History of South Africa podcast

On the afternoon of 10th January 1883, King Cetshwayo kaMpande climbed off a skiff and onto the beach at Port Dunford, surviving the heavy and powerful surf. The British had been using this stretch of desolate sand as their transport hub into Zululand, which is south of the modern harbour of Richard’s Bay.

King Cetshwayo then stepped out of the wet boat onto the sand of Port Durnford, where he was formally met by British official Sir Theophilus Shepstone to begin his return to Zululand. Cetshwayo looked around — there was no welcoming committee of his people. Shepstone has purposely kept the date of the King’s return a secret, this after 3 years in exile. It was just the sort of thing at which Theophilus excelled — a thoughtful deviousness.

The British brought him back to lead a detachment of 6th Dragoons to greet the old Zulu king, and to escort Cetshwayo back to Mthonjaneni above the the emaKhosini valley. Which he did. Shortly after they arrived in early January, Mandlakazi leader Zibhebu came to Mthonjaneni, but not to pay respects to Cetshwayo, he made a grand point of greeting Shepstone, his patron, and ignoring the king.

Zululand had been fractured, and Cetshwayo now led a broken people where the different regions were alienated from royal control. Cetshwayo had been restored, but their country was divided. The uSuthu regiment in particular were aghast they were forced to remain under Zibhebhu’s rule — he was a tyrant and hated.

For the previous 12 months, a game of smoke and mirrors had confounded the king. When he returned from visiting Queen Victoria in England in September 1882, he had been told he was to return home almost immediately. The actual boundaries of his kingdom were undefined. Natal officials were terrified of Cetshwayo, sure that he would invoke the spirits of Dingana and Shaka, and the Zulu would rise up once more. They wanted to confine Cetshwayo to the central portion of his former kingdom, where he would be managed by a Resident supervisor Henry Francis Fynn Junior.

In the north, Zibhebhu, Cetshwayo’s implacable enemy, would rule independently — the only independent chief out of the 13 selected by the British to rule over different territories in Zululand. Zibhebhu took control over the land north of the Black Mfolozi, land which was dominated by pro-Cetshwayo locals and Zibhebhu was distinctly anti-Cetshwayo.

It was into this newly divvied up landscape that Cetshwayo returned in early 1883. Shepstone officiated over the handover of power, and once again, was forced to face a plethora of complaints delivered by the king’s men, including Mnyamana’s induna Hemulaana. The kings restoration, they said, was a disgrace.

Ever the thin-skinned settler, Shepstone was outraged, he was merely a clerk, sent by the British to dot a few I’s and cross a few T’s, he had no power to alter any of the conditions. After the tongue lashing, he and the dragoons hurried back to the safety of Natal muttering about the insults they’d been forced to endure.

With stuffy old Shepstone gone, the Zulu let their hair down == Let the party begin — but the reality of his situation was clear to Cetshwayo. While his homestead at oNdini had been reinstated east of the original town burned down by the British, it was smaller. Still, almost 1000 huts were built in the traditional stye of an ikhanda with the isigodlo at the top, all protocols observed.

Well almost all.

A large number of senior indunas and chiefs were absent.

After Shepstone left, Zibhebhu left too.

Hamu stayed aaway. Mfanawendlela did arrive, somewhat shamefaced, it was he who had committed a sacrilege of planting crops on King Mpande’s Grave on Mahlabathini plain. But things had changed, when he walked into the isigodlo, he did not prostrate himself before the Zulu king, but idled up to one of the chairs and sat down as if he was Cetshwayo’s equal.

We’re up to the early 1880s where world events are intersecting in various ways with southern African events.

The mere ratification of the Pretoria Convention in 1881 failed to bring peace and prosperity to South Africa. The frenzied speculation in diamond shares reached it’s height in 1881, and war expenditure had swelled the tide of fictitious prosperity which had flowed from Table Bay to Lydenburg.

Now the troops and the glory departed, Natal after the pomp and ceremony of the Wolseley period, drifted into a political backwater — and yet clamoured for responsible government and an augmented imperial garrison.

In the Cape, the overcapitalised diamond companies began to topple, and banks shortened credit and in 1882, the crash came. John Scanlen the Cape Prime Minister succumbed to what some called retrenchment mania and laid off judges amongst other members of the bureaucracy.

Times were bad, and growing worse, with Phylloxera visiting the Western Cape vineyards, drought had smote the land and red-water fever the cattle. It was old testament level pestilence and suffering, at least if you read the journals of the time.

Did I mention the outbreak of smallpox as well? How remiss.

It scoured Cape Town first, this pestilence, from whence it followed the railway and wagon route to the diamond fields of Kimberley, and from there into the Orange Free State and Basotholand.

Plagues of locusts chewed through what was left. For anyone who would return to an earlier epoch in South African history, believing these were golden years, perhaps the reality I’ve just outlined would make you recalibrate your Time Machine.

SJ Du Toit launched his pro-Afrikaans campaign by the early 1880s, railing against die Engelse and the elites in the Cape who were determined to keep speaking high Dutch instead of this new form which was disparagingly called Kitchen Dutch. Emerging at this messy moment to influence South Africa forever was a lawyer who eventually became known as Lord De Villiers.

It’s difficult to understand this these days — in the 1880s South Africa was still a mishmash of rebels, settlers, African chiefdoms, Khoesan raiders, dirt tracker miners and trekboers, wild Baltic and Nordic merchants, American and Australian frontiersmen. Every geographical locale was represented by a different language so folks like De Villiers who obsessed over federal ideas were outliers.

Self-government meant they leaned towards the Union Jack, the English, for defence, but not the Union Jack as a cloak for interference in the internal affairs of the Cape.

The quarrels divided the Anglican community particularly in Natal into adherents of the Church of England, and the Church of the Province of South Africa.

The two main questions were these: Must Anglican Bishops in South Africa be appointed by Letters consecrated by the Archbishop of Centebury, and secondly, was the Church in South Africa bound by acts of an Imperial Parliament in England far far away or mainly independent?

De Villiers was going to decide both questions — and in doing so — would set the scene for a future South African Republic while also setting in stone, some of our concepts in South Africa of the right to practice the religion we prefer.

In 1882, the German mathematician Ferdinand von Lindemann proved that π was transcendental: it cannot be reduced to a tidy equation, never captured inside the comfortable boundaries expected by mathematicians. For centuries mathematicians tried to “square the circle” — creating a perfect square with the same area as a circle using only classical tools. In 1882, they finally got their answer: impossible. π’s transcendence meant the problem itself can never be solved.

π sits at the centre of order — wheels, planets, architecture, engineering — but does not obey the rules mathematicians thought would contain it. The more closely pi is examined, the more it slips beyond simple description. But pi also has beauty in it’s patterns.

π — roughly 3.14 etc etc — is the hidden constant inside every circle: divide the distance around any circle by the distance across it, and written out as a decimal, it goes on forever without ever stopping and without ever falling into a repeating pattern.

Southern Africa in the early 1880s had the appearance of something similar. The neat assumptions of empire borders that could be drawn, peoples classified, and territories administered into obedience — were beginning to collide with a far messier reality. The aftermath of the First Anglo-Boer War had humbled imperial confidence, African polities remained powerful actors, and the mineral revolution was creating forces no colonial administrator fully controlled. Like π, South Africa was proving resistant to simple formulas.

Emerging at this time was the Afrikaner Bond, led by Jan Hendrick Hofmeyr, his Boeren Beschermings Vereeniging, Farmers Protection Society, had merged with the Bond. Hofmeyr’s main aim was to merge the diverse Afrikaner cultural movements from behind the scenes, thus his nickname, The Mole.

Cape Prime Minister John Gordon Sprigg was sparring with political humanists, particularly Saul Solomon who owned the Cape Argus. As a liberal member of parliament, he was an articulate defender of African rights, called a friend of the natives and worse by some settlers. He was enticed to sell his paper to the editor at the time, what he didn’t know, was that Cecil John Rhodes was secretly backing the sale - no Rhodes owned the Argus.

It was in that moment that the Cape lost its important outsider voice, and Rhodes gained a news outlet. The main story the paper was covering after the first Anglo-Boer war was the instability in Basotholand. The Argus and other liberals had taken up the Basotho cause against the land-hungry settlers of the Orange Free State.

Shoring up his personal wealth and power, Rhodes was simultaneously using his growing influence in the Cape to protect its northern territories. This was a natural progression, north of Kimberley lay the Vaal River, and the Molopo River. Between the two lay not only the Boers of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, but the Tswana people. South of the Molopo there were the Thlaping, the Rolong, north of the Molopo the Ngwato chiefdom, ruled by Khama as well as the Kwena under chief Sechele, the Ngwaketse ruled by Gaseitsiwe and soon, his son, Bathoen.

The Tswana were tussling with colonial expansion, and navigating the difficult politics of the frontier, keeping the Boer settlers at arm’s length. Along the edge of these chief’s territory there lay the Great North Road, on the eastern side of the Tswana lands. Transvaal President Paul Kruger was behind efforts to cut off the Road to the North, something the British authorities suspected but couldn’t prove.

For Cecil Rhodes and British ambitions, these two micro-republics were a geopolitical nightmare. If the Transvaal annexed Stellaland and Goshen which was Paul Kruger's ultimate goal, the Boers would completely block Cape Colony access to the interior of Africa.

Rhodes had taken to calling the Great north Road the Suez Canal of South Africa.

When Cetshwayo kaMpande was captured after the Anglo-Zulu War, he was ferried to Cape Town and on to Robben Island. His countenance was one of dignity but that is difficult to maintain in the face of terrible sea-sickness.

The Zulu king had made it be known that he was afraid of the sea, and his nervousness compounded the queasiness.

He was also terribly sea-sick on the five day voyage from Port Durnford, modern day Richards’ Bay, and Simons Town. He and his five wives who’d joined him in captivity were ensconced in a hut that had been erected for him on the poop deck, from where he watched the activities on the shore for almost a week before he disembarked. As he observed all the ships, the developments on the coast, it became apparent that his attempt at fighting the powerful British empire had always been doomed.

When he eventually stepped onto Cape turf, his appointed custodian Captain J Ruscombe Poole of the Royal Navy escorted the Zulu King from Simon’s Town. Like Nelson Mandela’s minders much later, Captain Ruscombe-Poole was a sympathetic jailer, so too the king’s interpreter, Henry Longcast.

Henry was an Irish orphan who’d been brought up at the KwaMagwaza Mission station and had known Cetshwayo since he was a child.

An odd relationship developed between these two men, Longcast was a straighforward honourable man, and became Cetshwayo’s advisor - never betraying the Zulu King’s trust. Joining Cetshwayo in exile was Mkhosana kaZangqana, formely one of Mpande’s counsillors. Three other attendants were at hand, including the royal hairdresser, four young women of royal standing, and a female servant.

They were first to spend time in the Flagstaff Bastion of the 17th Century Castle in Cape Town, where they were alloted a suite of apartments and a parapet for daily walks. Throngs of what they called daytrippers in Victorian times, we would describe them as tourists, gathered to catch a glimpse of the Zulu King on the heights of the Castle.

Back in Zululand, Sir Garnet Wolseley had been fashioning together a new Zulu system.

Believe it or not, it resembled the system resembled what the British were trying to impose on Afrghanistan. There Lord Lytton was trying to secure the North West Frontier of India, what is now Pakistan, by breaking Afghanistan into a number of impotent principalities. There local princes who were sympathetic to British control would be handed the levers of power.

Wolseley wanted to secure the safety of Natal and the Transvaal by fragmenting the Zulu kingdom.

Sir Theophilus Shepstone was the go-to once more, along with ex-Cape Native Affairs Secretary Charles Brownlee and Natal commissioner, Sir Henry Bulwer. Shepstone’s main aim was to destroy the power of the Zulu royal family, and believed it was fragile anyway.

This was a miscalculation on numerous fronts. Cetshwayo may have been in exile, but the concept of political power in Zululand was well and truly in the hands of the extended Royal Family. Thirteen chiefs should be nominated, said Shepstone, each independent of the other but utterly dependent on the British.

Much much further north, in Afghanistan, Lord Lytton the British Viceroy of India, envisaged Kandahar province as the bulwark against the rebellious tribes of Afghanistan and the wild mountains of north western India. The British defeated Sher Ali Khan in the war between 1878 and 1880. Lytton’s vision involved separating key regions and strengthening frontier zones that could be more easily influenced from India. In this thinking, Kandahar mattered enormously. It sat astride the routes connecting southern Afghanistan to the approaches toward the Indian subcontinent, linking trade and military corridors running west toward Persia and north toward central Afghanistan.

By now, Cetshwayo kaMpande was technically free to return from exile once these arrangements had been made, but he first requesting a meeting with Queen Victoria.

Die Dorsland — the Thirstland — is part of the Kalahari that has an interesting history when it comes to pastoralists. The San didn’t call it the Thirstland, for them it wasn’t a barrier but part of a network of seasonal resource nodes. They would navigate the dry spans using sip-wells, inserting long, hollow reeds deep into the damp sand, use grass filters, and literally suck water up to store in hollowed-out ostrich eggshells buried along transit routes for future journeys. Around 2,000 to 2,500 years ago, a massive economic shift occurred when groups in northern Botswana acquired livestock, sheep and later cattle, transitioning from hunter-gatherers to pastoralists—becoming the Khoekhoe.

Archaeological evidence indicates the Khoekhoe moved out of the northern Botswana/Zambezi region and split. One major migration route skirted the western edge of the Kalahari desert, moving down through modern-day Namibia and into the Northern and Western Cape with the Kalahari was the geographic pivot around which this entire pastoralist expansion rotated. Moving large herds of sheep and cattle through a Thirstland required moving between reliable pans and riverbeds like the Nossob, Auob, and Molopo rivers. They transformed the Kalahari from a hunter-gatherer landscape into a series of strategic grazing corridors.

The Dorsland Trekkers were going to reverse that course to some extent, using the north western Botswana region to reach Namibia, and eventually, Angola.

The Khoekhoe like the Voortrekkers, appreciated their freedom, moving in small extended family groups, their mobility part of their world-view. Instead of heading north west like the trekkers, they had headed south west for hundreds of years, arriving in Southern Africa about 2400 years ago.

That was about the time parts of south-central Africa experienced a shift in rainfall, forests and dense woodlands expanded or contracted, the tsetse belts moved. If you were an early pastoralist whose entire wealth, diet, and social structure depended on cattle and sheep, a shifting tsetse belt was an existential threat.

The arid margins of the Kalahari, the Namib, and the Karoo environments further south were too dry for the tsetse fly. The Karoo was a safe haven for livestock, the Namib too dessicated.

In high-rainfall, tropical areas, grass grows fast but loses its nutritional value in winter, it becomes sourveld. In more arid regions like the fringes of the Kalahari and the Karoo the grass grows slower but retains its high mineral and protein content year-round, even when dry - it is sweetveld. To a sheep or cow, the arid south was an open buffet of incredibly nutritious feed.

The Khoekhoe migration pushed into the Western Cape, where they hit a completely different climate zone, the winter rainfall region, so just as the summer rainfall area dried out, the Cape valleys were greening up. But where the trekkers moved northwards taking a decade and arrived Angola in 1880, the Khoekhoe migrations took hundreds of years. A gradual seeping south if you like.

After the Khoekhoe, and before the Boers, the people of the Ngami area near the Okavango Delta were known as the Khwebe - from the word Kwe which simply means “people”. They dwelled close to a geographical anomaly in Botswana - the Khwebe Hills — Botswana is one of the flattest countries on earth.

The Khwebe hills are a windy place and Khwebe mythology speaks of the Gas Bird which lives in a certain baobab near the upper Okavango River valley. If you listen closely, you can hear his hissing voice inside the tree. The mythology is linked to earlier San cosmology, where the word !Khwe means wind — and where the wind is a supernatural being.