Abraham Esau
Abraham Esau was an independent coloured blacksmith and small transport driver in the northwestern Cape settlement of Calvinia. Educated in English at a Methodist mission school and strongly anglicised in character, Esau had established himself by the end of the 1890s as a lively, enterprising and articulate personality among Calvinia’s coloured community. Through his small property ownership, his attachment to the non-racial Cape franchise and his entitlement to the status of a Crown subject and citizen, Esau in many ways embodied the essential character of the literate coloured artisan class of the liberal Cape Colony. Like many others of his kind, his loyalty to British rule and wholehearted support of a stable colonial order under Cape Liberalism was rock solid.
The war turned him into an individual of stature. By 1900 the spread of republican commandos raiding in the Cape was increasingly menacing the security of black civilians. As panic gripped Calvinia, its apprehensive coloured inhabitants became vociferously pro-British and anti-Boer republican. At the forefront of this increasingly anxious and belligerent mood stood an energetic and influential Abraham Esau, using his abilities as an orator and organiser to try to assemble resistance.
When the local magistrate refused to issue arms to coloured men on the grounds that the war exclusively involved whites, a dismayed and incensed Esau turned to another defensive tactic. He came to a clandestine arrangement with the British army’s Namaqualand Field Force for his band of trusted followers to serve as a ring of spies and informers, providing information and intelligence on Boer movements and rebel activity. In reciprocation for this loyal and risky undertaking, a British military secret agent undertook to provide protection for Calvinia by imperial forces in the event of any Boer incursion.
It was a hollow promise. Calvinia was captured by an Orange Free State commando early in 1901. Being the district’s most troublesome and detested British collaborator, Esau was a marked man. Brazenly defiant towards republican authority to the end, he was executed in February 1901. Although a minor incident in the war, the wartime conduct and killing of Abraham Esau became invested with political significance, his death turning him into a martyr and symbol of Cape coloured loyalty to the British cause.
