History of South Africa podcast Desmond Latham

Episode 180 it is then so let’s get cracking.

Or crackling, which was the atmosphere in late 1850 as Xhosaland and British Kaffraria was seized by the exploits of prophet Mlanjeni.

He’d combined world views, his messianic emergence shook the land as far away as Cape Town.

AS a sickly young man from near King Williams Town, he’d disappeared to work in the Cape Colony and returned in 1850 claiming to have been living under the sea. Not quite Sponge Bob because unlike that loveable kids character, Mlanjeni said it was during his stint underwater that God spoke to him.

You’ll remember how I explained that Mlanjeni took to sitting in pools in nearby rivers and streams, the water lapping against his face as he sat deep in thought.

At first he seemed to be in sync with the missionaries and the Governor Harry Smith, saying the amaXhosa should abandon witchcraft, avoid raiding settler cattle and so on. However his message morphed as I explained, and very soon he was exorting his numerous adherents to stop burning the wood of gum trees — an invasive species — he believed the exotic tree symbolised white influence.

Word spread, and some began saying that Mlanjeni had miraculous powers, he could light his pipe from the sun, he wore his face on one cheek so he could spot witches and paralyse them.

When the missionaries heard that he was also saying that he could heal the sick, give sight to the blind, to make the mute speak and the lame walk. He refused to accept gifts, and the chiefs and commoners streamed to his home. Then the British tried to arrest him and he disappeared, thus growing more power in the eyes of his adherents.
We need to focus on these religious matters, so a quick return to the men in black.
The missionaries were in a spot. Robert Niven of the United Presbyterian Church was holding forth in Keiskamma hoekDown the road was a man who you could say was taking his position as missionary into the missionary position.

George Brown lived on the plains below the Amatolas, not far from the Thyumi valley, arriving in early 1849. At first people noted how he had a kind and manly appearance. But very soon, however, the manly appearance took on a reverential lust — a scandalous man as you’ll hear.
But first, he seduced the young Janet Chalmers, William Chalmers daughter, and John Forbes Cumming hated him so much for this act, that the two men spoke only through letters. Brown was forced to marry Janet Chalmers in August 1850, five months pregnant.Harry Smith by now was on the frontier, and Sandile’s mother Sutu who was Ngqika’s widow, went to the Thyumi mission station on 9th December to speak with him. She asked why the English wanted another war. Smith said that the chiefs were not paying fines and she warned

“You have taken away all my power, you take away the power of the chiefs, and then you find fault with us for not keeping the people in order…”
Christmas Eve was the date selecte by Harry Smith as the day his intimidatory force as Noel Mostert Called it, up the Boma Pass into the Amatola mountains. It was exactly sixteen years to the day of the outbreak of the Frontier War of 1834.

This is episode 179 and the prophet Mlanjeni is about to emerge. His story is one of the phenomenal tales of our land, he joined an already fairly long list of colonial era fighters who imbued their struggle against encroaching settlers with a combination of christian salvation ethos and a narrative full of amaXhosa ancient mystery and magic.

If you recall last episode, Mlanjeni had been calling all local spiritual leaders to his home, where they were to pass between two poles that had been cleansed and purified.

After this other rank and file amaXhosa were being called to be cleansed by Mlanjeni from his — village amongst the Ndlambe people — a people who were now being administered by Commissioner John Maclean.

As you heard last episode Maclean had written a brief message to Governor Harry Smith about the rising excitement amongst the amaXhosa about Umlanjeni’s prophecies. It was Messianic paradigm, eventually morphing into the a mythos about the triumphant resurrection of the ancestors who were going to drive the English back into the sea.

This message has been repeated since.

So let’s take a much closer look at Prophet Umlanjeni. What made him tick?

By the time he was a youth of 18, he had begun to fast regularly in the manner of all other messianic messengers like Moses or Mohammed — a process guaranteed to lead to hallucination. Without going too far into the weeds here, those who go on hunger strike or fast extensively report there is an incredible psychological impact.

Fasting beyond 72 hours for example causes a deficiency in nutrients, muscles begin to break down, dizziness and dehydration occur. As the prophet continues to fast, hallucinations can be extreme, as electrolyte imbalances trigger brain malfunction leading to delirium.
IT was in this delirius state the Umlanjeni found his happy place. And as psychologists will tell you, those with preexisting mental conditions should not fast beyond what is accepted as healthy.

When Mlanjeni called his people to the two poles for cleansing, he could barely walk he was so frail from his fastidious fasting. It was 18th August 1850 when Maclean first heard about this wardoctor, who at this point merely appeared to be a somewhat misguided youngster with pre-existing mental conditions.
Mlanjeni, like the previous wardoctor Nxele, had lived in the Cape Colony and heard the messages of Christianity and Islam. When he returned to the Ndlambe people living near the Amatola mountains, people say he had changed. His family said he took to sitting in a nearby river, in the still waters of a pool, sitting here in water up to his neck, musing on the world, refusing to eat.

He said he was talking to the spirit world, to his ancestors and he was infused with divine powers, endowed with the capacity to relay the messages from the ancients to the amaXhosa. He was told he had to purify his people, and the way he was going to do this was similar to War Doctor Nxele, also known as Makana.
He said the ubuthi was the root cause of all amaXhosa suffering, linked to disease and death, and he declared “Let us cast it away, and come to me to be cleansed…”

Normally, a grandiose claim of this sort from a troubled youth would have been ignored, but the amaXhosa across the Cape were ripe and ready for such a message. Their leaders had failed them, the traditional ways had failed them, and here was a messiah, preaching in a manner that was uplifting.

And a succession of British blunders were to take place which exacerbated the situation.

The mid-nineteenth Century was like the calm before the storm with the discovery of diamonds a decade away, and then the wars between the Boers and Brits, and the Brits and amaZulu a glimmer in the imperial eye.

Moshoeshoe was gaining power amongst the Basotho, and to the east, Mpande continued to dream of crushing the amaSwazi.

But to the South on Christmas Day 1850, another frontier war in a long and bitter series between the Cape colony and the amaXhosa erupted in the wake of the witchcraft eradication processes enforced by Governor Harry Smith.

I spent much of last episode explaining the religious and social ethos and differences between the empire and missionaries on one side, and the amaXhosa and their spiritual leaders on the other.

Mlanjeni one of these spiritual leaders was the driver of this attempt by the amaXhosa to throw off the yoke of the empire. Andries Stockenstrom had been warning the British for some time that their tone-deaf and blunt attempts at destroying the power of the amaXhosa chiefs was not just chafing the people of British Kaffraria, but becoming dangerous.

Smith had been compelled to maintain a heavy force of patrols in this territory to enforce the removals of the amaXhosa from land now allocated to English farmers and dislodge those who’d returned to places from which they’d already been driven.

It was like the very definition of madness. The British authorities were repeating exactly what they’d done to the Xhosa before the Seventh Frontier War of 1846 and 1847.

Since then they’d been very busy.

The British had laid out an extensive series of roads and forts, centred on King Williams’ Town which was the main pivot for this grid of power in and around the Amatola mountains. The town was about 22 kilometers south of the base of these picturesque peaks, on the banks of the Buffalo River which provided protection against assault from the high ground.
It was the Boma Pass down to the Keiskamma River that troubled the British soldiers most, it also extended upwards into the Amatola mountains behind the Fort to a point known as Keiskamma Hoek — the source of the Keiskamma where another mission station called Uniondale was located. This is not to be confused with the town of Uniondale in the Karoo.

After looking out from Keiskamma Hoek, taking in the scenic views, swept up in the wonder of the beauty of this region, you’d climb back on your intrepid pony and head back down the trail past Fort Cox and Burnshill, towards Fort White, and then onwards another 30 kilometers or so to Fort Hare.
Many military historians have fixated on the British propensity to forget what they’d learned in previous wars, it was a kind of disease of the age, which would become a pandemic during the Anglo-Boer War, then a catastrophic forgetfulness by the First World War.
The Khoekhoe were now extremely angry at the British authorities for messing around with the Kat River Settlement agreements, and the Boers had been embittered by Harry Smith’s unilateral annexation of the TransOrangia region. This grew into a seething hatred when Smith had a young Boer called Thomas Dreyer executed.
With so many Boers gone in the Great Trek, the British had to rely on the Khoekhoe and unfortunately for the people of the Kat River, the people now being called the coloured people, opprobrium and malice were heaped upon them. Who needs enemies when the British treated their friends like this?

We’re plunging into the developments of the 1850s now and this is episode 177.
In numerology the digits 1 and 7 are significant,1 represents new beginnings and leadership, while 7 is often associated with spirituality and introspection.
So it’s no mistake this this episode probes spirituality and introspection - and leadership.
Not that I necessarily ascribe to the tenets of numerology, but its a useful way into a sensitive subject.
By mid-19th Century, most of the game of the Cape, from the north, the east to the south, had been shot out. The amaXhosa had been driven across the Fish River in 1812, out of the Kat River Valley in 1829, then right past the Keiskamma River in 1847.

None of the land they lived on west of the Kei was secure, no longer did the sons of the chiefs leave their dad’s homesteads to seek out their own virgin territory because there was none left.
In the old days, when a man died his hometead was burned down and vacated where as now and the new cattle enclosure was built back to back with the old one. Dwellings were clustered closer together, and not everyone lived near a river unlike the century before.

This was change, and now drought took on calamatous forms. Before the people could move to water now they were stuck on the landscape. So it was not surprising that given the pressures of people and animals, the first great cattle lungsickness to be registered in this region followed hard on the land losses of 1850 to 1853.

The amaXhosa men were now labouring for the very people who had supplanted them, deprived of their means of subsistence and independence. Many amaXhosa had worked for the farmers and settlers before this time, and contrary to most reports, many were quite happy to do so because they earned cash, and left when they felt like it.

The standard of living on these farms determined how long the workers remained at least until this period of our history. The option of leaving at their own discretion eroded rapidly as the access to cattle as wealth eroded. The smaller Xhosaland could no longer support the population. Even within Xhosaland the men and women were now unconsciously working for the settlers by growing forage they sold to the farms, and then making some money to buy textiles and pots and pans.

Here is the crux of the contradiction in colonialism. That the people who bought the clothing preferred to buy this clothing than manufacture their skin karosses of yore, and yet, by doing so, they were becoming dependent on the cash they made from their labour.

As colonial intervention increased, a seachange in Xhosa politics took place. The petty rivalries of the various chiefs was encouraged by some of colonial officials, the divide and rule precursor and the new governor Sir Harry Smith was particularly active in his attempts to divide the royal line of the amaXhosa and the commoners.

This was not working. He’d try to ban lobola, he’d tried to usurp the power of the chiefs, but the commoners did not buy into the British plan. It was such a cynical move that the commoners despite little access to power, preferred their chiefs and an age of proper resistance to colonialism began.
This is the period that saw the rise of leaders who would be recalled all the way through the struggle period during apartheid, names like Hintsa, Sarhili, Ndlambe, Chungwa, Maqoma, Tyhali and Sandile.
As I’ve pointed out through this series, the grafting of two types of cosmology together, the ancient African legends and power ethos, with a salvation tale through the story of the cross, featured throughout our history of connection.

This is the period of the utilitarian liberal, not of the democrat, it’s 1850 and in the Cape, a newly ninted constitution had been drafted by the attorney general, William Porter.

This was based on a nonracial qualified franchise - all adult males who had occupied property worth at least twenty five pounds for a year were eligible to vote. Porter had toiled on the draft of this document for the also newly minted Governor, Sir Harry Smith, who sent it to London.

Porter later in 1850 had a complete change of heart as utilitarian liberals tend to do, he denounced the option of univesal suffrage — at least for men of all colours — as threatening to the colony with its in his words, “communism, socialisms, and red republicanism which had caused so much mischief in France….”

There had been an attempted major communist revolution in France in 1848, which spilled over into other parts of western Europe including the land that would become known as Germany. This horrified utilitarians everywhere, no less so in the Cape Colony.

As the ship bearing Smith’s new constitution headed north, another was heading south and crossed each other somewhere out there on the wild untamed ocean. It was a dispatch from Colonial Secretary Earl Grey who proposed sending Irish convicts to the Cape.

Smith announced this proposal to the horrified residents of Cape Town and immediately aroused a storm of agitation against the Governor. The settlers had been considering representative government for some time and this suggestion of Irish convicts arriving backfired — driving many more of the moderate thinkers into the arms of those who were agitating for some form of independent governance.
The colonists regarded the Irish as a threat to their respectability and citizens used the concept as a weapon to attaack the oligarchy that ran the Cape at the time. It was a legislative council, nominated by Governors not elected by the people so it had been tainted constantly by allegations of corruption, nepotism, and a host of other maladies associated with power wielded too long by men who were mostly too greedy.

The convicts duly arrived on a ship called Neptune, but they were refused entry to Cape Town, and the men sat in chains in Simon’s Bay for five months. Eventually in 1850 the ship was ordered to sail away.

One of the main antagonists in this crazy story was a man called John Montagu. He had been alarmed by how the Irish convict idea had radicalised even his mild-mannered friends, and so he demanded that Smith reimpose some kind of authority and stop this movement towards representative government.

Montagu argued that the whole idea was anti-English, not what the British should be supporting, so Smith delayed the implementation.

But what was going on was very very interesting. The hullabaloo had revealed two very distinct political movements inside the Cape. One was conservative, pro-English and pro-British government, led by Montagu, joined by the big merchants of Cape Town. They were also joined by the Eastern Cape settlers led by their flag bearer, Grahamstown Journal Editor and land speculator Robert Godlonton. Another powerful figure joined this conservative echelon, and that was the newly arrived Anglican Bishop, Robert Gray.

A newspaper called the Cape Monitor was launched in October 1850 by these conservatives.

The second political movement were the radicals, both British and Afrikaner, led by John Fairbairn, Christoffel Brand, Francis William Reitz and Andries Stockenstrom. They regarded the conservatives as a corrupt bunch of nepotists, an oligarchy, but they were divided by what to do about frontier policy. Fairbairn used his newspaper the South African Advertiser to defend the rights of blacks, while Brand preferred to defend the rights of the Dutch descendents against the oppression of old-English money elites. Stockenstrom had his own varied approach to both.

This is episode 175 - and we’re back in the Cape circa 1849 and thereabouts.

Before we dive into the latest incidents and events, let’s take a look at what was going on globally as everything is connected.

In France, citizens are able to use postage stamps for the very first time, a series called Ceres, which is also a place in the Western Cape. The Austrian Army invades Hungary entering the countries two capitals, which back in 1849 were called Buda and Pest. Next door, Romanian paramilitaries laid into Hungarian civilians, killing 600 in what we’d call ethnic cleansing.

The second Anglo-Sikh war was on the go in India, and the British suffered a defeat at the Battle of Tooele, while across the ocean in Canada, the Colony of Vancouver Island was established. This is important because that’s where one of my ancestors eloped later in the 19th Century for the metropolis that was Beaufort West.

Elizabeth Blackwell was awarded her M.D, thus becoming the first women doctor in the United States, and the Corn Laws were officially repealed by the UK Parliament. These were tariffs and trade resctrictions on imported food — including all grains like Barley, wheat and oats. I mention this because the repeal spelled the death knell to British mercantilism — skewing the value of land in the UK, raised food prices there artificially, and hampered the growth of manufacturing.

The Great Famine of Ireland between 1845 and 1852 had also revealed a real need to produce alternative food supplies through imports. It was this change that led to free trade finally being ushered into Britain — and of course this created opportunities for Southern African farmers.

It’s also the year the first Kennedy arrives in America, a refugee of the Irish Famine.

More prosaic perhaps, in New York on a cold February day, President James Knox Polk became the first president to have his photograph taken, while Minnesota became a formal US territory and the settlement of Fort Worth in Texas is founded.

In July, a slave revolt at the Charleston Workhouse breaks out led by Nicholas Kelly, but plantation owners manage to suppress the revolt and hang 3 of the leaders including Kelly. Later in September, African-American abolitionist and hero Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery.
And importantly for our story, Sir Benjamin D’Urban, after whom Durban in KZN is named and one of the Governors of the Cape, died in Montreal, Canada.

Back to the Cape, because the anger at Harry Smith’s new policies were curing, nay, ripening, stewing, brewing amongst the amaXhosa.

Arriving in the Eastern Cape, Harry was committed to reinstating the D’Urban system with which he had been associated - and which Lord Glenelg back in the colonial office has rejected.

But now Earl Grey was in the colonial hot seat back home and he gave the thumbs up. Smith set to work sorting out the administration, appointing members of the settler elite to official positions including Richard Southey as his personal secretary. AS a close colleague of Grahamstown Journal Editor and rabid anti-Xhosa Robert Godlonton, he was chosen for his anti-black bias.

If you remember how Smith had arrived, placing his foot on amaXhosa chief Maqoma’s neck, and his new edicts including the creation of British Caffraria — the previously known ceded territory —you can imagine how he was regarded further east.
What is not common knowledge these days is that there was great demand for children under the age of ten to work in the Western Cape. Of course, this was not a proper labour environment, and the shift meant that these young boys and girls, and their mothers and fathers, were being turned into indentured labourers. This was a free market situation of the amaXhosa being able to hawk their labour for a fair price.

Many were told they would be paid a wage, only to find that the terms of contract were vague, they were now receiving unspecified promises and the fabric of rural life