Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (6 page)

Now they began to think of themselves as a State. They were the
Maatschappij
‚ the Company of Emigrant South Africans, self-constituted in reaction to the British Empire, and from their leaders, so often at each other’s throats, they chose a Captain General. Piet Retief at 56 was more sophisticated than most of his contemporaries. He was of Huguenot stock, had grown up in the wine country around Stellenbosch, had lived in Cape Town and was a born wanderer, destined never to settle. He it was who gave the Great Trek its manifesto. Like most such declarations, it was meant to be read between the lines.
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‘As we desire to stand high in the estimation of our brethren,’ it said, ‘be it known
inter alia
that we are resolved, wherever we go, that we will uphold the just principle of liberty; but whilst we will take care that 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 will 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 of our ability….’

There one hears, perhaps for the first time, the authentic voice of Afrikaner self-justification: the flattened cadences, slightly petulant,
with which for a century or more the Boers were to plead their grievances and their cause—a peasant voice, uneducated and unsubtle, but more determined and more courageous than the British would usually suppose. Retief and his colleagues, in their laager beneath the Drakensberg, went on to establish the structure of the State. They determined its name—not New Eden, as had been suggested, but the Free Province of New Holland in South Africa. They adopted a constitution, with a Governor, a Council of Policy and a Court. They decreed that all members of the Volk must take an oath of loyalty: defaulters would be excommunicated, denied civic privileges and perhaps declared Enemies of the People. In a spirit of exaltation only intermittently marred by feuds and jealousies, the great body of the Voortrekkers, in the summer of 1837, thankfully beyond the reach of the British Empire, prepared to seize and settle for ever their Israel in the north.

To the south of them lay the coastline of the eastern Cape, now intermittently settled for some 500 miles by British colonists. It is difficult to imagine a society more different from the nomad encampments of the Voortrekkers: yet each was a frontier community in its way, and while the Voortrekkers debate their future with psalms and recriminations away in the empty veld, let us leave them for a while with their impending destiny, and descend the escarpment of the Little Karroo to visit the very British coastal village of Knysna—to point not a moral, as both sides might claim, but only a contrast.

A track led there out of the foothills, dropping through wooded gorges and tortuous passes, between splendid thickets of stinkwood and white pear, to a point where suddenly between the trees one saw a small streak of pure white substance, trapped apparently in a defile among the hills. It looked like a line of snow, or a patch of brilliant white sand, but it was really the Indian Ocean, perpetually foaming between the high looming headlands that were called Knysna Heads. Nowhere on the whole African coast was more exhilarating. The surf was tremendous. The rocks were black and bold.
Gulls swirled in the wind, cormorants dived recklessly into whirlpools, spray hung on the air, and all day long tides echoed, sucking and reverberating, against the black masses of the headland.

Inside the Heads there lay a lagoon. Around it the British had established a settlement, and had already transplanted to that savage place their own habits and values. The Royal Navy maintained a station at Knysna, but the tone of the hamlet was set by its principal landowner and first citizen, George Rex Esquire, who lived in gentlemanly style in the manor house of Melkhout Kraal. All the scattered farms that looked down upon the Knysna lagoon, black-thatched and white-plastered at the forest’s edge, formed part of Mr Rex’s estate, and around his presence, and the rent-books of his busy factor, the whole heirarchy of Englishness was assembled upon this distant frontier.

The country was wild—elephants still visited the lagoon shore—but the village was ordered and discreet. Its dust streets were rolled and watered, its houses were neatly thatched, and on a convenient corner stood the St George’s Tavern (landlord Tom Horn, lately of Bristol). The social order was self-evident. At the bottom were the coloured labourers, so recently released from slavery. Then came the few local Boers, who talked only a sort of pidgin English, and who lived as woodcutters in the forest, or foremen on the farms. Then there were the small tenant farmers; the captains of the Kynsna-based ships, Scotsmen and Irishmen chiefly and powerful drinkers; the local tradesmen and merchants, the apothecary, the chandlers; and there were the grander gentlemen settlers, the Barringtons, the Duthies, the Nelsons, the Sutherlands, the Botterills, or the widow Fauconnier and her children, in whose parlour, in the absence of a church, the Reverend Charles Bull used to take Sunday services, and Captain Duthie, Justice of the Peace, held his periodic courts.

And at the top was Mr Rex, who had personally approved all the original settlers. Rex lived like a polite English gentleman-farmer upon a large scale, but rumour suggested that he was something rather more: and what capped the ineffable Englishness of his village, and made it so unutterably alien to the harsh republicanism of the Voortrek laagers over the mountains, was the fact that, if what one
heard was true, the Squire of Knysna was the natural son of George III—Queen Victoria’s uncle. Nobody knew for sure, but just the suggestion was enough to ensure for him a feudal respect. Officialdom was fulsome in its gratitude, when Mr Rex erected an obelisk, or donated a site for a parish church. His labourers and artisans were gratified by his every condescension, his tenants were honoured by his briefest visit, curtseys and raised hats followed him down the village street: for this little microcosm of the English way even reproduced that trust in the divine grace of monarchs which was at once the equivalent and the antithesis of the Boer belief in the divine privileges of themselves.

How the Voortrekkers would have loathed it! How smug it would have seemed to them, how patronizing, how impious too! Knysna was a demonstration of all they most resented in the imperial presence: like suburbia to an old-school gypsy, perhaps, or barracks life to a guerrilla.
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But they were far away from George Rex and his kind. In the flank of the Drakensberg they discussed their next moves. Some decided they would stay where they were, in the country between the Orange and the Vaal rivers. Some thought they would cross the Vaal, to settle in the high grasslands of the Gatstrand and the Witwatersrand. But Piet Retief had his mind upon Natal, the glorious green country on the coast, lush, forested, watered, warm in the bitterest winter, in the summer freshened by breezes off the sea or the high mountains that bounded it inland. In October, 1837, he rode ahead with a party of horsemen and, passing through a pass in the Drakensberg, saw this paradise for the first time: there it lay
below the mountains, green and warm, with palms and bananas, heavenly wild flowers of the tropics, magnificent forests of yellow-wood and tambuti, and far in the distance beyond the downlands and the coastal plain, the blue line of the Indian Ocean. ‘The most beautiful land,’ wrote Retief, ‘I have ever seen in Africa.’

Surely it was Israel. Few Europeans lived in it, and few Africans either, while the British Empire had specifically declined to annex it. Its only suzerain was King Dingaan of the Zulus, and he did not live there himself, but claimed it merely as buffer territory to his Kingdom of Zululand farther north. With this capricious but formidable barbarian Retief, riding down through the foothills with 14 men and four wagons, accordingly opened negotiations.

Dingaan lived in some state. The name of his royal kraal, Umgungundhlovu, meant The Secret Plot of the Elephant, and commemorated Dingaan’s assassination of his half-brother Shaka, the greatest of Zulu kings. It was a city of thatched beehive houses above a stream. Behind it the humped wilderness of Zululand stretched away to the north, a terrific empty country of dry hills and green river-beds, speckled only with the villages of the Zulu pastoralists. The nearest European settlement to the east was the Portuguese colony of Delagoa Bay, a thousand miles away: the nearest to the west was Grahamstown, far across the wasteland of the Transkei. The Zulus, a highly organized fighting people, lived in a condition of terrible isolation, having slaughtered most of their nearer neighbours.

The King loved display. He surrounded himself with plump women, jesters and dwarfs. He liked to show off his famous glutton Menyosi, who could eat a whole goat in a single meal. His palace was a great mud hut, its floor rubbed with fat to make it shine, its reed roof beautifully woven, and around it stood hundreds of huts in circular groups: huts for the wives and concubines of the king, huts for the young warriors of the bodyguard, huts for the royal weapons. A large cattle-kraal stood ostentatiously near the palace, the wealth of the Zulus being expressed in cows, and behind it the lazy circling of vultures marked the Hill of Execution, which was littered with human bones and scavenged by hyaenas.

Retief was courteously received. Warriors danced for him,
marvellous in beads and ostrich feathers, with great skin shields brandished high, and plumes bobbing above their heads, and trained red oxen moving in rhythm with their gestures. Dingaan himself, bald, greased and resplendent in red, white and black, welcomed him graciously from his throne at the gate of the cattle kraal. Their talks were brief and to the point. Retief wanted simply to settle his people in the unoccupied territory of Natal, and Dingaan almost immediately concurred. The Boers could settle there, but only if they first performed a service for Dingaan: reclaim from the Basuto chieftain Sikonyela, in the mountains, a number of Zulu cattle he had lately stolen. When they had brought these beasts back to Umgungundhlovu, preferably with Sikonyela too, then the Boers could move into Natal.

Retief was delighted, and the Boers rode back in high spirits to the Voortrekker encampments beside the Drakensberg. The news preceded them, and the Afrikaners, quoting psalms, texts and prophecies, in-spanned at once and hastened impulsively through the passes, helter-skelter down the escarpment into Natal, until there were a thousand wagons, perhaps 4,000 Boers, prematurely encamped around the headwaters of the Tugela within Dingaan’s putative territory. There the first citizen was born upon the soil of New Holland, and the Voortrekkers felt that the worst of their hardships were over.

It did not take Retief long to perform his commission. With fifty burghers and ten of Dingaan’s Zulus he moved swiftly into the Basuto country, enticed Sikonyela into his camp, kidnapped him and held him prisoner until all the 700 stolen cattle were handed over. A week later Retief set off, with a commando of seventy volunteers and thirty coloured servants, to claim his reward from Dingaan. By now rumours had reached the Voortrekkers that the Zulu king might be less friendly than he seemed. He had been alarmed by the Boer victory at Vegkop—he resented the impetuous entry of the trekkers into Natal—he really had no intention at all of allowing the Boers to settle in his territory—he was blood-crazed and treacherous to the core. (‘Who can fight with thee?’ his warriors used to intone before him, dancing ferociously for hours at a time. ‘No king can fight with thee. They that carry firearms cannot fight with thee.’)

But Retief and his men rode boldly back to Umgungundhlovu, and found themselves respectfully welcomed again. There were dances and parades once more. The King talked at length about this and that. Zulu impis marched and counter-marched, beating their war-drums. After three days of mixed entertainment and discussion, Dingaan announced that all was settled, and he signed with his mark a deed granting to the Boers—‘the Dutch Emigrant South Africans’—all the land between the Tugela and the Umzimvubu rivers, ‘and from the sea to the north as far as the land may be useful and in my possession’. Natal was theirs, ‘for their everlasting property’. Retief and his lieutenants, leaving their weapons outside, entered the central kraal to seal the concord with a libation of African beer, while the dancers tossed and whirled in celebration around them, and the drums beat wildly.

They drank: and as they did so Dingaan, rising terribly to his feet in black and feathered splendour, cried ‘
Bulala
ama
Tagati
!’—‘Kill the wizards!’ Instantly the warriors and the dancers fell upon the Boers. They dragged them to the Hill of Execution, and there, binding their hands and feet with hide thongs, they beat their heads in with clubs and drove wooden spikes, as thick as a man’s arm, from their anuses through their chests. Retief was the last to die: they forced him to watch the sufferings of his comrades, and then they cut his heart and liver out, and buried them symbolically beneath the track that led across the river into Natal—‘the road of the farmers’, as Dingaan contemptuously called it.

Down on the coast, though most of the Voortrekkers did not realize it, a British colony of sorts was already established, by the precarious consent of the Zulus. Port Natal had no sanction from London, and Retief had assumed that it would easily be absorbed into the Free Province of New Holland—its only imperial representative was a retired Royal Navy officer, now an Anglican missionary, who had been given powers of magistracy by the Governor of the Cape.

It was a drab little settlement. Except for a couple of stores its buildings were only mud huts, scattered in the coastal scrub. Its
citizens were mostly dubious adventurers, half-African of habit—ivory traders or hunters, who dressed in a mixture of European and Zulu dress, who lived with native wives, and who were sometimes honoured as chiefs themselves by their rabble of native and half-caste followers. The Fynn family, for example, who were half-castes themselves, had loyal sub-tribes of their own—Frank Fynn was chief of the iziNkhumbi, Charles governed the iziNgolweni, Henry the Nsimbini. Such people spent half their time in the bush, hunting elephants, trading beads or firearms for hides, meat and ivory, and at home they still lived like nomads, in home-made clothes and boots, surrounded by dogs, skins, guns and carcasses, with miscellaneous Africans wandering in and out, or squatting at their doorways. There was no fort in Port Natal, no policeman, no church: though the Zulus had in theory ceded the little port and its coastline to the Queen of England, they did not regard the cession very seriously, and the Queen herself had doubtless never heard of it.