The origins of the 1820 settler experiment are to be found in Great Britain and not at the Cape itself. Theories of ‘overpopulation’ were gaining ground in Britain as a convenient explanation for the mass unemployment and political riots that racked the country in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. The Chancellor of the Exchequer approved a grant of £50 000 to assist ‘persons disposed to emigrate’ to move to the Cape. Over 80 000 hopeful emigrants applied and, between April and June 1820, some 4 000 English speaking people arrived to settle the eastern districts of the Colony, precisely those districts adjacent to the Xhosa border.
‘Settlers camping near the Fish River, 1837’ by F.T. I’Ons. Note the gloomy and wild background overshadowing the tiny tent and wagon, the only shelter in an inhospitable landscape.
In its origins, the 1820 settlement was nothing but a political stunt by a Tory government desperate to demonstrate public concern for the unemployed. But the Colonial Office was quite aware of the real difficulties the settlers would face and it was not prepared to turn the Cape Colony into a dumping ground for paupers. The vast majority of settlers were neither proprietors nor paupers; they were respectable individuals possessed of some financial means but lacking the large capital necessary to support a whole party of employees. They were not rural people. Fully 50% of them were urban artisans, and they had no intention of staying on the rural smallholdings where they were initially located. Unwilling rather than unable to make a living off the land, they turned with enthusiasm to the more profitable avenues of trade and manufacture.
Above all, they were people habituated to the use of money in commercial transactions. They bartered cheap but attractive goods such as cloth and iron utensils with Afrikaners and Xhosa alike, in exchange for valuable commodities such as cattle-hides and ivory, which fetched high cash prices on the English market. The quest for these commodities soon drew the settlers deep into the African interior and unleashed a new dynamic of colonial expansionism hitherto unknown to the colonial Afrikaners, who sought land for subsistence purposes only. The British settlers were mostly of a class that enjoyed limited democratic rights in Britain and, naturally, expected equivalent rights in any colony governed by the British Crown. The naked power patronage openly exhibited by Lord Charles and his clique of intimates gave rise to a stream of complaints and celebrated cases. Notable among the complainants was one Bishop Burnett, a gentleman farmer bankrupted by his attempts to break into the monopoly of military contracts enjoyed by the government farm at Somerset East.
Burnett’s attempts to gain legal redress eventually exposed the arbitrary nature of the Cape judicial system and of Roman-Dutch law
Cartoonist George Cruikshank’s alarmist drawing shows what, according to him, awaits the 1820 British settlers in South Africa – cannibalism, burning houses, wild animals.
itself. The accused had no right to summons his own witnesses or cross-examine the witnesses of the prosecution. The Fiscal, or Prosecutor, was also one of the judges and there was no trial by jury. None of the top judicial officials could even speak English with any comfort. Bishop Burnett proclaimed that he was an Englishman in an English colony, and that Roman-Dutch law was no more relevant to his case than ‘the laws of the Danes or the Calmuc Tartars’. Other sensational cases followed, not least one suggesting that Lord Charles had compromised himself sexually with the strangely effeminate military surgeon, Dr James Barry.
What made all this especially unbearable for Somerset was that detailed reports of these trials were printed in George Greig’s The South African Commercial Advertiser, the first independent newspaper ever published at the Cape (1824). Prior to this, the weekly Government Gazette had been the only permitted news medium and the authorities had underlined their opposition to a free flow of information by seizing a printing press found on board an 1820 settler ship.
Greig’s own attempts to start a newspaper were stalled for six months until, having discovered that there was no actual law in place to stop publication, Greig went ahead regardless. At the same time Thomas Pringle and John Fairbairn, who edited a small literary journal, were threatened with prosecution. Through their unyielding refusal to accept any concession less than full press freedom, Greig and Fairbairn eventually carried their point.
Suspended for a second time for continued attacks on Somerset, the Advertiser was reinstated in October 1828 and this time there was no turning back. By Ordinance 60 of 1829, the Cape press was finally freed from the executive control of government and allowed to print whatever it liked. John Fairbairn took over as editor of the and, over the next twenty years played a key role in the battle for greater democracy and Advertiser a more liberal Cape (see The first press polemic).
