Part of the concept of British supremacy had entailed the incorporation of the different regions of South Africa into one state after the Union Jack had been hoisted over them. A united or federated South Africa would, it came to be believed, be of greater value to Britain in case of war than four separately governed colonies.
The reports of two commissions encouraged South African unity. The Selborne Memorandum, named after the high commissioner at the time, stressed the advantages to white South Africans of joining forces and establishing one government for the whole region. It initiated a movement that many white South Africans favoured. The Lagden Commission had been...
The economic hub of the Eastern Cape peasantry was King William’s Town, the fourth biggest centre of the old Cape Colony, much bigger then than the port of East London and dependent for its prosperity almost entirely on peasant production. King William’s Town was also a centre of mission activity, and many of the prominent white merchants and professionals were closely connected to the Scottish missionaries of nearby Alice. Their intellectual, spiritual and economic sympathies aligned with the emerging...
The population movements that took place in southern Africa over many hundreds of years were usually described in old-style histories as ‘Bantu migrations’, and were depicted by thick arrows on maps indicating the alleged lines of march. Migration in the sense of deliberately motivated change of location did of course occur, but it cannot be accepted as a suitable description of the process whereby most of southern Africa became populated by people speaking related Bantu languages.
At the risk of...
Looked at from the vantage point of a democratic non-racial South Africa, the nineteenth-century may seem like one long bloody history of dispossession, the details of which are of little interest today. The Cape Colony of that time was not, however, a monolithic machine but a two-headed monster; although it was very powerful when the two heads faced in the same direction, it was wracked by internal contradictions which had concrete outcomes that can still be felt today. Most...
