'Die man wat die Groot Trek veroorsaak het': Glenelg's personal contribution to the cancellation of D'Urban's dispossession of the Rarabe in 1835 - Randolph Vigne

It is nearly 60 years since W M Macmillan's Bantu, Boer and Briton (1929) examined the frontier settlement of 1835 ordained by the Governor of the Cape, Sir Benjamin D'Urban, and the British Colonial Secretary, Lord Glenelg's, reversal of it. Nearly 50 years have passed too since the Huisgenoot's unequivocal headline 'Die man wat die Groot Trek veroorsaak het' typified the 'guilty' verdict on Glenelg for causing the Great Trek. The 11 years that had followed Macmillan's exculpation of Glenelg had done nothing to convert the public to his view. Perhaps it is a view still ignored.

Macmillan wrote that 'the reversal of D'Urban's settlement synchronised with the Great Trek and is often taken to have been its main cause', and called for a 'revision of this "authorised version'" and its 'long-overdue' dismissal. He proceeded to show in a brilliant chapter how the expulsion of the Rarabe Xhosa from their lands between the Keiskamma and Kei rivers, which Glenelg's epic 1835 dispatch annulled, had itself been cancelled by D'Urban three months earlier, to the dismay and anger of the Boers and British settlers, voiced with high drama in the Graham's Town Journal.

Edgar Brookes, in his History of native policy, had been there before. In 1924 he defended Glenelg from blame for the cancellation of D'Urban's dispossession of the Rarabe, since he had 'simply carried out the ... policies of his predecessors' in requiring treaties rather than annexation. His 'notorious dispatch' was no more than 'a minor incident of frontier Native policy' and one more misrepresented than any other. In Brookes's view, however, Glenelg should have accepted D'Urban's annexation, which would have advanced the 'task of civilizing the Native tribes'. Brookes refers, on another issue, to Glenelg's 'pigheaded adherence to principle'. Much later in life the liberal ex-Senator Brookes was to find that principle was something to be pig-headed about. The young Edgar Brookes, however, could not see that the Gleneig dispatch was much more than a 'minor incident' for the very fact of its author's adherence to principle.

Macmillan made his treatment of the Gleneig dispatch central to the new liberal 'authorised version' and by 1975 could claim that it was 'never seriously challenged' and that the main conclusions had been 'internationally accepted'. At home, however, he observed that 'very little of this revision has filtered through to the school histories.'

Macmillan taught that the Gleneig dispatch of 1835 simply reversed a policy that had itself been found impracticable by D'Urban, and Gleneig was informed of this in a dispatch that did not reach him until March 1836. By that date many Voortrekkers were already on the move. Piet Relief's letter of April 1836 to the civil commissioner of Grahamstown makes many complaints about the insecure and impoverished conditions of life caused by the 1834-35 frontier war. One of its few positive statements is that 'the inhabitants have much confidence in the measures of the Government to repress the rapacity of the Kafirs.'

Retief makes no mention of the Province of Queen Adelaide either here or, a year after its abandonment, in the 'Manifesto of the emigrant farmers' published in the Graham's Town Journal, or even of the policy of the British Government towards 'a country thus distracted by internal commotion'. If the 'farmers who quitted the colony' did so because of the lack of protection under the treaty system which superseded D'Urban's annexation, why in their search for 'a more quiet life' did they enter 'a wild and dangerous country' where there was no protection at all?

The losses suffered in the 1834-35 war by Boers and British settlers were grievous indeed, but it was not mainly the fear of further dangers they would be exposed to by the change of policy that mortified both white communities on the frontier. After Glenelg's 1835 dispatch it was his appointment of Andries Stockenstrom as lieutenant governor. It was this acceptance of the views of Dr John Philip, Superintendent of the London Missionary Society at the Cape, and his newspaper editor son-in-law John Fairbairn, and Thomas Fowell Buxton and the missionary societies in Britain, that they resented - the more so, perhaps, because Stockenstrom was one of their own.

The land between the Keiskamma and Kei rivers which D'Urban had annexed was returned to its Rarabe inhabitants by Stockenstrom on Gleneig's orders, but this action had little effect on the bulk of the Boers and settlers who lived west of the Keiskamma and Fish rivers. Many had trekked north for reasons other than the danger of attack by the Xhosa. Those who survived the War of the Axe and Mlanjeni's War eventually had access to the land withheld from them by Gleneig when Sir George Grey finally made the Ciskei part of the Cape Colony.

If Gleneig's dispatch had been merely the instrument of reversal of D'Urban's frontier settlement, its impact would have been forgotten with the passing years and the events which rendered it nugatory. Its importance was of a different order. To Sir George Cory, who talked to so many who remembered those days, 'of all official documents which have ever reached South Africa there has probably not been one that has been so effective in moulding the characteristic troublous history of the country as this one.'5 According to Henry Cloete, a barrister on circuit in Grahamstown when the war broke out, 'a communication more cruel, unjust and insulting to the feelings,... can hardly have been penned by a declared enemy of the country and its Governor.'

The next generation of Afrikaners felt as bitterly towards it. The anonymous Een eeuw van onrecht (1899), issued by F W Reitz but written by J C Smuts, declared, in W T Stead's 1900 English translation, that Glenelg maligned the Boers in even more forcible terms than the emissaries of the London Missionary Society, and openly favoured the Kafirs, placing them on a higher pedestal than the Boers ... It was useless to hope for justice from Englishmen. There was no security of life and property under the flag of a government which openly elected to uphold Wrong [and] which united a commercial policy of crying injustice with a veneer of simulated philanthropy.

English-speaking South Africans tended to blame Gleneig alone (and, of course, Philip, another Scot, though he was in favour of retaining the annexation and was not a confidant of Glenelg's). In a popular work funded by government, Hedley Chilvers wrote:

Could this foolish peer have visualised the tremendous effect of his dispatch on the colonists, could he have foreseen that it would become one of the great motives which determined so many hundreds of sturdy whites to abandon the Colony and British dominion ... he might have stayed his hand ... to Lord Gleneig and his blundering may be ascribed that tremendous event in South African history, the Great Trek ...8
To Chilvers's contemporary, the liberal historian Macmillan, it was 'perhaps the most momentous dispatch in South African history'.

Historians in many ways have interpreted its effect. In C W de Kiewiet's view it 'maintained a dangerous fiction and staved off the inevitable day' of white rule over black; it was merely 'a decision to allow the sores of the frontier to fester for another season till another outburst'.10 John Henderson Soga, combining the African with the missionary point of view, reflected that though 'Lord Glenelg's policy has come under the lash of colonial historians', his 'reputation remains unsullied as in him is reflected the spirit of enlightened British administration.'

J S Galbraith, De Kiewiet's student, disagreed with Macmillan's view that it was 'to Glenelg's credit, and to the honour of British imperialism, that annexation was not to be taken so lightly and greedily sanctioned for the sake of acquiring territory'.12 Emphasising the extreme reluctance of the Melbourne government to incur the heavy financial cost of acquiring new territory, Galbraith called the 'disgorging' of the Province of Queen Adelaide 'humanitarianism "on the cheap", designed to please both God and mammon'.

The war of 1834-35 and its aftermath were of cataclysmic importance in forming the relationship of South Africa's diverse communities. It has been the subject of a vast literature. Much of the contemporary material was published in Theal's Documents relating to the war of 1835 (1912), which contains 419 pages of documents acquired by Theal from descendants of D'Urban and relatives of his second-in-command. Colonel Harry Smith. Their correspondence, now in the Cape Archives, has a dimension missing from Theal's compilation, namely the ceaseless flow of scribbled, sometimes illegible and incoherent but often illuminating marginal notes made by D'Urban and others. It was these that enabled Galbraith to interpret the important personal factors in their decisions and their reaction to those of Glenelg.

Theal deposited in the South African Library typed copies 'sufficient for two volumes more' which he called 'Records of the Province of Queen Adelaide' and 'Documents bearing upon the emigration of the Dutch farmers from eastern districts of the Cape Colony'. In the Public Record Office, Kew, there is a vast accumulation of documents in the Colonial Office records. A single file, CO 48/192, contains Glenelg's 1835 dispatch in various stages of composition. It includes Glenelg's own drafting, as well as his notes on the draft by the public servant heading the Colonial Office, James Stephen, whose thinking was so close to his own, and on D'Urban's dispatches. More accessible than any of these are the printed Parliamentary Papers of the House of Commons for 1835 and 1836, and in the latter volumes: '5. Caffre War and death of Hintza' (vol xxxix, 279 et seqq).

At popular level, the Afrikaners' Een eeuw van onrecht was preceded by its mirror image, a statement as partisan and dogmatic of the opposite case. Strangely ignored by most authorities, The wrongs of the Caffre nation, written under the pseudonym 'Justus', contains in an appendix both Glenelg's 12 000-word dispatch, and the mere 1 500 words of his reply to D'Urban's November 1835 justification of his action, written with even greater asperity. So little attention has been paid to Justus that his identity is still variously given as Robert Mackenzie Beverley 15 and Ambrose George Campbell, the Grahamstown doctor who gave evidence of the mutilation of the Xhosa king Hintsa's body at the inquiry into his murder held in August 1836.16 Edwards attributed authorship of the book to Gleneig himself.17 Cory calls The wrongs of the Caffre nation 'a very untruthful book'18 and to Theal it was 'not only untrustworthy but ... utterly absurd' and even 'rubbish'.

To the writer of this fiery polemic, it was 'certainly no agreeable task thus to unveil the disgrace of England in the form of a narrative offered as a preface to Lord Glenelg's dispatch'.20 Campbell, who seems the most likely author, 'possessed considerable ability' and was an 'able and witty writer', as Gory concedes, but there is a lack of realism in his views, again a mirror image of the folly of much of the argument against Glenelg's position. This is perhaps best exemplified by Justus's rhetorical plea:

Never let there be a representative legislative assembly in the colony unless a large majority of the representatives are of the coloured race. The Boors and settlers must be outnumbered in the proportion of two to one at least, before such an experiment could be attempted with safety.

Representative government for the Cape was being canvassed in the 1820s but was not introduced until 1853. When it came, it allowed no colour distinctions in the franchise, which also was granted with a low qualification. Nevertheless, so considerable were the economic, educational and cultural differences between black and white that the possibility of election to the legislature of Khoikhoi and Mfengu members was almost nil.

With its free use of opprobrious epithets - 'rapacious colonists', 'our glaring misrule, our ceaseless oppressions, our insatiate aggressions', 'baffled spoliators and discomfited oppressors' - Justus's diatribe is indeed a salutary preface to the 1835 dispatch as it presents so marked a contrast with the measured and careful fairness of the dispatch.22 Glenelg's legal training explains his prudent use of evidence and his attitude to proof and disproof. Nowhere is this clearer than in his treatment of the murder and mutilation of Hintsa. Peires believed him to have been 'revolted by the circumstances surrounding the death of Hintsa', 23 yet the absence of evidence against George Southey caused Glenelg to exonerate him entirely for the mutilation of the dead Hintsa's shattered head.

Contemporary historians have referred to the 'inexplicable way in which ... Glenelg whitewashed those most widely suspected of being responsible for the mutilation'.24 A careful reading of the 1835 dispatch, and indeed of Glenelg's other dispatches and letters, renders the inexplicable fully explicable, however. Here was a man of the highest principle, always willing to give credit where it was due, above all to D'Urban, who was throughout antagonistic towards him, and showed it. He was also bound by the strictest legal tradition, as witnessed by his attitude to evidence. Analysis of the 1835 dispatch makes clear Glenelg's extremely high personal standards. In his thesis on frontier policy J Roxborough investigates the charge that the Colonial Office received newspaper accounts of D’Urban’s volte face before the 'great dispatch' was sent off, yet are nowhere referred to by Glenelg. He concludes that Gleneig concealed nothing - certainly falsified nothing: 'both the opinions of his contemporaries and the evidence from the public records reveal him as a man of probity.'

Among the factors giving the dispatch its power are Glenelg's courtesy to D'Urban, the fairness of his argument and the exculpation of Hintsa's mutilators, the eloquence of his prose and the extraordinary nature of his decision to take the part of the colonised blacks against the interests of the colonising whites. It is this combination that created for Gleneig a place in history, crudely defined as 'the man who caused the Great Trek', though the message of the dispatch was but one of many causes. The dispatch had another ingredient, which only Glenelg could have supplied, and that was its passion.

For generations South African pupils were taught that Glenelg was a 'philanthropist', a member of the Clapham Sect with deluded Rousseauesque views about the 'noble savage' who, as one textbook writer put it, 'made a serious mistake by consulting a handful of agitators rather than his own official South African advisers'.26 Glenelg was attacked even by missionary writers:

with the best intentions he blundered woefully. He had taken a prominent part in the recent emancipation of slaves throughout the British Empire and in the excitement of that movement he was ready to believe that every black man was a victim of oppression and every white man a Legree such as is described by Mrs. Stowe in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Acting on private and prejudiced communications and not on the dispatches of Sir Benjamin D'Urban he laid the blame for the war on the colonists and ordered that the land taken from the AmaXhosa should be restored to them. They rapidly swarmed back to their old fastnesses in bush and forest and kept the frontier in terror for years.

As Methodist missionaries these historians of the Mfengu were echoing what their predecessors the Revds William Boyce and W J Shrewsbury had said in defence of D'Urban's policy, to Glenelg's chagrin, in the 1830s. Even a century later R H W Shepherd of Lovedale saw fit to castigate Glenelg's dispatch. Dr Philip's protests were blamed and the fact that D'Urban's 'second proposal, to permit the Xhosa to live in the province as British subjects, unfortunately did not timeously reach Lord Gleneig'.28 The Glasgow Missionary Society (GMS), the founders of Lovedale, warmly backed Glenelg, however, for which he gave them credit.

It was neither private, prejudiced communications nor Philip's protests that swayed Glenelg but the mass of material in Colonial Office files. Most came from South Africa. There was the evidence of such as G de la Poer Beresford and A J Cloete, brother of Henry (two military officers sent by D'Urban to lobby on his behalf), Colonel Christopher Bird, Boyce and Shrewsbury, Colonel T F Wade, and the missionaries George Buchanan and the Rev William Shaw, Dr A G Campbell, William Ellis, secretary of the London Missionary Society, the Rev John Ross of the GMS, the settler leader Thomas Philipps and the stormy petrel Andries Stockenstrom, whose appointment deflected to himself so much of the hate that might have been felt towards Glenelg. The main component was the evidence laid, in August 1835, before the Aborigines Committee, chaired by Buxton, a friend of Glenelg's youth and his early parliamentary companion. All that was lacking was D'Urban's own reasoned presentation of his case, which did not 'timeously reach Lord Glenelg'30 simply because it was not timeously written.

There are some surprises in the evidence, such as the Rev William Shaw's written submission, which was less committed to the settler point of view than could be expected from that Methodist source. Another is the answer of D'Urban's aide-de-camp, Captain J E Alexander, who had fought with distinction in the war of 1834-35. His admirably succinct response to Question 1380 put by the Aborigines Committee reveals the open-mindedness to be found in many such replies. According to his testimony, the cause of the invasion of the colony by the Rarabe on Christmas Day 1834, the start of the war, was simply the old commando system. Thieves and bad characters among them plundered the settlers occasionally. The commandoes proceeded to the nearest kraal (innocent, of course, for the guilty were far in the interior) and took from it cattle equal in number to those taken. Human nature could not stand this.

Alexander's point is fully developed in the dispatch, strengthened by both the 'evidence of eye-witnesses' and the official reports.32 In assimilating thus the mass of information and coming to his conclusion Glenelg's mind can be seen at work. The role played by James Stephen, so often claimed to be the real author of the dispatch, can be determined too.

Stephen praised Glenelg as 'the most laborious, the most conscientious and the most enlightened' of the 11 colonial secretaries he had served by that date.33 Henry Taylor of the Colonial Office, who was otherwise strongly critical of Glenelg, found him 'high-minded, accomplished and occasionally eloquent'.34 Neither Glenelg's high-mindedness nor his habitual fairness were enough to silence the bouts of biting personal criticism of D'Urban expressed in the margins of the latter's dispatches with such words as 'pitiable' and 'drivelling'. The dispatch of 9 June 1836, which D'Urban delayed for a full year, Glenelg praised, more than faintly, as really creditable to D'Urban yet damned as 'the only thing in all his dispatches that approaches to a statesmanlike and comprehensive view of any subject' ,

What then were the issues which roused in Glenelg the passion that inspired the 1835 dispatch and his ire against D'Urban? All were related both to what can only be called the racist view of the Xhosa held by D'Urban and his supporters, and to the effect of D'Urban's policy on his and Glenelg's own people, the 'subjects of the nations of Christendom'. Dealt with at length in Glenelg's sprawling hand, they were the annexation of the land and expulsion of its Xhosa population, the reprisals against the Xhosa, and D'Urban's characterisation of them as 'irreclaimable savages'.

There are, of course, practical aspects to the first two of these which could be used to substantiate Galbraith's gibe that this was 'humanitarianism on the cheap'. The cost to the British Treasury of maintaining this huge new territory was as strong a reason for giving it up as any moral sanction, and the vengeful treatment of the enemy would make certain another outbreak at high cost to Britain in men and money. It is Glenelg's third point and his own outlook as affecting the other two that so aroused this 'mild, agreeable man', as the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, described him,36 seen also by Henry Taylor as 'amiable and excellent' 37 and by Joseph Howe of Nova Scotia as 'accessible, amiable [with] goodness of heart and suavity of temper'.

It was his appreciation of the humanity of the Xhosa, of their value as human beings that stirred Glenelg to react to D'Urban's phrase 'irreclaimable savages'. He quoted the latter's statement that the Khoikhoi and Mfengu 'not at all inaptly compare the Caffres to wolves, which in truth they resemble very much', in that even if caught young and tamed, they throw off the tameness and 'appear in all their native fierceness, so soon as the temptation of blood and ravage' arouses 'their instinctive thirst for it'. It seems more than mere rhetoric for Glenelg to continue: 'It would be difficult for me to describe the pain with which I have read and laid before His Majesty the preceding passage.' He compares it to 'similar reproaches cast indiscriminately' by Europeans on 'the uncivilised men with whom they have been brought into contact' and makes his point:

Having classed their fellow creatures among the wild beasts of the forest, these claimants to the exclusive title of human beings have found little difficulty in defending, at least to their own satisfaction, whatever measures were necessary to the subjugation or destruction of the enemy.

He notes privately in the margin that in such terms the war of 1834 can be seen 'in the light of a mere hunting expedition',40 and reproaches D'Urban, in his usual courteous style, for using such terms 'not in any careless discourse or hasty writing but in a dispatch addressed to His Majesty's Government for their guidance in a practical question of the utmost importance and difficulty'.

Glenelg is concerned not only for the humanity of the Xhosa. He also attacks D'Urban's 'unfavourable estimate' of their character. 'Referring to the great mass of evidence which it has been my duty to examine, I find it replete with proofs of a directly opposite tendency,' he writes. To such people, whose 'integrity and humanity' protected with kindness the Christian ministers and the 200 British traders and their families beyond the colonial boundaries, even when harassed by the 'incessant patrols and commotions ... the character of "irreclaimable savages" cannot be assigned'.

He is driven by the need to end their suffering, however ambiguous may have been his instructions to D'Urban regarding the abandonment of the new province. Indeed he held back from making a final decision while he awaited D'Urban's full justification of the annexation and expulsion. In comparison, his instructions on ending the war are peremptory and exact. They also convey his sense of extreme urgency and deep concern: 'You will receive as a most decided and positive injunction the directions which I now convey to you, to bring these hostilities to a conclusion by the earliest possible period.'43 There must be no motive of 'revenge or conquest ... The safety of His Majesty's subjects in the districts of Somerset and Albany [is] the single legitimate object' of the war:

if it be continued for a day or an hour longer than the necessity of self-defence plainly requires we shall not be able to rescue ourselves from the reproach of having exerted our superiority needlessly and unjustly to crush a people whose impotent resistance leaves room for no feelings but those of compassion.

Glenelg's motive is not merely to rescue the Xhosa from the bloodletting savagery of Colonel Harry Smith but to rescue Britain and the 'nations of Christendom from reproach'. The cost of the war is the least of the causes of regret the continuation of the war would cause the people of Great Britain. Indeed, it is a melancholy and humiliating but an indisputable truth that the contiguity of the subjects of the nations of Christendom with uncivilised tribes has invariably produced wretchedness and decay and seldom the utter extermination of the weaker party.

He adds that 'no greater real calamity could befall Great Britain than that of adding southern Africa to the list of the regions which have seen their aboriginal inhabitants disappear under the withering influence of European neighbourhood'. It is to avoid the bringing down upon Great Britain of 'the reproaches of mankind and the weight of national guilt' that the war must be ended and the policy changed, as much as to save the Xhosa from extermination.45 D'Urban and his advisers reeled under the impact of all this, as we know from his marginal comments as much as from the full year he took to reply.

The vital importance of the 1835 dispatch comes clear in these passionately worded passages: the primacy of the interests of the Xhosa and the vital necessity of observing them for the sake of Britain's reputation outweighed the case for annexation of land for settlers, the imposition of British rule and even the compensation of the many colonists who had suffered grievously from the war. Glenelg wrote comprehensively and with incontrovertible arguments. In doing so he brought government on to the side of Dr Philip, Exeter Hall, Charles Lennox Stretch, Dr Ambrose Campbell and John Fairbairn, cheering them and their black confidants, and alienated the Boers and settlers. It was this partisan, 'valiant-for-truth' character that made the dispatch a 'momentous document', not its immediate policy implications.

HAL Fisher wrote that keys to understanding the past might take unexpected forms, one of them being 'the incalculable intrusion of some decisive personality', 46 It remains to consider what it was in the life of Glenelg that prompted his 'incalculable intrusion'. The outlines of Glenelg's life are well known to us. In one of the ablest entries in the Dictionary of South African biography, J G Pretorius rehearses the birth in Kidderpore in 1778 of Charles, elder son of Charles Grant, of an old Highland family, later head of the Honourable East India Company and a member of the Clapham Sect of evangelical Anglicans which included Wilberforce, James Stephen of the Colonial Office and other important public men. After Cambridge and some literary work he spent the year 1806 as secretary to General Sir David Baird, acting Governor of the Cape of Good Hope. He was called to the bar in 1807, entered parliament as member for Inverness in 1811 and rose quickly through various ministries, his last post being Secretary for War and the Colonies from April 1835 until his resignation in 1839. He was made a peer in 1835 but never married and the title Baron Glenelg died with him in 1866. The two central events in his ministerial career were the crises in Canada and at the Cape in 1835-36. They put him at odds with King William IV and made him a target of the Tory opposition and eventually an embarrassment to his cabinet colleagues, which brought about his departure from public life. His personality played a part in this: Stephen wrote of 'the strange incompatibility of his temper and principles with the temper and with the rules of action to which we erect shrines in Downing Street'.47 With all his great gifts, he lacked the politician's capacity to make decisions for their own sake.

Three aspects of his life and background may account for that 'incalculable intrusion', the first being the family's Scottish origins. Glenelg, sophisticated intellectual, statesman and courtier was the grandson of a Highland 'tacksman', known as Alexander the Swords - man, head of a minor branch of the Grants of Shewglie, in Glen Urquhart. Alexander survived the battle of Culloden in 1746, on the eve of which he and 30 clansmen had attended the baptism of his first-born son, who was named Charles after the Young Pretender. In poverty after the Jacobite Rising and its brutal crushing, he enlisted in the service of the Hanoverian King against whom the clans had risen, and died of fever in the Siege of Havana in 1762.

The early hardships of the family, the shattering of their ancient Highland way of life and the struggle to success and great wealth of Charles Grant, son of Alexander the Swordsman, were formative memories which he passed on to his sons, Charles and Robert, both in parliament until Robert's departure for Bombay as Governor in 1834 and his death there the following year, and to their sisters. The similarities between the sufferings of the Xhosa and the Highlanders after their defeat by the English and Lowland Scots in 1746 are inescapable and may equally have awakened in Glenelg the sympathy for the Xhosa that he expressed so strongly in the 1835 dispatch. Futhermore, the contempt for the Highlanders expressed by generations of Englishmen as uncivilised, and their depiction, even by Sir Walter Scott, as barbarians must equally have made Glenelg unusually sensitive to the dehumanising insult to the Xhosa in classing them with the 'wild beasts of the forest'.48 It is worth noting that the Khoikhoi, the Mfengu and the Europeans shared Glenelg's blame for claiming for themselves 'the exclusive title of human beings'. For it was the Xhosa themselves, not the blacks of South Africa generally, who seem to have won Glenelg's keenest sympathy.

It is too great a coincidence to leave unnoted that another Glen Urquhart fugitive from Culloden was a Macmillan, whose life was saved by Alexander the Swordsman. He was a source of pride to his kinsman W M Macmillan, whose sympathy for the defeated Xhosa may, like Glenelg's, have been stirred by the historical analogy.

Though a friend of Buxton's and the son of one of the central figures of the Clapham Sect, Glenelg played no particular role in the agitation in England for the rights of the Khoikhoi, and he expressed no special feeling for the Mfengu as the liberated underdogs of the Gcaleka Xhosa. The Xhosa, moreover, bore an uncanny resemblance to his father's people in the Highlands, with words like 'chief and 'clan' taken from Scottish terminology to translate these concepts from Bantu languages. Was Glenelg's fellow Scot Thomas Pringle, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society from 1827 until his death in December 1834, an inspiration? Many of his African poems -with their landscapes of glens and cleughs, peopled with chieftains and clansmen - were deeply sympathetic to the 'AmaKosae', none more so than 'The Caffre Commando', published in his African sketches in 1834, the year of Glenelg's appointment as Colonial Secretary. Pringle bewailed the massacre of the commando's victims:

Or who care for him who once pastured this spot
Where his tribe is extinct and their story forgot and blamed British rule
For England hath spoken the tyrannous word,
And the edict is writing in African blood!

Glenelg's distress at the killing and mutilation of the Gcaleka king, Hintsa, 'regarded with an attachment almost idolatrous by his people',51 is unfeigned. 'As a man,' wrote Peires, 'Lord Glenelg was revolted by the circumstances surrounding the death of Hintsa.'52 He could not have been unaffected by the knowledge that Highland clansmen honoured the person of their chief as the Xhosa did, though the reason he gave for requesting a military inquiry into these circumstances was because 'the honour of the British' demanded it. Glenelg does not parade the Scottish affinity with the Xhosa that was clear to later generations, shown to many by the Gcalekas' loyalty to their fugitive king Sarhili, Hintsa's son, in hiding after the last frontier war of 1877-78. The echo of Prince Charles Edward Stuart's concealment (by Grants of Glenmoriston, as it happened) was unmistakable. It must be remembered that British romantic interest in the Highlands was not created until later in the 19th century, with Queen Victoria's residence at Balmoral, the vogue for tartans. Highland dress and all that went with it. If Glenelg said nothing of it, this was because Highland connections were still undervalued and the Scots often mocked in the way that Dr Johnson mocked the faithful Boswell.

A second aspect that formed the Glenelg of the 1835 dispatch was that same Indian background. Charles Grant Senior had followed to India a cousin of his father's. Major Alexander Grant, who, like Alexander the Swordsman, had fled the field of Culloden. As his employee, Charles Grant Senior had 'shaken the pagoda tree' and in his early years in India had differed little from the other pleasure-seeking young Britons building wealth and careers in India. His conversion, after a family tragedy, to a strict Christian morality and evangelical Anglicanism led to his undertaking pioneering work for the establishment of Christian missions in India. With his closely-knit family, after their return from India in 1790, and his Clapham Sect friends, he campaigned until 1813 for this often-unpopular cause. It was a major expression of his conviction that Britain owed a duty to the Indians under her rule willingly to share with them the 'superior truth' of the Christian religion. The foundation of a mission to India caught the imagination of the British people and became 'generalised to include an interest in the rest of the non-Christian world'.

Charles Grant Junior, who supported his father in the Commons over the Bill to introduce Christian missions to India, was thus caught up in the great missionary movement, which had itself grown out of the new code of responsibility of coloniser to colonised, best expressed in Grant's Observations on the state of society among the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain (1792). A final element of Glenelg's life and background which may account for the forcefulness of the 1835 dispatch is to be found in his connections with South Africa itself. The late Elspeth Huxley with all his papers loses great-great granddaughter of his brother Sir Robert Grant the letters he wrote during his year there 55, despite efforts to find them. The records of Baird's acting-governorship await detailed research. He may have toured the western Cape with Baird56 and certainly visited Algoa Bay,57 where Baird put Captain Cuyler in command of Fort Frederick, with instructions for his dealings with the Xhosa of the neighbouring Zuurveld.

We know of his social relations with Pieter Lourens Cloete, whose sons were later to play a part in this story and, from Sir John Herschel, of his lengthy correspondence with 'old Mrs. de Witt', with whom Lord Macartney had stayed on his arrival in Cape Town in 1795. With such links - and especially thanks to his time at Algoa Bay - Glenelg 'may know something of the Caffer character', Sir John Herschel suggested.

(His wife described the 1835 dispatch, which Fairbairn had brought them, as 'a simple exposure of the oppressor and the oppressed'. 58) The Grants' connections with the Cape went further back than this, however. Major Alexander Grant had married Margarita Hendrika, daughter of Johan Zacharias Beck, a successful brewer and grazier, who had arrived at the Cape as a soldier in 1715, and his wife Geertruijda Christina Blankenberg, perhaps a relative of 'old Mrs. de Witt', the widow (born Blankenberg) of the wealthy farmer and burgher councillor Petrus Johannes de Witt. Margarita Hendrika was widowed in 1768 and took as her second husband Charles Grant's brother-in-law General Simon Fraser, who was killed in the battle of Saratoga in 1777.59 1768 was also the year that Charles Grant Senior and his brother Robert first travelled to India, with the help of Major Alexander Grant's colleague in London, W B Sumner. At the Cape ‘Mrs. Sumner’s mother’ hospitably received them. Five years later, with his wife, her mother and sister. Grant was at the Cape again, bound for Calcutta, and was caught up in a harrowing event, the killing of their friend Captain Ferguson by the notorious duellist 'Tiger' Roche.60 Glenelg must have been at the Cape, bound for England, as a boy of 14 when the family came home for good in 1792. The disappearance of the Grants' personal papers has deprived us of Glenelg's private views on the South African situation. His friendship with the Moravian missionary C I La Trobe may have begun during his service with Sir David Baird.61 His acceptance in 1838 of Sir John Herschel's plan for a public education system for the Cape Colony was a later link, which benefited many generations of pupils, both black and white, until the Cape Education Department was destroyed by the Bantu Education Act 1955.62 If we have no confirmation about Glenelg's views on the Cape situation based on his personal knowledge of it, why should that knowledge be seen as relevant to the 1835 dispatch and its impact? It is part of the enigma of Glenelg's character and personality that he appears to have been passive, even inert, in his conduct of affairs in other colonies, above all, the West Indies,63 to have made errors and caused delays in the implementation of policy in Canada, yet to have devoted single-minded attention and a great amount of sheer hard labour to his dealings with D'Urban, above all with the 1835 dispatch. Perhaps it was his personal and family connections with the Cape which stimulated him into the production of a dispatch which, wrote Justus, in the 'secret history of all our frightful injustices towards the natives of South Africa, for the first time checked the progress of aggression in the East'.

What Glenelg checked was soon unchecked. Glenelg did not, pace Justus, halt 'the misrule of South Africa ... so effectually in his golden dispatch to Sir Benjamin D'Urban that it will not be easy for the violent party to reconstruct the old system'.64 The dispatch was also a small part of a process which led to the Boers 'breaking boundary to the North unrestrained by the authorities of this ill-governed colony' 65 and to the ultimate destruction of Xhosa power by the Nongqawuse disaster.

The importance of the dispatch lies not so much in its direct effect on Britain's Cape frontier policy as in the clear, unambiguous expression it gave to the overriding issues of justice, mercy and humanity in the relations of Britain and her African subjects and their still independent neighbours. The dispatch found the governor, settlers and Boers guilty of the 'frightful injustices' of which Justus accused them. By thus blurring the line between conqueror and conquered, coloniser and colonised, white and black, did it help to make possible the infant non-racial democracy of South Africa today? As Chou-en Lai is said to have replied when asked whether he thought the French Revolution was a good thing or a bad thing, 'It is too soon to tell.'

Source:

Kleio XXX, 1998

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