The Eight Zulu Kings – From Shaka to Goodwill Zwelithini by John Laband

Author:John Laband
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
Published: 2018-07-26T08:29:22+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE WHITES HAVE COME TO FIGHT WITH ME

In January 1877 Sir Theophilus Shepstone, the newly appointed British Special Commissioner in the Transvaal and previously the Secretary for Native Affairs in Natal, entered the ZAR with a small escort of 25 Natal Mounted Police. He carried in his valise secret instructions entrusted to him by the Earl of Carnarvon, the Secretary of State for Colonies, to annex the republic to the Crown.

Shepstone’s démarche had its roots in the anxieties of Tory imperial strategists. They regarded the intensifying jostling among the rival European powers to acquire new territories abroad as a perilous moment for Britain, urgently requiring them to consolidate and defend the Empire. To their way of thinking, India, rather than Africa, was central to British commercial interests and its status as an imperial power. Nevertheless, India’s security depended on the Royal Navy’s control of the African sea routes through the Suez Canal and around the Cape. It was essential, therefore, to secure South Africa as a strategic link, and Carnarvon argued that this could best be achieved through knitting together a politically stable British confederation of the subcontinent’s white settler states.1 Thanks to the discovery of diamonds in 1867 in the northern Cape and the enormous wealth being generated at the Kimberley diggings, the whole region was being sufficiently transformed economically to support the edifice of the envisaged confederation.

Nevertheless, serious obstacles would have to be overcome. The Cape, Natal and Griqualand West were already British colonies,2 but British rule would have to be extended over the Boer republics of the interior. Of the two, it would be more difficult to incorporate the isolationist ZAR than the Orange Free State, with its close social and economic ties to the Cape.3 A further challenge was posed by the endemic wars with African neighbours along the frontiers of the Cape and the Boer republics. These conflicts threatened to destabilise the whole region and to be an ongoing drain on British and settler military resources. The Tory administration was attempting to economise on the costs of empire, and the last thing it wanted was to be compelled to maintain large garrisons of British troops in South Africa to prop up the new confederation. So it was clear to Carnarvon that it was imperative that he also break the military power of the remaining independent African kingdoms, disarm them, and impose some form of British supremacy over them to keep the peace.

The Boer-Pedi War of 1876–1877 gave Carnarvon the lever he was seeking. When he learned that the Pedi of the Maroteng paramountcy, ruled by Sekhukhune woaSekwati and bordering the eastern ZAR, had inflicted a decided reverse on the inept forces of the anarchic and bankrupt republic, he seized on the Boer military debacle as an excuse to annex the ZAR preparatory to dealing conclusively with the recalcitrant Pedi.

Shepstone, his chosen instrument to bring about this political coup, did not disappoint. The ZAR, overwhelmed by the burden of its national debt, was paralysed by divisions between political factions.

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