Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (5 page)

Freetown society was rich and strange. The founders had been concerned to create an educated African bourgeoisie, to be the governing class of the place, and to perpetuate its Christian origins: the evangelicals were seldom radicals in any modern sense, and generally held strong Whiggish views about property and the continuity of class. Almost at once they founded a place of higher education, Fourah Bay College, which inhabited an imposing building on the hill, and which presently produced an entire social layer of educated Africans—clergyman, lawyers, school-teachers, civil servants. These were the first of the Sierra Leone Creoles, a people destined to play an important part in the development of the British Empire. ‘Creole’ was a word of many meanings. In the French colonies of America it meant a locally-born European. In Spanish South
American it meant a half-caste predominantly white. In West Africa it meant at first a liberated slave or his descendants, as distinct from a local African: but there it presently came to mean more too, and signified a person who subscribed to the particular Anglo-African culture propagated by Fourah Bay.

The Creoles became an imperial caste. They developed their own Afro-English language, Krio—far more than a pidgin language, but a tongue with its own literature, which sounded indeed like a hazily slurred recording of cultured southern English, but was graced with its own nuances and idioms, and eventually became so divorced from the parent language that scholars translated Shakespearian plays into it.
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They wore European clothes, conveniently differentiating them from the local tribespeople, whom they tended to despise, and who were either draped in blinding swoops of textile, or almost totally nude. They filled their houses with the orthodox bric-à-brac of the English middle classes, upright pianos and lithographs and portraits of the Queen and framed embroidered samplers. They aimed above all at respectability. We see them, in starched white collars and stifling crinolines, presiding stiffly over public functions, or trailing beneath sunshades to morning service. We see their heavy black features sweating over dog-collars (the first black Anglican bishop was a Creole) or stuffed into red serge jackets (the first black British Army doctor was another) or crowned with judge’s wigs, or hung about with stethoscopes, or bespectacled over philosophical treatises. They ran the colony more or less themselves, with intermittent advice from white governors and transient civil servants, and by and large they did it well. One of the earliest coherent plans for self-government in British African colonies was produced by Major Africanus Horton, who had enjoyed a successful
career in the British Army before settling down to a literary and commercial retirement in Horton Hall, Freetown.
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Presently, too, the Creoles began to demonstrate talents more specifically their own—throw-backs, so to speak, to the distant times before their redemption. They turned out to be marvellous money-makers. Capitalism sprouted and thrived in Sierra Leone. The paternalist white clerics of Fourah Bay found some of their most promising pupils, steeped in the maxims of Dean Stanley or the examples of William Wilberforce, abruptly blossoming into immensely rich entrepreneurs, landowners or speculators. Dynasties of rich Creoles were founded, and those modest houses of Trelawny Street were often abandoned for more ostentatious mansions and country estates. At the same time the Creoles, while still honouring the principles of the evangelical faith, threw off its gloomier forms. They became a particularly gay and hospitable people. Half-forgotten ancestral rhythms enlivened the cadences of metrical psalms, and the sons of sober bureaucrats discovered in themselves inherited aptitudes for dance and buffoonery.

Sierra Leone still had its ups and downs. Periodic scandals excited the little colony, and heavy-bearded commissions of inquiry occasionally disembarked at Freetown quay to put things straight again. Here as elsewhere, even the most compliant Africans sometimes disappointed their mentors and liberators—as was said by one judicial commission, ‘the known Christian moral lesson should be continually impressed on their minds that we must earn our bread with the sweat of our brow’. But the settlement survived, and Freetown itself became the principal base of the Royal Navy on the West African coast—a town where generations of transient Britons, on their way to grimmer places farther south, would be surprised by the gaiety of their welcome, and first discover that there might be some element of fun, after all, in the prospect of a posting to the White Man’s grave.
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So the first monuments of Queen Victoria’s empire were monuments of liberty. The fight against slavery at its source would continue throughout the Victorian era, being a prime motive as we shall see of the great mid-century explorations, and it proved a fertile seed of imperial emotion. It was seen as a stake in providence—as Lord John Russell told the House of Commons in 1850, ‘it appears to me that if we give up this high and holy work … we have no right to expect a continuance of those blessings, which, by God’s favour, we have so long enjoyed’. The adventures that were to come, as imperialism itself developed into a kind of faith, and dominion became a national ambition for its own sake, were grounded upon this good old base, erected so long before by the earnest philanthropists of Clapham and Exeter Hall: and when evangelicalism had long lost its dynamism, when a harsher generation was in command, impelled by cruder ends, still the memory of these aspirations tempered the brashness of the British Empire, and sometimes touched the imperial conscience.

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T was only to be expected that the improving instinct would presently father the interfering impulse, as the evangelical power of Britain pursued new fields of action. It was much easier to reform people if you ruled them, and so the British began, tentatively at first, guardedly, even unwittingly, their long attempt to mould the world in their own image. ‘The complete civilization and the real Happiness of Man,’ decreed the Aborigines Protection Society, ‘can never be secured by any thing less than the diffusion of Christian Principles’; and the diffusion of true Christian Principles could best be achieved by the exertion of British authority.

Among the first people to feel the effects were the Afrikaners of South Africa.
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They were an intensely religious people themselves. A mixture of Dutch, Flemish, German and French Huguenot stock, they had first emigrated to the Cape in the seventeenth century, to farm there under the rule of the Dutch East India Company, and they had established in that delectable country a society altogether their own. They were almost paranoically independent. They wanted to be alone. They asked nothing of government, and offered nothing in return. Bold, bloody-minded, sanctimonious outdoor people, they wanted only freedom to wander where they liked, establish their farms as they pleased, worship their own God and mind their own
business. With their great creaking ox-wagons and their herds of long-horned cattle, their plump wives in poke bonnets and their rangy dogs behind, they had long ago become indigenous to Africa, and adopted some of its values. The local Hottentots they enslaved, the local bushmen they virtually exterminated, the fierce and magnificent tribes of the African interior they kept at bay by force of arms. The Boers were a very lonely people, but they did not mind. They had virtually cut their ties with Europe, they spoke a bastard Dutch of their own, and they were sufficient unto themselves.

They worshipped a severe Calvinist version of the Christian God. He was a God of absolutes. His commandments were inflexible. He had ordained for ever the hierarchy of the stars and planets, the ordering of the seasons, the place in the world of men and women, beasts and birds. He was a literal God, who had revealed his truths once and for all in the infallible text of the Old Testament. He was a God who had decreed, if only implicitly, that every Boer farmer was his own master, with a right to his own African farm, and absolute leave to exploit the black peoples of the continent as his own conscience allowed.

There were Boers in the Cape peninsula who lived exquisitely, in lovely oak-sheltered towns like Stellenbosch or Paarl, in wide-stoeped homesteads of the wine valleys, or fine old houses, with floors of red tile and furniture of stink-wood, among the gardens of Cape Town. The most Afrikaner of the Afrikaners, though, lived with Jehovah on the Great Karroo, the high dry plateau which lay to the north-east. These were the frontier Boers, the Volk quintessential, who considered themselves an elect within an elect, and embodied all their divine privileges in the conception of
lekker
lewe
—‘the sweet life’, to be lived in lands wide enough to exclude the smoke of the next man’s chimney, with a sufficiency of stock, no interference from busybody authority, and obedient black men round the back of the house.

In 1815 these grand but disputatious peasants (for like most dogmatists they were always squabbling) had become unlikely subjects
of the British Crown. The British had retained the Cape of Good Hope, which they had captured in the wars, as a way-station on the route to India, and they had settled at Cape Town in the easy confidence of victory. They soon established a governing class of English gentry, with a leavening of Dutch burghers left behind by the previous regime. Cape Town became a genial blend of the Dutch and the English Georgian styles, with fragrant gardens running up the slopes of Table Mountain, and avenues of oaks and camphors, and well-proportioned offices of Government arising around the old Dutch castle. Along the coast, too, English settlements took root: Grahamstown, the frontier town, 500 miles to the north-east, elegantly disposed around its garrison church, or Port Elizabeth upon Algoa Bay, guarded by its little stone fort and overlooked by the memorial to its eponymous patroness Elizabeth Donkin—‘
to
the
memory
of
one
of
the
most
perfect
of
human
beings,
who
has
given
her
name
to
the
town
below
’.

India was the reason for the English presence, and India never seemed far away. There were the ships, of course, always swinging around the Cape, or putting into the base at Simonstown for victualling or refurbishment. There was the faintly Indianified manner of English life. And there was a constant shifting society of Britons from India—Hindus, as the Boers called them, as against Kapenaars. Many officers from India spent their leave at the Cape—it did not count as home leave, so that they need not sacrifice their overseas allowances. Some retired to the Cape, a happy compromise between the swelter of India and the mist of England, and some came to recuperate from the fevers of Calcutta and the plains: the spa at Caledon, east of Cape Town, depended almost entirely upon the Indian trade, and was always full of worn-out Collectors, faded memsahibs and debilitated majors of the Bengal Army—who, resting among its springs and rubber-trees, and looking across the gentle plain to the mauve cool mountains beyond, must sometimes have wished they had never set eyes on Malabar or Madras.
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The Anglo-Indians often brought their own servants with them, and with
these turbanned or shawled domestics at their heels, browned themselves by the Indian sun they would parade through the esplanade gardens of the Cape, to remind the watching burghers and wondering Hottentots that they were subjects now of a wider sovereignty. 

No society could be more alien to the inbred and unimaginative community of the Boers, and almost from the start the British and the Afrikaners distrusted each other. The Boers thought the British stiff-necked, snobbish and interfering, and called them
rooineks
, rednecks.
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The British thought the Boers ignorant, ungainly and often queer. At first, though, there seemed no conflict of interest. The Boers were essentially pastoralists, landsmen, whose eyes turned instinctively to the open grasslands of the interior. The British were interested in South Africa only as a staging-post to the east, and the little wars which they found themselves obliged to fight against the African tribes along their frontiers were intended only to keep the Cape safe and stable. As late as the 1840s only one surfaced road led out of Cape Town, for strategically the British did not need to extend their authority inland—the smaller and tighter their footholds on the coast, the better. They were not much attracted,
anyway, by the high veld of the interior: ‘a worn-out and emaciated country’, John Howison thought it in 1830, ‘its mountains, without soil or verdure, resemble skeletons, and its unwatered plains … are like an animal body in which circulation has ceased from disease or exhaustion’. Only a handful of wandering artisans or adventurers, mostly Scots or Irish, had penetrated the Karroo to live among the frontier Boers.

It was idealism that changed all this. Sooner or later it was inevitable that English evangelicalism, with its emphasis on the welfare of the coloured peoples, would come into conflict with the dour fundamentalism of the Boers. Disturbing rumours reached London about Afrikaner mistreatment of the Hottentots, and by the 1820s the London Missionary Society had gone sternly into action. Its chief representative in South Africa, the Reverend John Philip, was vociferous in defence of native rights, and outspokenly critical of Afrikaner attitudes. The English newspapers took up the cause, successive English Governments were prodded into action, and before long the more extreme of the Boers began to feel themselves threatened—not in their persons, for from the start they had enjoyed equal rights with Englishmen, but in their way of life.

In 1828 they were horrified to be confronted by an ordinance declaring black men and white to be, ‘in the most full and ample manner’, equal before the law. In 1833 they were stunned to learn that, by a decision of the English Parliament 4,000 miles away in London, slavery in South Africa was banned. They were told that black people had a right to the possession of land, something which struck at the very roots of the Boer philosophy. They were told that Hottentots had a right to travel where they pleased, without passes. They were warned that they must not take the punishment of Kaffirs into their own hands, as they had with every success for 200 years, but must make a complaint through a magistrate. Their own opinions, they considered, were distorted or disregarded, and wherever they turned they found, in league with the blacks, in conspiracy with the local authorities, influential in London and honoured among the barbarous black chiefs of Kaffirland, the ubiquitous Mr Philip and his clerics, those earnest instruments of the imperial instinct.

All this was too much for the frontier Boers. It seemed to them
that not merely the legal or constitutional, but actually the natural order of things was being deliberately disrupted. How was a man to keep order on his farm, if he could not flog a recalcitrant employee? How could the murderous black warriors of the frontier zones, represented by the English missionaries as no more than misunderstood innocents, be kept at bay? How could the divine hierarchy itself be maintained, if Ham was the equal of Shem? The Boers felt betrayed, but worse still, perhaps, they felt despised. So free, so bold, in many ways so generous, now they felt themselves treated as inferiors, half-Europeans, backwoodsmen, by the sanctimonious representatives of the new British order. Unlimited land, cheap obedient labour, security from blacks and whites alike—these were essentials of the
lekker
lewe
‚ and all three the British Empire seemed determined to deny them.

So it came about that in the late years of the 1830s the Boers, the first refugees of Victoria’s empire, undertook the hegira of their race, the Great Trek—a mass migration of frontier people, perhaps 10,000 souls, out of the eastern Cape into the unexploited high veld of the interior, where they could pick their own land and be themselves. They were escaping in fact from the modern world, with all its new notions of equality and reason, but on the face of it they were simply trying to get away from the British. They were early victims of that latent British aptitude for interference which was presently to find subjects, and make enemies, from Canada to Bengal.

The Boers of the Great Trek—the Voortrekkers, as they were ever after to be known—made for the Orange River, the eastern frontier of the colony. Once across it, they would be free. They moved for the most part independently, in small wagon groups, commanded by craggy elders and guarded by mounted riflemen: but though their exodus was spread over several years, they did move to a general plan. It was based upon the reports of secret reconnaissance parties, and it was propagated among the Volk by word of mouth. They would rendezvous, in their shambled scattered way, at the foot of the
Drakcnsberg Mountains, in territory claimed only by black Africans, and there they would decide where their final destination was to be.

They were very experienced frontiersmen, and they travelled with a loose-limbed expertise. We see their high-wheeled trek wagons plunging through rivers and over ravines, the long ox-teams slipping and rearing, the driver with his immense hide whip cracking above his head, the black servants straining with ropes on the back wheels. We see them camped in laager within the circle of their wagons. The men in their wide-brimmed hats are smoking long pipes beneath awnings, or lie fast asleep upon the ground. The women are imperturbably suckling their children, mending their clothes, or preparing heroic Boer meals of game, eggs and violent coffee. Hens scrabble among the propped rifles and powder horns, a tame gazelle, perhaps, softly wanders among the carts, and in the distance the black men separately squat and gossip beside their fires. It is a truly Biblical scene, and the trekker Boers were searching quite consciously for a Promised Land. They moved in a spirit of revelation, as though pillars of fire were leading them (and one unusually ecstatic group, coming across a verdant spring in the remoter veld, assumed it to be the source of the River Nile, and named it Nilstrom). They were penetrating country almost unknown to white people—up through the scrub of the Karroo into the brilliant immensities of the high veld, which seemed to extend limitlessly into the heart of Africa, which smelt of herbs and heather, and over whose silences the stars hung at night with a clarity unimaginable to the distant philanthropists of Empire.

There were few black people to harass them. The only real opposition came from the warlike Matabele tribe, whom the Boer commandos, loose in the saddle and quick with the elephant gun, smartly defeated in a battle at Vegkop, well over the Orange River, killing 400 warriors and capturing 7,000 cattle. More often the trekkers quarrelled among themselves, for there were all sorts on this epic. Some were rich men, with household possessions piled high in their wagons. Others had nothing but their horses, guns and hands. Few could read or write, fewer still had any experience of administration or leadership, nearly all were people of fractious individuality, exceedingly difficult to control. The story of the Great Trek, for all
its poignant grandeur, is a story of endless bickerings, political rivalries and even religious antagonisms. The trekkers mostly-travelled in groups of a dozen wagons or so, with ten or twelve fighting men, twenty or thirty black servants and a rag-tag tail of cattle, horses, sheep and goats. It was only in 1834 and 1835 that a sporadic movement of families and friends developed into a migration; and only in 1837 that the main body of the Voortrekkers, some 3,000 men and women, assembled at their rendezvous at Thaba Nchu, at the foot of the Drakensberg on the borders of Basutoland.
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