Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

The African Hundred Years War (Review of Frontiers by Noel Mostert)

This is the epic narration of a war in Africa that lasted one hundred years. It was fought in fits and starts from its first tentative skirmishes in the eighteenth century until it reached its full-blown military denouement in 1877. It took place at the continent’s southern tip and embroiled all of southern Africa’s tribes and peoples: white and black, coloured and Boer, settler and nomad, English redcoat and Xhosa impi. In the footnotes of imperial history books these bush conflicts were dubbed the “Kaffir wars”—inglorious, violent, muddled affairs, that brought no particular honour to the British Army (no Victoria Crosses were won) and reflected rather the attenuated, sweaty struggle involved in administering the pax Britannica. There were nine of these wars altogether, punctuating the century with savage and absurd regularity, but they have been overshadowed in the popular imagination — in the historian’s imagination too — by the more dramatic and compelling Zulu wars of the 1870s and Cecil Rhodes’s annexation of Matabeleland.

All this will change now, I should imagine, as a result of this massive, extraordinary and fascinating book. All histories of colonization shame the colonizers and this one is no exception. But Frontiers’ ambitions are prodigious. Over 1,300 pages, weighing as much as a car battery, its sheer heft and palpable scale provide a daunting objective correlative of its historical claims and scholarly revisionism. For Noel Mostert’s grand aspirations are cogently and confidently set down from the outset. Forget other imperial struggles in Africa, he states, the nineteenth-century wars in South Africa’s Cape are “central to the experience of the Atlantic community, or the Western world as it is usually referred to …” and, moreover, he will also demonstrate how these wars, this interminable conflict, are “integral to the confused moral debate about human conscience and the values of empire that arose in the post-abolition world of the nineteenth century.”

These are large claims, but Mostert makes his case not only exhaustively but with skill and passion. They arise from events that took place in a comparatively small area of land around the coast, eastwards from the Cape, on territory demarcated and irrigated by two rivers, the Great Fish River and the Great Kei River. It was here, more or less, that the crucial frontier was variously to be found between white and black, between the colonists of the Cape and one of the indigenous black peoples of southern Africa, the Xhosa nation. This was the line of confrontation where the battles and skirmishes ensued, the volatile border where colonial expansion met local intransigence and brutal warfare proved to be the only solution to the impasse.

Mostert begins his history some five centuries earlier, however, with a vivid and extensive account of the first visitors to the Cape, the Portuguese, who arrived in 1488. This was a small fleet of three ships commanded by one Bartolomeu Dias. A two-week gale blew them round the Cape and they landed to replenish their water barrels. Natives approached and began hurling stones. Dias picked up a crossbow and shot one of the stone throwers dead. This was the first indigene to be killed by a white man in southern Africa. It hadn’t taken long. (Indeed one of the many satisfactions in this book is the way hindsight provides such ghoulish and baleful ironies — the breezes of discord that presage the whirlwind we are reaping today.)

After the Portuguese came the Dutch who planned to use the Cape as a provisioning port-of-call for ships making the long voyage to the East Indies. The little plantation (first established in 1615) did not thrive and the colonizers were reluctant settlers. As they struggled to survive and slowly establish themselves they encountered three distinct native groups: the Bushmen (whose few successors still roam the Kalahari desert), the Khoikhoi (known disparagingly as Hottentots) and, a little further north, the handsome, prosperous and peaceful Xhosa, leisurely following their vast herds of cattle from grazing ground to grazing ground.

As with all incipient colonies at first some sort of coexistence appeared possible. There were occasional flare-ups and hostilities but by and large this curious new white tribe posed no real threat, even when pastoralist Boers began to move out of the Cape settlement into the hinterland during the “long quietude of the eighteenth century.” In fact at this stage there was little to separate Boer and Xhosa in terms of way of life. It centred round their beasts and their needs; it was tough, secular, communal and distinctly un-European in character. Families slept together in crude huts, miscegenation was frequent and unstigmatized. The Boers, like the Xhosa, wanted only to lead their own lives, free from external influence and control.

All this changed at the end of the eighteenth century, more or less when the British arrived, and took over from the Dutch as the colonial power in the Cape Colony. After “a century and a quarter of slothful and haphazard presence in South Africa” the remorseless northward drift of the whites had begun to penetrate the traditional Xhosa grazing lands. Cattle-raiding, farm-burning and skirmishes forced the government of the day to try and determine where the colony ended and a rudimentary frontier was posited. What this meant, of course, was that the Xhosa had to yield. They were to be encouraged to move north of the Great Fish River. If they wouldn’t move they would be “dislodged.” The hundred years war had begun.

The story of the nine “Kaffir” wars between the whites and the Xhosa is the main burden of Mostert’s history. Essentially, all the wars followed the same pattern. As a result of repeated provocation and encroachment the Xhosa would take to arms and attack white settlements. Commandos — groups of armed horsemen — would be raised (in the early days) in reprisal and Xhosa kraals would be attacked and their cattle driven off and seized. There would follow some terrifying ambuscades and hand-to-hand fighting in the bush before exhaustion set in and some sort of peace would be made and the frontier redrawn, inevitably to the Xhosa’s disadvantage.

By 1828 the Cape had become a fully-fledged British colony and the subsequent wars and the subsequent destruction of the Xhosa people take on a different character. Now professional British soldiers marched against black insurgents and the violence and blood-letting remorselessly escalated on both sides.

No summary can do justice to the vividness and detail of Mostert’s patient documentation of this tragic crescendo, nor can one do more than indicate the wealth of character and incident that this turbulent period of history throws up. Certain personalities emerge, on both sides, as key players in the drama. Harry Smith, a coarse, stupid and colourful British soldier determined “to put the kaffir in his place.” Andries Stockenstrom, a wise and humane Dutchman endlessly trying to mediate between settler and Xhosa. The Xhosa chiefs themselves, Maqoma, Ngqika and Hintsa, shrewd and proud. And the missionaries, the soldiers, the farmers and their families all trammelled up in the endless cycle of war and pillage.

In retrospect we can now see that the penultimate frontier war, the eighth, proved to be the most significant. It lasted twenty-eight months, the longest war in South Africa’s history (longer than the Boer War), and was its most bloody and devastating. It cost the British government £2–3 million to prosecute and 16,000 Xhosa died compared to 1,400 on the colonial side. The carnage and turmoil were to have a more bizarre and terrible side-effect on the Xhosa people. As if in response to the virtual disintegration of their way of life a millennial fervour arose en masse amongst a majority of the tribe. A young girl called Nongquwuse claimed to have seen a vision that promised the resurrection of the Xhosa and their eventual triumph. The British would be swept into the sea and new cattle would replace the old herds. The great day was proclaimed as 18 February 1857. Two suns would rise that day as a signal that the new order was about to begin. In preparation the Xhosa began killing their cattle and ceased to sow and reap grain. As an example of mass hypnosis this shocking self-immolation of the Xhosa is virtually unparalleled in human history. With the cattle slaughtered and the grain stores empty the Xhosa gathered on hilltops to watch two suns rise. As the day dawned, bright and completely orthodox, and the solitary sun marked its regular trajectory across the African sky the Xhosa nation knew that its time was over. Appalling famine and fatalities completed the job that one hundred years of frontier warfare had only partially achieved. Forty thousand are believed to have died in the famine and the survivors were dispersed about the colony as menial labourers. The first and most tenacious frontier to the north had been breached. The white tribe was moving on. Now it was the turn of the Zulus and the Matabele.

1992