Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (7 page)

Captain Gardiner, R.N. (retd.), loyal and devout, had a difficult time of it, for he was not much loved by his disreputable neighbours at the port. Once he had briefly persuaded them to constitute themselves a town—to be named Durban in honour of the Cape Governor, Sir Benjamin D’Urban—and to petition the Government to declare it a British colony: but when this initiative was spurned by London, Gardiner was left without power, without prestige and without assistants. He was rebuffed in all his attempts to bring order to the community, whose members thought him too goody-goody by half, and in the end he gave up, and withdrew disenchanted from Africa to devote himself to good works in Patagonia.
1
The settlers were relieved to see him go: if he was a true representative of British sovereignty, they thought, on the whole they would prefer the authority of the Boers—who, though they might be equally inclined to quote Ezekiel or invoke the Great Incomprehensible Being, at least understood the ethos of the frontier and the veld.

But the news that the Voortrekkers had entered Natal from the north gave to Port Natal a new meaning. In the British view the
Voortrekkers were renegades from the imperial authority: by the Cape of Good Hope Punishment Act of 1836 the British Empire had claimed jurisdiction over all British subjects south of the 25th parallel—which ran hundreds of miles to the north. Her Majesty’s Government were accordingly perturbed to hear that these particular subjects were now stirring up trouble and establishing pretensions among the native peoples so far along the coast. The nearest imperial forces were at Grahamstown, and the notion of such uncouth Calvinists butchering Basutos or subverting honest Zulu kings was profoundly disquieting to Whitehall. So it was that on November 14, 1838, Sir George Napier, Governor of Cape Colony, announced after all the annexation to the British Empire of Port Natal—‘in consequence of the disturbed state of the Native tribes in the territories adjacent to that part, arising in a great degree from the unwarranted occupation of parts of those territories by certain emigrants from this colony, being Her Majesty’s subjects, and the probabilities that those disturbances will continue and increase’.

Two weeks later a British warship appeared off the little port, and a force of soldiers disembarked. The Union Jack was run up, and a hundred Highlanders of the 72nd Regiment of Foot established themselves in a fort specially erected for the occasion, and naturally named after Queen Victoria.
1

The Boers were bent first on revenge against the blacks. After the massacre at Umgungundhlovu the Zulu regiments, sweeping across Natal, had attacked the scattered Boer encampments on the upper Tugela, killing 500 people, wounding hundreds more, driving off thousands of cattle, and plunging the Volk into chaos. Impis marched here and there, Boer commandos were ambushed, and even Britons found themselves embroiled—a missionary travelling through Natal in March, 1838, met a body of 400 Zulus, bellowing a monotonous war-song, led by a solitary Englishman with an ostrich feather in his
straw hat and an elephant gun covered with a panther skin on his shoulder.

Some of the trekkers decided that this could not be Zion after all, and moved away to the north into the mountains. Many more moved deeper into Natal, some settling in the lee of the mountains, some trekking south-east along the line of the Tugela, some striking for the coast. Now a written constitution was drawn up for the Natal Republic, and a capital was laid out at Pietermaritzburg, some fifty miles north-west of Port Natal. But it remained to settle the score of Umgungundhlovu. In November, just as the 72nd ran up the flag above Durban Bay, Andries Pretorius, one of the most respected and resourceful of the commando leaders, assumed the office of Head Commandant and prepared to fall upon Dingaan. ‘O Lord, defer not and do’, the elders prayed before his commandos left, ‘defer not, for thy name’s sake’: and in return Pretorius and his men swore that if God gave them victory over Dingaan, they would build a church in His honour to commemorate the day—‘we shall observe the day and the date as an anniversary in each year … and we shall tell our children that they must take part with us in this for a remembrance even for our posterity.’

So they crossed the Tugela, 400 angry horsemen of God, and rode direct for Umgungundhlovu. On Saturday, December 15, they halted to keep the morrow’s Sabbath on the banks of the Ncome River. They set up their laager, they mounted their three guns, and when dawn came on the Sunday they found that squatting silently upon their heels around them, thousands upon thousands in concentric circles, the feathered Zulu warriors waited. ‘Do not let us go to them,’ said Pretorius, ‘let them come to us’: and so the sun rose with the Zulus still and silent outside the laager, and the Boers singing solemn hymns within.

When daylight came the Zulus attacked, rattling their assegais against their shields to make a noise like falling rain, and hurling themselves in their hundreds upon the laager. They had scarcely a hope. The Boers, impregnably ensconced behind their wagons, decimated them with rapid fire. For hours the Zulus repeatedly charged, each time they were cruelly repulsed, until at last the Boers sprang from their wagons, let loose their commandos and rode into the impis,
shooting the warriors down as they ran, driving them into the river, or slaughtering them as they crouched among the reeds of the river bank. It was like a terrible dream of war. ‘Nothing remains in my memory,’ wrote one of the Boers afterwards, ‘except shouting and tumult and lamentation, and a sea of black faces.’ Only three Boers were wounded in the battle, but at least 3,000 Zulus died. They lay on the ground ‘like pumpkins on a fertile piece of garden land’, and so stained the passing river with crimson that it was called Blood River ever afterwards.

The Boers rode on to Dingaan’s kraal elated, but they found it abandoned. Not a soul was there. They plundered it, destroyed what was left, and reverently examining the remains on the Hill of Execution, discovered Piet Retief’s knapsack. In it, unharmed, was Dingaan’s deed of cession, granting the whole territory of Natal into the possession of the Volk.

They built the church they had vowed, in their shanty-capital of Pietermaritzburg, and for ever after they honoured Dingaan’s Day as they had sworn.
1
Now the Republic of Natalia was born. A Volksraad met in formal assembly, and for a time the Voortrekkers seemed to have achieved their Promised Land—‘I will rejoice, I will divide Shekhem and mete out the valley of Succoth.’ Every trekker, it was decreed, was entitled to two farms, and every burgher could take his complaints direct to the elected leaders of the people in the Volksraad. But it was all fruitless. The British Empire, from whose cloying rectitude they had so painfully escaped, could not permit it, and all their sacrifices and hardships, all the horrors of Umgungundhovu and Blood River, came to nothing in the end.

At first the Boers tolerated the presence of the British at Durban,
as Port Natal now called itself. The commander there, Captain Henry Jervis, was concerned chiefly to restore peace to Natal, and he it was who brought Pretorius and Dingaan to terms—unforgiving terms, for Dingaan was forced to withdraw his power far to the north, to the Black Umfulosi River, thus ceding to the Voortrekkers not merely the whole of Natal, but half Zululand too. But once peace was restored and their ascendancy established, the Boers determined that the British must go. They did not recognize the suzerainty of the Crown, they did not need British protection, and they were determined that the Cape Government should not extend its foothold in Natal. They sent Jervis a formal protest at his presence there, recalling in emotive detail the purposes and miseries of their trek—their departure from the Cape ‘insulted, ridiculed and degraded’, their struggles with barbarian tribes with no knowledge of the Great Incomprehensible, their sufferings at the hands of the murderer Dingaan. Now, they said, they were resolved to be their own masters. If British immigrants landed at Durban they would be treated as enemies of the State, and if they were backed by imperial forces the Natal Republic would go to war.

Unexpectedly the British did withdraw their forces, and it momentarily seemed that the Empire might even recognize the independence of the Republic. But it was only cat and mouse. In September, 1840, the Volksraad wrote to Napier asking that it might ‘graciously please Her Majesty to acknowledge and declare us a free and independent people’: but even as this disarming prayer reached the imperial authorities in London, so there filtered through to the Colonial Office and the evangelical lobby ugly reports of the Republic’s racial policies. It seemed that the Boers still kept slaves, and bullied local chieftains, and in no way honoured the principles of humanitarian imperialism. Besides, the structure of Government, without a Briton at the helm, seemed to be breaking down. Within their Promised Land the trekkers went their own ways incorrigibly. They disregarded their own land laws, they refused to settle where they were told to settle, they squabbled with each other incessantly. Thousands of natives, pouring into Natal to squat on old kraal-sites, threatened security and defeated all efforts to segregate the races. An American trading ship had arrived at Durban and was
doing brisk business with the Boers, an intolerable invasion of British mercantile preserves: and perhaps most important of all, coal had been discovered in Natal, and might prove, as was recognized at once in London, ‘of the utmost importance to steam navigation in the

So when, in December, 1841, the Republic proposed to expel several thousand unwanted blacks into Pondoland to the north, without so much as consulting the King of the Pondos, the Empire intervened again. The Natalians, Sir George Napier warned, were still British subjects whether they liked it or not: and in May, 1842, after a long march overland from the Umgazi River, the forces of the British Army arrived in Durban once more—red-coated, gold-frogged, with a troop of cavalry, and a couple of guns, and wives, and babies, and hundreds of servants, and a gleam of bayonets and a beat of drums, and all the swank, polish and conviction of superiority that the Boers most detested in the British style of life.

The British baulking of the Voortrekkers, so languidly but implacably arranged by the distant power of Empire, made the Afrikaner in his heart an enemy for ever. The memory of the Great Trek, its symbols and its sacrifices, Moordspruit the river of death, Weenen the place of weeping, became the central myth of the Afrikaner people, around which they would in future generations preserve their identity and consolidate their attitudes: Blood River, the Church of the Vow, Dingaan’s Kraal, even the image of the trek-wagon itself, these would be the tokens of their self-esteem, and of their tribal identity—for in many ways the trekker Boers
were
an African tribe, speaking the same language, of land, cattle, bondage, revenge and primitive divinity, as the Zulus or the Basuto themselves.

They tried once more to preserve their Republic of Natal, for the Boers promptly besieged the troops in Fort Victoria, and nearly starved them out. But once again they were thwarted. A young English settler, Dick King, broke the siege lines at night, and riding non-stop for three days and nights clean across the wild Transkei, alerted the imperial command at Grahamstown. On June 25 the
three-masted frigate
Southampton
arrived in Durban Bay, and the Republic was doomed. Within a few years Natal was among the most absolutely British of British colonies, officially defined as ‘a centre whence the blessings of civilization and Christianity may be diffused’, and the most visionary and unyielding of the Boers, packing their guns and Bibles, had trekked still farther into the interior—over the high Drakensberg, across the Vaal, deep into the territory of the Matabele, to establish high on that bitter plateau the Republic of the Transvaal—so for away this time, in country so sparse and unenticing, so innocent of advantages, that even the imperial instincts of the British, it seemed, would not again disturb the
lekker
lewe
of the burghers.