Pringle reached the age of forty on 5 January 1829, a year that was to be in many ways a turning point in his life. His financial plight was still a sore trouble to him. He wrote to Hogg in March 1829 that he had been ‘absolutely overwhelmed with work, all the forenoon with my office and my evenings occupied’ with editorships of both the Oriental Herald and Friendship's Offering, Owen's MSS and ‘scribbling for two other periodicals … This is too much on my hands – but I am scribbling to make all the Siller I can to clear off old scores’. Nevertheless, there was much to please him. Lord Charles Somerset had resigned when Bathurst and Lord Liverpool's other high Tory ministers had left office on Canning's succeeding Liverpool as Prime Minister in 1827. Somerset had escaped punishment and even censure, but had been discredited in the public mind.

He was succeeded by Lieutenant General Sir Richard Bourke, who shared the determination of Dr Philip and his friends to emancipate the Khoikhoi. He was to work closely with Pringle in their attempt to repatriate the ‘last chief of the Hottentots’,David Stuurman, from New South Wales, to which he had been transported as a convict in 1823. Stuurman died in 1830 a year before his release was effected. Bourke's and Pringle's interaction came about from an unusual overlap of Pringle's literary and humanitarian commitments. Bourke had arrived at the Cape as Lieutenant Governor of the Eastern Districts in 1825 and was acting governor in Somerset's absence ‘on leave’ – polite fictions for Bourke's being in place to succeed Somerset.