‘Never luff to meddle mit politics, sir’: Errant Satire and Historical Gainsaying in A.G. Bain's ‘Kaatje Kekkelbek, or, Life among the Hottentots’

Abstract

Andrew Geddes Bain's doggerel squib, ‘Kaatje Kekkelbek’, lies towards the front of anthologies of English and Afrikaans poetry in South Africa. Its foundational status urges the historicist treatment of this essay, in order not only to more thickly describe the social moment of its composition and performance, and thereby to elucidate its real subject, but also to conjoin the objects and methods of literature and history. The Cape Colony between Ordinance 50 of 1928 and the Glenelg Retrocession of 1837 resounded with rhetoric on both sides of debates around colonial subjectivity, whether colonised indigene or establishing settler. Against the noise of the War of Hintsa, scholarship must listen also to the voluble archive of a very textual decade: the first years of the Cape press, the inquiry into the murder of Hintsa, the evidence before the Select Committee on Aborigines sitting at Exeter Hall, meetings and petitions around the proposed Vagrancy Ordinance of the early 1830s. ‘Kaatje Kekkelbek’ belongs to this archive and exemplifies the knot of text and history in these seminal years. Its donation to posterity is in part the constitution of the type and temper of Cape history, and the language used to tell it.

Notes

¹ Bain's son-in-law, Frederick Rex, has long been held to be his collaborator on the piece. The skit was first performed in Grahamstown on 5 November 1838, and we should note its Guy Fawkes context as we proceed. The text first appeared in print in the South African Sentinel on 4 March 1839. See P.R. Anderson, ‘“The Host of Vagabonds”: Origins and Destinations of the Vagrant in Cape History and Ideas’ (PhD thesis, University of Cape Town, 2007), pp. 113–23; D. Shaw, ‘Two “Hottentots”, Some Scots and a West Indian Slave: The Origins of Kaatje Kekkelbek’, English Studies in Africa, 52, 2 (2009), pp. 4–17.

² This is even recorded as among the poem's significances in Bain's entry in the Dictionary of National Biography. See also J.C. Kannemeyer, Geskiedenis van die Afrikaanse Literatuur (Pretoria, Academica, 1984, 2^nd edn) pp. 35, 48; M.H. Lister (ed.), The Journals of Andrew Geddes Bain: Trader, Explorer, Soldier, Road Engineer and Geologist (Cape Town, Van Riebeeck Society, 1949), p. 193.

³ M. Chapman, A Century of South African Poetry (Johannesburg, Ad. Donker, 1981), pp. 19, 47–52, 372.

⁴ S. Gray, ‘The Frontier Myth and the Hottentot Eve’, Southern African Literature: An Introduction (Cape Town, David Philip, 1979), pp. 50–58.

⁵ Thus Arrowsmith recorded Bain's 1826 journey in his (1834) map as the northernmost European journey. Lister (ed.), The Journals of Andrew Geddes Bain, p. xv.

⁶ See P.R. Kirby ‘“Calder Fair”, “Kaatje Kekkelbek” and “Sing a Song of Sixpence”: A Study of Musical Integration’, Quarterly Bulletin of the South African Library, 22, 2 (December 1967), pp. 42–51.

⁷ De Zuid-Afrikaan, 2 July 1830. Lister (ed.), The Journals of Andrew Geddes Bain, p. 199, notes this source and that the style and Graaff-Reinet address of the correspondent, though anonymous, point to Bain's authorship. Indeed, reading De Zuid-Afrikaan and The South African Commercial Advertiser (SACA) and the Graham's Town Journal (GTJ) of this period one soon picks up Bain's reportage or correspondence, where anonymous, from the peculiar character of its style – droll, mordantly ironic, playful with names. Other correlations suggest his presence too – a penchant for court reporting (with witty asides) and for controversy, an interest in litigation, and in executions.

⁸ GTJ, 4, 204, 19 November 1835.

⁹ Lister (ed.), The Journals of Andrew Geddes Bain, pp. xix–xxiv.

¹⁰ J.B. Peires, The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of Their Independence (Johannesburg, Ravan, 1981), p. 94.

¹¹ B.A. Le Cordeur (ed.), The Journal of Charles Lennox Stretch (Cape Town, Maskew Miller Longman, 1988), pp. 95–7. Stretch represents an uncommonly humanitarian voice on the frontier.

¹² T. Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (Cape Town, David Philip, 1996), p. 143.

¹³ J. Milton, The Edges of War: A History of Frontier Wars, 1702–1878 (Cape Town, Juta, 1983), p. 141.

¹⁴ Lister (ed.), The Journals of Andrew Geddes Bain, p. xxiii.

¹⁵ J.M. Berning (ed.), The Historical ‘Conversations’ of Sir George Cory (Cape Town, Maskew Miller Longman, 1989), p. 122.

¹⁶ Lister (ed.), The Journals of Andrew Geddes Bain, p. xxiv.

¹⁷ Keegan, Colonial South Africa, p. 152.

¹⁸ Bain, ‘The British Settler’, in Chapman, A Century of South African Poetry, p. 47.

¹⁹ Government Archives, Cape Repository (CA), A50, William Morrison Collection, 1819–44, ‘Minutes of a Meeting held at Philipston’, 5 August 1834.

²⁰ Few settlers managed to live up to his ideal, but the ideals are fascinating. See CA, Deputy Surveyor General and Land Commissions, Eastern Cape (DSGEP), 82: ‘Plan upon which the Commissioner General has Proceeded in the Granting of Lands in the Kat River Settlement’, 9 October 1831; ‘Regulations for the Kat River Settlement (Amended)’. For the ideological value of these plans and regulations, see P.R. Anderson, ‘The Human Clay: An Essay in the Spatial History of the Cape Eastern Frontier, 1811–1835’ (MLitt thesis, University of Oxford, 1993).

²¹ Lister (ed.), The Journals of Andrew Geddes Bain, pp. 198–202.

²² W.T. Black, The Fish River Bush, South Africa, and Its Wild Animals (Edinburgh, Y.J. Pentland, 1902), p. 9.

²³ W.T. Black, The Fish River Bush, South Africa, and Its Wild Animals (Edinburgh, Y.J. Pentland, 1902), p. 16.

²⁴ H. Ward, Five Years in Kaffirland, with Sketches of the Late War in that Country, to the Conclusion of the Peace, Written on the Spot (London, H. Colburn, 1848), Volume 1, p. 293.

²⁵ J.E. Alexander, Narrative of a Voyage of Observation Among the Colonies of Western Africa in the Flagship Thalia; and of a Campaign in Kaffir-Land on the Staff of the Commander-in-Chief, in 1835 (London, H. Colburn, 1837), Volume 2, p. 51.

²⁶ Peires, House of Phalo, p. 150.

²⁷ Ward, Five Years in Kaffirland, Volume 1, p. 265.

²⁸ Lumley Graham, MS diary, Rhodes House, Oxford.

²⁹ Lister (ed.), The Journals of Andrew Geddes Bain, p. xx.

³⁰ The archives and histories employ it frequently. See P.R. Anderson, ‘The Fish River Bush and the Place of History’, South African Historical Journal, 53, 1 (2005), pp. 23–49.

³¹ Keegan, Colonial South Africa, pp. 237–40.

³² These estimates are rounded down from probably exaggerated colonial claims, but they offer scope. See A.C.M. Webb, ‘The Agricultural Development of the 1820 Settlement Down to 1846’ (MA thesis, Rhodes University, 1975), p. 160ff. The returns of losses provided by settlers to the Government Commission responsible for relief claimed 11,418 cattle lost and 156,878 sheep and goats. GTJ, 17 December 1835.

³³ An account of the new wool agriculture is given in Webb's ‘Agricultural Development’, Chapter 5.

³⁴ T. Pringle, Narrative of a Residence in South Africa (London, Edward Moxon, 1835, reprinted Cape Town, Struik, 1966), p. 210.

³⁵ Webb, ‘Agricultural Development’, pp. 183–8.

³⁶ R. Godlonton, A Narrative of the Irruption of the Kaffir Hordes into the Eastern Province of the Cape of Good Hope, 1834–35 (Grahamstown, Meurant and Godlonton, 1836), p. 9. His book was collated from his running account as editor in the Graham's Town Journal (hereafter referred to as GTJ), where the phrase first occurs on 9 January 1835.

³⁷ Cases reported in GTJ, 20 January 1832.

³⁸ GTJ, 27 January 1832.

³⁹ ‘A Decayed Tapster’, GTJ, 27 January 1832, bemoaning temperance initiatives, complained that he could ‘hardly get a Hottentot to chop my firewood, without paying him either in money, or in victuals for his cubs in the bush’. The ‘cubs’ evoke fears of predation and rapacity, just as we would now expect to find located ‘in the bush’.

⁴⁰ CA, A50, ‘Minutes of a Meeting’.

⁴¹ Temperance joined vagrancy in the vanguard of colonial rhetoric against Ordinance 50 and the ill-effects of liberty. Schemes and societies flourished in the early 1830s – to the horror of the canteen owners. The role of liquor in prompting Kaatje's loquacity and (im)pertinence – alcohol's relationship to cackling – is significant. The aimless wandering of the vagrant is figured in the totter of the drunk. The drunk's uninhibited thought and address likewise echo the defiance and ‘cheek’ of Kaatje's patter, everything that G. Butler, characterising her for his Cape Charade, or Kaatjie Kekkelbek (Cape Town, A.A. Balkema, 1968), p. viii, called ‘irrepressible, cheeky, vulgar, vigorous’. But alcohol is an explanation that draws the sting of ‘Hottentot’ speech and renders it intemperate, the effect of drugs, a kind of madness. The ‘alcoholism’ of textual representations is kin to the ensnaring ‘dop system’ of the Cape farms, a local and intense form of colonisation, and one that makes stupid any opposition, in person and thus in character – a pernicious but effective logic.

⁴² D.B. Bosman, I.W. van der Merwe, L.W. Hiemstra, Tweetalige Woordeboek (Cape Town, Tafelberg, 1984), p. 414.

⁴³ CA, 1/AY, 3/1/1/1/3, ‘Albany Criminal Record Book, 1835–7’ (hereafter ‘Albany Criminal Record Book, 1835–7’.

⁴⁴ ‘Albany Criminal Record Book, 1835–7’.

⁴⁵ ‘Albany Criminal Record Book, 1835–7’

⁴⁶ SACA, 25 September 1830.

⁴⁷ Lister (ed.), The Journals of Andrew Geddes Bain, p. xxiv.

⁴⁸ CA, 1/AY, 3/1/1/1/4, ‘Albany Criminal Record Book, 1837–8’.

⁴⁹ Le Cordeur (ed.), The Journal of Charles Lennox Stretch, p. 129.

⁵⁰ Le Cordeur (ed.), The Journal of Charles Lennox Stretch, pp. 129–30.

⁵¹ Le Cordeur (ed.), The Journal of Charles Lennox Stretch, pp. 129–30.

⁵² Le Cordeur (ed.), The Journal of Charles Lennox Stretch, p. 122.

⁵³ Le Cordeur (ed.), The Journal of Charles Lennox Stretch, p. 181; C.P. Brownlee, Reminiscences of Kaffir Life and History (Lovedale, Lovedale Press, 1896), pp. 23–4.

⁵⁴ Le Cordeur (ed.), Journal, pp. 58, 96, 103, 108.

⁵⁵ In Dutch/Afrikaans ‘uncle’ figures as a familiar term of respect for a senior male, but that familiarity may be extended to effect a ‘softening’ intimacy that need not be there for both parties. An example of this (often racialised) imposed intimacy is ‘Uncle Tom’.

⁵⁶ The term is used by V.C. Malherbe, ‘The Cape Khoisan in the Eastern Districts of the Colony Before and After Ordinance 50 of 1828’ (PhD thesis, University of Cape Town, 1997), p. 43. Its evocation of ‘enslaved’ goes a long way to closing the gap between the anachronistic ‘serf’, the euphemistic ‘bonded labour’ and the technically incorrect, but substantially accurate, ‘slave’.

⁵⁷ GTJ, 2 January 1835.

⁵⁸ GTJ, 19 November 1835.

⁵⁹ GTJ, 15 October 1835.

⁶⁰ Lister (ed.), The Journals of Andrew Geddes Bains, pp. 198–202.

⁶¹ See, however, Shaw, ‘Two “Hottentots”’, for discussion of an entirely different precedent.

⁶² GTJ, 17 December 1835.