Journal of Historical Geography, 24, 1 (1998) 2–19

‘Otherness’ and the frontiers of empire:the Eastern Cape Colony, 1806–c.1850

Alan Lester

Postcolonial analyses of the construction of ‘otherness’ have enabled an enhancedappreciation of the cultural dynamics of imperialism. However, some postcolonial workhas been characterized by an unhelpful degree of abstraction. Within geography, aswithin other disciplines, the postcolonial perspective has also suffered from a restrictedmetropolitan focus. Based on a study of the connections between official, settler andhumanitarian discourses within the Cape Colony on the one hand, and metropolitanpolitical discourses on the other, this paper sets the metropolitan construction of racialdifference in a wider context informed by developments at the periphery of empire. Italso establishes some of the ways in which constructions of racial ‘otherness’ influencedBritish spatial strategies on the early nineteenth-century imperial margins.

1998 Academic Press Limited

Introduction

This paper is an attempt to clarify of the successes and limitations of postcolonialapproaches to situations of colonial contact. Perhaps the most valuable insights ofpostcolonialism concern the importance of mutual constructions of identity—the cre-ation of the conceptual ‘other’—in the development of relations between colonizer andcolonized. Edward Said’s Orientalism has been an important inspiration here. For Said,imperialism was more than just the naked exercise of material power. It was also basedon cultural representations of ‘otherness’ which were (and remain) extremely powerful.[1]

However, postcolonial approaches have suffered from two significant limitations.The first, and most salient, is a tendency to abstract conceptions of ‘otherness’ fromthe enormous variety of historical contexts in which they were generated. In Said’swork this was largely unintentional but in the cases of Homi Bhabha and Ashis Nandy(who are concerned to demonstrate that history itself is a textual exercise in epistemology)this strategy is deliberate.[2] The result is a tendency to over-generalize about the activitiesof former imperial powers. Imperialism appears as a kind of ‘meta-narrative’ in whichWestern approaches and, to a certain extent, the responses of the colonized are bothviewed as monolithic, opposing forces. This is particularly evident in postcolonialliterary analyses which often conflate texts written in a variety of very different periodsand places and for very different audiences.[3] Fortunately these problems have not goneunnoticed in the discipline of geography.[4]

A second and related problem, manifest in even the most empirically rich postcolonialwritings, is a tendency to focus on metropolitan discourses.[5] Two kinds of metropolitan

20305–7488/98/010002+18 $25.00/0/hg970073 1998 Academic Press Limited

3‘OTHERNESS’ AND THE FRONTIERS OF EMPIRE

constructions of colonized ‘others’ have been much studied by geographers. The firstare those produced by travellers visiting the peripheries of empire. Pratt’s work on thediscursive strategies of various European travellers on the fringes of empires, has beenmost influential here and goes some way towards explaining how representations ofpeoples at the imperial margins were converted into a popular metropolitan imagery.[6]

Secondly, much effort has gone into characterizing metropolitan imperial thinking,including that of geographers, during the late nineteenth-century era of ‘high’ Victorianimperialism; an era marked particularly by ‘scientific racism’.[7]

Two dimensions, respectively temporal and spatial, are relatively neglected in theseaccounts. On the one hand, a critical period in the development of Britain’s empire,and of imperial thought in general, has been overlooked. This is what Chris Bayly callsthe ‘Second Empire’, extending from the American War of Independence to the era of‘high’ imperialism beginning in the 1840s.[8] It was during this period that British settlersand officials first came into contact and conflict with many of the African, Indonesian,South Asian and Australasian ‘others’ whose resistance was to shape the later imperialexperience.[9] Also overlooked are the the racial discourses, both official and settler,which were produced within the colonial peripheries and which influenced metropolitanthinking and action. There is more at stake in the analysis of representations generatedin this period and these places than historical comprehensiveness. Cultural constructionsgenerated by various groups at the margins of empire, and in these years when Britishdomination was being extended to incorporate vastly more polities than ever before,are critical in understanding both peripheral and metropolitan thought.[10] It was largelyupon the interaction between these colonial constructions and influential groups in themetropolis, that later imperial racial stereotypes were built.

One intention of this paper is to question the idea, implicit in much postcolonialwriting, that ‘waves’ of influence, washing out from a late nineteenth-century imperialcore, alone shaped the cultural constructions of colonized ‘others’ on the peripheralfrontiers of empire. Through an analysis of the dynamic articulation between divergentCape colonial discourses and prevailing political discourses in the metropole, thispaper indicates how diverse colonial peripheries connected with, and partially shaped,metropolitan thought and action. As an empirical study of the cultural constructionsof a particular colonized ‘other’, the paper also discusses the strategic spatial responsesof the British to their conceptions of ‘otherness’ in the early nineteenth-century empire.

Discourses of the metropole and the periphery

The eastern frontier of the early nineteenth-century Cape Colony was the first arenain which a British colonial administration came into contact with coherent, independentAfrican polities.[11] On this frontier between European- and African-dominated societies,official strategies for the exclusion and the guarded incorporation of Africans within aBritish administered colony were first developed. But there was no single totalizingdiscourse of African ‘otherness’ which lay behind these strategies. In order to understandofficial colonial policies, it is necessary to examine them in the light of competingdiscourses of the ‘other’. These discourses were both metropolitan-centred (within theBritish political environment), and local (arising from the contingencies of colonialexperience).

During the first part of the period under consideration, hegemonic metropolitanpolitical discourses, although by no means homogenous, shared a concern with avertingthe threat of revolution in an industrializing society showing the strain of widespread

4 A. LESTER

discontent.[12] Tory attempts to secure order during the Napoleonic and immediate post-war period were based largely on repression. Under the Whig governments of the 1830s,a strategy of restricted reform was introduced. By the late 1840s, this reformist impetushad ended. Earlier humanitarian liberalism (with which the campaign for reform hadbeen closely connected) left a rhetorical legacy but it was a utilitarian political economyof free trade which provided the ideological backdrop for the mid-century metropolisand its empire.[13] These metropolitan discourses did not determine the specific frontierstrategies adopted by the various Governors of the Cape Colony, but they did providethe political context within which these individuals operated. They set the limits ofwhat was feasible for government at the colonial margins.

However, metropolitan discourses were locally mediated by competing SouthernAfrican colonial discourses about the nature of the Xhosa—those Africans situatedalong the colony’s frontier. From 1806 onwards, the eastern limits of the colony, inwhich colonists and Xhosa mingled, were a constant preoccupation of local Britishofficials. Official discourses of the frontier, and of the Xhosa, will be outlined first,before overlapping settler and competing humanitarian discourses are considered.

From 1806 to the 1830s, a succession of Governors, all of whom were military menand most of whom had experience in the Napoleonic wars, consistently saw the frontieras a strategic boundary, the accurate delimitation of which was crucial for the protectionof the colony and its nascent civilization. Before the British government had acquiredthe Cape Colony on a long-term basis as a strategic naval base on the route to India,previous Dutch and British administrations had already presided, somewhat remotely,over three major and numerous minor conflicts along the frontier zone.[14] For subsequentBritish military Governors, the frontier was literally the front line of the colonial order:“The ideal frontier [was] one that was clearly delineated, such as a large unfordableriver running through the country with unlimited visibility and no prospects forconcealment . . . each new line of demarcation was designed to enhance security”.[15]

During the early years of the British occupation, Governors’ opinions of the Xhosawere influenced and modified by the struggles on the ground in which local colonialofficials were involved, as well as by their own metropolitan political predispositions.Although the precise construction of the Xhosa varied, the wider parameters of statepower had to be defined either by conquering the frontier Xhosa, as many settlerswished, and including them on strictly policed colonial terms or by excluding thementirely from the colony.

The official military conception of the frontier as defence line was, however, onlyone perspective. For many humanitarians, the margins of the colony were conceivedin a different light. They saw these regions as a progressively advancing zone in whicha utopian order of Christian civilization could be continually extended over thosepreviously denied its benefits. Humanitarian discourse was articulated most frequentlyand eloquently by John Philip, the London Missionary Society Director in the Cape.His main ally during the 1820s and 1830s was Henry Fairbairn, his son-in-law and theeditor of the South African Commercial Advertiser, based in Cape Town. Both menwere products of middle-class Scottish families and campaigned initially for bettercolonial treatment of the colony’s indigenous Khoikhoi and Bushmen. Subsequentlythey identified the duty of the colonial authorities to ‘improve’ the Xhosa. Implyingthat the Xhosa continued to be troublesome neighbours along the colonial margins inthe east because the colony itself neglected to tutor them, these humanitarian voicesarticulated a benign form of cultural assimilation, whereby the Xhosa would continueto have access to their land, and in the long-term, would be accepted into colonialsociety as acculturated equals.[16] By the 1830s, Philip realized that this would only be

5‘OTHERNESS’ AND THE FRONTIERS OF EMPIRE

possible if the Xhosa were shielded by government from the aggressive intentions ofthe colonists. He wrote:

On the subject of it being desirable that the caffres should be retained as British subjects,I have long made up my mind . . . The caffres cannot otherwise be saved fromannihilation. Were the Colony surrounded by belts of Native Tribes under the Britishgovernment, nations would get time to form beyond us, but no Tribe will be allowedtime to rise into civilisation and independence on our borders, if they are in immediatecontact with our colonists.[17]

In their desire for an extension of benign British authority over the frontier Xhosa,the Cape humanitarians displayed an ambivalence characteristic of humanitarianismas a whole. Whilst advocating the transformation of Xhosa custom, they lamented theimplications of this very process—the collapse of Xhosa autonomy and the increasingsubjugation to colonial domination. It could be argued further that humanitarianismwas complicit in fulfilling the very antithesis of its desired outcomes. In representingBritish civilization as the ideal, it allowed for racially determinist interpretations ofindigenous peoples’ failure to attain (or resistance to) that ideal. As Legassick puts it:“Ideas of inherent, natural, racial hierarchy were the inevitable social consequence of[humanitarianism’s] contradiction”.[18]

British settlers first became a significant element of the colonial population along thefrontier in 1820 and it was their discourses (to a large extent shared by Wesleyanmissionaries with whom they were closely connected) which were most vehement intheir denunciation of perceived Xhosa savagery and treachery.[19] Settler unease at theindependent Xhosa presence stemmed directly from the forms that Xhosa resistancetook to the settlers’ own position as colonizers—resistance prompted above all by landloss.

Expulsions of Xhosa chiefdoms from areas claimed by the colony in 1809 and 1812had already had profound effects on the Xhosa before the British settlers arrived inthe region. Although there were no exclusive rights to land occupation in Xhosa society,chiefdoms were recognized as legitimately occupying certain areas. The allocation ofland for agricultural purposes was a prerogative of chiefly political authority and accessto broader swathes of grazing land was essential for the Xhosa pastoral politicaleconomy.[20] Xhosa cattle raiding was not directed solely at colonists, but its employmentagainst them could serve both as retribution for lands lost as well as economicaccumulation. Such raids into ‘colonial’ territory generally took place without the overtsupport of the chiefs, but British Governors were irritated by what they saw as “triflingdepredations occasionally committed by wandering caffres”.[21] At times of particularpressure however, larger raids would be sanctioned and legitimated by chiefly authority.For the Governors and, later, the settlers, it was the persistence of raiding (identifiedas ‘thievishness’) which signified the Xhosa’s backwardness on a pre-ordained Britishscale of civilization.

For the British settlers, established in lands from which the Ndlambe Xhosa hadbeen expelled in 1812:

The near neighbourhood of the Caffres is another very serious evil. When a settler hasproduced stock and fancies himself comfortable in the prospect of success thesedepredators make an inroad by night and sweep the whole of his hopes away, perhapsfire his home and murder himself and his family for daring to resist . . . the settlersmust keep strict guard against the cunning and stratagems of so dangerous an enemy.[22]

This construction lay behind the general settler desire to seal off the colony from Xhosa

6 A. LESTER

penetration. Yet that strategic desire conflicted with settler desires to expand the limitsof settler capitalism in the eastern Cape through trade and, increasingly, by securinglabour from beyond the colonial border. What most settlers initially wanted was accessto Xhosaland without reciprocal independent Xhosa access to the colony—a frontierof one-way permeability.

In this early colonial situation, then, the colonizing authorities faced competing localdiscourses of race and civilization, which could influence their strategic approachestowards the African ‘other’. It is the outcome of this configuration of official, hu-manitarian and settler influences, and their interaction with the metropole during thefirst phase of British colonial contact in the region that is explored next.

Cape colonial constructions and strategies, 1806–1836

Following an initial period in which the separation of colonists and Xhosa along thefrontier was only half-heartedly enforced by the British administration (as it had beenby the Dutch), a more coherently separationist official discourse was elaborated byBritish Governors from 1809 to 1816.[23] In 1809, frontier Xhosa were driven east acrossthe Sundays River and, in 1812, during the Fourth Frontier War, across the Fish River,in order to attempt complete spatial and economic separation between them andcolonists (see Figure 1). In enacting these expulsions, the British authorities referred toa treaty between the previous Dutch government and some, but not all, frontier Xhosachiefdoms. This established the Fish River as their boundary.[24] Further legitimationwas provided with reference to the European pattern of supposedly exclusive nationalboundaries. In clarifying his intention to maintain an “inviolate” British colonial space,Governor Cradock explained that he could act only “upon such general [European]principles as will apply to every case of the present nature”.[25]

After the expulsions, frontier policy was geared towards safeguarding the emergingcolonial order from the newly expunged Xhosa threat. Governor Caledon, Cradock’spredecessor had already outlined the prevailing strategy: “it should be our invariableobject to establish the separation from them, as intercourse can never subsist to theadvantage of one party, or the other”.[26] The dominant official discourse remainedseparationist until, in the face of continued disorder and cattle raiding (itself exacerbatedby the fact that the expelled Ndlambe had been forced to compete for space with therival Ngqika chiefdom), Governor Somerset made his own modifications from 1816.[27]

Somerset was “looked upon as the embodiment of High Toryism by Whigs andRadicals in England, and as an oppressive autocrat by many at the Cape”.[28] He wasdescended from the Plantagenet line and, like many of those Whigs who later ledBritain on a course of reform, he was concerned to preserve an order in which thearistocracy prevailed in positions of influence. This would be achieved, he believed, byexercising aristocratic responsibility towards those of less illustrious descent. His wasa paternalistic autocracy and it was manifested both in the politics of the ‘court’ whichhe developed around his residence outside Cape Town, and in aspects of his frontierpolicy.[29]

Somerset’s frontier strategy had two dimensions. On the one hand, like his pre-decessors, he sought to protect the colonial border, consolidating it as the barrieragainst a perceived Xhosa barbarism. On the other hand, in the wake of their recentexpulsion, Somerset hoped that the frontier Xhosa might be susceptible to long-termcultural transformation. He held that “so long as the habits of savages remain unbrokenthe colony will . . . be exposed to the changes incident to the fickleness of that character”.

7‘OTHERNESS’ AND THE FRONTIERS OF EMPIRE

Figure 1. The eastern frontier zone.

However, he continued, a system based upon their long-term ‘civilization’ “is not solelyto be trusted to . . . it should be supported by that prudential strength which shall tendto overawe the restlessness of our hostile and wily neighbours”.[30] In other words, theXhosa, like the working classes of Britain, were to be rendered more amenable to theexercise of ‘proper’ authority, both through a demonstration of that authority’s powerand, in the long-term, through a cultural conversion which would secure their consent.

The gradual cultivation of the Xhosa as more docile neighbours was to be achievedby two means. First, missionaries were permitted to introduce “agriculture and civil-isation” to the frontier Xhosa chiefs, these two markers of social progression beingseen by the aristocratic and improving Governor as inextricably linked.[31] Secondly,Ngqika, the dominant but vulnerable frontier chief was accorded a special status inthe expectation that he would control further Xhosa ‘outrages’ against those colonistssettled on their land and diffuse “civilization and its consequences” to the rest of thefrontier Xhosa.[32]

8 A. LESTER

Somerset soon found that ‘remote control’ of the Xhosa, from within the colony,was impossible. In 1819, colonial interference to prop up Ngqika precipitated the FifthFrontier War, among others against Ndlambe.[33] The war convinced Somerset thatmore effective measures were needed to protect the colonial margins during the intervalbefore the Xhosa could be transformed into more passive neighbours. First, a furtherexpulsion of frontier Xhosa (including the colonial ally Ngqika) created a buffer stripbetween them and the colonists—the land wedged between the Fish and KeiskammaRivers and known as the ceded territory. Secondly, in 1820, the most radical attemptyet to redefine the edges of the colonial order was realized when around 5000 Britishsettlers were located along a section of the former frontier line abutting the Fish River.Colonel Collins, who had reported on the frontier in 1809, had originally proposed theidea of a European emigration there to secure the colonial margins.[34] Subsequentsuggestions involved the settling of Highland Scots in the region, partly on the groundsthat they were themselves a warlike and cattle-raiding folk whose presence wouldcounteract that of the Xhosa, but the final version of the settlement scheme had beendeveloped in London in 1817.[35] The Tory government backed the proposal, seeing itas a demonstration of proactive policy to relieve the unemployed, but the ColonialOffice held out for a frontier buffer of large landowners, small farmers and indenturedemployees. This would not only provide a more secure barrier to Xhosa entry into thecolony, but it would also mark out the Cape as a zone for British enterprise, supersedingits still largely Dutch character.[36] The settlement could also be backed by humanitarianssince it would provide a white working class for the colony and thus begin the erosionof forced indigenous labour practices.[37]

Aside from the party leaders many of the settlers were artisans who had been forcedout of work in Britain, or agricultural labourers suffering from the post-Napoleonicglut of rural labour. The well-publicized emigration scheme was heavily oversubscribed.Expectations of the life of a leisured Cape settler class were high and settlers fromurban areas lied about their occupations to gain acceptance in an agricultural set-tlement.[38] However, such expectations ran counter to the official role envisaged for thesettlers. Precariously positioned on a turbulent frontier, they were to take care of theirown defence and help protect the colony as a whole.

This soon ceased to be an agricultural settlement. Farming efforts proved generallydisappointing and the first few harvests were disastrous. While some settlers remainedlanded proprietors, most broke free of the indentures with which they had arrived andbegan to engage in other kinds of capitalist endeavour. Initially, illicit trade with theXhosa was the most important of these. Although illegal from 1822 until 1828, Xhosaconsumption of British goods was running at £30 000 per annum by the mid-1830s.[39]

However, the settler “apostles of free enterprise and free trade” were soon to press forvery different economic relations with the Xhosa.[40] An ambiguous relationship basedon British condemnation of Xhosa backwardness and fear of raiding mixed with adesire for unimpeded access to the Xhosa market had, by the mid-1830s, mutated intoa more aggressive desire for colonial expansion onto Xhosa lands and the appropriationof Xhosa labour.

The material basis of this shift was the growth of wool farming within the easternCape. With frequent reference to comparative experience in the colonies of Australasia,the settler mouthpiece, The Graham’s Town Journal, was an important source on woolproduction and a consistent advocate of expansion into Xhosa lands during the 1830sand 1840s.[41] The journal frequently exaggerated settler insecurity in the face of Xhosathreats in order to justify intervention by the imperial army. Furthermore, it sought toinvoke a variant on the discourse of humanitarian salvation, arguing that the Xhosa

9‘OTHERNESS’ AND THE FRONTIERS OF EMPIRE

were too savage to be ‘reclaimed’ by any means other than outright domination.[42]

According to the Journal, the spread of British civilization in the Cape was part of anunstoppable and divinely ordained global phenomenon for which “geography andscience have opened up the road”.[43] Thus, while the settlers’ immediate experience ofthe Xhosa as threat had established pejorative constructions, the promise of commercialexpansion added further impetus.[44] Soon, the experience of a full-scale Xhosa assaultwould decisively sharpen and consolidate settler representations of this ‘savage other’.

After an interlude of relative peace following the settler arrival and official optimismconcerning the chances for the Xhosa’s ‘improvement’, tension mounted again in thecontext of a late 1820s drought.[45] The frontier Xhosa chief Maqoma, recently ‘tolerated’by the colonial state within the ceded territory, attacked the neighbouring Thembu andwas punished by the colony with expulsion from his lands on three successive occasions.Maqoma’s polity finally led the plundering of the colonial margins which initiated theSixth Frontier War.[46]

This was the most vicious war yet and the first one in which the mass of Britishsettlers were targets. It generated the most virulent colonial construction of an ir-redeemably savage Xhosa character.[47] The fighting ended only after the overall Xhosaparamount Hintsa had been lured into the military commander Harry Smith’s campfor negotiations and then taken captive. Whilst trying to escape he was shot dead andhis ears cut off as settler trophies.[48] For the British settlers though, it was Xhosabarbarity which had characterized the fighting. The experience of Xhosa attack, of thekilling of unarmed male settlers and the burning of their homes came as a profoundshock. Survivors of the first onslaught, crammed within Graham’s Town, were in astate of panic until Smith restored order.[49]

During and after the war, prominent settlers declared themselves convinced that“many of the missionaries have been labouring under the greatest delusion and althoughliving for years amongst the Kafirs, they have not been able to form anything like acorrect estimate of the character of the people around them”.[50] Harry Smith agreedwith them, stating it to be “evident that Christian principles and the rules of conductwhich they are taught by their religious instructors are disregarded whenever anopportunity presents itself of indulging their unconquerable propensity to commitrobbery and murder on their neighbours”.[51]

The Graham’s Town Journal became the primary forum for the expression of post-war settler racial constructions. It printed a range of assessments of ‘the Kafir character’,from analogies between the Xhosa and incurably spoilt children to those which weregenocidal in nature.[52] One settler wrote in to advise the use of a spring gun for “Kafirsand wild beasts in general”, noting that two prominent settlers had recently “destroyed”two “Kafirs” in this way.[53] The more temperate contributions took an environmentallydeterminist line, describing the Xhosa as having “all the ferocity, cruelty and craft ofsome of the lower animals” adjusted to the same “bleak, rough and uncomfortable”climate and vegetation.[54] Dissenting voices like that of the visiting Bombay Armyofficer, Captain Fawcett, who compared the viciousness of settler responses to the“enlightened” East India Company administration, were overwhelmed with invectivewhen they dared make themselves heard to the journal’s readers.[55]

It was during and in the immediate aftermath of the war that Dr H. E. Macartneyintroduced an early form of metropolitan ‘scientific racism’ to the frontier zone. Heoffered a series of well-received public lectures on the “now popular science of phreno-logy” using model skulls of different nations, including those of Xhosa “lately received”,presumably as trophies of the war.[56] This colonial adoption of metropolitan racialtheory was to be crucial in establishing the foundations for later imperial representations

10 A. LESTER

as a whole. It provided both the anatomical raw material and an enthusiastic audiencefor the further development of ‘scientific racism’ in the metropole.[57] It also signifiesthat, contrary to traditional interpretations of South African colonial history, it wasnot frontier Boers, but British settlers who first elaborated systematic racial ideologieslegitimating the dispossession and subjection of indigenous peoples during the nineteenthcentury.[58] Bank points out that the ‘science’ of phrenology held little attraction forBoers “whose world view was shaped by institutions of slavery and servitude ratherthan frontier violence”, and was resisted by humanitarians like Fairbairn. But it had“greater appeal for those with experience of frontier conflict and an associated antipathytowards a ‘savage’ enemy”.[59]

Leading settlers found a bastion of support for their representations within Wesleyanmissionary circles. If the Reverend Shaw’s proposal of expelling the ‘offending’ Xhosafrom their lands (and thus making them available for settler sheep farms) was harsh,the Reverend Shrewsbury’s was draconian. He advocated the confiscation of all thehostile Xhosa’s property and the deposition of their chiefs, as well as the execution ofanyone who could be shown to have killed colonists or soldiers in the war. A “merciful”sentence of hard labour on colonial roads would be reserved for those whose lives werespared. Furthermore, every Xhosa man was thereafter to wear a tin identification platearound his neck. This would render the Xhosa easier to enumerate and to detect incrime. Thus would the British Empire “subserve the great principles of justice andmercy”.[60]

Official responses too, hardened further in the wake of the war. Governor D’Urban,having recently arrived in the colony with humanitarian plans to settle frontier problemsthrough treaties with the Xhosa chiefs, visited the scene of burnt-out farms and metthe dispossessed and the grieving in the wake of their attack. He soon wrote to hissuperior in London, “I cannot adequately point out to you the devastation andhorrors which these merciless barbarians have committed”.[61] Passing on Shrewsbury’srecommendations, he remarked only that they showed how even a man of God couldbe driven to extreme measures by this “savage” foe.[62] In the wake of the war, both heand Harry Smith wielded the construction of the Xhosa as “irreclaimable savages”, intheir official documents, a phrase which humanitarians, notably John Philip, denouncedwholeheartedly, but which became a rallying cry of the settlers in their representationsto the imperial government.[63]

D’Urban’s first intention was to expel all of the frontier Xhosa to beyond the KeiRiver, establishing this as a strategically advantaged new frontier line. The newlycaptured territory would be transformed into a province available for settler expansion.Ultimately though, D’Urban and Smith were forced to concede that they were militarilyunable to expel Maqoma and the other Xhosa remaining in the steep bush of theAmatola mountains—a sizeable chunk of this new territory. The recently “irreclaimable”Xhosa instead were to be overawed by a colonial military presence and, for the firsttime, intensively “reclaimed” after the Sixth War.

After May 1835, the Xhosa-inhabited territory between the Keiskamma and KeiRivers, the new Province of Queen Adelaide, was subjected to martial law. If thecolonial margins could not be secured through Xhosa expulsion, they would be redefinedby controlled Xhosa integration. A rhetoric of the Xhosa’s reclamation from barbarismwas invoked to legitimate outright military domination and subjugation: “these savagesare to be at length (at any rate the rising generation) assimilated with the mass of theold colonists, admitting . . . the habits of civilisation and industry, with the concomitantblessings of Religion and morality; and these, doubtless are the only possible means ofconverting a savage and vexatious enemy into peaceable and useful subjects”.[64] It was

11‘OTHERNESS’ AND THE FRONTIERS OF EMPIRE

declared that missionaries, teachers and magistrates were to provide the technologiesfor this transformation of the Xhosa character. Smith, rather more forthrightly, let itbe known that “we shall . . . have . . . surveillance and magisterial power drawn aroundthe several component bodies of the Kafir nation, and the means . . . to subdue anyserious resistance”.[65] He admitted that “the only institution for the suppression of vicefor some time to come is the hand of power wielded by innumerable Patroles [sic] andthief catchers”.[66]

However, D’Urban and Smith had miscalculated both the political influence of theCape’s own humanitarian discourse and the changing political environment of themetropole. D’Urban’s despatch describing the Xhosa as “irreclaimable savages” andjustifying their first intended expulsion was received in London not by the Tory Secretaryof State for the Colonies, the Earl of Aberdeen, for whom it was intended, but by hisrecently appointed Whig and humanitarian successor, Lord Glenelg.

The articulation of peripheral and metropolitan humanitarianism

In the interval between the sending of D’Urban’s despatch and its reception in London,Peel’s short-lived Tory government had been replaced by a Whig government underMelbourne. The new regime was influenced by a strong humanitarian discourse asseveral (not always compatible) interest groups (including Benthamites, industrialutilitarians and evangelicals) sought to access power. The abolition of slavery hadbecome a rallying cry and a core political identity around which this discourse, likethe overlapping evangelical discourse, had chrystallized. Abolitionism “revealed asmuch if not more about how the British thought about themselves, as it did about howthey saw black people on the other side of the world”.[67] In a fervently ProtestantBritain waging war on ‘Catholic’ enemies abroad, abolitionism had been constructedby both Tories and Whigs as a test of Britain’s willingness to fulfil its contract withthe Almighty. “If Britain prospered, then clearly it must persevere with the good work.But if it failed, it must still persevere, in the hope that this might serve as anatonement.”[68] The exercise of humanitarian sensibility towards the indigenous peopleswith whom the empire came into contact was seen by many as an extension of thesame religious philosophy.

More specifically, within the metropole an influential imagery of Africans had beeninherited from the abolitionist movement. It was constructed largely around thecharacteristics of inoffensiveness and passivity in the face of brutal slavery. Indeed suchimagery was vital to the eventual success of abolitionism in Britain, and with themovement coming to be defined by ruling groups as a symbol of British nationalintegrity, the image developed into a politically potent one.[69] Accordingly, Glenelg waspersonally horrified by D’Urban’s use of the phrase “irreclaimable savages”. He informedthe governor that “there is, I fear, little prospect of reconciling your estimate of theKaffre character with mine”.[70] From Glenelg’s perspective, the Xhosa had been wrongednot by slavery but by a frontier system designed to subdue and exploit them.[71]

In case Glenelg faltered in his conflict with peripheral official and settler rep-resentations, the prime proponent of abolitionist and humanitarian discourse in theHouse of Commons, Thomas Fowell Buxton was on hand to provide support. Buxtonwas an important conduit through which Cape peripheral humanitarianism was chan-nelled to the metropole. He was in turn dependent on John Philip for his informationon the colony. In the 1830s, Philip worked hard to ensure that humanitarianism’senemies amongst the settlers and officials of the Cape would be brought to book in

12 A. LESTER

London for their colonizing activities.[72] Publication of his Researches had alreadyinitiated a metropolitan campaign for the better treatment of the colony’s Khoikhoi.[73]

Prior to the Sixth Frontier War, Philip agitated for improved treaties with the Xhosa.After the war, he remained agreeable in principle to the extension of British authorityover the Xhosa but it was his arguments against D’Urban’s measures which wereinvoked by humanitarians within Britain.

From 1836 to 1837, Buxton chaired a House of Commons Select Committeeinvestigating the treatment of ‘Aborigines’ throughout the British empire, with particularreference to the Cape. Implicit in the committee’s questioning of key witnesses was anassumption that colonial policy, and the self-aggrandizement of settlers, were the maincauses of the Sixth Frontier War.[74] Citing the proceedings of the committee togetherwith representations from Cape humanitarians and their London sponsors as evidence,Glenelg criticized D’Urban’s measures for the post-war settlement in the Cape whileemphasizing the need for economy in colonial administration. The Secretary of Statefor the Colonies then wrote to D’Urban insisting that, in view of their suffering at thehands of colonists, the Xhosa had “a perfect right to hazard the experiment” of invadingthe colony.[75]

Officials and settlers in the Cape were outraged. The Graham’s Town Journal,deliberately flaunting the anti-humanitarian cry of “irreclaimable savages” in its columnsand letter pages, argued vehemently that if the British were to retreat in the face ofXhosa ‘barbarism’, the whole civilizing mission of the British empire would grind to ahalt. Furthermore, the journal blamed the humanitarians of the Cape for provokingthe Xhosa to war by convincing them of the validity of their grievances and forencouraging the metropolitan abandonment of settler interests.[76] Settlers found avaluable organ of metropolitan support in the Tory-inclined London Times. The paper,protective of its metropolitan readership’s trading connections with the Cape settlers,obligingly referred to the colonial humanitarians as “ambitious hypocrites”. Oneeditorial argued that: “When civilisation and barbarism meet, a shock will be felt, andis the liberal Cabinet of Downing Street to decree in their excessive devotion to mistakenphilanthropy, that the former is to give way?”[77] In an attempt to build upon this baseof support from a metropolitan counter-discourse, some leading settlers, inspired byCanadian colonists, even contemplated paying for a permanent representative of theirinterests in the London parliament.[78]

D’Urban showed some political astuteness in his own defence, drawing on thehegemonic humanitarian rhetoric to express his intention to ‘redeem’ the Xhosa withinthe conquered province.[79] He also sent envoys to London where they represented theCape’s humanitarians as the cause of the war and persuaded the King of the settlers’cause. But the King’s intervention could only delay Glenelg’s final response. To thechagrin of D’Urban, Smith and most of the British frontier settlers, the scheme for theforced cultivation of the Xhosa as docile neighbours under British rule was abandonedin December 1836. Under a new Lieutenant Governor of the frontier zone, a systemof treaties recognizing Xhosa independence was imposed instead. The victory ofperipheral Cape humanitarianism in the metropole was, however, short lived.

The triumph of the settler vision

While local humanitarian representations had successfully drawn upon a hegemonicmetropolitan discourse in the mid- to late 1830s, it was settler constructions of theXhosa and settler prescriptions which secured support from both Cape governmentand metropole from the 1840s.

13‘OTHERNESS’ AND THE FRONTIERS OF EMPIRE

Shortly after the 1836 apotheosis of peripheral humanitarianism’s influence, Buxtonlost his seat in the House of Commons and Philip retired from active politics. But themalaise of humanitarianism went deeper than the loss of two influential adherents. Bythe early 1840s, the wider reformist drive at Westminster, with which humanitarianshad been able to connect, was grinding to a halt. Domestically, the middle classeswhose incorporation was the central thrust of reform, had already become detachedfrom the potentially rebellious working classes. As Evans puts it, “government basedon property [had] not only survived but was strengthened thereby”.[80] The Whigs, nowdependent on O’Connell and other ‘radicals’ for parliamentary support, were a spentforce in London.

But this loss of immediate humanitarian political influence at the metropole occurredwithin a broader context of metropolitan disillusionment with the colonized ‘others’ ofempire. As Nancy Stepan argues, the war against slavery had been won (deprivingmetropolitan humanitarians of their most powerful cause), but the war against racismwas lost.[81] From the peripheries of empire, and from various constituencies extendingbeyond the settlers to include missionaries and liberal officials, the idea of indigenesand former slaves failing to make progress towards a pre-ordained civilized ideal beganto dominate the metropolitan discourse from the mid-1840s. The 1850s and 1860sproved decisive, with resistance to colonial authority flaring up not just on the Capefrontier again, but in India during the Mutiny, in Jamaica with the Morant Bay rebellion(crushed so brutally by Governor Eyre), and in New Zealand with the Maori Wars.[82]

As Belich puts it in the case of the Maori, the humanitarian cause of “salvageabilitywas based partly on their readiness selectively to adopt European ways in commerce,agriculture, literacy and religion . . . resistance was seen as a reversal of this trend;evidence that the civilizing mission had failed, or even that it had always been doomedto failure”.[83] The ‘atrocities’ committed by former slaves in Jamaica, Xhosa in theeastern Cape, Maoris in New Zealand and sepoy and civilian rebels in India providedthe bedrock for a widespread metropolitan adoption of imageries approaching the“irreclaimable savage”, disseminated in Britain by respectable figures such as Carlyle,Dickens and Tennyson.[84]

While settler constructions were to achieve their greatest influence over the metropolein the late 1850s and 1860s, humanitarian constraints on those settlers had alreadybeen loosened by political changes in Britain during the 1840s. When the new treatieswith the Xhosa were breached by a fresh Cape Governor, provoking the Xhosa tofurther warfare in 1846, they had no advocates left either in the Cape or in Britain.[85]

The waning of humanitarian discourse in the Cape had its counterbalance in the riseof settler influence over the colonial state. The expansion of wool farming in the easternpart of the colony tied its settlers closer to the purse-strings of the colonial governmentand allowed for the further appropriation not just of Xhosa land, but of their labourtoo. The scheme of domination earlier envisaged for Queen Adelaide Province wasrealized after 1847 in the territory of British Kaffraria. This became Harry Smith’ssecond attempt at the forced ‘civilization’ of the Xhosa within a military state.[86] Italso marked a decisive shift in official spatial strategy, away from the complete separationof colonists and Xhosa and towards the material incorporation of controlled Africanlabour within the settler economy, but in a racially segregated space.[87] In 1854, theeconomic value of the settlers was recognized with the granting of RepresentativeGovernment giving them a formal voice in Cape government policy.[88]

The final flourish of frontier Xhosa resistance came in the 1850s. Following a furtherdevastating war in 1850–2 and the spread of fatal cattle disease, many Xhosa embarkedon a last desperate attempt to secure the spiritual assistance of their ancestors. In

14 A. LESTER

1856–7, some 30 000 Xhosa died after sacrificing their remaining cattle and destroyingtheir crops in response to millenarian prophecies promising the restoration of anidealized precolonial order. A roughly equal number was absorbed into the colony asa labour force for the settlers, servitude having been made a condition for faminerelief.[89]

By the late nineteenth century, interaction between British and Africans in the Capewas conceived in the metropole in the terms set by British settlers themselves. Therewas little humanitarian opposition in the Cape and no powerful dissenting version ofthe colonizing process in the metropole. At the centre of empire, the cattle killingcatastrophe of the Xhosa could be conceptualized with an unprecedented degree ofequanimity. A late nineteenth-century empire based on free trade with settler-dominatedsocieties which had been ‘given their head’ in the advance of peripheral capitalistfrontiers, was also based on scientific constructions of racial inferiority which foundtheir deepest reservoirs of support and their anatomical raw material in the margins ofempire. On those margins, official attempts to restrict contact between settlers andindigenous peoples, and thereby reign in conflict, had mutated by mid-century into anaggressive ordering of a materially integrative, but culturally defensive settler capitalism.

Conclusion

The central premise of this paper has been that the strategies towards a colonized‘other’, and the cultural constructions of that ‘other’ on the eastern Cape frontier andin the metropole, were by no means an extension of universal, metropolitan-derivedapproaches. Instead, they were the outcome of a contingent interaction between dynamicmetropolitan and peripheral Cape discourses. The latter were informed by materialconflicts over land and other resources arising directly from the extension of Britishsettler capitalism. On a broader scale, it was flow of ideas between periphery and themetropole that shaped cultural constructions and spatial strategies in all early colonies.

John Philip’s role in the Cape fed a peripheral humanitarian counter-discourse backinto the metropole where, given the prevailing conditions within Britain, it acquiredbrief but substantial political significance. In this case, colonial representations had asmuch influence at the imperial core as the latter had over the periphery. While settlerinterests found an influential local spokesman in the form of the Cape Governor duringthe 1830s, their influence at the metropole was confined to restricted, temporarilymarginalized Tory circles. In the 1840s though, the flow of their ideas to the centre ofimperial power was unimpeded. Both local humanitarian interference and the strategicreformism of the centre had declined, allowing for an imperial practice dictated moreby peripheral settler interests. Through critical mediators those interests significantlyassisted the construction of metropolitan racial imageries during the late nineteenthcentury. Metropolitan ‘scientific racism’ was built upon the foundations provided bysettler representations of racial difference that had been formed during earlier periodsof struggle at the periphery.

Further studies will be required to demonstrate how humanitarian and less sympatheticsettler discourses, both from the Cape and elsewhere, interacted with metropolitanthinking and action within the nineteenth-century empire. Postcolonial approaches tothe construction of ‘otherness’, provided they pay close attention to contingent materialcontexts, are well suited to the task. This paper has taken a step towards the dis-aggregation of colonial/imperial interests which are often represented as monolithic inpostcolonial approaches. It has demonstrated how the frontier between Europeans and

15‘OTHERNESS’ AND THE FRONTIERS OF EMPIRE

Africans was imagined in various ways from different colonial positions. Settlers sawthis frontier as an obstacle to the expansion of commerce and ‘civilization’. Human-itarians saw it as an opportunity for the extension of a benign (but fundamentallycontradictory) civilizing influence. Officials saw the frontier initially as a defensive lineprotecting a vulnerable colonial order and subsequently as an impediment of the kindthat settlers themselves imagined. The paper has also drawn attention to some of theways in which peripheral discourses of the Xhosa ‘other’ connected across the spacesof the empire with a shifting array of political discourses within the metropole. Throughtheir interaction such peripheral and metropolitan discourses shaped enduring culturalrepresentations of ‘otherness’.

St Mary’s University College (University of Surrey),Waldegrave Road,Twickenham TW1 4SX,UK

Notes[1] E. W. Said, Orientalism (London 1978).[2] H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London 1994); A. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss

and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi 1983) xv. For a convincing critique, see D.Kennedy, Imperial history and post-colonial theory, Journal of Imperial and CommonwealthHistory 24 (1996) 345–63, 346. For criticism of Said’s own neglect of historical context, seeJ. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester 1995) and L. Lowe,Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca 1992). For a criticism of Spivak,B. Parry, Problems in current theories of colonial discourse, Oxford Literary Review 9 (1987)1–2.

[3] Kennedy, op. cit. singles out for this criticism B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths and H. Tiffin (Eds),The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London 1989);L. Donaldson, Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender, and Empire-Building (Chapel Hill1992) and D. Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel-Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham 1993).

[4] D. Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford 1994) 165–205; J. Crush, Post-colonialism,de-colonisation and geography, in A. Godlewska and N. Smith (Eds), Geography and Empire(Oxford 1994) 333–50.

[5] See for example the influential R. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West(London 1990). For metropolitan-based literary approaches, see G. Ching-Liang Low, Hisstories? Narratives and images of imperialism, and his White skins/black masks: the pleasuresand politics of imperialism, in E. Carter, J. Donald and J. Squires (Eds), Space and Place:Theories of Identity and Location (London 1993) 187–220 and 241–66. Notable and importantexceptions include P. Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (London1987); T. Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Cambridge 1988); C. Crais, White Supremacy andBlack Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa (Cambridge 1992), A. Stoler, Race and theEducation of Desire: Foucault’s ‘History of Sexuality’ and the Colonial Order of Things(Durham 1995) and J. Duncan, The power of place in Kandy, Sri Lanka, 1780–1980, in J.Agnew and J. Duncan (Eds), The Power of Place (London 1989) 185–201.

[6] M. L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London 1992). See also T.Youngs, Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850–1900 (Manchester 1994) and S. Mills,Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London1991). Within geography see also A. Blunt, Travel, Gender, and Imperialism: Mary Kingsleyand West Africa (New York 1994).

[7] For example, D. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition (Oxford 1992) 216–59, M.Heffernan, The science of empire: the French geographical movement and the forms ofFrench imperialism, 1870–1920, in Godlewska and Smith, op. cit. 92–114 and F. Driver,Geography’s empire: histories of geographical knowledge, Environment and Planning D:Society and Space 10 (1992) 23–40.

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[8] C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London1989). For two influential post-colonial studies which take into account important aspectsof this period, see Carter, op. cit. and Mitchell, op. cit.

[9] See Bayly, op. cit.; Carter, op. cit; V. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudesto Other Cultures in the Imperial Age (London 1995); J. Belich, The Victorian Interpretationof Racial Conflict: The Maori, The British and the New Zealand Wars (Montreal 1986); P.Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (Madison 1964) and J.Roseberry, Imperial Rule in the Punjab: The Conquest and Administration of Multan,1818–1881 (New Delhi 1987).

[10] For example, both metropolitan Philosophic Radicalism and the work of John Stuart Millhave been set in the context of colonial activity in early nineteenth-century India. Theabolition of colonial slavery inspired Wollstonecraft’s analysis of British gender relations, andhumanitarian discourses of colonization (as we shall see, themselves generated significantly onthe peripheries of empire) were also employed in a British feminist cause. See J. Majeed, L.Zastoupil, M. Ferguson and A. Burton, cited in Kennedy, op. cit., 358–9. See also R. Young,Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London 1995) chapters 2 and 3.For colonial acts being integral to English national identity, see the collection edited by B.Schwarz, The Expansion of England: Race, Ethnicity and Cultural History (London 1996).

[11] The only other British administration in Africa at the time when the Cape was taken, apartfrom minor trading posts, was that in Sierra Leone, where a humanitarian-inspired tradingcompany had governed freed slaves since 1793. See Curtin, op. cit., vol. 1 chapters 4 and5.

[12] For introductory overviews see S. Lee, British Political History, 1815–1914 (London 1994);E. Evans, The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, 1783–1870 (Harlow1996) and E. Halevy, The Liberal Awakening, 1815–1830: A History of the English PeopleVol. 2 (London 1987). See also P. Cain and A. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation andExpansion 1688–1914 (London 1993) 71–101, and references cited there.

[13] This metropolitan shift was intricately connected to changes within the colonies. Earlynineteenth-century gubernatorial colonial governments had been an extension of the au-thoritarian metropolitan government itself (Bayly, op. cit.). Colonial representations for self-government later combined with and influenced metropolitan free-trade thinking. See J.Gallagher and R. Robinson, The imperialism of free trade, 1815–1914, Economic HistoryReview 6 (1953) 4. For a critique, see Cain and Hopkins, op. cit., 229–43.

[14] For a seminal analysis emphasizing frontier interactions other than racial conflict see M.Legassick, The frontier tradition in South African historiography, in S. Marks and A.Atmore (Eds), Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa (Harlow 1980) 44–79.For a qualification, see S. Newton-King, The Enemy Within: The Struggle for Ascendancyon the Cape Eastern Frontier, 1760–1799 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, London University1992).

[15] J. S. Galbraith, Reluctant Empire: British Policy on the South African Frontier, 1834–1854(Berkeley 1963) 50.

[16] For humanitarian approaches, see J. Philip, Researches in South Africa 2 Vols. (London1828); A. Ross, John Philip (1775–1851): Missions, Race and Politics in South Africa(Aberdeen 1986); H. Botha, John Fairbairn in South Africa (Cape Town 1984); J. G.Pretorius, The British Humanitarians and the Cape Eastern Frontier, 1834–1836 (Pretoria1988) and Public Record Office London (hereafter PRO) n.d. (1836?) CO 48/165 M. Beecham,Paper Prepared by Mr Beecham for the Use of Mr Buxton: The Cape of Good Hope.

[17] Ross, op. cit., 141.[18] M. Legassick, The state, racism and the rise of capitalism in the nineteenth-century Cape

Colony, South African Historical Journal 28 (1993) 329–68, 338.[19] For settler-Wesleyan connections, see M. D. Nash, The Settler Handbook: A New List of

the 1820 Settlers (Cape Town 1987), B. Le Cordeur, Eastern Cape Separatism, 1820–1854(Cape Town 1981) 68 and T. Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the RacialOrder (London 1996) 65–7. Also, E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English WorkingClass (London 1988) chapters 2 and 11.

[20] Colonial resistance to the full assimilation of conquered black foes at first bemused Xhosachiefs who practised the eventual integration of conquered peoples. Unfortunately, giventhe emphasis here on changing British constructions, there is insufficient space to elaborateon Xhosa constructions of British colonialism, but see J. Peires, The House of Phalo: AHistory of the Xhosa People in the Days of Their Independence (Johannesburg 1982).

17‘OTHERNESS’ AND THE FRONTIERS OF EMPIRE

[21] Cape (Government) Archives Cape Town (hereafter CA) GH 23/2 Calderwood to Castlereagh18 Sept. 1809.

[22] CA A 602/2 Journal of S. H. Hudson, Bathurst 1821 (no precise date).[23] For a brief overview of earlier British views of southern African ‘others’, see A. Lester,

From Colonization to Democracy: A New Historical Geography of South Africa (London1996) chapter 1. For a more detailed analysis of spatial strategy during this period, see A.Lester, Cultural construction and spatial strategy on the Eastern Cape frontier, 1806–c.1838,South African Geographical Journal 78 (1996) 98–107.

[24] For the ambiguities of this boundary see W. M. Macmillan, Bantu, Boer and Briton: TheMaking of the South African Native Problem (Oxford 1963) 45.

[25] CA GH 28/4 Cradock to Graham 6 Oct. 1811.[26] CA CO 5807 Government Proclamation 21 Aug. 1810.[27] CA GH 23/5 Somerset to Bathurst 24 Apr. 1817.[28] A. Millar, Plantagenet in South Africa: Lord Charles Somerset (Cape Town 1965) inside

cover.[29] For Somerset’s individual background see ibid. For the general situation regarding reform

as anti-revolutionary strategy see Lee, op. cit., 15–28 and Evans, op. cit., 223–30.[30] CA GH 23/5 Somerset to Bathurst 24 Apr. 1817.[31] CA GH 1/20 Goulbourn to Somerset 22 Oct. 1816.[32] CA GH 23/5 Somerset to Bathurst 24 Apr. 1817.[33] Peires, House of Phalo, 143–5 and N. Mostert, Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation

and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People (London 1992) 472–9.[34] Col. Collins, Supplement to the Relations of a Journey into the Country of the Bosjesman

and Caffre People, in D. Moodie, The Record or a Series of Official Papers Relative to theCondition and Treatment of the Native Tribes of South Africa (Cape Town 1960) V 18–19.

[35] B. Maclennan, A Proper Degree of Terror: John Graham and the Cape’s Eastern Frontier(Johannesburg 1986) 161–2; J. Peires, The British and the Cape, 1814–1834, in R. Elphickand H. Giliomee (Eds), The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840 (Middletown 1989)474.

[36] Peires, The British and the Cape, 474.[37] Legassick, The state, racism and the rise of capitalism, 333–4.[38] See Mostert, op. cit. 524–34, 541–50; Crais, op. cit. 87–95; and in particular, Nash, op. cit.[39] Graham’s Town Journal (hereafter GTJ) 24 Dec. 1835.[40] Peires, The British and the Cape, 472.[41] Cape wool exports, produced largely in the east, increased from 114,000 lb. in 1834 to

5,500,000 lb. in 1851 and became the colony’s most significant export commodity by far(Macmillan op. cit., 193). See also Keegan, op. cit., 72 and 158–61.

[42] A. Lester, Settlers, the state and colonial power: The colonization of Queen AdelaideProvince, 1834–37, Journal of African History (forthcoming). See also Keegan, op. cit.,chapter 5.

[43] GTJ 12 May 1836.[44] Many may actually have been influenced before they even left Britain. A well-known cartoon

by Cruikshank for instance portrayed the prospective settlers being eaten alive by cannibalsupon their arrival on the frontier. Titled Blessings of Emigration to the Cape of Forlorn/Good Hope (with a line drawn through Forlorn), the cartoon is now in the William FehrCollection, Cape Town.

[45] For the official policies of the Xhosa’s “improvement” and increasing tolerance of theirinteraction with settlers during this brief period see Lester, Cultural construction and spatialstrategy, 101–2.

[46] Cory Library, Grahamstown, MS 17042 Somerset papers, 5 Feb. 1828 and South AfricanCommercial Advertiser 22 Feb. 1834. See also PRO CO 58/165 Beecham op. cit., T. Stapleton,Maqoma: Xhosa Resistance to Colonial Advance, 1798–1873 (Johannesburg 1994) 63–99 andMostert, op. cit. 635–6.

[47] This was despite the fact that some Xhosa chiefs, notably those given land concessions inthe ceded territory, collaborated with the British (see Lester, Settlers, the state and colonialpower).

[48] Smith was forced to fabricate a version of events surrounding the death in order to defendhimself before an imperial court of enquiry. See Pretorius, op. cit., chapter 6.

[49] The best account of the attack is Mostert, op. cit., 664–82.

18 A. LESTER

[50] GTJ 23 Jan. 1835, letter from Southey, Southey and Shaw.[51] CA GH 22/1 Smith to D’Urban 14 Jan. 1835.[52] For the former, see GTJ 1 Dec. 1836, letter from ‘A Kafir Doctor’.[53] GTJ 15 Oct. 1835, letter from ‘A’.[54] GTJ 21 Apr. 1836, anonymous letter.[55] GTJ 4 Feb. 1836, letter from Capt. Fawcett and editorial response. See also settlers’ letters

in subsequent issues.[56] GTJ 12 Nov. 1835 and 10 Dec. 1835. See also A. Bank, Of “native skulls” and “noble

caucasians”: phrenology in colonial South Africa, Journal of Southern African Studies 22(1996) 387–403.

[57] See S. Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge 1995) 20–66 and Bank,Of “native skulls”. It is also worth noting that Robert Knox, widely regarded as one of thefounding fathers of British ‘scientific racism’, served as army surgeon on the Cape frontierduring the Fifth Frontier War. See Legassick, The frontier tradition, 78 n.116 and Bank,Of “native skulls”, 393.

[58] This is a point emphasized by Crais, op. cit., Mostert, op. cit., Legassick, The state, racismand the rise of capitalism and Keegan op. cit.

[59] Bank, Of “native skulls”, 402. Bank refers to the similar popularity of phrenology amongsettlers in Australia and New Zealand, in the latter, particularly after the Maori wars ofthe 1850s and 1860s.

[60] CA GH 28/12/1 D’Urban to Glenelg 19 June 1835 enclosure no. 14: Shrewsbury’s Thoughtson the Principles to be Adopted in Reference to the Kafir Tribes 10 Jan. 1835. Shrewsburywas censured for his comments by both the metropolitan Wesleyan Society and the Secretaryof State for the Colonies, Lord Glenelg.

[61] CA GH 23/11 D’Urban to Spring Rice 21 Jan. 1835.[62] CA GH 28/12/1 D’Urban to Glenelg 19 June 1835.[63] For use of the phrase see CA GH 28/12/1 enclosure 18 Smith to D’Urban undated (May–June

1835?) and CA CO 5831 Government Proclamation 10 May 1835. For Philip’s reaction seeMacmillan, op. cit., 145 and Galbraith, op. cit., 111.

[64] CA GH 19/4 D’Urban’s confidential Notes Upon the Treaties Signed With the Xhosa 17Sept. 1835.

[65] Mostert, op. cit., 763.[66] Pretorius, op. cit., 121.[67] L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London 1992) 351.[68] Ibid., 353.[69] Ibid., 353–5.[70] CA GH 1/114 Glenelg to D’Urban 1 May 1837.[71] Glenelg reacted with particular distaste to the news of Hintsa’s mutilation and blamed the

paramount’s death on settler desires for his land (ibid.).[72] Philip would today be described as a capable ‘spin doctor’. For example, knowing full well

that Maqoma’s Xhosa had resented deeply the confiscation of their land along the KatRiver, Philip was still able to persuade his London superiors that they had been only toohappy to see it allocated to fellow-oppressed Khoikhoi in order that they may be redeemedat the hands of the LMS mission. See Pretorius, op. cit., 165; CA A50 Vol. 4, Stretch toFairbairn 4 Oct. 1836.

[73] Philip, op. cit.[74] For the committee, see Pretorius, op. cit., chapter 5. In addition to the Aborigines Committee,

in 1836 a military Court of Enquiry was established on the Cape frontier to investigate thekilling and mutilation of Hintsa. This enquiry was in a sense a microcosm of contemporaryperipheral-metropolitan ideological interaction: on the one hand, there was a diversity ofcolonial interests, with settlers defending Smith and the culpable colonists, colonial officialsclosing ranks and local humanitarians calling vociferously for justice. And on the otherhand, there was a liberal metropolitan intervention prompted by concern over the apparentdegradation of settlers in contact with barbarism, and enormously resented by those settlersand their officials. Ultimately the court condemned the barbarity of Hintsa’s killing butfixed the crime on no-one in particular. PRO CO 48/185 Report of Inquiry into Hintsa’sDeath.

[75] CA GH 1/107 Glenelg to D’Urban 26 Dec. 1835.[76] See most issues of The Graham’s Town Journal throughout 1836.

19‘OTHERNESS’ AND THE FRONTIERS OF EMPIRE

[77] The Times 5 Jan. 1836.[78] GTJ 7 Apr. and 19 May 1836.[79] CA GH 23/11 D’Urban to Glenelg 9 June 1836.[80] Evans, op. cit. 223.[81] N. Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960 (London 1982).[82] T. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labour and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938

(Baltimore 1992); C. Bolt, Victorian Attitudes Towards Race (London 1971); Belich, op. cit;C. Hall, Imperial man: Edward Eyre in Australasia and the West Indies, 1833–1866, inSchwarz (Ed.), op. cit. 130–70; A. Bank, Liberals and Their Enemies: Racial Ideology at theCape of Good Hope, 1820–1850 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge 1995).

[83] Belich, op. cit., 328.[84] These were ranged alongside Eyre, defending his hanging of the “savage” Jamaican rebels.[85] This war marked Fairbairn’s final abandonment of humanitarian support for the Xhosa,

and his transition to a less sympathetic and more utilitarian political economy. In thisscheme, the Xhosa’s conquest should be effected for their own good. See Botha, op. cit.,chapters 6 and 7 and Keegan, op. cit., 216–7).

[86] Smith was now governor. See A. Lester, The margins of order: strategies of segregation onthe Eastern Cape Frontier, 1806–c.1850, Journal of Southern African Studies 23, 4 (1997)635–53.

[87] Ibid.[88] See Le Cordeur, op. cit.[89] See J. Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement

of 1856–7 (Johannesburg 1989).