Roughing It. Ralph Goldswain

      A doodle from one of the note books of Arthur Barker, written from 1823 to 1828. Barker was part of the Wait party but he left it in Algoa Bay, and settled at Waterford on the Kariega River. Source: National Library of South Africa: Cape Town Campus

      Preface

      This is the story of the coming of the 1820 settlers. I have attempted to seek out bits and pieces of narrative in which one can hear the voices of the settlers themselves, and allow them to tell the story.

      This story is contextless: it says nothing about the damage that was done by this colonisation project to the African peoples, its effect on the social and political structures of southern Africa or its impact on post-apartheid South Africa. It is simply the story of the 1820 settlers’ voyage, arrival and first three years in the Eastern Cape. The settlement of some 4 000 Britons on the frontier, and the tragic and violent conflict that took place in that region for more than a century, contributed significantly to the creation of the fault line that has been painful for South Africans for two centuries and that looks as though it will never be repaired. I haven’t addressed that issue in telling this story.

      People who live through an experience do not make history: they simply live from moment to moment, not knowing what the next moment will bring. Like all of us, they just do the best they can. Historians, looking at that experience from a moment sometime in the future, are the ones who make history. I have simply attempted to capture the moments as the settlers lived them. Ordinary people don’t normally think about what their actions are going to look like 200 years later, particularly when the main theme of their lives is the daily struggle for survival. This narrative is about the day-to-day progress of people who were transplanted to an alien place where they soon found that they had, in the words of Henry Hare Dugmore, to ‘take root or die’.

      I make this declaration in an attempt to dispel any notion that this book is nothing more than a history similar to those of George McCall Theal and Sir George Cory, historians who commit themselves to the Victorian heroism ideology that these settler men (and it’s the males they write about) were heroes of the British Empire, pitted against ‘murdering’, ‘thieving’ ‘savages’ over whom they subsequently triumphed and went on to establish a civilised, British culture in southern Africa. For such historians, writing when they did, exporting British culture, with its ‘superior’ language, religion, education and so on is a good thing. How many people died and were displaced and had an alien culture imposed on them in such a ‘noble’ cause is not the point for them.

      This book is not a history; it is a point-of-view story. It is worth noting, too, that it focuses on just the first three years of the settlers’ experience – the voyage, arrival, settling in and the ultimate failure of the project, caused by the floods of October 1823. During these three years, the settlers’ contact with Xhosa people was minimal. There was a large tract of no-man’s-land between the two groups and all contact, in the form of employment, trading, etc., was banned by the colonial authorities on pain of imprisonment. It was only after the devastation of the frontier by three crop failures and a flood that the governor of the Cape Colony, Lord Charles Somerset, relented and relaxed the restrictions. This led to prosperity for both groups for several years as they interacted and traded with each other. The wars that came later, and which are not the subject of this book, the first a decade after the settlers’ arrival, were driven by political conflicts between the Cape government and the various Xhosa politicians. These wars were fought between soldiers and warriors. The settlers and other civilian inhabitants of the Eastern Cape were caught in between, apart from some young settlers who volunteered to fight alongside burgher commandos.

      One of the characteristics of the work of historians writing in the era of Theal and Cory is the absence of a female perspective. For them, human progress was about what males did, and one can understand that because of the attitudes of their time and the way women were positioned in society. Historians now feel obliged to explore the female perspective but have to dig deep to find primary sources for that during the three years’ scope of this book. It is really hard work and it’s not surprising that I was unable to find much on that subject. Apart from the diary written by Sophia Pigot, daughter of a wealthy settler, I was able to find only two letters written by one woman. I was not able to find anything in the British Library, where I did most of my research. That is because texts written by 1820 settler women are scarce, in fact almost non-existent.

      The diary of Sophia Pigot, which is cryptic and shallow in its observations, and mainly a self-portrait of a self-absorbed teenage girl, is about the only available account of that time written by a female. She presents an impressionistic view of the daily life of a settler family, albeit that of an aristocratic family that was coddled and protected by their privilege. But it does contain a few valuable observations about life on board the ship – events involving the ‘lower orders’, which Sophia couldn’t avoid or ignore because of the claustrophobic nature of the setting.

      Women are silent, and virtually invisible, in 1820 settler accounts, other than for some brief patronising, patriarchal references to them in their husbands’ letters, journals and reminiscences. I hope that I will not be charged with ignoring, being blissfully unaware of, or just dismissive of the undoubtedly important role played by females in the 1820 settler project. Their silence is just a phenomenon of their time. History writers 200 years from now, looking back to 2020 will find more South African female fiction writers, poets and commentators than male writers.

      I do offer some glimpses of female settlers, however. There are the women of Wait’s party, who walked to Grahamstown to beg the landdrost, the district chief administrator and magistrate, to help them save their children from starvation. There is the hilarious account of three ladies who had to slaughter a sheep so that they could get meat on the table for their husbands. There are the girls who were sent out to the pastures to herd the cattle. There are the young girls who collected plants and insects, drew them and made notes on them, and there’s the young settler wife who had to contend with a huge snake curled up beside her bed, and ants ‘an inch long’.

      The involvement that the British government had in this African colony, expanding it during the 1820 settler period, had little to do with anything other than its own commercial and strategic interests, and the anti-colonial backlash we are seeing in South Africa in the twenty-first century is understandable. The Dutch East India Company and its first representative in South Africa, Jan van Riebeeck, could not have foreseen the way their establishment of a refreshment station at the Cape was going to go: one never knows how any initiative is going to develop and end up. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen profound tensions among the people of South Africa as a result of European colonisation.

      The language Cory uses about the ‘murdering’ Xhosa people encountered by colonists is quite hard to swallow. How could he not have known that the murders of settlers during raids on cattle were not sanctioned

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