Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- List of sources
- Terminology
- Preface
- Introduction
- PART ONE The incorporation of the Khoesan into the colonial body politic
- PART TWO Colonial crisis and the establishment of a new order, 1848–1853
- PART THREE Post-rebellion politics
- Chapter 17 Contesting reconstruction
- Chapter 18 On the politics of the church
- Chapter 19 On the rights of burghers
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 19 - On the rights of burghers
from PART THREE - Post-rebellion politics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2018
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- List of sources
- Terminology
- Preface
- Introduction
- PART ONE The incorporation of the Khoesan into the colonial body politic
- PART TWO Colonial crisis and the establishment of a new order, 1848–1853
- PART THREE Post-rebellion politics
- Chapter 17 Contesting reconstruction
- Chapter 18 On the politics of the church
- Chapter 19 On the rights of burghers
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Document 98: On the privileges of Kat River burghers in war
By 1879, when the last of the frontier wars in the Eastern Cape broke out, a new political order was beginning to emerge. There was an increasingly large Xhosa Christian elite developing, for whom the politics of warfare began to seem outmoded and certainly unproductive. The call, made at the end of the war by Isaac Wauchope, to ‘Lay down the spear,/ Come out of the Hoho and Mnyube forests./ Fight with the Pen’ was more generally answered. A new form of modern politics was developing, in which parliamentary politics and the forerunners of the nationalist parties were seen as the way forward. Nevertheless, in the Kat River, the old reflexes were still in play. The following petition reviews the loyalist history of the Kat River Settlement, and returns to their previous grievances, all the way back to the meeting on the Vagrancy Bill fortyfive years earlier. At that meeting, Andries Hatha had sat behind the table recording the speeches that were made. Now in 1879 he once again chaired the meeting.
That your humble Petitioners are landed proprietors, of the Hottentot, Bastard, and other mixed races of the Colony, as above described, and they would beg to place before your Honourable House the fact that, since the establishment of the Kat River, otherwise called the Stockenstrom, Settlement in 1829, they were always designated, or according to European usage, belonged to that class who are supposed to enjoy certain privileges in boroughs, and who, besides other rights, have the privilege of returning one or more members to serve in Parliament.
II. Under this designation they were called out in Kafir patrols, Kafir wars, expeditions, or campaigns, under their own commandants and field-cornets, subject to European generals or superior officers, and did eminent service, especially in the wars of 1835, 1846, and 1851 (and in the late Kafir war, as a militia, furnishing altogether over four hundred men, and now again in the Morosi war two hundred men, consisting of levies and volunteers, for the campaign against that rebel chief), under various commanders or general officers, as their Excellencies the late Sir B. D'Urban, Sir P. Maitland, Sir H. Somerset, Sir A. Stockenström, and many others, as the archives of the Colony may show.
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- Information
- These Oppressions Won't CeaseAn Anthology of the Political Thought of the Cape Khoesan, 1777–1879, pp. 188 - 192Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2017