Lord Charles Somerset, Sir Harry Smith and Sir George Cathcart onwards had battled with what they called the ‘Xhosa problem’ to absolutely no avail. But times were about to change.

  To understand my take on the matter you first need to delve into the past of Sir George Grey who took over in 1853 from Sir George Cathcart as the new Governor of the Cape Colony. Let’s have a look at a bit of his dubious past prior to his appointment to the Cape.

  There is no doubt that Sir George Grey was a brilliant man. At the tender age of 24, he was Governor of South Australia and, from 1845, the Governor of New Zealand. But there was a dark side to this man; according to the New Zealand historian Professor BJ Dalton he was driven by ‘a ruthless egotism’ to satisfy which he would sacrifice anything and anybody.

  Beneath his polished veneer of charm and intelligence, Dalton says, there lurked a deeply insecure personality which manifested itself as selfish, vindictive and paranoid. He considered the local Maori traditions as puerile and their religion as totally absurd, and the only way forward for New Zealand, he believed, was for them to be converted to his concept of ‘Christian civilisation’.

  By a lethal combination of brute force and barefaced lies, the Maori people lost six million acres of disputed North Island territories and thirty million acres of the South Island. Even more repulsive was his treatment of Te Rauparaha, a powerful but neutral Maori chief whom Grey accused – falsely – of conspiring to kill settlers and rape white women. Te Rauparaha was released only after his subjects agreed to surrender three million acres for white settlement. And other Maoris were not that lucky.

  It all sounds a bit like Hernán Cortés and Montezuma’s Incas …

  One Christian convert was tried by court martial, without benefit of defence counsel, and shot, while his companions were illegally transported to Australia. All these little tricks – conspiracy theories, false accusations and court martials – were Grey’s stock in trade. The chiefs began to think of a Maori king who would unite the people and resist white encroachment.

  But Grey was anxious to wind up his governorship in a blaze of glory, so he told London absolutely nothing about the true state of affairs and bombarded the Colonial Office with despatches which were a mixture of blind optimism and deliberate deceit. The distant Whitehall mandarins were completely taken in, credited Grey with a ‘singular ability in dealing with the savage races’, put him up for a knighthood (which he got) and appointed him Governor of the Cape.

  As another New Zealand historian has put it:

  Grey set forth on a policy of trickery and deceit; it is difficult to find one important subject about which Grey did not lie … the most favourable view [is] that the impact of Grey must be judged by what he did, and not from what he said he did.

  Grey was untruthful from the moment he arrived in New Zealand and was so practised in this art that it is difficult to believe that he had ever been otherwise.

  These, then, are the credentials of the man who was given ultimate authority over the Eastern Cape.

  Let us take a brief look at the Eastern Cape in the 1850s.

  It was a time of sweeping changes in the British Empire. The Crimean War, incompetently handled for the most part, had cost huge sums of money and a great number of lives, among other things, through avoidable illness. The two Boer republics to the north had been granted independence in terms of the Sand River Convention of 1852 (on which the British government was to renege in scandalous fashion in 1877).

  The Berea Expedition into Basutoland (1851–1852) and particularly the Eighth Frontier War (also known as the Mlangeni War), which lasted from 1850 to 1853, had cost the British taxpayer a million pounds – very big money in those days – and achieved very little … and when it was over the Eastern Cape was still a festering sore, as it had been for more than half a century, that appeared to be impossible to heal.

  The bottom line was that Britain was tired of paying in both blood and treasure for wars that brought no favourable outcome; the prevailing feeling at Whitehall at the time was that all the British government really needed was the economically strategic Cape of Good Hope. Consequently Grey was told to pull out all the settlers who wanted to go back to the Cape and hand the territory back to the Xhosas.

  Grey responded with a letter to the Colonial Secretary stating that he thought he had found a way to break the power of the Xhosa nation without so much as one English bullet being fired, and asked for one last chance to achieve the colonisation of the Eastern Cape. Exactly how he proposed to do this was not explained, but the Colonial Office, dazzled by his past achievements and the accolades he had received, allowed itself to be sucked in, and now the scene changed.

  Now a question arises. Why would Sir George Grey, who had not hesitated to misuse the traditional Maori belief structure in New Zealand, state that he had found a way to break the power of the Xhosa nation?

  In September 1853 a Dutch ship docked at Mossel Bay with a cargo of Friesland bulls, all of which were infected with bovine pneumonia, and the disease spread inland. This disease starts off as nothing more than a dry husky cough, but as the sickness tightens its grip, the hapless beasts die a lingering death. Tongues protruding and front legs wide apart, their nostrils dilated in a vain attempt to suck in enough air to breathe, they waste away to mere skeletons before they die.

  The Xhosa people were horrified at the devastation wreaked by the bovine pneumonia. Never in their entire history had their most prized assets been attacked by such a terrible and deadly disease; when it had taken proper hold they were said to be losing up to 5 000 head of cattle a month. And to make matters even worse, their maize crops were blighted by a grub which penetrated the roots and destroyed the stalks before the maize was edible.

  The two things they relied on for their very existence – cattle and maize – were disappearing before their very eyes and there was nothing they could do about either. The Xhosa nation was gripped by such terror of whatever was destroying the cattle and maize that Chief Phalo ordered 20 sangomas, or traditional diviners, to be killed for causing trouble.

  But now a final calamitous ingredient was added to the coming catastrophe. A young girl called Nongqawuse, who had been scaring birds from her uncle Mhalakaza’s crops at the Gxarha River’s mouth in the present Wild Coast area, returned from the fields with an electrifying story.

  While she and a companion had been scaring the birds, she related, they had been confronted by two Xhosa ancestral spirits who had told her that the cattle were dying and the maize had failed because the time had come for the defeat of the white man.

  It was a story that was both powerful and weak. Powe
rful because it struck at the heart of Xhosa superstitions and traditional beliefs at a time of widespread despair. Weak because according to all the extant accounts the ancestral shades were only ever seen twice, both times by Nongqawuse, while on a third occasion she convinced her uncle, Mhalakaza, by telling him what the shades – which were invisible and inaudible to him – were saying.

  In any case, the word spread like wildfire and the Xhosa nation slowly split into what Zakes Mda calls the believers and the non-believers. The believers said the Xhosas must kill the cattle and burn the grain, and once that had been done, a black tribe called the Russians would land to assist the Xhosas in driving the white people into the sea. The Russians, so the story flashed from mouth to mouth, had recently defeated the British in the Crimean War and killed Grey’s predecessor, Sir George Cathcart, at the Battle of Inkerman.

  Like all good rumours, this one had a basis of truth. Cathcart was a career military man and a major-general, and in 1854, after handing over to Sir George Grey, he returned to active military duty, was appointed Adjutant-General to the Forces and on 5 November that year was killed in action at Inkerman.

  Where the rumour went drastically wrong, however, was that the Russians had not won the Crimean War, having waged it even more incompetently than the British, were not black and, pre-occupied with holding their sprawling empire together, certainly had no interest whatever in aiding the Xhosas.

  The intriguing question is from whom the Xhosas got hold of the rumour about the Russians and the Crimea, a people and place almost unimaginably distant from their homeland.

  The non-believers, on the other hand, said it would be absolute madness, but the believers retorted that if this chance was missed they would never get rid of the whites – and so fanatical were they in their belief that chief after chief of Xhosa clans like the Gqunukhwebe and the Ngqika started to believe in the prophesy.

  And so the Xhosas slaughtered their remaining cattle and burned what was left of their maize, then waited for the great day when the blood-red sun would rise, pause at midday and turn back to set in the east. It did not, and soon famine stalked the Eastern Cape, harvesting its victims indiscriminately (among them Mhalakaza and his entire family).

  In their magnificent book Reminiscences of Kaffir Life and History Chas Brownlee and his wife Janet relate how the great Xhosa nation started to die of starvation. Janet tells of one woman who collapsed and perished, her baby by her side, within sight of the Brownlees’ mission station. There were rumours of cannibalism, of people eating other people’s children in order to survive. Unbearable hardship, terror and suffering stalked the green hills and lush valleys of the Transkei.

  When the famine was at its height, Grey announced that it was the Xhosas’ own belief structure that had caused their misery, and he implemented a policy which he said would ‘teach the Xhosa the value of work’. But the damage had been done. By the end of the famine the Xhosa population had dropped from around 150 000 down to only 37 000, and their beliefs and their power were gone forever.

  I have had the privilege of meeting the Fick family, of very old settler farming stock, which to this day still cultivates its land just east of Alexandria. The Ficks, like their Xhosa neighbours, preserve the stories of that terrible time. When the famine hit, the old Ficks used to take huge three-legged pots full of water and cook maize in them all day, then leave them outside to cool so that the starving tribespeople could fetch food for the elderly who were too weak to walk without losing face by being seen as beggars.

  If you ever go down to Alexandria and you ask any Xhosas how to get to the Ficks, they will greet you with a smile and tell you which road will take you to the Penenkobe (the ‘people who cooked the corn’). It is no wonder that the Ficks seldom have trouble on their farm, and that if there ever is, they don’t have to sort it out as the local people do it themselves.

  On the Ficks’ farm there is a small plaque to the memory of Nongqawuse, the young girl whose visions, real or imagined, finally persuaded the Xhosas to destroy themselves as a powerful tribe.

  But who was she really? No-one knows. It has been suggested that she was suffering from a neurotic condition brought about by her people’s suffering, and which had made her strongly suggestible. That is quite possible. A young girl with a neurotic disposition would have been under great spiritual stress at such a time.

  At the same time I can’t help wondering whether or not she was somehow unwittingly duped into doing what she did and when she did it. Similarly, I can’t help wondering what Grey had in mind when he told the Colonial Office that he had a scheme for breaking the power of the Xhosa nation. I doubt if either question will ever be answered because as far as I know there is nothing on paper about either matter.

  All I do know is that in New Zealand Grey had not hesitated to misuse the traditional Maori belief structure in New Zealand, and it is so that when the famine was raging he stated that it was the Xhosas’ own beliefs that were the cause of their downfall. That is correct, as far as it goes, but does not answer the question of why Nongqawuse announced her visions at precisely the worst moment (or the best, depending on the observer’s point of view).

  Am I impugning the reputation of a man whose tenure in the Cape Colony is commemorated by statues, place names and street names? Or have I discovered a fire whose smoke has long been dissipated by time and the official chronicles of the period? All I can say is that I believe I am doing the right thing by putting the questions and trying to find the right answers – which might be very different from the generally accepted ones.

  Very possibly this is an impossible quest given the fact that any substantiated evidence for or against seems to be lacking. But who knows what the future might bring? In the meantime, I leave it to my readers to make up their own minds.

  The War at Grahamstown

  THE WAR AT GRAHAMSTOWN

  All South Africans know vaguely about the ‘Frontier Wars’ the British waged against the Xhosas of the Eastern Cape, but not many realise the extent or the time span of those wars. To be absolutely accurate there were two frontier wars between 1779 and 1793 during the time of the Dutch East India Company, but these consisted mainly of back-and-forth cattle raiding when the belligerents were not busy planting or harvesting.

  The serious warfare began in 1811, after the second British conquest of the Cape. Between then and the last one, the so-called Tambookie Campaign of 1879, no less than eight frontier wars were fought; some commentators believe that in fact all of them formed part of one long war of attrition that lasted for almost 70 years, even though they took place years apart.

  The end, though, was inevitable. Sheer force of numbers and better weapons saw the Xhosa nation go under, just like three other independent entities in southern Africa – the two Boer republics and Zululand.

  But the Frontier Wars are a story for another occasion. What I would like to tell you about is the Battle of Grahamstown which took place on 22 April 1819. If you happen to be in Grahamstown go and have a look at the monument in High Street which not only commemorates the battle but links it to a Xhosa chief and mystic named Makana.

  To give you some background, the attack on Grahamstown was part of the Fifth Frontier War, which in turn was sparked largely by a long struggle between Ngqika, the rightful chief of the Rarabe clan, and his uncle, Ndlambe, who had been appointed regent of the clan when Ngqika inherited the chieftainacy while still a mere boy, and had then usurped the throne.

  The struggle took on an even greater intensity in 1817 when the then Governor of the Cape, Lord Charles Somerset, recognised the statesmanlike Ngqika as the paramount chief of the Ngqikas, as the Rarabes were now called after their rightful ruler. This enraged Ndlambe, and at the Battle of Amalinde (‘the place of the little hills’) in 1818 – one of the bloodiest fights in Xhosa history – he and Makana decisively defeated Ngqika with the help of Chief Hintsa’s Gc
aleka clan.

  Somerset reacted by sending a Lieutenant-Colonel Brereton to Ngqika’s assistance at the head of a combined force of soldiers and burgher commandos. Brereton crossed the Fish River, joined hands with Ngqika’s followers and advanced on Ndlambe. Ndlambe did not give battle on open terrain, which would have favoured Brereton, but withdrew to thickly bushed areas where he and his men would have the advantage.

  Wisely, Brereton did not attempt to follow Ndlambe’s warriors into this deathtrap, but destroyed their kraals and confiscated 23 000 head of cattle. Then he returned to Grahamstown. There the burgher commandos were demobilised and the soldiers returned to their barracks.

  But Ndlambe was not finished with the British and neither was his charismatic spiritual adviser, the prophet-chief Makana. Makana was revered among Xhosas – he was not only a fighting man but a diviner who was widely believed to be in communication with the spirits of past tribal heroes and whose visions and dreams were divinely inspired.

  Makana was the chief originator of the attack on Grahamstown. He assured Ndlambe that the tribal deities would be on their side if they attacked Grahamstown, adding that he had made up special medicine which would turn the British bullets to water. Makana’s long-term plan was far more ambitious: the complete expulsion of all whites from the eastern frontier. Ndlambe, who was now in his seventies, approved the plan, and Makana started gathering his forces, estimates of which range from 6 000 to 10 000.

  At that time Grahamstown was merely a straggling village with about 30 houses and some government offices, all grouped around the high street and the market square, and, further east, the ‘East Barracks’, the headquarters of the Cape Corps (and now the site of the Fort England Asylum).

  So confident of victory was Makana that on 21 April 1819 he sent a message to the commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Wiltshire of the 38th Regiment, which read: ‘Tomorrow I will have breakfast with you.’ Not to be outdone, Wiltshire told the messenger, ‘Tell your master that I shall have everything ready for his reception.’