History of South Africa podcast

Episode 204 - A quick whip around the globe in 1855 and Cetshwayo kaMpande makes his Regal Entrance. First up, a quick thank you to Adi Badenhorst at AA Badenhorst family wines in the Swartland of the Cape — your gift was extraorindarily generous and well received. I am truly indebted to you. And to all those folks sending me tips and notes, thank you its gratifying to receive correspondence from such learned people! Straight to our episode 2024, Planet Earth 1855, Cetshwayo kaMpande grows powerful and Natal Land Realities. A legend is the only way to describe the amaZulu king who was going to dethrone his father Mpande kaSenzangakhona, usurp his brother’s right to rule, and later in life, destroy an entire British column at Isandhlwana. In this episode we’ll deal with the initial years of his life. Folks tend to focus on Shaka when it comes to important Zulu warriors, but by the time we’re done, you’ll agree that Cetshwayo was probably more significant. I’ll end the editorialising there - let’s head over to the eastern seaboard of South Africa, into Zululand across the Thukela. It’s 1855. Mpande had overthrown his half-brother Dingana, and one of his professed goals was to stop the internecine conflict that had riven the house of the Zulu. Peace is what he strived for, and so he set about creating sons unlike Shaka and Dingana who had their offspring killed and tried to insure themselves against being bumped off by their own children by just not getting their wives or concubines pregnant. Easier said than done. Mpande had at least 30 sons with his wives, believing that protection lay in numbers. Problem was, there will always be someone who thinks they’re better than the eldest son of the Great Wife. And the eldest son of the Great Wife will always believe he should be king. Fade up the ominous music. And thus, in a nutshell, Cetshwayo. The settler port village of Durban had gone through various ructions by the mid-1850s. For some distance around the port and into the interior, English settlers had replaced the original Dutch farmers with the stipulation that a farmer could own only one farm of 2500 acres and security of tenure had improved. Originally tenure was a measly 15 years - then changed to perpetuity. Marking out the farms was done on horseback at walking pace. One hour each way. Four hours later, that was your farm. Of course most mustered the fastest horse they could find, some even changed horses, then tried to gallop or canter the four hours. Land sizes could top 5000 acres by cheating in this way. Simultaneously a clash of ideas between the indigenous population of South Africa and the British Government was most marked in Natal. Most of the region is suitable for farming in some manner — the region can be divided, pretty broadly, into two zones. The interior grasslands and open tree savannah, and the coastal bush and forest. The grasslands were not ideal for arable agriculture, but were great for livestock farming. The coastal zone was a different story — more rain fell along the coast, it was more suitable for farming — and that’s why sugar became such an important story in Natal a little later. With that, its time now to step back and peer inscrutably at what was going on internationally in the year 1855. The Panama Railway became the first railroad to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, long before before the time of the Canal which was built between 1904 and 1916. In 1855 Alexander the Second ascended the Russian throne while in China, the Taiping Rebellion rolled on — the Taiping army of 350 000 invaded Anhui in the east of the country. Van Diemen’s land was seperated from New South Wales and granted selfgovernment and later in the year, renamed Tasmania. For the wine connoissours listening, including Adi Badenhorst I hope, the Bordeaux wine classification system was first listed in 1855.

We’re picking up speed from here on, the fulcrum that was the mid-19th Century is passed and our story is developing quickly - this is episode 203 the Siege of Makapansgat and Reconstituting history. It is 1854, almost mid-way through the sixth decade of this momentous century and the region that’s under our gaze is the northern Limpopo territory, the Waterberg. Those who live there today will know of its grandeur, and its extensive mountain ranges, riverine bush, delightful geology. Thaba Meetse is the northern Sotho name for the Waterberg, where the average height of the peaks here are 600 meters, rising to 2 000 meters above sea level. The vegetation is officially known as dry deciduous forest, or just the Bushveld to you and me. The original people here date back thousands of years, early evolutionary stages of hominid development can be traced here, so in some ways, it’s part of the story of human existence on the planet. Its all about the type of rocks here, and the soils. Clamber amongst the red koppies and ravines and you can look out over the bush veld, with it’s minerals such as vanadium and platinum, part of the Bushveld Igneous complex I spoke about in episodes one and two. Tectonic forces forced the rocks upwards, creating the famous Waterberg, the Thaba Meetse ranges, rivers deposited sediment and in these sandstone layers, you’ll find the famous caves surrounded by cliffs hundreds of feet high, rising from the plains. Scientists and palaeontologists tracked our very first human ancestors who lived at Waterberg as early as three million years ago, and inside the cave we’re going to hear about, Makapansgat, skeletons of Australopithecus Africanus have been found. Homo Erectus remains have also been found in the cave. This site has yielded many thousands of fossil bones, and what is known as The Cave of Hearths preserves a remarkably complete record of human occupation from Early Stone Age “Acheulian” times in the oldest sediments through the Middle Stone Age, the Later Stone Age and up to the Iron Age. It also is where one of the earliest Homo sapiens remains were found, a jaw found in the cave layers by archaeologists. The lime enriched deposits and dry conditions within the cave have allowed for the exceptional preservation of plant, animal and human remains as Amanda Beth Esterhuysen points out in her 2007 Wits University PhD. So its really metaphorical — an iconic cave because this is where the Boers and the Kekana people were going to go to war. Part of our story this episode is about a track, a wagon trail, that passed between the ivory hunting centre of Schoemansdal, Soutpansberg and the newly established Boer town of Pretoria and which cut straight through the middle of Kekana chief Mokopane’s territory. And inside this territory is Makapansgat. Since the first trekkers had arrived in 1837, the Langa and Kekana people who lived in the Waterberg had watched in some disquiet as the numbers of Boers increased over the years. It was almost two decades after Louis Trichardt had wheeled his wagons through the Waterberg, and by the mid-19th Century there wasn’t a week that went past without hunters or prospectors wandering through. It’s a double irony then to relate that both the Langa and Kekana had origins further south, they were part of the amaNdebele who had fled from Northern Zululand during Shaka’s reign, related to the amaHlubi, and had been involved in some land seizing themselves. Don’t simplify history, its more radical than a buffet hall of red berets. King Mghombane Gheghana of the Kekana, and Mankopane of the Langa, were not prepared to accept Trekker overlordship like they had fought against Mzilikazi’s overlordship. They rejected the trekker system of labour where every black adult male was supposed to work for the Boers for nothing. Mokopane by the way is a northern Sotho form of Mghombane Gheghana, and he was known throughout the territory as Mokopane.

This is episode 202, the sounds you hear are the sounds made by wagons rolling across the veld — because we’re going to join the trekkers who’ve mostly stopped trekking. For the trekkers, the promised land was at hand. The high veld, parts of Marico, the northern Limpopo region, the Waterberg, the slopes of the Witwatersrand into the lowveld, the Free State with its rocky outcrops and vastness, the dusty transOrangia. In the Caledon Valley, Moshoeshoe was monitoring the Dutch speakers who were now speaking a combination of languages, morphing the taal into Afrikaans. Further east, King Mpande kaSenzangakona of the Zulu had been keeping an eye on the colonial developments while indulging in expansion policies of his own. This period, 1854 and 1855, is like a fulcrum between epochs. The previous lifestyle of southern Africa, pastoral and rural, was running its final course, the final decade before precious mineral discoveries were going to change everything. Let’s just stand back for a moment to observe the world, before we plunge back into the going’s on in the Boer Republics. Momentous events had shaken Europe, a succession of revolutions which had somehow swept around Britain but never swept Britain away. This is more prescient than it appears. These revolutions are forgotten now, they’re an echo but in the echo we hear the future. The 1848-1855 revolutions were precipitated by problems of imperial overload in Europe. Liberal nationalism was also sweeping the world, and the American constitution was on everyone’s lips. Copies of the American Constitution were cropping up in the oddest places. Like the back of Boer ox wagons and inside the churches, alongside the Bibles. American missionary Daniel Lindley who you heard about in our earlier episodes, the man from Ohio who had started out life in south Africa as a missionary based near Mzilikazi of the amaNdebele’s great place near Marico. He had copies distributed to the Boers. This is important. There is a direct link between the American constitution, South African concepts of what democratic rights were, which you could then track all the way to the 1994 New Constitution after apartheid. Schoemansdal, to the north, and the basis of ivory trade, was much bigger and richer than Potch. The Schoemansdalers looked down their noses at the Potchefstroomers — it was an ancient Biblical pose — it was hunters and shepherds versus farmers, Cain versus Abel. The clash between settled and nomadic societies. One of the dirty little secrets of South African life in the mid-19th Century was how successfully these new arrivals in the north, the trekkers, had decimated the elephant, rhino, lion, leopard, crocodile, and hippo populations. Schoemansdal was living on borrowed time. The story begins with a hunting party seeking white gold — ivory. An elephant hunt. It also begins with a massacre, and ends with a siege of a cave. The Nyl Rivier was always disputed territory, particularly since chief Makapan and Mankopane, otherwise known as Mapela - Nyl means Nile and the Boers had renamed this river for all sorts of important resonant reasons. This river is a tributary of the Limpopo and it is located in the northern part of the Springbok flats.There are two main versions of what happened, and I’m going to relate both, then we shall try to extricate fact from fiction. This episode will deal with the initial events, and next episode we shall conclude the saga with it’s terrifying cave fighting and ultimate South African symbolism. The Langa and Kekana people first experienced trekkers in 1837 when Louis Trichardt entered their territory — from then on a steady trickle of trekkers could be found inside Langa and Kekana territory. The area we’re focusing on is close to where the town of Potgietersrus would be founded, the modern day town of Mokopane. We can begin to connect our histories here. Makapan, Mokopane, Mankopane, Potgieter.

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.