Writing the South African San: Colonial Ethnographic Discourses (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture) 3030862259, 9783030862251

Citation preview

Writing the South African San Colonial Ethnographic Discourses Lara Atkin

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture Series Editor Joseph Bristow Department of English University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA, USA

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a monograph series that aims to represent innovative and interdisciplinary research on literary and cultural works that were produced from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fin de siècle. Attentive to the historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series features studies that assist in reassessing the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The aim of the series is to look at the increasing influence of different types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects a broad shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the 1800–1900 period but also every field within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14607

Lara Atkin

Writing the South African San Colonial Ethnographic Discourses

Lara Atkin School of English University of Kent Canterbury, UK

ISSN 2634-6494     ISSN 2634-6508 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ISBN 978-3-030-86225-1    ISBN 978-3-030-86226-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86226-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image © Alex Treadway / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

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1834 Map of South Africa produced by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, with cut-outs indicating the environs of Cape Town, the District of George, and the Environs of Grahamstown. The Griqua captaincies of Griquatown and Philippolis as well as the Eastern Cape province of Albany have been indicated on the map by the author. (Digitized image courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License)

Acknowledgements

This book is the product of many collaborations. Its genesis was in my PhD research, and I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my supervisors, Nadia Valman and Rachael Gilmour. I would also like to thank my second supervisor, Andrew van der Vlies. Andrew’s knowledge of South African book history, as well as of the intellectual currents flowing through the South African academy more broadly, has been invaluable throughout this project. I am grateful to my PhD examiners Ruth Livesey and Isabel Hofmeyr for their generous feedback and support for this project. I would particularly like to thank Prof. Hofmeyr for alerting me to the complexity of “Indigenous” identities in the South African context. The postdoctoral research fellowship that enabled this book to be completed was funded by the European Research Council under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 679436), and I would like to thank the Council for its generosity. I would also like to thank Porscha Fermanis, the PI of “SouthHem.” Porscha has been an energetic collaborator; a thorough editor and an extremely generous colleague and friend. I would also like to thank the postdoctoral community at University College Dublin’s Institute of Humanities, in particular Sarah Comyn, Nathan Garvey, Britta Jung, Fariha Shaikh, and Sarah Sharp for your friendship and lively interest in the project. During the past two years, colleagues in the School of English at the University of Kent have also been useful interlocutors and interrogators of this project. In particular, I would like to thank Cathy Waters and David Stirrup for their advice and guidance. I am also deeply grateful to the vii

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anonymous reviewers who gave such thoughtful and helpful feedback on this manuscript and to Joseph Bristow for his rigorous and generous editorial work. Finally, but by no means least, I would like to thank my wife Silke Vanbeselaere for being my support and general cheerleader at times of crisis and my mum, Celia Atkin, for being the first voluntary reader of this book. I would also like to thank Kirsty Rolfe, Shan Vahidy, and Jack Jones for living with me and this project throughout my PhD; your friendship and patience are greatly appreciated.

Contents

1 Literature and Ethnology: Towards a Theory of “Ethnographic Poetics”  1 2 Representing the Khoisan c. 1600–1800 23 3 Better to Be Naked and Free than to Wear Clothes and Be Oppressed: Indigenous Uses of Humanitarian Discourse 55 4 “The South African ‘Children of the Mist’”: The Bushman, the Highlander, and the Making of Colonial Identity in Thomas Pringle’s South African Poetry 89 5 The “Bushboy” in Children’s Literature: Missionary Ethnography and Imperial Adventure Fiction115 6 Encountering Southern Africa: The Display of Khoisan Peoples in London155 7 Conclusion: The Colonial Encounter and Identity Formation181 Bibliography191 Index209 ix

About the Author

Lara Atkin  joined the University of Kent in 2019 as Lecturer in Victorian Literature, after completing an ERC postdoctoral fellowship on the SouthHem project at University College Dublin. She is co-author with Sarah Comyn, Porscha Fermanis, and Nathan Garvey of Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere (Palgrave New Directions in Book History, 2019).

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CHAPTER 1

Literature and Ethnology: Towards a Theory of “Ethnographic Poetics”

In the opening of the first volume of London Labour and the Labour Poor (1861), Henry Mayhew’s genre-defining sociological investigation into the lives and habits of the metropole’s urban poor, Mayhew situates his enquiry within a globalized ethnological framework. “Of the thousand millions of human beings that are said to constitute the population of the entire globe,” he writes, “there are […] but two distinct and broadly marked races, viz., the wanderers and the settlers—the vagabond and the citizen—the nomadic and the civilised tribes.”1 This imaginative act of global incorporation divides mankind into “races” not on the basis of skin colour, as the modern meaning of the word race has come to signify, but on the basis of modes of subsistence and social organization. Mayhew’s comment is indicative of the extent to which ethnological discourse had given nineteenth-century Englishmen the cognitive tools to comprehend ethnic diversity on a global scale. For Mayhew, the enquiries of British ethnologists provided a clear framework of biological, moral, and cultural traits which divided human societies into “wanderers,” “herdsmen,” and “settlers” that could be readily mapped onto the labouring population of London. Mayhew even goes so far as to argue that the “points of coincidence” between ethnological accounts of non-European Indigenous peoples and his own observations  Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (Griffin, Bohn, 1861), vol. 1, 1.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Atkin, Writing the South African San, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86226-8_1

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on London’s poor lead him to “marvel that the analogy should have remained this long unnoticed.”2 Drawing on Scottish Enlightenment stadial theory, comparative anatomy, and comparative philology, ethnology was, as historian of science Richard McMahon has argued, a “transdisciplinary” project aimed at associating “biological racial types with cultural nations” through “assemblages of physical, psychological and cultural traits.”3 Comparative ethnology underwrote European representations of Indigenous peoples throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, it provided a framework through which European racial and cultural supremacy could be naturalized by providing a pseudo-empirical developmental scale along which European and non-European cultures and societies could be measured and compared. Second, as a transdisciplinary project, ethnological comparisons could be made across a range of different writings, from sociological studies such as Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor to government reports on political governance and even works of fiction. It was this malleability that was also the cause of its durability; ethnological representations of Indigenous people migrated from works of comparative anatomy and philology into literary culture through travelogues that were extracted and commented upon in British and colonial periodicals, creating a discursive basis for the racist representations of Indigenous peoples that circulated across the British world during the nineteenth century. The extent to which ethnology had become popularized in Britain by the mid-nineteenth century is evinced by the fact that Mayhew cites ethnologists James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848) and Andrew Smith (1797–1872) in order to lend scholarly authority to his enquiry into the London poor. In particular, he turns to Andrew Smith’s study of the social formations of Indigenous South African peoples to form his hypotheses about the relationship between affluent “settled” classes and the peripatetic labouring poor within Britain. According to Dr. Andrew Smith, who has recently made extensive observations in South Africa, almost every tribe of people who have submitted themselves to social laws, recognising the rights of property and reciprocal social duties, and thus acquiring wealth and forming themselves into a  Mayhew, vol. 1, 2.  Richard McMahon, ‘The History of Transdisciplinary Race Classification: Methods, Politics and Institutions, 1840s–1940s’, British Journal for the History of Science 51, no. 1 (March 2018): 65, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087417001054. 2 3

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respectable caste, are surrounded by hordes of vagabonds and outcasts from their own community. Such are the Bushmen and Sonquas of the Hottentot race—the term “sonqua” meaning literally pauper. But a similar condition in society produces similar results in regards to other races.4

In Smith’s taxonomy of South African Indigenous peoples, the sonqua or San people of Southern Africa, known in British colonial parlance as the “bushmen,” emerge as the paradigmatic wandering people: a peripatetic race of “vagabonds” who resist inclusion into the more settled social structures of the Khoekhoe and other Indigenous pastoralists. Smith’s work profoundly influenced James Cowles Prichard’s writings on South African Indigenous peoples in Natural History of Man (1844), a work that has been identified by historians of ethnology and anthropology as a key work in the establishment and popularization of ethnology in Britain.5 Such was the popularity of Prichard’s Natural History of Man by the time Mayhew came to write London Labour and the London Poor, that Mayhew was able to use ethnological representations of the San as an analogy through which he could introduce to British audiences what Mayhew presented to his readers as a less familiar subject: the social and economic lives of London’s peripatetic labouring poor. Mayhew’s observation that ethnological discourse provided writers with an epistemological basis which enabled analogies to be drawn between geographically dispersed societies brings us to a key claim of this book: that nineteenth-century ethnology was a poetic as well as a scientific discourse. Nineteenth-century ethnological discourse blended the empiricist truth claims of science with a consciously literary preference for metaphor and analogy, creating a set of mobile ethnological types that could be disseminated to different reading publics across the British world through a variety of literary genres and textual media. Mayhew’s choice of the “bushmen” as the paradigmatic example of the “wandering savage” on which to base his hypotheses about London’s labouring poor is a case in point. The transition from Dutch to British rule in the Cape Colony after 1806 led to a proliferation in representations of “bushmen” in British publications as missionaries, government surveyors, and curious European travellers sought to document the Indigenous populations of Britain’s first African  Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1, 1.  Sadiah Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-­ Century Britain, First Edition (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 86. 4 5

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settler colony. The word “bushman,” or more commonly its Dutch equivalent bosjesman, first appeared in European writings in the early eighteenth century. While in British writing about southern Africa during the eighteenth century the term had been used interchangeably to describe Khoekhoe pastoralists and San hunter-gatherers, from the early nineteenth century onwards the term “bushman” came to signify the descendants of aboriginal hunter-gatherer groups who are the earliest known human inhabitants of Southern Africa.6 Today, the term “bushman” is a contested term as it carries both “sexist limitations” and “the racist overtones of eighteenth- and nineteenth-­ century usage.”7 As the term “bushman” continues to have pejorative associations, throughout this book I use speech marks to indicate a literary figure in colonial discourse rather than the peoples who the term was supposed to represent.8 When referring to the culture and social practices of the peoples the term “bushman” was supposed to represent, I use the word San. Although originally used by Khoekhoe pastoralists in a pejorative sense to mean people who “gathered wild food,” the word San “is relatively free of colonial connotations.”9 When discussing light-skinned Indigenous southern African peoples, I follow my historical sources in distinguishing between San hunter-gatherers and Khoekhoe pastoralists. Differentiating between Khoekhoe and San peoples recognizes the fact that prior to the advent of European settler colonialism in southern Africa, San and Khoekhoe communities were distinguished from one another by their distinct modes of subsistence. As Griqua scholar Berte Van Wyk notes: Traditionally, the Khoi Khoi were largely pastoralists, while the San lived primarily from hunter-gathering, and hence the differences in their livelihoods, culture, languages and identity make for some significant distinctions

6  Archaeological evidence suggests that independent foraging bands who were described as “bushmen” were found in southern Africa over 120,000 years ago. 7  Hedley Twidle, ‘“The Bushmen’s Letters”: |Xam Narratives of the Bleek and Lloyd Collection and Their Afterlives’, in The Cambridge History of South African Literature, ed. David Attwell and Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 20. 8  Mohamed Adhikari, The Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples (UCT Press, 2010), 27; Shane Moran, Representing Bushmen: South Africa and the Origin of Language (University Rochester Press, 2009), 9. 9  Hedley Twidle, ‘“The Bushmen’s Letters”: |Xam Narratives of the Bleek and Lloyd Collection and Their Afterlives’, in The Cambridge History of South African Literature, ed. David Attwell and Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 20.

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between Khoi and San peoples, despite their having some common ancestry and cultural commonalities.10

It is also worth observing that the terms San and “bushman” refer to several different communities that anthropologists today recognize constitute a diverse range of people with different social and cultural practices. When I refer to contemporary ethnographic studies on the San, I refer to the particular groups studied and name individual informants where they are known. Thus, throughout this study there are references to the testimony and cultural practices of the Ju/’hoansi or northern San who live in north-western Botswana, north-eastern Namibia, and southern Angola and the ≠Khomani or southern San, a diversity of groups based in southern Botswana and in the area surrounding the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park in the Northern Cape area of South Africa.11 I will also refer, where relevant, to the/Xam, the San group who originally inhabited the Western and Eastern Cape and whose mythology and folklore was recorded by the philologists Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. These distinctions are necessary because it is important to recognize that Khoekhoe and San are not just historical terms but Indigenous communities who continue to occupy a marginal position within the South African postcolony. Dispossessed of their traditional lands under colonialism rather than apartheid, many Khoekhoe and San communities have been unable to access restorative justice through land restitution because of peculiarities in South African law that limit historical land claims to the period following the 1913 Natives’ Land Act, which formally instituted apartheid. Under apartheid, Khoekhoe and San peoples suffered a further dislocation when their ethnic identities were erased by the classificatory procedures of the apartheid state, subsuming them under the generic ethnic category of “coloured.” In South Africa today, many people with Khoi and San ancestry who were classified under the apartheid system as “coloured” have increasingly reclaimed the term “khoisan” as an ethnic identity.12 Today, Khoisan Revivalists can be defined as activists who ­“campaign for cultural development and/or claim indigenous people’s

10  Berthe Van Wyk, ‘Indigenous Rights, Indigenous Epistemologies and Language: (Re) Construction of Modern Khoisan Identities’, Knowledge Cultures 4, no. 4 (2016): 34. 11  For a full list of different San groups and their territories, see Alan Barnard, Anthropology and the Bushman (Berg Publishers, 2007), 6–7. 12  For more on Khoisan revivalism and its relation to ‘coloured’ identity, see Rafael Verbuyst, ‘Claiming Cape Town: Towards a Symbolic Interpretation of Khoisan Activism and Land Claims’, Anthropology Southern Africa 39, no. 2 (31 May 2016): 83–96.

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status, and recognition for traditional authorities.”13 These activists tend to be based in and around Cape Town or in towns and cities in the Western and Northern Cape and are increasingly advocating for the repatriation of traditional lands and an end to their economic marginalization within the South African state. When I use the term Khoisan in my discussion, I am not referring to Khoisan identity as it is understood by Khoisan Revivalists today. Instead, I use it to collectively name the Indigenous communities who were described as “hottentots” (Khoekhoe) and “bushmen” (San) in colonial discourse. Most crucially, it is important to recognize that Writing the South African San is not a work of ethnography or historical anthropology but a work of literary history that tracks the production and circulation of particular discursive constructions of the “bushman” in nineteenth-­ century science, travel writing, and print culture. The persistent use of the figure of the “bushman” as a synecdoche for the peoples of pre-colonial Southern Africa in the longue durée of Anglophone colonial writing has been pointed out by J. M. Coetzee. In White Writing, Coetzee argues that the representation of the “bushman” as the “truest native of South Africa” was a remarkably resilient motif that he identifies in writings ranging from British naturalist William Burchall’s Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa (1822–1824) to South African author Laurens van der Post’s Lost World of the Kalahari (1958).14 The identification of the San as the “truest native” of South Africa suggests that the figure of the “bushman” was endowed with a sense of authenticity. The symbolic association of the “bushman” with authentic indigeneity in colonial discourse derived from their construction as a synecdoche for a “primitive” old Africa that was rapidly vanishing in the wake of first colonial expansion and later postcolonial modernity. Part of the violence done to traditional lifeways by the colonial encounter in Southern Africa was the epistemological effort made by colonial writers to separate and reify traditional groups with long histories of co-­ existence and interdependence into separate and distinct ethnic types, and it is this process and the ideologies behind it that the present study aims to 13  Lorenzo Veracini and Rafael Verbuyst, ‘South Africa’s Settler-Colonial Present: Khoisan Revivalism and the Question of Indigeneity’, Social Dynamics 46, no. 2 (3 May 2020): 261, https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2020.1805883. 14  J.M.  Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, New edition edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 177.

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deconstruct. In the case of the San, central to the construction of the “bushman” as an ethnic type was the belief that the people categorized as “bushmen” exist “outside of history” in a “deep human past.” The idea of the “bushman” as existing in the “deep human past” before the advent of modernity stemmed in part from European representations of their culture as defined by what Coetzee has termed “a set of absences.”15 This reification of San culture as a set of absences operated on several different socio-cultural levels in accounts written by naturalists, philologists, missionaries, and comparative anatomists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In colonial ethnography, derogatory depictions of San culture ranged from representations of San languages as lacking the means for articulating anything beyond basic material needs to the temporal positioning of San peoples in the distant past or even outside of history, emphasizing their alleged lack of the material and cultural signifiers of a modern, “civilized” society. Since the fall of apartheid, scholars in the interdisciplinary field of Khoisan Studies have returned to the colonial archive to rescue Khoekhoe, Griqua, and San cultures from such harmful misrepresentations. The scholarly efforts to recover the life of Sarah Baartman from the cultural afterlife of her display as the “Hottentot Venus,” which I shall discuss further in Chap. 6, are one manifestation of this effort.16 Another is the wealth of scholarship that has emerged from a reconsideration of the 15  Rachael Gilmour, Grammars of Colonialism: Representing Languages in Colonial South Africa (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2006), 16. As Gilmour, Anthony Traill, Shane Moran, and others have noted, this negative representation also applied to European accounts of Khoisan languages. 16  There is a substantial body of literature covering both Baartman’s life in the Cape and her time in Europe. See, for example, Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography, Reprint edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Zoé S. Strother, ‘Display of the Body Hottentot’, in Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business, ed. Bernth Lindfors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Zine Magubane, ‘Which Bodies Matter?: Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the “Hottentot Venus”’, Gender and Society 15, no. 6 (2001): 816–34;Sadiah Qureshi, ‘Displaying Sara Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus”’, History of Science 42, no. 2 (1 June 2004): 233–57; Yvette Abrahams, ‘Disempowered to Consent: Sara Bartman and Khoisan Slavery in the Nineteenth-­ Century Cape Colony and Britain’, South African Historical Journal 35, no. 1 (1 November 1996): 89–114; Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘Sara Baartman and Andries Stoffels: Violence, Law and the Politics of Spectacle in London and the Eastern Cape, 1809–1836’, Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne Des Études Africaines 45, no. 3 (1 January 2011): 524–64.

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Bleek-Lloyd archive of San folklore.17 In particular, my commitment to close-reading government reports and ethnological works draws on methodologies for analysing and deconstructing colonial archives of San folklore and mythology developed by South African literary scholars such as Shane Moran, Michael Wessels, and Hedley Twiddle. As well as drawing upon the methods of literary criticism and social anthropology, my engagement with South African historiography has enabled me to situate the displacements of San people that took place during the early nineteenth century within the broader context of other internal displacements of Indigenous communities taking place across southern Africa at a similar time. The shifting migrations and allegiances during the so-called Difaqane led to the genesis of a range of new polities across southern Africa, many of which were reified in colonial accounts into “ethnic” identities.18 As the historian Paul Landau has persuasively argued: “ethnic differences existed, but chiefly politics made and remade ethnicity, not the other way around.”19 Writing the South African San is committed to documenting the history of genocide and dispossession that Khoisan communities suffered under British colonialism and its impact on Khoekhoe, San, Griqua, British, and South African settler cultures. Ethnological discourse was responsible for rewriting this history of settler genocide and Indigenous dispossession as a story about the erasure of weak and primitive race by a strong and modern one, a story that would justify settler appropriation of 17  This work includes efforts made by historians and historical anthropologists to recover the histories of the |Xam informants whose folktales were recorded by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. See, for example, Janette Deacon et al., Voices from the Past:/Xam Bushmen and the Bleek and Lloyd Collection (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1996). It also includes the work of folklorists and anthropologists interested in recovering |Xam folklore and a broader Khoisan mythic tradition. See, for example, Mathias Georg Guenther, Bushman Folktales: Oral Traditions of the Nharo of Botswana and the/Xam of the Cape (Stuttgart: F. Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GMBH, 1989). In recent years, Pippa Skotnes has used the collection to inspire her creative work, most notably in the “Miscast” exhibition of 1996, and more recently in her collection of interdisciplinary scholarship on the archive; see Pippa Skotnes and Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek, Claim to the Country: The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek (Jacana Media, 2007). In the field of literature, scholars have also begun to examine both how the archive was formed and the nature of the |Xam narratives contained within. 18  The difaqane (Sesotho), sometimes known as the Mfecane (isiZulu), refers to a period of forced migration due to conflict that afflicted Indigenous communities across Southern Africa between 1815 and 1840. 19  Paul S. Landau, Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 41.

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Khoekhoe, San, and eventually Griqua land as well as providing a racial mythology that was a powerful part of white British and South African identity formation. Returning to the discursive source of these racial myths and attending to the histories of genocide and dispossession that were the material conditions of their formation is an important step towards unthinking the racial hierarchies that continue to underpin white identities in both Britain and South Africa. To avoid the risk of replicating colonialist practices by reinscribing an essentialist notion of indigeneity that does epistemic violence to these complex histories, I have had to think carefully about the ways in which racial categories were determined in Britain and South Africa during the nineteenth century. Inherent in this approach is the need to pay careful attention to the historical processes by which race and culture were elided in European textual constructions of the figure of the “bushman.” As Shane Moran has argued in relation to the representation of the San in colonial writings, deconstructing ethnological discourse involves paying careful attention to the ways in which colonial understandings of “the categories of culture and race developed together, imbricated within each other.”20 However, when Europeans spoke of different “races” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, skin colour was not the only (or even the primary) marker of racial difference. In the late eighteenth century, Linnaean racial taxonomies worked in tandem with Scottish Enlightenment historiography to establish categories of identity in which “socioeconomic factors” and “skin colour” were both “visible testimony of contemporary identity.”21 However, even after the “Linnaean watershed” these categories of racial difference were more fluid than is sometimes acknowledged.22 Even Scottish surgeon and comparative anatomist Robert Knox, whose The Races of Man (1850) is often seen as marking the transition between more flexible notions of racial difference and a more rigid “scientific racism,” viewed race as imbricated with culture.23 Knox’s ethnology drew 20  Shane Moran, Representing Bushmen: South Africa and the Origin of Language (University Rochester Press, 2009), 8. 21  Roxane Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 36. 22  Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science, 2nd edition (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 118. 23  See, for example, Nancy Stepan, Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1982), 41; George W.  Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), 65; On the alleged shift from cultural to biological notions of racial

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upon both the comparative anatomy of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Baron Georges Cuvier, and the arguments of eighteenth-century ethnologists such as Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, that different races could develop or degenerate according to the environments in which they lived. Knox’s ethnology, in line with many of the texts examined in this book, was highly influenced by Scottish Enlightenment historiography. The stadial theory of Adam Smith and notions of fixed national character first proposed by David Hume informed ethnological discourse during this period. Smith’s stadial theory argues that societies advance progressively through successive stages: hunting, herding, agriculture, and commerce. Stadial theory suggests that all societies could follow a similar developmental trajectory from “savage” to “civilized,” making an argument for the basic unity of mankind. Accordingly, stadial theory could be used to make universalist arguments about the potential progress that Indigenous people could make towards “civilization” through conversion and acculturation, a rhetorical argument that was particularly appealing to many of the Evangelical writers examined in this book.24 By the mid-nineteenth century, ethnology had permeated far beyond the rarefied circles of gentlemanly science and philosophy, becoming an increasingly influential lens through which literate, middle- and upper-­ middle-­class British readers viewed both Indigenous peoples and their own internal Others.25 Mayhew’s reference to Smith’s account of the social organization of southern African San communities makes visible the extent to which ethnological writings had permeated other discursive fields, providing a set of socio-cultural types that could be used diagnostically to describe and classify European and colonial societies. It is this imbrication of ethnology with a range of other discourses ranging from newspaper journalism and travel writing to poetry and fiction that gives rise to what I call an ethnographic poetics. A distinctive feature of all of the difference in the mid-nineteenth century, see, for example, Wheeler, The Complexion of Race, 299; P. Kitson, Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2007), 37. 24  Silvia Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress, trans. Jeremy Carden, Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History (Palgrave, 2013). 25  For more on Mayhew’s use of racial and ethnic markers to define which religious and ethnic minority groups were included or excluded from his conception of Englishness, see Thomas Prasch, ‘Ethnicity as Marker in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor’, in Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia, ed. Marlene Tromp, Maria K Bachman, and Heidi Kaufman (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2013), 231–49.

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writings examined in this book is ethnography’s epistemological grounding in empiricism. From the encounter narratives of colonial travellers and sojourners, which provided the field “data” for armchair ethnologists in the metropole, to the imperial adventure stories that provided the racial mythologies that underwrote the identities of white boys and girls in Britain, middlebrow literary culture was awash with descriptions of Indigenous peoples that were consumed for their ethnographic content. If it is more obvious to contemporary readers that travel writing would be read ethnographically than adventure fiction, this distinction was not always as clear to early and mid-nineteenth-century readers, who often regarded novels as mimetic and habitually read imperial romances ethnographically. A reviewer of Captain Fredrick Marryat’s The Mission; Or Scenes in Africa (1844), writing in the Literary Gazette, commented that by the end of the novel the reader gains “a very clear notion of the interior of South Africa, its geography, its people, its natural history, its habits and its adventures for European explorers.”26 This is not an isolated comment; contemporary reviewers praised The Mission for the perceived verisimilitude of the zoological and ethnographic descriptions provided by Marryat, indicating they were central to the novel’s popular appeal. If nineteenth-century readers habitually read novels ethnographically, twentieth-century anthropologists have drawn our attention to the inherently poetic nature of ethnographic description. As social anthropologist James Clifford persuasively argued many years ago, ethnography “cannot avoid expressive tropes, figures and allegories that select and impose meaning as they translate it,”27 leading ethnographers to produce what Clifford Geertz famously termed the “thick description” that requires the anthropologist (and, by extension, the reader) to use their interpretive powers to make cultural practices legible through discourse.28 Hence, ethnography is a poetic discourse, with the tropes and figures adopted by ethnographers requiring, in order for them to be legible to their readers, particular interpretive practices. My contention throughout this book is that literary scholars and historians of empire have been too slow to recognize the 26  Anon, ‘Book Review’, The Literary Gazette: A Weekly Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts, 12 July 1845. 27   James Clifford and George Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, 2nd edition (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 2010), 7. 28  Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–33.

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poetic quality of colonial ethnographic writings and the crucial role  of such poetics in shaping the mythologies of whiteness that underwrote the racial logics of imperialism and colonialism.

Writing the Cultures of the British Empire The remediation of Andrew Smith’s ethnology of the “bushman” from the South African scientific journal in which it was first published to Henry Mayhew’s sociological investigation into London’s labouring poor illustrates the importance of tracking these representations across a range of literary and non-literary textual forms, as well as tracing the transnational routes by which colonial ethnology reached a broad range of British reading publics. My study therefore analyses representations of the San in relatively ephemeral media such as newspapers, periodicals, and pamphlets, alongside more canonical works. The discussion demonstrates that the writings examined informed contemporary political debates in both Britain and the Cape Colony about the abolition of slavery, British colonial policy, and the evolving relationship between the British public and the Indigenous populations of Britain’s expanding empire. By excavating a wealth of under-researched literary sources that circulated among Anglophone readers in both Britain and the Cape Colony and placing them alongside representations in popular novels and travel writing, I argue for the crucial role that popular middlebrow genres played in producing and disseminating discourses of racial difference in the nineteenth-­ century British world. As historians of science interested in tracing the disciplinary formation of anthropology in the long nineteenth century have argued, the development of the “science” of racial classification was inextricably linked to the cultural politics of European nationalism and colonialism.29 While Sadiah Qureshi’s recent enquiries have highlighted the role that ethnographic displays played in the popularization of ethnology and anthropology in Britain, very little attention has been paid to the role that literature played

29  See, amongst others, Nancy Stepan, Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960, St Antony’s Series (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1982); George W.  Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987); Sadiah Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain, First Edition (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

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in popularizing race science.30 Representations of the San, whether produced by settlers, British travellers, missionaries, or Griqua leaders themselves drew heavily on the discourses of ethnology and anthropology that emerged from the spread of scientific exploration and learned societies throughout Britain and its empire. British and colonial writers consciously appropriated the typologies of contemporary ethnology, reshaping them to suit the religious and political ideologies of a variety of metropolitan and colonial “reading communities.”31 Central to my methodology is attending carefully to the geographical and historical contexts informing the production of writings about the San. Throughout this book, close readings of representations of San communities take place in dialogue with the vast body of historiography that investigates the historical processes which shaped the formation of the colonial social order in the early nineteenth-century Cape Colony.32 This body of scholarship, largely emanating from South Africa, is brought into dialogue with the work of Catherine Hall, Alan Lester, Linda Colley, Kathleen Wilson, and other British and American “new” imperial historians.33 Following their approach, I bring metropole and colony into the 30  The one monograph that addresses the link between literature, race science and Indigenous representation is Kate Flint, The Transatlantic Indian, 1776–1930 (Princeton University Press, 2009). 31  William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, 1st edition (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 32  On race and the making of the colonial social order, see, for example, Richard Elphick, Khoikhoi and the Founding of White South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985); Clifton C.  Crais, The Making of the Colonial Order: White Supremacy and Black Resistance in the Eastern Cape, 1770–1865 (Australia: Wits University Press, 1992); Timothy Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997); Wayne Dooling, Slavery, Emancipation and Colonial Rule in South Africa (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007). On the history of the London Missionary Society at the Cape Colony and missionary racial discourse, see, for example, Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008); Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); E.  Cleall, Missionary Discourses of Difference: Negotiating Otherness in the British Empire, 1840–1900, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012). 33  For examples of cultural historical approaches to the British Empire which draw on theoretical approaches from literary studies, see, for example, Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867, 1st edition (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2002); Catherine Hall, ed., At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the

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same analytic frame by considering how the San were represented to readers in both spaces. Rather than arguing that the circulation of ideas emanated from the metropole outwards, I view the “space of empire” as “intellectually integrated” with that of the metropole.34 The chronological focus of this book is 1795–1851. This period is particularly significant as it was an era in British colonial epistemology that Alan Lester and Fae Dussart have termed “humanitarian governance.”35 Lester and Dussart define this as a period at the beginning of the nineteenth century during which “a British governmental responsibility to protect [Indigenous peoples] emerged at the same time and in the same spaces as that government assumed the right to colonize.”36 As we shall see in Chap. 4, ethnographic accounts of San communities published in travelogues and reprinted in British and colonial journals in the period between the abolition of the slave trade in 1806 and the abolition of slavery in the colonies in 1833 collectively constituted what John O’Leary has characterized as a “well established discourse about the ill-treatment of South Africans.”37 My study is concerned with analysing both the rhetorical structure of what I term a humanitarian discourse on the ill treatment of the San and the ways in which this colonial discourse overlaps with metropolitan abolitionism and liberal arguments in favour of so-called moral colonization. This humanitarian discourse was a key feature of the cultural politics of British imperialism in the early to mid-nineteenth century. In order to assess the relationship between Indigenous representation and the cultural politics of British imperialism, this study takes seriously historical anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler’s injunction to attend carefully Imperial World (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Wilson, A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, Illustrated edition (Cambridge, UK; New  York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For more on the ways in which the formation of Britain as a political entity impacted on questions of empire and British identity formation, see, for example, Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, 3rd Revised edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 34  Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 3. 35  See Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 36  Lester and Dussart, 1. 37  John O’Leary, ‘“Unlocking the Fountains of the Heart”: Settler Verse and the Politics of Sympathy’, Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 1 (March 2010): 57.

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to the “affective strains” of “colonialism’s political grammar.”38 I draw upon on a recent critical historiography that reassesses the allegedly humanitarian ideology that underpinned the politics of moral colonization and place this historiography in dialogue with a body of work in affect theory that analyses the workings of sympathy and pity, in order to trace the political and affective dimensions of nineteenth-century humanitarian discourse.39 Informed by the work of Amit Rai, Luc Boltanski, Thomas Laqueur, and others, I trace the rhetorical structure of a racialized moral sympathy for the suffering Indigenous Other that was the affective keynote of the political ideology of moral colonization.40 Racialized moral sympathy operated as a distancing mechanism that enabled a limited sympathetic identification between British readers and Indigenous peoples affected by the violent displacements of settler colonialism. It was by exercising a limited or “imperfect sympathy,” to paraphrase Charles Lamb, for the Indigenous Other that humanitarian writers could present the amelioration of Indigenous suffering as a moral imperative while simultaneously advocating for the extension of a colonial enterprise that denied Indigenous peoples their land and sovereignty and entrenched an increasingly racialized social order in sites of colonization across the British-controlled world.41 An important but frequently overlooked aspect of the development of racial thinking in the British-controlled world during the nineteenth century is the influence of missionary ethnography and its transnational dissemination through Evangelical publishing networks. As Isabel Hofmeyr has pointed out, during the expansion of book production in the early nineteenth century, religious material constituted by far the greatest 38  Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, N.J.; Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2008), 40. 39  For work on the cultural politics of sympathy, see, for example, A. Rai, Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race, and Power 1750–1850 (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2002), https://doi. org/10.1057/9780312299170; Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, trans. Graham D. Burchell (Cambridge, UK ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Thomas W. Laqueur, ‘Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative’, in The New Cultural History (University of California Press, 1989). 40  On the link between humanitarianism and moral colonization, see, for example, Lester and Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance; Elbourne, Blood Ground; Penelope Edmonds and Anna Johnston, ‘Empire, Humanitarianism and Violence in the Colonies’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 17, no. 1 (2016), https://doi. org/10.1353/cch.2016.0013. 41  Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb, The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Methuen & Company, 1903).

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proportion of what was produced. The Bibles, periodicals, and tracts produced by Evangelical religious organizations addressed themselves to a worldwide audience, providing an important textual circuit through which a transnational reading public was created.42 With the spread among the British middle classes of the Evangelical Revival, Evangelical religious discourse gained national importance. In the colonial context, the most significant manifestation of this was the spread of nonconformist missionary organizations throughout the British Empire. In and around the Cape Colony, the London Missionary Society (LMS) was “probably the most politically important” organization of its kind during this time.43 As we shall see, the diffusion of missionary ethnography to a wide range of audiences through Evangelical publishing networks played a key role both in disseminating ethnology and in binding Evangelical religious ideology to ideas about British national identity and imperial citizenship. Although, with the notable exception of the Griqua writers discussed in Chap. 3, all of the writers dealt with in Writing the South African San were born in Britain and spent most of their lives there; all of them also spent extended periods of time living and travelling in southern Africa. Residing in southern Africa for extended periods often engendered in British sojourners a first-hand awareness of the complex negotiations over land, resources, and labour taking place between Indigenous and settler communities daily during the extended “first contact” period that preceded full colonization even if this awareness was overlaid with racist cultural assumptions. This sense of being caught between cultures meant that these writers sought to appeal to transnational reading communities in both Britain and South Africa. All of them also sought to stage through their literary writings political interventions in live debates around questions of national and ethnic identity, around settler/Indigenous social and economic relations, and around the nature and scope of Britain’s imperial “mission.” These debates circulated among multiple reading publics through the pages of the metropolitan and colonial newspaper and periodical press. 42  Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘The Globe in the Text: Towards a Transnational History of the Book’, African Studies 64, no. 1 (1 July 2005): 87–103, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00020180500139080. 43  Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 11.

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The inclusion of Griqua writers within the expanded archive of nineteenth-­century literature and print culture alerts us to the limitations of narrowly nationalistic categories of literary history, especially when it comes to examining the responses to colonialism produced by Indigenous peoples. As Nikki Hessell has argued, when considering Indigenous texts we must consider how “meaningless European notions of period can be for Indigenous peoples and how distorting these period labels can be for Indigenous histories.”44 As will become particularly evident in Chap. 3, when we focus on the Griqua captaincies of Transorangia, periodizations framed around the lifespan of a particular British monarch (Victorian) or even a particular set of Western philosophical and literary traditions (Romanticism) do not provide the analytical tools necessary to understand the complex social worlds of these multi-ethnic and multi-lingual communities who inhabited the lands surrounding the Cape Colony and other sites of European colonization. Attending carefully to the particular local social and cultural conditions of fluid borderlands such as Transorangia enables us to comprehend the material conditions out of which Indigenous polities and their textual productions emerged. As Adrian Wisnicki has recently suggested in his work on African expeditionary literature, such an approach necessarily involves attending to the “multi-layered, multidirectional process of intercultural interaction in the field” between explorers, settlers, and Indigenous groups: namely, the ways in which southern Africa’s peoples, cultures, and politics helped shape British and European discourse on the area and its cultures.45 Such an approach avoids viewing Indigenous peoples as discursively trapped within European ideologies and epistemologies, instead revealing the active role many of them played in shaping both the politics and discourses of colonialism. Yet establishing points where Indigenous groups such as the Griqua were able to insert themselves into the networks of textual dissemination and knowledge exchange that were so central to the functioning of the British Empire is in no way intended to deny the violence done to Indigenous cultures and lifeways by colonialism. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith has contended, from the time of first contact, scientific research has been 44  Nikki Hessell, Romantic Literature and the Colonised World: Lessons from Indigenous Translations, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 5–6. 45  Adrian S.  Wisnicki, Fieldwork of Empire, 1840–1900: Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of British Expeditionary Literature, 1st edition (New York, NY: Routledge, 2019), 12.

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used as a tool of political power by colonial regimes. As a result of this research has come for Indigenous communities to be inextricably associated with “policies that intruded into every aspects of our lives, legitimated by research, informed more often by ideology.”46 My research proceeds in the knowledge that for Indigenous communities across the world colonialism is not a matter of history but of ongoing lived experience, and fully acknowledges the limits of this particular British researcher’s expertise when it comes to articulating this experience. To be clear, my research addresses Griqua and San experience in so far as it can be recovered in the archives of British imperialism and settler colonialism, not one that claims to speak for contemporary Khoekhoe, Khoisan, Griqua, or San communities, many of whom are actively pursuing land restoration claims in South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia, often in the face of overt hostility from national governments. The second chapter traces the genealogical roots of the ethnographic poetics used to represent the Indigenous peoples of the Western Cape— the Khoekhoe (“Hottentots”) and the San (“bushmen”)—in European writings stretching from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. It provides a literary-historical analysis of the formation, by the early nineteenth century, of a racial discourse that provided the affective and ideological base upon which public support for British imperial expansion was built. In particular, this chapter argues for both the inherently literary quality of ethnographic writings, revealing how particular racial typologies occurred recursively across a variety of travel narratives, and philosophical writings about southern Africa produced by European writers. Even travellers and sojourners writing travelogues based on personal observation and long-­ term residency at the Cape relied on pre-existing racial types drawn from a dense range of sources ranging from the Bible to Roman history writing in order to make their writings on southern African peoples legible to educated European audiences. Chapter 3 traces how colonial discourses on Indigenous peoples were used by the Indigenous leaders of the autonomous Griqua polities that sprung up north of the colonial border in the area known as Transorangia. Here, I argue that Griqua leaders were acutely aware of the ethnological typologies used against them in British and colonial humanitarian writings. The chapter begins by examining a range of British government 46  Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd Revised edition (London: Zed Books Ltd, 2012), 33.

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reports and travelogues by government officials represented the San as abject victims of Griqua and trekboer violence in order to make the case for the extension and consolidation of British rule in southern Africa. The sentimental pity for the San as paradigmatic “suffering Indigenes” in need of benevolent protection was deployed not only by the British government, but also by Andries Waterboer, a Griqua leader, in his correspondence with the London Missionary Society. Waterboer self-consciously adopts the humanitarian rhetoric of protection in order to cast himself as the moral and legal protector of the San and other Indigenous groups against the violence of white and brown frontiersmen illegally encroaching on their territories. In the final section of the chapter, I examine letters published in the Cape Town weekly newspapers South African Commercial Advertiser and The Cape of Good Hope Observer by Hendrik Hendriks, secretary to the Griqua leader Adam Kok II, to demonstrate how Hendriks’s acute awareness of the moral purchase that the figure of the suffering indigene had on liberal Anglo-settler audiences led him to cast the Griqua as oppressed indigenes in need of the British government’s benevolent protection. Hendriks exploits Anglo-settlers self-­representation as “protectors” of Indigenous peoples in order to argue for the necessity of British intervention to protect the Griqua from the incursions of trekboers and to critique the colonial government for failing to honour their legal and ethical obligations to the Griqua. Chapter 4 examines the figuration of the “bushman” in the South African newspaper poems by the unknown “Evitas” and the Scottish settler-­poet Thomas Pringle. These poets sought to both define and circumscribe the San’s indigeneity through their alleged rootedness to a particular locale: the Kalahari Desert. This representation threads motifs appropriated from ethnographic travel narratives into the affective rhetoric of racialized moral sympathy to argue explicitly for a recognition of the San’s sovereignty over their desert wilderness in the face of a century of dispossession at the hands of settler-colonists. Yet for all their humanitarian political power, these poems operate self-reflexively to disclose a crisis of identity amongst these settler-poets. Representing the “bushman” as a symbol of primitive authenticity enables the settler-poet to reflect upon the unsettled identity of the newly arrived emigrant who, though no longer British, can never truly belong in southern Africa. In the second part of the chapter, I consider the interrelationship between settler and British literary cultures by tracking the transnational and trans-medial journey that Pringle’s “Song of the Wild Bushman”

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underwent between its first publication in a Cape Town newspaper in the 1820s and its recirculation in the periodicals of 1830s Britain. The first Anglophone poem written in the voice of an Indigenous southern African, its success in Britain was dependent on Pringle’s refashioning of the tropes of popular Romanticism. Most notably, Walter Scott’s representation of the Scottish Highlander was mobilized by Pringle and mapped onto his representation of the San “bushman” in order to draw an analogy between the painful integration of Scotland’s Highlanders into the Anglo-Empire in the late eighteenth century and the plight of the Cape Colony’s Indigenous peoples, who in Pringle’s view were playing out a similar struggle against the expanding British colonial state in 1830s southern Africa.47 Chapter 5 focuses on the figure of the “bushboy” as he emerges at the intersection of Evangelical tract fiction, imperial adventure writing and Robinsonades in nineteenth-century Britain. I argue for the dual influence of ethnographic travel narratives written by missionaries in the field and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in the creation of what I term the Evangelical Robinsonade in the early nineteenth century, a genre of children’s writing that played a central role in the development of the imperial romance. In doing so, this chapter makes a contribution to broader debates about the interplay between religion and material accumulation in the reception history of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. It also recovers the important role played by Evangelical publishing networks and children’s tract fiction in the formation of the imperial adventure story by uncovering the influence representations of San people in LMS missionary John Campbell’s tract fiction had on Captain Fredrick Marryat’s imperial romances. Chapter 6 explores a series of ethnological lectures and reviews of San ethnographic performers who toured Britain between 1810 and 1851. I reveal how “human zoos” and the ethnological lectures that accompanied them both popularized ethnological representations of the San and could be used as a tool to critique as well as enforce British imperial ideology, complicating the oft-assumed interrelationship between racism and imperialism. Turning to these lectures and performances highlights the 47  While this analogy has been noted before by Pringle critics, its significance in relation to Pringle’s vision of British Empire building and South African colonial nationalism has not been explored. See Randolph Vigne, Thomas Pringle: South African Pioneer, Poet and Abolitionist, xvii, 270  pp. (Woodbridge, England: Currey, 2012), 84–85; Damian Shaw, ‘Thomas Pringle’s “Bushmen”: Images in Flesh and Blood’, English in Africa, 1998, 53.

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complex ways in which ethnological discourse could be used as a means of entertainment and a tool of political propaganda. As with Mayhew’s use of ethnological accounts of the San to draw analogies with his own real-­ world encounters with London’s labouring poor, this chapter draws textual and face-to-face encounters into the same analytical frame to probe further the ways in which British writers and commentators used the figure of the  ‘bushman’ to critique Britain’s national self-fashioning as a “moral” colonizing power from as early as the 1840s. Throughout, I argue that attending to the ethnographic poetics of my sources reveals the interrelationship between religious, philosophical, and scientific discourses that together underpinned the representations of the San and other Indigenous peoples. Attending to the literary and figurative nature of ethnological writing enables us to view ethnology during this period not as a unified discourse used for one ideological purpose, but as composite and multi-layered. My critical approach reveals the complex entanglement between ethnography, literature, and identity formation in the works of settler and Indigenous Anglophone writers in Britain and southern Africa as they struggled to come to terms with the impact of an increasingly global and aggressively expansionist British colonialism on their various social worlds.

CHAPTER 2

Representing the Khoisan c. 1600–1800

The truth is they would commonly violate the graves of those dead men we buried, and feed upon their carcasses; the greatest piece of barbarity within the compass of expression one would think; for in humanity men naturally abhor it; and here they are more savage than lions. —Sir Thomas Herbert, 1634 Few histories have been handed down to the world with so much falsehood and imperfection as the accounts we have hitherto had of the people about the Cape of Good Hope. —Peter Kolb, 1731 For three or four hundred years since the inhabitants of Europe inundated the other parts of the world and continually published new collections of travels and stories, I am convinced that we know no other men but Europeans alone. Moreover, it would appear […] that everybody does hardly anything under the pompous name of “the study of man” except study the men of his country. Individuals may well come and go; it seems philosophy travels nowhere. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1755

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s astute remark about the self-reflexivity of European accounts of non-European peoples appeared in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), and serves to remind his readers that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Atkin, Writing the South African San, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86226-8_2

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representing the “savage” was integral to the construction of the post-­ Enlightenment European sense of self. Rousseau’s complaint that “philosophy travels nowhere” registers a frustration with the inability of European voyagers and natural philosophers to create representational systems that adequately account for the religious, social, and political structures of non-European cultures without replicating Eurocentric assumptions about the innate superiority of Western “civilization.” When we consider that Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality perhaps did more than any other eighteenth-century text to essentialize North American and African Indigenous cultures into the trope of the “noble savage” as a means of reflecting critically upon the failures of the decadent West, we cannot help but notice the irony of his complaint. Yet although Rousseau may have been an armchair anthropologist writing in Geneva, rather than a traveller reporting back on his observations from the field, he was far from operating in a vacuum. Rousseau’s construction of the “noble savage” drew heavily on travellers’ accounts of the manners and customs of the peoples of North America and southern Africa which had, by the eighteenth century, had become popular reading among Europe’s intellectual elites. One of the most frequently cited works in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality is the German astronomer Peter Kolb’s account of the Khoekhoe peoples of the Western Cape: The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope (1731), a volume that profoundly influenced subsequent representations of southern Africa’s Khoekhoe and San peoples.1 Aiming for the empiricism of the scientific observer, Kolb’s account includes an encyclopaedic recitation of the religious, social, and political structures of a range of autonomous Khoekhoe societies, which he claims to have visited during his eight years’ residence at the Cape. Yet even Kolb’s first-hand account, like those of the European travellers whose journeys followed his, was densely allusive, referring both critically and deferentially to the seventeenth-century accounts, whose false 1  First published in German in 1719, the 1731 English translation by Guido Medley has substantial embellishments as Ann Good, Richard Elphick, Nigel Penn, and others note. However, according to Good, the details examined in this chapter do appear in the original German as it was Kolb’s representations of the Khoekhoe that were most frequently translated and recirculated in European learned journals of the period. For more on the history of the production and circulation of Kolb’s writing on the Khoekhoe, see Anne Good, ‘The Construction of an Authoritative Text: Peter Kolb’s Description of the Khoikhoi at the Cape of Good Hope in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Early Modern History 10, no. 1 (1 January 2006): 61–94.

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representations of Khoekhoe culture he claimed to be correcting. These earlier accounts, like that made by the English ambassador to Persia, Sir Thomas Herbert, who travelled to the Cape en route to India in 1628, were the product of a Renaissance European intellectual culture that was heavily informed by both Classical and biblical authorities. In these narratives, ideas about the “monstrous peoples” that Greek and Roman historians such as Herodotus and Pliny argued could be found in southern Africa are combined with the myth, one deriving from the biblical account of the aftermath of the great flood, that the Khoekhoe were the cursed sons of Ham.2 These reports blended into a discourse that depicted communities as existing on the boundary between the human and the animal. Such accounts sparked debates in European intellectual circles as to whether the Khoekhoe peoples had more in common with humanity or with primates.3 This representation of the Khoekhoe as intermediaries between humans and animals played a specific role in the development of the English nation’s self-image. Linda Merians has argued that “the example of the Cape people offered the English a chance to assemble positive ideas and images of themselves against an unequivocally negative background.”4 Merians argues that representations of cross-cultural encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans played a central role in the forging and consolidating of national identities. For English readers, it was the representation of the Khoekhoe as “humanity’s worst” that provided them with a foil against which to measure their own standards of civilization.5 While seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century representations of encounters between Europeans and autonomous Khoekhoe and San communities tended to emphasize their ferocity and bestial customs, later the figures of 2  Nigel Penn argues that, during the seventeenth century, the myth that the Khoekhoe were the cursed sons of Ham and therefore destined to a life of subjugation was produced as part of a broader justification for the enslavement of African peoples that developed out of the beginning of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. See Nigel Penn, ‘Written Culture and the Cape Khoikhoi: From Travel Writing to Kolb’s “Full Description”’, Written Culture in a Colonial Context, 1 January 2012, 171–93. 3  Linda Evi Merians, Envisioning the Worst: Representations of ‘Hottentots’ in Early-Modern England (University of Delaware Press, 2001), 20; Strother, ‘Display of the Body Hottentot’, 3; Andrew B. Smith, The Khoikhoi at the Cape of Good Hope: Seventeenth-Century Drawings in the South African Library, trans. Roy H.  Pheiffer (Cape Town: South African Library, 1993), 16. 4  Merians, 25. 5  Merians, 13–14.

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the “noble savage” and the “faithful Hottentot” replaced the “wild hottentot,” and they did so at the same historical moment that many dispossessed Khoekhoe groups became forcibly subsumed into the colonial labour economy. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when it was the San rather than the Khoekhoe who continued to resist dispossession at the hands of settlers and forced integration into the colonial economy, the figure of the fierce, bestial “wild bushman” emerged as the dominant icon in European accounts of San peoples. This was a discursive response to the concerted resistance that San communities across the Western and Northern Cape offered to settler colonialism, resistance that often involved disrupting colonial farming practices by stealing livestock and reoccupying land that settlers had illegally appropriated. In the nineteenth century, as the British took control of the Cape Colony from the Dutch, a new discourse of “humanitarian governance” presented the Khoekhoe and San peoples as the culturally degraded victims of trekboer cruelty, peoples who were in need of the “protection” of a humane British government. As imperial historians have noted, there was an inherent paradox in that this ideology of humanitarian governance underwrote the violence and dispossession that accompanied British colonial expansionism across Africa, North America, and the Pacific. As we shall see both here and throughout the chapters that follow, after the British took full control of the Cape Colony in 1806, British and settler representations of Khoekhoe and San peoples became important not only to the ways in which British and settler communities imagined themselves and their culture, but also to Britain’s self-representation as a “moral” colonizing power.

Early Representations of the Khoekhoe The earliest encounters between Europeans and the Khoekhoe communities of south-west Africa followed Portuguese navigator Bartholomeu Dias’s rounding of the Cape in 1488. The first recorded encounter between a Khoekhoe person and European was recorded by Vasco da Gama in 1497. He recorded the following: The inhabitants of this country are tawny-coloured [baço]. Their food is confined to the flesh of seals, whales, and gazelles, and the roots of herbs. They are dressed in skins, and wear sheaths over their virile members. They are armed with poles of olive wood to which a horn, browned in the fire, is

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attached. Their numerous dogs resemble those of Portugal, and bark like them.6

This neutral description comes from an age before discursive conventions for representing the Khoekhoe were firmly established in European travel writing. This encounter was recorded by one of Vasco de Gama’s men, Fernão Veloso, who disembarked at St Helena Bay on Wednesday, 8 November 1497, to investigate the possibilities of trading European goods for Khoekhoe cattle. Although the Portuguese were initially welcomed by the Khoekhoe, an unrecorded altercation occurred and the Khoekhoe chased Veloso and his fellow Portuguese travellers back to their boat, wounding several others in the process. Such was the strength of Khoekhoe resistance to the Portuguese throughout the sixteenth century that the Portuguese abandoned the idea of settling in Khoekhoe areas, instead making their colonies in modern-day Angola and Mozambique.7 Between the arrival of the first Portuguese navigators and the beginning of the formal settlement by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1652, Dutch and English ships passing through southern Africa en route to the East Indies traded extensively with the Khoekhoe. The best-­ known Khoekhoe person to appear in European records prior to 1652 was a Gorinhaikona chief named Autshumato, later known as “Herry” or “Harry the strandloper” (from the Dutch for “beach ranger”). Autshumato acted as an interpreter and trade-broker between Europeans and the Khoekhoe, amassing considerable wealth in the process. Such was Autshumato’s importance to Europeans that in 1631 or 1632 he was taken to Java on a British ship and taught English and Dutch en route. Upon his return to the Cape, he and twenty followers were settled on Robben Island, where he acted as a postman and liaison for European ships passing through the area.8 Moving back to the mainland eight years later, Autshumato worked to create trade between the Gorinhaikonas and the Dutch before the expansionist policies of Van Riebeeck resulted in Autshumato’s imprisonment on Robben Island in 1658 and pushed the Gorinhaikonas into war with the Dutch in 1659. With Indigenous people still in control of the land and trade networks, European travellers who visited the Cape did not stay long. This situation meant that when they  Da Gama cited in Barnard, Anthropology and the Bushman, 11.  Barnard, 11. 8  Barnard, 12. 6 7

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came to write about the Khoekhoe, they often relied more on the recycling and replication of earlier anecdotes rather than upon first-hand observations resulting from substantive cross-cultural contact.9 Renaissance scholarship offered two distinct, but overlapping, discursive systems for understanding what was imagined to be the cultural difference between southern Africans and Europeans. The first, derived from the fantastical accounts of the Greek and Roman historians, depicted the peoples of southern Africa as “monsters, the inverse of the beings found in the world of Classical northern Europe.”10 According to Classical historiography, the further one travels from the centre of civilization in the Mediterranean, the greater the departure from European cultural and anatomical norms one could expect to encounter among Indigenous peoples. The perceived absence of the signifiers of European civility was used to position cultures upon a developmental scale. In the seventeenth century, this view found its philosophical expression in the idea of the “Great Chain of Being,” which arranged all of God’s creations hierarchically from the lowest animal to the angels. As Zoe Strother has pointed out, the Khoekhoe were persistently positioned in seventeenth-century accounts as “an intermediary between the human and the animal realms.”11 Herbert draws on Pliny when he portrays the Khoekhoe on the boundary between the human and the animal: “their habitations are usually in caves, so as these are proper Troglodytes.”12 In this comment, we see the development of a racial rhetoric that emphasized their lack of European aesthetic and 9  Carli Coetzee, ‘In the Archive: Records of the Dutch Settlement and the Contemporary Novel’, in The Cambridge History of South African Literature, ed. David Attwell and Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 138–57. 10  Malvern van Wyk Smith, ‘Shades of Adamastor: The Legacy of The Lusiads’, in The Cambridge History of South African Literature, ed. David Attwell and Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 118, 8; Penn, ‘Written Culture and the Cape Khoikhoi’, 169. 11  Strother, ‘Display of the Body Hottentot’, 3. 12  Thomas Herbert, Some Years Travels into Divers Parts of Africa, and Asia the Great. Describing More Particularly the Empires of Persia and Industan … As Also, Many … Kingdoms in the Oriental India … (London : R. Everingham for R. Scot, etc., 1677), 17. The “troglodyte” was a category from Pliny’s description of the “monstrous peoples” who were supposed to inhabit Southern Africa. The “troglodyte” was an ugly, brutal, and technologically backward type that lived in caves and occupied an intermediary position between the human and the animal. For more on the recirculation of Pliny’s representations of the peoples of Southern Africa in Renaissance Europe, see Merians, Envisioning the Worst, 20; Smith, The Khoikhoi at the Cape of Good Hope, 16.

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c­ ultural norms, such as fixed dwellings.13 Herbert further states that the Khoekhoe “wear raw guts of beasts, which serve as well for food.”14 The alleged use of the entrails of animals as clothes is a visual image that reinforces the association of the Khoekhoe with the animal rather than the human, as well as indicating a perceived lack of two key signifiers of European “civilization”: clothing and the ability to cook food.15 However, the most important and persistent lack registered in European accounts of Khoisan culture from the seventeenth right through to the nineteenth century related to European interpretations of Khoisan languages. Khoisan languages have a phonological system that is characterized by clicks that are not found in European ones.16 The failure of Europeans to recognize these implosive consonants or “clicks” as speech meant that “the Khoekhoe’s acquisition of language was in doubt.”17 This is evident in Herbert’s comment that “their language is rather apishly than articulately founded,” a remark that locates the Khoekhoe discursively on the threshold “twixt human and beast.”18 A third discourse at work in Herbert’s account derives from the biblical story of Noah and the flood. According to the book of Genesis, the sons of Noah repopulated the earth after the flood. In the seventeenth century, there was an enduring myth that Ham, the cursed son of Noah, travelled to Africa. Hence, as Herbert argues, “the natives” are “propagated from Cham [… and] seem to inherit his malediction.”19 Herbert uses this biblical myth to justify his racist denigration of Khoekhoe culture. At one point he states that they used their toes so they would have “the greater liberty to steal […] which they did while looking us in the face, the better to

 Coetzee, ‘In the Archive’, 144.  Herbert, Some Years Travels into Divers Parts of Africa, and Asia the Great. Describing More Particularly the Empires of Persia and Industan … As Also, Many … Kingdoms in the Oriental India…, 17. 15  Zoé S Strother, ‘Display of the Body Hottentot’, in Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business, ed. Bernth Lindfors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 8. 16  Rachael Gilmour, Grammars of Colonialism: Representing Languages in Colonial South Africa (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2006), 16, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286856. 17  Strother, 3. 18  Herbert, Some Years Travels into Divers Parts of Africa, and Asia the Great. Describing More Particularly the Empires of Persia and Industan … As Also, Many … Kingdoms in the Oriental India…, 17. 19  Herbert, 16. 13 14

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deceive.”20 The curse of Ham, and the perceived lack of morality more generally amongst Khoekhoe and San peoples, was another belief that was to persist through the centuries, especially in missionary accounts of southern Africa’s Indigenous peoples. It was a racial myth that proved particularly useful to missionaries, who used it to justify cultural genocide through conversion and forced acculturation. Most shocking of all to European readers were the accusations of cannibalism levelled by early travellers at the Khoekhoe. Herbert’s accusation that they “violate the graves” of the European dead and eat their bodies depicts the Khoekhoe as amoral beings who are willing to violate the sanctity of the grave in pursuit of their enemies.21 A reputation for unusual savagery that is evidenced in this description derives, as Andrew Smith has argued, from the success of early Khoekhoe resistance to European incursions into their territories, and continued to endure as long as Khoekhoe society was able to exist autonomously.22 After the Khoekhoe had been forcibly absorbed into the colonial economy, the trope of the “wild hottentot” was mapped onto autonomous San “bushman” communities of the arid interior, communities who settlers and travellers encountered from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, and who continued to resist assimilation into the expanding Cape Colony during the first three decades of British rule in the early nineteenth century. After the Dutch East India Company formally established a settlement at Table Bay in 1652, there followed a protracted struggle between the Dutch settlers and the Khoekhoe of the Western Cape for control over Khoekhoe lands in and around Table Bay. When the VOC built a fort and refreshment station, the Khoekhoe realized that the Dutch were not, as they had first thought, “migratory beings” but that they intended to stay.23 Initially, it was in the VOC’s economic interest to maintain good relations with the Khoekhoe as they were reliant upon the trade in Khoekhoe cattle to provide necessary food supplies.24 However, the first Dutch governor, Jan van Riebeeck, frustrated by the increasing unwillingness of the  Herbert, 16.  Herbert, 17. 22  Andrew B. Smith, The Khoikhoi at the Cape of Good Hope: Seventeenth-Century Drawings in the South African Library, trans. Roy H.  Pheiffer (Cape Town: South African Library, 1993), 11. 23  Carli Coetzee, ‘Visions of Disorder and Profit: The Khoikhoi and the First Years of the Dutch East India Company at the Cape’, Social Dynamics 20, no. 2 (1 June 1994): 43. 24  Coetzee, 38. 20 21

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Khoekhoe to trade on the settlers’ terms, began to press the central VOC administration in the Netherlands for permission to take more aggressive measures against them. Central to van Riebeeck’s argument in his report to the Company officers was his representation of the Khoekhoe as irredeemable “wild savages.” According to Carli Coetzee, van Riebeeck’s account of the Cape and its inhabitants “shows signs of textual influence: Company policies and desires, as well as travel accounts commenting on the Khoekhoe as barbarous and cannibalistic.”25 Coetzee goes on to argue that these representations of the Khoekhoe as “wild” people were repurposed by van Riebeeck to justify expansionist moves into Khoekhoe territory, moves that were presented as “the only possible mechanism for dealing” with a land “inhabited only by lazy ‘wilden’ [wild men] who did not want to work it, nor create permanent structures on it.”26 By dehumanizing the Khoekhoe, van Riebeeck created a rhetorical justification for the aggressive expansion into Khoekhoe land that he was enacting in defiance of official VOC policy. February 1657 was a landmark moment in Khoekhoe-settler relations. It was the first time that the VOC permitted Dutch citizens to illegally occupy Khoekhoe land outside the bounds of the Company’s established fort. The justification for this foundational act of dispossession was the need to grow food supplies for the station. As Dutch free burghers enclosed lands used as seasonal pasturage by Khoekhoe herders, these autonomous Khoekhoe groups were systematically stripped of both their lands and their cattle.27 Initially, the colonists encountered strong Khoekhoe resistance to these illegal acts of dispossession, with the First Dutch-Khoekhoe War of 1659 marking what many Khoisan activists today regard as the first insistence of Indigenous defiance of an “apartheid border” erected by van Riebeeck in order to keep Khoekhoe groups off land that he and other Dutch settlers had enclosed for his personal use.28  Coetzee, 39.  Coetzee, 45. 27  Linda Evi Merians, Envisioning the Worst: Representations of ‘Hottentots’ in Early-Modern England (University of Delaware Press, 2001), 18. 28  Dr William R.  J. Langeveldt, Khoisan delegate to the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, quoted by Rafael Verbuyst, ‘Claiming Cape Town: Towards a Symbolic Interpretation of Khoisan Activism and Land Claims’, Anthropology Southern Africa 39, no. 2 (31 May 2016): 19. 25 26

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Khoekhoe resistance in 1659–1660, under the leader known as Doman, maintained pressure on the Dutch to grant the Khoekhoe access to g ­ razing lands that had been illegally enclosed. The first Dutch-Khoekhoe treaty was concluded in 1660, with a peace agreed between the Dutch and the Goarchoqua and Goringhaiqua Khoekhoe. However, a series of important military victories in 1663–1667, combined with the steady rise of the European population of the colony in the 1670s, effectively put an end to such resistance.29 As Richard Elphick has argued, by 1720 an independent Khoekhoe society in the Western Cape had ceased to exist.30 At this time, a combination of the expansion of illegal settler land grabs and the 1713 smallpox epidemic, in which only one in ten of the Western Cape Khoekhoe population survived, meant that the vast majority of the remaining Western Cape Khoekhoe, unable to subsist independently, were forcibly absorbed into the colonial labour economy.31 The change in material relations with the Khoekhoe influenced European representations of them, with negative appraisals of Khoekhoe life and culture giving way to more sympathetic representations. During the eighteenth century, as David Johnson notes, there was an “asymmetry between the improving aesthetic representations of the “Hottentots” […] and their material dispossession and impoverishment.”32 As we shall see from a detailed discussion of these representations, the Western Cape Khoekhoe had, by the mid-eighteenth century, been dispossessed of all their lands, losing their political autonomy and social cohesion. During this period, there was a directly inverse relationship between, on the one hand, the improving aesthetic representations of the figure of the “hottentot,” and, on the other hand, the worsening material conditions for Western Cape Khoekhoe communities.

29  Zoé S.  Strother, ‘Display of the Body Hottentot’, in Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business, ed. Bernth Lindfors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 12. 30  Richard Elphick, Khoikhoi and the Founding of White South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985), 235. 31  David Johnson, ‘Representing the Cape “Hottentots,” from the French Enlightenment to Post-Apartheid South Africa’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 4 (2007): 533. 32  Johnson, 545.

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Peter Kolb, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the Making of the “Noble Savage” In the eighteenth century, travellers with scientific backgrounds provided some of the most influential accounts of the peoples of the Cape of Good Hope. Drawing upon both Enlightenment philosophy and natural history, these accounts combined philosophical enquiry into the nature of man with the empirical methodology of natural history.33 The German astronomer Peter Kolb wrote the most influential account of the peoples of southern Africa in the mid-eighteenth century in The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope (1731). Kolb’s work was the first European text to provide detailed ethnographic accounts of Khoekhoe culture and social practices, based on empirical observations made while travelling beyond the colonial border, and the first volume that was translated into English that provided of evidence a more sympathetic representation of Khoekhoe communities and their cultural and social practices. Kolb’s Present State is worth examining in some detail for two reasons. First, it was “generally acknowledged to be the most complete, and therefore the most authoritative account of the Cape of Good Hope.”34 Kolb’s representations of the Khoekhoe had an afterlife that stretched through the nineteenth century. Importantly, in the British context, Kolb’s deployment of representations of the Khoekhoe in the service of a critique of a colonial administration was a rhetorical move that British humanitarian writers also made in the nineteenth century. Like the British humanitarians, who mostly hailed from nonconformist or Evangelical backgrounds, Kolb’s critique of the impact of Dutch colonization on Indigenous cultures was grounded in a morality rooted in Protestantism. Kolb’s writings were themselves also influenced by contemporary representations of North American Indigenous peoples that appeared in popular European travellers’ tales. As Ann Good has argued: “his narrative was part of the emerging trope of the noble savage, influenced directly by Baron de Lahontan’s narrative of travels in Canada.”35 33  Ian Glenn, ‘Eighteenth-Century Natural History, Travel Writing and South African Literary Historiography’, in The Cambridge History of South African Literature, ed. David Attwell and Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 159. 34  Anne Good, ‘The Construction of an Authoritative Text: Peter Kolb’s Description of the Khoikhoi at the Cape of Good Hope in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Early Modern History 10, no. 1 (1 January 2006): 62. 35  Good, 85.

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What gave Kolb’s account such authority was its detailed ethnography of Khoekhoe culture and society. Rather than defining the people purely by their lack of the European signifiers of culture and civilization, Kolb gives a detailed account of Khoekhoe religion, customs, political structures, languages, and lifeways. In Kolb’s account we see the establishment of an ethnographic discourse that, as Merians has argued, “stresses “sameness” but also distance.”36 He demonstrates that Khoekhoe cultures have political, religious, and social structures that are recognizable to Europeans and uses comparisons between Khoekhoe religious practice and those of European Jews to position both cultures in a more primitive developmental phase in comparison to Christianity. One of the ways in which he denies Khoekhoe society coevalness with Christian Europe is through his representation of Khoekhoe religious practices. He argues that “in their customs and institutions” they resemble “the Jews.”37 Evidence for this resemblance included the idea the Khoekhoe worship the moon, refrain from eating pig flesh, and practice a form of circumcision.38 In arguing that Khoekhoe religious practices resemble those of the Jews, Kolb situates his comparative ethnology in relation to eighteenth-century re-­ evaluations of the religious practice of the ancient Jews. As David Chidester has noted, comparative religionists in the eighteenth century came to believe “that the original religion of the Jews was based on the worship of a national or tribal god. Like any tribal religion, they imagined, the religion of ancient Israel could be barbaric.”39 This analogy between the “barbaric” practices of ancient Judaism and the religious practices of Indigenous societies enabled Kolb to situate both the Khoekhoe and Jewish peoples in

36  Linda Evi Merians, Envisioning the Worst: Representations of ‘Hottentots’ in Early-Modern England (University of Delaware Press, 2001), 155. 37  Peter Kolb, The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope: Or, A Particular Account of the Several Nations of the Hottentots: Their Religion, Government, Laws, Customs, Ceremonies, and Opinions; Their Art of War, Professions, Language, Genius, &c. Together with a Short Account of the Dutch Settlement at the Cape (W. Innys, 1731), vol. 1, 30. 38  Kolb refers to the practice of removing the left testicle from the child at birth, a myth that also circulated in the seventeenth century. Various writers gave different explanations for this: that Khoekhoe women thought it would increase speed and agility or that it would stop them from giving birth to daughters. For more on this, see amongst others: Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science, 2nd edition (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 136. 39  David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (University Press of Virginia, 1996), 169.

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a more “primitive” socio-cultural developmental phase than that of European Christianity. Khoekhoe resistance to Christian conversion also enabled Kolb to align their religious practices with those of Jewish people.40 Kolb gives an example, of an unnamed Khoekhoe boy who was raised by Simon van der Stel, the second Dutch Governor of the Cape. The boy successfully learned several European languages before being sent to work alongside the VOC Commissary General in the East Indies. When he returned to the Cape, Kolb claims the boy renounced his newly acquired Christian religion, his clothing, and his position in the Colony, choosing instead to live in the Khoekhoe community he was born into. Kolb, having visited the man in question in an effort to persuade him to re-adopt Christianity and return to the Colony, concludes that “they [the Khoekhoe] seem born with a moral antipathy to every religion but their own.”41 Here, although Kolb’s Eurocentric perspective renders acculturation a desirable end, he does at least present the Khoekhoe as having a distinct cultural identity that individuals might choose to embrace in preference to the material advantages offered by assimilation into Dutch culture. We might also read the boy’s rejection of the spiritual and material trappings of European culture as an explicit rejection of the Dutch settlers’ presumed right to seize control of land and natural resources that multiple Khoekhoe communities had had customary use of for centuries prior to the arrival of Europeans. Ultimately, Kolb erases the individual to suit his polemical purpose, which becomes clear in his subsequent commentary on the anecdote. But those loose immoral lives of multitudes of Europeans at the Cape, I apprehend, do not a little contribute to rendering the hottentots such haters of instruction and admonition in matters of religion. The contradiction between profession and practice had been fatal to most designs to propagate the faith. The hottentots see when principles and practices are dissimilar as well as other people.42

 Chidester, 54.  Peter Kolb, The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope: Or, A Particular Account of the Several Nations of the Hottentots: Their Religion, Government, Laws, Customs, Ceremonies, and Opinions; Their Art of War, Professions, Language, Genius, &c. Together with a Short Account of the Dutch Settlement at the Cape (W. Innys, 1731), 100–109. 42  Kolb, 109. 40 41

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Here, the failure of missionaries and VOC officials to convert the Khoekhoe does not undermine the superiority of European, Christian culture, but reflects upon the failings of the VOC officers based at the Cape. To this end, Kolb’s account is peppered with anecdotes illustrative of the corruption and moral degeneracy of the VOC administration, suggesting that the Khoekhoe learn their antipathy to Christianity by observing the immoral practices of the VOC officials. Another example of Kolb’s exploitation of ethnographic detail to make a political point is his account of the life of Claas, a Khoekhoe trader whom Governor van der Stel employed as an intermediary to organize trade between the VOC and the Khoekhoe. In Kolb’s account, Claas is rendered the archetypal “noble savage” who “notwithstanding the ignorance in which he was born […] was a man of excellent morals, and who had perhaps as much charity and benevolence for mankind as the best of us all.”43 Claas’s exemplary behaviour is contrasted with that of the VOC traders who, jealous of his success, falsely accuse him of theft, resulting in his imprisonment. After the intercession of a Dutch captain who knew of his innocence, Claas is returned to his homestead, only to be murdered by a Khoekhoe headman who resented his collaboration with the Dutch colonists. Yet rather than providing a commentary on the complexity of the economic relations between the Dutch and the Khoekhoe, Kolb’s account is framed in explicitly moral terms. Like the story of Van der Stel’s boy, Claas’s life serves as a tool of critique, stressing further the moral degeneracy of certain employees of the VOC. In these specific examples, we see how European accounts of cross-cultural encounters were strategically deployed to reflect upon both the moral and political failings of a colonial administration. As well as his detailed ethnography of the Khoekhoe, Kolb’s account also marks the beginnings of a more critical strain of writing about the peoples of the Cape Colony, one which used accounts of injustices perpetrated by Europeans towards Indigenous peoples as a means of highlighting the demoralizing effect of VOC mismanagement. In this regard, Kolb anticipates the use of ethnographic accounts of the exploitation of Khoekhoe and San peoples by settlers to critique colonial governance that was to characterize British humanitarian writings of the early nineteenth century. Drawing on Kolb’s account, Rousseau’s ethnographic representations of Khoekhoe and North American Indigenous peoples are deployed to  Kolb, 3.

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critique European modernity. However, whereas Kolb’s criticisms were aimed at what he perceived as the moral corruption of VOC officials, Rousseau’s writings on the “noble savage” were the product of anxieties about the social and cultural changes that Europe underwent during the eighteenth century. The boom in the production and consumption of travel writing representing the peoples of non-European cultures led many European philosophers and historians, dissatisfied with the inequalities and social upheavals resulting from industrialization and the rise of modern political economy, to turn towards Indigenous cultures whose societies remained apparently untouched by modernity—a narrative that deliberately excludes the extensive instances of Indigenous dispossession and genocide that arose from the expansionist actions of European settlers in Africa and the Americas. The figure of the “noble savage” emerged from a sense that it was civilized man who had declined from his former benevolence, strength, and natural hardiness as well as from a deeply problematic view of Indigenous cultures as inherently closer to nature.44 Unlike Kolb, however, Rousseau was not a traveller. Uninterested in the material conditions of settler expansionism and Indigenous dispossession and genocide that characterized European/Indigenous relations in North America and Africa, Rousseau’s Indigenous “noble savage” is less culturally specific and more abstracted than that we find in Kolb. This lack of cultural specificity has much to do with Rousseau’s insistence on defining fundamental, fixed differences between “savage” and “civilized” man. In Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, the body of Rousseau’s essentialized “savage” reflects the degenerative effect of European society. For example, the enervated state of the bodies of those who live in societies based on “industry” is counterpointed with the perfection of the “savage man’s body” which is “the only instrument he knows.”45 Rousseau quotes extensively from Kolb’s account of the superior marksmanship of the Khoekhoe to the Dutch,46 as well as Kolb’s remarks on their ability to see as far “with the naked eye” as “the Dutch can with telescopes.”47  Fiona J.  Stafford, The Last of the Race: The Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin (Clarendon Press, 1994), 235. 45  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Basic Political Writings: Discourse on the Sciences & the Arts, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Discourse on Political Economy, On the Social … Contract, The State of War, ed. David Wootton, trans. Donald A.  Cress, 2nd edition (Indianapolis, IN; Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co, Inc, 2012), 40. 46  Rousseau, 87–88. 47  Rousseau, 44. 44

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Rousseau’s emphasis on the superior health of Indigenous people also owes much to Kolb’s descriptions of the Khoekhoe. According to Rousseau, Indigenous people do not need modern medicine because “they know almost no illnesses but wounds and old age.”48 Interestingly, for Rousseau, the destruction of the Indigenous body is viewed as a metonym for the degenerative effect of contact with European civilization on Indigenous societies. This proposition is reflected in Rousseau’s assertion that the only Indigenous peoples who become ill are those who have been “ruined with our strong liquors.”49 Rousseau also reframes Kolb’s account of the life of van der Stel’s Khoekhoe boy to make an essentialist argument about the metal faculties of Indigenous people. Living outside society and without the capacity for reason or for the establishment of social bonds, Rousseau’s man in the “state of nature” is “only a child” dominated by instinct rather than reason.50 The Indigene as a child-like figure persisted into the nineteenth century, becoming a convenient racial myth that justified the administrative control of Indigenous bodies and lands by the British colonial state. Although ostensibly more positive than contemporary ethnographic accounts that stressed the degeneracy of non-European races, the trope of the “noble savage” operated within the same broad Enlightenment discourse of progress. During the mid-eighteenth century, the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment profoundly impacted the development of racial theory. Influenced by Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois (1748), which argued that societies could be analysed by examining the functional connections between different factors such as climate, religion, laws, customs, and manners, David Hume’s essay “On National Characters” (1748) first made the interrelationship between economic, political, social, and cultural attributes “the cornerstone of the historical process.”51 Less than ten years later, Adam Smith proposed a structure in which to situate comparative socio-cultural development in his Glasgow lectures in the 1750s and 1760s. Smith’s stadial theory provided a historiographical account of social development in which societies progressed through four successive  Rousseau, 42.  Rousseau, 42. 50  Rousseau, 57. 51  Silvia Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress, trans. Jeremy Carden, Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History (Palgrave, 2013), 45. 48 49

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stages: hunting, herding, agriculture, and commerce.52 Stadial theory enabled the peoples of the Americas and Africa to be made legible to Europeans by being “positioned on the same temporal plain” as Ancient near Eastern and European peoples, cementing the association between non-European societies and “primitivism.”53 Drawing on stadial theory, Rousseau fixes “savage” societies such as the Khoekhoe asynchronously in relation to European society. This temporal distancing is further reinforced by Rousseau’s reproduction of the myth that dates back to Early Modern accounts of Cape society, namely that the Khoekhoe lack a language system.54 Hence, we can see that even Rousseau’s romanticized identification of the Khoekhoe with the figure of the “noble savage” was still to a large degree informed by older representational systems that sought to dehumanize the Khoekhoe, creating a racial myth that justified settler violence towards Khoekhoe communities who resisted settler expansionism and the accompanying pressure to assimilate into European colonial society.

The Modern Wild Man: Peter Kolb’s Descriptions of the San In Kolb’s work, too, traces of this older representational system remain. Although his representation of the Khoekhoe is more sympathetic, the figure of the savage “wild man” that earlier travellers used to represent the Khoekhoe was mapped onto the figure of the “bushman.” At the time when Kolb was writing, dispossessed Khoekhoe pastoralists were beginning to be forcibly integrated into the colonial economy and so could be depicted as “noble savages” and faithful servants55; however, this was far

 Sebastiani, 6.  Sebastiani, 11. 54  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Basic Political Writings: Discourse on the Sciences & the Arts, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Discourse on Political Economy, On the Social … Contract, The State of War, ed. David Wootton, trans. Donald A.  Cress, 2nd edition (Indianapolis, IN; Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co, Inc, 2012), 57. 55  This later trope is embodied in Kolb’s account in the figure of Claas, the model of a faithful servant who is used by Kolb as a means of contrasting the virtues of the Khoekhoe with the moral degradation of the Dutch colonists. See Kolb, The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope, vol. 1, 39–46. 52 53

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from the case for the peoples described as “bushmen.”56 As trekboers encroached into Indigenous lands in the southern African interior, they began to encounter the hunter-gatherer San societies. As South African historian Mohamad Adhikari explains: “The dynamic behind the encounter with the San tended to be markedly different to that with the Khoekhoe. Whereas traditional Khoekhoe society crumbled in the face of colonial conflict, San social formations proved to be much more resilient.”57 Between 1710 and 1739, the colonial frontier moved rapidly both north and east. As the colonists drove their cattle over the Cederberg Mountains in the northern and eastern parts of the Western Cape and entered San territory, competition over limited food and water resources meant that they met with fierce resistance from the San, whose “dispersal in small groups across extensive, rugged terrain made it considerably more difficult for the sparsely spread trekboer population to subjugate” than the Khoekhoe pastoralists in the southwest Cape, whose territories were the first to be colonized by free burgher settlers.58 To a certain extent, the dynamics of these eighteenth-century encounters with the San were similar to the earliest encounters recorded between Portuguese and Khoekhoe peoples. Although the Portuguese navigators of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries rounded the Cape and bartered with autonomous Khoekhoe groups for food and water, they were reluctant to stay. As historian Nigel Penn explains, while the Portuguese “immortalised and mythologised Table Mountain and the Cape of Storms through the epic poetry of Camōes, they tended to avoid Table Bay as anchorage. Both the weather and the people were judged to be too dangerous.”59 The most famous case of successful Khoekhoe resistance during this period was during the visit of Francisco de Almeida, Viceroy of Portuguese India, to Table Bay in 1510. After de Almeida and his crew kidnapped a group of Khoekhoe children in an attempt to force the Khoekhoe to bring cattle to barter, they were met with a counter-attack which resulted in the death of fifty Europeans, including de Almeida

56  As noted in the introduction, those defined as “bushmen” included cattle-less Khoekhoe as well as San. 57  Mohamed Adhikari, The Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples (UCT Press, 2010), 31. 58  Adhikari, 32. 59  Nigel Penn, ‘Written Culture and the Cape Khoikhoi: From Travel Writing to Kolb’s “Full Description”’, Written Culture in a Colonial Context, 1 January 2012, 168.

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himself.60 Celebrated today among Khoisan revivalist communities in the Western Cape as the “first ever anti-colonial battle,” the successful Battle of Gorinhiqua is now remembered as it symbolically represents their anti-­ colonial spirit.61 For European commentators, on the other hand, the historic memory of the Khoekhoe’s victory was responsible for the persistent emphasis in European accounts during the early modern period on the alleged “savagery” of the Khoekhoe. When the trekboers moved north-east into San territory they encountered a period of “intense San resistance” to colonial expansion into their unceded territories that was to last nearly one hundred years.62 It is therefore not surprising to find many of the racist tropes used in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts of the Khoekhoe mapped onto the San. In Kolb’s account, we see one of the earliest European accounts of the Bushies or “bushmen”: These are troops of abandon’d wretches, who finding the laws and customs of their country to be too great restraints upon their inclinations, repair to the mountains; and there securing themselves in almost inaccessible fastnesses, sally out from time to time into the fields to steal cattle for their sustenance. […] They know there is no mercy for ’em if they are taken. They therefore engage with all imaginable fury and desperation, and rarely shrink or abate their rage, till they have routed the enemy, or all are slain.63

In this vitriolic piece of racist mythmaking, the figure of the “bushman” is positioned beyond the bounds of civilization both literally and figuratively. The San communities that Kolb describes, who were responsible for stock 60  Andrew B. Smith, The Khoikhoi at the Cape of Good Hope: Seventeenth-Century Drawings in the South African Library, trans. Roy H.  Pheiffer (Cape Town: South African Library, 1993), 11. 61  Dr William R.  J. Langeveldt, Khoisan delegate to the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, quoted in Rafael Verbuyst, ‘Claiming Cape Town: Towards a Symbolic Interpretation of Khoisan Activism and Land Claims’, Anthropology Southern Africa 39, no. 2 (31 May 2016): 90. 62  Nigel Penn, ‘“Civilising” the San: The First Mission to the Cape San, 1791–1806’, in Claim to the Country: The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek, ed. Pippa Skotnes (Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jacana Media, 2007), 91. 63  Peter Kolb, The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope: Or, A Particular Account of the Several Nations of the Hottentots: Their Religion, Government, Laws, Customs, Ceremonies, and Opinions; Their Art of War, Professions, Language, Genius, &c. Together with a Short Account of the Dutch Settlement at the Cape (W. Innys, 1731), 89–90.

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thefts from illegal trekboer farms and so incurred the wrath of the settlers, lived in the mountains rather than as labourers on settler farms or in fixed settlements as other independent African groups did. As Adhikari points out, the term “bushman” referred to any peripatetic group of dispossessed Indigenous southern African peoples: Often colonists did not, or were not able, to distinguish between the San on the one hand, and the Khoekhoe who had been stripped of their stock on the other. […] Sometimes dispossessed Khoekhoe joined hunter-gatherer communities or resisted colonial encroachment in alliance with them.64

Hence, the alleged savagery of the San “wild bushman” was a useful trope that European writers circulated to delegitimize the efforts by Khoekhoe and San communities to resist dispossession. Khoekhoe and San peoples frequently collaborated to actively disrupt settler efforts to farm livestock on unceded Indigenous territories by stealing livestock, often deliberately killing, and maiming the animals. Rather than recognizing these acts as conscious and deliberate resistance to illegal settler land-grabs, European commentators preferred to view these “thefts” as evidence of a disrespect of all law. It is particularly notable that even where commentators such as Kolb make a concerted effort to understand Indigenous customs and lifeways, there is never any effort to understand why Khoisan communities might resist either settler appropriations of their lands or efforts by missionaries and government officials such as Simon van der Stel to forcibly acculturate them into European society. The further development of the figure of the “wild bushman” in colonial writings during the eighteenth century was informed by the discursive shift in the ways in which Europeans understood and analysed nature.65 The rise of natural history—a rise that occurred through what Mary Louise Pratt terms a “global knowledge system,” one in which the flora and fauna of the world were gathered, classified, and integrated into a taxonomical structure—had a profound effect on the ways in which 64  Mohamed Adhikari, The Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples (UCT Press, 2010), 27. 65  Leonard Guelke and Jeanne Kay Guelke, ‘Imperial Eyes on South Africa: Reassessing Travel Narratives’, Journal of Historical Geography 30, no. 1 (1 January 2004): 18, https:// doi.org/10.1016/S0305-7488(03)00029-X; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London; New York: Routledge, 1992); Michel Foucault, The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970).

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Indigenous peoples were represented in travel writing.66 Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus’s Systemae Naturae (1758) provided a classificatory structure for plants and animals that was produced from the collection and comparative analysis of specimens from across the world. In the tenth edition of Systemae Naturae, Linnaeus first integrated human beings into his system, producing “a hierarchy of human types on the basis of rationality and civility.”67 Although Linnaeus’s system was based on the collection of empirical data, Peter Kitson has argued that it was “essentially an adaptation of the Great Chain of Being” demonstrating “gradation in nature.”68 As a result, there was “no essential difference between humans and primates.”69 Hence, alongside his six varieties of the species Homos, Linnaeus maintained (after Pliny) the category of “nocturnal Troglodytes” of “wild men.”70 As we shall see, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts of South African Indigenous peoples, Europeans frequently portrayed autonomous San communities as “wild bushmen” who continued to be “ambiguously located on the boundaries of culture and nature, human and animal.”71 French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon was another eighteenth-century naturalist who profoundly influenced the development of human typologies. His Histoire Naturelle (1749–1804) shared with Linnaeus’s Systemae Naturae the classification of human races into six types, and the privileging of European aesthetic and socio-cultural norms by maintaining that all non-European races degenerated from one original European type.72 Buffon’s premise was that “as humans moved further from their geographic places of origin in Europe, they degenerated and were most degenerate in the New World and Africa.”73 Thus, for Buffon, the driver of racial degeneration was environmental and climatic difference. As with the Linnaean system, this change was gradated and  Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London  ; New York: Routledge, 1992), 27–29. 67  Dirk Klopper, ‘Boer, Bushman, and Baboon: Human and Animal in Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century South African Writings’, Safundi 11, no. 1–2 (January 2010): 3. 68  P. Kitson, Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2007), 17. 69  Klopper, ‘Boer, Bushman, and Baboon’, 3. 70  Kitson, Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, 17. 71  Klopper, ‘Boer, Bushman, and Baboon’, 5. 72  Kitson, Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, 22. 73  Kitson, 22. 66

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potentially subject to a forward or a backward motion along the scale of progress, according to changes in environment. Buffon’s system further reinforced the correlation between environment, physical form, and socio-­ cultural development made by Enlightenment philosophers, as well as maintaining the idea that races can both progress and degenerate along a scale of progress. Like Linnaeus, Buffon also blurred the distinction between human and animal, arguing that “the orang-utan might be the most degenerate of men, one stop beyond the ‘Hottentot’, who [of all the Africans] received the brunt of Buffon’s scorn.”74 Perhaps the most influential ethnologist of the late eighteenth century was German naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. He believed in the importance of comparative anatomy and comparative physiology in enabling the ethnologist to make clear distinctions between different racial variations. Although, like Buffon, Blumenbach maintained the importance of climatic and environmental factors in the formation of racial types, his main innovation was to divide humanity into five distinct physical types: the Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, Malayan, and Caucasian.75 Crucially, even while Blumenbach’s racial distinctions contained within them notions of hierarchy, “transition from one to another [was] a gradual and almost imperceptible sequence.”76 In Blumenbach’s work, we see the coexistence of a comparative anatomical approach, one that seeks to categorize races according to innate physical differences, alongside Buffon’s ideas about the importance of climatic and environmental factors in enabling individuals to transition from one racial type to another. This was an approach to race theory that was to characterize the ethnological theories of influential British ethnologists of the nineteenth century, such as James Cowles Prichard and Robert Knox.

Anders Sparrman and the Development of Humanitarian Racial Discourse In Anders Sparrman, who travelled to the Cape in the mid-eighteenth century, we have a highly influential writer who combined the scientific insights of post-Linnaean natural historians with empirical evidence gained from direct encounters with the peoples of the Cape. Sparrman, a student  Kitson, 22.  Kitson, 30. 76  Kitson, 30. 74 75

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of Linnaeus, was sponsored by the Royal Swedish East-India Company to search for new plant and animal species that could be exploited for commercial potential.77 Like other Europeans before him, Sparrman relied on a combination of anecdote, hearsay, and empirical observation to compile his ethnographic descriptions of the Khoekhoe and the San. As with all European travellers, Sparrman’s writing is intertextual and highly allusive, drawing upon the works of previous writers as well as first-hand information. This point is crucial if we are to begin to understand why new representational systems for depicting Indigenous peoples that were developed as a result of what Pratt has termed the “Linnaean watershed” continued to operate alongside older representational systems deriving from Classical sources, the Bible, and Enlightenment philosophy.78 Coinciding with this shift in the discursive construction of non-­ Europeans were fundamental changes in the relations between Indigenous peoples and Europeans in the Cape Colony. During the course of the eighteenth century, illegal European settlement expanded dramatically, decimating Khoekhoe and San populations meaning that, as Guelke and Guelke argue, “the colony that Sparrman came to observe was a very different place from the one Kolb described.”79,80 At the time when Kolb was writing, the process of dispossession that was to destroy autonomous Khoekhoe society in the Western Cape was under way, but Kolb was still able to record in detail the religious, cultural, and political practices of autonomous Khoekhoe groups who lived outside the boundaries of the colony.81 Meanwhile, settlers were encountering strong resistance from San groups. By the time Sparrman reached the Cape in the 1770s, the destruction of autonomous Khoekhoe society was complete and autonomous San populations were beginning to be destroyed by a system of state-sanctioned genocide known as the commando system. Established under the VOC as a means of responding to resistance from the Khoekhoe to encroachments upon their land by free burgher settlers in the late seventeenth century, commandos were groups of farmers, servants, and company soldiers who were commandeered in pursuit of 77  Leonard Guelke and Jeanne Kay Guelke, ‘Imperial Eyes on South Africa: Reassessing Travel Narratives’, Journal of Historical Geography 30, no. 1 (1 January 2004): 19. 78  Leonard Guelke and Jeanne Kay Guelke, ‘Imperial Eyes on South Africa: Reassessing Travel Narratives’, Journal of Historical Geography 30, no. 1 (1 January 2004): 19. 79  Leonard Guelke and Jeanne Kay Guelke, ‘Imperial Eyes on South Africa: Reassessing Travel Narratives’, Journal of Historical Geography 30, no. 1 (1 January 2004): 19. 80  Guelke and Guelke, 19; Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 52. 81  Leonard Guelke and Jeanne Kay Guelke, ‘Imperial Eyes on South Africa: Reassessing Travel Narratives’, Journal of Historical Geography 30, no. 1 (1 January 2004): 19.

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Indigenous Africans deemed responsible for stock thefts and attacks on farms.82 When an African village was attacked, the men were generally killed, while the women and children were kidnapped and used as forced labour on settler farms. During the eighteenth century, as the San replaced the Khoekhoe as the main threat, trekboers began organizing commandos informally against San groups, either because such groups were considered a genuine threat or simply for the purpose of rounding up forced labour.83 So widespread had the use of commandos become that by the 1770s “to be identified as Bushman was to become the target of the merciless search-­ and-­destroy tactics of the burger commandos.”84 On 5 June 1777, the VOC Council of Policy explicitly sanctioned “the eradication of San wherever and whenever they were encountered,” thus marking the beginning of what Adhikari has argued was a “genocidal moment” in settler-San relations.85 As well as decimating the San population, a significant part of the “genocidal process” of the commando system, as Adhikari observes, resulted in the “effacement of San identities” because “those [San] assimilated into trekboer society as forced labourers were usually referred to as ‘Hottentots,’ and in time many came to see themselves as such.”86 This argument provides a further explanation for the confusion in European writings as to what exactly the difference was between a “hottentot” and a “bushman.” Where Europeans did feel able to distinguish adequately between San and Khoekhoe labourers, a new nomenclature emerged in colonial writings for the San in which the San who had been integrated into the colonial economy as labourers were designated as “tame bushmen” (ones who were frequently elided with the “hottentots” in travellers’ descriptions), while those living autonomously outside of colonial society were known as “wild bushmen.”87

 Guelke and Guelke, 19.  Mohamed Adhikari, The Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples (UCT Press, 2010), 39. 84  Adhikari, 47. 85  Susan Newton-King, Masters and Servants on the Cape Eastern Frontier, 1760–1803 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 61. Cited in Adhikari, The Anatomy of a South African Genocide, 55. 86  Mohamed Adhikari, The Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples (UCT Press, 2010), 58. 87  Adhikari, 51. 82 83

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Sparrman’s account of his travels in and around the Cape Colony between 1766 and 1777 include the first detailed description of both “tame” and “wild bushmen” in a European travel narrative. Like Kolb’s work, Sparrman’s account was widely translated and circulated across Europe, and it became an important point of reference for the nineteenth-­ century British travellers’ accounts of the Cape Colony. In discussing the “wild bushman,” Sparrman persists in positioning the “bushman” on the boundary between the human and the animal. On the other hand, the “tame bushman” appears as a “noble savage” whose virtues support an argument against the inhumane treatment of Khoisan servants by Dutch colonists. It is this latter strand of critique that we find becomes particularly prominent in the writings of British humanitarian writers such as John Barrow and, more particularly, the missionary John Philip, whose writings advocate Sparrman’s broader political campaign for the amelioration of conditions for Indigenous labourers. To Sparrman, the “wild bushmen’s” manner of living becomes a key indicator of their intermediate position between the human and animal: bushes and clefts in rocks by turns serve them instead of houses; and some of them are said to be far worse than beasts, that their soil [excrement] has been found close by their habitations […]As ignorant of agriculture as apes, like them they are obliged to wander about over hills and dales after certain wild roots, berries, and plants.88

Sparrman’s focus on the fact they live in “bushes and clefts in rocks” immediately identifies autonomous San communities with Pliny’s cave-­ dwelling Troglodytes. Working alongside this Classical representational system is an ethnological discourse that blends Enlightenment stadial theory with Linnaeus’s and Buffon’s identification of Khoisan peoples with primates. The San’s hunter-gatherer lifestyle appears not as an adaptation to the arid habitat in which they reside—a habitat that would make agriculture, or even pastoralism, impossible to sustain—but rather as an index of their alleged lack of humanity.

88  Anders Sparrman, A voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, towards the Antarctic Polar Circle, round the world and to the country of the Hottentots and the Caffres, from the year 1772–1776, based on the English editions of 1785–1786 published by Robinson, London, ed. Vernon S Forbes (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1975), 197.

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This dehumanizing rhetoric suggests that Sparrman, as well as drawing on early textual accounts of the Khoekhoe, had absorbed the racial prejudices of the trekboer farmers: Some of their maxims are, to live on hunting and plunder, and never to keep any animal alive for the space of one night. By this means they make themselves odious to the rest of mankind, and are pursued and exterminated like the wild beasts, whose manners they have assumed. Others of them again are kept alive, and made slaves of.89

Here, we see a repetition of Kolb’s assertion that the San are “degenerate Hottentots” who choose to live on “hunting and plunder,” rather than individuals whom the trekboers have forced into stock theft due to the appropriation of their land, cattle, and hunting grounds. Later, Sparrman further justifies the commando system by suggesting that the manner in which the trekboers capture San servants is humane, with the colonists shooting game for them to eat and offering them tobacco in order to lure them voluntarily to their farms.90 When Sparrman shifts his focus to those San people who have been forcibly absorbed into the colonial labour economy, he presents more sympathetic vision of the San. Here, he draws upon the figure of the “noble savage” in order to critique rather than endorse the system of forced labour: Both by nature and by custom detesting all manner of labour, and now […] having besides been used to a wandering life, subject to no control, he most sensibly feels the want of his liberty. No wonder then, that he generally endeavours to regain it by making his escape; but what is really a subject for wonder is that, when one of these poor devils runs away from his service, or more properly bondage, he never takes with him anything that does not belong to him.91

Central to this passage is the association of an innate love of liberty with man in a “state of nature.” As with Rousseau’s descriptions of the Khoekhoe, Sparrman links the “noble savage’s” love of liberty to both moral virtues and an alleged aversion to labour. In this instance, he  Sparrman, 194.  Sparrman, 198–99. 91  Sparrman, 199. 89 90

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explicitly contrasts the conduct of “bushman” servants with that of the trekboer “tyrants,” whose inhumane treatment has caused them to seek to free themselves from their service. Sparrman’s critique of the habitual cruelty with which the trekboers have treated San labourers is rooted in his assertion that the conditions under which they worked were equivalent to the slavery being practised on the Western Cape.92 The routine use of forced Khoisan labour on frontier farms was necessary because impoverished trekboers, unlike their longer-established and more affluent counterparts in the Western Cape, “did not have the means or lines of credit to afford slaves.”93 The introduction of the inboekstelsel or “apprenticeship” system “was an attempt at mimicking chattel bondage.”94 Like slaves, there were no official contracts between masters and “apprentices” and Khoisan labourers were subject to arbitrary and cruel punishment for any perceived wrongdoing. In 1780, the Stellenbosch authorities declared that those “bushmen” captured in commandos should be divided among those who participated in the commandos as indentured “apprentices.”95 The use of commandos as a way of acquiring cheap labour on the frontiers was so widespread that Wayne Dooling estimates that by 1795, over 1000 San individuals had been taken captive as farm servants, meaning there were twice as many war captives in settler employ as chattel slaves.96 There is no doubt that routine violence inscribed into master/servant relations on the frontier by the use of commandos and the inboekstelsel shocked European travellers such as Sparrman, and informed the sympathetic portrayals of apprenticed San labourers that emerged in their travel writings. Sparrman’s “tame bushmen” continue to be represented as “noble savages” whose petty thefts are overlooked in recognition of the injustices done to them: Free from many wants and desires, that torment the rest of mankind, they are little, if at all, addicted to thieving, if we except brandy, victuals, and tobacco. It is not improbably likewise, that the advantages accruing from a

92  Wayne Dooling, Slavery, Emancipation and Colonial Rule in South Africa (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007), 26. 93  Dooling, 23. 94  Dooling, 25. 95  Dooling, 27. 96  Dooling, 27.

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theft may be overlooked by them when their thoughts are taken up with regaining their liberty, the greatest of all treasures.97

In this passage, Sparrman seems to depart from a particularized ethnographic description of the San to present them as generic “noble savages.” As with Rousseau, the “savage’s” love of liberty is inextricably linked to his emancipation from the “wants and desires” of civilized society. A final rhetorical move that Sparrman makes in his discussion of the San is that of moral sympathy. Deriving from the moral philosophy of Scottish Enlightenment philosophers, moral sympathy was the imaginative process of placing oneself in the position of another. In the British context, perhaps the most influential articulation of this process is in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759): Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us in any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case.98

In Smith’s formulation, sympathetic engagement with another individual is an imaginative process that is self-reflexive: the subject can only imagine a fellow human’s reactions by assuming that they will be the same as his own. This self-reflexivity was key to the rhetorical use of moral sympathy in abolitionist discourse as a call to sympathize with the plight of the abject slave was simultaneously a call to action on the part of the reader. Where this racialized discourse of moral sympathy differs from Smith’s formulation is that identification between the assumed British subject and the Indigenous “object” is necessarily imperfect. Thus, as Amit Rai has argued, the use of moral sympathy to reinscribe racial and social difference characterized encounters with racial Others in humanitarian discourse during the 97  Anders Sparrman, A voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, towards the Antarctic Polar Circle, round the world and to the country of the Hottentots and the Caffres, from the year 1772–1776, based on the English editions of 1785–1786 published by Robinson, London, ed. Vernon S. Forbes (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1975), 199. 98  Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments: To Which Is Added a Dissertation on the Origin of Languages, 3rd edition (A. Millar, A. Kincaid and J. Bell in Edinburgh; and sold, 1767), 9.

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late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, creating a paradox: on the one hand, the performance of sympathetic identification was necessary for the construction of the self as a moral being, while on the other hand, the failure of full sympathetic identification was necessary to assert the boundaries between the white, (implicitly) male self, and the racial Other.99 In Sparrman’s account, we can see how this racialized moral sympathy operates: The slave business, that violent outrage to the natural rights of mankind […] is exercised by the colonists with a cruelty towards the nation of the Boshies-men, which merits the abhorrence of everyone; though I have been told, they pique [pride] themselves upon it: and not only is the capture of Boshies-men considered by them merely as a party of pleasure, but in cold blood they destroy the bands which nature has knit between husbands and their wives and children.100

Sparrman’s rhetoric of “natural rights” was particularly resonant when Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope was published in 1789, in the wake of the French and American Revolutions, when issues of freedom and equality were at the forefront of the European public consciousness.101 In Britain, the late 1780s and 1790s marked what George Boulukos has termed the “flowering of the abolition movement.”102 In Sparrman’s Voyage, the explicit reference to the slave trade served to represent the Boers of the Cape Colony as equivalent to the European plantation owners and the forced labour system on which Boer life depended as equivalent to slavery. Sparrman finishes his account with a comment on the effect the system of forced labour imposed by the colonists has had upon the San.

99  A. Rai, Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race, and Power 1750–1850 (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2002), 164. 100  Anders Sparrman, A voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, towards the Antarctic Polar Circle, round the world and to the country of the Hottentots and the Caffres, from the year 1772–1776, based on the English editions of 1785–1786 published by Robinson, London, ed. Vernon S. Forbes (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1975), 200. 101  Fiona J. Stafford, The Last of the Race: The Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin (Clarendon Press, 1994), 236. 102  George Boulukos, The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture, Illustrated edition (Cambridge; New  York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 201.

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Without doubt the Boshies-men have been a long while in a savage state, and many of them are now brought into a still more miserable situation, since the Christians have invaded their country, and pursue them with chains and fetters into their deserts.103

Here, Sparrman depicts the San people as abject “objects” who deserve the reader’s sympathy because of the demoralizing effect that forced labour has had on their communities. Meanwhile, Sparrman absorbs the Boer farmer into the abolitionist figure of the degenerate plantation owner in order to reinforce a polemical point about the mutually corrupting influence of slavery; it both reduces the enslaved to a state of abject degradation and the slave owner to a state of moral degeneracy. Thus, what is ostensibly a sympathetic account of the San becomes an intervention in contemporary European debates about the abolition of the slave trade, the “rights of man,” and the moral consequences of European colonial expansion. It is this same appropriation of moral sympathy in the service of colonial critique that British humanitarian writers deployed in the nineteenth century. Sparrman’s Voyages to the Cape of Good Hope has been identified by literary critics as the first of a new breed of travel narratives that self-­ consciously deploys humanitarian arguments in favour of the protection of Indigenous peoples and the amelioration of their labour conditions in the Cape and other sites of British colonization.104 As we shall see in the following two chapters, both of which deal in more detail with British humanitarian travel narratives, the growing popularity of these writings in both Britain and the expanding Anglophone settler colonies during the 1820s and 1830s was inextricably linked to discursive a shift in British colonial policy towards what Alan Lester and Fae Dussart have termed “humanitarian governance.”105 Two important influences on the 103  Anders Sparrman, A voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, towards the Antarctic Polar Circle, round the world and to the country of the Hottentots and the Caffres, from the year 1772–1776, based on the English editions of 1785–1786 published by Robinson, London, ed. Vernon S Forbes (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1975), 201. 104  Matthew Shum, ‘Writing Settlement and Empire: The Cape after 1820’, in The Cambridge History of South African Literature, ed. David Attwell and Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 191. 105  Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1.

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emergence of “humanitarian governance” in Britain were the Evangelical religious revival and the campaign to abolish the slave trade. These combined to create a “moral vernacular” of protection and human rights that was underpinned by an evangelically inflected Protestant, national identity that emphasized both Britain’s uniquely powerful position as an imperial nation and her moral obligation to “protect” the Indigenous peoples of her empire. In the nineteenth century, it was this “moral vernacular” that was used as the justificatory principle for the policy of socalled moral colonization.

CHAPTER 3

Better to Be Naked and Free than to Wear Clothes and Be Oppressed: Indigenous Uses of Humanitarian Discourse

My dear Mr Landdrost,—I submit a friendly request to you not to be ashamed of me in my great need, in that in my unworthiness I am letting you know that I am badly in need of protection. Help me my Lord, please. I intend trekking to an area where the Bergenaars have been, with those of whom I am the leader. My Lord knows, does he not, how they have ruined the veld with all kinds of iniquities. I am writing this letter, Mr. Landdrost with the hope that my Lord will not have one distrustful thought about me, and also that my Lord will have compassion on me, because I have the intention of establishing a stable home with buildings and crops and to urge my people to continue with all good works. I remain in good expectations and I remain your humble servant, —Adam Kok (‘Adam Kok II to Andries Stockenstrom: Request for Protection against the Bergenaars (October 1825)’, in Griqua Records: The Philippolis Captaincy, 1825–1865, ed. and trans. Karel Schoeman (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1996), 254)

This plea for protection was addressed to Andries Stockenstrom, Civil Commissioner of Graaff-Reinet in the Eastern Cape. The petitioner was Adam Kok II (1760–1835), captain or leader of a group of Griqua based around the former London Missionary Society mission station at

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Atkin, Writing the South African San, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86226-8_3

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Philippolis in Transorangia, the area north-east of the Cape Colony that is today known as the Free State Province of South Africa. In the context of the geopolitics of Transorangia, in which the Christianized Griqua stood as intermediaries between the British Colony and the autonomous Indigenous polities in the southern African interior, Adam Kok II’s rhetoric of protection was strategic—and not unique in that, as this chapter will argue. This canny move enabled him to represent his community, the Philippolis Griqua, simultaneously in two different discursive positions. On the one hand, he argues that his people are as defenceless indigenes in need of the guiding hand of the British colonial state—a move which played into Britain’s self-representation as a “moral colonizer” in southern Africa. On the other, he argues that the Griqua will make good colonists, establishing “stable homes with buildings and crops” in the politically unstable and violently contested borderlands of Transorangia.1 Collectively, the “Griqua” numbered only around 2000–3000 people, but they were nevertheless economically and politically powerful actors in the Transorangia borderlands during the first half of the nineteenth century.2 The ethnogenesis of the Griqua as a distinct set of independent polities was the result of multiple displacements dating from the middle of the eighteenth century. During the 1750s, a baster3 man called Adam Kok acquired grazing rights in the Piketberg area of the Northern Cape. Adam Kok I (c. 1710–1795) attracted a following among the Chaguriqua Khoekhoe as well as fellow basters. According to Karel Schoeman, while “many individuals observed Khoi customs and spoke Xiri, a Khoe language, a considerable number possessed horses, wagons and guns, and spoke a form of Dutch or Afrikaans,” becoming what Martin Legassick has termed “brown frontiersmen,” migratory stock farmers whose quest for pastures led them further and further into the southern African 1  I use the term “borderlands” here, after Paul Landau, to signify a space that is characterized by overlapping and competing claims to political authority. For more on the term “borderland” and the competing territorial claims in Transorangia, see Martin Legassick, ‘The Northern Frontier to c.1840: The Rise and Decline of the Griqua People’, in The Shaping of South African Society 1652–1840, ed. Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee, 2nd edition (Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1989), 358–420; Paul S. Landau, Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3. 2  Landau, Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948, 13–14. 3  Although rooted in the pejorative Dutch term “bastaard,” baster remains a common descriptor for mixed-race people in colonial South Africa. Adam Kok I was reportedly the son of an emancipated slave and a European colonist.

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interior.4 The Kok community became so numerous that Adam Kok was recognized as a “Captain” or Kaptyn by the Dutch East India Company and presented with a staff of office similar to those conferred upon traditional Chiefs of Indigenous groups.5 Under Adam Kok’s son Cornelius Kok I (1746–1820), the community came under pressure from trekboer settlers and moved to a farm in Namaqualand. It is in Namaqualand that the Koks joined with a prominent group of Khoekhoe Goringhaiqua from the Western Cape, under the leadership of Klaas Berends.6 1802 marks the ethnogenesis of the Griqua as a distinct political formation as the Berends and Kok groups joined together and trekked up the Orange River to form a series of independent states at Klaarwater (Griquatown), Campbell, Boetsap, and Philippolis.7 This movement coincided with the arrival in 1800 of the London Missionary Society (LMS), which initially worked with scattered baster communities across Transorangia. Cornelius Kok I was baptized around 1800, marking a period of heightened cooperation between the LMS and the political groups who were now coalescing into the Christian community that became known as the Griqua.8 The transformation of the loose kinship networks that characterized baster and Khoekhoe political formations into a more formal political structure with its own raad or council was linked directly to the arrival of LMS missionaries in the area. Cornelius Kok I continued to live at his farm and did not take a formal role in Griqua politics, instead appointing two provise kaptyns, his son Adam Kok II (1872–1835), and his nephew, Barend Barends.9 It was while visiting Klaarwater in 1813 that the LMS missionary John Campbell persuaded the Berends and Kok II groups to rename themselves. They became the Griquas, in commemoration of their Goringhaiqua origins.10 At the time, Klaarwater was renamed Griquatown and a set of rules were set up to 4  Martin Legassick, Hidden Histories of Gordonia: Land Dispossession and Resistance in the Northern Cape, 1800–1990 (Johannesburg: Wits Press, 2016), 127. 5  Karel Schoeman, ed., Griqua records: the Philippolis Captaincy, 1825–1861 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1996), xi. 6  Schoeman, xi. 7  Martin Legassick, Hidden Histories of Gordonia: Land Dispossession and Resistance in the Northern Cape, 1800–1990 (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2016), 7. 8  Legassick, 8. 9  Karel Schoeman, ed., Griqua records: the Philippolis Captaincy, 1825–1861 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1996), xi. 10  Schoeman, xi.

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govern what was now the first official Griqua captaincy under the joint leadership of Berend Berends and Adam Kok II.11 In 1820, the Griquatown council elected Andries Waterboer (c. 1789–1852), a San man, as the captain in an election that marked a decisive break with the established habit of hereditary rule. Martin Legassick has argued that Waterboer’s election marked a transitional point for the Griquatown polity, which went from being a community whose primary mode of subsistence was nomadic pastoralism to a settled society of pastoralists and smallholders whose economic success became increasingly “based on commodity exchange with the Cape Colony [and] organised politically around the commando system and the presence of Christian missionaries.”12 Waterboer’s close ties with the LMS missionaries at Griquatown led to a major split between Waterboer and Berends and Adam Kok II. While Berends and his followers departed from Griquatown to found an independent captaincy, Adam Kok II retired to an area between the Vaal and Riet rivers in what is now the Free State Province. In 1822, Adam Kok II’s followers increased as Griquatown inhabitants, who became unhappy with the increasingly authoritarian stance of Waterboer, also settled in the mountainous interior between the Vaal and Riet rivers, from where they orchestrated cattle raids on neighbouring trekboer, Indigenous, and Griqua groups, leading them to be granted the nickname bergenaars, after the Dutch word for “mountain-dweller.”13 The early nineteenth century was a time of intense competition for land and resources in Transorangia between Griqua, Batswana, San, Khoekhoe, and illegal trekboer settlers from the Cape Colony. In addition, Transorangia harboured large numbers of autonomous African communities who had migrated from the east, having been displaced from their native lands by the violent upheavals caused by the so-called Difaqane.14 Adam Kok II’s plea for protection from the British government must therefore be seen against the backdrop of unprecedented competition for land and resources in the Griqua-controlled territories north of the Orange River. Yet Kok II was not alone in mobilizing the humanitarian discourse of protection to bolster his claims to legitimate authority in these contested borderlands  Schoeman, xi.  Schoeman, xii. 13  Martin Legassick, Hidden Histories of Gordonia: Land Dispossession and Resistance in the Northern Cape, 1800–1990 (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2016), 8. 14  See note page 16. 11 12

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during the 1820s. His secretary, Hendrik Hendriks (c. 1795–1881), petitioned directly to British administrators and Anglo-Dutch settler elites through two extraordinary letters published in the South African Commercial Advertiser in 1830 and in The Cape of Good Hope Observer in 1849. Hendriks’s acute awareness of the emotional purchase the figure of the suffering indigene had on the hearts and minds of Cape liberals and British humanitarians enabled him to strategically cast the Philippolis Griqua as oppressed indigenes in need of the benevolent protection of the British government. Crucially, his emotional appeal created a counter-­ discourse to colonial allegations that the Philippolis Griqua were lawless individualists, heavily implicated in the genocidal murder of the San and traffic in San child slaves, that by 1830 had reached the ears of the British colonial authorities through reports made to the London Missionary Society. Part of the difficulty that the Griqua captains posed to colonial officials was that they presented an ontological and territorial challenge to the Indigenous/settler binaries. In Transorangia, indigeneity was “a relative condition,” as Edward Cavanagh has argued.15 It is the fragility of the Griqua’s claim to an authentic Indigenous identity that made their claims to sovereignty and protection from the British colonial government so fraught. Whereas British colonial discourse had no problem identifying San and Batswana communities as the Indigenous inhabitants of the area known to colonial surveyors as “bushmanland,” the Griqua’s mixed descent and relatively recent migration to Transorangia meant that their claim to sovereignty over their land and to the protection of the British colonial government was viewed as less stable. This claim rested on their leaders’ ability to simultaneously prove their authentic indigeneity and present themselves as a civilizing and restraining influence on the violent excesses committed by white and black frontiersmen against the San and Batswana. British humanitarian writings in the early nineteenth century cast the San as the abject victims of trekboer and Griqua settler violence in order to make the case for the extension and consolidation of British control in Transorangia. Central to this particular strand of ethnological discourse is the importance of what Ann Laura Stoler terms the “affective strains” of

15  E.  Cavanagh, Settler Colonialism and Land Rights in South Africa: Possession and Dispossession on the Orange River (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2013), 10.

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“colonialism’s political grammar.”16 Stoler argues that affects were as significant as epistemologies in the construction of colonial social imaginaries because the ability to express particular sentiments provided one of the ways in which racial categories were defined and demarcated: imperial projects called upon specific sentiments, and assessed racial membership in part by locating appropriate carriers and recipients of those feelings. To whom one expressed attachment as opposed to pity, contempt, indifference, or disdain provided both cultural and legal “proof” of who one was, where one ranked in the colonial order of things, and thus where one racially belonged.17

The ability to articulate a sentimental pity for Indigenous suffering was a crucial marker of belonging to the British colonial social order because it was the affective correlative to the humanitarian political ideology of moral colonization. To be an effective moral colonizer, the humanitarian had to be able to pity the Indigenous victim of colonial violence in order to ameliorate their suffering through a combination of spatial control and legal coercion. This racialized moral sympathy, which depends upon the ability to pity the indigene’s suffering while simultaneously recognizing that the indigene’s vulnerability to settler violence is precisely what disqualifies them from any claim to sovereignty over the territories in which they reside. Thus, racialized moral sympathy for Indigenous peoples served as a discursive marker of racial belonging for British settlers and governing elites, one that provided a central plank for the rhetorical justification of an aggressive colonial expansion and the exertion of increasingly coercive controls over Indigenous movement in the name of “protection.” As Stoler points out, such “affective strains” were important precisely because colonial racial typologies were never solely reducible to phenotype. British representations of the trekboers of the southern African interior as deculturated barbarians whose migratory pastoralism bore a close resemblance to the lifestyles of the Indigenous Khoekhoe were a staple of early nineteenth-century travel writing about southern Africa.18 These unflattering representations of trekboers were circulated at the Cape as well 16  Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, N.J.; Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2008), 40. 17  Stoler, 40. 18  For more on analogies drawn in nineteenth-century British writing between the lifestyles of trekboers and indigenous Khoekhoe, see Klopper, ‘Boer, Bushman, and Baboon’.

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as in Britain, with John Barrow’s influential Travels to the Interior of Southern Africa appearing in Dutch translation in the circulating libraries and coffee shops of Cape Town.19 Writings such as Barrow’s Travels became important propaganda weapons in efforts that the British colonial government made at the Cape during the 1820s and 1830s to anglicize the public sphere and legislative codes of a colony where only one in eight white settlers were of British origin.20 The expression of pity for Indigenous suffering was therefore an affective marker of membership of a liberal Cape Town Anglo-Dutch, bourgeois settler elite, and could be used by Dutch as well as British settlers to assert membership of what was at this point an emerging colonial social order. Yet it was not just British imperialists and Cape Town settlers who mobilized a sentimental pity for the suffering of the San to legitimize their moral and judicial claims to sovereignty. Andries Waterboer wrote to the acting Superintendent of the London Missionary Society through the missionary and translator Peter Wright (1796–1843), who was stationed at Griquatown with Waterboer and his followers. Like Hendriks and Kok II, Waterboer sought to use the British humanitarian rhetoric of protection to bolster his own wavering claims to legitimate authority in this crowded and contested borderland. Waterboer’s appeal to the British government was embedded in a narrative of the history of the Griquatown captaincy written in 1827. In this text, Waterboer adopts the humanitarian rhetoric of protection to cast himself as the moral and legal defender of the Transorangia San against illegal frontier violence. By expressing a sentimental pity for the suffering of the San and the Batswana at the hands of lawless frontiersmen, Waterboer demonstrates to his missionary interlocutors his mastery of the “affective strains” of humanitarian moral sympathy. By doing so, he argues for full membership of the colonial social order by identifying himself affectively and morally with the colonial government and distancing himself from those Indigenous groups whose very vulnerability to violent attack had marked them in the British government’s eyes as incapable of independent rule. In Waterboer’s account, we can see a clear example of an Indigenous leader deploying the rhetoric of racialized moral sympathy 19  John Fairbairn makes reference to the ready availability of English and Dutch translations of Barrow’s Travels at the booksellers and circulating libraries of Cape Town in an editorial printed in the South African Commercial Advertiser, 5 May 1824, p. 1. 20  A.M. Lewin Robinson, None Daring to Make Us Afraid: A Study of English Periodical Literature in the Cape Colony from Its Beginnings in 1824 to 1835, 1st edition (M. Miller, 1962), 68.

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in order to call upon the British government to translate its rhetorical promise of protection for Indigenous peoples into legal protection and economic support.

Representing the San in British Humanitarian Narratives The San had occupied a privileged position within British “humanitarian narratives” ever since John Barrow’s influential Travels to the Interior of Southern Africa (1801) had first drawn the British reading public’s attention to the use of the commando system enacted by frontier trekboers in pursuit of San people accused of stock theft.21 Although accounts of the commando system first appeared in Swedish natural historian Anders Sparrman’s Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope (1795), Barrow’s position as Secretary to Governor Lord Macartney in 1799–1801 lent authority to his ethnographic historiography of settler/San relations on and beyond the northern frontier described in his Travels. This authority was increased in the 1810s and 1820s by his position as the Quarterly Review’s main writer on colonial affairs. In Travels, Barrow made an influential contribution to the historiography of settler-San relations in the southern African interior by presenting the San as the “chief ethnographic interest” of his book.22 Writing at a time when the British were struggling to consolidate their control over the newly acquired Cape Colony, Barrow’s objectives in Travels were both economic and ethnographic: he aimed to provide his British readers with ethnographic sketches of the Indigenous and European peoples to be found at the Cape and to assess the economic potential of both as part of a general survey of the colony. Although mostly adopting the pose of the dispassionate observer surveying the topography and ethnography of a newly acquired territory, there is a striking moment in Barrow’s narrative when his positionality shifts from observer to participant. The episode occurs when Barrow joins a group of trekboers on a commando assault against the San. Mary Louise Pratt has argued that Barrow’s adoption of “a sentimental counter-discourse” to the discursive position of the 21  Thomas W.  Laqueur, ‘Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative’, in The New Cultural History (University of California Press, 1989), 177. 22  Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London; New York: Routledge, 1992), 63.

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­ ispassionate observer that he adopts throughout most of Travels evinces d a “breakdown of the discursive order” in the face of unjustifiable colonial violence.23 However, if rather than following Pratt’s lead in positioning Barrow’s Travels in a genealogy that connects it to the natural historical travelogues of gentleman naturalists in the eighteenth century, we instead view Barrow’s sentimental horror at the violence of the commando as part of an established rhetoric of moral sympathy that was central to humanitarian representations of British colonization in southern Africa as a moral mission, we can see how the rhetoric of racialized moral sympathy operates in his eyewitness account of a commando against the San. Barrow describes a midnight attack by trekboer settlers on the San community as follows: Day was just beginning to break; […] our ears were stunned with a horrid sound like the war-hoop of savages; the shrieking of women and the cries of children proceeded from every side. […] I had certainly seen neither arrows nor people, but had heard enough to pierce the hardest heart; and I peremptorily insisted that neither he [the leader of the commando] nor any of his party should fire another shot […] On their promise I could place no sort of dependence, knowing that, like true sportsmen when game was sprung, they could not withhold their fire. Of this I was perfectly convinced by the report of a musquet on the opposite side of the hill; and, on riding round the point, I perceived a bosjesman lying dead upon the ground.24

Barrow’s eyewitness account carefully constructs a “humanitarian narrative,” to borrow Thomas Laqueur’s term. This narrative effect is created through the layering of descriptive detail to lend his subjective experiences an objective “reality effect,” one that combines with an unrelenting focus on the spectacle of the suffering Indigenous body.25 So we find that the calm of the daybreak ruptured by “a horrid-scream […] like a war-hoop,” which would appear to signify an attack from a San community objecting  Pratt, 67.  John Barrow, An Account of Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa in the Years 1797 and 1798 Including Cursory Observations on the Geology and Geography of the Southern Part of That Continent; the Natural History of Such Objects as Occurred in the Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral Kingdoms; and Sketches of the Physical and Moral Characters of the Various Tribes of Inhabitants Surrounding the Settlement of the Cape of Good Hope… (London: T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1801), 272–73. 25  Thomas W.  Laqueur, ‘Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative’, in The New Cultural History (University of California Press, 1989), 177. 23 24

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to the presence of Europeans on their hunting grounds. However, the “shrieking of women and the cries of children” are enough to “pierce the hardest heart,” a metaphor that vividly evokes the deadly shots that trekboer colonists inflict on the San. While the colonists continue to insist that they were fired upon first, and the San are the threat, Barrow’s first-hand account reveals the fallacy of this logic—with the colonists as the brutal, callous murderers, and the San as the innocent victims. Having cast himself in the role of the witnessing, feeling subject, Barrow constructs the San as the passive, suffering objects of his sentimental pity. As Luc Boltanski has argued, in order for a suffering individual to be cast in the affective register of pity they must be “hyper-singualised through an accumulation of details of suffering,” which at the same time “merge into a unified representation” that is “exemplary” of a whole group.26 Ethnographic histories such as Travels produce exactly the typologized images of Indigenous suffering that mobilized what Boltanski terms the “politics of pity” by enabling European readers to interpret eyewitness accounts of individual acts of colonial violence as “exemplary” of the suffering of whole Indigenous populations. In Barrow’s Travels this “politics of pity” served a distinctively instrumentalist end: it strengthened his argument that the British government could act as a “moral” colonizer in southern Africa by protecting vulnerable San populations against the barbaric acts of brutal trekboer frontiersmen. The politics of pity were also central to the polemical arguments in favour of “protecting” Indigenous communities made in government Commissions of Inquiry. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars, six such commissions were appointed to investigate “the administration of public offices, colonial finances, the state of the laws and the practical administration of laws” in Britain’s recently acquired colonies.27 The Commission of Eastern Inquiry (1822–1837), which was dispatched to the Cape Colony, Mauritius, and Ceylon was, as Zoe Laidlaw has argued, “also a response to pressure from anti-slavery activists” in Britain, particularly Thomas Fowell Buxton’s Evangelical party in the British parliament.28 Under the influence of both the metropolitan abolitionist lobby and missionaries working 26  Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, trans. Graham D. Burchell (Cambridge, UK; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 12. 27  Zoë Laidlaw, ‘Investigating Empire: Humanitarians, Reform and the Commission of Eastern Inquiry’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, no. 5 (1 December 2012): 753, https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2012.730829. 28  Laidlaw, 754.

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“on the spot,” the commissioners of the Eastern Inquiry received official instructions directing “their attention to slaves, liberated Africans and indigenous peoples in all three colonies.”29 During their nine years of investigation, the commissioners periodically dispatched reports from the colonies back to London containing interviews undertaken with European and Indigenous peoples as part of their investigations into settler/ Indigenous labour relations. These dispatches included testimonies from colonial bureaucrats, missionaries, traders, and the Indigenous inhabitants of mission stations. After they had sent their statements to the Colonial Office, the commissioners’ evidence was read before the British parliament, an act that, as Zoe Laidlaw has argued, lent any “disputed testimony” that had been recorded in the field “an aura of authority.”30 When the first volume of the evidence presented to parliament on the conditions of the Cape Colony’s Indigenous people was published in 1835, more than 90 of the pamphlet’s 230 pages were devoted to historic accounts of the use of the commando system in the interior of the Cape Colony and in the northern borderlands of Transorangia. The focus on cataloguing the trekboers’ historical violence served to construct the San as the abject victims in need of the “protection” of a benevolent British government. For example, we can see this argument in the testimony that the former Civil Commissioner of Graaff-Reinet, H.  Maynier, presented to the commissioners in 1825. This was the period when John Barrow visited the Cape. Maynier corroborates Barrow’s narrative of trekboer cruelty: With regard to the Bosjesmen, I beg leave to observe, that when I was appointed landdrost of Graff Reynet [in 1793], I found that regularly every year large commandos, consisting of 200 to 300 armed Boors, had been sent against the bosjesmen, and learnt by their reports that generally many hundred of bosjesmen were killed by them. […] I was also made acquainted with the most horrible atrocities committed on those occasions, such as ordering the Hottentots to dash out against the rocks the brains of infants (too young to be carried off by farmers for the purpose to use them as bondmen), in order to save powder and shot.31

 Laidlaw, 754.  Laidlaw, 761. 31  Anon, Papers Relative to the Condition and Treatment of the Native Inhabitants of Southern Africa, Within the Colony of the Cape of the Good Hope, Or Beyond the Frontier of That Colony (House of Commons, 1835), 28. 29 30

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Maynier combines the accounting voice of the empiricist magistrate who can give a vivid sense of the scale of the commando raids consisting of “200–300” armed trekboers with a graphic account of the “horrible atrocities” committed by the trekboers. His description of trekboer atrocities served to raise his listeners’ moral sympathy and assimilate individual acts of violence against the San into a broader British humanitarian narrative of Indigenous suffering. This endless repetition of accounts of colonial violence is also part of what Amit Rai has termed the “massification” of Indigenous suffering in British parliamentary discourse: the discursive transformation of the experiences of heterogeneous Indigenous individuals into “a single objectified category: an ‘unfortunate people.’”32 Focusing the reader’s attention on the bodily suffering inflicted enabled the San to emerge in these narratives as the passive victims of settler violence, a group whose very abjection marked them as the worthy recipients of humanitarian pity. Whereas Maynier is keen to differentiate in his testimony between those trekboers who participated in acts of genocidal violence against the San and those who do not, the commissioners state unequivocally: The principle source of the calamaties of the frontier districts, and of the evil spirit evinced against the aborigines, is to be looked for in the great power with which the commandants were entrusted […] as these commandants were chosen from the number of Boors [sic], and generally men of rough, hardened, and atrocious mind.33

Such an editorial intervention from the Commissioners demonstrate how the figuration of Dutch trekboer farmers as deculturated barbarians had become an established part of the racial discourse deployed by bureaucrats working in the British colonial office during the 1830s. In his capacity as Civil Commissioner of the area between Graaff-Reinet and Colesberg between the 1810s and the 1830s, Andries Stockenstrom made great efforts to bring an end to the commando system and slave-­ raiding in Transorangia. As his evidence to the Commissioners of Eastern Inquiry shows, this agenda more than once put Stockenstrom into conflict 32  A. Rai, Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race, and Power 1750–1850 (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2002), 126. 33  Anon, Papers Relative to the Condition and Treatment of the Native Inhabitants of Southern Africa, Within the Colony of the Cape of the Good Hope, Or Beyond the Frontier of That Colony, 29.

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with colonial officials working for him as he persistently blocked their petitions to send out commandos against the San, urging restraint in their pursuit of San communities alleged to have committed stock theft.34 However, Stockenstrom stopped short of challenging trekboer claims to grazing rights over the area still marked on British maps as “bushman land.” When the commissioners urged him to force settlers occupying San territory to return to the Colony, Stockenstrom responded by arguing that forcing migrating trekboers to withdraw to the Colony would be “ruining vast numbers of families without benefiting the Bosjesmen in the least.” 35 As well as making an economic argument, a second strand of Stockenstrom’s discourse involves writing back against what he viewed as British misrepresentations of trekboer cruelty against the San. As a Cape-­ born colonist of Swedish origin who found himself having to mediate between the demands of a British colonial administration and those of the predominantly Boer settlers of Graaff-Reinet, Stockenstrom’s testimony strikes the balance between acknowledging the culpability of the trekboer farmers for historic abuses of the San and arguing that the present generation of Boer settlers are in the best position to provide the benevolent protection that the commissioners argue the San are in such desperate need of: Were I to argue that the condition of the bushmen is not truly lamentable, and that the colony is not principally to blame, I should contradict all my own representations and complaints, of which you are already in possession; but I do unequivocally deny the charge that a desire generally exists to oppress them further; the Boors would be glad to make great sacrifices to induce them to keep the peace. Often voluntary contributions have been made in cattle to set particular peaceable kraals as breeders.36

In Stockenstrom’s testimony, there is a visible tension between the “recognition and non-recognition of Indigenous people’s place in the settler colonial world” that, as Amanda Nettelbeck has argued in relation to the Australian context, remains inherent in the concept of British Crown protection.37 While the San’s legitimate claim as the original Indigenous  Anon, 70–90.  Anon, 117. 36  Anon, 119. 37  Amanda Nettelbeck, ‘“We Are Sure of Your Sympathy”: Indigenous Uses of the Politics of Protection in Nineteenth-Century Australia and Canada’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 17, no. 1 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2016.0009. 34 35

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inhabitants of southern Africa is never questioned, this claim is positioned diachronically in the period prior to illegal trekboer expansion into their lands. After Stockenstrom has shown that “bushman land” has effectively been subsumed into the settler colonial state by the trekboers’ migratory movements, he reframes the San’s continued presence on what he earlier acknowledged to be their sovereign territory as the result of the “great sacrifices” that the settlers made to “keep them at peace.”38 This movement involves recasting the Boers as the benevolent protectors rather than the violent dispossessors of the San. In order to elevate the Boers, Stockenstrom’s reports from Transorangia began to focus on the documentation of the use of commandos against the San by Adam Kok II’s Griqua followers based at Philippolis. Stockenstrom had raised concerns about the behaviour of the Philippolis Griqua towards the San in a report he made to the colonial government on 24 March 1830, following a fact-finding mission to Transorangia, in which he investigated Griqua complaints against trekboer encroachments on their lands and allegations of Griqua mistreatment of the San communities who resided in the vicinity of Philippolis. Stockenstrom recorded the extent of Griqua complicity in the use of commandos and the illegal trafficking of San children to be sold in the colony as slaves: I had discovered that a kraal of Bushman living among the migratory Boers, daily fed by and assisting these people, being perfectly peaceable and, as the Boers say, without the slightest shadow of bad intention on their part, were attacked by a Commando of Griquas of [A]Dam Kok’s party, who killed fifteen, left two for dead badly wounded, and carried off the only survivors (three children), after offering them for sale to the farmers. The manner in which the women had been put to death is too awful to be related. In another kraal fourteen were killed by a party of Griquas under the command of Kok’s son-in-law, Hendrik Hendriks.39

Stockenstrom’s measured tone and his recourse to statistics serve to authorize this anecdote, lending it an ethnographic authority by  At this point, it was illegal for colonists to settle permanently north of the colonial border in the area termed “bushman land.” 39  Andries Stockenstrom, The Autobiography of the Late Sir Andries Stockenstrom, Bart, Sometime Lieutenant-Governor of the Eastern Province of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, ed. C. W. Hutton (Cape Town: J.C. Juta, 1887), vol. 1, 376. 38

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positioning himself as a witness to Griqua commandos against the San. As Stoler has argued, the empirical recording of atrocities was a means of measuring “gradations of morality” in conditions where violence was the norm.40 In order to cast the trekboers as higher on the moral scale than the Griqua, Stockenstrom is careful to characterize the trekboers as the protectors of the San while personally implicating both Adam Kok II and his son-in-law and secretary Hendrik Hendriks in genocidal murder and people-trafficking. There is a further tension in Stockenstrom’s testimony between the detailed accounting of the number of dead and a strategic withholding of detail about the exact nature of the crimes committed. The details that Stockenstrom includes—the number of dead, the allegations that Adam Kok II and Hendrik Hendriks tried to sell San child captives into slavery— were exactly those best calculated to appeal to British concerns about the excessive use of the commando system beyond the northern frontier and the trafficking of Indigenous children into the colonial labour economy. Yet his assertion that “the manner in which the women had been put to death is too awful to be related” marks a momentary shift into a more emotional register. The use of the intensifier “too awful” denotes Stockenstrom’s horror at the crimes committed by Adam Kok II and Hendriks, suggesting that they exceeded the violence of the trekboers against the San which had already been recorded in graphic detail in the ethnographic travel narratives of missionaries and colonial administrators, and in the evidence presented before parliament and the British public by the Commission of Eastern Inquiry. In another report dated 4 August 1830, Stockenstrom uses the testimony of Batswana groups who had been raided by Griqua commandos. He employs this information to lay responsibility for the violence against the Indigenous peoples of “bushman land” firmly with Adam Kok II’s Griqua, by stating that “the complaints against the Griqua were heartrending.”41 Here, Stockenstrom communicates an indistinct horror at acts so violent that they are cannot be articulated. Instead, the reader is left to speculate about deeds that are “too awful” and “heartrending” to name, thus opening up an imaginative space into which all manner of imagined fears could be projected. 40  Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, N.J.; Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2008), 30. 41  Stockenstrom, The Autobiography of the Late Sir Andries Stockenstrom, Bart, Sometime Lieutenant-Governor of the Eastern Province of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, vol. 1, 378.

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Stockenstrom’s testimony points to the ambivalent position the Griqua occupied in British colonial discourse. On the one hand, the Griqua were represented as playing a crucial role in the governance of Transorangia by acting as intermediaries who could mediate in trade negotiations between colonists and a range of Indigenous African communities to the north and east of the Cape Colony. The presence of the London Missionary Society among the Griqua from the 1810s, and the Griqua’s widespread adoption of Christianity, also enabled missionaries such as Robert Moffat to represent the Griqua as the vanguard of a cultural colonialism aimed at spreading Christianity and cultivation to the Indigenous communities of the African interior. Yet the involvement of some of the Griqua captains and council-members in the illegal arms trade with migratory trekboers and the evidence that Stockenstrom gathered about Griqua commandos against San groups accused of stock theft meant that the Griqua could also be represented as savages in need of the restraining arm of direct British rule. In some cases, such arguments directly challenged Griqua sovereignty in Transorangia.

Griqua Uses of Humanitarian Discourse One Griqua response to such challenges was Andries Waterboer’s A Short Account of Some of the Most Particular and Important Circumstances Attending the Government of the Griqua People (1827). This work was produced in collaboration with Peter Wright, an LMS missionary based at Griquatown, and was translated at the request of  Mr. Miles, temporary Superintendent of the LMS in southern Africa during Dr Philip’s absence in Britain in 1827–1828. Waterboer’s self-representation as protector of the Indigenous peoples of Transorangia was intimately connected to his efforts to maintain his authority as ruler of the Griquatown area. In the 1820s, he found an energetic support in the LMS missionary Robert Moffat (1795–1883). Moffat, who had been resident at Griquatown during 1820–1821, testified to the commissioners of the Eastern Inquiry as follows: Andries Waterboer has exerted himself to protect them [the San] and to cause them to be treated with lenity and conciliation. There are some instances of bushmen who have settled holding lands from the Griquas

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[…]They are protected in whatever property they acquire, and it is divided amongst the children at their death, and secured to them by law.42

Here, Moffat casts Waterboer as both the upholder of British law and the benevolent protector of Indigenous San communities vulnerable to attack from Griqua, Batswana, and trekboer commandos. He also presents Waterboer as a capable leader, fair and judicious in his proceedings and capable of protecting the persons and property under his control. Educated in mission Christianity at the LMS school at Griquatown, Waterboer was a poor man of San descent who, in his roles as a school teacher and lay preacher at Griquatown, had impressed his missionary mentors with his moral and intellectual seriousness.43 Throughout the 1820s, however, his authority was eroded by the so-called bergnaar rebellion under the leadership of Adam Kok II. Although the bergnaar rebellion was primarily an attack on Waterboer’s leadership and governance, the peripatetic lifestyle of Adam Kok II’s Griqua community during the 1820s was characterized by periodic raids on Griqua, San, and Batswana communities in the area. As Robert Ross has argued, it was after John Philip’s decision to cede the LMS mission station at Philippolis to Adam Kok II’s Griqua community that Indigenous San inhabitants in and around Philippolis “quickly came under Griqua pressure” in the form of commandos against San communities accused of stock theft, commandos that frequently resulted in the death of San men and the capture of women and children.44 As part of his campaign to present himself as the sole legitimate authority in Transorangia, Waterboer recorded his own personal account of the events in Griquatown following the rebellions by Adam Kok II and his followers. As David Johnson has stated, Waterboer’s Short Account was an exercise in Griqua nationalist historiography, a narrative structured by both the historical emergence of the Griqua captaincies in the early nineteenth century and Waterboer’s urgent political struggle to maintain law and order and to bolster his own position as a legitimate source of political

42  Anon, Papers Relative to the Condition and Treatment of the Native Inhabitants of Southern Africa, Within the Colony of the Cape of the Good Hope, Or Beyond the Frontier of That Colony, 127. 43  Robert Ross, Adam Kok’s Griquas: A Study in the Development of Stratification in South Africa, African Studies Series 21 (Cambridge; New  York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 20. 44  Ross, 24.

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and legal authority in Transorangia.45 What Johnson does not note, but which is central to Waterboer’s political self-fashioning, is his conscious use of the British humanitarian rhetoric to present himself as the protector of the Indigenous Batswana and San groups against the predatory commandos of both the Philippolis Griqua and other powerful African groups. In order to do this, he makes a rhetorical display of his own sentimental pity for the suffering of the Batswana and San at the hands of Adam Kok II’s bergenaars. In the following extract, Waterboer evinces a conscious knowledge of the ability accounts of Indigenous bodily suffering had to move the moral sympathies of British humanitarians. He would have perhaps been familiar with missionary accounts of Indigenous suffering from visitors to Griquatown such as John Philip and John Campbell, while his education at the Griquatown mission school would have familiarized him with the moral discourses of the Congregationalist LMS missionaries. In addressing his account directly to a missionary audience, Waterboer mobilizes his knowledge of what, in their eyes, constitutes “decent” moral character. Throughout, he positions himself as a moral as well as judicious leader in contrast to Adam Kok II and his “lawless” “banditti”: They made commandoes against the poor Bechuanas [Batswana] to steal their cattle; the bushmen, without end were, by that banditti, either shot dead or had their throats cut; and frequently women had their bellies cut open. Those individuals amongst us who were decent characters saw this state of things with grief.46

The primary function of Waterboer’s humanitarian representations of Indigenous suffering is to present himself as one of those “decent characters” who is emotionally capable of looking upon the suffering of the oppressed “with grief.” As a subject who looks at the “poor Bechuanas” and “bushmen” as the pathetic objects of his humanitarian pity, he demonstrates the capacity for racialized moral sympathy and through this

45  David Johnson, Imagining the Cape Colony: History, Literature, and the South African Nation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 172. 46  Andries Waterboer, ‘A Short Account of Some of the Most Particular and Important Circumstances Attending the Government of the Griqua People’, trans. Peter Wright (Griquatown, South Africa, 1827), CWN-LMS, SA Incoming, Council for World Missions/ London Mission Society, SOAS Special Collections.

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particular affective positioning seeks to claim a place for himself within the colonial social order. In Short Account Waterboer contrasts the “disorderly” conduct of Adam Kok II and his followers and Waterboer’s own commitment to the maintenance of “law and order.” Waterboer’s own mixed ethnic origins as an ex-slave of San descent who rose to be the elected captain of the Griquatown Griqua means that appealing to the moral sympathies of his missionary audience was the most effective means of bolstering his personal authority, an authority that could not be asserted by recourse to a single, stable Indigenous identity. Waterboer’s constant construction of Adam Kok II’s Griquas as “disorderly people” and “banditti” who “separated themselves from captains and laws” was designed to be read as evidence that he operates within an established Christian moral framework and can distinguish clearly between right and wrong.47 Moreover, by presenting himself as the sole source of moral and judicial authority in the contested and unruly borderlands, Waterboer also seeks to delegitimize the authority conferred upon Adam Kok II by John Philip, the Superintendent of the London Missionary Society who ceded the Philippolis Mission Station to Adam Kok II and his followers in 1825. This prepares the ground for the central dramatic episode of Waterboer’s Short Account, the bergenaar attack on Griquatown on 6 July 1827. In the night the body of the bergenaars sent me a message that they intended falling on Griqua Town to revenge the blood of six of their party who had been executed, and that neither man, woman nor child should be spared in the attack.48 They took possession of a part of the village and burned twelve houses; they murdered six individuals, and carried away our cattle and sheep and tools, and took away our wagons. I had only eighteen men on the place able to fight; but during the first and second day of the battle the number increased to thirty two. With these few I drove the enemy out of the place, and kept them out.49

Waterboer’s account of the battle presents Adam Kok II’s Griquas bandits as incapable of showing the humane restraint that was a key marker of civility. He shows how these men breached both Christian morals and the  Waterboer, ‘Short Account’.  On 7 May 1827 Waterboer’s government executed six bergenaars found guilty of stealing cattle from !Kora groups under Waterboer’s protection. 49  Waterboer, ‘Short Account’. 47 48

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ethics of honourable war by murdering the innocent and looting the village. By constantly reiterating the moral as well as legal legitimacy of his leadership, Waterboer prepares his readers for his self-fashioning as the successful warrior-leader, driving away the enemy despite being heavily outnumbered. This strategy enables him to transform a defeat, one that greatly weakened his authority both in Griquatown and beyond, into a moment of heroic resistance. In contrast to Waterboer, Hendrik Hendriks’s claim to sovereignty over the Philippolis territories that John Philip granted to Adam Kok II’s followers relied on his ability to cast the Griqua as vulnerable Indigenes in need of the benevolent protection of the British state. Hendriks was secretary to the Griqua leadership at Philippolis from 1828 until 1850, and he continued in that position after Adam Kok II died in 1835 under his successor, Adam Kok III. Like Waterboer, Hendriks learned to read and write at the mission school in Griquatown and was well acquainted with the LMS missionaries and colonial officials who visited and resided in Transorangia and the Eastern Cape.50 In his capacity as secretary, Hendriks corresponded with the colony on behalf of Adam Kok II. According to Archie L. Dick, Hendriks was “a highly literate man who ordered and read the colonial newspapers to Kok and his colleagues in a group, often in the open veld or special location.”51 Reading the colonial newspapers enabled Hendriks to access a literate public sphere that was ordinarily the preserve of middle-class colonists, who were generally of European origin. In particular, it made him aware of the debates being aired in the pages of the liberal South African Commercial Advertiser over controversial legislation emanating from the British parliament that aimed at ameliorating labour conditions for slaves and Indigenous labourers at the Cape. In 1828, the passing of Ordinance 50, which granted Indigenous peoples nominal legal equality with whites, was viewed by many of the settler community as an unforgivable imposition by the British government that infringed on their inalienable right to control Indigenous labourers however they saw fit. The editor of the South African Commercial Advertiser, John Fairbairn, staunchly defended Ordinance 50. His unerring support for the 50  Robert Ross, Adam Kok’s Griquas: A Study in the Development of Stratification in South Africa, African Studies Series 21 (Cambridge; New  York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 34–36. 51  Archie L.  Dick, The Hidden History of South Africa’s Book and Reading Cultures (Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 43.

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e­ vangelizing and educational work of the missionaries in southern Africa made him the ideal interlocutor to whom Hendriks could address his concerns over illegal trekboer land grabs in the Philippolis area. In a letter published in Fairbairn’s newspaper, under the title “Oppressions of the Griqua,” Hendriks consciously adopts the humanitarian rhetoric of protection in order to claim sovereignty for Adam Kok II’s Griqua over the territories surrounding the Philippolis mission station. Hendriks’s appeal for “protection” can be read as a strategic move in a propaganda battle aimed at enlisting the moral sympathies of Cape Town liberals and LMS missionaries to bolster the Philippolis captaincy in its battle against trekboer encroachments. He thus begins his appeal to Fairbairn’s readers as follows. Mr. Editor,—I have heard that hottentots have permission to write to you Sir, and that you are a good friend to all oppressed men. We have also hear that the great King of England has made all the hottentots free, but we do not believe that the king knows how it fares with us in this country, otherwise he would likewise take care of us.52

This direct appeal to British humanitarian self-representation as “protectors” of Indigenous peoples and friends to the oppressed clearly deploys moral sympathy to make the case for Griqua sovereignty over Philippolis. By affecting to take the social contract implied by the discourse of “protection” at face value, Hendriks appeals directly to British claims to sentimental and moral refinement by making a legal claim to sovereignty over land in the affective register of familial “care.” In doing so, he challenges the British government to fulfil the responsibilities implied in its self-­ representation as the protective “father” of the empire’s Indigenous populations. Hendricks draws a direct analogy between the status of the Khoekhoe and that of the Griqua to claim for the Griqua the status of an Indigenous people in need of protection from settler expansionism. Elsewhere in the letter, he articulates this point even more forcefully: “The spot where the Cape stands, and all about it has been the land of our forefathers; there they have pastured their cattle and sheep in peace and freedom; and had it

52  Hendrik Hendriks, ‘Oppression of the Griqua’, South African Commercial Advertiser, 29 September 1830, 2.

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not been for the Christian men we would to this day in that country.”53 This claim to Indigeneity ran contrary to an important strand of Griqua ethnic self-fashioning, by which they defined themselves as what Martin Legassick has termed “swarthy Hollanders,” adopting the modes of economic subsistence and Christian religious practice that were characteristic of the trekboers.54 This need to fashion an Indigenous identity for his community was made urgent for Hendriks by the increasing embedding of racial thinking in British colonial governance in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, a period that coincided with the ethnogenesis of the Griquas as a distinct community. As Alan Lester and Zoe Laidlaw have argued, humanitarian notions of “protection” were “predicated on a critical relationship between the assumed identity of Indigenous peoples— their degree of “pristine purity” and their tenure on the land.”55 In order to stake a legitimate legal claim to the lands around Philippolis, Hendriks knew he had to establish the Griqua in the minds of European humanitarians as the Indigenous possessors of that territory. The indeterminacy of the Griquas position poised between Indigenous and colonial social orders was reflected rhetorically in Hendriks’s appropriation of the religious and economic discourses that underpinned the ideology of moral colonization. First, he adopts the rhetoric of Christian universalism that characterized LMS missionary discourse during this period, to assert the political rights of is people on the basis of shared Christian values: We have resided here [at Philippolis] already four years, and remained in peace and friendship with the Colony: wherefore must we be plagued and annoyed incessantly? Are we not also creatures who are destined by the same God of us all to remain on the earth? Wherefore then must we suffer continually so much from the Boers as to compel us to fly further into the interior?56

 Hendriks, ‘Oppressions of the Griqua’.  For more on the parallels between Griqua and trekboer social and economic life, see Ross, Adam Kok’s Griquas, 10. 55  Z. Laidlaw and Alan Lester, eds., Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World, Cambridge Imperial and Post-­ Colonial Studies (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015), 12. 56  Hendriks, ‘Oppressions of the Griqua’. 53 54

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Hendricks uses the Christian concept of universal fellowship in order to highlight the gap between the rhetorical offer of “friendship” proffered by the missionaries and the material reality of dispossession resulting from the refusal of colonial officials, such as Andries Stockenstrom, to restrain illegal trekboer encroachments upon territories claimed by the Griqua. Hendriks’s emphasis on the suffering caused by the constant cycle of migration and displacement imposed on the Griqua also demonstrates an acute awareness of the moral currency the figure of the suffering Indigene had in liberal humanitarian circles. Elsewhere in the letter, Hendriks demonstrates an ability to adopt the discourses of colonial ethnography in support of his cause. In particular, he shows that he is well versed in contemporary economic discourses about the relationship between social development and the management of land that emerged from the application of Scottish Enlightenment stadial theory to colonial social formations. He presents the Griqua as not just peaceful “friends” to the colony in need of protection, but also economically productive settlers, cultivating and improving the lands they own: Sir, is it true that it is the will of the King of England that all people in the world shall build house, and plough and sow, and make gardens? In old times we have pastured our cattle and hunted, but since we came to this country, we have taken fifty farms in hands; have led the water out; have ploughed, sowed, and made gardens. I think, Sir, that the king will be glad if you tell him that hottentots have done this; and, Sir, you must come yourself to look at our farms. We have also the intention to do more; but we have now been quite discouraged, from the intrusion of the Boers; for we think on the manner of old times, when Christians seized the places of our forefathers.57

Hendricks argues that since the official recognition by colonial authorities of the legitimacy of Adam Kok II’s captaincy at Philippolis in 1826, the Griqua have been secure enough in the possession of the land not only to cultivate arable crops and make gardens, material indicators of a society’s progress from the pastoral to the settled developmental stage according to stadial theory, but to improve their lands through modernization, most notably irrigation. This construction of the Griqua enables Hendriks to frame the Griqua as model settlers as well as authentic Indigenes.  Hendriks, ‘Oppressions of the Griqua’.

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In his letter, Hendriks uses stadial theory to present regression into a state of “savagery” as the inevitable consequence for the Griqua of trekboer encroachments into their territory. He does this by drawing on a widely held belief that spatial distance from “civilization” leads to socio-cultural regression. If we must go there [into the interior of southern Africa] we must do the same which the Christians always do; we must likewise seize their country. I think how it will be with us if we go so far from the Colony: we shall become very savage and wild in the interior, without clothing and other things; but, sir, we think it is better to be naked and free, than to wear clothes and be oppressed.58

Hendriks’s alignment of socio-cultural regression from “civilization” to “savagery” with the violent dispossession of Indigenous people that was the foundational act of settler colonialism enables a reversal of the central ideological premise of stadial theory: that European societies are inherently more civilized than Indigenous societies. By stating that “it is better to be naked and free, than to wear clothes and be oppressed,” Hendriks argues for the importance of political autonomy over the external signifiers of settled life. He holds up the threat of a regression to “savagery” in order to challenge both Cape liberals and the British colonial government to demonstrate that their commitment to racial equality is not merely rhetorical, demanding that they work with him to ensure the political and social progress of his “semi-civilized” Griqua polity. Hendriks ends by referring to the Griqua as “half savages” in order to argue that the “savagery” of their treatment of the San and Batswana was not the result of their Indigeneity, but a behaviour learned from the use of commandos against the San and by the trekboers: With regard to our bad things, sir, I say myself that we have cause to be ashamed about some things, we must improve yet, we are still half savages, and no so as civilized men. I think that men require many years to become properly civilised, but sir, it is a pity that the Christians do not get better, considering that they are so long a time Christian men. We have learnt many things from them that are not good. Some of us have made in former times Commandos with them, and shot Caffers [amaXhosa] and Bosjesman, and I hear that continually Commandos go against the Caffers and bring out  Hendriks, ‘Oppressions of the Griqua’.

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thousands of cattle, and that guiltless are shot. Have you not heard, sir, of the great Commando which went some months ago against the bosjesmen at Bamboosberg? They have killed many bosjesmen. The bosjesmen had only taken horses. Sir, I think, according to my simple understanding, that people who pick up our faults must first remove these things and give a little example to us, for they are Christian-men, and they can speak about us.59

Hendriks positions himself as the Indigenous mimic man, one ready to learn from his colonial masters the ethical standards required of civilized nations. Yet his careful reading of reports about colonial commandos against the amaXhosa and the San in the colonial press enables him to expose the double standards of a colonizing power, a power that condemns the Griqua for their crimes against the Indigenous peoples of Transorangia, while permitting British and trekboer frontiersmen to pursue commandos against the San and the amaXhosa with impunity. He thus exposes the limits of the humanitarian discourse of moral colonization by arguing that the “Christian-men,” instead of setting an ethical example for the Griqua to follow, are complicit in the violent extermination of the very Indigenous people that they claim to be protecting. Throughout his letter, Hendriks demonstrates an awareness of the role that the South African Commercial Advertiser played in the media ecology of the British Empire by addressing himself to both the liberal settler elite of the Cape Colony and a global British audience. He is clearly aware of the different representations of the Griqua that were commonly circulating among the Anglo-Dutch settler elites in Cape Town. This knowledge of colonial ethnographic discourse enabled him to position the Griqua as both model settlers whose cultivation of the land and aspiration towards moral improvement marked them as legitimate participants in the colonial political and social order and authentic Indigenes. He appeals to the British crown for “protection” from the excesses of the trekboer frontiersmen, whose violent excesses against southern Africa’s Indigenous peoples had already been well documented by British humanitarians. In so doing, Hendriks exploits the indeterminacy of the Griqua’s role as intermediaries between the Christian colony and the independent African communities beyond the borderlands to expose the limits of the universalizing humanitarian discourse. By appropriating the affective rhetoric of “protection” and the socio-economic discourse of stadial theory, he is able to both  Hendriks, ‘Oppressions of the Griqua’.

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advocate for the intervention of the colonial government on behalf of the Griqua to remove the material threat of dispossession at the hands of migratory trekboers and present the Philippolis Griqua as model settlers, cultivating and improving both their land and their manners according to British economic and social norms. In the 1830s, Hendriks’s and Waterboer’s respective pleas for aid from the Colony were temporarily answered. Through the mediation of John Philip, a treaty was signed between Waterboer and the Cape Colony, in which he was to be paid an annual salary of 100 pounds and supplied with ammunition. In return, he was charged with protecting the northern colonial frontier, returning fugitive slaves to the colony, and warning the colonial administration of any possible attacks. Peter Wright, the LMS missionary stationed at Griquatown, was also appointed as a government agent.60 During the 1830s, Hendriks “became the dominant political figure and ‘kingmaker’” in Philippolis, impressing contemporary colonial administrators such as Andries Stockenstrom with his abilities.61 In 1837, Abraham Kok, successor to Adam Kok II at Philippolis, signed an agreement with the  Cape Colony, which recognized his authority and also granted him a stipend and access to ammunition. These agreements, as well as the Napier Agreement of 1843, which was signed between Abraham’s successor, Adam Kok III (1811–1875) of Philippolis and the Cape Colony, were a mark of the important role the Griqua played in the 1830s as brokers between the British-controlled Cape Colony, the migratory trekboers, who were deserting the colony in search of greater independence, and the Indigenous Basotho and Batswana polities that lay beyond its borders.62 The partial success of Hendriks’s and Waterboer’s appropriations of the humanitarian discourse of protection exemplifies what Lauan-Australian historian Tracey Banivanua Mar has described, in the context of the British-controlled Pacific, as “a new imperial literacy […] that went beyond letters and numbers to a proficiency in concepts,” in ways that enabled Indigenous leaders across the globe to refashion the humanitarian discourse introduced to them by missionaries to their own local 60  Martin Legassick, ‘The Northern Frontier to c.1840: The Rise and Decline of the Griqua People’, in The Shaping of South African Society 1652–1840, ed. Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee, 2nd edition (Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1989), 400. 61  Legassick, 401. 62  For details of The Napier Treaty, see Schoeman, 67.

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circumstances.63 Both Hendriks and Waterboer were educated at the London Missionary Society school at Griquatown before taking leadership roles in Griquatown and Philippolis, where they became part of a generation of Indigenous leaders across the British-controlled world who “embraced the literacy that accompanied the Bible as a means of engaging with the colonial world.”64 Banivanua Mar has demonstrated how Indigenous leaders in the Pacific gained fluency “in the imperial language of protection and humanitarianism” and “utilised its vocabulary to articulate their own expression of rights and entitlements arising from colonial encounters.”65 From the evidence of Waterboer’s and Hendriks’s writings, Griqua leaders were also acquiring literacy in humanitarian discourse as part of an effort to carve a unique role for themselves as mediators between the European colony and the African polities beyond its borders. Yet embedded in Hendriks’s letter to the South African Commercial Advertiser is also a subtle critique of the very discourses that he is appropriating for his own political purposes. He uses the well-documented evidence of trekboer commandos against the San that were widely circulated both in British government reports and in the pages of Fairbairn’s newspaper to argue that the Europeans are failing to embody the moral standards that they seek to impose on Indigenous groups. Hendriks’s shrewd awareness of the monopoly that Europeans have over public discourse on the social and political future of southern Africa’s Indigenous groups is manifest when he states ironically: “Sir, I think, according to my simple understanding, that people who pick up our faults must first remove these things and give a little example to us, for they are Christian-men, and they can speak about us” (my emphasis). This irony evinces Hendriks’s acute awareness of the influence that even anecdotal ethnographic accounts of the activities of Indigenous peoples, such as those gathered by the commissioners of Eastern Inquiry, had on shaping colonial policy in the disputed borderlands. In his Short Account, Waterboer demonstrates a similar awareness of the power that Anglophone representations of Indigenous peoples had in shaping colonial policy. His self-conscious deployment of the rhetoric of racialized moral sympathy for the San and the Batswana is a means by 63  Tracey Banivanua Mar, ‘Imperial Literacy and Indigenous Rights: Tracing Transoceanic Circuits of a Modern Discourse’, Aboriginal History 37 (2013): 3. 64  Mar, 8. 65  Mar, 11.

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which he distances himself from his own Indigenous identity as the descendent of San former slaves. By appropriating the affective grammar of moral colonization, Waterboer is making a plea to his missionary supporters for full membership of the colonial ruling class to bolster his own dwindling authority within his Griquatown captaincy, a polity which had been greatly diminished by the loss of Adam Kok II and his followers. The precarity of his position as leader perhaps made it even more necessary for him to prove to his colonial supporters his credentials as a strong leader, a good Christian, and a loyal subject. While Waterboer is to a certain degree trapped by his unwavering loyalty to the British crown and the LMS missionaries stationed at Griquatown, Hendriks’s greater independence from direct missionary control enables him to expose the limits of the discourse of moral colonization and its hollow rhetoric of protection. The existential threat posed to the Philippolis Griqua by the British colonial government’s failure to control illegal trekboer settlement in Transorangia makes Hendriks’s clarion call that it is “better to be naked and free than to wear clothes and be oppressed” such a potent challenge to colonial authority. Through this call, Hendriks questions the desirability of acculturation for the Griqua by challenging the British state’s self-representation as the “protector” of Indigenous communities both inside the Cape Colony and in the disputed borderlands of Transorangia. Hendriks’s assertive tone makes a marked contrast with the humility displayed by Adam Kok II in his correspondence with Stockenstrom that opened this chapter. Perhaps Adam Kok II’s pose of humility was staged to demonstrate his good character in the face of reports that he had been carrying out commandos against the San. Adam Kok II’s explicit hope that Stockenstrom “will not have a distrustful thought about me” certainly suggests as much.66 Hendriks certainly would have been aware that he had found a sympathetic audience and vocal advocate in the South African Commercial Advertiser’s editor, and an awareness that his complaints of trekboer cruelty would have met a sympathetic audience amongst the newspaper’s liberal, predominantly Anglophone, readership. During the 1840s, Hendriks was compelled again to use the pages of the settler press to call on his colonial allies for support. This was a decade during which the Philippolis Griqua came under intense pressure from an increasingly organized and assertive Boer republicanism and were forced into a 66  Kok II, ‘Adam Kok II to Andries Stockenstrom: Request for Protection against the Bergenaars (October 1825)’.

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series of territorial concessions. These compromises began in 1840, with Adam Kok III’s decision to lease part of his Philippolis territory to trekboers, while allowing them to retain the laws of the colony and live outside his legal authority.67 In 1846, the Maitland Treaty formally partitioned the Philippolis into “alienable” territory, which could be legally leased to Boer farmers and administered by colonial law, and the “unalienable” territory that was retained by the Griqua under their own laws. Although Adam Kok III was content to accept this agreement on the basis that the Griqua would have the right to half the quitrents from the leased farms and be granted permanent protection from the British government to safeguard the “unalienable” territory from Boer encroachments, the Maitland Treaty marked the beginning of formal British Government support for Boer sovereignty in Transorangia, a policy change that was to prove catastrophic for the Philippolis captaincy. In 1848, under the Governorship of Sir Harry Smith, the British temporarily claimed sovereignty over Transorangia, putting in place a punitive treaty with Adam Kok III that forced him and his people to submit to colonial law and British sovereignty. Most significant, the Bloemfontein Treaty of 1848 transferred ownership of all the “alienable” territory of the captaincy to Boer farmers, resulting in the loss of over 100 farms, which together were worth between £100,000 and £200,000.68 Not only was this a huge financial loss for the Philippolis Griqua; it was also a violation by the British of the terms of the Maitland Treaty drawn up only two years previously. This act of betrayal was a turning point in British-Griqua relations. Mistrustful of the intentions of the British colonial government who were deaf to Adam Kok III’s pleas for redress, Hendriks once again turned to his long-standing connections in the Colony, Fairbairn, Philip, and Stockenstrom, just as he had done when he wrote to the Advertiser in 1830. In December 1848, Hendriks made two visits to Stockenstrom’s home in the Eastern Cape. By this time, Stockenstrom had become Lieutenant-Governor of the territory and an influential member of the colonial elite, with connections to the Imperial Government in London. Hendriks must have known that Stockenstrom had a direct line of

67  Karel Schoeman, ed., Griqua records: the Philippolis Captaincy, 1825–1861 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1996), 42. 68  These are the figures given by Adam Kok III in a letter to Sir George Grey in 1857. See Schoeman, 186–87.

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communication to Earl Grey, the British Colonial Secretary, as well as having sympathies for the Griqua cause. On 12 June 1849, Stockenstrom published a letter in the Cape of Good Hope Observer: a newspaper edited by the Cape liberal lawyer and journalist Frank Watermeyer. Hendriks’s correspondence narrates the meeting between Adam Kok III and Governor Harry Smith to Earl Grey. Hendriks records that, after Governor Smith threatened the Griqua with dispossession if they did not adhere peacefully to the terms of the Bloemfontein Treaty, Adam Kok III offered a pointed response: “The Chief and council went into the room, where the Governor received them, and told His Excellency what they had determined, and after some argument explicitly told the Governor that they wished to adhere to the Maitland Treaty as ratified by the Queen.”69 Hendriks explicitly contrasts Adam Kok III’s civility in dealing with Harry Smith’s provocations with the governor’s barbarity. He describes how, in response to their request, Smith “swore he would hang the Chief from the beam over his head” and “turned Chief and Council out the room like a pack of dogs.”70 Here, Hendriks again questions the ontological basis of the distinction drawn in colonial racial discourse between “civilized” and “barbarous” peoples by confirming legal and moral legitimacy on Adam Kok III at the expense of Governor Smith. Hendriks portrays Smith as acting with excessive violence and disrespect for the rule of law. These are attributes conventionally associated in colonial racial discourse with “uncivilized” ethnic groups. At the end of his interview with Stockenstrom, Hendriks repeats the technique he used in 1830 by positioning the Griqua in the “semi-­ civilized” developmental stage between nomadic wanderers and settled cultivators. He adopts this strategy to warn the British of the potentially destabilizing consequences for the Colony that would result from any failure to protect Griqua sovereignty: “We shall never think of resisting British authority, but we shall emigrate far into the interior, as the Boers have done, and leave civilisation and the Word of God behind us. Who shall answer for the barbarism and bloodshed that will follow?”71 69  Hendriks to Stockenstrom, quoted in Fredrick Watermeyer, ‘Earl Grey and the Frontier’, The Cape of Good Hope Observer, 12 June 1849, 3–7, 6. Colonial Office Collection, National Archives, London. 70   Hendriks to Stockenstrom, quoted in Fredrick Watermeyer, ‘Earl Grey and the Frontier’, 6. 71   Hendriks to Stockenstrom, quoted in Fredrick Watermeyer, ‘Earl Grey and the Frontier’, 7.

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As in his 1830 letter to the Advertiser, Hendriks exploits colonial racial discourses for his own purposes. Since he understands the rhetorical power of racial myths about the alleged barbarity of unacculturated Indigenous peoples, Hendriks presents the threatened withdrawal of his people from the influence of the Colony and the Christian teachings of missionaries as a deliberate regression to savagery, a regression that will result in bloodshed that has the potential to further unsettle the northern frontier, thus threatening the peace and prosperity of the Cape Colony itself. As unrest intensified across Transorangia throughout 1849, Hendriks registers his disillusionment with the failure of the British to honour the terms of the Maitland Treaty in a letter to Stockenstrom dated 1 August 1849, which was translated by Stockenstrom and printed in the Cape of Good Hope Observer on 28 August 1849. In this letter, Hendriks twice explicitly accuses Harry Smith of illegal land theft. Referring to the Bloemfontein Treaty, he states that “the land of the Griquas was taken away by threats.”72 Later, he claims Smith dispossessed the Griqua of an even greater portion of land than agreed to under the terms of the Bloemfontein Treaty: “The Governor has oppressed us, and by means of threats took our ground, and even took more ground from us than the widest construction of the so called ‘Amicable Arrangement’ [i.e., The Bloemfontein Treaty] which he (the Governor) had subscribed with his own hand, permits.”73 Here, Hendriks explicitly reframes British relations to the Griqua by arguing that far from being their protectors the British were now their “oppressors”—breaking legally binding treaties and dispossessing them of lands to which the Griqua owned titles that had been formally recognized under colonial law. That Hendriks, an ally of the Colony, should publicly expose the hypocrisy inherent in the rhetoric of protection that underwrote Griqua-British relations is a measure of the level of disillusionment that Hendriks and the Philippolis Griqua experienced in the wake of the Bloemfontein Treaty. He was to leave Griqua politics the following year after an acrimonious dispute with Adam Kok III resulted in his being sacked as secretary of the Philippolis Council, a position to which he had given twenty years of service. Once control of Transorangia was formally ceded to the Boers in 72  Hendriks to Stockenstrom, quoted in Fredrick Watermeyer, ‘The State of Southern Africa’, The Cape of Good Hope Observer, 28 August 1849, 1–5, 5. Colonial Office Collection, National Archives, London. 73  Hendriks to Stockenstrom, quoted in Watermeyer, ‘The State of Southern Africa’, 5.

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1854, Adam Kok III played an increasingly marginal role in the political life of the Philippolis area. The cession to the Boers culminated in the sale of the remaining Griqua lands, in what was now known as the Orange Free State, and the trek of the Philippolis Griqua across the Drakensberg Mountains to set up a new statelet adjacent to the colony of Natal in what would become known as Griqualand East. This territory, too, was to come under pressure from both British and Boer expansionism, leaving the Griqua a dispossessed people by the end of the nineteenth century. Attending to the rhetorical self-fashioning of the Griqua leaders therefore highlights the challenges and possibilities presented by the indeterminate status of the Griqua polities, poised as they were between Indigenous and colonial social orders. Waterboer’s dependence on the backing of his British missionary patrons for access to guns, horses, and military support from the colony to bolster his ailing authority in Transorangia caused him to adopt the affective grammar of moral colonization to claim membership of the colonial social order. By comparison, Hendriks’s more oppositional stance to missionary intervention enabled him publicly to expose the limits of moral colonization in the Cape by drawing attention to the repeated failures of the British government to protect Indigenous people from the depredations of illegal trekboer settlers. The example of the Griqua also presents a challenge to the analytical frameworks that scholars currently adopt to analyse settler/Indigenous encounters in sites of colonization. For one thing, as Edward Cavanagh has pointed out, the Griqua were perpetrators as well as victims of frontier violence.74 They were responsible for the violent displacement of other Indigenous groups to secure their power and sovereignty in Transorangia, displacing and eliminating San and Batswana people, some of whom they sold into white colonists. For another, the Griqua were what Martin Legassick has termed “frontiersmen” who migrated into the lands they settled, intermixing with other migrating white and black communities.75 For many years Griqua leaders demonstrated a capacity to exploit their position as intermediaries between the Colony and the Indigenous polities in the interior to their advantage, using colonial law to secure title to their lands and to treaty with the British to secure the financial and military resources necessary to 74  E.  Cavanagh, Settler Colonialism and Land Rights in South Africa: Possession and Dispossession on the Orange River (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2013), 39. 75  Martin Legassick, Hidden Histories of Gordonia: Land Dispossession and Resistance in the Northern Cape, 1800–1990 (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2016), 4.

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maintain their position as the dominant political actors in the Transorangia borderlands. They were also able to use their imperial literacy to participate in the colonial public sphere through their correspondence with missionaries, colonial administrators, and newspaper editors, mobilizing these imperial networks publicly to defend their legal entitlement to their lands in the face of illegal trekboer expansionism. Moreover, as the case of Hendriks proves, their intimate knowledge of Christian religion and colonial law enabled Christianized Indigenous communities like the Griqua to hold the British Colonial government to account for failing to fulfil both the moral obligations of the civilizing mission and legal obligations placed upon them by the treaties to which they entered with the Griqua captains. Turning back to the writings of Indigenous people such as Waterboer and Hendriks therefore reveals the varying strategies which Indigenous people who lived under the conditions of settler colonialism deployed to become agents and actors in the colonial world, not just the passive victims of an inevitable process of displacement and elimination. Fig. 3.1  Adam Kok III (1811–1875). Photograph by P. Morozow ca. 1860–18-75. Image reproduced courtesy of the Western Cape Archives and Records Service

CHAPTER 4

“The South African ‘Children of the Mist’”: The Bushman, the Highlander, and the Making of Colonial Identity in Thomas Pringle’s South African Poetry

The name Thomas Pringle cannot be unknown to any of our readers, and wherever it is known, it will vouch for the modest and substantial worth of the volume to which it is prefixed. […] We are in want of a geographical term to describe the region of the Cape Colony and what has been barbarously denominated Caffaria; i.e. pagan land. But, til a better is found, we must be content to use the term South Africa. —Anon, ‘African Sketches by Thomas Pringle’, Eclectic Review, 11 June 1834, 425–441, 425

In this review of Thomas Pringle’s African Sketches (1834), the Eclectic Review carefully counterpoints the fame of the author with the obscurity of his subject matter. By 1834, Pringle had become a familiar figure in British literary culture. As secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society between 1827 and 1834, he was a prominent abolitionist and is perhaps best-­ known today as the editor of The History of Mary Prince (1832).1 Between 1  See, for example, Matthew Shum, ‘The Prehistory of The History of Mary Prince : Thomas Pringle’s “The Bechuana Boy”’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 64, no. 3 (December 2009): 291–322; Jane Stafford, Colonial Literature and the Native Author: Indigeneity and Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 107–47.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Atkin, Writing the South African San, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86226-8_4

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1828 and 1834, he was also editor of the popular annual Friendship’s Offering, where he published many of the era’s leading poets, including the juvenile offerings of John Ruskin and Alfred Tennyson.2 In contrast to his early failures in Edinburgh in 1817–1819, Pringle was also a poet and journalist of some note. In particular, his accounts of settler violence against Indigenous San and amaXhosa communities were instrumental in drawing the attention of the metropolitan abolitionist lobby to the mistreatment of Indigenous labourers at the Cape in the years immediately preceding the abolition of slavery in the Crown colonies in 1833. These were published both in the magazines and newspapers of the Cape Colony and in the Oriental Herald and New Monthly Magazine, where they came to the notice of Thomas Fowell Buxton and the Evangelical, anti-slavery party in Britain.3 Yet so remote was the Cape Colony both geographically and imaginatively from the metropolitan core in 1834 that the Westminster Review quipped: “The Cape is only known as a place somewhere or other [but] whether it belongs to India or England, or to nobody at all, would puzzle most of our countrymen to declare.”4 While the Cape Colony had failed to capture the public imagination to the extent that the Australian and North American colonies had done, the Westminster’s witticism belies a wave of emigration fever that had gripped British pressmen and pamphleteers in the wake of the British Parliament’s decision in 1819 to grant £50,000 to support the large-scale British settlement of the Eastern Cape. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, and subsequently throughout the 1820s, the virtues of emigration to the Cape were trumpeted in the British press, from the pen of John Barrow at the Quarterly Review, to popular emigration pamphlets that celebrated the Cape’s mild climate, productive soil, and cheap commodities.5 The naturalist William Burchell’s 2  During Pringle’s time as editor of Friendship’s Offering he published works by Robert Southey, S. T. Coleridge, Alfred and Fredrick Tennyson, James Hogg, John Browning, and Bernard Barton. Friendship’s Offering also published poems by Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Felicia Hemans and tales by Mary Russell Mitford. 3  Damian Shaw, ‘The Writings of Thomas Pringle’ (Doctoral thesis, Cambridge, UK, University of Cambridge, 1996), 136–41. 4  Anon, ‘Hottentots and Caffres’, Westminster Review, October 1836, 93–107:93. 5  Other examples of emigration pamphlets “puffing” the Cape Colony prior to 1820 include G.A.  Robertson, Notes On Africa; Particularly Those Parts Which Are Situated Between Cape Verd and the River Congo […] To Which Is Added and Appendix Containing a Compendious Account of the Cape of Good Hope, Its Productions and Resources with a Variety of Important Information Very Necessary to Be Known by Persons about to Emigrate to the

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comments in his Hints on Emigration to the Cape of Good Hope (1819) are typical of the exuberant praise that was lavished on the Cape as a site of emigration: The capitalist emigrant […] when his prospects in his own country lose their brightness […] May look with confidence towards the Cape of Good Hope as a land where, with the remainder of his property he may enjoy the comforts, as well as the necessaries of life; and by moderate exertion and care, attain even a moderate independence, and secure for his children possessions in a most healthy climate, still under the parental government of his native country.6

Such accounts did much to encourage sanguine expectations about the ease with which a living could be made in southern Africa, leading more than 80,000 people to apply for places on the government-sponsored emigration programme. Five thousand settlers, divided into parties of ten able-bodied men over eighteen and their families, were each allotted 100 acres of land in the so-called neutral territory, a stretch of land on the eastern periphery of the colony some 700 miles from Cape Town. This was land that had recently been unilaterally annexed by the British from neighbouring amaXhosa chiefs.

Humanitarianism, Ethnography, and Antiquarianism: The Making of Thomas Pringle’s “Ethnographic Poetics” During the 1820s and 1830s, the Cape Colony was a nation that was coming into being, and Pringle, along with his friend and fellow Scot, John Fairbairn, was instrumental in helping shape the ideological contours of an emergent Cape-British settler identity through the establishment of an independent Anglophone press. Pringle’s position as a journalist, editor, and poet both in Britain and the Cape enabled him to intervene in debates about imperial policy and colonial nationalism in the years preceding the Colony (London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones; and Fisher, 1819); Richard Barnard Fisher, The Importance of the Cape of Good Hope as a Colony to Great Britain: Independently of the Advantages It Possesses as a Military and Naval Station and the Key to Our Territorial Possessions in India… (London: Printed for T. Cadell and W. Davies…, 1816). 6  William John Burchell, Hints on Emigration to the Cape of Good Hope (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1819), 17.

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abolition of slavery in the colonies in 1833. Pringle’s writings on Indigenous peoples can be situated within a broader humanitarian discourse that underpinned much British writing on the settler colonies during the 1820s and 1830s. As discussed in Chap. 3, this discourse involved couching British colonial expansion in a “moral vernacular” underpinned by an evangelically inflected Christian morality and British law.7 Pringle’s writings on Indigenous peoples were part of this humanitarian discourse, which justified British colonial expansion into unceded Indigenous lands on the basis that it would bring legal protection, legitimate commerce, and the abolition of slavery to Britain’s new imperial subjects. When Pringle published his ethnographic accounts of San and amaXhosa communities in British periodicals and in his longer prose account of life in the Cape Colony, he deployed humanitarian discourse quite self-consciously. For this reason, Pringle’s Narrative of a Residence in South Africa (1834) can be situated, as John O’Leary and Matthew Shum have argued, in a popular sub-genre of the nineteenth-century travelogue that was concerned with drawing the European reading public’s attention to the plight of Indigenous peoples. As O’Leary contends, by the 1830s there was a “well established discourse about the ill-treatment of South Africans,” which he traces from Swedish naturalist Anders Sparrman’s A Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope (1785), through to John Barrow’s Travels to the Interior of Southern Africa (1801), before reaching its apotheosis in the missionary John Philip’s Researches in Southern Africa (1828).8 Philip’s Researches played an important role in drawing the attention of British abolitionists Thomas Fowell Buxton and William Wilberforce to the coercive labour conditions at the Cape, thus imbricating ameliorationist arguments for improving Indigenous labour conditions at the Cape with metropolitan abolitionist debates in the run-up to the abolition of slavery in the colonies in 1833.9 This humanitarian discourse was underpinned by contemporaneous theories of uneven development. Such theories emerged in the eighteenth century from an ethnological discourse in which the distance between Europe and the colonies was imagined as temporal as well as spatial. This  Lester and Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, 2.  O’Leary, ‘“Unlocking the Fountains of the Heart”’, 57; Shum, ‘Writing Settlement and Empire’, 191. 9  Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 79. 7 8

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discursive elision between spatial and temporal distancing, which anthropologist Johannes Fabian terms the “denial of coevalness,” allowed late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ethnologists and ethnographers to frame cultural difference within an evolutionary discourse structured around Enlightenment notions of “progress” and “regression.”10 As Evan Gottlieb has pointed out, Adam Smith’s stadial theory provided a conceptual framework through which early nineteenth-century ethnologists, historians, and travel writers were able to draw analogies between different societies on a global scale:11 By teaching readers to apprehend that societies could co-exist in space yet seem to occupy different historical moments, Smith and those who took up his ideas were giving Britons the cognitive tools to grasp their world as an interconnected albeit uneven whole.12

The stadial theory developed by Scottish Enlightenment conjectural historians became a means whereby history and ethnography could be discursively elided, allowing readers to see time on a spatial as well as a temporal axis. This development in turn enabled analogies to be drawn in ethnographic travel narratives between non-European societies and European societies of the premodern past. This newly globalized ethnographic history brought European and extra-European peoples into the same analytic frame in the early nineteenth century, as travel writers of all stripes used representations of Indigenous peoples in what Mary Louise Pratt has termed the “contact zone” of the colonies in order to reflect upon their own national identities and historical narratives.13 The discursive elision between European antiquarianism and the ethnographic representation of non-European peoples is also evident in the analogy that Pringle draws in his South African poetry between the southern African “bushman” and the Scottish Highlander. Pringle’s immersion in the history and folklore of his native Roxburghshire profoundly influenced both the form and content of his poetry. While 10  Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, Second edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 31. 11  On Scottish Enlightenment thinkers and their influence on nineteenth-century ethnology, see Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress. 12  Evan Gottlieb, Romantic Globalism: British Literature and Modern World Order, 1750–1830 (The Ohio State University Press, 2014), 32. 13  Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7.

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Pringle was working as a journalist in Edinburgh, we see the first evidence of his interest in Scottish folklore as he “wrote several songs for old unpublished Scottish airs” for Alexander Campbell’s two-volume Albyn’s Anthology (1816–1818) and published a collection of loco-descriptive verse titled Autumnal Excursions, or Sketches in Teviotdale; with Other Poems (1819).14 When Pringle came to write about South Africa, his frequent use of the ballad form, as Jason Rudy has persuasively argued, enabled him to draw his readers’ attention not only to his continued connection to the poetic and folkloric traditions of Scotland but also to questions of portability and circulation that are inherent in the use of a genre that enabled the print transmission of oral poetic forms.15 By tracing the circulation history of Pringle’s ballad “Song of the Wild Bushman,” the first poem in the English language to be written in the voice of an Indigenous South African, I show how Pringle’s blending of ethnographic, poetic, and political discourses enabled the poem be disseminated to different “communities of interpretation” in the Cape Colony and Britain. The differing political and literary currents running through the reading communities the poem reached in each of these locations in the 1820s and 1830s ensured the poem acquired difference valences in each location.16 Before turning to this poem, I want to outline more broadly how Pringle’s South African poetry discloses an anxiety about belonging and identity that resulted from his position as a first-generation settler in a colony whose material success was far from assured.

Exile and Settlement in Thomas Pringle’s South African Poetry Ever since Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1991) appeared, it has become axiomatic to view print media as central to the formation of national consciousness. In the British Empire, newspapers functioned as what historian Chris Holdridge has termed a “discursive mediator of identity” for those British emigrants who forsook the metropole for the settler 14  George W.  Robinson, ‘A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS PRINGLE’S “AFAR IN THE DESERT”’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 17 (1923): 24. 15   Jason R.  Rudy, ‘Scottish Sounds in Colonial South Africa’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 71, no. 2 (1 September 2016): 210, https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2016.71.2.197. 16  Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, 4.

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colonies after the end of the Napoleonic Wars.17 The function of newspaper poetry within this broader Anglophone media ecology has been debated in recent years, as poetry’s portability has reestablished its importance to scholars interested in the role that print culture played in enabling the articulation of emerging national identities in the British settler colonies. Poetry’s ability to traverse borders—both physically, as the portable property of emigrants or through the “cut-and-scissors” reprint culture of nineteenth-century journalism, and imaginatively, through memorization, reproduction, and imitation—has led to a spate of recent studies that highlight the importance of poetry for the development of colonial literary cultures across the Anglo-world.18 As Jason Rudy has argued, the material form of poetry is central to its success as a globally circulating cultural commodity: Poetry’s portability “meant it could circulate with ease through Britain’s colonies, spaces that at first were not equipped to publish longer works.”19 Throughout the nineteenth century, the most common way for poetry to be transferred from the private notebooks and memories of recently arrived emigrants to the public sphere was through colonial newspapers. In an era before the development of field-specific periodicals, colonial newspapers functioned as what Scotsman George Greig, the printer of the Cape Colony’s first independent newspaper the South African Commercial Advertiser, termed “a medium of general communication” connecting geographically dispersed settler communities to colonial hubs such as Cape Town as well as to metropolitan Britain.20 Correspondence pages and “poets’ corners” featuring reprinted and 17  Christopher Holdridge, ‘Circulating the African Journal: The Colonial Press and Trans-­ Imperial Britishness in the Mid Nineteenth-Century Cape’, South African Historical Journal 62, no. 3 (1 September 2010): 489, https://doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2010.519898. 18  See, for example, John O’Leary, Savage Songs & Wild Romances: Settler Poetry and the Indigene, 1830–1880, Savage Songs & Wild Romances (Brill, 2011); Mary Ellis Gibson, Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore, Illustrated edition (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010); James Mulholland, Sounding Imperial: Poetic Voice and the Politics of Empire, 1730–1820, Illustrated edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Manu Samriti Chander, Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century, Illustrated edition (Lewisburg: Lanham: Bucknell University Press, 2017); Jason R. Rudy, Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies, Illustrated edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); Nikki Hessell, Romantic Literature and the Colonised World: Lessons from Indigenous Translations, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 19  Rudy, Imagined Homelands, 16. 20  George Greig, ‘Prospectus of the South African Commercial Advertiser’, 1823, 2.

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­ riginal verse were the means through which settlers could participate o dialogically in the public sphere debates that editors of colonial newspapers were shaping through their lead articles. As a result, poetry can be considered as an integral part of the nation-building project that colonial editors were actively engaged in through newspaper publication. Both Jason Rudy and Kirstie Blair have recently focused on the role that emigrant verse played in enabling diasporic communities, fractured by the upheavals of emigration, to reestablish a sense of community in their new homelands.21 One such example is a lyric by Thomas Pringle variously titled “The Emigrant’s Farewell” or “Our Native Land.” Written in 1819, the year that Pringle and his family left Roxburghshire for the Cape, the poem first appeared in the appendix to volume three of John Struthers’s anthology of ancient and modern Scottish songs The Harp of Caledonia (1819). The inclusion of this brand-new emigration lyric, written in Scots and set to the traditional air “My Guid Lord John,” indicates that, by 1820, the “emigrant farewell” was a generic sub-category of Scottish song, one that was recognized by songster compilers. “The Emigrant’s Farewell” is a nostalgic description of Pringle’s native Teviotdale, in which conventional pastoral evocations of the countryside operate synecdochally to represent the cultural history of the communities who inhabit the Scottish borderlands: “Farewell, ye hills of glorious deeds, / And streams renown’d in song! / Farewell, ye blithesome braes and meads, / Our hearts have loved so long!”22 Here, the generic loco-descriptive imagery evokes a nostalgic imagining of a homeland no longer physically accessible due to the distance and expense of long-distance travel but imaginatively accessible through the forms and tropes of local poetic forms, in this case the Scots-language song. As Blair has pointed out, “the pose of missing Scotland from abroad” was a “recognised literary stance” for Scottish emigrant poets in the nineteenth century.23 It has become a truism in critical analysis of these poems to state that these poems are nostalgic, with sentimentalized representations of Scotland providing an affective connection to the comforts of home and hearth so sorely missed by emigrants struggling to adjust to the privations of frontier life.24 However, this pose of 21  Rudy, Imagined Homelands, 22; Kirstie Blair, Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press, Community (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 128–29. 22  In John Struthers, The Harp of Caledonia…, 3 vols (Glasgow: Printed by Khull, Blackie for A. Fullerton, 1821), vol. 3, 445. 23  Blair, Working Verse in Victorian Scotland, 130. 24  Blair, 131.

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affectionate nostalgia for home is the affective response to a condition of out-of-placeness experienced by many first-generation emigrants involved in the process of colonial nation-building as settlers during the 1820s and 1830s. The 1820s marked a period of protracted crisis for the 5000 British settlers who had migrated to the Eastern Cape in the 1820 government-­ backed settlement scheme. The sense of isolation and despondency engendered by the failure of the British agricultural settlement in the Eastern Cape is movingly articulated in the following letter signed “A Tired-Out Emigrant” and printed in the South African Commercial Advertiser in 1829: Sir,—A British settler of 1820, is desirous to receive, through your columns, some information for himself and a numerous body of his friends, respecting the projected Settlement at Port Natal. Disgusted and disappointed with our reverses in the Colony throughout a series of nine successive years without any intermission, occasioned by Rust, Drought, Storms, and Locusts, to which there still appears no promise of conclusion, and terrified at the prospect of an increasing Taxation upon decaying income, it is not unnatural that we should cast our eyes upon some other asylum than that which has to us at least verified its old name of the Cabo Tormentoso.25

In response to both the geographical displacement of global emigration and the sheer precariousness of life on the agricultural frontiers of settlement, the trope of emigration-as-exile emerged in much original settler poetry, as Elizabeth Webby has shown in her analysis of early Australian settler verse.26 In her study of locality in nineteenth-century fiction, Ruth Livesey argues that the use of the term “nostalgia” was markedly different in the nineteenth century from today, denoting a feeling of “acute homesickness,” an affective “yearning to smell, touch, hear, see the localities from whence they came” that was the result of “a world on the move—out of local belonging and into global circulation.”27 25   A Tired Out Emigrant, ‘Letter from “A Tired Out Emigrant”’, South African Commercial Advertiser, 18 April 1829, 3. 26  Elizabeth Webby, Early Australian Poetry: An Annotated Bibliography of Original Poems Published in Australian Newspapers, Magazines & Almanacks before 1850 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1982). 27  Ruth Livesey, Writing the Stage Coach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-­ Century British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 5–6.

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Livesey views the spatial displacements that resulted from increased global mobility as central to the experience of modernity in the nineteenth century, creating a tension between local attachments and a more expansive metropolitan modernity. In contrast, my interest is in the ways in which the global displacements caused by emigration created new forms of local attachment that involved settlers identifying not as part of a cosmopolitan British diaspora, but as citizens of specific colonial localities. Where early British settlers are concerned, global movement did not on the whole bring with it a particularly cosmopolitan consciousness. To the contrary, long-distance travel was expensive and impossibly inaccessible for most settlers, who worked as either small-scale merchants or tenant-­ farmers, often eking out a precarious existence on unproductive land. As a result, their worlds shrank. Their material concern with bare survival and the impossibility for most of ever returning home rooted them in their new localities whether they liked it or not. In this context, the rhetoric of exile emerged in emigrant verse as a poetic response to the nostalgia or homesickness brought about by the dislocation, the out-of-placeness that was produced by the settler’s position as an exile from the old world who was not yet ready to claim belonging in the new. Viewing nostalgia, as Livesey does, as “rooted in the spatial rather than the historical” enables us to see why global mobility, the paradigmatic marker of modernity, paradoxically produced a turn towards interiority and containment that lyric verse was so well suited to articulating.28 A contrasting image of a more settled existence is presented in Pringle’s poem “The Albany Emigrant.” Published in the South African Chronicle in 1825 under the pseudonym “Agricola,” “The Albany Emigrant” revises a set of British poetic conventions to present the emigrant farmer not as a disappointed exile but as a resilient and independent member of a regenerated colonial yeomanry. To be sure, Romantic poets such as Wordsworth influentially celebrated the folk and rejected modernity, but in Pringle’s work the tropes of the British pastoral migrate to South Africa to present emigration as a solution to the rapid social and material changes wrought on British society by the agricultural and industrial revolutions. In the poem, pastoral and georgic figures depict the settler farm as a self-­sufficient colonial state in miniature, a place where the emigrant can exert control

28  Ruth Livesey, Writing the Stage Coach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-­ Century British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 6.

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over both his leisure and his labour. “The Albany Emigrant” begins with a pastoral image of rural retirement: The sun has sunk and I seek my cot, Each early scene and friend forgot; With little to long for or regret, For she I love best is beside me set: And the Hottentot maid is singing and churning.29

The iambic tetrameter sets a musical tone that suggests the poem is a song naturally emanating from the speaker. Throughout the poem, the speaker’s farm embodies both the social structures and the values of a nostalgic reimagining of pre-industrial Britain, but a Britain that is hybridized to reflect the speaker’s African surroundings. The first person who comes into view in the poem is “the hottentot maid […] singing and churning,” an adaptation of the pastoral trope of the rustic milkmaid to reflect the racialized labour economy of colonial South Africa.30 This move emphasizes the fact that the speaker’s leisured retirement is contingent upon the ready supply of inexpensive Khoekhoe labour, drawing attention to the racialized class hierarchy of settler society. This is perhaps the earliest example of what Dirk Klopper has termed the “colonial pastoral.” Klopper argues that, whereas the British pastoral sets up an opposition between “the urban and the rural within the same social order,” the “colonial pastoral” sets up an opposition between “two social orders”: the Indigenous and the European.31 As well as presenting a reimagined social order that emphasizes the racialized labour economy of the Cape, Pringle’s linguistic choices mediate the cultural hybridity of the Colony. In what is probably the first example of the use of Cape Dutch dialect in Anglophone poetry, “The Albany Emigrant” is peppered with Cape Dutch loanwords. Kraal (farm) was originally a Portuguese word, which had migrated into common usage in Cape Dutch, and finally into English via European travel narratives, while schelm has German origins but was widely used by trekboers as a pejorative term to describe Indigenous peoples who stole livestock to feed their destitute families or thieved animals as deliberate acts of resistance to settler appropriations of land and hunting  Agricola, ‘The Albany Emigrant’, South African Chronicle, 26 July 1825, 3.  Agricola, ‘The Albany Emigrant’, South African Chronicle, 26 July 1825, 3. 31  Dirk Klopper, ‘Politics of the Pastoral: The Poetry of Thomas Pringle’, English in Africa 17, no. 1 (May 1990), 21–59: 29. 29 30

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grounds. Pringle’s use of Cape-Dutch loan words to describe interactions with Indigenous peoples is far from ideologically neutral, intimating Pringle’s absorption of some of the racial prejudices of the Boer farmers in the Eastern Cape. Throughout “The Albany Emigrant,” the poetic voice makes a distinction between the labour suitable to be undertaken by Indigenous servants that appropriate to the role of the settler-farmer. Specifically, the georgic mode valorizes the labour of cultivation, which is undertaken by the settler-­farmer himself: I guard my flocks, and plough and plant, And prune my vines, and graft my trees, And work or saunter as I please.32

The two caesuras in the opening couplet emphasize the acts of ploughing, planting, and grafting—physical labours that the settler-farmer undertakes to improve the productivity of the land. The piling of base form verbs meanwhile emphasizes manual labour, a move which recasts the emigrant settler in the role of the rural labourer. This rhetorical move serves to naturalize the settler’s presence on occupied land. Ideologically, we can see the settler colonial logics of “dispossession” and “transfer” at work here. As Lorenzo Veracini and Rafael Verbuyst explain: Contrary to colonialism, which seeks to subjugate and exploit the native, settler colonialism aims for the “elimination of the native” in two interrelated domains: dispossession (i.e., strategies pursued to alienate and destroy the native, such as physical destruction of indigenous communities, or the forcible occupation of indigenous lands) and transfer (ie strategies pursued to replace the native with the settler, such as assimilationist policies or the disavowal of Indigenous presences.33

Pringle’s speaker’s self-representation as the cultivator of allegedly unproductive land eliminates any possible claim to the land by Khoekhoe, San, or amaXhosa communities—first, because such peoples have been relegated to the subordinate role of servants on the settler farm and, second, because the poem transfers indigeneity onto the settler-farmer by  Agricola, ‘The Albany Emigrant’, South African Chronicle, 26 July 1825, 3.  Lorenzo Veracini and Rafael Verbuyst, ‘South Africa’s Settler-Colonial Present: Khoisan Revivalism and the Question of Indigeneity’, Social Dynamics 46, no. 2 (3 May 2020): 261. 32 33

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valorizing the labour that he puts into cultivation. After all, to cultivate land you need to first possess it. So, Pringle’s focus on the labour of cultivation becomes a means of shoring up his uncertain claim to ownership of land that was “gifted” to him and his family by the British government, just months after it had been illegally appropriated from the amaXhosa. In the poem’s final third stanza, Pringle adopts the trope of the emigrant-­as-exile to present emigration to the wilderness of the colonial back country as a solution to the rapid social and material changes wrought on Britain by the agricultural and industrial revolutions: And far remote from port intrusion, I live in quiet and seclusion, From former friends and foes exiled, With independence in the wild.34

Here, the state of exile leads the speaker not to despondency but to an independent existence that was impossible either in Britain or in the status-­ conscious world of colonial Cape Town. Thus, we see a conception of settler identity that is rooted in the personal rather than the collective. For Pringle, freedom is intimately connected with the settler’s connection to the land through his productive cultivation of its natural resources. Yet this emancipation is predicated on both the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their land and the subsequent transfer of Indigeneity onto the settler through the imaginative rendering of the settler-farm as a state-in-miniature.

South Africa’s “Truest Natives”? Indigenous Representation and Authenticity As these examples suggest, Pringle’s poems of emigration and settlement are forms of auto-ethnography. In “The Emigrant’s Farewell,” Pringle reflects nostalgically upon the comforts of home and hearth in order to counter the affective and physical displacements caused by emigration. In contrast to the homeward-facing nostalgia of “The Emigrant’s Farewell,” “The Albany Emigrant” indicates Pringle’s effort to articulate a settler consciousness that is rooted in a re-casting of the settler-farmer as a rural labourer whose presence on stolen land is justified by his productive  Agricola, ‘The Albany Emigrant’, South African Chronicle, 26 July 1825, 3.

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cultivation of its natural resources. Yet the ideology of white settlement is continually disrupted by the Indigenous figures in the poem, whose presence as domesticated farm labourers is essential to the success of the settler-­poet’s pastoral fantasy. Pringle’s acknowledgement of the necessity of Indigenous people to the success of white settlement disrupts the straightforward transfer of Indigeneity from the native to the settler that the poem is attempting to imaginatively effect. In what follows, I want to turn specifically to the figuration of the “bushman” in two poems by Pringle and an unknown poet writing under the pseudonym “Evitas.” Both these settler poets sought to define and circumscribe the “bushman’s” indigeneity not by incorporating them into the colonial labour economy, as in “The Albany Emigrant,” but by presenting their active resistance to colonization. This representation threads figures appropriated from ethnographic travel narratives into the affective discourse of moral sympathy to argue explicitly for a recognition of the San’s sovereignty over the Kalahari in the face of a century-long history of dispossession at the hands of colonial farmers. Yet for all their humanitarian political power, these poems also disclose a crisis of identity among these settler-poets. The typology of the “bushman” as a symbol of primitive authenticity enables the settler-poet to reflect upon the unsettled identity of the newly arrived emigrant who, though no longer British, can never truly belong in the settler colony. Pringle’s “Song of the Wild Bushman” and Evitas’s “The Bushman” were published in 1825 in the South African Commercial Advertiser and South African Chronicle. Letters printed in the correspondence pages of the South African Commercial Advertiser document the perceived threat that so-called “wild bushmen”—that is, groups of San people living independently outside the colony—posed to the livelihoods of settler-farmers throughout the 1820s and into the early 1830s. In August 1829, a settler from Beaufort in the Northern Cape called “Alfred” complained the Advertiser: The bushmen, who stroll about this part of the District as beggars and vagabonds, have murdered not less than twenty-five people. The farmers are obliged to keep them as friends by relieving their wants: by refusing this sort of forced charity they incur the resentment of the horde to which the party belongs, and, in revenge, they watch their flocks […] and steal the whole or part, as may suit their convenience, and sometimes murder the herdsman. This has happened many times, and several industrious individuals have

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been reduced to the necessity of asking assistance from, or becoming servants to their more fortunate neighbours.35

In this account, the material losses resulting from periodic stock thefts are an existential threat to the frontier farmers living far from the economic and political centre of Cape Town. In November 1829, the same correspondent stated: it is with deep regret that I have again to bring to the notice of the readers of your valuable Journal, the continued depredations of the bushmen, on the northern borders of this district. […] A Commando was to meet at the Field Commandant’s, Jacobs, on the 5th November to go in pursuit of these savages […] and we hope some decisive measures will be taken to prevent the recurrence of what has passed.36

“Alfred’s” call for a commando refers to the policy enacted by the Dutch East India Company during the eighteenth century of raising settler militias to murder any San accused of stock theft. As I argued in Chap. 2, the brutality of this system of state-sanctioned genocide was the subject of humanitarian critique throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.37 As early as 1775, the Swedish naturalist Anders Sparrman stated: “Does colonist at any time get sight of a bushman, he takes fire immediately, and spirits up his horse or dogs, in order to hunt him with more ardour and fury than he would a wolf or any other wild beast.”38 Similarly, as we saw in Chap. 3, when John Barrow travelled in the Cape from 1801 to 1802 in the capacity of government surveyor, his account of the cruelty of a commando enacted against the San was highly influential in shaping British attitudes towards the Cape’s trekboers.39 Despite these critiques, even in the age of British humanitarianism, commandos against 35  Alfred, ‘Outrages of the Bushmen’, South African Commercial Advertiser, 25 August 1829, 1. 36  Alfred, ‘Bushmen Depredations’, South African Commercial Advertiser, 21 November 1829, 2. 37  Mohamed Adhikari outlines the case for defining the commando system as a genocide against the San in Adhikari, The Anatomy of a South African Genocide. 38  Adhikari, 53–54. 39  For more on Barrow’s influence on nineteenth-century representations of both the San and the frontier Boers, see Dirk Klopper, ‘Boer, Bushman, and Baboon: Human and Animal in Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century South African Writings’, Safundi 11, no. 1–2 (January 2010): 3–18.

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San and amaXhosa communities continued to be sanctioned by the colonial administration. As “Alfred’s” letter proves, such acts were often tolerated and even supported not just by trekboers, but also by British settlers living on the frontier. As a settler based in the colony’s second city, Grahamstown, the unknown “Evitas” evinces an attitude more in line with liberal humanitarians such as Pringle. In his prose report of an excursion that he made to the north of the colony, “Evitas” presents an ethnographic account of the “bushmen” he encountered: As objects for the benevolent and well directed steps of Missionary labours the testimony of the teachers living in the country itself is favourable to their civilisation, because they possess natural habits of activity, induced of course by want, as few among them have progressed beyond the state of hunters.40

Here, the conversion and acculturation of the San is couched within a moral framework that presents the Indigenous subject as the willing recipient of the missionary’s labours. Underpinned by a socio-evolutionary discourse informed by Scottish-Enlightenment stadial theory, this humanitarian ethnography adopts a Whiggish rhetoric of improvement to present the acculturation of the San and their integration into the colonial labour economy as both natural and desirable. A second aspect to his “Notes” is the creation of a racialized moral sympathy between the reader and the Indigenous subject through an evocation of the “bushman’s” bodily suffering: The ant furnishes a luxurious repast; but a more touching picture of human degradation and misery, in the state of barbarism, cannot possibly be observed, than to see those poor creatures pacing their arid plains in search of this supply;- the man dejected in countenance, and pinched by want, with his belt drawn tightly around his middle, to allay the cravings of his hunger, wanders rapidly from heap to heap, which he breaks open with his assegai.41

40  Evitas, ‘Notes on the Nature, Extent, and Promise of the Trading Intercourse of the Transgareipine Nations, and the Present State of Some Tribes on the Northern Frontier of the Colony’, South African Commercial Advertiser, 11 January 1826, 1. 41  Evitas, ‘Notes on the Nature, Extent, and Promise of the Trading Intercourse of the Transgareipine Nations, and the Present State of Some Tribes on the Northern Frontier of the Colony’, South African Commercial Advertiser, 11 January 1826, 1.

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This sentimentalized rhetoric, which was also a feature of abolitionist writings, produces a form of limited sympathetic identification in the reader that, as Amit Rai has argued, is ultimately self-reflexive; such rhetoric “both appropriates and makes proper all forms of otherness: the other’s body is embodied in pity; the savagery of the racialized other is both renarrativized into the story of the ‘social affections’: the effeminacy of sentiment is made proper to the civilized, re-masculinised, universal human.”42 Essential to the self-definition of the nineteenth-century humanitarian man—the figure who was to undertake the “civilizing mission” in the colonies—was the imaginative ability to absorb the racial other into the British narrative of sociable affection. This sympathy for the Other was necessarily constrained by its expression as pity, a distancing mechanism that maintained the inferiority of the racial Other in the moment of sympathetic identification.43 In the long era of sensibility, the rhetorical use of this racialized moral sympathy across a range of genres enabled the Indigenous African to be positioned asymmetrically in relation to the Briton: as a pathetic victim in need of the “guardianship” of a British protector. It is the aestheticization of the Indigene through this racialized moral sympathy that enabled humanitarian writers during this period to convert their encounters with Indigenous people into a variety of media that could be circulated to a wide variety of audiences. In the case of “Evitas’s” encounter with the San of the Northern Cape, his prose account was a remediation of “The Bushman,” a poem that was published in the short-­ lived South African Chronicle in November 1825. As with his “Notes,” his speaker invites a sentimental pity for his subject by stressing the interconnection between the “bushman” and the inhospitable wilderness of the desert. “O’er these wide wastes, immeasurably wild, / Roves the poor bushman, nature’s modest child.”44 Here, the hostility of the landscape serves to emphasize the pathos of the “bushman’s” position, allowing the writer to shift into a sentimental rhetoric associated with abolitionist poetry, which figures the Indigene as both an abject victim and a “noble savage,” one uncorrupted by modernity. In the moment of limited sympathetic identification, the speaker denies coevalness with Indigenous 42  A. Rai, Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race, and Power 1750–1850 (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2002), 164. 43  Rai, 163. 44  Evitas, ‘The Bushman’, South African Chronicle, 29 November 1825, 3.

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s­ubject. He reinforces such temporal distancing by later drawing a comparison between the “bushman’s” mode of habitation and subsistence and the settler’s own: “No festive board invites his famish’d form; / No roof to shelter from the beating storm.” Here, the “bushman” blends into a landscape that is severed from the present, fixed in the geological time of the rocks that form his “moss-grown cavern,” while his “famished form” evokes pity in the reader. After having fixed the “bushman” as a uniform racial type, the speaker proceeds for the rest of the first stanza to relate a variety of ethnographic details about the San’s mode of subsistence, appearance, and weaponry. Yet there is an abrupt discursive shift when the poetic voice contemplates the “bushman’s” resistance to integration into the colony. Through this movement, the speaker’s limited identification with the “bushman” shifts into a more self-reflexive mode. Instead of looking at the other from a distance, he reflects upon his own attachment to, and displacement from, home. He imaginatively draws the “bushman” into a poetic realm where one’s birth and the nostalgic remembrances of childhood are the markers of national belonging: Say then what spell, within these deserts rude, Can bind the savage to his solitude? What mighty talisman can make him scorn Lean want, pale terror, and th’ unheeding storm? Search well the heart, - it is, where’er we roam, In the warm charms of freedom and of home. (ll.44–49)

Rather than distancing himself from the “bushman,” the poetic voice constructs him as sharing the same fundamental values as himself. In a reversal of dominant modes of representation, ones that constructed the San’s peripatetic hunter-gatherer lifestyles as less evolved than the settled existence of pastoralists and urban dwellers, here it is the emigrant who, having abandoned his home, roams restlessly, while the “bushman” remains firmly rooted to his desert abode. The “bushman’s” attachment to home also gives him a freedom that is both literal and figurative. He is free from being forced into servitude under the colonists and free from the despondency that frequently overcomes the settler who is exiled from his home. Yet the poem also suggests that such a life is only possible in the desert wilderness outside the colonial boundary. Inside the colony, however, the only choice for the San was to become the de facto slaves of colonists or to

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be annihilated by the systematized genocide that was the commando system. The “noble savage” can exist only in the pre-modern era, with his pathos lying in his inability to reconcile his independence with integration into settler society. In Pringle’s “Song of the Wild Bushman” the heroic qualities of the romanticized “bushman” are even more explicit. In the opening stanza, Pringle makes the familiar identification of the “bushman” with the inhospitable wilderness: Let the proud White Man boast his flocks, And fields of foodful grain; My home is ’mid the mountain rocks, The Desert my domain.45

Pringle’s adoption of common metre to voice his “bushman” speaker clearly draws upon the re-invigoration of the ballad form that stemmed from an antiquarian interest in collecting and adapting the traditional songs and tales of English and Scottish folklore. From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, Scottish and Welsh poets appropriated poetic forms associated with Celtic folk traditions in order to re-create an oral past in a literary marketplace characterized by a burgeoning print culture. James Mulholland argues that: oral voices were so appealing because they were seen as wild and passionate, instilling a spirit of communal relationship and promising the intimacy of face-to-face contact. This idealized sense of oral performance as collective belonging offered an antidote to the detachment associated with print circulation.46

Thus, the lyric, the ode and the song become means to articulate a sense of belonging through an illusion of intimacy between speaker and reader that creates a sense of a shared culture that is anchored in a celebration of a vanished, heroic past. This stemmed from a revival of interest in the eighteenth century amongst antiquarians in the search for historical 45  ‘Song of the Wild Bushman’ in Thomas Pringle, African Poems of Thomas Pringle (Killie Campbell Africana Library Publications) ed. Ernest Pereira and Michael Chapman, Illustrated edition (Durban: Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 1996), 11–12. 46  Mulholland, Sounding Imperial, 2.

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manuscripts, a search which revived an interest in long-lived British traditions—especially different modes of oral storytelling. The literary market in anthologizing and re-interpreting the lyrics, odes and songs of Scotland was well established by the time Pringle was writing, with Pringle himself contributing his lyric “The Emigrant’s Farewell” to one such anthology, John Struthers’s three-volume The Harp of Caledonia (1819) as well as writing some songs to accompany the Scottish poetic fragments collected in Alexander Campbell’s Albyn’s Anthology (1816–1818). As Mulholland has suggested, the popularity of anthologies and poetic re-imaginings of Scottish songs and folktales meant that by the early nineteenth century oral forms such as the ballad had been “redefined” to signify not only the folkloric past of England and Scotland, but also “foreignness and exoticism” more broadly.47 Specifically, the voices of minstrels, bards, and fairies were used by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century poets to evoke a vanished culture rooted in the people and landscape of a very particular locale. The poetic re-imagining of the Scottish Highlands in particular was created through the appropriation of the poetic forms and narrative tropes of Celtic folk tradition, but underpinned by the modern epistemology of the Scottish enlightenment, with stadial theory locating the Scottish highlander in the more primitive “barbarian” phase between “savage” and “civilized.” Thus, while Pringle’s use of common metre creates a sense of intimacy between speaker and reader through its evocation of orality, it is also aligned with the ethnographic exploration of the primitive and the antiquated, making it the ideal form for voicing Indigenous people who were imagined by British and colonial poets to exist in a more “primitive” phase of socio-­ cultural development. In “Song of the Wild Bushman,” Pringle’s Indigenous speaker contrasts the pastoral mode of existence of the colonists with the hunter-­ gatherer lifestyle of the San, positioning the San in a more primitive phase of social development. While this clearly denies the “bushman” speaker coevalness with the speaker and his imagined readers, Pringle’s San speaker also takes ownership of his desert domain, using his local knowledge not merely to survive but to thrive where Europeans cannot: The crested adder honoureth me, And yields at my command  Mulholland, 22.

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His poison-bag like the honey-bee, When I seize him on the sand. Yea, even the wasting locusts’-swarm, Which mighty nations dread, To me nor terror brings nor harm— For I make of them my bread. (ll. 17–24)

Here, Pringle plays on the dual associations of both the adder and the locust with divine vengeance and with the unique lifestyle of the San.48 The San’s use of adder poison to construct their deadly poison arrows, a potent weapon that was still feared by frontier farmers during this period, inspired feelings of fear and awe in colonial travellers.49 Meanwhile, the eating of locusts more often inspired feelings of disgust rather than astonishment in colonial travellers. Still, Pringle represents the destructive locust, “which mighty nations dread,” as a symbol of San’s local knowledge of the Kalahari Desert that enables them, to thrive in an environment that Europeans perceived as hostile and threatening. Pringle’s “bushman” is thus associated with unfettered freedom and a hatred of injustice. The difference with the poem by “Evitas” is that Pringle renders the “bushman” as superior to the “cruel white man,” a figure whose moral integrity has been compromised first by slavery, and then by the settlers’ continued subjugation of Indigenous peoples: Thus I am the lord of the Desert Land And I will not leave my bounds, To crouch beneath the Christian’s hand, And kennel with his hounds: To be a hound, and watch the flocks, For the cruel White Man’s gain— No! the brown Serpent of the Rocks His den doth yet retain; And none who there his sting provokes, Shall find its poison vain! (ll.25–34)  The locust is figured as a minister of divine vengeance in Exodus 10:12–15.  See, for example, Barrow, An Account of Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa in the Years 1797 and 1798 Including Cursory Observations on the Geology and Geography of the Southern Part of That Continent; the Natural History of Such Objects as Occurred in the Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral Kingdoms; and Sketches of the Physical and Moral Characters of the Various Tribes of Inhabitants Surrounding the Settlement of the Cape of Good Hope…, 239; Hinrich Lichtenstein, Travels in Southern Africa in the Years 1803, 1804, 1805 and 1806, trans. Anne Plumptre (London: Printed for Henry Colburn…, 1812), 249. 48 49

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The end rhymes of the trimeter lines foreground the power of the “bushman’s” resistance to settler colonialism. In the first trimeter line of this stanza we hear the speaker articulate a clear claim to sovereignty over territory claimed by colonists in his defiant claim that “I will not leave my bounds.” The second trimeter line articulates a radical refusal to be integrated into the colonial labour economy, with the “bushman” likening the act of serving a colonial farmer and living on his farm to being forced to “kennel with his hounds.” The final trimeter line of this stanza, meanwhile, threatens active resistance to settlers through open warfare. Yet even while representing this act of anti-colonial resistance, Pringle’s “Song of the Bushman” splits nineteenth-century southern Africa into two distinct “chronotopic zones”50: the “primitive” wilderness of the wild “bushman” and the modern cultivated settler colonial state. The “wild bushman” can maintain his integrity in the pre-modern realm of the desert, where his Indigenous knowledge enables him to be the master of his environment. In contrast, the only position afforded to him the modern settler colonial social order is that as servile labourer bound to a European master. The “wild bushman” thus serves as a synecdoche for pre-colonial southern Africa: the remnant of a primitive, but noble, culture that was rapidly being displaced by the expanding settler colonial state. Pringle was aware of the central role ethnography would play in providing a historical framework through which his poems about Indigenous peoples could be read by British audiences. Hence, his decision to publish his travelogue Narrative of a Residence in South Africa and his African poetry together in African Sketches (1834). Even his earlier poetry collection, Ephemerides: or, Occasional Poems, Written in Scotland and South Africa (1828), included an appendix providing copious ethnographic notes on the history and customs of the Indigenous subjects of his South African poetry. In September 1832, “Song of the Wild Bushman” reached its widest audience after being published in Penny Magazine. Edited by Charles Knight and distributed under the auspices of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, the Penny Magazine was designed to bring useful knowledge on art, literature, science, natural history, history, and biography to the literate working classes. During the 1830s it was 50  Working with Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope, Chandler uses the term “chronotopic zone” to describe spaces which are represented as existing asynchronously with the present. See James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism, 2nd ed. edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 135.

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extremely popular, reaching a circulation of around 200,000 by the end of 1832.51 Extracted from Ephemerides, the poem was published in the Penny Magazine with the ethnographic note on the history of the “bushman race” that was originally published in that volume’s appendix: The bushmen appear to be the remains of the hottentot people, originally subsisting, like all the aboriginal tribes of southern Africa, chiefly by rearing cattle; but who have been driven, chiefly by the gradual encroachments of the European Colonists, to seek for refuge among the inaccessible rocks and sterile deserts of the interior.[…]The bushman retains the ancient arms of the hottentot race; namely, a javelin or assegai, and a bow and arrows. […] One of these arrows, formed merely a piece of slender reed tipped with bone or iron, is sufficient to destroy the most animal. Nevertheless, although the colonists very much dread the effects of the bushman’s arrow, they know how to elude its range; and it is, after all, but a very unequal match for the firelock, as the persecuted natives, by sad experience, have found.52

The regression of the “bushmen” from the agricultural to the hunter-­ gatherer developmental stage resulted, in this reading, from the history of settler/Indigenous encounters since the Dutch East India Company first settled at the Cape in 1652.53 Pringle’s effort to stress the role settler colonialism has played in disrupting San culture and lifeways invites a limited sympathetic identification with the “bushman.” This limited moral sympathy was necessary to the construction of the Western self as a feeling subject in the long era of sensibility. Yet by inviting the reader to pity the “bushman,” Pringle’s historical narrative simultaneously deprives the San people of agency by presenting them as the passive victims of a historical process (settler colonialism) that is beyond their control, a process symbolized by the European colonist and his “firelock.” By binding the “bushmen” once more to the chronotopic zone of the desert, Pringle therefore implies that the San are an anachronistic remnant of a

51  Rosemary Mitchell, ‘Knight, Charles (1791–1873), Publisher and Writer’ (Oxford University Press, January 2008), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/15716. 52  Thomas Pringle, Ephemerides, or, Occasional Poems Written in Scotland and South Africa (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1828), 165. Reprinted in The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (London: Charles Knight, 1832), vol. 1, 243. Originally published 22 September 1832. 53  For more on settler/Indigenous relations during the early years of Dutch settlement, see, amongst others, Coetzee, ‘Visions of Disorder and Profit’.

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premodern era doomed to be either incorporated into the settler colonial state or extirpated from it.

Ethnography as Antiquarian Enquiry In Pringle’s 1834 Narrative, his historical account of the origins of the “wild bushman,” he brings the national and the global into the same analytic framework to draw parallels between Scotland’s integration into the Anglo-empire in the eighteenth century, and the Cape Colony’s integration into the nineteenth-century British Empire. In order to do so, he relies on his British readers’ assumed knowledge of the novels of Walter Scott by creating an analogy between the history of the “wild bushmen” on the colonial periphery and that of the “Children of the Mist”: the peripatetic Highland clan who lived on the peripheries of the expanding Anglo-empire in Walter Scott’s historical romances, Rob Roy (1817) and Legend of Montrose (1819): Whether any considerable hordes of these people existed in their present state previous to the occupation of the country by Europeans, seems to be doubtful; but it is certain that numerous tribes, once subsisting in ease and affluence on the produce of their herds and flocks, have by the incessant encroachments of the colonists been either driven to the sterile deserts, and of necessity transformed into bushmen, or utterly extirpated. This process has been carrying on, as the authentic records of the Colony prove, for at least a hundred and twenty years. And thus on the outskirts of our ever-­ advancing frontier, numerous wandering hordes of destitute and desperate savages—the South-African “Children of the Mist”—have been constantly found in a state of precarious truce, or bitter hostility with the colonists.54

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there were two conflicting discourses counterpoised in the representation of the Highlander. Juliet Shields explains that in one discourse, arising from anti-Jacobite propaganda and popularized by writers such as Samuel Johnson, Highlanders were portrayed as “thieving, belligerent, uncouth, and even cannibalistic savages” and another, popularized by James Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian (1760–1763), which represented them as “noble savages” whose society was “the epitome of martial valour doomed through their 54  Thomas Pringle, Narrative of a Residence in South Africa, with a Biographical Sketch of the Author by Josiah Conder (Edward Moxon, 1840), 78.

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heroic virtues to become tragic victims of Southern Britain’s greedy corruption.”55 In Legend of Montrose, set during the Earl of Montrose’s Highland campaign on behalf of King Charles I during the English Civil War, the hero of the story, the Lowland aristocrat Lord Menteith, gives an ethnographic sketch of the Children of the Mist that bears a striking resemblance to the account of the “bushmen” given by Pringle in the Narrative. Scott’s narrator describes them as: a small sect of banditti, called, from their houseless state, and their incessantly wandering among the mountains and glens, The Children of the Mist. They are a fierce and hardy people, with all the irritability, and wild and vengeful passions, proper to men who have never known the restraint of civilised society.56

Here, the MacGregors lack the emotional restraint that was a marker of civility, since they are subject to the “vengeful passions” that locate them in the “savage” rather than “civilized” developmental phase and to which the “wild bushman” is also subject. As well as being denied coevalness with their Lowland neighbours, there is another similarity between the lifestyle of the “Children of the Mist” and that attributed by Pringle to the San in the Narrative. Just as colonial expansion has made the San into peripatetic outlaws, the Highland Clearances have made the MacGregors “houseless” “banditti” relegated to the inhospitable wilderness and operating outside the bounds of colonial society. The separation of Scotland into two chronotopic zones—the “primitive” Highlands and the “modern” Lowlands—in Scott’s Scottish novels is echoed in Pringle’s division of South Africa into the “primitive” desert and the “modern” settler colonial state. In the case of Scott, Katie Trumpener has argued that it is “only through forcible, often violent, entry into history [that] the feudal folk community become a nation, and only through dislocation and collective suffering is a new identity forged.”57 By explicitly drawing an analogy between the “authentic records” of the San’s dispossession at the hands of the colonists and Scott’s aestheticized representation of the “Children of 55  Juliet Shields, ‘From Family Roots to the Routes of Empire: National Tales and the Domestication of the Scottish Highlands’, ELH 72, no. 4 (2005): 922. 56  Walter Scott, A Legend of Montrose (Blackie, 1910), 33. 57  Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 142.

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the Mist,” Pringle’s ethnographic account simultaneously stresses both the authenticity and the fictionality of the “wild bushman.” Like Scott’s Highlanders, his “wild” excesses are figured as both characteristic of the “authentic” Indigene and belonging to a pre-modernity that has already given way to the modern colonial state. The belatedness of the San’s struggle against the depredations of the settlers that characterizes Pringle’s ethno-historical accounts of “wild bushmen” enabled him to reframe colonial ethnography as a form of antiquarian enquiry. While the pathos of the San’s position inevitably invites a degree of readerly sympathy, the temporal distancing still places the “wild bushman” in a primitive socio-historical stage that is not distinct from the modernity of the assumed British reader. As a result, Pringle maps the well-known narrative of Scotland’s union with the Anglo-Empire onto the unfamiliar setting of one of Britain’s newest colonial possessions. Pringle and “Evitas’s” humanitarian impulse to imaginatively incorporate Indigenous “bushmen” into this cosmopolitan imperial citizenry exposes the racialized limits of this trans-imperial Britishness by acknowledging Indigenous sovereignty over territories claimed in the name of Great Britain. Yet by using his ethnographic poetics to reframe ethnography as a form of antiquarian enquiry, Pringle simultaneously forecloses the possibility of Indigenous sovereignty within the settler colonial state through the strategic use of the ethnographic past. Once the possibility of Indigenous sovereignty is imaginatively relegated to a pre-modern past, the moral contradiction between humanitarian concern for Indigenous suffering and settler colonialism is less apparent. In contrast to the active resistance voiced by the “bushman” speaker, the ethnographic paratext to the poem serves to imaginatively contain the possibility of Indigenous sovereignty within the settler colonial state by re-casting Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism as a heroic struggle that is doomed to failure. As a Whiggish Evangelical, Pringle actively supported missionary work in South Africa, viewing assimilation into a colonial state where all races were equal under the law as the natural and desirable future for Indigenous communities affected by the displacements of settler colonial state-­ building—an endeavour in which Pringle and his family were active participants.

CHAPTER 5

The “Bushboy” in Children’s Literature: Missionary Ethnography and Imperial Adventure Fiction

In May 1847, the first ever group of San people to be publicly displayed in Britain arrived in Liverpool. After being purchased in Transorangia, north of the Cape Colony, by a Liverpool merchant, and displayed in Manchester by the surgeon, ethnologist, and racial theorist Robert Knox as living illustrations of his pseudo-scientific theories about the distinctive features of what he termed the “dark races,” the group of four adults and a baby were exhibited at the Egyptian Hall in London under the management of an ethnological showman by the name of J. S. Tyler. The family group were supposed to serve a representative and educative function, embodying for British audiences ideas about San domesticity that had long been circulating in Britain and the settler colonies through the writings of Evangelical missionaries. Although nominally scientific rather than religious, Tyler’s focus on San domesticity in his ethnological lecture, which accompanied the group’s performance, implicitly invites a contrast with the evangelically informed domestic values of the British middle classes in the 1840s. For this middle-class audience, who flocked in their thousands to see the show, “the bourgeois ideal of the family” had “become part of the dominant culture.”1 In his lecture, Tyler represented the San’s alleged cultural

1  Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History, 1st edition (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), 91.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Atkin, Writing the South African San, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86226-8_5

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inferiority through lurid and deeply racist depictions of their domestic practices. Tyler’s most shocking description of San domestic practices comes from the LMS missionary J.  J. Kicherer and includes a description of infanticide. To contemporary audiences, this event would seem to be a complete repudiation of Evangelical domestic ideals: They kill their children on various occasions, as well as when ill shaped, or when they are in want of food; when the father has forsaken its mother, or when obliged to flee from their enemies, in which case they will strangle them, smother them, or cast them away in the desert, or bury them alive.2

An important tenet of Evangelical domestic ideology in the nineteenth century was the privileged status of the child within the family unit. In missionary ethnography, infanticide was presented as a routine aspect of San parenting in missionary ethnography for the alleged brutality of the San parent towards her children to become emblematic of the moral degradation of their race. This focus on parent/child relations became integral to the racial myths constructed through missionary ethnography, myths which underwrote frequently unsuccessful efforts to convert and acculturate San communities across southern Africa. The source of this defamatory portrait of San family life was J. J. Kicherer the missionary from the London Missionary Society who led the first mission to the “bushmen” from 1799 to 1803. Kicherer encountered many obstacles during his time at the Zak River mission. These ranged from a lack of farming equipment and finances from the LMS to the overt hostility of local trekboer farmers, who viewed the San residents of the mission station as a potential source of cheap labour. In addition, Kicherer met overt resistance to his proselytizing from some San communities, who poisoned his wells. Natural disasters also thwarted Kicherer’s efforts. He lost many of the sheep and goats donated by local trekboer farmers to lion attacks and he failed in his efforts to cultivate crops during the drought of 1804.3 Defeated and demoralized, Kicherer retreated to the colony, where he wrote his “Narrative of a Mission to the Hottentots and Boshesmens,” first published in the Transactions of the Mission Society in 1804. As 2  Tyler, ‘A Lecture on the Mental and Moral Attributes of the Bushmen With Anecdotes by Their Guardian’, 3. 3  Mathias Guenther, Tricksters and Trancers: Bushman Religion and Society, Illustrated edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 204.

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anthropologist Matthias Guenther has argued, Kicherer sought to justify his failure to convert the San by painting a portrait of their culture and social practices “so defamatory that the conclusion of their unsuitability for the Gospel becomes a self-evident truth, thereby resoundingly justifying his failure at the task of shepherding them into Christianity’s fold.”4 In spite of its status as a racial myth, an ethnological showman in 1840 remediated this depiction of San domesticity from Kicherer’s Evangelical tract from 1804. During this period, Evangelical racial discourse, which was disseminated in both missionary ethnography and religious tract fiction, emerged as a highly influential lens through which a variety of reading publics viewed the peoples of Britain’s expanding empire. This Evangelical racial discourse underpins the representation of the San in the Revd John Campbell’s tract fiction Life of Kaboo (1830) and in early imperial adventure stories set in Africa such as Captain Fredrick Marryat’s The Mission; or Scenes in Africa (1844). Both ethnographic tract fiction and early imperial adventure fiction are generically hybrid and interconnected, drawing on the formal and representative conventions of two popular non-literary genres: the ethnographic travel narrative and the Evangelical spiritual biography. These narratives performed important cultural work in nineteenth-century Britain by binding Evangelical religious ideology to ideas about British national identity and imperial citizenship. In these works, San parent/child relationships were remediated from ethnographic writings to children’s literature through two opposing tropes: first, the “savage” and degraded parent, and second, the resourceful, redeeming child. The emphasis that Campbell and Marryat place on the redeeming power of the San child is inextricably linked to the privileged place that children occupied in Evangelical domestic discourse. The eighteenth century is often seen as an important era of change in the recognition of the child’s special nature among upper-middle-class families.5 During the eighteenth century, different theories of education emerged stressing the importance of childhood as a unique developmental period, rather than merely embryonic adulthood. In the nineteenth century this general concern developed in England into two “different conceptions of the natural state of children: “Original Innocence and Original Sin.””6  Guenther, 210.  Penny Brown, The Captured World: The Child and Childhood in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing in England (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1993), 4. 6  Brown, 5. 4 5

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The former derived from the writings of the English Romantic poets and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose description of a boy brought up by a tutor in rural seclusion Émile ou de l’éducation (1762) played a central role in popularizing the conception of the child as innately innocent. Meanwhile, the view that children were innately sinful and needed to be educated into virtue to avoid remaining in a “savage” state emerged from the growing influence of the Evangelical movement. The figure of the redeeming child represented a convergence of these two ideas.7 It is the fragility of the child’s position, as one who is poised between sin and redemption, that makes the redeeming child such an important figure. Depending on the story, this figure can either help to guide and save those adults who have yet to turn to a godly life or become the “helpless victim” of persecution by a “godless society.”8 In the case of the San child, the redeeming child emphasized the importance of the role of the missionary as saviour. The child redeemer “rescues” other Indigenous children from the innate sin and the “barbarity” of their own society by harnessing their intelligence before it is corrupted and teaching them the ways of Christianity. The utilization of ethnographic details gained from travel narratives reinforced this message by adding verisimilitude to the didactic structure of the conversion narrative. Ethnographic detail created narrative interest by representing the cultural specificity of a particular Indigenous group while simultaneously stressing their potential for education and conversion.

John Campbell, Religious Tract Fiction, and Colonial Ideology Tract fiction, as Nancy Cutt explains, was cheap literature produced by Evangelical religious tract societies which was aimed at both children and the newly literate working-class poor.9 Although the didactic function of children’s tract fiction has its origins in the moral tales of the eighteenth century, the rise of the Evangelical movement meant that “between 1810 and 1830 religious teaching in literature came to displace the older forms

 Brown, 7.  Brown, 41. 9  Margaret Nancy Cutt, Ministering Angels: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Writing for Children (Five Owls Press, 1979), xi. 7 8

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of moral tale.”10 Cutt argues that by 1810 Evangelical moral and religious sensibilities had permeated every stratum of British society, effecting a “quiet domestic revolution” that “brought respectability into fashion.”11 Catherine Hall adds that this revolution in manners was the result of the ability of Evangelical groups to create networks that cut across social and regional divides, influenced in part by the collective need to respond to the perceived threat to their ideology presented by the popularization in Britain of the political ideology of the French Revolution.12 As Hall argues, the spread of the Sunday School movement across both England and Scotland was a means by which children of all classes could be inculcated with Evangelical religious and social ideology. Central to Evangelical practice was “the constant renewal of […] religious life by prayer, Bible reading, and Sunday observance,” with literacy becoming central to the fulfilment of this religious imperative.13 A central religious practice was the personal communion with God enabled by Bible-reading, which meant that “reading […] was seen as a key route to conversion.”14 As a religious commitment to the transparency of language as a vehicle for divine revelation made Evangelicals deeply distrustful of novels, didactic tract fiction was an important source of narrative pleasure. Based on exemplary lives of pious individuals or model converts, the direct link to lived religious experience meant that even a fictional tract could maintain a claim to both literal and moral truth. Printed and distributed through Evangelical organizations such as the Religious Tract Society, tract fiction became approved sabbath reading in Evangelical households both at Sunday Schools and in the home. The most important means of disseminating both factual and fictional tracts to a wide readership was through the Cheap Repository Tracts, an eighteenth-century precursor to the Religious Tract Society (RTS). The Cheap Repository Tracts produced a series of “histories” of pious, lower-class adults and children that “read like  Cutt, 16.  Cutt, 16. 12  Hall, White, Male and Middle Class, 4–5. See also Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4–5. 13  Cutt, Ministering Angels, 52. 14  Aileen Fyfe, ‘A Short History of the Religious Tract Society’, in From the Dairyman’s Daughter to Worrals of the WAAF: The Religious Tract Society, Lutterworth Press and Children’s Literature, ed. Dennis Butts and Pat Garrett (Cambridge, UK: Lutterworth Press, 2006), 14, https. 10 11

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fiction, with brisk dialogue, vivid description, and genuine suspense,”15 providing readerly pleasure as well as religious instruction. Moreover, writers of tract fiction took pains to stress the authenticity of their narratives by framing them as edited, overheard, or found narratives. The popularity of such works cannot be overestimated. The RTS issued over a million tracts between its foundation in 1799 and 1805.16 In 1825, the society began to produce tracts explicitly for children, with 292 publications for children listed in the RTS’s catalogue by May 1831.17 Like the Cheap Repository Tracts, the blending of fact and fiction and the assimilation and adaptation of popular literary forms in the RTS’s publications were key to their widespread appeal. The career of Revd John Campbell exemplifies how tract production and dissemination became central to the success of Evangelical preachers and educators between the 1780s and 1830s. In the short “Biographical Sketch of the Author” that accompanied his most popular tract, African Light Thrown on a Selection of Scripture Texts (1835), a letter from Campbell is interpolated describing how, during the 1780s, he bought tracts from booksellers in London to Edinburgh and circulated them for free among his friends. During this period, Campbell also became an early founder-member of the RTS, which printed and distributed factual and fictional tracts “to the rich and poor.”18 Campbell played a pivotal role in the foundation of both the RTS and the British and Foreign Bible Society (established in 1804) before travelling to South Africa in 1812 and 1819 on behalf of the LMS to oversee the progress of mission work in southern Africa. Upon his return, his published travel narratives describing South Africa and its peoples that were widely circulated in Evangelical circles. Campbell also adapted his southern African travel narratives into numerous didactic children’s tracts during the 1820s and 1830s. The depiction of Indigenous peoples in these stories retains much of the ethnographic detail of his non-fiction, making Campbell’s tract fiction important sites for the consideration of the popularization among Evangelical reading

 Cutt, Ministering Angels, 16.  Dennis Butts and Pat Garrett, From the Dairyman’s Daughter to Worrals of the WAAF: The RTS, Lutterworth Press and Children’s Literature (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2006), 7. 17  Butts and Garrett, 7. 18  John Campbell, African Light Thrown on a Selection of Scripture Texts, ed. William Innes (Edinburgh: Waugh & Innes, 1835), 19–20. 15 16

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communities of missionary representations of the San and other southern African Indigenous groups. After completing his training in Glasgow in 1804, Campbell took up the ministry of Kingsland Chapel, northeast of London. He turned his attention to writing tracts aimed specifically at children. In 1804, he set up the Youth’s Magazine, and in the following year he published his first full-­ length children’s work, Alfred and Galba. During his first decade in London, he published more than ten different works of children’s tract fiction.19 When Campbell returned from his first journey to southern Africa in 1812, his account of the trip was avidly consumed by a literate public who, following the formal British acquisition of the Cape Colony from the Dutch in 1806, had developed an appetite for narratives about this new colonial possession. The distances that missionaries covered in southern Africa and the perceived dangers of the veld meant that the representation of journeys in which the missionary/hero battles against the elements to evangelize to the native “heathens” became, as Esme Cleall has argued, the defining feature of missionary accounts of southern Africa.20 Campbell’s travels on behalf of the LMS, and the documentation of the mission stations that he undertook, brought him beyond the established frontiers of the Cape Colony and into the southern African hinterland where few Europeans had travelled, making his travels part-fact-finding missions and part-voyages of exploration. Tracing the trajectory of publicity and promotion that Kicherer had inaugurated fifteen years earlier and that David Livingstone would follow upon his return from Africa thirty years later, Campbell undertook a series of public appearances on his return from his second trip to southern Africa in 1819. He appeared at the LMS annual May meeting in London and toured mission societies throughout the provinces. Campbell’s biographer, Robert Phillip, describes the impact of Campbell’s talk at the LMS’s annual meeting in May 1821: Quite the lion of the day, and both in the metropolis and throughout the provinces his presence at missionary meetings created a great sensation. Multitudes flocked to hear his racy, humorous anecdotes of the hottentots 19  John Campbell, African Light Thrown on a Selection of Scripture Texts, ed. William Innes (Edinburgh: Waugh & Innes, 1835), 31. 20  E. Cleall, Missionary Discourses of Difference: Negotiating Otherness in the British Empire, 1840–1900, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012), 13.

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and bushmen of South Africa. Even in his sermons occasional allusions were made throughout the whole of his future life to his African travels.21

The emphasis upon his “racy” and “humorous” anecdotes suggests that even at the LMS, Campbell’s main appeal lay, not in his account of the progress of mission work southern Africa, as the LMS may have perhaps hoped, but rather in his narrative accounts of the peoples he encountered. The pleasure that Campbell’s accounts inspired during his nationwide tour of Evangelical mission societies led him to realize that his African travels could potentially reach an even broader audience. After returning to his chapel and school at Kingsland, Campbell published a series of tracts about the peoples he encountered in southern Africa aimed largely at juvenile readers. As we shall see, these tracts served as both ethnographic sketches of the peoples of southern Africa and Evangelical conversion narratives. The moral framework that Evangelical religion provided, with its emphasis on literature as both a means of religious instruction and a tool for teaching literacy, led to the integration of religious and secular genres by tract writers.22 Jeffery Richards has argued that the proliferation of “factual travel works” written by missionary and secular travellers meant that juvenile readers developed a thirst for the exotic.23 Though the genealogy of the traveller’s tale dates back to ancient Greece, a greater emphasis on factual accuracy differentiated late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century encounter narratives from their predecessors. This emphasis also gave them a clearer educational function which allowed Evangelical writers as early as the late eighteenth century to utilize the genre to gain the interest of young readers, often by publishing excerpts and abridgements of popular natural historical and travel works in the form of cheap tracts.24 As well as transmitting a moral message to readers, juvenile tract fiction and adventure fiction disseminated a particular view of Britain’s relationship to her expanding empire. The ideological work done by boys’ adventure fiction in forming what we might term an imperial imaginary among the literate British public in the nineteenth century has been the subject of 21  John Campbell, African Light Thrown on a Selection of Scripture Texts, ed. William Innes (Edinburgh: Waugh & Innes, 1835), 33–34. 22  Jeffrey Richards, ed., Imperialism and Juvenile Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 3. 23  Richards, 3. 24  Cutt, Ministering Angels, 1.

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many studies.25 There is a critical consensus that “to celebrate adventure was to celebrate empire,” and that adventure fiction was part of what trained young men for roles in the administration of the colonies.26 In the wake of Edward W.  Said’s Orientalism, critics in the 1970s and 1980s positioned adventure fiction in a genealogy of the development of the novel in which Robinson Crusoe emerges as a foundational work, one that established the tropes and ideology that underpinned adventure stories, as well as the narrative conventions of the bildungsroman.27 In the last thirty years, there has been a reorientation in the focus of critical commentary on adventure fiction to a critique of the ways in which it articulates what Jacqueline Rose terms “that conception of the world in which discovering, or seeing, the world is equivalent to controlling, or subduing it.”28 Mid-­ century adventure fiction, populated as it was by physically robust and morally consistent male heroes, became a means by which “an association between physical strength, religious certainty, and the ability to shape and control the world around” was established.29 This imagined interrelationship between the robust male body, evangelically underpinned morality and the ability to tame and subdue the natural world was central to the development of “muscular Christianity,” an imperial ideology that was popularized through imperial adventure fiction.30 25  See, for example, Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (New York: Basic Books, 1979); Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914, Reprint edition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Jeffrey Richards, ed., Imperialism and Juvenile Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989); Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World, 1. publ. (London: Harper Collins, 1991); Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: Geographies of Adventure, 1st edition (London; New York: Routledge, 1996). 26  Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 37. 27  See Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (New York: Basic Books, 1979); Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (University of California Press, 1957). 28  Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan: Or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, Language, Discourse, Society (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1992), 58. 29  Donald E.  Hall, Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge University Press, 2006). 30  For discussions of the ideals of “Muscular Christianity” and its manifestations in mid-­ Victorian culture and literature, see, among others, Henry Randolph Harrington, Muscular Christianity: A Study of the Development of a Victorian Idea (Stanford University, 1971); J.  A. Mangan, Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester University Press, 1987); Hall, Muscular Christianity; Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and

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Robinson Crusoe offers the prototype for this explicitly masculine colonial ideology of containment and control in his naming of the spaces on the island. Early in the narrative, Crusoe asserts: “I might call myself king, or emperor over all the country which I had possession of.”31 The conception of colonial landscapes as an unpeopled terra incognita allowed European writers to erase any signs of existing Indigenous cultures to remake the colonized world in their own image. As Julietta Singh explains: “a colonial master understands his superiority over others by virtue of his ability to conquer them materially and by his insistence on the supremacy of his practices and worldviews over theirs, which renders ‘legitimate’ the forceful imposition of his worldviews.”32 In this analysis, the power that the male colonizer seizes by claiming space is entangled with the power through which the colonizer claims to replace the worldviews and cultures of colonized peoples with his own. Prior to the period when mission Christianity was sufficiently embedded in a colonized space for native preachers to proselytize, the displacement of Indigenous worldviews with European could be accomplished only through the instruction of Indigenous populations by Westerners, with missionaries often the first to provide such instruction. In order to justify the replacement of Indigenous epistemologies with European ones, colonial discourse reframes Indigenous peoples as ignorant infants in need of the paternalistic guidance of educated and cultured Europeans. This colonial paradigm offered new possibilities for didactic literature. The narrator of children’s tract fiction traditionally takes the instructive, parental role in relation to his imagined child reader, by demarcating and policing the boundaries between correct and incorrect behaviour. In the imperial adventure story, Rose argues, this parent/child relationship is mapped onto the encounters between Europeans and Indigenous peoples, ensuring that the

Religious Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On masculinity and popular fiction in the late nineteenth century, see Bradley Deane, Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 31  Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Penguin Classics ed. edition (London: Penguin, 2004), 102–3. 32  Julietta Singh, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements, Illustrated edition (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2018), 9.

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entertaining and potentially destabilizing effects of adventure and exploration are contained within a clear moral framework.33 Campbell’s Alfred and Galba is a fictional autobiography that capitalizes on the popularity of Robinson Crusoe to instruct children in Evangelical religious ideology.34 It charts the conversion of two French brothers from Catholicism to Protestantism. After they are banished from France for apostasy, the boys take up residence on a remote island, where they form a model religious community by proselytizing to the Indigenous peoples. The narrative demonstrates Campbell’s concern with post-Enlightenment forms of knowledge acquisition. Prior to the imagined first-person testimony of the two brothers, Campbell presents a brief frame narrative in which an unnamed narrator takes a journey in his sleep to the French city of Montpellier; “Having amused myself for some weeks with the study of Geography; tracing the boundaries of Empires and Kingdoms; the sources and currents of rivers; the manners, customs, and populations of different nations, I frequently seemed to traverse the Globe at night.”35 Campbell’s narrator surveys and categorizes the globe with a panoptical eye, adopting the cartographer’s concern with the “boundaries of empires and kingdoms,” the geographer-explorer’s curiosity about the “sources and currents of rivers,” and the ethnographer’s interest in the “manners, customs, and populations of different nations.” These different post-Enlightenment knowledge systems underpinned the narrative position of the authors of government surveys, missionary reports, travel narratives, and the natural historical works of scientist-collectors, who produced the information that laid the foundations for the expansion of European empires into the non-­ European world. As the narrator of Evangelical tract fiction adopted an instructional, parental role, Campbell suggests that these nominally secular forms of knowledge can also be seamlessly integrated into Evangelical teaching, thus creating a heterogeneous discourse that draws upon the structure and tropes of travel writing, spiritual autobiography, and the Robinson Crusoe trilogy. As many critics have argued, these same post-Enlightenment knowledge systems also underpin Robinson Crusoe’s actions on the island. 33  Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan: Or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, Language, Discourse, Society (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1992), 58. 34  A.  O’Malley, Children’s Literature, Popular Culture, and Robinson Crusoe, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012), 50 and 48. 35  John Campbell, Alfred & Galba: Or, the History of Two Brothers, Supposed to Be Written by Themselves. For the Use of Young People (Williams & Smith, 1805), 1.

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Recent commentaries on Robinson Crusoe have identified Defoe’s novel with a particular moment in the cultural history of British imperialism, a moment, according to Hans Turley, when we see that dissenting religion and mercantile trade “go hand in hand in understanding the ethnocide practiced by British colonists, traders, and […] marooned individuals.”36 Yet in Alfred and Galba, these ideological positions are adapted to reflect a specifically Evangelical form of religious ideology that foregrounds the personal, spiritual development of the native converts whom Alfred and Galba encounter, excluding to a large degree the concern with trade and capital identified by Turley as integral to “Crusonian identity.” Replacing Crusoe’s mercantile activity is the boy protagonists’ development of an island colony that provides a prototype for the ideal mission station. This supplantation of the economic imperative with the religious reflects the influence that the development of the mission movement overseas was having upon Evangelical religious ideology in the metropole. We can see how Campbell appropriated and reshaped the tropes and structure of Defoe’s novel to form what I shall term his Evangelical Robinsonade. In Alfred and Galba, the proto-colonialist ideology of Defoe’s trilogy is reshaped to reflect a uniquely Evangelical conception of Britain’s global role as an imperial power. Both Robinson Crusoe and Alfred and Galba begin with the rupture of the ties between the protagonists and their parents. In both cases, this break is due to individual choice. In Crusoe’s case, the rupture is presented as a wilful “breach of duty to God and to my father.”37 Here, the older Crusoe is interpolated into the narrative, reflecting upon his life after his conversion experience on the island and his further travels.38 This metalepsis is indicative of the self-reflexive nature of Protestant spiritual autobiography, a genre in which the convert reflects back upon his sins in order for the reader to be made aware of theirs. Defoe presents Crusoe as only able to name this disobedience as a sin after he has gone through a process of reflection, repentance, and conversion while upon the island. In the imagination of the newly converted Crusoe, the island is a punishment for this act of disobedience: “To look back upon my primitive condition, and 36  Hans Turley, ‘Protestant Evangelicalism, British Imperialism, and Crusonian Identity’, in Wilson, A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge, UK  ; New  York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 176–193: 193. 37  Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 9. 38  King James Bible, Exodus, 20:4.

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the excellent advice of my father, the opposition to which was, as I may call it, my ORIGINAL SIN, my subsequent mistakes of the same kind had been the means of my coming into this miserable condition.”39 Here, the reference to “original sin” alludes to Adam and Eve’s disobedience of God and subsequent expulsion from paradise, suggesting Crusoe has now been reading the Bible and absorbing its narratives into his own personal history. In Alfred and Galba, the protagonists are also wrenched from their parents, but this is not a result of individual error but rather a consequence of their rejection of Catholic priestly authority in favour of individual conscience. The boys state that the reason for their banishment to the remote desert island, and the model colony that they establish there, is due to their “inclination to be secluded from the hurries of life, and to consult the Scriptures for ourselves.”40 The two pillars of seclusion and a personal relationship with God (a relationship gained through the close study of Scripture) were integral to the way in which Evangelicals defined their religious practice. Underpinning this self-imagining was a belief in a personal communion with God and trust in his Providential care. Such steadfast faith allows the boys to view their time on the island, not as a punishment, but rather as an opportunity for good works. This faith can be seen in the final words the boys give before they have been banished from France. Before we were put on board of ship at Brest our conductors solemnly charged us to renounce what they called Calvinistic, Lutheran, and Zuinglian errors, and confess our belief of the Papal Creed, and we should instantly return to Montpellier. But this offer we absolutely rejected; assigned our reasons, and assured them our Lord for whose sake we suffered, would take care of us, and make this severe trial work for our good; that we daily committed ourselves to his protection, and we knew his faithfulness who had said: “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”41

Here the boys are figured not as repentant sinners, but as child redeemers who eventually serve as a role model to both the Indigenous peoples they encounter on the island and their parents back in France. In the case of the former, the boys’ guidance facilitates the conversion from “heathenism”  Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 154.  John Campbell, Alfred & Galba: Or, the History of Two Brothers, Supposed to Be Written by Themselves. For the Use of Young People (Williams & Smith, 1805), 17. 41  Campbell, 20–21. 39 40

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to Christianity. In a parallel move, Alfred and Galba’s example inspires their parents to convert from Catholicism to Protestantism. By deploying the trope of the redeeming child, Campbell shapes his heroes into an established Evangelical typology so that their steadfast faith and activities upon the island become models for both child and adult readers to follow. As well as establishing a greater identification between the protagonists and his dual readership, the children’s exile to a desert island prefigures the use of boy heroes in mid-century Robinsonades such as R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858). Having established the boys’ spiritual credentials from the start, Alfred and Galba provide idealized role models for the native converts that later populate their desert island. Throughout, Alfred and Galba operate in the dual role of child redeemers to their families at home and missionary-saviours to Indigenous converts abroad.42 In Alfred and Galba, the boys also ascend to a high point where they survey the land. But instead of framing their view in the language of possession and economic acquisition, as in Robinson Crusoe, they express wonder at the natural world that stems from a conception of the world defined by a providential view of God’s workings through Jesus: We employed the next day in viewing the valley, which runs from east to west about five miles. A small river ran through its centre, along whose banks grew trees, laden with the richest fruits […]Having the gracious presence of our God, accompanied with the assurance of his favour in Jesus, we appeared placed like Adam of old, in paradise.43

This figuration of the island as a second Eden indicates how it becomes a site for redemption and renewal, a place where it is possible to construct a model civilization away from the corruption of a European materialistic society. In Campbell’s hands, the island transforms into an imaginative space for a “New Jerusalem,” one that contains a colony of model native converts. Encoded in the idea of a “second Eden” is also the idea of a virgin territory without any imprint of Indigenous culture. This idea of a terra nullius is particularly evident in Campbell’s representation of the Amerindians who visit the island and become Alfred and Galba’s first 42  For more on the figure of the model child in missionary writings, see chapter two of Angharad Eyre, ‘Zeal and Sacrifice: The Woman Missionary and Women’s Writing, 1830–1900’ (PhD, London, Queen Mary University of London, 2014). 43  John Campbell, Alfred & Galba: Or, the History of Two Brothers, Supposed to Be Written by Themselves. For the Use of Young People (Williams & Smith, 1805), 38–39.

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model converts, people who appear to lack any visible signs of their own religion or culture. Without so much as their own names, these “copper-­ skinned”44 Indians are generic representations of Amerindians that draw heavily on Defoe’s representation of Crusoe’s Indigenous companion, Friday, in Robinson Crusoe. The culminating stage in the Evangelical conversion process was the acquisition of literacy by Indigenous converts. Alfred and Galba note this ultimate stage shortly prior to their departure from the island: Many made remarkable progress in reading, writing, and understanding the French language, in which all the books we had given them were written. Some were so attached to the information which they had acquired, that we believe they would continue to instruct their countrymen in the same things after we were gone.45

The emphasis on literacy and language acquisition reflects Evangelical concerns with both native agency and individual communion with God through Bible study. The acquisition of literacy also enabled native converts to instruct the next generation in the knowledge that they had acquired, and so ensure the continuation of the colony after the boys have withdrawn. Moreover, knowledge of the French language also confirms that, as with the two “model converts” Jacob and Joseph, the presence of an Indigenous linguistic or religious culture will be erased and replaced with European language systems. Such structural changes imply that the colony will continue to operate according to European principles, as the Indigenous people shall no longer have the language with which to articulate and transmit their native culture. It has been argued that dissenting forms of Christianity shaped Defoe’s account of Robinson Crusoe’s activities on the island.46 Yet Campbell’s later conception of colonial endeavour is rooted firmly in the ideology of nineteenth-century, Evangelical missionary work, rather than the more acquisitive, mercantile model that critics have identified in Defoe’s text. This innovation in the Robinsonade allows Campbell to argue for the importance of the mission movement while at the same time working within a well-established literary genre that would excite young readers.  Campbell, 35.  Campbell, 171. 46  See, for example: Watt, ‘Robinson Crusoe, Individualism and the Novel’; Turley, ‘Protestant Evangelicalism, British Imperialism, and Crusonian Identity’. 44 45

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The typological representation of both the native converts and the model child protagonists means that the potentially destabilizing thematics of travel, material gain, familial rupture, and intercultural encounter that characterize what Peter Hulme has termed that “restless mobility” of Robinson Crusoe are contained within the didactic structure of a tract.47 Although the brothers, like Crusoe, eventually gain large estates and become wealthy, they reject the urge to gain materially from their elevated economic and social status, preferring to return to Favourite Island so that they can continue their missionary work. In this way, Campbell contains the acquisitive spirit in Crusoe that Defoe presents alternately as sinful and enterprising through the harnessing of Alfred and Galba’s energies in aiding the full acculturation of their “heathen” settlers. Through these child redeemers, Campbell offers his juvenile readers the mobility of travel and the deferred rewards of future planning, which are harnessed for spiritual rather than material acquisitiveness. The appropriation of these capitalist structures in the service of evangelism therefore enables Campbell’s youthful readers to become ideologically prepared for the coupling of Christianity and commerce that underpinned Evangelical arguments in favour of the expansion of the British Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century.

John Campbell’s Life of Kaboo (1830) as “Ethnographic Spiritual Autobiography” When examining representations of redeeming children in early nineteenth-­ century children’s literature, the figure of the San “bushboy” in Campbell’s and Marryat’s respective children’s writing merits particular attention because of his unique ambivalence. In early nineteenth-century missionary travel writings, representations of the San adult as the irredeemable “wild bushman” coexist alongside reports of the superior intelligence of San children. European travellers were often dependent on the hired labour of San child guides for survival on their journeys through the arid spaces of the southern African interior, spaces that were beyond the boundaries of the Cape Colony. Colonial travelogues often register the sense of gratitude travellers felt towards their young Indigenous guides. These contradictory modes bifurcated the San into two opposing tropes: the savage and degraded adult, on the one hand, and the resourceful, redeeming 47  Hulme quoted in A.  O’Malley, Children’s Literature, Popular Culture, and Robinson Crusoe, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012), 74.

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child, on the other hand. While missionaries often viewed San adults as capable of a limited form of conversion, in which they would always be reliant on European religious instruction, the child had the potential of full redemption. By indicating the positive effect that conversion and education could have on children, the San child could act as an exemplar to Christian children of the transformative effect of religious conversion. The model child convert also played a crucial role in mission work by mediating between the mission station and Indigenous communities through the proselytizing role of the “native agent.” On a material level, the San child’s perceived intelligence, which was expressed through local knowledge of the environment, also meant the child’s labour played a vital role in helping Europeans negotiate the harsh terrain of the African veld. In the first volume of Travels in South Africa (1815), Campbell generally represents the San as degraded “wild bushmen” rather than sharing the humanitarian ideology of fellow LMS missionary John Philip. Still, Campbell also recognizes the important role that the San played as hired guides to European travellers, as the following account of his first journey beyond the borders of the Cape Colony demonstrates: Our being accompanied by the young bushman appeared to be a singular favour from providence, for had he not been with us, it is probable we should neither have found grass, nor water, nor wood for fire at night. We had not seen a blade of grass during the first day’s journey; but a little after sun-set he led us out of our track, up a narrow pass between two hills on our right, to a small sequestered valley, where there was a fountain, grass, and abundance of fire-wood. I looked to him, as Elijah may be supposed to have looked to the ravens that fed him in the wilderness, as God’s instrument for fulfilling his gracious will to us, in answer to the prayers of distant friends.48

Here, the San boy’s resourcefulness is framed within an Evangelical discourse that conflates his ability to locate the material necessities for the group’s survival with a religious ideology that stresses God’s providential intervention in the lives of individuals. The boy transforms from a hired guide to a metaphorical saviour through Campbell’s allusion to the story in 1 Kings: 17, where the prophet Elijah is fed by ravens while in the wilderness during a time of drought. In Campbell’s narrative, the boy becomes both the means by which the Europeans survive their journey 48  John Campbell, Travels in South Africa: Undertaken at the Request of the Missionary Society (Black, Parry, & Company, 1815), 190–91.

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through the Kalahari Desert and “God’s instrument” in the deliverance of the Europeans from the trials of life in the wilderness. The clash of the ethnographic and Evangelical discourses in this single moment radically shifts the subject position of the San boy/guide. The story both emphasizes the importance of the child’s unique skills and the contribution they make to the material survival of Campbell and his party, while elevating the boy to the typological role of the redeeming child. In Campbell’s Life of Kaboo, this Evangelical discourse blends with an ethnographic discourse that seeks to represent the San’s “manners and customs,” thus creating a “double voiced” discourse that can be analysed with reference to Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas about linguistic hybridity.49 Robert J. C. Young has described how this model of linguistic hybridity, whereby multiple discourses can be contained within a single utterance, can be applied specifically to racial discourse; he argues that “even the same word will belong simultaneously to two languages, two belief systems that interact in a hybrid construction, and consequently the word has two contradictory meanings, two accents.”50 This double-voiced discourse is a characteristic of both ethnographic accounts of the San and other Indigenous peoples written by missionaries and representations of non-­ Europeans in imperial adventure stories. In Life of Kaboo, these two discourses are split into two distinct narrative voices: the narrator/ ethnographer and the San convert, the eponymous Kaboo. There is also a generic tension between Campbell’s need to provide ethnographic information about the San and the representation of the story as a work of fictionalized spiritual autobiography. The friction generates a heterogeneous narrative that shows how the tropes that missionary ethnographers established for representing the San established migrate into what was perhaps their first manifestation in fiction. At the start, prior to the shift into the mode of first-person, fictional autobiography, Campbell positions his third-person narrator in the place of an ethnographer, one who makes field observations about the social practices of San communities in a manner that blends the empirical register of scientific observation with morally freighted value judgements: 49  M. M. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse and the Novel’ in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays: 1, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson, Revised ed. edition (Austin, Tex: University of Texas Press, 1982), 240–282: 262. 50  Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, 1st edition (London ; New York: Routledge, 1994), 20–21.

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“Having neither cattle nor cultivated ground, from a kind of necessity they have become robbers of all tribes. Consequently, all consider them as enemies of the worst description who deserved to be extirpated from the earth.”51 Campbell constructs the San as archetypal wandering savages who resist both forced incorporation into the colonial labour economy and submission to the laws laid down by the British administration. Instead, the San’s raids on the farms of Indigenous and settler groups who have encroached on their territories justify the genocidal commando raids which colonial authorities instigated against their communities. Here, we see the familiar trope of the “wild bushman” evident in Kicherer’s account. As with Kicherer, the emphasis on the San’s brutality and violence communicates the difficulties that missionaries encountered in their attempts at convert these peoples, thus rendering such efforts heroic. Echoes of Kicherer are also present when the narrative perspective switches from third-person narrator to that of Kaboo, the San convert whose fictionalized spiritual autobiography makes up most of the text. Of particular importance is Kaboo’s family life. Kaboo’s descriptions of maternal neglect add authenticity to the ethnographic descriptions. He describes his upbringing as follows: “As a child I used to creep most part of the day about our little hut, as unnoticed by my parents as the lizards or field-mice around” and that he became “accustomed to hunger and neglect.”52 As Cleall has argued, the trope of Indigenous parenting having no natural affections permeated missionary representations of non-­ European peoples.53 However, distinctions were made between the familial practices of different ethnic groups. As Cleall notes, “some missionaries argued that the Tswana were ‘naturally domestic’, [while] other groups, such as the Khoi [Khoekhoe], were thought to lack domesticity entirely.”54 The constant emphasis on the brutality of Khoekhoe and on San domestic practices supports the conviction that missionary intervention in these communities is imperative. This racial myth particularly appealed to Evangelical readers, who could register the implicit contrast between the 51  John Campbell, Life of Kaboo A Wild Bushman, Written in Narrative Form by Himself, Describing the Circumstances and Habits of His Wretched Countrymen and the Happy Change Which Christian Instruction Is Calculated to Produce Among a Barbarous People (London: James Nisbet, 1830), 2. 52  Campbell, 4. 53  E. Cleall, Missionary Discourses of Difference: Negotiating Otherness in the British Empire, 1840–1900 (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012), 35. 54  Cleall, 36.

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domestic practices of the San and their own domestic ideology, which made the virtues of motherhood central to the moral regulation of the family. In order to present his mother’s neglect in the most sensational light, Kaboo repeats Kicherer’s allegation that San mothers would feed their children to lions.55 As Hall has argued, the mother played a central role in Evangelical domestic ideology.56 The moral power of women within the family was predicated on both marriage and family, with the maternal role and its connotations of ease, simplicity, and dignity demonstrating that women could “act as the moral regenerators of the nation.”57 The San mother’s alleged lack of a maternal bond with her son completely repudiated this ideal and was emblematic of the moral degradation of her nation. Kaboo’s position as a converted Christian looking back and reflecting upon his conversion process allows Campbell to channel some of the ethnographic critiques of San culture made by European travellers, thus blending the ethnographic and the Evangelical into a double-voiced discourse. Prior to his conversion, when visiting traps set to catch game and finding them empty, Kaboo ventriloquizes the colonial myth that argued for a correlation between lack of communication and intellectual inferiority within his community: On such occasions I have seen us travel together almost half a day without a single word being spoken by one of the party. Such is the misery attending a bushman’s life; they are either under the extremes of depression or exultation, almost always in extremes, seldom a mediocrity. The constant concern is, what we shall eat—nothing else prompts us to be active.58

Here, Kaboo appears to distance himself from his group, taking an observational rather than participatory role in the proceedings. This episode also marks one of the many points in the early part of the story where the instability of the narrative voice emerges through slippages from the first into the third person. Such shifting moves the genre momentarily from 55  Campbell, Life of Kaboo A Wild Bushman, Written in Narrative Form by Himself, Describing the Circumstances and Habits of His Wretched Countrymen and the Happy Change Which Christian Instruction Is Calculated to Produce Among a Barbarous People, 8. 56  Hall, White, Male and Middle Class, 75–94. 57  Hall, 86. 58  Campbell, Life of Kaboo A Wild Bushman, Written in Narrative Form by Himself, Describing the Circumstances and Habits of His Wretched Countrymen and the Happy Change Which Christian Instruction Is Calculated to Produce Among a Barbarous People, 21.

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fictionalized autobiography to instructional, ethnographic travel writing. Moments like these expose ideological tensions between secular and religious instruction, typological ethnography, and personal spiritual autobiography. In the second half of Campbell’s fiction, we see how the missionary’s intervention brings about the convert’s awareness of this alleged degradation. One of the first interventions the missionary makes, prior to any spiritual teaching, is to introduce the group of San people to a mirror.59 The act of seeing themselves for the first time becomes a metaphor for their spiritual awakening, with the ability to see oneself serving as the prelude to the self-examination necessary so that the Evangelical can lead a life of active Christian faith. Kaboo describes how, upon looking into “white man’s glass,” his parents found that “it gave an exact representation of themselves. On this discovery they were not so fond of looking into it. They gave evident signs of disgust with their own appearance.”60 After this point, the discourse shifts from an ethnographic description of the customs and practices of the San, which are focalized from Kaboo’s perspective, into a fictional version of the spiritual autobiography in which his acknowledgement of the degraded physical body is followed by self-­ reflection that begins the process of converting the San convert to an Evangelical idea of the self. Kaboo next describes the religious teachings conferred by the missionary and the spiritual awakening of the group. Here, we see both ethnographic and Evangelical discourses simultaneously assimilated into his voice: This was the most wonderful day of my life, I seemed to have been asleep all my former life and had just been awaked. Formerly, I took notice of nothing but what was for eating and drinking, any more than the wild beasts. Now I began to think of myself, and of everything I saw, as made by another, and for the first time began to wonder at objects I saw, and to think of the power, invention, and ingenuity of him who made them. But my thoughts were so wild and confused. I could not express them to anyone.61 59  This is another example of an incident taken directly from Campbell’s experiences in Southern Africa. See Campbell, Travels in South Africa, 188–89. 60  Campbell, Life of Kaboo A Wild Bushman, Written in Narrative Form by Himself, Describing the Circumstances and Habits of His Wretched Countrymen and the Happy Change Which Christian Instruction Is Calculated to Produce Among a Barbarous People, 36. 61  Campbell, 43–44.

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The voice of the older, fully acculturated, Kaboo narrates this process step by step. At first, Kaboo’s experiences are universalized to encourage the reader to identify with Kaboo’s conversion. Campbell uses a common metaphor in Evangelical sermons and spiritual autobiographies; he draws an analogy between the spiritual transformation of the soul through conversion and the physical transformation of the body as it moves from sleep to wakefulness. However, in the next sentence, the reader is distanced from Kaboo through tropes specifically associated with ethnographic representations of San communities. In this case, the zoomorphization of the San evident in Kicherer’s account again surfaces through Campbell’s comparison between Kaboo’s perceptions of his surroundings and that of “wild beasts.” The analogy serves to emphasize the intellectual uplift caused by Kaboo’s knowledge of God. God here is associated with “invention” and “ingenuity,” qualities ascribed to the technology brought to the San community by the white men. The association between divine authority and modern technology elides the introduction of European manufactured products and technology into the community with a sense of divine purpose or spirit. The final sentence ventriloquizes the frequently reported allegation by European travellers that Khoisan languages in general (and San languages in particular) lacked the linguistic complexity to express abstract ideas.62 However, as Matthias Guenther has argued, missionary assumptions about the inability of San converts to understand Christianity had less to do with any inability to comprehend abstract thought or unfamiliarity with complex spiritual ideas, and more to do with the problem of ineffective communication between missionaries and their San congregants. Guenther notes: “Bushman click languages were virtually unintelligible to the missionaries and difficult to learn (then as now). Indeed, many a colonial European held the Bushman tongue to be quite unlearnable.”63 This unintelligibility led to ideological assumptions that the  bushman 62  In Chap. 2, I discuss briefly the early modern origins of this idea. By 1830, perhaps the most influential European analysis of San languages was provided by German traveller Henry Lichtenstein in his Travels. Lichtenstein describes the San languages as the most “rough and wild” of all the peoples of Southern Africa and “much poorer in sounds.” Hinrich Lichtenstein, Travels in Southern Africa in the Years 1803, 1804, 1805 and 1806, trans. Anne Plumptre (London: Printed for Henry Colburn…, 1812), 468. Such ethnographic observations led to a common perception that San languages were inadequate for expressing complex ideas and were thus used to explain the alleged “inferiority” of the San intellect. 63  Guenther, Tricksters and Trancers, 212.

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language was incapable of conveying abstract or symbolic expressions—an idea that even a superficial acquaintance with bushman folklore or mythology would rapidly dispel, but which was nonetheless pervasive among missionaries and colonial travellers who passed through mission stations. Efforts to use Khoekhoe or bushman farm labourers as interpreters were made, but frequently either because of mutual suspicion between farm bushmen and independent San groups or because of differences between Khoekhoe languages and bushman languages, such efforts resulted in mistranslation, adding further to the communicative confusion. Contemplation of God for Kaboo did not immediately result in the personal relationship with Jesus that was so central to Evangelical religious ideology because, as Campbell alleges, Kaboo’s culture lacked the language to articulate such a relationship. This alleged inadequacy implicitly justifies the erasure of the San languages and their replacement with English, since acquiring a language in which abstract ideas could be articulated was a precondition for successful conversion and acculturation. By vocalizing these racist and Eurocentric views of San culture through Kaboo, the abandonment of his own language and cultural practices appears as an active choice rather than an imposition, making him a willing agent in his own conversion and forced acculturation. Here, the discourses of ethnographic writing and those of Evangelical spiritual autobiography are fused to uphold the cultural genocide enacted on San communities by missionaries in southern Africa, and the forced assimilation of San converts into colonial society. In Life of Kaboo, the adults in Kaboo’s community are gradually acculturated through both hearing the missionary preach and abandoning their hunter-gatherer lifestyle for a settled life of agricultural labour structured around a six-day working week, with times for rest and religious education built into each day: They also shewed up six marks on each side of the pole toward the sun-rising and sun-setting, which divided the day into twelve parts, or hours - from one mark to another the shadow of the pole would take an hour to move; by attending to this, said they, we know when to go to work and when to come from it, when to eat and when to attend the white man’s instruction.64

64  Campbell, Life of Kaboo A Wild Bushman, Written in Narrative Form by Himself, Describing the Circumstances and Habits of His Wretched Countrymen and the Happy Change Which Christian Instruction Is Calculated to Produce Among a Barbarous People, 63.

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Later, there are scenes in which the “white man’s instruction” extends from religious to secular instruction to ensure that the community acquires both the language requisite for the expression of abstract ideas and the literacy necessary for Bible study. However, the recipients of this instruction are the children rather than the adults of the group. The reluctance of the missionary to teach the adults either to read or write is predicated on the implicit assumption that they have regressed too far down the road of “savagery” to be able to be fully saved and are therefore a part of a culture that is reified, trapped at an earlier, pre-Christian socio-evolutionary moment. In this framework, missionary hopes for the salvation of the adults lay in the next generation, whose conversion and acculturation promised to give them the ideological tools to act as “native agents,” as itinerate preachers who could proselytize in their own communities. A sense of the potential of the next generation to renew their community comes first through Kaboo’s account of the response of the children to the missionary’s initial writing lesson: “I never saw our young people so happy; they felt pleasure from being noticed, from having their minds employed, and from the novelty of the exercise in which they had been engaged, and from believing what he told them, that great things would result from what they were learning.”65 The children’s affective response stems from the attention the missionary is paying them, in contrast to the neglect that both Campbell and Kicherer falsely allege to be typical of San parenting. Such joy also indicates a future-orientated outlook in the belief that “great things would result from what they were learning.” The phrasing alludes both to their own ability to read the Bible and access the word of God directly, and their ability to redeem their community. Through the voice of the native convert, Campbell masks the process of cultural genocide that the missionary is practising upon the San children by naturalizing the missionary ideology. Campbell stresses the agency of the San by presenting this voluntary acculturation as a choice that converts made out of gratitude to his missionary teachers, rather than the forced acculturation that it most likely was. In the final scene of Life of Kaboo, the child-convert is the first to learn to read the Bible and thus the first to be able to act as a “native agent,” disseminating Christian knowledge both within his own community and beyond. When the older Kaboo describes how the missionary’s teaching changed his community, he again vocalizes the perspective of the  Campbell, 66–67.

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missionary-ethnographer. The following description shows the first time that a young “bushboy” performs a Bible reading: The first time that a bushboy stood up and read aloud a part of the white man’s book, a number of strangers, who had arrived that day, were so amazed that, as with one consent, all of them clapped their hands on their eyes, turned round, falling with their faces to the ground and laughed immoderately for some time. […] The exhibition had a fine effect on all present, for after it almost all the parents who had children old enough to be taught, came forward to solicit the white man to teach their children to do what the little bushboy had done. We could not call it, to read, for we had no word of that meaning in our language; nor had we any word for a book, till the white man brought the book of God into the country.66

Here, the group’s affective response to the child’s preaching creates an implicit contrast with the lack of emotion that is represented as typical of the San in the ethnographic narrative that prefaces Kaboo’s story. As with Kaboo’s own conversion experience, the tropes of missionary ethnography and Evangelical spiritual autobiography are combined to indicate a mental and spiritual change that could be effected through Christianity. Yet the linguistic limitations of the unacculturated adult San, who are presented as unable to adequately express what they are witnessing because they lack the words for reading or book, appears as a barrier to full conversion. It is therefore only the children who have the capacity to achieve full conversion and act as redeeming children, disseminating their knowledge to the adult population. For the adult and juvenile readers of Life of Kaboo, the trope of the “ministering child” had a dual purpose.67 The anonymous “bushboy” becomes a model convert not only because his youth means that he can easily absorb the spiritual and intellectual education he receives, but also for the role he can play in disseminating Christianity to his people. The example of the model child convert also provided both a reminder to adult audiences of the importance of inculcating their children with “religious habits of thought” in order to “make Christianity the focus of an active life,” and an example for adults to follow.68 In Life of Kaboo, the model convert and the ministering child, which, in Alfred and Galba, were split  Campbell, 86.  Brown, The Captured World, 42. 68  Brown, 42. 66 67

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between the European protagonists and the Indigenous converts, are fused into the single figure of the San child-convert. Campbell intended the story to both entertain and instruct children in Evangelical religious ideology and bolster support for the ailing LMS operations in southern Africa. It is therefore of crucial importance that the adult Christian Kaboo is seen to have adopted not only Christianity and the English language, but also the narrative of cultural uplift and intellectual as well as spiritual improvement that were central to Evangelical arguments in favour of missionary work outside of Europe. Yet evidence from recent historical analyses of missionary accounts of the activities of San converts on the various LMS missions in the early nineteenth century suggests that “model converts” such as Kaboo never existed, even among those of the San who converted to Christianity. In his study of the last LMS mission to the San on the banks of the Caledon River between 1828 and 1833, Jared Macdonald notes that, although land was cultivated by the San converts, “residents actively engaged in agricultural practices alongside their traditional foraging modes of subsistence.”69 He goes on to argue that, while historians have acknowledged “syncretistic indigenous responses to the gospel message,” the “syncretistic indigenous responses to the dynamics associated with the material encounter” have only recently begun to be explored.70 Macdonald maintains that even the San communities based permanently at Bushman Station would often go on hunting trips for days on end, practising their traditional hunter-gatherer modes of subsistence and leaving their allotted land on the mission station uncultivated. We could, then, infer that the San converts were probably not returning to the mission station for school lessons or prayer meetings during these routine foraging expeditions. So, far from actively abandoning their traditional cultural practices in favour of a “superior” civilization, the San communities in southern Africa picked the elements of settled mission life that suited their needs and continued their own religious and cultural traditions, even while formally under the “protection” of European missionaries. From this evidence, we can see that Campbell’s representation of Kaboo’s community as a place of model

69  Jared McDonald, ‘Encounters at “Bushman Station”: Reflections on the Fate of the San of the Transgariep Frontier, 1828–1833’, South African Historical Journal 61, no. 2 (1 June 2009): 378, https://doi.org/10.1080/02582470902859674. 70  McDonald, 383.

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converts is the stuff of fiction, a fiction that also served a distinct political purpose.71 Kaboo’s spiritual awakening and consequential disavowal of his previous language and culture make the political case for the evangelization of the San, offering the transformative power of religious conversion as the most powerful tool for subduing and acculturating a group who persistently resisted both settler appropriations of their land, and efforts to forcibly integrate them into the colonial labour economy. Meanwhile, the missionary/saviour as the agent of this change serves to present the work of Evangelical missionaries as the means through which such transformations can occur, and in so doing argues for greater public support of the ailing LMS missions to the San. Throughout the narrative, the San are shaped through a discourse that simultaneously stresses the universality of the conversion experience and the specific benefits of conversion to their Indigenous communities. Finally, through the assumed identification with the San child, the narrative implicitly suggests the role that the reader can play in advancing the missionary cause by means of moral and financial support for the mission movement.

The San Child in Marryat’s The Mission; or Scenes in Africa (1844) With public support for mission work at its peak during the early to mid-­ nineteenth century, the figure of the missionary hero migrated from Evangelical tract fiction to a variety of different novelistic sub-genres. This figure appeared in the works of writers as diverse as R.  M. Ballantyne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charlotte Brontë, and Charles Kingsley.72 The 71  The failure of the Sak River mission station set up by Kicherer is an earlier example of the lack of success the LMS had in converting the San. For more on this, see Nigel Penn, ‘“Civilising” the San: The First Mission to the Cape San, 1791–1806,’ in Claim to the Country: The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek, ed. Pippa Skotnes (Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jacana Media, 2007), 90–115. 72  Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 19. While it is true that characters such as Brontë’s St John Rivers in Jane Eyre (1847) are not unequivocally heroic, even where middle-class support for the mission movement is critiqued, such as through the character of Mrs Jellaby in Dickens’ Bleak House (1853), these texts evidence the continuing influence of the mission movement on the ideology of the British middle classes during this period.

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increasing popularity of both missionary travelogues and juvenile tract literature is entwined with the development of the boys’ adventure novel during the nineteenth century through a shared appropriation of the Robinsonade genre by a variety of Evangelical writers producing juvenile tract literature. The dual concern of Evangelical tract writers with verisimilitude and moral didacticism is also evident in the children’s fiction of Captain Fredrick Marryat, the earliest imperial adventure fiction writer. Marryat’s turn towards Evangelical religion in later life seems to have led to an interest in missionary travelogues that provided the source material for his late novel The Mission; or Scenes in Africa (1844). The Mission is notable because of the amount of space Marryat devotes to the ethnographic representation of the various European and Indigenous peoples of southern Africa. In these descriptions, the influence of both tract literature and missionary and secular travelogues about the continent is evident. Although one of only two novels not based in a place Marryat had visited, The Mission was praised by contemporary reviewers for its verisimilitude. The Literary Gazette stated: “Its simple narrative style and its Daniel-de-­ Foe-like verisimilitude, carry the reader through all the scenes with the ease of an ambling steed; and at the end he finds that his amusement is attended by a very clear notion of the interior of South Africa.”73 The comparison with Defoe indicates the place that Robinson Crusoe enjoyed as the foundational story for boys’ adventure writers. The reviewer also praises the ethnographic and natural historical elements of the novel. Like much children’s writing of its day, Marryat’s fictions are underpinned by a didactic morality, which Joseph Conrad described as “honourable and conventional,”74 and which Virginia Woolf, with characteristic acerbity, dismissed as possessing “the glib slickness of a schoolmaster preaching down to small children.”75 Many critics have claimed Marryat’s novels present us with a series of well-rendered types, whose individuality is always subordinated to the requirements of convoluted and high-paced plots and didactic, conservative morality. Yet it is evident that this moral framework was important to reviewers. An unsigned critic writing in the Examiner argues that The 73  Anon, ‘Book Review’, The Literary Gazette: A Weekly Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts, 12 July 1845. 74  Joseph Conrad, Tales of the Sea (London: Richard Clay and Son, 1919). 75  Virginia Woolf, The Captain’s Death Bed: And Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1981), 42–43.

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Mission is particularly suited to young readers precisely because of Marryat’s use of the preaching or “teaching” voice of the adult that Woolf so disparages: “He [Marryat] does not affect to teach them too much, but his lessons are in the right direction […] With no ultra delicacy of sentiment, there is never anything shabby or ungenerous, and not often anything common-place.”76 This comment serves to demonstrate how, even for non-religious audiences, there was an expectation that literature written for children should not only be informative but should also inculcate young readers with a set of moral values. Marryat’s representations of Indigenous and European residents and sojourners in southern Africa are more complex and less typological than those of Campbell. Yet Marryat’s blend of exotic adventure, moral didacticism, and ethnographic and natural historical detail clearly owes a debt to the generic heterogeneity of the children’s tract fiction that came before his adventure stories. This generic hybridity is also reflected in The Mission. Like Campbell, Marryat uses both an instructional third-person narrator and a first-person narration, a structure that leads to a split identification on the part of readers between, on the one hand, the narrator’s judgements and, on the other hand, the characters’ opinions. The narrative discourse becomes polyphonic as a broad cast of characters articulate contradictory viewpoints, all of which are assimilated and interpreted by the novel’s main protagonists and the omniscient third-person narrator. This split identification has implications for Marryat’s depiction of southern African peoples. In line with contemporary racial discourse, the relationships between the Europeans and the Africans are structured by difference, but the reader is exposed to several different viewpoints on the Indigenous and European inhabitants of the Cape Colony and its environs. The presence of these multiple voices allows Marryat to accommodate perspectives that are both contradictory and critical, even if they are eventually enfolded within an evangelically inflected humanitarian moral framework. In The Mission, we can sense the clear authorial intention behind the narratorial voice, one imbuing it with the authority to pass judgement on various characters and events. This judgemental tone in turn allows Marryat to maintain different degrees of distance between the various characters and events, creating a work that is both dialogic and determined. This shift from the earlier tract fiction such as Campbell’s

 Anon, ‘The Mission; Or Scenes in Africa’, The Examiner, 12 July 1845, 456.

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reflects more broadly the greater flexibility offered by the novel as a means for representing the complexity of interracial encounters. The Mission follows the quest of Alexander Wilmot, who leaves Britain for Africa in 1828 in search of the daughter of his great-uncle, Sir Charles Wilmot, who disappeared in the wreck of the Grosvenor in 1782. Sir Charles’s fear is not that his daughter should be dead, but rather that she may have become “the wife or slave of some wild savage; her children […] growing up as brutes of the field in ignorance and idolatry.”77 Wilmot’s anxiety that his daughter may have “gone native” is articulated using the common motif of the Indigenous African as a “wild savage.” Cut off from the religious and cultural influences of home, the daughter would likely have regressed into a near-bestial state. In response to Sir. Charles’s concerns, Marryat pays homage to travel accounts having Alexander counter his great-uncle’s objections by taking from his library “all the works he could find relative to South Africa.”78 Alexander’s response to reading these travelogues is to cast the British missionaries as heroes in his own romantic narrativization of British involvement in southern Africa: The country, which was then a desert, is now inhabited by Europeans, within 200 miles of the very spot where the Grosvenor was wrecked. The continual emigration since the Cape has fallen under British government, and the zeal of those who have braved all dangers to make known the Word of God to the heathen and idolater, have in forty years made such an alteration, that I see no more danger in the mission which I propose, than I do in a visit to Naples.79

The variegated Indigenous groups of southern Africa are merged into two single categories, the “heathen” and the “idolator,” which are opposed to the (implicitly Christian) “Europeans.” In contrast to the more secular binary of “savage” and “civilized,” these categories stress the centrality of religion to British activities in the Cape. As I suggested earlier, this blending of socio-evolutionary and religious discourses within the same 77  Fredrick Marryat, The Mission or Scenes in Africa, New edition (London: Rex Collings, 1970), 5. 78  Fredrick Marryat, The Mission or Scenes in Africa, New edition (London: Rex Collings, 1970), 14. 79  Fredrick Marryat, The Mission or Scenes in Africa, New edition (London: Rex Collings, 1970), 13.

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utterance was characteristic of both ethnographic travel writing that missionaries produced and Campbell’s Life of Kaboo. In Alexander’s reading of his great-uncle’s library of travel literature, the missionary emerges as a heroic explorer who has “braved all dangers to make known the Word of God.” It is the pioneering work of the missionary who tames the wilds of Africa that ensures the European traveller can roam as free from danger as if he were on the Grand Tour: a heroic fantasy voiced through the novel’s hero, with whom the reader is supposed to identify. On the boat travelling from England to the Cape Colony, Alexander encounters Fairburn, a long-time resident of Cape Town, who expresses opinions in line with those of the Cape Colony liberal elite, and who gives him an authoritative account of the region’s history. Threaded through the account is a critique of the demoralizing effect of slavery on both the slaves and the slavers. In what appears to be an allusion to John Phillip’s Researches into South Africa (1828), Fairburn describes the impact that missionary work had made in southern Africa after the abolition of the slave trade in 1806: It was by the missionaries chiefly that this change was brought about; they had penetrated into the interior and saw with their own eyes the system of cruelty and rapine that was carried on; they wrote home accounts, which were credited, and which produced a great alteration. To the astonishment and indignation of the boors, law was introduced where it had always been set at defiance; they were told that the life of a hottentot was as important in the eye of God, and in the eye of the law, as that of a Dutch boor, and that the Government would hold it as such.80

Although Fairburn attributes the implementation of “law,” which holds that “the life of a hottentot was as important […] as that of a Dutch boor” to the British government, he states that the missionaries are the pioneers, since they challenged the systemic cruelty of the trekboer farmers towards their slaves and servants by introducing legal and moral restraint. Fairburn proceeds to critique behaviour of the colonial government towards the amaXhosa. He ascribes the frontier wars to British interference in internecine conflicts among the different amaXhosa groups; there were wars in 80  Fredrick Marryat, The Mission or Scenes in Africa, New edition (London: Rex Collings, 1970), 26–27. A clear reference to Ordinance 50, an ordinance enacted in 1828 which theoretically recognized Khoekhoe as equal to Europeans under the law. See Chap. 3 for more on this.

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which the English “had no business to interfere.”81 Fairburn’s account of the aggressive frontier policy enacted by Colonel Harry Smith towards the amaXhosa leads Alexander to conclude that “it really does not appear that the Colonial Government, when in our hands, was more considerate than when it was held by the Dutch.”82 This appraisal of the British colonial administration allows Marryat to throw the heroic work of the missionaries into even greater relief, articulating an evangelically inflected humanitarian criticism of British colonial policy towards the amaXhosa on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony. Patrick Brantlinger has argued that Marryat’s representations of non-­ European peoples are “usually more sympathetic—and often more knowledgeable—than those by many of his imitators.”83 As is evidenced from Fairburn’s comments, Marryat was alert to the brutality of both the colonial administration and the behaviour of the white settlers, and he was able to acknowledge and respect non-European peoples, if only when their actions most resemble those of Europeans. If we are to accept Brantlinger’s premise, we must also accept that Marryat’s representations of non-­ European peoples are typological, without the delineation of individual character that Conrad and Woolf thought characteristic of his work. Yet not all of Marryat’s characters are types. Within the group of Khoekhoe servants who accompany the group on their travels, there are some who conform to the Khoekhoe stereotype presented in European travel writing, while there are others who are brave, loyal, and alert, conforming to the loyal Khoekhoe servant that is a common trope in South African imperial romances by later imperial novelists such as R.  M. Ballantyne and H. Rider Haggard. Marryat’s more nuanced representation of Indigenous peoples can be most readily illustrated if we consider his approach to the San. We have already seen how Campbell’s juvenile tracts bifurcated the San into the “wild and degraded” adult, and the resourceful and redeeming child. Like Campbell, Marryat’s first representation of the San is of a community living outside the bounds of both the colonial economy. Prior to any 81  Fredrick Marryat, The Mission or Scenes in Africa, New edition (London: Rex Collings, 1970), 31. 82  Fredrick Marryat, The Mission or Scenes in Africa, New edition (London: Rex Collings, 1970), 31. 83  Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914, Reprint edition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 67–68.

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encounters with the San, Swinton—the naturalist of the party—describes the people as follows: The bushman may be considered as the hottentot driven out of his fertile plains, deprived of his cattle, and compelled to resort to the hills for his safety and subsistence—in short, a hill hottentot: impelled by hunger and by injuries, he has committed depredations upon the property of others until he has had a mark set upon him; his hand has been against every man, and he has been hunted like a wild beast, and compelled to hide himself in the caves of almost inaccessible rocks and hills.84

While the familiar themes of degradation and criminality that characterize the “wild bushman” are present here, Marryat is less inclined than Campbell and Kicherer to perceive these characteristics as innate. In line with John Philip and Thomas Pringle, Swinton justifies the San’s behaviour as legitimate responses to illegal settler expansionism and the genocidal commando system. Working concurrently with this humanitarian discourse, however, are invidious comparisons between the San and wild animals. Although Swinton articulates a more compassionate rendering of the “wild bushman,” he still positions the San as culturally inferior and in need of management by representatives of the British settler colonial social order. In contrast to this classic colonial representation of the “savage” San’s resistance to the systematic dispossession of their lands is the narrative trajectory of the “bushboy” Omrah, a San child who is befriended by the travellers. Omrah’s development follows the arc of a typical Evangelical conversion narrative, while also serving as a means for Marryat to communicate ethnographic information about the San. Thus, as in Campbell’s Life of Kaboo, Omrah’s development as a character suggests the use by Marryat of a double-voiced discourse that incorporates the ethnographic and the Evangelical in his mini-narrative of Omrah’s interactions with the Europeans.85 Shortly following Alexander’s arrival in Cape Town, the naturalist Swinton encounters the “bushboy”: “Mr. Swinton perceived something moving in the bushes. He advanced cautiously, and discovered that 84  Fredrick Marryat, The Mission or Scenes in Africa, New edition (London: Rex Collings, 1970), 87. 85  The name Omrah also appears to be a corruption of the Arabic Umrah, the word used for the act of undertaking the pilgrimage to Mecca, further emphasizing the importance of Omrah’s spiritual journey.

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is was a poor little bushman boy, about twelve years old, quite naked, and evidently in a state of starvation, having been left there in a high fever by his people.”86 As in Campbell’s Life of Kaboo, we can infer a lack of affection between mother and child. Yet the affective response of the author is very different. In line with Marryat’s more humanitarian outlook, the reader is invited to sympathize with the abject position in which the child is found. The affective response of the narrator who describes him as “a poor little bushman boy” is extended to the implied reader so that, despite his abject position, both the child and adult reader enter a limited imaginative sympathy with the “bushman boy,” an affective engagement that provided readerly interest in the spiritual journey that Omrah undertakes. Later, the representation of Omrah is again double-voiced: Our little bushman had now quite recovered not only his strength but his gaiety, and was one of the most amusing little fellows that could be met with. He could not make himself understood, except to one or two of the hottentots; but he was all pantomime, trying, by gestures and by signs, to talk to Mr. Swinton and his companions.87

Here, Marryat entertains the reader by foregrounding Omrah’s animated desire to interact. The narrator’s condescending tone stresses Omrah’s childish qualities by associating his “little” stature with his “amusing” personality. Simultaneously, Marryat appropriates the empirical voice of the ethnographer through typologizing Omrah. In stressing his novelty, the narrator is also emphasizing the differences between the boy and the Europeans, giving a detailed account of his external appearance. Furthermore, in referring to Omrah as the “little bushman,” the narrator depersonalizes him, suggesting to the reader that these characteristics are typical not only of this individual but of his race in general. Despite this early recourse to ethnographic essentialization, Omrah is presented as mentally agile and able to quickly acquire both the language and manners of the English. This ability to mimic and assimilate enables him to become the model child convert, with Marryat’s Evangelical ideology coming to the fore at the end, where Omrah has become both a model convert and 86  Fredrick Marryat, The Mission or Scenes in Africa, New edition (London: Rex Collings, 1970), 64. 87  Fredrick Marryat, The Mission or Scenes in Africa, New edition (London: Rex Collings, 1970), 68.

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a ministering child. In the final chapter, the narrator makes the following account of Omrah’s later life: We may here as well observe, that, a few months after Alexander and the Major left the Cape, Omrah, who had been placed at a school by Swinton, was admitted into the church, and baptized by the name of Alexander Henderson Omrah; Alexander and the Major being his sponsors by proxies. He turned out a very clever scholar, and remains with Swinton at this moment. He has more than once accompanied him to the interior, and has done much in reclaiming his countrymen, the bushmen, from their savage way of life, and has been of great service to the missionaries as interpreter of the Word to his heathen brethren.88

As with Life of Kaboo, the closing section of The Mission describes Omrah’s assimilation into a Christian and British life. Like the “bushboy” who reads the Bible to his people, Omrah leads an active Christian life through the discipline of religious and secular education. Most crucially, he acts as a “native agent” proselytizing to his own people back in southern Africa. His redemption from near-death to a life of active Christian service through the paternalistic intervention of Swinton and his British companions reinforces Marryat’s representation of the British as a benevolent force in southern Africa, provided that their actions are guided by the missionaries, whose work has a transformative effect upon Indigenous peoples. This ending positions Omrah within the framework of the ethnographic spiritual biography, a narrative which follows the structure of an Evangelical spiritual biography while incorporating detailed ethnographic information, figuring the San child as both typical convert and racial type. As we have already seen, this double-voiced discourse served several ideological functions. First, it allowed Evangelical writers to capitalize upon the increased interest in travel narratives and the new imperial subjects described therein in order to present an image of empire in which the mission movement played a central role. In this imagined empire, Indigenous peoples are incorporated into the colonial economy through a process of conversion and acculturation. In contrast to the coercive actions of both the settler community and the colonial administration, the Indigenous population plays an active and willing role in their own conversion. This 88  Fredrick Marryat, The Mission or Scenes in Africa, New edition (London: Rex Collings, 1970), 281.

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representation became an argument for the continued domestic support of the ailing mission movement in southern Africa. Finally, it allowed for a split identification on the part of both adult and child readers between the instructional voice of the narrator and that of the model convert. However, Marryat’s novel is more than double-voiced; it is polyphonic. The variety of characters presented not only allows for different racial types to emerge but, in the case of Omrah, enables the contradictory tropes for representing the San to arise within Marryat’s presentation of a single character. On many occasions, Omrah confounds the expectations of the British travellers by using his local knowledge to rescue the group. For example, he saves their lives on no fewer than three occasions: when they are attacked by lions, rhinos, and baboons; when he provides them with sustenance for their journey by finding tortoises and big game; and, most significant, when he saves Alexander and the Major when they are lost in the desert. His procurement of water when the group is close to death from dehydration and fever prompts the travellers to make the following remarks: “We have much to thank God for,” said Alexander to the Major. “We have indeed, and, next to divine aid, we have to thank that poor boy. We have been as children in his hands, and we are indebted to him and his resources for our lives tonight. I could not speak yesterday, nor could you; but his courage in remaining with the horse as an offering to the lion, I shall not forget.” “He is a child of the desert,” replied Alexander. “He has been brought up among lions, and where there is scarcity of water, and he has most wonderfully guided us in our path.”89

Here, it is Omrah’s knowledge of the desert that proves essential to the group’s survival. The Major’s assertion that they have been “as children in his hands” amounts to an admission that, removed from the structures of European life and cast into the literal and symbolic wilderness, the father/ child binary that was frequently imagined the relationship between the colonizer and colonized is reversed, with the San boy placed in the position of parent and the Europeans as helpless as offspring. Although this reversal is maintained only so long as they remain in the desert, it still suggests that, even within the context of a pro-imperialist boys’ adventure 89  Fredrick Marryat, The Mission or Scenes in Africa, New edition (London: Rex Collings, 1970), 264.

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story, Indigenous knowledge is valued—so long as it is utilized in the service of European travellers. San trackers have a long and fraught history of entanglement with colonial and apartheid regimes.90 As we have seen in both Campbell’s travel narrative and Marryat’s novel, San people were highly valued as Indigenous guides due to their familiarity with the environment of the Kalahari Desert: an environment Europeans could only see as a barren wilderness. Because foraging is integral to their survival, rural San communities both historically and today often have intimate knowledge of the food and medicinal uses of various plants, nuts, and roots to be found in the Kalahari. What most impressed European colonial travellers, however, was their ability to track animals. In 2007, a Ju/’hoansi man, Cwi Cucga, explained to the anthropologist Chris Low that his community uses both footprints and the wind to track animals. Cwi Cucga explains: “If I see the footprints, I know where they [the animals] are. You can also use the wind. You cannot go with it, you must turn and start at the end, come through the wind so the animal cannot smell you.”91 This intimate knowledge is borne from a cosmology in which the wind is simultaneously conceived as a phenomenon that moves through the environment and a means of connection between human, animal, and plant life. Low explains that, for the Ju/’hoansi, “wind, often equally conceived as smell, can move between phenomena, embedding itself in the perceiver. The smell is a living connection between one organism and another, enabling one essentially to become another.”92 Given the intangibility of this wind and the lack of familiarity that colonial travellers had with San cosmology, it is hardly surprising that Europeans often misread their San guides’ ability to locate animals and to use their intimate knowledge of the environment to identify food and water sources not visible to the naked eye. The missionaries interpreted these skills as evidence of some sort of divine intervention on the part of a benevolent, Christian god.

90  For details on the role of Khoisan trackers in efforts by the South African Defence Force to locate anti-colonial guerrillas during the 1970s and 1980s, see Berthe Van Wyk, ‘Indigenous Rights, Indigenous Epistemologies and Language: (Re)Construction of Modern Khoisan Identities’, Knowledge Cultures 4, no. 4 (2016): 33–45. 91   Chris Low, ‘Khoisan Wind: Hunting and Healing’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (2007), 71–90: 75. 92   Chris Low, ‘Khoisan Wind: Hunting and Healing’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (2007): 71.

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Marryat’s presentation of the San child as both knowledgeable Indigenous guide and child saviour also suggests a biblical allusion to Jesus’s presentation of a child to his disciples along with the injunction: “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”93 Viewed in this context, Omrah becomes the agent of the Europeans’ own spiritual redemption, by exposing the limits of their knowledge and restoring them to the state of trusting innocence necessary to ensure salvation. Omrah’s agency has implications for way that Marryat’s novel portrays this exemplary convert. Encoded in this moment is a suggestion that a rejection of the material and a return to the wilderness, like Crusoe’s time on the island, is a precondition of spiritual redemption. In contrast to the regulated space of Campbell’s imaginary mission station, Marryat’s African desert becomes a site of spiritual struggle for both the Europeans and the Africans. On the one hand, the missionaries are figured as heroic explorers who, in the words of Alexander, “braved all dangers to make known the Word of God” to the African “heathen,” providing them with a spiritual and intellectual education. On the other hand, it is only through abandoning the pretence to cultural and moral superiority and surrendering to the guidance of the San child/saviour that the European travellers can ensure both their material survival and their spiritual redemption. The complexity of Marryat’s representation of Omrah was enabled by the early nineteenth-century development of the novel. The pattern for the fictional spiritual biography found as far back as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) laid the foundation for the secularized narrative of personal progress that structured the personal development of the protagonists in the realist bildungsroman, and it is visible in Omrah’s conversion and acculturation, which appears as a developmental narrative of his transformation from “savage” to scholar. Yet the movement in characterization away from the typological and allegorical, and towards greater polyphonic complexity, had implications for the ways in which Marryat and other boys’ adventure writers were able to represent colonial encounters. The authority invested in Omrah through his resourcefulness in the desert indicates a respect on Marryat’s part for the San boy’s local knowledge of the land, a wilderness that Europeans were finding so difficult to navigate. Although contained within the framework of humanitarian ideology, Marryat gestures towards the cultural imbrication inherent in all  Matthew 18:1–5; Mark 10:15–17; Luke 18: 17–19.

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colonial encounters, signalling the ways in which European readers might be able to learn from the Indigenous peoples of the African continent. Marryat’s commitment to ethnographic verisimilitude is a result of his engagement with contemporary travel narratives, which themselves evidence contradictory representations of the San and other Indigenous groups. As we have seen in Chap. 2, missionary ethnographers created categories of racial difference that were mobile and flexible, often changing as a result of direct encounter during postings. The same was true of natural historians and government agents. Nevertheless, the faith that Evangelicals demonstrated in the transformative powers of religious conversion had the contradictory result of hardening their attitudes to the alleged “cultural degradation” of groups such as the San, while at the same time making them particularly alert to signifiers that would indicate the capacity for transformation through conversion. The San lacked signifiers such as fixed dwellings and domestic roles that conformed with Evangelical domestic ideology. Then again, the intelligence and resourcefulness often attributed to the San child were both an acknowledgement of the value of certain forms of Indigenous knowledge and an indication of the capacity of the San for conversion—and hence the value of missionary work among them. This realization made the San child an ideal protagonist around which to structure a progressive narrative that stressed the importance of spiritual growth through the self-reflection enabled by education, and finally full conversion to Evangelical Christianity. Ultimately, this transformation of the allegedly uncivilized San imaginatively contains and neutralizes the threat to European religious and administrative authority posed by their Indigenous resistance. The generic flexibility practised by writers of children’s tract fiction provided a model for the integration of fictional and factual modes of representation that was essential to the development of imperial adventure fiction. Central to this paradigm was the adaptation of a double-voiced discourse, in which the claims to truth made by both ethnographic writing and Evangelical religious ideology could be accommodated. Thus, detailed descriptions of the flora and fauna of exotic locales could be represented within a clear moral framework designed to inculcate within young readers the imperialist values of an explicitly Evangelical muscular Christianity. By examining the construction and evolution of this discourse in relation to the San, we can chart the migration of a racial discourse from missionary ethnography into adventure fiction and see how the need to accommodate

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this discourse led to the emergence of a new fictional genre: the imperial adventure story. This influential genre became a key site for the dissemination of an imperial imaginary that was to influence how British people envisioned their relationship to non-European peoples throughout the nineteenth century and into the first half of the twentieth.

CHAPTER 6

Encountering Southern Africa: The Display of Khoisan Peoples in London

On 17 May 1847, the Edinburgh surgeon and ethnologist Robert Knox took to the stage at London’s Exeter Hall, accompanied by a party of five San people from Transorangia. According to contemporary press reports, Knox addressed “a crowded, scientific and philosophical audience” of over 2000 people in what was the metropolitan debut of his influential “Lecture on the Dark Races.”1 Newspapers noted that although “the want of physical force on the lecturer’s part caused disappointment to numbers who could not possibly hear what fell from him,” the five San people themselves—two men, two women, and a baby—provoked intense media interest.2 In the surviving coverage, the San were subjected to what Zine Magubane has termed the “ethnological gaze” of metropolitan reviewers, a gaze that involved exercising “a studied indifference to the particulars” of the different cultures of the performers under scrutiny in order to offer them up as “objects to be viewed with ‘delight’ by the ‘civilized world.’”3 In the ensuing press coverage, the dehumanized San are offered up as 1  This and all subsequent quotations from Knox’s lecture are from Robert Knox, “Dr. Knox’s Lecture On The Bosjemans, or Bush People, At Exeter Hall, Monday, 17 May, 1847” in “Now Exhibiting at the Egyptian Hall Piccadilly” (London, May 1847), Evanion Collection, British Library. (BL 74/Tab. 597.03/895), p. 2. 2  Anon, ‘The Bosjiemans at Exeter Hall’, The Morning Chronicle, 18 May 1847, 2. 3  Zine Magubane, Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 43–44.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Atkin, Writing the South African San, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86226-8_6

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ethnological “objects” for the scrutiny of a largely middle-class metropolitan public who revelled in the rare opportunity to encounter face-to-face the celebrated “wild men” described in the popular travel narratives written by European travellers and sojourners in southern Africa.4 Tracking the reception of this group of San people through the British and Irish press reveals that during their four-year stay in Britain and Ireland they received press attention on an almost daily basis.5 Between 1847 and 1848, they visited the metropolitan centres of Manchester, Liverpool, London, Dublin, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and York, where a predominantly upper-class and upper-middle-class audience could visit them for between one and two shillings.6 In 1849, their audiences diversified as they were exhibited at mechanics’ institutes in Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, and Lincolnshire.7 As the presence of these performances at 4  Anon, ‘The Bosjesmans, or Bushmen, Aborigines of Southern Africa’, The Morning Post, 19 May 1847, 6. 5  In one of their earliest visits to the Manchester Hall of Science in 1847, it was reported that they were visited by over 50,000 people (“Now Exhibiting,” 1). Between 1847 and 1851 group were in London twice, first at The Egyptian Hall between 18 May and 30 June 1847, and then as part of the entertainment at the Cremorne Gardens between 30 May and 14 June 1851. In the intervening years, they toured the country. In 1847 they visited Manchester and Liverpool, as well as London (“Now Exhibiting,” 1–2). In 1848 they visited Newcastle and York (Newcastle Journal, Saturday 18 November 1848; York Herald, 9 December 1848). At these exhibitions, prices varied between two shillings and one shilling, suggesting they were visited primarily by more affluent members of the upper and middle classes. However, in 1849 they were exhibited at Hull, Lincolnshire, Leeds, Huddersfield, Bradford, and Sheffield. Here, they were often exhibited at Mechanics Institutes, with seats varying from sixpence to one shilling, suggesting they were being viewed by members of the lower-middle class and possibly wealthier artisans (Lincolnshire Chronicle, 9–16 February 1849, 5; Leeds Intelligencer, 17 March 1849; Bradford Observer, 22 March 1849, 1; Sheffield Independent, 16 June 1849). This implies that displayed peoples in the 1840s were reaching a wider audience than the upper- and upper-middle-class audience previously thought. Further south, evidence suggests that the San party visited Birmingham, Northampton, Bristol, Bath, Devizes, and Exeter. Before returning to London for a final visit, the group also visited Dublin. Newspaper advertising also suggests they were being marketed as educational events, with adverts frequently offering half price tickets to school children (Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, Thursday 25 April 1850, 3). Although it is impossible to assess precisely how many people attended the exhibition, or to trust the figures quoted on promotional material, it is clear from the wealth of press coverage that the San group cut across class divides, reaching a broad cross-section of the upper, middle, and lower-middle classes. 6  See “Now Exhibiting,” 1; Newcastle Journal, 18 November, 1847; Freeman’s Journal, Dublin, 21 January 1848; York Herald, 9 December, 1848. 7  See Lincolnshire Chronicle, 9 February 1849; Leeds Intelligencer, 17 March 1849; Bradford Observer, 22 March 1849; Sheffield Independent, 16 June 1849.

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mechanics’ institutes indicates, they were frequently framed as what Richard D. Altick has termed “rational entertainment”: popular entertainments which had an educative function.8 As Sadiah Qureshi has pointed out, the lectures that accompanied ethnographic displays played an important role in the popularization of ethnological and anthropological writings on Indigenous peoples. This intersection between entertainment and education is also evident in the advertisements for the shows, which were marketed to a range of audiences, including children and families.9 While surviving reviews in national and regional newspapers leave plenty of evidence of how contemporary audiences viewed the San, it is harder to establish what the Indigenous group experienced during their time in Britain and Ireland. The archive reveals fleeting glimpses of efforts made by the performers to exercise agency over the terms under which they performed. After Knox’s lecture at Exeter Hall, a frustrated journalist for the Morning Chronicle stated: “we were unable to give any sketch of the cerebral development, as they could not be induced to remove their caps.”10 The reviewer notes the group’s apparent reluctance to submit themselves to cranial measurement, one of the pseudo-scientific methods for measuring intelligence popular among anthropologists, a moment that perhaps reveals a resistance on the part of the San performers to the objectifying essentialization of the audience’s “ethnological gaze.” In another report, the younger man refuses to perform the “mock bush fight” that constituted part of the group’s performance of the alleged “manners and customs” of their tribe, until “a penknife was handed to him and when he had examined it very cursorily, he handed it to his wife, and uttering a few words, prepared for the exercise of dancing.”11 In this case, the San man appears to recognize the performance as an economic transaction, refusing to proceed until he has been adequately incentivized with the gift of a penknife. In the absence of any written contracts outlining the terms under which the performers were engaged, we have only anecdotes gleaned from press reports, souvenir pamphlets, and promotional materials to guide us. We

 Richard Altick, Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 228.  See, for example, ‘The Bosjesmans or Bush People. Assembly Rooms Bath’, Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 25 April 1850, 3. 10  Anon, ‘The Bosjiemans at Exeter Hall’, The Morning Chronicle, 18 May 1847, 2. 11  “Now Exhibiting at the Egyptian Hall Piccadilly” (London, May 1847), 2. 8 9

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know that during their four years in Britain and Ireland they were under the management of an ethnological showman named J. S. Tyler, who delivered an ethnological lecture to accompany the show based on Knox’s original “Lecture on the Dark Races” (1847). Anecdotes from Tyler’s scrapbook appended to a souvenir programme state that while in London they visited the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, where they saw “the brass band, Arab vaulters, the wonders of the petit Louise and the equitation of Melle. Caroline”; they ended the outing by viewing a “display of fireworks” which, according to Tyler, caused them to shake “with an agony of terror” at so fearful a spectacle. While in Dublin, they witnessed the “defensive preparations” of the British military in anticipation of “an outbreak of the discontented populace” on St Patrick’s Day. Again, Tyler notes the group’s reaction to the spectacle of the military preparations: “The women clung to their husbands, who quickly seized the bows, with arrows of poison to afford them the protection sought; and which noble privilege, I may add, seems as inherent in the savage as those of civilized men.”12 These intriguing glimpses of the social lives of the San invite us to reach beyond the “ethnological gaze” that informed much of the contemporary coverage of ethnographic displays, and to search for traces of the lived experience of the individuals involved. Tyler’s anecdotes are particularly telling as they reveal the struggles of one Englishman to transcend the ethnological frameworks that governed how British people related to Indigenous peoples. For every moment in which Tyler seems to recognize the universal human impulses that are “as inherent in the savage as those of civilized men,” there is a corresponding instance of ethnographic distancing. So, the acknowledgement of common humanity is tempered by Tyler’s comment that “the strong war-horses” of the British military “could not fail to cause the most excitable emotions in the minds of these ‘children of the desert,’ whose natures are of the most wild, fierce and indomitable character.”13 Tyler’s recourse to the language of emotional excess and savage ferocity—especially when describing what to the modern reader might seem a quite natural response to the intimidating 12  J.  S. Tyler, ‘A Lecture on the Mental and Moral Attributes of the Bushmen With Anecdotes by Their Guardian’ (C.A. Wilson and Co., Sherwood’s Yard, Leeds, 1847), 7–8, Evanion Collection, British Library. 13  J.  S. Tyler, ‘A Lecture on the Mental and Moral Attributes of the Bushmen With Anecdotes by Their Guardian’, 8.

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s­pectacle of an army preparing for battle—indicates the extent to which the tropes of ethnological discourse continued to frame how British people understood Indigenous southern Africans. Even after four years of daily interaction with the San, whose names Tyler knew and whose language he learnt, he remained unable to weaken the discursive hold that ethnological thinking had over the ways he thought about the Indigenous people he managed.14 This overdetermination was the result of the pervasiveness of representations of the San in British print culture. As we have seen in Chaps. 1 and 4, ethnographic accounts of the San had begun to circulate widely in Britain through the tracts and periodicals of the Evangelical missionary organizations working in southern Africa from as early as 1803. It was through the Evangelical publication networks and the tract distribution of Evangelical organizations such as the Religious Tract Society that missionary ethnography reached a wide range of reading publics across Britain. Meanwhile, upper-middle-class readers could access an increasingly wide range of travel narratives by gentleman, missionary, and scientific travellers to southern Africa through expensive multi-volume works published by John Murray and Henry Colburn. Such works were extracted extensively in British periodicals. The personal observations of travellers and missionaries played a central role in the development of nineteenth-century practitioners of the sciences of man. This blending of anecdote and pseudo-scientific observation enabled ethnologists such as Knox to position their lectures as interventions in both a rapidly evolving, cutting-edge scientific field and the politics of empire. Framing himself as both a scientific expert and a military man with first-hand experience of southern Africa and its peoples, Knox consciously presents his lecture on the “dark races” as a political as well as scientific intervention. While there is no doubt, as Nadja Durbach and others have argued, that “displays of bodily difference were […] part of the discourse of imperial superiority that rested on seemingly scientific studies of race,” historical evidence from Knox’s lectures also suggests that ethnographic displays could be used to critique as well support British imperial policy.15 14  An article from the Bath Chronicle notes that Tyler had acquired a “thorough mastery of their [the San’s] difficult language.” See “The Bosjesmans or Bush People. Assembly Rooms, Bath,” Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 25 April 1850, 3. In one of the anecdotes recounted in A Lecture, Tyler calls the mother of the group by the name “Gaiky.” 15  Nadja Durbach, The Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture, Illustrated edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 30.

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The publication of Knox’s Races of Men (1850) is often thought of as a key moment in the transition from socio-cultural explanations of racial difference to a “scientific racism” based primarily on fixed biological differences.16 Yet Knox’s theories of the “dark races” of Africa emerged from his encounters with South Africa’s Indigenous peoples during his time as an army surgeon working on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony. While his background as a surgeon and anatomist led him to believe in fixed biological differences between the races, his colonial experiences also made him a strident critic of British imperial policy in southern Africa. In light of this radical strand of critique, Exeter Hall was a strategic choice of venue in which to make the metropolitan debut of his lecture. Knox was clearly aware of the symbolic value of lecturing at a venue that was synonymous with the Evangelical campaigns against slavery during the early 1830s, and which in the 1840s was still—as Diarmid A.  Finnegan has pointed out—“regarded as the leading platform for the expression of Evangelical causes.”17 Examining fully the imbrication of evangelically influenced anti-colonial critique with Knox’s racial historiography is essential if we are to better understand not only the relationship between race science and the cultural politics of British imperialism, but also the centrality of Evangelical religious ideology to the development of nineteenth-­ century race science.

Sarah Baartman and the Cultural Politics of Ethnographic Display Ever since the arrival of Sarah Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, in Britain in 1810, ethnographic displays had become stages on which live political debates over slavery, the status of Indigenous labourers in the colonies, and British colonial policy could be freely aired. Historical 16  See, for example, Nancy Stepan, Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1982), 41; George W Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), 65. On the alleged shift from cultural to biological notions of racial difference in the mid-nineteenth century see, for example, Roxane Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 299; P.  Kitson, Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2007), 37. 17  Diarmid A. Finnegan, ‘Exeter-Hall Science and Evangelical Rhetoric in Mid-Victorian Britain’, Journal of Victorian Culture 16, no. 1 (2011): 47, https://doi.org/10.108 0/13555502.2011.554675.

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research that aims to recover the traces Baartman’s life from her spectacularization as the “Hottentot Venus” illuminates how her presence in Britain and France shaped public understandings of Khoisan/settler labour relations at the Cape.18 Modern scholarship has also revealed how public responses to Baartman’s display were informed by an Evangelical abolitionist racialist discourse that sought to justify the expansion of British colonization in southern Africa on moral and economic grounds. As Zine  Magubane has argued: “the rhetoric of antislavery merged [almost] seamlessly with that of imperial expansion.”19 In the ethnographic display, the individual was read as a metonym for their race, which meant that “the show of the Hottentot Venus” was able to “reach beyond the unique body of Baartman presented, to link with a whole culture of people in the Cape.”20 Baartman was brought to England under the “guardianship” of Hendrik Caesars, whose family she had worked for as a wet nurse in Cape Town, and Alexander Dunlop, doctor at the slave lodge in Cape Town. Baartman was first displayed to British soldiers at the Cape Town slave lodge before Caesars and Dunlop transported her to London by ship.21 Upon arriving in London, she was displayed as the “Hottentot Venus” at 225 Piccadilly for an entrance fee of two shillings and was led by her keeper “like a wild beast being obliged to sit, stand or walk as he ordered.”22 Baartman’s position as an object of public spectacle raised questions about her agency over both the conditions and circumstances of her own exhibition. In November 1810, a series of letters appeared in the contemporary press written by Zachary Macaulay suggesting that

18  See, for example, Yvette Abrahams, ‘Disempowered to Consent: Sara Bartman and Khoisan Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony and Britain’, South African Historical Journal 35, no. 1 (1 November 1996): 89–114; Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘Sara Baartman and Andries Stoffels: Violence, Law and the Politics of Spectacle in London and the Eastern Cape, 1809–1836’, Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne Des Études Africaines 45, no. 3 (1 January 2011): 524–64. 19  Zine Magubane, ‘Which Bodies Matter?: Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the “Hottentot Venus”’, Gender and Society 15, no. 6 (2001): 829, https://doi.org/10.1177/089124301015006003. 20  Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 73. 21  Crais Scully, 39–59. 22  Sadiah Qureshi, ‘Displaying Sara Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus”’, History of Science 42, no. 2 (1 June 2004): 236, https://doi.org/10.1177/007327530404200204.

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Baartman was kept in a state of slavery.23 Macaulay was chairman of the African Association, an organization set up by the Evangelical abolitionist lobby in the wake of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 with the aim of bringing to the attention of both parliament and public cases in which Africans were still kept in conditions of de facto slavery. Macaulay and the African Association brought a court case to the King’s Bench in November 1810 against Caesars, in which the allegation posed a twofold question. First, had Caesars received permission from the governor of the Cape Colony to bring Baartman to Britain? Second, did Baartman give consent to her own display? Extracts from Macaulay’s affidavit claimed that Baartman “gave evident signs of mortification and misery at her degraded situation in being made a spectacle for the derision of bystanders.”24 Macaulay’s reading of Baartman’s performance as a “spectacle” erases any sense of her responses to her audience, reducing her to an object of pity that served the purposes of the African Association, for whom the disempowered African was the “object” towards which their assiduous campaigning was directed. However, the case was eventually found in Caesars’s favour when Baartman was interviewed through the medium of a Dutch translator. She maintained that she was paid to perform, that she loved her master, and that she had no wish to return to Cape Town.25 Although Crais and Scully have read this interview as an example of Baartman’s agency and consent, Khoisan scholar Yvette Abrahams has interpreted it differently. Abrahams notes that there is no evidence to suggest that Caesars and Dunlop gained official permission from the colonial authorities in the Cape for Baartman to leave the colony. To the contrary, evidence suggests that Baartman was working for Caesars in Cape Town in conditions that amounted to slavery and had no recourse to object either 23  Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography, Reprint edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 91; Sadiah Qureshi, ‘Displaying Sara Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus”’, History of Science 42, no. 2 (1 June 2004): 238–39, https://doi.org/10.1177/007327530404200204. 24  Hershini Bhana Young, “‘Rude’ Performance: Theorising Agency,” in N.  Gordon-­ Chipembere, ed., Representation and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2011), 47–65: 55. 25  Although Crais and Scully read this as evidence of a limited control Baartman was able to exercise over her performance, questions have been raised about how far Baartman was able to express her own preferences, and how far Caesars and his partner Alexander Dunlop were coercing her. See, for example, Yvette Abrahams, ‘Disempowered to Consent: Sara Bartman and Khoisan Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony and Britain’, South African Historical Journal 35, no. 1 (1 November 1996): 89–114.

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to her transportation to Britain or to the circumstances under which she performed. The spotlight that Macaulay’s court case shone on the potential for exploitation inherent in ethnographic displays ensured that promoters of the ethnographic displays that followed were keen to stress the agency of performers in order to counter public concerns that ethnographic performers were working in conditions tantamount to slavery. In the case of the San individuals who accompanied Knox in 1847, promotional material accompanying the show placed strong emphasis on tracing the provenance of the group. Manufacturing an origin story for the party that stressed their status as contracted labourers enabled the show’s promoters to disavow preemptively potential accusations of complicity in the well-documented illegal trade in stolen San children that took place between brown and white frontiersmen in Transorangia, and British and Dutch settler farmers residing in the Cape Colony.26 A broadsheet published to promote the group’s summer residency at the Egyptian Hall that followed Knox’s presentation of the group at Exeter Hall had this to say about their provenance: “These strange Aboriginal Visitors were landed at Liverpool […] Captain Wheeler and the gentleman who induced them to visit this country and France has stipulated with the authorities of the Cape to return them to their far-distant homes within a stipulated period.”27 The allusion to a contract from the “authorities of the Cape” suggests the promoters are keen to guard against the accusations levelled at Caesars. This idea is further supported by the assurance that the San people in the display will return to the Cape Colony after “a stipulated period.” Whether or not R. G. Bishop, the merchant who procured the San group, actually had a contract with the Cape authorities enabling him to transport the group out of the colony for display in Europe, the presence of this statement on the front page of the broadsheet suggests that the promoters took pains to reassure their audiences that the performers were not subjected to conditions that amounted to slavery. In the case of the San, the vexed question of the status of Indigenous peoples within the colonial labour economy was particularly important because of widespread concerns that Evangelical missionaries and their metropolitan supporters voiced about the conditions of Indigenous  For more on the illegal trade in San children between Transorangia, the Cape Colony, and Britain, see Martin Legassick, Hidden Histories of Gordonia: Land Dispossession and Resistance in the Northern Cape, 1800–1990 (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2016), 134. 27  Anon, “Now Exhibiting at the Egyptian Hall Piccadilly” (London, May 1847), 1. 26

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labourers on settler farms, and the use of commandos by both settlers and the colonial authorities. These forms of violence frequently involved the kidnapping of San women and children who were sold to frontier farmers, and to whom they were “apprenticed” as unpaid labourers for extended periods of time, sometimes amounting to their entire lives. The fact that a merchant brought the San group to Britain in 1847 raises the possibility that they were kidnapped during a commando raid and then sold on to Bishop. If this was the case, it would suggest that the British colonial authorities failed to question the origins of performers taken from the colony to Europe and that it was up to the promoters of the show to reassure audiences that the performers were there of their own free will. It was in Liverpool that the San party first caught Knox’s attention. Knox had been familiar with San communities during his service as an army surgeon with the Highlanders during the frontier wars with the amaXhosa, when he formulated both his anti-colonial views and his interests in ethnology, zoology, and geography. He was keen to use the San already in Britain as living illustrations of his ethnological theories.28 As well as his pre-existing interest in both the peoples and politics of southern Africa, another important factor in determining Knox’s choice of the San to accompany him to London was the fact they were ethnically distinct. As Qureshi observes: “Knox was able to list every San individual whom the public could have viewed before his show arrived on the scene. Apart from Saarjie Baartmann—the ‘Hottentot Venus’—who he argued was of mixed cast, he mentioned just three individuals, all of whom were brought over by missionaries rather than commercially exhibited.”29 Thus, the appeal of the San lay in their political relevance both as dispossessed people emblematic of the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples in one of Britain’s most recently acquired colonies and as ethnological curiosities in their own right.

28  Knox’s lectures on race, which were delivered in 1847  in London, Newcastle, and Manchester, were used as the basis for his popular The Races of Men: A Fragment (1850). 29  Sadiah Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-­ Century Britain, First Edition (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 173.

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“Race Is Everything”: Robert Knox’s Racial Historiography Knox’s choice of Exeter Hall was not accidental. As Elizabeth Elbourne has demonstrated, Exeter Hall was inextricably associated with Evangelical missionary spectacle.30 The London Missionary Society’s annual May meetings, held at Exeter Hall, were promotional tools used to encourage both public enthusiasm and financial support for missionary work in the field. As the century progressed, the display of Indigenous converts became an increasingly frequent characteristic of these spectacles. The first Indigenous southern African people to be displayed in this way were a group of Khoekhoe converts brought from the Zak River mission station in Transorangia by LMS missionary J.  J. Kicherer in 1803. As I have argued in Chap. 5, Kicherer’s wilful misrepresentations of San domestic practices became a highly influential lens through which the literate British public viewed the San and other Indigenous southern Africans. The presence of Indigenous converts in Britain to authenticate Kicherer’s missionary ethnography was an important factor in the popularization of his account. Even more influential than Kicherer’s Zak River delegation were a party who arrived in 1836 from Bethelsdorp in the Eastern Cape, under the leadership of James Read and James Read Jr. Both of the Reads were key informants for John Philip’s Researches in Southern Africa (1828), a work which had played a central role in bringing the mistreatment of Indigenous labourers at the Cape to the attention of both the British public and metropolitan and colonial governments. Accompanying the Reads were two “native teachers” who worked as missionary assistants at Bethelsdorp: the Khoekhoe Andries Stoffels and Dyani Tshatshu (an amaXhosa chief who had converted to Christianity and come to live at the Bethelsdorp mission station).31 It was against the backdrop of missionary spectacle and contemporary debates about free and unfree Indigenous labour in southern Africa that Knox took to the stage at Exeter Hall. In addition to the San group, we also know Knox gestured towards a map of the Cape Colony and its 30  Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘Sara Baartman and Andries Stoffels: Violence, Law and the Politics of Spectacle in London and the Eastern Cape, 1809–1836’, Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne Des Études Africaines 45, no. 3 (1 January 2011): 524–64. 31  Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘Sara Baartman and Andries Stoffels: Violence, Law and the Politics of Spectacle in London and the Eastern Cape, 1809–1836’, Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne Des Études Africaines 45, no. 3 (1 January 2011): 544.

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environs to indicate where the performers were from, and he also held up a model of a San cranium to illustrate the section of his lecture that referred to anatomical studies of San brains.32 Knox’s use of these props in addition to the live performers indicates the importance of two different contexts for his construction of the San as an ethnographic type. The first involved public debates about colonial policy in South Africa, particularly the injustice of the wars against the amaXhosa in the wake of the Seventh Frontier War (1845–1847), after which Britain rapidly and illegally expanded its colonial territories on the eastern frontier. The second entailed ethnological discussions about the San as a specific ethnological “type.” Knox began his lecture by distinguishing between “race” and nationality, arguing that “race” is the driving factor of history. Knox contended that there were two races in Britain, the Saxons and the Celts, who had “been living under the same climate” for 700 years, and “for half that period […] ostensibly under the same laws” although they had “neither amalgamated nor approached each other physically and mentally.”33 Although these two races differed from one another substantially, Knox claimed that “their exterior and interior configuration show no very marked anatomical differences.” Racial identity, for Knox, was derived primarily from a people’s psychological and physical attributes, and it was independent of both climate and geographical location.34 By defining racial identity in this way, Knox was able to link the actions and characteristics of British “Saxons” with their Dutch “Saxon” counterparts in the Cape Colony, a point to

32  Anon, “Now Exhibiting at the Egyptian Hall Piccadilly” (London, May 1847), 2. Knox’s interest in cranial measurement evidences the increasing importance that Cuvier’s comparative anatomy was exerting over popular ethnological theories during this period. For more on the increasing influence of comparative anatomy on ethnology, see Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science, 2nd edition (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 127–39; P. Kitson, Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2007), 29–31. 33  Robert Knox, ‘Dr. Knox’s Lecture On The Bosjemans, or Bush People, At Exeter Hall, Monday, 17 May, 1847 in “Now Exhibiting at the Egyptian Hall Piccadilly”’ (London, May 1847), 2. 34  As Roxane Wheeler has argued in The Complexion of Race, climate theory underpinned much of the thinking on the causes of human variety in the eighteenth century and continued to influence ethnology in the early nineteenth century. Although he rejects the climatological arguments favoured in the 1840s by James Cowles Prichard, Knox does go on to suggest that geographical proximity to “civilized” races is a factor in determining the attributes of a particular race.

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which we shall return when we consider Knox’s analysis of race relations in southern Africa. Developing this definition of race as distinct from nationality, Knox argued that there were a great variety of characteristics among all the races of the world, but none are as “singular” as the “bushmen.” However, it is notable that only three paragraphs of the lecture are devoted to the observable physical characteristics of the San. Drawing upon his own experience, and referring the audience to the exhibition of Baartman, Knox gives a brief summary of the physical features of the San with reference to the Orange River group. Of a remarkably low stature, frail and slender; small and rather finely formed hands and feet, limbs proportioned to the torso, neck short, skin yellow, sometimes darker; women still smaller than men, and rather handsome when young, like most young people all over the world, but either acquiring an excessive corpulency as they advance in life, especially on the haunches (as the Hottentot Venus exhibited some years ago in this country), or losing all traces of fat and of the beauty of youth, and so becoming absolutely frightful […]; the eyes are dark and penetrating, deep set, and without the beautifully coloured Iris, which […] adorns the eyes of the European woman; but then, comes to be spoken of, the energy of these eyes, for they are microscopic and telescopic too.35

Knox’s layering of short, paratactic clauses here objectifies the San as he emphasizes their apparent peculiarity, presenting a positivist discourse that absorbs both descriptors such as “skin yellow” and subjective observations such as “small rather finely formed hands and feet” into an ethnographic account that aims at scientific neutrality. By the 1840s, characteristics such as “low stature,” “finely formed” limbs, and what Knox terms the “excessive corpulence” of the women were well-rehearsed tropes in the ethnological descriptions of San peoples, lending textual authority to Knox’s observations. Knox utilizes the remoteness of the San’s geographical location in the heart of the Kalahari Desert to reinforce both their natural innocence as “children of the desert” and his view that they can never move beyond their original hunter-gatherer developmental stage. He maintains that it is 35  Robert Knox, ‘Dr. Knox’s Lecture On The Bosjemans, or Bush People, At Exeter Hall, Monday, 17 May, 1847  in “Now Exhibiting at the Egyptian Hall Piccadilly”’ (London, May 1847).

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not skin colour that is the determining factor as to whether a people are capable of civilization, but rather interaction with civilized races. Moreover, he shares his first-hand observations of San individuals who were working in the service of Boer farmers. In the following description, his proximity argument is applied equally to the Dutch settler farmers, with Knox arguing that the remote location of the Boers led to a regression on their part towards a less refined state than that of their other European counterparts. Some [San people] we had as servants; others recently taken from the deserts, might be considered as unaltered, unsophisticated by even a semblance of civilization; for the civilization of the Dutch Saxon boor, like the far-west Anglo-Saxon, is but a semblance of civilization, so quickly do the very first races descend in the scale of civilization when removed from the great stream.36

Like the Scottish Enlightenment historiographers and ethnologists of the previous century, Knox conceives of “civilisation” as operating on a sliding scale, with the “Dutch Saxon boor” in southern Africa, like the “far-west Anglo Saxon” of Scotland and the remote western regions of England, shifting closer to a state of “barbarism” when removed from what Knox describes as the “great stream” of European civilizations. Like the conjectural historians of the eighteenth century, Knox’s view of history is cyclical rather than progressive, allowing for the possibility of degeneration as well as progression.37 The metaphor of the stream also suggests that the cultural and social factors that determine the progress of a particular race are fluid and potentially subject to change, as opposed to the anatomical and psychological factors, which Knox viewed as fixed. Despite Knox’s reputation for propounding controversial ethnological theories, most notably his support for polygenesis—the idea that different races descend from different evolutionary ancestors—the bulk of Knox’s lecture is devoted to the history of intercultural encounter between the 36  Robert Knox, ‘Dr. Knox’s Lecture On The Bosjemans, or Bush People, At Exeter Hall, Monday, 17 May, 1847 in “Now Exhibiting at the Egyptian Hall Piccadilly”’ (London, May 1847), 2. 37  In this respect, Knox’s thinking on race is similar to Gibbon’s thinking on empire in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which Knox occasionally cites to support his reading of history in Races of Man. However, while for Gibbon the cyclical rise and fall of empires is the driving force of historical change, for Knox it is race.

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so-called yellow race and their white and black antagonists. Knox suggests that there is a natural antipathy between the races, noting “the dislike that the Saxon exhibits abroad towards the dark races of men.” He presents the “hottentots”38 as a “simple and harmless” race when first encountered by Vasco de Gama. Still, he claims that the Dutch, through “unerring industry,” “never ending cumulative desires,” and “go-ahead energy”—all of which Knox sees as innate characteristics of the Saxon race—settled on the Cape with devastating consequences.39 He represents the Dutch settlers’ aggressive expansionism as a war of the races between the “strong” and the “feeble” in order to demonstrate his central thesis that race is the key driver of historical change. Driving before them a feeble and helpless race, the hottentot or yellow-­ skinned race of southern Africa, seizing their flocks and herds, and finally their lands, reducing the natives to a state of miserable bondage, the necessary state of all races of men deprived of land and refused the privilege of defensive arms. To the powerful fire-arms and sinews of the Dutch boors, the tallest and strongest people on the face of the earth, the wretched hottentot could only oppose with bow and arrow, and perhaps assegai; the arrow he had dipped in poison, the resort of a feeble race.40

Working concurrently with this narrative of “strong” versus “feeble” races is an acknowledgement of the decisive role that technology plays in deciding the outcome of inter-racial conflict. In the image of the “powerful fire-arms and sinews” of the “tallest and strongest people on the face of the earth,” Knox couples the powerful body of the Dutch settler farmers with their weapons, which creates a strong contrast with that of the small-statured “yellow-skinned race” who “could only oppose with bow and arrow, and perhaps assegai.” Here, Knox uses his model of racial antagonism to emphasize the asymmetrical relationship between the power that the settlers were able to exert and the ability of the Indigenous 38  While in this lecture Knox is keen to emphasis the novelty of the San, sometimes he fails to fully distinguish between the San and the Khoekhoe people. 39  Knox’s construction of the Khoekhoe as a “feeble race” erases the history of Khoekhoe resistance to efforts by Portuguese travellers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to force them to trade and to set up refreshment stations at the Cape. For a slightly more extended discussion of early Portuguese-Khoekhoe encounters, see Chap. 2. 40  Robert Knox, ‘Dr. Knox’s Lecture On The Bosjemans, or Bush People, At Exeter Hall, Monday, 17 May, 1847 in “Now Exhibiting at the Egyptian Hall Piccadilly”’ (London, May 1847), 2.

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inhabitants of the Cape to resist the systematic violence and dispossession that accompanied the expansion of colonialism at the Cape. Yet it is not just the white settlers who are presented as oppressing the “yellow race.” Knox states that the “Kaffir” or amaXhosa people can be characterized as: tall, stout, robust, of a deep bronze colour, enterprising, chivalrous and bold; freemen, in fact, who have more than once driven in British troops, and with whom at this moment we wage a war of extermination—be assured of this: the Kaffir will never become the slave of the white man; he will never yield his lands to the British and Dutch now gaping for them.41

In their size, their enterprising and independent spirit and strength the amaXhosa are presented as more similar to the European races than to the Khoekhoe and San who inhabit their own country. Later in the lecture he is even more explicit on this point, stating that the “Anglo-Dutch Saxon” and “Kaffir” are “nearly identical in physical and moral nature.” Knox’s allusion to the Seventh Frontier War of 1846–1847, over possession of territory to the east of the Cape Colony, is provocative, since it directly challenged the policies of Sir Henry Pottinger, who was appointed by Colonial Secretary Lord Stanley to the role of Cape Governor in 1842. Pottinger had been charged with the task of “pacifying” the amaXhosa through military force.42 Knox asserts that both the military action and the rapid appropriation of amaXhosa territory by the British that followed the 1846–1847 war were undertaken, not in the interests of maintaining the security of the colony, as the British government suggested, but rather to make the amaXhosa “the slaves of the white men” by bringing tribal chiefs under the control of the colonial state.43 41  Robert Knox, ‘Dr. Knox’s Lecture On The Bosjemans, or Bush People, At Exeter Hall, Monday, 17 May, 1847 in “Now Exhibiting at the Egyptian Hall Piccadilly”’ (London, May 1847), 2. 42  For more on the frontier wars against the amaXhosa in the first fifty years of the nineteenth century, see, amongst others, Timothy Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), 139–50; Clifton C.  Crais, The Making of the Colonial Order: White Supremacy and Black Resistance in the Eastern Cape, 1770–1865 (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1992). 43  Keegan argues that Pottinger’s appointment to the role of Cape Governor marked a “decisive shift in imperial policies and objectives” (Keegan, 217) away from a policy of trade and negotiation with the amaXhosa to the expansion and consolidation of the colonial state in the amaXhosa territories.

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What is perhaps most striking about Knox’s ethnological discourse is his blend of biological determinism, Enlightenment historiography, and political polemic, which allowed him to use the public platform acquired through his role as an ethnological showman to stage an intervention in contemporary debate about British foreign policy. At the end of his lecture Knox claims that due to British colonial “mismanagement,” Dutch and British settlers have encroached ever further into the African interior, illegally seizing first the herds and cattle, and then finally the land from the Khoekhoe and San, “reducing the natives to miserable bondage, the necessary fate of all men deprived of land, and denied the privilege of defensive arms.” At this point in the lecture, Knox shifts to a humanitarian discourse of protection to present the “yellow races” in need of protection and improvement. Knox begins by praising Lord Stanley for resisting calls by white settlers in the Cape Colony for self-rule, which he argues will only lead to a continuation of the cycle of violence and oppression that has characterized encounters between colonists and the Indigenous inhabitants of southern Africa. Instead, he argues for the establishment of a series of frontier posts where trade could take place between Indigenous peoples and settlers, thus creating an Anglo-Saxon-run free-trade empire. He also calls for the irrigation of the desert, so that colonists could farm lucrative crops such as sugar and tobacco. Knox proposes a model of colonial governance, one based on laissez-faire economics, and the implementation of a colour-blind legal framework. He argues that it is only by the strongest encouragement given to commerce along all this line […] by declaring equal freedom and liberty to all, no matter what colour the element of race may have stamped upon them […] by offering every man protection of life and property under the rule of law […] by the cultivation of what is now desert […] not only may the traffic of slaves be forever terminated, but a vast Anglo-Saxon empire founded here superior in many respects to our eastern; but these desirable ends will never be attained by the bayonet alone, the only policy hitherto adopted by Britain in her management of southern Africa.44

Knox urges direct rule from the metropole as the only means of bringing “civilisation” to southern Africa through the building of a free trade 44  Robert Knox, ‘Dr. Knox’s Lecture On The Bosjemans, or Bush People, At Exeter Hall, Monday, 17 May, 1847 in “Now Exhibiting at the Egyptian Hall Piccadilly”’ (London, May 1847), 2.

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empire that would benefit both settlers and “natives.” This development would in turn enable the improvement of the agricultural lands in the southern African interior, a move that would ensure that the unruly borderlands of Transorangia and the Eastern Cape came under the discipline of British colonial rule. An intriguing strand to Knox’s political vision for southern Africa is his implicit assumption that it is not only the Indigenous Africans that need the restraining hand of metropolitan civilization, but the settlers too. In contrast to the aggressive expansionism practised by the settlers, Knox conceives the role of the government as a moderating influence, one working through the imposition of the restraining arm of British law on settlers and Indigenous peoples. A key tenet of Knox’s rhetoric is the integration of southern African Indigenous peoples into a market economy as agricultural labourers and small-scale traders. Working concurrently with this economic argument is the rhetoric of “equal freedom and liberty to all, no matter what colour.”45 Intriguingly, given Knox’s reputation as a staunch biological determinist, this blending of the rhetoric of abolitionism with that of laissez-faire political economy was an essential part of the discourse of “moral colonization” that was evident in the writings of John Barrow, John Philip, Thomas Pringle, and other humanitarian writers of this period.46 This appropriation of humanitarian rhetoric could be seen as Knox’s deliberate effort to appeal to his Exeter Hall audience, and it is an aspect of his racial discourse that critics frequently overlooked in favour of the biological determinism in his ethnology.47 By emphasizing the fixity of racial characteristics and the inability of races to change, Knox conceived of racial difference as the key driver of history. This determinism meant that, while Knox argues that an informal empire governed by free trade and British law would be beneficial to South Africa’s Indigenous peoples, he disputes the large-scale settlement of colonial territories as that will lead 45  Robert Knox, ‘Dr. Knox’s Lecture On The Bosjemans, or Bush People, At Exeter Hall, Monday, 17 May, 1847 in “Now Exhibiting at the Egyptian Hall Piccadilly”’ (London, May 1847), 2. 46  See Timothy Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), 76. 47  In the version of his lecture on “The Dark Races” that appears in The Races of Men, Knox critiques what he views as the innate hypocrisy of Britain’s self-defined role as protector of the aborigines. This is most notable in his rejection of the Treaty of Waitangi (1840), which he views as an aggressive land grab framed in the rhetoric of guardianship. See Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Fragment (H. Renshaw, 1850), 222.

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to an inevitable “war of the races,” a war between the “Anglo-Saxon” and the “yellow races” that would lead to the extermination of the latter. Knox’s lecture was devised as both an ethnological treatise and a strategic intervention in the cultural politics of British imperialism. As we have seen, his transcultural encounters with South Africa’s Indigenous during the brutal wars on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony informed his ethnological theories about the asymmetric relation between “strong” and “weak” races. These theories emerged from his engagement with Enlightenment historiography and contemporary comparative anatomy, as well as his experiences in the “contact zone” of the Cape Colony. As Knox’s comparison between the amaXhosa and the European “Anglo-­ Saxon” demonstrates, this divide between “strong” and “weak” races did not necessarily cut evenly along the colour line. However, he did see clearly the reasons why European colonial expansion would continue the cycle of violence and dispossession that had characterized European/ Indigenous relations in Africa and elsewhere. His assertion that this will always lead to the degradation of the Indigenous populations led him to criticize the expansionist policies of the British colonial administration during the 1840s. Knox’s anti-imperialism significantly complicates the overwhelming critical consensus that, during the nineteenth century, “ideologies of racism and imperialism were powerfully symbiotic and often indistinguishable from one another.”48 Knox’s lecture shows instead the way in which ethnological representations of the San and other Indigenous peoples could be used to critique Britain’s national self-fashioning as a “moral” colonizing power.

Race, Class, and Encounter Beyond the Exhibition Space That Knox could use an ethnological lecture to stage a political critique of the ideology of moral colonization indicates the flexibility of ethnological discourse in the mid-nineteenth century. His ethnology owed as much to a historiographical consciousness derived from Scottish Enlightenment conjectural history and a political ideology informed by humanitarian critiques of British colonial expansionism as it did to the comparative anatomy of Friedrich Blumenbach and Baron de Cuvier. This blending of 48  Patrick Brantlinger, Taming Cannibals Race and the Victorians (Ithaca (N.Y.); London: Cornell University Press, 2011), 6.

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scientific, historical, and political discourses in ethnological writings enabled the tropes of nineteenth-century ethnology to migrate from scientific circles into the broader public realm. As the elision between the peripatetic “wandering savages” of the colonial peripheries and London’s internal “street Arabs” in volume one of Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor also illustrates, by the mid-nineteenth century the figures and types of ethnological discourse could be readily transposed onto Britain’s working-class subcultures. The uneven economic development within Britain triggered by the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution and the political convulsions of Peterloo, the Captain Swing Riots, and Chartism increasingly led middle-class social commentators across the political spectrum from Thomas Carlyle to Friedrich Engels to perceive the working classes as, in Engels’s words, “a race wholly apart from the English bourgeoise.”49 As John Plotz has argued, in the wake of Peterloo and Chartism, the word “crowd” took on a new meaning in the 1840s to specifically refer to the working-class participants in Britain’s increasingly assertive radical politics.50 The Othering of working-class crowds was symptomatic of what Saree Makdisi has called a “racially inflected attitude towards plebeian culture” cultivated by middle-class and upper-middle-­ class Britons during the early to mid-nineteenth century.51 The rhetorical slippage in mid-nineteenth-century media discourse between portrayals of working-class crowds and representations of Indigenous peoples is evident once we turn to contemporary newspaper accounts of unscripted encounters between San ethnographic performers and their English audiences. One particular encounter that took place in the sleepy market town of Devizes, Wiltshire, captured such attention that it was reprinted in at least twenty-one local papers spanning Britain and Ireland.52 In May 1850, we learn from the Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette 49  Frederick Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, with a Preface Written in 1892, trans. Florence Kelly Wischnewetzky, reprint edition (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1936). 50  John Plotz, The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 2. 51  Saree Makdisi, Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2014), 24. 52  Papers which carried the reprinted account from the Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette between 9 May 1850 and 24 May 1850 were (in chronological order): Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette; Bradford Observer; Dublin Evening Mail; Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser; Huddersfield Chronicle; Preston Chronicle; Kendal Mercury; Oxford Journal; Leeds Mercury; The Era (London); Caledonian Mercury; Dundee, Perth and Cupar

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that a visit to the town from Tyler’s San group “excited considerable curiosity among our townspeople, who flocked in large numbers to the Town Hall.” During the performance, the younger man in the party had his “anger excited by a person in the room who he fancied had been mocking him” and “suddenly snatched an arrow from his quiver and shot at him with all the force he could put in his bow.” The first consequence of this action is that the performer “in a frenzy of passion […] sprung, like an ourang-outang (sic), from the platform among the company.” Here, we have a clear example of the racist troping characteristic of the metropolitan ethnological gaze as the San performer the reviewer zoomorphoses him: his “frenzied passion” serves as evidence of the performer’s innate animalism rather than the result of provocation. What is also notable, however, is the breakdown in order among the supposedly “civilized” English crowd as the San man’s “savage” emotional excess is mirrored in the responses of the crowd. The reviewer comments that “the confusion among the company baffles all description […] the females shrieked and caught hold of the men with a death like grasp; and even the men themselves were well-nigh frightened from their property by so strange and sudden a turn in the performance.” The narration here refuses a continuous flow of discourse, instead resorting to impressionistic vignettes emphasizing the inarticulate emotional excesses demonstrated by both the “savage” performer and the supposedly civilized crowd of English spectators.53 After the dramatic moment of confusion has passed, the crowd moves outside the reviewer’s narration, no longer worthy of representation. Intriguingly, the performer returns to the reviewer’s attention, but this time his individuality is more clearly delineated, and his reactions no longer appear generically “savage.” Mr. Tyler stated that the African’s anger had been excited by a person in the room that he fancied had been mocking him; but upon being assured that this was not the case he became more tranquil, and in about a quarter of an

Advertiser; Kentish Gazette; Dundee Courier; Fife Herald; North Devon Journal; Chelmsford Chronicle; Essex Standard; Aberdeen Journal; Dumfries and Galloway Standard; John O’Groat Journal [Source: British Newspaper Archive: accessed August 2021]. 53  All quotations from Anon, ‘“Extraordinary Scene” at the Bosjesman Exhibition’, Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette, 2 May 1850, 3.

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hour was again brought upon the platform, when by signs and gestures he endeavoured to convey his regret for what had passed.54

Here, the San man’s outburst is reframed as the consequence of cross-­ cultural miscommunication rather than an emblematic example of “savage” emotional excess. This rupturing of the ethnological gaze is made possible by Tyler’s intervention; he draws the reviewer’s attention to the constructed and performative nature of the behaviours exhibited on the “platform.” This conscious performativity is mirrored in the behaviour of the San man himself, who—through Tyler’s mediation—both acknowledges and defers to the codes of nineteenth-century middle-class civility byway of “signs and gestures,” ones that Tyler argues convey the man’s “regret for what had passed.” It would seem that it was only when the performer left the “platform” and the boundary between performer and spectator was ruptured that the codes of polite conduct were broken, with both the San man and the crowd exhibiting emotional excess that the reviewer interprets as unruly and “savage.” The moment the boundary has been reestablished, even the “savage” African is represented as operating within the codes of polite, rational “civilized” behaviour, while the crowd—once corralled back into the role of spectators rather than participants—recedes from the reviewer’s narration. The crowd in Devizes was predominantly made up of upper- and middle-­class English men and women who would have paid between one and two shillings each to see the show. Hence, in the Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette we are never in any doubt that the dissolution of polite norms among the audience members resulted from the San performer’s behaviour rather than British spectators’ provocations. Yet this apportion of blame for the breakdown in order that occurred is not so clearly assigned to the San when we turn to the rare glimpses that the archive offers of unplanned encounters between the San and working-class English crowds. In an anecdote appended to a copy of Tyler’s ethnographic lecture printed at Leeds, there is a series of anecdotes labelled as “from the Scrap-Book of Mr. S.  Tyler, Guardian to the Bosjesmans.” One, which purports to be from Tyler’s own hand, gives a rare account of a series of unscripted interactions between the San performers and two different sections of London’s urban working class. 54  Anon, ‘“Extraordinary Scene” at the Bosjesman Exhibition’, Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette, 2 May 1850, 3.

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In the opening section of the anecdote, Tyler recounts how, during the San’s residence at the Egyptian Hall, London, the performance was infiltrated by a professional gang of pickpockets, whom he characterizes as a “swell mob.” Being offered an orange by a well-dressed person, the tallest of the savages naturally held out his hand, when, instead of the proffered gift, he received a blow from a cane upon his knuckles. ’Twas but trifling, but enough to set the room into a commotion which I shall not easily forget. This was of course wrought to the gentleman’s desire; for, in the act of picking a lady’s pocket, he was recognised as one of a swell mob and taken into custody.55

Although the threat to public order and property was easily contained, the social consequences of such a disruption were not so easily controlled. In the ensuing chaos, the San performers began to throw objects from the stage at the assailant and then at Tyler himself, resulting in the evacuation of the venue and the cancellation of the performance. Tyler recounts the events that followed: Mr. Clark, the keeper of the rooms, supplying the fainted and fainting ladies with water—carriages called before their time and not found—ladies, with their children, seeking shops in Piccadilly to appease their own children’s frights—a mob had followed—the police, who sometime before had entered the hall, stood appalled. Our rapid driving from the hall was the signal for one of the most discordant yells from civilized Londoners that perhaps have ever greeted human ears. It followed us, and every minute the savages seemed to get more and more excited.56

Tyler’s narration takes on the discontinuous, impressionistic quality that we also saw when the reporter in Devizes showed how an audience member’s provocative actions ruptured the boundaries between performer and spectator. This depersonalized “mob,” who pursued Tyler and the San performers through the streets of London, lacks the capacity for articulate speech, uttering only a collective “discordant yell” more often associated with the inarticulate calls of “savages” than the articulate utterances of 55  J.S.  Tyler, ‘A Lecture on the Mental and Moral Attributes of the Bushmen With Anecdotes by Their Guardian’ (C.A. Wilson and Co., Sherwood’s Yard, Leeds, 1847), 7. 56  J.S.  Tyler, ‘A Lecture on the Mental and Moral Attributes of the Bushmen With Anecdotes by Their Guardian’ (C.A. Wilson and Co., Sherwood’s Yard, Leeds, 1847), 7.

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Westerners. The italicization of “civilized Londoners” suggests that the reaction of the crowd was anything but. Tyler’s fractured prose also leaves the reader uncertain as to whether the “appalled” reaction of the police was purely owing to the actions of the “savages,” or whether it was the chaotic actions of the increasingly unpredictable crowd that became the most shocking aspect of the scene. In the final sentence, the refined ladies and children vanish and are replaced by an amorphous “mob,” as the boundary between “savage” and “civilized” dissolves. The only hint as to who was in this “mob” occurs when Gaiky, the San mother, disembarks from the carriage upon reaching the Tower Street Police Station. We are told that on leaving the carriage she encountered “unsuspecting mechanics, returning from their labour” who “lay bleeding in all directions,” suggesting the crowd described variously as a “mob” or a “rabble” was primarily working class in its composition. As Tyler moves from Piccadilly to Tower Street in Covent Garden, the “savage” San’s ferocious response to the disorder is matched by the violent eruptions from the English crowd. As the story unfolds, this second “mob” pursues the group as Tyler carries them away in a carriage, until they finally reach the safety of the police station. Tyler describes the conclusion of events as follows: without any serious consequences we at length found ourselves in Tower-­ street station-house—my clothes literally torn from my back, a bruised head, minus a tooth, and a rhinoceros coat of impenetrable mud. But all I had suffered was comparatively nothing to the mental agony of the bosjesmen, who [were] wrought to the highest pitch of madness by the rabble.57

Tyler’s representation of this London crowd as a “mob” or a “rabble” contrasts sharply with the Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette’s representation of the exhibition audience as “company.” While the latter suggests a polite, bourgeois crowd, Tyler’s designation of the London mechanics as a “rabble” signifies both a disorderly assemblage and a working-class crowd, with all the threat of violent disorder that middle-class commentators with mass assemblies associated with the Chartist mass meetings of the 1830s and 1840s.58 As Tyler’s anecdote unfolds, the working-class crowd 57  J.S.  Tyler, ‘A Lecture on the Mental and Moral Attributes of the Bushmen With Anecdotes by Their Guardian’ (C.A. Wilson and Co., Sherwood’s Yard, Leeds, 1847), 8. 58  John Plotz, The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 128.

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­ aintains this amorphous quality, while both “the bosjesmen” and Tyler m himself come into clear focus as individuated subjects. What is particularly striking is the inversion of the ethnological gaze that constructs the European as subject and the San as object, as Tyler emphasizes the San’s “mental agony,” while he objectifies to working class as a savage “rabble.” It was not only the figures and types of ethnological discourse that were transposed onto mid-nineteenth-century representations of British working-­class cultures, it was also ethnology’s temporal schema. In the mid-nineteenth century, middle-class social commentators argued that certain sections of the urban and rural English underclass were temporally out of sync with bourgeois modernity, existing in communities which were “not yet incorporated, culturally, economically, and politically, into the space-time of imperial modernity.”59 This sense of a developmental as well as economic gap between rich and poor was given intellectual weight by the temporal schema that stadial theory offered. Most notably, as we saw in Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, the division of human societies into “settled” and “wandering” peoples that was derived from Adam Smith became an increasingly popular frame through which to view class relations within Britain itself. In The Condition of the Working-Class in England (1845), Engels uses an analogy drawn from stadial theory that explicitly links the physical, mental, and moral degeneration of the “proletariat” to the “perpetually varying, shifting conditions under which the proletariat lives.”60 In his “introduction,” Engels argues that the social and economic disruptions caused by the Industrial Revolution transformed the “settled” rural artisan into the shiftless proletariat: So it was [before the Industrial Revolution] that the weaver was usually in a position to lay something aside and rent a little piece of land that he cultivated in his leisure hours, of which he had as many as he chose to take, since he could weave whenever and as long as he pleased. True, he was a bad farmer and managed his land inefficiently, often obtaining but poor crops, nevertheless he was no proletarian, he had a stake in the country, he was

59  Saree Makdisi, Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 24. 60  Frederick Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, with a Preface Written in 1892, trans. Florence Kelly Wischnewetzky, reprint edition (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1936), 101.

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permanently settled, and stood one step higher in society than the English workman of today.61

Engels’s separation of the English proletariat into a distinct racial group from the bourgeoisie builds on Smith’s division of human societies into four distinct developmental stages: hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, arable farmers, and commercialists. This four-part structure enables Engels to present arable cultivation as the dividing point between “settled” and unsettled modes of subsistence. In this schema, being “permanently settled” on one particular piece of land is the economic pre-condition for other forms of intellectual and moral cultivation to develop. It is important to note that this developmental schema is not necessarily progressive. Instead, it takes the cyclical structure of eighteenth-century conjectural history, which allows that societies can regress as well as progress through these various socio-cultural developmental stages. Engels’s use of the same developmental schema to structure his analysis of class difference in 1840s Britain as ethnologists such as Knox and Prichard were using to analyse the social, cultural, and intellectual habits of the different races of the non-­ European world indicates the extent to which stadial theory enabled social commentators such as Engels and Mayhew to map not only the figures but also the temporalities of contemporary ethnology onto their sociological studies of the English working classes.

61  Frederick Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, with a Preface Written in 1892, trans. Florence Kelly Wischnewetzky, reprint edition (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1936), 2.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: The Colonial Encounter and Identity Formation

I am an African. I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land. I owe my being to the Khoi and the San whose desolate souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape—they who fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen, they who were the first to lose their lives in the struggle to defend our freedom and independence and they who, as a people, perished in the result. —Thabo Mbeki, “I Am an African,” speech delivered in Cape Town, 8 May 1996, following the adaptation of South Africa’s post-­apartheid constitution (Clifton C. Crais and Thomas V. McClendon, The South Africa Reader: History, Culture, Politics, 2014, 475–80)

Thabo Mbeki’s “I Am an African” speech was given on the eve of the passing of South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution. It begins with a reading of South African history that presents settler violence and Indigenous resistance as central to the formation of national identity. This narrative begins with the clashes between the first Dutch settlers and the Khoekhoe (Khoi) and San peoples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout his speech, Mbeki traces this story of Indigenous resistance to European settler expansionism across the whole continent of Africa, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Atkin, Writing the South African San, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86226-8_7

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travelling through history and traversing borders. He focuses on Khoisan resistance to the Dutch through the struggles of the Indigenous “warrior chiefs” of Lesotho, Mozambique, and South Africa against Western colonial powers during the nineteenth century, and the concurrent Afrikaner struggles for political autonomy from the British. In an effort to exorcise the racial logic of colonial and apartheid racial categories, Mbeki elides these very different histories of African resistance against European colonialism with the anti-apartheid struggle, culminating in the foundation of the Republic of South Africa that was symbolized by the enactment of the post-apartheid constitution. By constructing this narrative, Mbeki argued for the important role that the histories of colonial settlement and Indigenous resistance still play in shaping the cultural and political life of South Africa. In Mbeki’s reading of South African history, the San are positioned as both the “first to lose their lives in the struggle to defend our freedom and independence” as a result of the genocidal policies of the VOC and the first to have their cultural identities erased through dispossession and integration into the colonial labour economy. Mbeki’s “commemorative inclusion” of southern Africa’s earliest inhabitants in his historical narrative of the foundation of the new South Africa simultaneously involves, as Shane Moran points out, a process of “reification and forgetting.”1 In Mbeki’s reading, the Khoekhoe and San “souls” that “haunt” the landscape of the Eastern and Western Cape are evoked to mourn the absence of the peoples and cultures they represent. This register of commemorative mourning effaces the continuing presence of those who identify as Khoekhoe, San, or Khoisan in modern South Africa. In an anti-colonial historical narrative, this recurrence of the “vanished race” trope—one of the most persistent from the repertoire of colonial racial discourse—demonstrates the malleability of such figurations, while foregrounding their continuing importance in debates about identity formation in the South African postcolony. Part of the reason for this continuing erasure of Khoisan ethnic identities within contemporary South Africa is because Khoekhoe, San, and Griqua identities have been fractured and remade by both colonialism and apartheid, which means these communities occupy a marginalized status. While the displacements of colonialism largely left Griqua cultural identity 1  Shane Moran, Representing Bushmen: South Africa and the Origin of Language (University Rochester Press, 2009), 139.

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intact, the remaking of race and culture that followed the implementation of apartheid post-1948 had the effect of erasing Khoekhoe, San, and Griqua ethnic identities. As anthropologist Piet Erasmus explains: “apartheid defined race, ethnicity, and nation in distinctive terms, and produced a set of practices concerned with setting the boundaries between these categories. Khoekhoe and Griqua identities were subsumed within the apartheid category of ‘coloured,’ with many communities being forcibly removed to urban “locations.”2 Griqua sociologist Berthe Van Wyk has pointed out that, under apartheid Griqua and other Khoisan peoples were required to register as “coloured”: “a label that came to be widely resented, especially from the 1980s, for its neglect of their distinct identities.”3 Although sub-categories of coloured identity, including Cape coloured, Cape Malay, Griqua, Nama, and “other coloured,” offered a space for Griqua identity to be named, the apartheid regime did not allow for any articulations of these Indigenous identities to be expressed either politically or culturally, encouraging instead the emergence of a “coloured” cultural identity that emphasized affinity with European whites rather than Indigenous cultures and ethnic identities. Since the fall of apartheid, Khoisan communities have increasingly rejected the ethnic label “coloured” in favour of an Indigenous identity and a process known as the Khoisan Revival. Today, the government in South Africa officially recognizes the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (CONTRALESA) as a body of “traditional leaders.” Khoekhoe and San communities claim to be Indigenous rather than traditional leaders; hence, the term “traditional and khoi-san” is used as a descriptor that includes Khoisan leaders but acknowledges their distinction from Bantu traditional leaders. A tribal representative body, the National Khoisan Consultative Conference, was established in 2001, and numerous other small activist groups have formed via social media. According to Van Wyk, the aim of these various Khoisan groups is “to raise awareness of Khoisan heritage, rendering the pursuit and preservation of their cultural more significant.”4 A significant, if controversial, ­outcome of Khoisan Revivalism in the Republic of South Africa is the 2  Piet Erasmus, ‘Dreams and Visions in Koranna and Griqua Revival in Colonial and Post-­ Apartheid South Africa’, Journal of Pan African Studies 3, no. 9 (15 June 2010): 82. 3  Berthe Van Wyk, ‘Indigenous Rights, Indigenous Epistemologies and Language: (Re) Construction of Modern Khoisan Identities’, Knowledge Cultures 4, no. 4 (2016): 40. 4  Berthe Van Wyk, ‘Indigenous Rights, Indigenous Epistemologies and Language: (Re) Construction of Modern Khoisan Identities’, Knowledge Cultures 4, no. 4 (2016): 42.

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Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Act 3 of 2019 (TKLA). This act, the first to grant Khoisan communities a degree of political recognition within the Republic of South Africa, defines the ethnic category of Khoisan as “any person who lives in accordance with the customs and customary law of the Cape-Khoi, Griqua, Koranna, Nama or San people, or any subgrouping thereof, and is consequentially a member of a particular Khoi-­ San community.”5 That it took until 2019, over twenty-five years since the end of apartheid, to gain formal legal recognition for Khoisan communities within the Republic of South Africa points to the ongoing impact that the fracturing of Khoekhoe, Griqua, and San identities by colonialism and apartheid still has on Khoisan peoples. In particular, the violent displacement of Khoisan peoples from their sovereign territories during Dutch and British colonialism continues to impact members of these communities today. In this study, I have traced how the Khoekhoe, Griqua, and the San were the first Southern African Indigenous peoples to lose their land and their lives to settler colonialism.6 As a result of losing their lands during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Khoisan communities in the Republic of South Africa have found themselves left out of the land restitution claims that other Indigenous communities have been able to pursue following the Land Restitution Act 1994. The Land Restitution Act allows for the reclamation of property that was appropriated as a result of apartheid policies or practices. Yet by placing a historical limit on these claims to the Land Act 1913, the piece of legislation that formally marked the beginning of apartheid by limiting African land ownership to “native reserves,” the Land Restitution Act excludes those communities who were dispossessed during the colonial era. Khoisan communities have thus found themselves excluded from making land restitution claims precisely because they were dispossessed by settler colonialism rather than apartheid.7 In light of the mobilization of ethnic Khoisan identities within South Africa today, in pursuing land claims and reactivating a sense of 5  ‘Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Act 3 of 2019 (English/Afrikaans) | South African Government’, Pub. L.  No. No.1550 (2019), https://www.gov.za/documents/ traditional-and-khoi-san-leadership-act-3-2019-28-nov-2019-0000. 6  Lorenzo Veracini and Rafael Verbuyst, ‘South Africa’s Settler-Colonial Present: Khoisan Revivalism and the Question of Indigeneity’, Social Dynamics 46, no. 2 (3 May 2020): 260, 10.1080/02533952.2020.1805883. 7  Berthe Van Wyk, ‘Indigenous Rights, Indigenous Epistemologies and Language: (Re) Construction of Modern Khoisan Identities’, Knowledge Cultures 4, no. 4 (2016): 39.

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pride in pre-colonial Indigenous identities, Hendrik Hendriks’s effort to use the colonial rhetoric of protection in order to fashion a distinctive Indigenous identity for the Griqua in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s appears strikingly modern. After all, it was not until 13 September 2007 that the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People placed self-definition as one of the four criteria that define what it is to be an Indigenous community.8 One could argue that in their correspondence with their European interlocutors, both Hendriks and Waterboer were practising forms of strategic essentialism by presenting themselves as “semi-civilized” model converts in need of the benevolent protection of the British colonial administration. Like their descendants in contemporary South Africa, who have revived their pre-colonial identities and reconstructed historic cultural practices as part of an ongoing effort to revive cultural practices and ethnic identities disrupted by colonialism and apartheid, Hendriks and Waterboer strategically refashioned the essentializing discourses of colonial racial theory in an effort to carve out a distinctive position for the Griqua within the expanding colonial social order. If the influence of the colonial encounter with European powers on South African identity formations is taken as read in debates about the political and cultural life of the nation in South Africa, the absence of a sustained focus on the continuing legacies of British colonialism in similar debates in Britain is equally marked. When I completed the doctoral research on which this book is based in 2016, before the Brexit referendum and the presidential election of Donald Trump in the United States, one could still imagine that the yoking of racism and politics was a thing of the past in Western political culture. Revisionist historiography had done much to deconstruct the Enlightenment epistemologies that first enabled European philosophers to create the figure of rational, universal Man in their own image. Subaltern Studies and postcolonial history had waged an assault on 500 years of Western historical writing that produced Europe, as Dipesh Chakrabarty had termed it, “the sovereign subject of all histories.”9 In public discourse, the British Empire and debates about its legacy were notable only for their almost utter absence from political 8  ‘United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’, Pub. L. No. 61/295 (2007), https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/declaration-on-the-­ rights-of-indigenous-peoples.html/. 9  Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference—New Edition, New edition with a New preface by the author (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 27.

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discourse. The global rise of the right and the culture wars waged in some sections of the British and American press have highlighted how integral celebratory narratives about the British Empire remain to contemporary ideas about British national identity. A central protagonist in the culture wars in Britain is Revd Nigel Biggar, a moral philosopher rather than a historian, whose 2017 Ethics and Empire project sought to pose the question of whether empires can be viewed as ethical. Biggar’s method was to weigh massacres of Indigenous peoples in imperial wars against the ethical contribution made by supposedly progressive imperial ideologies such as abolitionism. Seeking to reintroduce moral absolutism into historical scholarship, Biggar maintained that global and postcolonial history has simplistically dismissed empire as “wicked” without sufficient attention to the contributions empires have made to human history.10 When many historians publicly challenged Biggar for returning to “balance sheet” arguments discredited as long ago as 1950 and for mobilizing “good and evil” as terms of analysis, moral absolutes which may be useful to ethicists but which “are meaningless to historians,” Biggar’s response was to dismiss such critics as intemperate and immoral.11 While it may be true that some of the social media attacks levelled at Biggar were unpleasantly personal, the substance of the critique was methodological rather than ideological. The scholarly critique of Biggar’s Empire and Ethics project has become something of a cause celebre among right-wing commentators concerned about the political impact postcolonial and global history has had on the way British people view their colonial past. The anxiety that Biggar controversy produced is evident in responses that continue to appear periodically in the press, which moves rapidly from common sense arguments about free speech and scholarly debate to an all-out assault on scholarship that seeks to recover the histories of historically marginalized groups. In a recent defence of Biggar, Simon Heffer has opined: In history faculties, the talk is all about “decolonising” the curriculum; about removing the focus from the British and European history that has been the basis of our shared past, and the key to answering the question of why we are where we are, and putting it on to abstruse studies of colonial 10  ‘Ethics and Empire | McDonald Centre’, accessed 9 August 2021, https://www. mcdonaldcentre.org.uk/ethics-and-empire. 11  Erin O’Halloran et al., ‘Ethics and Empire: An Open Letter from Oxford Scholars’, The Conversation, accessed 9 August 2021, http://theconversation.com/ethics-and-empire-anopen-letter-from-oxford-scholars-89333.

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cruelty and exploitation, or of the role of women and working class people within our domestic history. Anyone who attempts to look at historical questions in their own context, to evaluate why what happened at the time happened, is regarded as a reactionary.12

In his ahistorical decoupling of “British and European history” from global history, Heffer unwittingly reveals a core assumption of cultural wars rhetoric: the world can be separated into geographically discrete political and cultural systems, ones whose particular ethics and values must be studied in order to reveal “why we are where we are.” In order to understand the European self, Heffer suggests, we must understand “our” history—a history from which the experiences of women, ethnic minorities, and the working classes are erased in favour of a focus on major political events and actors who are overwhelmingly white and male. In this view, any scholarship that seeks to analyse the effects of empire on ordinary people who lived under its rule or to uncover the entanglements and interdependencies between Western and non-Western cultures and economic systems is “abstruse”: an unhealthy distraction from the celebratory narratives of technological, economic, and political progress that underwrite the role of empire in “our” (i.e. Britain’s) national story. Underpinning such insular revisionism is an assumption that it remains possible to use history to discover some kind of sui generis Anglo-Saxon or Western cultural identity. It is the supremacy of this shared culture, it is often argued, that means that Europeans still control the majority of the world’s wealth and power. Such racialized readings of world history are not only wilful acts of erasure which efface the contribution of BIPOC people to European history and culture; they also highlight how the core assumptions behind conservative readings of British cultural identity today remain deeply imbricated with the racial logics of colonialism. So, why do such narratives still hold such powerful cultural sway? And what can we do to disrupt them? If the ongoing cultures wars in American and British media are a continual reminder of history’s centrality to questions of national identity, they are also a reminder of how integral the distancing logics of racism are to policing the boundaries between nations and peoples that today’s populist nationalisms thrive upon asserting. Antiracist scholarship needs therefore to be alert to the importance of 12  Simon Heffer, ‘Free Speech in an Uncivil Society’, The Critic Magazine, 7 February 2020, https://thecritic.co.uk/free-speech-in-an-uncivil-society/.

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historical and regional specificity when analysing the formation of racial discourses. What my focus on a single case study allows for is a granular analysis of the formation of racial discourse about South African Indigenous peoples that moves beyond settler/Indigenous binaries. Throughout, I have been committed to attending to the political, regional, ethnic, and cultural differences between different Indigenous and settler groups rather than treating either as a monolithic category for analysis. For example, British representations of the trekboers of the South African interior as deculturated barbarians, ones whose migratory pastoralism bore a close resemblance to the lifestyles of the Indigenous Khoekhoe, were recirculated at the Cape in Dutch translations among the libraries and coffee shops of Cape Town.13 These representations became important propaganda weapons in efforts made by the British colonial government at the Cape during the 1820s and 1830s to anglicize the public sphere and legislative codes of a colony where only one in eight white settlers were of British origin.14 Attending to these distinctions between different settler communities is an important reminder that colonial racial typologies were not solely reducible to phenotype and that national distinctions between different European communities were frequently central to colonial identity formation during the “Anglophone settler explosion” of the nineteenth century.15 By examining the fictional reworkings of ethnographic representations alongside genres that were understood as factual such as travel writing and ethnology, I have demonstrated the portability of figures for representing the “bushman”—their ability to travel across time, space, and genre. Types such as the “noble savage,” “wild bushman,” and “tame bushman” not only recurred in a variety of different textual media but were also adapted to suit varied, often contradictory, polemical purposes. By foregrounding the centrality of ethnographic poetics to the formation and dissemination of the racial logics that enabled the Othering of Indigenous peoples, it is my hope 13  For more on analogies drawn in nineteenth-century British writing between the lifestyles of trekboers and indigenous Khoekhoe, see Dirk Klopper, ‘Boer, Bushman, and Baboon: Human and Animal in Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century South African Writings’, Safundi 11, no. 1–2 (January 2010): 3–18. 14  A. M. Lewin Robinson, None Daring to Make Us Afraid: A Study of English Periodical Literature in the Cape Colony from Its Beginnings in 1824 to 1835, 1st edition (M. Miller, 1962), 68. 15  James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 21.

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that this book goes some way towards recognizing that white supremacy was enacted at an aesthetic as well as ideological level in nineteenth-­century writings about non-white peoples. As Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong have highlighted, Victorian Studies as an academic discipline has often displayed a “marked resistance” to this uncomfortable insight.16 I hope that this book’s attention to the discursive overlap between scientific and literary discourse on race goes some way towards recognizing the influence that ethnological and anthropological discourse had on shaping the way non-white peoples were imagined by nineteenthcentury British and settler readers, and how these imaginings continue to shape the ways we think about race, identity, and national belonging, across the Anglo-world today.

16  Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R.  Wong, ‘Undisciplining Victorian Studies’, Los Angeles Review of Books, accessed 9 August 2021, https://www. lareviewofbooks.org/article/undisciplining-victorian-studies/.

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Index1

A Abraham Kok, 80 Adam Kok I, 56 Adam Kok II, 19, 55–59, 68, 69, 71–75, 77, 80–83 Adam Kok III, 74, 80, 82–84 African Association, The, 160–163 amaXhosa, 78–79, 89–92, 100, 101, 104, 145, 146, 164–167, 170 Apartheid, 5, 7, 31, 151, 181–185 Autshumato, 27 B Baartman, Sarah, 7, 160–163, 161n18, 167 Barrow, John, 47, 61–65, 90, 92, 103, 172 Bastaard, 56n3 Baster, 56

Batswana (Tswana), 58–59, 61, 69–72, 78, 80, 86 Bergnaar, 71 Bleek-Lloyd archive, 8 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 10, 44, 173 Boer, 51–52, 66–68, 76–77, 82–86, 100, 168 Buffon, Comte de, 10, 43, 44, 47 Burchall, William, 6 Bushman, 4–7, 9, 12, 19, 20, 30, 39, 41–42, 46, 47, 49, 68, 89, 93, 102–111, 131, 134, 136, 137, 140, 148, 188 Bushman land, 66–69 C Caesars, Hendrik, 161, 162 Campbell, John, 20, 57, 72, 117–141

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Atkin, Writing the South African San, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86226-8

209

210 

INDEX

Cape Colony, 3, 12, 13, 16, 17, 20, 26, 30, 36, 45, 47, 51, 56, 58, 62, 64–66, 70, 79–80, 82, 91, 92, 94–96, 112, 121, 130, 131, 143, 145–146, 160, 162, 163, 165–167, 170–173 Cape liberals, 59, 78 Cape of Storms, 40 Cape Town, 6, 19, 20, 60–61, 75, 79, 91, 95, 101, 103, 145, 147, 160–163, 188 Chaguriqua, 56 Coetzee, J.M., 6, 7 Commission of Eastern Inquiry, 64, 69 Cornelius Kok I, 57 D Defoe, Daniel, 20, 125–130, 142 Denial of coevalness, 93 Dias, Bartholomeu, 26 Difaqane, 8n18, 58 Doman, 32 Dutch East India Company (VOC), 27, 57, 103, 111 E Engels, Friedrich, 174, 179–180 Ethnographic poetics, 1, 10, 18, 21, 91–94, 114, 188 Ethnographic spiritual autobiography, 130–141 Ethnology, 1–4, 9–14, 16, 21, 34, 164, 172–174, 179, 180, 188 Evangelical domestic ideology, 116, 134, 153 Evangelical racial discourse, 117 Evangelical Robinsonade, 20, 126 Exeter Hall, 155, 157, 160, 163, 165–167, 172

F Fairbairn, John, 61n19, 74, 91 G Gorinhaikona, 27 Grahamstown, 104 Griqua, 4, 7–9, 13, 16–19, 55–60, 75–87 Griquatown, 57–58, 61, 70–75, 80–82 H Hendricks, Hendrick, 75–79, 82 Hottentot, 3, 6, 18, 26, 32, 44, 46, 48, 75, 77, 99, 111, 116, 121, 145, 147, 148, 160–162, 164, 167–169 Hottentot Venus, 7, 160–162, 164, 167 Humanitarian discourse, 14, 15, 50, 55–87, 91–93, 147, 171 Humanitarian governance, 14, 26, 52, 53 Hume, David, 10, 38 I Imperfect sympathy, 15 Imperial literacy, 80, 87 J Ju/’hoansi, 5, 151 K Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, 5 Khoekhoe, 3–9, 18, 24–42, 45, 46, 48, 56–60, 75, 99, 133, 137, 146, 165, 170–172, 181–184, 188

 INDEX 

Khoi, 4, 5, 56, 133, 181, 184 Khoisan, 5–8, 18, 29, 31, 41, 42, 47, 49, 136, 155, 161, 162, 181–185 Khoisan Revivalism, 183 ≠Khomani, 5 Kicherer, J.J., 116–117, 121, 132–134, 136, 138, 141n71, 147, 165 Knox, Robert, 9, 10, 44, 115, 155, 157–160, 163–173, 180 Kolb, Peter, 24, 33–39, 41–42, 45, 47, 48 L Lamb, Charles, 15 Linnaeus, Carl, 43, 44, 47 Liverpool, 115, 156, 163–164 London, 1–3, 12, 21, 65, 115, 120–122, 155–158, 161, 164–165, 174, 176–179 London Missionary Society (LMS), 16, 55, 57, 61, 70, 73, 74, 80, 81, 116 M Macaulay, Zachary, 160–163 Marryat, Frederick, 11, 20, 117, 130, 141–154 Mayhew, Henry, 1–3, 10, 12, 21, 174, 179–180 Mbeki, Thabo, 181–182 Moffat, Robert, 70–71 Moral colonization, 14, 15, 53, 60, 76, 79, 82, 86, 172, 173 Moral sympathy, 15, 19, 50–52, 61, 63, 66, 72, 73, 75, 81, 102, 104–106, 111

211

N Namaqualand, 57 Noble savage, 24, 26, 33–39, 47–50, 105–107, 112, 188 Northern Cape, 5, 6, 26, 56, 102, 105 P Philippolis, 56, 57, 59, 68–69, 71–77, 80–86 Phillip, John, 145 Pottinger, Sir Henry, 170 Prichard, James Cowles, 2, 3, 44, 166n34, 180 Pringle, Thomas, 19, 20, 20n47, 89 R Racialized moral sympathy, 15, 19, 51, 59–63, 72, 81, 104–105 Religious Tract Society, 119, 159 Robben Island, 27 Robinsonade, 20, 125–130, 142 Robinson Crusoe, 20, 122–130, 142 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 23–24, 33, 36–39, 48, 50, 118 S Scott, Walter, 20, 112 Smith, Adam, 10, 38, 50, 93, 179 Smith, Andrew, (ethnologist), 2, 3, 12 Smith, Harry, 83–85, 146 Sonqua, 3 Sparrman, Anders, 44–53, 62, 103 Stadial theory, 2, 10, 38, 39, 47, 77–80, 92–93, 104, 108, 179–180 Stockenstrom, Andries, 55, 66–70, 77, 80, 82–85

212 

INDEX

T Tame bushmen, 46, 49 Tract fiction, 20, 116–125, 141, 143, 153 The Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Act, 184 Transorangia, 17, 18, 56, 59, 68, 71, 72, 79, 83, 86, 87, 115, 163 Trekboer, 19, 39–49, 57–71, 74–83, 86–87, 99, 103, 104, 116, 145, 188 Tyler, J.S., 115, 116, 157–159, 174–179

V Van der Post, Laurens, 6 Van Riebeek, Jan, 30, 31 W Waterboer, Andries, 19, 58, 61, 70–75, 86–87, 184–185 Western Cape, 18, 24, 30, 32, 40, 41, 45, 49, 57, 182 Wild bushmen, 43, 46, 47, 102, 112, 114, 131 X /Xam, 5