Episode 201 - Labour, Lovedale and Roads are all the Rage in 1854

History of South Africa podcast

This is episode 201. The sounds you’re hearing are those of roadworks, because South Africa is upgrading.
Quickly.
The arrival of governor sir George Grey in 1854 heralded a new epoch. Previous governors had been Peninsular war Veterans, they’d fought against Napoleon. This one was the first who was the child of a veteran of the war against Napoleon, and a person who was schooled in liberal humanism.
He was also a Victorian, steeped in the consciousness of evolution, principled and simultaneously, flaunting truth. A fibber who was in a delirium of post-renaissance spirituality, combining dialect and salvation.
You heard about George Grey’s time in New Zealand last episode, and here he was, the new Cape Governor. So without further ado, let’s dive into episode 201.
He was free from prejudice against black and coloured people, and all indigenes as such, firmly believing from his own insight into the Polynesians cultures, the Maori, that there was nothing to distinguish them in aptitude and intelligence from anyone else in mankind. The same applied to Aborigines and black South Africans he believed.
At the same time, Grey wanted indigenous people to wean themselves from what he called barbarism and heathenism. By suppressing tribal laws and customs, and incorporating indigenes into the economic system through labour and industry.
During his short stint in Australia, he had set the Aborigines to work building roads, and those who worked hardest, earned the most. At the same time, he ruthlessly suppressed any sort of push back from the Aborigines, then the Maoris, and now he brought this brand of colonialism to South Africa.
Dangling the carrot of labour, then applying the stick of punishment. The Cape colony was his laboratory in the Victorian age of discovery. An intellectual exercise. There was quite a bit in it for him of course. An ideologue and highly learned, he had written the New Zealand articles of Representative Government, an act that led to him being knighted.
Sir George.
Utopia beckons those who are imbued with internal fire — it’s only now and then that history provides a crack into which people with this sort of vision can plunge. A man or woman appears at a particular point in time, restructuring entire territories and societies by dint of their character, and their timing, their epoch.
During this time, a powerful figure with a vision for change could restructure an entire land before his minders back in England could do anything about it. Correspondence with the antipodes, New Zealand and Australia, took nearly a year for an exchange of letters to take place. Six months one way, six months return. In the meantime, an industrious social engineer could get very busy indeed.
South Africa was closer to the centres of power, the new steam driven ships could do the return journey in four months, but that was more than a financial quarter in modern jargon. A person with initiative could launch quite a few initiatives before the folks back in London put a stop to their initiating.
The biggest problem at this moment for Grey was not the amaXhosa or AmaZulu or Basotho, nor the Khoe, or the Boers.
IT was the British colonial office. They were in the throes of recession not expansion. Retrenchment and withdrawal.
Grey pondered the solution. Five thousand white European immigrants should be brought in he wrote, the occupy British Kaffraria. There was a certain problem, and that was the amaNqika Xhosa lived there at a pretty squashed density of 83 people per square mile. To give you an idea of how squashed this was, the Cape colony population density of 1854 was 1.15 per square mile at the same time.
The second conundrum was accessing cash to construct all these new schools and public buildings. Grey sent a letter to the Colonial office outlining his needs — this new plan would require 45 000 pounds a year.