Life of Sir George Grey: Governor, High commissioner, and Premier. An Historical Biography.

Chapter XIV. — High Commissioner in South Africa

Chapter XIV.
High Commissioner in South Africa.

His Native Policy.

However it might condemn its officer's recalcitrancy, the Colonial Office could not afford to stand on its dignity. It wanted its strongest man for its most difficult post. Sir George Grey was sent to South Africa. The situation there was in many respects analogous to the one he had just quitted. The Governor was practically absolute. There were mutinous Native races still unsubjugated. There were allied peoples, whom he might endeavour to federate. In South Africa, accordingly, he found a field of labour after his own heart. He had gone to Western Australia on a quest worthy of Saul, the son of Kish, but he found a kingdom in the natives whom he strove to win over to a new life, to raise and improve. A more important sphere of the same kind, with larger powers, was opened up to him in South Australia, and there he laboured earnestly to effect the advancement of a degraded race. In New Zealand he was given a still grander task, and, with all the energy of an enthusiastic nature, he schemed and toiled to develop an inchoate civilisation and arrest the decline of a dying people. Once more he was granted a fresh commission of a similar order and placed in a position to lift one or another of the lower members of the human family from its slime.

The blacks of South Africa did not belong to a race that excited a like enthusiasm with the Maoris. Most of them were negroes, far down in the scale, and there was then no evidence that they could be raised. Unlike the Maoris, they were not personally attractive. It made no difference to Grey. With a heart large enough to embrace all the failures and abortions of humanity, he set himself to improve the condition of the Bantus as he had done to improve the condition of the Maoris. His efforts were remarkable, and his apparent success was notable.

British Kafraria.

He set to work in the province nearest his hand, where he possessed consular powers. There he repeated the policy he had striven to carry out in New Zealand. Disregarding the warnings of Earl Grey, who urged, publicly in 1848 and privately in 1853, that the power of the chiefs should be maintained with a view to the preservation of order, he strove to break the power of the Kafir chiefs by undermining their influence and secretly sapping their authority. From 1856 onwards he appointed them magistrates, and, in lieu of the fines they had arbitrarily levied on defaulting or offending kraals, he assigned them a salary or pension, paid monthly and calculated on the fines. By the side of the chief, sitting in his own court, he proposed to place a European assessor, who was a virtual magistrate, and who thus supplanted the chief in his judicial capacity. It was intended that the fines thus levied should meet the cost of the arrangement, but it soon proved that the institution would cost as much as £3,000 a year in excess of them. The scheme was reported against by the British Resident in Kafraria, whom Grey must soon after have got rid of, on the Turkish principle, but Grey induced the Secretary of State to assent to it, on the understanding that the expenditure in connection with it should be drawn from colonial funds. This was far from being Grey's intention. He designed that the Imperial Government and the British tax-payer should bear the chief burden, and as a matter of fact it was this that happened.

The new system had a measure of success. Two of the chiefs promptly accepted the magistrates nominated by Grey, and four others had agreed to do the same. It was characteristic of his optimism that he believed, after a tour through Kafraria, that the natives had generally found the system acceptable. We shall soon see how far they were from accepting it.

Native Reserves.

Grey next segregated the Native tribes by setting apart tracts of land for their exclusive occupation. The chief source of trouble with the indigenes in all countries has been, not the invasion of native territories in force, but the steadfast encroachment of settlers on the lands of the Natives as their own give out or their numbers increase. By the assignment of reserves or locations the Kafirs were parked off and protected against the stealthy invasions of the colonists. It is the policy that has been more or less fitfully pursued in other countries that have been at handgrips with the same difficulty. The United States also has set apart such reserves for the Indian tribes, if it has not always kept them sacred. It has been feebly attempted in Australia, and both there and in New Zealand it is now proposed as a settled policy—in Australia, with the object of saving the remnants of the aborigines; in New Zealand, with the intention of appropriating the greater part of the Maori lands, which are no longer wanted for the dwindling Native population. Grey's object was not only to preserve the Kafirs, who were in little danger of disappearing, but also to provide scope for British settlement. We shall see how he aimed at settling the country.

Hospitals.

Grey had, moreover, a hospital policy that no less merits commendation. He schemed to build hospitals all over Cape Colony, and he made a beginning with a hospital at King William's Town. He employed the Kafirs in quarrying stones for it and the military in rearing it. Soldiers were used as day-labourers and sappers as skilled mechanics, and military waggons were requisitioned. When it was finished, he summoned from Wellington Dr. Fitzgerald, whom he had known in New Zealand, to take the place of resident physician. It was a tribute to both Grey and Fitzgerald that the Doctor was induced to come to South Africa mainly by the strong affection he felt for the Governor. The hospital seems to have proved a great practical success. The natives travelled long distances by waggon and on foot to seek medical aid at the new temple of æsculapius. By 1858 11,380, by 1886 111,000, by 1890 130,000 patients had been treated in it. One notable result was the revolution it effected in the minds of the Kafirs. By them, as by all primitive peoples, diseases were believed to be of super-natural origin and could be treated only by preternatural means. Now the superstition was destroyed, as false beliefs are best destroyed, by the inculcation of true beliefs through the use of natural agencies, and the power of the witch-doctor was as effectually broken as the power of the chiefs.

Such, at least, was the claim made by Grey. It appears to have been one of his many delusions about the effects of his measures. Witchcraft survived in South Africa, as it survived for centuries the establishment of hospitals among the most advanced European peoples, and survives indeed, to the present day. The hospital has not been enlarged for half a century, and the matron confessed to Professor Henderson that the natives do not resort to it as much as might be desired.

Public Works.

The Governor further acquired influence over the Kafirs by employing them on public works, as he had employed the Maoris, and in opening up the country. Two long lines of roads, dotted with forts, near which Europeans were to be settled, were carried through the country. The roads were made by Kafirs, graded as overseers, second-class men, and ordinary labourers, and paid accordingly; all were under European superintendents. The scheme was excellent—in theory, but it wrecked itself on three rocks. First, the Kafirs, like most indigenous peoples, could not be got to work. Next, it was hard to find capable European superintendents. Lastly, as we shall see, the Imperial Government kicked against the burden of expense thus thrown on it.

A Kafir Rising.

Meanwhile, Grey's civilising schemes had been exciting the distrust of the Kafir chiefs, who saw their judicial functions being absorbed by white assessors and their authority over their tribesmen undermined by white superintendents. They must have believed that, in the mind of so far-seeing a Governor, there was a deeply laid plot to conquer the natives by pacific means. They met plot by counterplot and hatched a conspiracy which, had it been successfully carried out, would have reconquered British Kafraria for the blacks.

Two very different versions of the events have been given. On one side there is the picturesque and poetical narrative of Mr. Bees, probably inspired by Grey and told just as Grey was in the habit of telling it. On the other, we have the far balder and more prosaic, but possibly more exact, narrative of Professor Henderson, who presumably derived his facts from the copies of Grey's despatches in the Government archives at Capetown. The discrepancies between the two at first sight transcend the discordances among the Roman legends that whetted the ingenuity of Niebuhr or those that baffle the harmonizers of the Pentateuch or the Gospels. Examined more closely, they are seen to be mutually complementary. Each is by itself imperfect and incomplete. Either states what the other omits, and vice versâ. The two, taken together, contain the whole truth. We will try to fuse them.

At the beginning of the chain of events, and underlying it, we discern a Kafir conspiracy against the British occupation of Kafraria. Kreli, the paramount chief of the Kafirs, was the soul of it. His fellow-conspirators were named Fadanna, Quesha, and Macomo. They cleverly used the priesthood, which was probably sympathetic, as a collaborator. The high-priest, Umhlakaza, cunningly created an instrument in a prophetess, who professed to be in communication with the dead ancestors of the race. A secret subterranean passage, known only to herself, took her below the waters of a lake and brought her into the presence of the dead chiefs. There the eye was gladdened by evergreen pastures where grazed countless herds. Receiving the ancestral commands, she told them that homes would there be provided for them and never-failing supplies of food; never again would they need to toil. It was, of course, a mere lure, but it misled a whole people, numbering 60,000 warriors and 200,000 souls. In obedience to it, and by command of their chiefs and priests, the infatuated tribesmen promised to destroy their crops, cattle, and stores of food on an appointed day—February 18,1857—and sacrifice them to the spirits of their ancestors. All who disbelieved in this prophecy and refused to make the required sacrifices would be destroyed. The real object was to reduce the Kafirs to desperation by the destruction of their supplies, and thus induce them to rise against the British. To indicate the day, a great miracle would be performed. On the appointed day the sun would rise as usual, but would soon turn back and set in the quarter whence it had risen. A hurricane would spring up. The Kafirs would then advance, and the Europeans would be swept into the sea. A new and brighter era would dawn.

The colonists waited in suspense for the arrival of the dread day. A British force, under an English general, guarded the frontier. The great day arrived. The voluntary promises were kept, and the destruction duly effected. Then the Kafirs prepared to advance. Greatly outnumbered and evidently alarmed, the general proposed to retreat, and he sent a message to Grey to that effect. With a statesmanlike eye Grey saw at once the impolicy of a retrograde movement, and promptly ordered the general to hold his ground. If he dared to retreat, Grey threatened to supersede the Commander-in-Chief and himself take the command. It was no idle menace. He believed he had the power, and he certainly had the will. Needless to say, he was submissively obeyed. To the end of his days he recalled the incident with satisfaction and pride.

The Kafirs did not venture to attack. The expected miracle was not performed. A schism broke out in the Kafir camp between the believers and the unbelievers, which latter, as is usual, were blamed for the failure of the prophecy. The two sides fought, and some were killed. Feeling that he had gained his end, Grey set out to return to Capetown, and he captured several leading chiefs on his way back. Having destroyed their supplies of food, the Kafirs were overtaken by famine, and the appalling number of 50,000 died of starvation. Grey's humanity was as energetic as his hostility. He immediately devised measures of relief. He brought 34,000 natives into Cape Colony and distributed them as servants. For the rest he built villages and supplied them with food, agricultural implements, seeds, and cattle.

Several of the chiefs captured were sentenced to longer or shorter terms of imprisonment. But Grey was not the man to leave his work unfinished. Realising that there could be no lasting peace in South Africa while Kreli remained powerful, he gathered together a small force of colonial irregulars and the mounted police he had created and attacked the chief in his own country, where he lay in fancied security. Then he drove him into the interior, where for years he was kept powerless, and, on his own humble petition, permitted to return to a location in his former territory only when he could no longer be active for mischief. The case was parallel to the seizure of Rauparaha, and its effects were similar. It broke the back of the Kafir resistance, as the seizure of Rauparaha ensured the definitive ascendancy of the British in New Zealand. Grey won great repute in South Africa by the decisive stroke, and he received high laudation from the Colonial Office in a despatch that bears the traces of Bulwer Lytton's lofty diction. Well might the Secretary of State commend his "firm and benevolent dealing with the native races," his "sagacity in foreseeing and averting collisions, and" his "able policy in using unexpected and strange incidents in the history of the Kafirs for their advantage and for the security of the Colony."

The Cost of Civilising the People

Grand civilising projects cannot be carried out without money, and all of Grey's civilising schemes, in Western Australia, South Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and again in New Zealand, demanded a large expenditure, of which the greater portion fell on the Imperial Treasury. When he pensioned the chiefs in British Kafraria, he calculated the amount of the pensions on the amount of the fines previously levied, but it was found that a sum of £3,000 more would be annually required. The Secretary of State sanctioned the arrangement only on the understanding that the corresponding expenditure should be met out of colonial funds. By the end of 1854 Grey estimated that the total expenditure on his complete schemes, now fully developed, would amount to £60,000, and he asked that the Imperial Government should contribute two-thirds of the amount, the remainder being provided from the revenues of British Kafraria. So powerful was the mana of Grey with both the English Ministry and the Parliament that that sum was cheerfully, indeed, enthusiastically voted, and Mr. Labouchere (Lord Taunton), then Secretary for the Colonies, congratulated him on the popularity of his administration and the credit it reflected on the ministry.

For three successive years a subsidy was voted, and for only three years had it been originally asked for. At the end of that period, Grey professed to believe it would no longer be wanted, because the necessity for employing Kafirs on public works would then cease, the education of young Kafirs would become self-supporting, their increasing civilisation would increase the demands for English commodities and thus enlarge the revenue, and progressive settlement by Europeans would augment the prosperity of the province. Grey's expectations were not realised. In drawing up his estimates for 1858 he made no allowance for a reduction, and Lord Stanley, the Secretary for the Colonies in the new Derby Ministry, advised that there should be no reduction. The Lords of the Treasury, vigilant guardians of the public purse, protested, and Lord Stanley was constrained to intimate to Grey that the vote for the dependency would be cut down by one-half.

Grey was thrown into a panic. What was he to do? Should he break up his administrative apparatus, dismiss his magistrates and unpension his chiefs, close his hospitals and his schools? He could not and he would not do it. He was pledged for another year to support the institutions he had called into existence. As Daniel Webster once threatened to pay the United States' national debt out of his own impecunious pocket, Sir George Grey more seriously resolved to Garry on the system at his own expense, and he laid out £6,000 on this benevolent object. Of course, he well knew that the British Government could not remain indebted to one of its own servants, and the sum was ultimately repaid him.

Meanwhile, he fought hard for his cherished system. He was reminded that he was laying heavy burdens on the British taxpayer, and he might have remembered that the taxes on the prime necessaries of life, such as tea and sugar, were then burdensome. In vain did he plead that, by averting war, his civilising schemes made a vast saving to the country. None the less, he had not the smallest intention of accepting the retrenchment. Professing submission, as always, he practised rebellion, as always. He continued his expenditure as before, unreduced. The Treasury accounts for the following year showed that he had exceeded the annual vote by no less a sum than £46,000. Truly, here was a man who knew how to flout his superiors. And this was only one of several directions in which he outran the constable.

The Results.

To what extent were these costly schemes successful? Historians cast doubt on the results. Some assert that, with his recall in 1859 and his departure from South Africa two years later, his structure of beneficent administration tumbled to the ground. The grand-fatherly government of a Native race came to an end. He himself claimed that he had been signally successful. The Kafirs throve, and throve in consequence of the institutions he had planted. Almost a quarter of a century later another High Commissioner, Sir Henry Loch, visited the community and was received by 8,000 Kafirs mounted on horseback, who were wealthy and independent. They had not forgotten the old Governor who had done so much for them, and, when Loch recalled his name, they vividly remembered him. So did the Maoris in after years. Evidently, he made a deep impression wherever he went. He was a force and his administration a reality. He undoubedly counted for much in the improvement now so observable.