Roots of Outrage. John Davis Gordon
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new nooses the priest led the emotional people in prayer again. Then the condemned men sought permission to sing a hymn. This was granted, and the tearful cadence rose up. Then one of the condemned asked permission to say a few last words, and in a shaking voice he urged his brethren to heed his unhappy fate. They mounted the scaffold again. The magistrate ordered another roll of drums. The platform was kicked away.
This time the ropes held: the men hung, their eyes bulging and their tongues sticking out, excrement dripping down their kicking legs, and a howl of anguish went up from the people.
King Henry the Navigator called it the Cape of Good Hope, for he was sure it was the sea-route to China, but despite its mercantile importance this southern tip of Africa lay unoccupied until, in 1652, the Dutch East India Company established a small revictualling station for its ships there, called Cape Town. The Company had no intention of colonising the interior, but within a hundred and fifty years Dutch farmers had, in defiance of Company edicts, wandered six hundred miles along the rugged coastal hinterland with their cattle, building mud and thatch homesteads, then wandering on after a while. They were called Trekboers, and a new language evolved, a bastard Dutch called Afrikaans.
Theirs was a good life, called the Lekker Lewe, of limitless land, adequate slave labour and security, for they met no Caffres – as black men were then called – the hinterland being empty but for small bands of nomadic Bushmen who were soon driven out. But finally they came to the big river called the Fish, and beyond were many warlike Caffres, the Xhosa, and they were also cattle men.
The Company forbade the Trekboers to cross the Fish River, to have any contact with the Xhosa. But there was always cattle thievery, followed by raids to recover the cattle (and probably a few more besides), and by the time the British occupied the Cape in 1806 to protect her Far Eastern trade against Napoleon there had already been three bloody, full-scale ‘Kaffir’ Wars.
The British were mighty unwelcome amongst the rough and ready Boers. And with the Redcoats the Age of Enlightenment arrived at the wild and woolly colony, in the form of the London Missionary Society and British justice. The missionaries blamed the frontiersmen for the Kaffir Wars, and the British magistrates busied themselves with cases of mistreatment of slaves and servants, which was deeply resented. A handful of Boers plotted a rebellion after one of their number was shot dead resisting arrest, and their leader stole across the Fish River to make a treasonous pact with the dreaded Xhosa: Join forces with me, together we’ll drive the British into the sea and then divide the land between us. The wily Xhosa chief declined. The rebellion was quickly put down by the redcoats, but the British took treason seriously and their ringleaders were sentenced to death. Their ghastly public execution at Slagter’s Nek followed.
It is bitterly remembered to this day. And history was to repeat itself.
At about the same time, far away on the lush coast of south-east Africa, there arose a warrior king called Shaka, who welded together the nation of the Zulus, the ‘People of Heaven’. The Zulus made war on neighbouring tribes, who fled and made war on their neighbours, all killing and plundering for food. This period was called the Mfecane, which means the ‘crushing’. It was a time of chaos, the veld blackened with burnings and littered with skeletons. One of Shaka’s generals, Mzilikazi, rebelled and led his people up onto the highlands, making mayhem more terrible, and established a new nation called the Matabele, which means the ‘destroyers’. The dislocations pressed upon the Xhosa, who had no place to go but across the Fish River into white man’s land; the cross-border thieving, raids and counter-raids got worse.
The government decided to settle thousands of British immigrants on farms along the Fish, to form a buffer zone, and forts were built; but the thieving continued and in the next decade there were two more full-scale wars. The missionaries blamed the frontiersmen and raised a furore in London, so the imperial government hesitated to act decisively against the Xhosa. And then the missionaries forced the repeal of the Vagrancy Laws, so now blacks roved the frontier at will, thieving. And then the Abolition of Slavery Act was passed: all slaves throughout the British Empire would be emancipated at midnight 31st December 1834. This would wreak great hardship on the Cape’s frontier. On Christmas Day 1834, six days before the slaves were to be freed, the Sixth Kaffir War broke out. It was the bloodiest of all.
As the frontiersmen celebrated Christmas, there was a massive eruption of Xhosa warriors across the Fish, burning, killing, plundering. They swarmed over thousands of square miles before they were driven back across the Fish by British troops and frontier commandos. It was the costliest war in the frontier’s bloody history; eight hundred farms destroyed, hundreds of thousands of cattle stolen. It took six months to drive them further back across a distant river, for the British commander intended to create a militarised cordon sanitaire to keep the races apart. There was rejoicing on the frontier, for it looked as if a new order was being ushered in at last.
But it was not to be. The missionaries blamed the frontiersmen for the war, and so the imperial government ordered that the newly annexed buffer zone be abandoned. It seemed towering folly: the thievery and wars would continue. There was outrage on the frontier. And then the news came that the British government had reneged on its promise to compensate slave-owners fairly: the sum of three million pounds that had been allocated for the purpose was reduced to one million, and would only be given to those who journeyed to London to claim it.
The sense of outrage redoubled on the frontier, amongst Boer and Briton alike, for who would leave his farm unprotected from marauding Xhosa for a year to make an expensive journey to London?
And so the Great Trek began. And Ernest Mahoney, from New York, enters our story.
The Great Trek was not a sudden, stormy mobilization of an angry people, as romantic chroniclers like Ernest Mahoney have suggested, it was the slow culmination of bitter debate that had been going on since the terrible Slagter’s Nek hangings: the thievery, the repeal of the Vagrancy Laws, the ‘ungodly’ attitude of the British towards master-and-servant relationships, the injustice of the missionaries, the Abolition of Slavery Act which defrauded them, the terror and devastation of Kaffir Wars, the British government’s refusal to fight them decisively. The Great Trek was a gradual consensus of people who had been bitterly tried, God-fearing folk who knew little other than the Bible and the gun, who had finally had enough of their incompetent, duplicitous government. In part it was the old trek spirit of their forefathers coming back, the quest for pastures new and the Lekker Lewe, but more important was the resentful determination to set their world to rights. One after another the hardy Boers packed up their wagons, rounded up their herds and set off. Out of the mauve hills of the frontier they rolled northwards, up into the highveld of Trans-Orangia, to find their Promised Land.
It was in Piet Retief that the people found their Moses. It was he who published the Voortrekker Manifesto:
… We despair of saving this country from the threat posed by vagrants ... nor do we see any prospect of peace for our children … Be it known that we are resolved, wherever we go, that we will uphold the just principle of liberty; but whilst no one shall be in a state of slavery, it is our determination to maintain such regulations as may suppress crime and preserve proper relations between master and servant … We shall not molest any people, nor deprive them of the smallest property; but, if attacked, we shall consider ourselves fully justified in defending our persons and effects to the utmost …
It was a profession of faith, an enunciation of constitutional principles for a democratic Boer republic. Much of the turbulent story of South Africa is a betrayal of that manifesto.
Enter Ernest Mahoney of New York, sent thither by the Harker-Mahoney Shipping Company to investigate trading opportunities in this opening-up of the African hinterland. A hundred and twenty years later, when Ernest’s great grandson, Luke Mahoney, read his forebear’s journals of that epic time, he could visualise the meeting of shareholders in New York, the rotund old chairman, Ernest’s grandfather, saying:
‘The Mahoneys were amongst the first to transplant the principles of our magnificent American Revolution across the oceans ... Amongst the first to seize the unspoilt virtue of our frontier heritage and reject the wiliness of the Old World, “its useless memories and vain feuds”, amongst