Beyond the Pale: The ‘Foreigner’ in the Politics of the ‘Frontier’ in the Fish River Marches of the British Cape Colony, c. 1830–1850

ABSTRACT

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the British Cape Colony was the site of multiple and interrelated constructions of the foreign and articulations of some brand of ‘foreigner’ as threatening. This paper, part of a longer study, explores one construction of foreignness in relation to the ‘frontier’. It makes three main points. First, it analyses the frontier not as a structural condition or zone but as a subjective, political positioning. It proposes the concept of the ‘marchland’ to distinguish between spatial description and political space. Second, it looks at the rendition of the ‘foreign’ in the politics of the frontier, how African land and people ‘beyond the boundary’ were labelled ‘foreigners’ or treated as foreign through the invocation of European norms of international law. It addresses colonial politicisations of chiefly authority in those discourses. Last, it considers the frequently employed idea of ‘the pale’, which speaks to political difference and aids us in conceptualising foreignness in the Cape colonial marchlands. This history considers the relationship between accusations of foreignness and a specific, historical political subjectivity and politics – of the frontier – that politicised foreignness.

KEYWORDS:

• Cape Colony
• frontier
• foreign
• foreigner
• foreignness
• xenophobia
• South Africa

Notes

1 J. M. Bowker, Speeches, Letters & Selections from Important Papers of the late John Mitford Bowker, Some Years Resident and Diplomatic Agent with Certain Kafir and Fingo Tribes (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1962), 113.

2 The most appropriate route would be to replace offensive words from archival sources with non-racialised, accurate language, as, for example, ‘amaXhosa’, or ‘African’, where a general term is called for. However, this conceals an important aspect of colonial discourses of ‘Othering’ or defining difference. That these words are historically and politically significant and can convey important information does not excuse their bigotry. I will not repeat them endlessly, as citing the colonial sources would require, so I have chosen to proceed with replacing them with the suitably Victorian ‘K—r’ or ‘C—r’. It is a thin guise but reminds us of both of the white supremacy and the other forms of collective ‘Othering’ that were written into these colonial texts.

3 J. M. Bowker, Speeches, Letters & Selections from Important Papers of the late John Mitford Bowker, Some Years Resident and Diplomatic Agent with Certain Kafir and Fingo Tribes (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1962), 113.

4 See also ‘Proclamation by Sir David Baird’, 25 February 1806, in G. M. Theal, ed., Records of the Cape Colony, Vol. V (Cape Town: William Clowes and Sons, 1899), 354.

5 R. K. Bright, Chinese Labour in South Africa, 1902–10: Race, Violence, and Global Spectacle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); A. F. Hattersley, The Convict Crisis and the Growth of Unity (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1965).

6 M. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 23.

7 B. Maclennan, A Proper Degree of Terror: John Graham and the Cape’s Eastern Frontier (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1986), 128.

8 N. Etherington, The Great Treks (London: Pearson Education, 2001), 64.

9 M. Legassick, ‘The Frontier Tradition in South African Historiography’, Collected Seminar Papers, Institute of Commonwealth Studies 12 (1972), 12, 20.

10 M. Legassick, ‘The Northern Frontier to c. 1840: The Rise and Decline of the Griqua People’, in R. Elphick and H. Giliomee, eds, The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840 (Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1989), 360.

11 H. Giliomee, ‘The Eastern Frontier, 1770–1812’, in R. Elpick and H. Giliomee, eds, The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840 (Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1989), 426–427, 449.

12 S. Ellis, ‘The English Pale: A “Failed Entity”?’, History Ireland 19, 2 (2011), 14–17.

13 National Library of South Africa (hereafter NLSA), The South African Commercial Advertiser, IX, 573, 8 December 1832.

14 Legassick, ‘The Frontier Tradition’, 18.

15 Cory Library (hereafter CL), The Graham’s Town Journal, IV, 181, 13 June 1835, emphasis in original; CL, Graham’s Town Journal, IV, 182, 19 June 1835.

16 B. A. Le Cordeur, ‘Robert Godlonton as Architect of Frontier Opinion, with Special Reference to the Politics of Separatism, 1850-57’ (MA thesis, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, 1956), 1; A. Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001), 46.

17 A. L. Harington, ‘The Graham’s Town Journal – its Founding, Early History and Influence’, South African Historical Journal, 1, 1 (1969), 25.

18 I am taking seriously settler politics because we can learn something from them about the foreign as an imagined threat, not because it is inherently more important than any indigenous histories, practices, or discourses. That Africans in the nineteenth century had vocabularies of difference or foreignness is not in question. Historian of the Eastern Cape Jeff Peires notes the evolution of Xhosa terms for the European people in their purview from ‘the polite term abantu abasemzini (people of another house)’ to ‘amagwangqa (pale beasts) or even amaramncwa (beasts of prey)’, for a people who, through preserving their separateness and generally behaving with hostility, remained ‘outside the moral community’. Of course, this was in the context of conquest, atrocity, deceit, and expropriation by Europeans; generally, Xhosa politics of the period are framed as ‘resistance’, and I will not reframe them here as xenophobic. See J. B. Peires, The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of their Independence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 44.

19 I. D. MacCrone, Race Attitudes in South Africa: Historical, Experimental and Psychological Studies (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 25, 27, 33.

20 ‘Report of Lieutenant Colonel Collins to the Earl of Caledon’, in Theal, Records of the Cape Colony, Vol. VII (1900), 99–105, 137–138.

21 Maclennan, A Proper Degree of Terror, 65.

22 Bowker, Speeches, Letters & Selections, 116.

23 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, II, 103, 12 December 1833; IV, 170, 27 March 1835; III, 153, 27 November 1834; XII, 585, 16 February 1843.

24 G. Grieg, The South African Commercial Advertiser. No. 1 January 7 1824 to No. 18 May 5 1824, Together with Facts Connected with the Stopping of the South African Commercial Advertiser.

25 NLSA, Cape Town Mail, II, 94, 17 December 1842; II, 97, 7 January 1843; III, 125, 22 July 1843.

26 T. Pringle, Narrative of a Residence in South Africa (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1966), 307, 326.

27 CL, Cape Frontier Times, IV, 205, 18 April 1844, emphasis in original.

28 Bowker, Speeches, Letters & Selections.

29 Pringle, Narrative of a Residence, 307–308. Timothy Stapleton’s biography of the chief Maqoma (1798–1873) is one of the better sources for capturing the extent of pillaging and extortion by colonists and their military forces. See, for example, T. Stapleton, Maqoma: Xhosa Resistance to Colonial Advance 1798–1873 (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1994), 50.

30 W. M. MacMillan, Bantu, Boer, and Briton: The Making of the South African Native Problem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 77–79.

31 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, II, 76, 6 June 1833.

32 E. de Vattel, The Law of Nations, or, Principles of the Law of Nature, Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns, with Three Early Essays on the Origin and Nature of Natural Law and on Luxury, edited by B. Kapossy and R. Whatmore (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008), ix–xx; ‘Emmerich de Vattel’, Encyclopedia Britannica (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 2019), https://www.britannica.com/biography/Emmerich-de-Vattel, accessed 29 April 2019.

33 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, II, 76, 6 June 1833, emphasis in original.

34 Lester, Imperial Networks, 48.

35 Here I not only mean ‘colonial’ in the sense of a territory settled by Europeans and governed, in essence, by a hardly cushioned military dictatorship but also in how the colonists thought of themselves.

36 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, II, 77, 13 June 1833; II, 78, 20 June 1833.

37 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, III, 143, 18 September 1834; VII, 334, 7 June 1838, emphasis in original.

38 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, X, 483, 1 April 1841, emphasis in original.

39 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, XVIII, 922, 11 August 1849.

40 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, III, 135, 24 July 1834.

41 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, III, 118, 27 March 1834.

42 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, III, 151, 13 November 1834.

43 National Archives of South Africa, Western Cape Archives and Record Service (hereafter CA), Government House (hereafter GH) 1/201/334, Grey to Smith, 7 June 1849, 128–146. Indeed, the most common use of the word ‘foreign’ in British Foreign Office and Cape Colonial officialdom was in regard to trade, as in foreign goods, markets, wines, brandies, vessels, ‘bottoms’, to name the most frequent foreign things. ‘Powers’ and some people might be labelled ‘foreign’ as well, but mostly in connection with commerce. See, for example, Theal, Records of the Cape Colony, Vol. XVII (1903), 116, 128, 131–133; Theal, Records of the Cape Colony, Vol. XXVII (1905), 32, 35, 158–164, 454–455, 516.

44 CA, GH 1/102/1477, Rice to D’Urban, 14 October 1834, 34, emphasis in original.

45 Ibid., 5.

46 N. Mostert, Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People (New York: Knopf, 1992), 749; see also, CA, GH 1/107/1588, Glenelg to D’Urban, 26 December 1835, 10–164.

47 In Bowker, Speeches, Letters, & Selections, 11, emphasis in original.

48 In Bowker, Speeches, Letters, & Selections, 10–17, emphasis in original.

49 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, VIII, 394, 11 July 1839.

50 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, III, 116, 13 March 1834.

51 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, II 100, 21 November 1833.

52 In Stapleton, Maqoma, 60.

53 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, III, 118, 27 March 1834.

54 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, IV, 164, 13 February 1835.

55 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, IV, 182, 19 June 1835.

56 CA, GH 1/108 1836, Glenelg to D’Urban, 17 February 1836, 116–117.

57 In Peires, House of Phalo, 33.

58 Bowker, Speeches, Letters & Selections, 51.

59 Grieg, Commercial Advertiser, 26, emphasis in original.

60 T. Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 247.

61 P. S. Landau, Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), xiv, 11, 124; Peires, House of Phalo, 27–29.

62 Peires, House of Phalo, 22–24, 32, 36–37, 39, 42, 44; Landau, Popular Politics, 34, 51–53, 66; J. C. Wells, The Return of Makhanda: Exploring the Legend (Pietermaritzburg: UKZN Press, 2012), 101–102.

63 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, IV, 190, 13 August 1835, emphasis in original.

64 CL, Cape Frontier Times, V, 210, 23 May 1844.

65 See Wells, The Return, 36–42.

66 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, VII, 339, 12 July 1838.

67 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, VII, 323, 8 March 1838.

68 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, XII, 628, 14 December 1843.

69 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, X, 498, 34 June 1841.

70 CL, Cape Frontier Times, IV, 201, 21 March 1844.

71 Grieg, Commercial Advertiser, 1.

72 Lester, Imperial Networks, 73–74.

73 CL, Cape Frontier Times, V, 210, 23 May 1844.

74 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, X, 478, 25 February 1841.

75 Bowker, Speeches, Letters & Selections, iii, vi–vii, 1–5.

76 ‘Pale’, Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. XI, 2nd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 91; Ellis, ‘The English Pale’.

77 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, XIII, 668, 19 September 1844.

78 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, V, 220, 10 March 1836; XIV, 707, 19 June 1845.

79 Pringle, Narrative, 326.

80 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, XI, 574, 1 December 1842.

81 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, X, 502, 22 July 1841.

82 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, XI, 574, 1 December 1842; XVI, 802, 24 April 1847.

83 CL, Graham’s Town Journal, XVI, 797, 20 March 1847.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the African Centre for Migration and Society.

Notes on contributors

Paddy O'Halloran

Paddy O'Halloran is a National Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow with the African Centre for Migration and Society at the University of the Witwatersrand. His research considers transnational histories of the politicisation of foreignness in colonial southern Africa and the Atlantic world, from the seventeenth century to the present.