READING 3
James Gump, “The Imperialism of Cultural Assimilation: Sir George Grey’s
Encounter with the Maori and the Xhosa, 1845-1868,” Journal of World History 9,
no. 1 (Spring 1998), 89–106.
Abstract: A governor in New Zealand (1845–53 and 1861–68) and in South
Africa (1854–61), Sir George Grey was recognized by his contemporaries as
one of the most successful colonial administrators in the British empire.
Grey’s reputation rested in large part on his celebrated “native policy,” which
he characterized as a program of “amalgamation.” This article examines the
implementation of Grey’s amalgamation strategy between 1845 and 1868 and
evaluates its effects. The immediate legacy was the advent of a spirited
resistance, a cultural rejection of colonial domination by the Xhosa and the
Maori. At the same time, Grey’s policies helped pave the way for white
supremacy in South Africa as well as the alienation of millions of acres of
Maori land in New Zealand.
In early 1855, shortly after George Grey took up the governorship of the Cape
colony in South Africa, a letter arrived from London dispatched by Grey’s old
friend George Barrow. “If you succeed with the Natives there in any degree
approaching to what you have done in New Zealand,” Barrow wrote, “what
a glorious triumph it will be after all that has been said of the impossibility of
doing anything with them.”1 By the mid-1850s Grey was widely recognized
as one of the most successful colonial governors in the British empire. As
Barrow’s letter implies, Grey’s reputation rested on his apparent success in
dealing with the Maori during his governorship of the New Zealand colony
in 1845–53. Grey’s celebrated “native policy” in New Zealand emphasized
racial “amalgamation,” the systematic assimilation of the Maori to a Western
cultural ideal, as well as their rapid incorporation into the labor force. Could
a similar policy resolve tensions in South Africa’s volatile eastern Cape, thus
sparing the British government the expense of another frontier war? Might
Grey’s amalgamation scheme overcome, as Sir George Napier put it, the
white settlers’ “determined hostility to the Coloured races” as well as their
“determined prejudice never to admit of the possibility of a Black man
becoming equal to a white”?2 The colonial secretary, the duke of Newcastle,
believed so. When Newcastle offered Grey the Cape governorship in June
1854, he praised Grey’s “energy and steadiness of purpose” in New
Zealand—a career, the duke judged, affording “a just hope and pledge that
the permanent interests of another extensive and increasingly important
Colony will surely advance under your government.”3
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1
With Newcastle’s official vote of confidence, Grey embarked on the Cape
governorship with a list of programmatic imperatives based on his experience
with racial amalgamation in New Zealand. What was the governor’s agenda?
Grey articulated his guiding principles in 1855: “talented and honorable
European gentlemen being brought into daily contact with the [Xhosa] chiefs,
and interesting themselves hourly in their improvement and advancement
will in degrees gain an influence over them which will in the course of time
induce them to adopt our customs and laws in place of their own, which the
system I propose to introduce will gradually undermine and destroy.”4 In other
words, the “advancement” of the Xhosa, as for the Maori, required the
insertion of European settlers as well as the “destruction” of indigenous
cultures. Thus, while advancing the scope of the settler empire, Grey’s
policies held dire consequences for indigenous land rights, economic
independence, and political autonomy. As for cultural transformation —and
irrespective of his lofty pronouncements—Grey would generally fail in his
quest to “colonize the minds”5 of his indigenous subjects. Indeed, the
rejection of forced acculturation manifested itself conspicuously through
widespread millenarian movements in South Africa and New Zealand in the
1850s and 1860s.
The ambiguous legacy of Grey’s governorships in New Zealand (1845–53 and
1861–68) and in South Africa (1854–61) is compounded by a personality prone
to authoritarianism and deceit. As the historian Keith Sinclair put it, Grey’s
“conduct is a never-failing source of astonishment. Such a mixture of greatness
and pettiness, breadth of intellect, and dishonesty, is rarely met with.” During
his two governorships of New Zealand, Sinclair asserts, Grey ruled “with a
despotism… shrouded by the meshes of his guile.”6 Grey’s contemporary
Edward Eyre, lieutenant governor of the province of New Munster, wrote that
Grey operated “with much distortion, some absolute untruths, great rancour,
malicious insinuations, sinister suggestions—all calculated to impress a person
at a great distance unacquainted or only partially acquainted with the facts.”7 In
the words of historian J. G. Peires, Grey “was a great Colonial governor,” one
who “implemented successfully the established objectives of early Victorian
imperialism.” On the other hand, Grey’s “despotic inclinations and paranoid
obsessions… fuelled his extraordinary capacity for crushing and subjugating
indigenous peoples, while loudly and sincerely proclaiming that he was doing
so in their own best interests.”8
In this article I seek not to vilify Sir George Grey, who was one of the most
remarkable colonial governors of the nineteenth century,9 but rather to
identify the contradictory impulses in Victorian imperialism and to evaluate
their effects. If Grey is unique as a colonial governor, it is due to his
discursive virtuosity in finessing these contradictions and in rationalizing
their consequences. Despite Grey’s grandiose claims, however, one finds that
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2
the immediate legacy of his “imperialism of cultural assimilation”10 was the
advent of a spirited resistance, a cultural rejection of colonial domination by
the Xhosa and Maori. At the same time, Grey’s policies helped pave the way
for white supremacy in South Africa as well as the alienation of millions of
acres of Maori land in nineteenth-century New Zealand.
Grey’s views on the rapid assimilation of native peoples evolved from his
background as a Victorian liberal and practicing Christian. Born in 1812, a
week after his father was killed while fighting Napoleon’s forces in the
Peninsular War, Grey was raised by his pietistic mother. Her religious
influence made a lasting impression, as did the tutelage of Reverend Richard
Whately, who inspired the young Grey with liberal views on penal and
educational reform, emigration, suffrage extension, and Catholic
emancipation. Early on, Grey envisioned himself following in the footsteps of
his father, a lieutenant colonel in the British Army. Grey gained admission to
the Royal Military College of Sandhurst in 1826 and following his
commission in 1830 was posted in Ireland for the next six years. Ireland
exposed Grey to an unimaginable poverty, which profoundly affected him.
As a result, he decided to forego a military career for a profession dedicated
to administration and reform. As Grey put it, he wished to experience “the
greatness of the work of attempting to do something for the hopeless poor.”11
Grey imagined the British empire as a destination for Britain’s suffering
masses as well as the global arena for his liberal activism. With the
authorization of the Colonial Office, he set off in 1836 to explore the
uncharted coast of northwestern Australia. After two expeditions, however,
he gave up hope of founding the colony of which he dreamed. Nonetheless,
he recorded his experiences in meticulous detail. Grey’s Journals of Two
Expeditions of Discovery in North-west and Western Australia offers a
compendium of his views on imperialism and the “civilizing mission.” For
example, Grey marveled that “the rapidity of communication from point to
point, had introduced such vast effects in the march of improvement among
distant lands, as only eye-witnesses can believe.” The London merchant,
“with the wizard wand of commerce… touches a lone and trackless forest,
and at his bidding, cities arise, and the hum and dust of trade collect.” How
ironic, Grey thought, that these anonymous Londoners, seated in dark and
dingy countinghouses, could execute schemes that resulted in such striking
transformations. Joining forces with London merchants were those “noble
minds,” no doubt like himself, “who have a perception of the true object of
their calling, who feel a just and laudable pride that they are the employers
and benefactors of mankind… who, within the last fifty years, have either
actually erected or laid the stable foundation of six great empires, offsets of
that strong nation, who, together with her progeny, is overspreading the
earth, not by the sword, but by the gentle arts of peace and beneficence.”12
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3
In Grey’s view, “the gentle arts of peace and beneficence” carried a price for
recalcitrant aborigines. Grey believed that the inevitable advance of AngloSaxon civilization would sweep away the “ancient races” and consign their
“antique laws and customs” to oblivion. “Primitive” cultures must yield at
any rate, for in Grey’s view they represented “strong-holds of murder and
superstition,” the antithesis of Christian morality.
To believe that man in a savage state is endowed with freedom either of
thought or action is erroneous in the highest degree. He is in reality subjected
to complex laws, which not only deprive him of free agency of thought, but,
at the same time by allowing no scope whatever for the development of
intellect, benevolence, or any other great moral qualification, they necessarily
bind him down in a hopeless state of barbarism, from which it is impossible
for man to emerge, so long as he is enthralled by these customs; which, on the
other hand, are so ingeniously devised, as to have a direct tendency to
annihilate any effort that is made to overthrow them.13
Supremely confident that his ethnocentric assumptions constituted an
absolute truth, Grey postulated that the separation of indigenous peoples
from white settlers—a view previously supported by Colonial Office
humanitarians—was counter-productive. Segregation, designed to protect
indigenous peoples from the effects of white expansion and to prevent
conflict, accomplished neither goal. Grey felt that separation only
perpetuated suspicion, ignorance, and savagery, thereby exacerbating, not
restraining, frontier warfare. Isolating indigenes from the inevitable advance
of “civilization” only served to decrease their chances of surviving the
nineteenth century. Therefore, from Grey’s perspective the only solution was
radical assimilation, what he called “amalgamation.” By exposing societies
like the Maori and Xhosa as rapidly as practicable to Western justice,
education, health care, and agricultural techniques, by absorbing them into
white employment, and by teaching them Christian morality, colonial rule
could prepare these native peoples to compete as equals with European
settlers and advance accordingly.14
Grey’s assimilationist paradigm, consistent with the views of his compatriots
James Mill, Charles Trevelyan, and Thomas Babington Macaulay, constituted
part of a transnational discourse in the nineteenth century. In France, for
example, assimilation was a feature of republican ideology and ran “through
French colonial theory and practice from the previous days of the Bourbon
monarchy to the future moments of the Fourth Republic.”15 Assimilation, in
both theory and practice, may have reached its peak in the United States. In
the last two decades of the nineteenth century U.S. government agents and
Christian reformers waged an aggressive campaign to “Americanize” the
American Indians. High-minded agents of change, such as the Indian Rights
Association, sought the Indian’s “redemption from heathenism and
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ignorance, his transformation from the condition of a savage nomad to that of
an industrious American citizen.” Herbert Welsh, secretary of the Indian
Rights Association, in 1886 called for legislation that could guide the Indian
“from the night of barbarism into the fair dawn of Christian civilization.”16
Grey’s own views on compulsory assimilation, neither new nor unusual,
impressed his superiors in the Colonial Office, which appointed Grey to the
governorship of South Australia in 1840. Despite his efforts to establish
protectors and set up a handful of schools, Grey was largely unsuccessful in
“amalgamating” the small Aboriginal population. He did succeed, however,
in balancing the budget—a task he later mishandled in South Africa and the
Antipodes—and based on this fiscal success Grey was appointed governor of
New Zealand in 1845. He inherited a colony riven with violent conflict
between settlers and Maori over land claims. Five years earlier Maori chiefs
had signed the Treaty of Waitangi,17 by which Maori believed their land
rights had been secured. At the same time the British government chartered
land companies whose fundamental goal was to take Maori land away.18
Grey finessed this contradiction with grace and guile. For example, he
thought he must “allay the feelings of irritation stated to be rising in the
native mind, and to prepare [the Maori]… cheerfully to receive that form of
Government which it may ultimately be thought necessary to introduce to
secure the future welfare of this country.”19 He assured Maori leaders that
their land rights were secure and sought to mediate land disputes between
Maori and pakeha.20 Shortly after his arrival in New Zealand Grey wrote to the
chiefs of the Ngati Toa and Ngati Awa that “the Queen has directed me to do
all in my power to ensure your safety and happiness. Maoris and Europeans
shall be equally protected and live under equal Laws, both of them are alike
subjects of the Queen and entitled to her favor and care. The Maoris shall be
protected in all their properties and possessions, and no one shall be allowed
to take anything from them or to injure them. Nor will I allow the Maoris to
injure one another—an end must be put to deeds of violence and blood.”21
Grey also nurtured personal friendships among nonhostile Maori leaders,
enhancing his prestige among them by learning the Maori language and
culture. In so doing, Grey believed he could manipulate Maori leadership to
his point of view. As he put it, “I soon perceived that I could neither
successfully govern, nor hope to conciliate, a numerous and turbulent people,
with whose language, manners, customs, religion, and modes of thought I
was quite unacquainted.”22 If persuasion failed, Grey was perfectly prepared
to break the power of uncooperative Maori chiefs. In a confidential
memorandum to Earl Grey in May 1847, Sir George wrote that “the object of
the older chiefs has always been to draw back the mass of the native
population to their old barbarous customs, on which alone the authority of
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5
their chiefs rested. These old customs of the natives are probably the most
murderous and horrible which have ever existed in the world, and I cannot
but dread [the consequences] if any steps are taken which should unite a
large proportion of the native population against us.”23
To preempt a potential “native combination” in New Zealand, Grey arranged
for the capture of the neutral Ngati Toa chief Te Rauparaha in 1846 and
imprisoned him without trial for eighteen months. This humiliating assault—
the captors trapped Te Rauparaha in his own house and subdued the aging
leader by grabbing his testicles— destroyed Te Rauparaha’s mana (prestige).24
When the powerful Ngati Tuwharetoa leader Te Heuheu protested the
unwarranted seizure, the governor invited the chief to Auckland. “I… feel
sure,” Grey wrote, “that when you have heard all the evil of Te Rauparaha’s
conduct, you will see that I have acted rightly, and that your thoughts upon
this matter will be the same as my thoughts when you come to see me.” Grey
assured Te Heuheu that “you shall see for yourself how bad a man Te
Rauparaha has been” and signed the letter “From your father, G. Grey.”25
And what of Grey’s amalgamation schemes during his first governorship in
New Zealand? With rather meager financial resources, the governor
subsidized mission schools, established hospitals, and appointed resident
magistrates, supported by Maori assessors, to introduce British law in Maori
districts. Despite the extremely limited impact of these initiatives, Grey
boasted of their crowning success. On the eve of his departure for the Cape
colony, Grey wrote the secretary of state for the colonies that “both races
already form one harmonious community, connected together by commercial
and agricultural pursuits, professing the same faith, resorting to the same
Courts of Justice, joining in the same public sports, standing mutually and
indifferently to each other in the relation of landlord and tenant, and thus
insensibly forming one people.”26
Grey’s manufactured triumph in New Zealand convinced the Colonial Office
that he could rescue the unstable Cape colony, his next assignment. In fact,
Grey’s aggressive efforts to impose British hegemony in New Zealand
contributed to a growing unease among Maori chiefs “that they were losing
control of their own destinies, and [were] being subordinated to the political
and economic power of the settlers.”27 For example, in various places on the
east and west coasts of North Island, fighting had already broken out among
the Maori between the tuku whenua (the landsellers) and the pupuri whenua
(land-holders).28 By the early 1850s some Maori chiefs had begun to worry
that “amalgamation” constituted less a genuine biracial sharing of power
than a one-way capitulation to European domination.
When Grey arrived in South Africa in 1854, he found few sympathetic Xhosa
chiefs and nothing like the Treaty of Waitangi. Therefore, in the words of
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6
Peires, Grey “applied his ‘civilization’ policy with a rigour untempered by
sympathetic restraint.”29 According to his biographer James Rutherford,
Grey’s policy in South Africa “was to undermine the power of the chiefs,
break up the larger tribes into smaller more manageable units, overawe them
by a show of military force, remove large numbers of natives out of the
province altogether, concentrate the rest in village settlements under
European officers, and convey large areas of the best land to Europeans.
[Grey] announced in 1857 that the [Xhosa] must either be absorbed by the
Europeans or succumb to them.”30
Furthermore, Grey’s assimilation policies in South Africa came in the wake of
a series of catastrophes in the eastern Cape. In 1850 the War of Mlanjeni
(1850–53) erupted among the Ngqika31 Xhosa, whose ancestral lands had been
annexed to the British empire as British Kaffraria in 1847. During the war, the
imperial scorched-earth policy devastated the region, driving many Xhosa
men and women into migrant labor. Confiscated lands fell into the hands of
white speculators or were awarded to Mfengu32 collaborators. Expropriation
and proletarianization were followed by an epidemic of lung sickness in
cattle; beginning in 1854, the disease wiped out nearly 100,000 head of Xhosa
cattle. Xhosaland represented a nation “driven to desperation by pressures
that people today can barely imagine.”33
The cattle epidemic, which also undermined the major source of wealth for
Xhosa chiefs, afforded Grey, in his words, “a most favorable opening for
destroying the whole of that portion of the Kafir system of polity, which
renders the progress of the Kafirs in the arts of peace impossible.”34 Grey’s
“assimilation” program for Xhosaland, which included the establishment of
schools and a hospital, and public works employment, rested on the
transformation of Xhosa chiefs into salaried employees of the colonial state.
As Grey explained it, “every chief of importance will receive a certain regular
income for which he will be dependent upon the government of the country,
and will therefore have the strongest interest in its maintenance and
success.”35 A corollary to this plan was Grey’s intention to bring thousands of
European settlers into British Kaffraria. White farmers, who could employ
Africans as laborers, might wean the Xhosa from their “idle vagabond
pastoral life” and teach them the “habits of industry.”36 Thus, despite the
rhetoric of assimilation, Grey did not “aim to ‘assimilate’ the ‘natural leaders’
[i.e., chiefs] into colonial society as equals, but to break their power as ‘natural
leaders’.” In so doing, Grey hoped to simultaneously convert “the mass of the
Xhosa into a labour force for white colonists on the basis of a newly constructed
and only pseudo-traditional form of government.”37 As Grey boasted, his
plan could “win [the Xhosa] to civilization and Christianity, and thus change
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7
by degrees our present unconquered and apparently irreclaimable foes into friends
who may have common interests with our-selves.”38
In the space of a decade Xhosaland had experienced the dislocations of
subjugation and deprivation, and it now encountered the radical intrusion of
the colonial state. Many Xhosa responded with a millenarian movement
typically described as the “cattle killing.” As the historian Martin Legassick
notes, “unprecedented world-historical developments brought
unprecedented world-historical responses.”39
The cattle-killing prophecy arose from the visions of a fifteen-year-old Xhosa
girl named Nongqawuse. In her vision, Nongqawuse claimed that “the whole
nation will rise from the dead if all the living cattle are slaughtered because
these have been reared with defiled hands, since there are people who have
been practicing witchcraft.”40 After the destruction of all defiled cattle and corn,
she prophesied, harmony, goodness, and material abundance would prevail
forever. Peires argues convincingly that Nongqawuse’s prophecy represented
an amalgam of traditional Xhosa beliefs and the Christian ideas of sacrifice and
resurrection. In the Xhosa cosmology, the notion of personal immortality, the
omnipresence of recently departed kinsmen in the lives of the living, was a
central belief. Hence, the prediction that the dead would rise to a regenerated
Earth seemed credible to many Xhosa, especially in light of their dire
circumstances. As a nineteenth-century Xhosa writer put it, “the idea that a
person does not die was an original belief of we black people. When, therefore,
[Nongqawuse] spoke of the rising up, she was [merely] setting a spark to
things that were already known concerning the ancestors.”41
By the 1850s these common Xhosa beliefs adapted some features of Christian
doctrine as well. Since the establishment in 1817 of the first station in
Xhosaland by the London Missionary Society, elements of Christian belief,
especially the idea of the resurrection, had gained wide currency among the
Xhosa.42 Therefore, in an ideological milieu that combined old ideas and new,
despair as well as hope, Nong-qawuse’s argument and predictions bore a
tragic cogency. The majority of the Xhosa complied with her instructions. By
the end of 1857 the Xhosa had destroyed 400,000 head of cattle, and in the
ensuing famine more than 40,000 Xhosa died of starvation.43
The cattle-killing experience divided the Xhosa people into two parties, the
“soft” believers (amathamba) and the “hard” unbelievers (amagogotya). The
majority “soft” faction, which included a vast cross-section of chiefs and
commoners as well as most women, regarded themselves as the loyal
defenders of the traditional Xhosa values of mutual aid and communal
solidarity. According to a nineteenth-century commentator, the Xhosa people
were “hospitable by custom more than by nature. It is considered
disgracefully mean to eat in the presence of any one not provided with food,
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8
without offering them some.. . . Children are taught habits of generosity as far
as food is concerned from their infancy, and little creatures of two or three
years of age may be seen handing their morsel from one to another, so that
each may have a taste.”44 The minority “hard” party, composed principally of
men who benefited from the economic and social opportunities of the
colonial presence, considered the killing senseless.45
Grey interpreted the cattle-killing as a plot among the Xhosa chiefs to
overthrow white rule and regarded the tragedy as an opportunity to launch
some of his major assimilationist goals.46 As Grey informed his commissioner
John Maclean in 1856, “I am very anxious that the crisis which has recently
taken place in Kaffraria should in as far as possible be made a source of
advantage to our interests.”47 In this vein, Grey advanced his system of
government-appointed “headmen”; indentured nearly 30,000 Xhosa laborers
to employers in the Cape colony; and invaded chief Sarhili’s territory in the
trans-Kei, opening the chief ‘s country, as well as British Kaffraria, to white
settlement.48 Simultaneously, he refused assistance to Xhosa unbelievers who
were endangered by vengeful believers and undermined the work of the
humanitarian Kaffir Relief Committee, which, in Legassick’s words, sought to
aid “the victims of a famine of (in modern terms) Somalian dimensions.”49
Thus, despite the wealth of evidence undermining his position, Grey
displayed Panglossian certitude in the beneficence of British expansionism.
As he wrote in early 1857, “unprecedented and disastrous as this whole affair
has been, and unaccountable as the delusion was, under the influence of
which the Kaffirs have been led astray, there can, I think, be little doubt, that
great ultimate good will flow from it.”50 In particular, Grey exulted in an
event that served to further undermine the power of the Xhosa chiefs:
The influence hitherto possessed by the Chiefs continues in the present state of
general destitution rapidly to decline, and I hope that this will so effectually be the
case, that they can never hereafter exercise an influence over their race, which they
have hitherto almost always employed for evil...The power of these Chiefs had
already received a severe blow from their having been compelled to derive their
Revenues from the Government ...and I feel quite satisfied that their late conduct
has irretrievably destroyed that portion of their influence which was still left to
them, and that henceforth we may govern the country ourselves, the Chiefs being
mere dependents upon us.51
The triumphant tone of Grey’s official dispatch in 1857 belies a period of
unhappiness in the governor’s professional as well as private life. Grey’s
propensity for overspending his British Kaffraria account, as well as his
advocacy of the federation of Britain’s South African possessions, earned him
the rebuke of the Colonial Office. Due to his administrative transgressions,
Grey was recalled temporarily to London in 1858. Only a change in
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9
governments, and the restoration of Grey’s supporter the duke of Newcastle
as secretary of state for the colonies, saved Grey’s position in South Africa.
On the voyage back to Cape Town in the flagship Forte, Lady Grey developed
a romantic attachment to Admiral Sir Henry Keppel. The Greys’ marriage
was already rocky by the 1850s. Eliza Grey suspected her husband of being
unfaithful, based perhaps on his penchant for flirting with young ladies. At
any rate, Grey grew hysterical when he learned of his wife’s (likely
unconsummated) liaison with Keppel. He first threatened suicide, then put
Eliza ashore at Rio de Janeiro and sent her back to England. Another thirtysix years passed before the Greys were reconciled.52
Grey’s tenure in the Cape ended in 1861. Meanwhile, an influx of Europeans
into New Zealand in the 1850s boosted land sales to pakeha in the colony.53 In
response, the Waikato tribes formed a pan-tribal anti–land-selling league in
the late 1850s known as the Maori King movement.54 Following the outbreak
of war in 1860 over a land dispute in Taranaki, the Taranaki tribes joined the
King movement as well. The dislocation of war and colonialism gave rise to
the millenarian movement Pai Marire (The good and peaceful), also known as
Hauhauism.55 It originated in 1862 from the teachings of Te Ua Haumene in
southern Taranaki. As a boy, Te Ua had been baptized Horopapera by the
Wesleyan missionary John Whiteley, and as a young man he worked as a
religious adviser and preacher. Te Ua became a supporter of the King
movement in 1860 and remained a faithful subject of the Maori king. In 1862
he claimed to have received the Angel Gabriel. “It was on the fifth day of
September [1862], that the Angel of God appeared to me… The message of
Gabriel was that I should reject the warlike practices. That is to reject the
heavy yoke of the flints of the rifles, that you might be glorified by God, that
you might stand here on the roof of clouds.”56
Te Ua’s prophecy blended elements of Chistianity57 with traditional Maori
belief, and emphasized unity and peace. For example, in Te Ua’s vision, the
end of the world would bring a New Jerusalem for the Maori faithful: a place
free of despair, illness, and pain; a time in which the living would reunite
with the dead; a world liberated of the unrighteous. Since only the righteous
would survive, many of Te Ua’s teachings focused on virtuous behavior. In
this respect, he emphasized New Testament parables as well as the peaceful
arts of Maori culture. According to Maori scholar Lyndsay Head, Te Ua
encouraged “the peaceable song, the peaceable haka (dance), the peaceable
oriori (songs about tribal identity sung to high born sons), [and] the peaceable
tattoo of the face, lip, and chin.”58 Thus conceived, Hauhauism peaked
between 1864 and 1866, embraced by approximately one-fifth of the Maori
population. Te Ua’s relationship with the King movement solidified in 1864,
when the second Maori king Matutaera converted to the Pai Marire faith. Te
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10
Ua rechristened the king “Tawhiao” (Encircle the world) during a ceremony
in late August of that year.59
Much to Te Ua’s dismay, some Hauhau militants made use of the religion to
settle old scores and strengthen their position in local disputes, thus
stereotyping the movement as bloodthirsty fanaticism. Such a view derives
especially from the execution and decapitation of the white missionary Carl
Sylvius Volkner by a Pai Marire follower in 1865.60 As historian Paul Clark
has demonstrated, however, such incidents of violence represent the
exception and not the rule, and were exaggerated by white settlers to justify
the subjugation of all Maori resisters. The “bulk of Pai Marire supporters,”
according to Clark, “were attracted by its promise of peace.”61 Historian
James Belich describes Pai Marire as “a peace-oriented adjustment cult,
though strongly opposed to the alienation of land, and eager to strengthen
Maori identity.”62 Despite the peaceful orientation of the movement, the
activities of Te Ua’s more militant Pai Marire disciples gave rise to new
divisions in Maori society, bolstering the ranks of Maori collaborators.
Meanwhile, Grey had returned to the volatile New Zealand colony as
governor in 1861, determined to win over the Kingites through his “new
institutions” policy.63 Before his arrival Grey had been instructed by the
colonial secretary “to take care that neither your own mission, nor the
cessation of hostilities when it arrives, shall carry with it in the eyes of the
Natives any appearance of weakness or alarm. It would be better to prolong
the war than to end it without producing in the Native mind such a
conviction of our strength as may render peace not temporary and
precarious, but well grounded and lasting.”64
Therefore, Grey prepared for war 65 yet remained confident that he could
capture the Kingites’ hearts and minds through moral suasion. For example, in
a letter written to the Maori king Matutaera in February 1862, Grey pleaded
with the Maori leader to separate himself from the “faulty teaching” he was
receiving. Grey signed his appeal “from your father, the everlasting friend of
the children.”66 The governor’s patronizing letter, written to a Maori leadership
enflamed by nationalistic passions, also represented a thinly disguised threat.
In the words of Rutherford, the governor “was virtually dictating peace at the
point of the sword as he had done in British Kaffraria in 1857, and the odds in
New Zealand were against his being able to avoid hostilities.”67
Grey’s supreme confidence in his rhetorical skills, his authoritarian
temperament, and his religious commitment to racial amalgamation all
blinded him to the tenacity of Maori nationalism as represented in the King
movement. Rebuffed by Kingite chiefs again and again during 1862, Grey
prepared the Colonial Office for a “serious crisis” that was brewing in New
Zealand “which now appears… daily increasing.”68 In early 1863 Grey moved
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11
troops to the turbulent Taranaki region. Then in July, based on the unfounded
pretext that the Kingites were planning a “bloodthirsty” assault on Auckland,
he authorized the invasion of the Waikato. Grey’s specific role in plotting the
Waikato war well in advance of July 1863 remains murky. Yet as Belich
comments, Grey “could certainly have taught Machiavelli a trick or two in
methodology.”69
Although the Waikato phase of the New Zealand Wars had run its course by
late 1864, Maori resistance continued throughout the 1860s. Incensed that the
main body of Kingites still refused to submit to British authority, and
appalled by the apparent spread of Hauhau militancy in 1865 and 1866, Grey
struck some “sordid bargains… with settler premiers in order to retain as
much influence as he could in the now self-governing colony.”70 Such
agreements included the confiscation of more than 1,215,000 hectares of
Maori land,71 as well as the subjugation of Hauhau militants. In a defense of
the confiscation legislation, Grey argued its necessity as “an example to show
that those who rose in arms against their fellow subjects of another race,
suffered such a punishment for doing so as might deter others from
embarking in a similar career. It is therefore [necessary] to deprive such
persons of a considerable portion of their landed properties, and to provide
for the future safety of the Colony, by occupying such lands with an
European population.”72
Regarding Pai Marire, Grey officially condemned the movement and declared
his intention to suppress it. With Grey’s sincere approval, Major-General W.
C. T. Chute waged a Shermanesque campaign in southern Taranaki in early
1866, shooting prisoners, burning and looting villages, and destroying crops.
On 15 February 1866 Grey entertained Chute at a banquet in Wellington
“unrivalled by anything of the kind ever before given in New Zealand.”
Guests included the settler ministry, heads of departments, officers of the
imperial and colonial forces, and principal citizens of Wellington. Following a
toast to the general, Grey hushed the assembly and proclaimed: “Gentlemen,
I say that we should acknowledge not only that General Chute has restored
peace and tranquility to a previously most dangerous district, but that he has
given us an example which must be of the greatest possible use to ourselves,
and those who are to follow us. (Cheers)” Grey’s speech was followed by the
band’s spirited rendition of “See the Conquering Hero Comes.”73
In early 1867 Grey expressed confidence that the Maori population was “now
in a better state than I have ever previously known it,” and that “the
European population… can again safely traverse the interior of the country
[and] spread into all parts of it, developing the great resources of valuable
districts which are now but little known.”74 Contrary to Grey’s account,
however, demoralization affected a significant number of Maori hapu (clans)
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in the late 1860s, and major centers of Maori resistance bisected the North
Island. The King Country, for example, “nearly two-thirds the size of
Belgium,”75 remained virtually autonomous until the mid-1880s. The Colonial
Office tolerated Grey’s preposterous assertions, even his land thefts and
unprovoked invasions,76 but could no longer accept his unwarranted
expenditures and continual disobedience. Grey received his dismissal notice
in August 1867 and was replaced as governor of New Zealand early the next
year.77
The Colonial Office may have grown weary of Grey’s administrative style,
yet it remained committed to his amalgamation strategy in principle. And
herein lies the rub. For Grey as well as for colonial officialdom in general,
“amalgamation,” despite what the term implied, never meant a genuine
sharing of power or an authentic merging of cultures. Instead, compulsory
assimilation required indigenous societies, such as the Maori and Xhosa, to
capitulate wholeheartedly to white domination. Unwilling to accept such
inequitable terms, many resisted. Hence, in both New Zealand and South
Africa Grey’s governorship witnessed the opening of spacious tracts of land
to white settlers at the expense of indigenous cultivators. As Grey explained
it, “when once the serious and terrible evils which spring from such an
attempt [to flout British law] are made manifest, I think it becomes the duty of
the European population, and of the well-disposed amongst the Native
population, to take every precaution within their power which they can take
without acting unjustly or unmercifully, not only to repress and terminate
such an attempt, but to prevent such an attempt from being ever again
made.”78 Thus Grey could rationalize these revolutionary transformations in
New Zealand and South Africa as the just and merciful price of progress. In
reality what happened was another phase of empire building, notable for its
tragic outcome as well as its display of cultural resilience.
1.
2.
3.
Barrow to Grey, 20 February 1855, Sir George Grey (Auckland)
Collection, MSB 223, South African Library, Cape Town, South Africa
(hereafter cited as Grey [Auckland] Collection).
Napier to Grey, 16 August 1854, Grey (Auckland) Collection.
Newcastle to Grey (private), 12 June 1854, cited in James Rutherford, Sir
George Grey, K.C.B., 1812–1898: A Study in Colonial Government (London:
Cassell, 1961), p. 291. 4 Grey to Maclean, 17 September 1855, GH 30/4
Letters Dispatched by High Commissioner, Cape Archives, Cape Town,
South Africa (hereafter cited as CA). Emphasis mine. 5 Clifton C. Crais,
White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 200.
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13
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
Keith Sinclair, The Origins of the Maori Wars (Wellington: New Zealand
University Press, 1957), p. 33.
Letter to J. R. Godley, 22 August 1852, cited in A. H. McLintock, Crown
Colony Government in New Zealand (Wellington: Government Printer,
1958), p. 404.
J. B. Peires, The Dead Will Rise Again: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa
Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856–7 (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1989), pp. 46–47.
Grey was a keen botanist and assiduous collector of rare books and
manuscripts. He established libraries in Cape Town and Auckland, and
presented each with extensive personal collections. He wrote books on
Australian Aboriginal vocabularies and Maori language history and
culture. Among his works are Ko nga machinga a nga tupuna Maori (The
deeds of the Maori ancestors) (London, 1854); Ko nga moteatea, me nga
hakirara o nga Maori (The songs, chants and poetry of the Maori)
(Wellington, 1853); Ko nga waiata Maorii (The songs of the Maori) (Cape
Town, 1857); and Ko nga whakapepeha me nga whakaahuareka a nga tipuna o
Aotea-roa (Proverbial and popular sayings of the ancestors of the New
Zealand race) (Cape Town, 1857).
D. M. Schrueder, “The Cultural Factor in Victorian Imperialism: A Case
Study of the British Civilising Mission,” Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History 4 (May 1976): 290.
Cited in Rutherford, George Grey, p. 5. See also A Dictionary of New Zealand
Biography, vol. 1, ed. G. H. Scholefield (Wellington: Department of
Internal Affairs, 1940), p. 323; Mark Francis, Governors and Settlers: Images
of Authority in the British Colonies, 1820–60 (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp.
221–22; and Peires, Dead Will Rise, p. 47.
George Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-west and
Western Australia during the Years 1837, 38, and 39, vol. 2 (London: T. and
W. Boone, 1841), pp. 200– 201.
Ibid. pp. 201, 217–18.
Rutherford, George Grey, pp. 204–206; Peires, Dead Will Rise, pp. 45–52.
Raymond F. Betts, The False Dawn: European Imperialism in the Nineteenth
Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975), p. 169.
Cited in Americanizing the American Indian: Writings by the “Friends of the
Indian” 1880–1900, ed. Francis Paul Prucha (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1973), pp. 43, 99. For an excellent interpretive study of
the assimilation campaign in the United States, see Frederick E. Hoxie, A
Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920(Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1984).
Several months before proclaiming sovereignty over New Zealand, the
British government signed the Treaty of Waitangi with an assembly of
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14
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
Maori chiefs at the Bay of Islands on 6 February 1840. Interpretation of
the treaty remains problematic. In the Maori version of the treaty text, the
chiefs agreed to cede their “governorship” in return for the undisturbed
“chieftainship” of their lands, villages, and property. With regard to their
lands, the chiefs apparently yielded to the British crown the exclusive
right of preemption. The treaty also promised the Maori the rights and
privileges of British subjects. The New Zealand government constituted
the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975, which since its inception has offered Maori
a forum for airing grievances against the crown for alleged violations of
the treaty. See Claudia Orange, “The Covenant of Kohimarama,” New
Zealand Journal of History 14 (April 1980): 61–82; and Orange, The Treaty of
Waitangi (Wellington: Allen and Unwin, 1987); I. H. Kawharu, ed.,
Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha Perspectives on the Treaty of Waitangi (Auckland:
Oxford University Press, 1989).
J. B. Peires, “The Late Great Plot: The Official Delusion concerning the
Xhosa Cattle Killings 1856–57,” History of Africa 12 (1985): 262.
George Grey to Earl Grey, 26 October 1847, British Parliamentary Papers,
Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1968 (hereafter cited as BPP),
vol. 63, 1847–48.
A Maori term for a New Zealander of European descent.
Grey to chiefs of the Ngati Toa and Ngati Awa, 19 January 1846,
Governor’s Letter-book 1846–47, MA 7/1 (Maori Affairs), New Zealand
National Archives, Wellington.
Sir George Grey, Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the
Maori as Told by Their Priests and Chiefs, ed. W. W. Bird (London, 1855;
reprint, Christchurch: Whit-combe and Tombs, 1961), preface.
McLintock, Crown Colony Government, p. 393.
James Belich, “The Governors and the Maori,” in The Oxford Illustrated
History of New Zealand, ed. Keith Sinclair (Auckland: Oxford University
Press, 1990), p. 84.
Grey to Te Heuheu, November 1846, Governor’s Letterbook 1846–47, MA
7/1, New Zealand National Archives, Wellington.
Rutherford, George Grey, p. 226.
Ward, Show of Justice, p. 98.
Sinclair, Origins, p. 72.
Peires, Dead Will Rise, p. 55.
Rutherford, George Grey, p. 329.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Xhosa people formed three
major divisions: the Gcaleka, who inhabited the region east of the Kei
river; the Ngqika between the Fish and the Kei; and the Ndlambe west of
the Fish River.
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32. Conventionally the Mfengu are identified as refugees from the Mfecane
wars who often collaborated with imperial and colonial troops in the
subjugation of the Xhosa. An alternative perspective argues that many
“Mfengu” were in fact Xhosa who entered the Cape Colony in the 1830s
in search of employment. See Alan Webster, “An Examination of the
‘Fingu Emancipation’ of 1835,” paper presented to the Centre for African
Studies, University of Cape Town, 2 May 1990.
33. Peires, Dead Will Rise, p. x.
34. Grey to Molesworth, 10 December 1855, GH 23/26, CA.
35. Ibid.
36. Grey to Russell, 3 December 1855, GH 23/26, CA.
37. Martin Legassick, “The State, Racism and the Rise of Capitalism in the
Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony,” South African Historical Journal 28
(1993): 360–61.
38. Grey to Colonial Secretary, 22 December 1854, GH 23/26, CA (emphasis
mine).
39. Ibid., p. 362.
40. J. B. Peires, “The Central Beliefs of the Xhosa Cattle-Killing,” Journal of
African History 28 (1987): 43.
41. William Philip to Isigidimi samaXosa, 2 July 1888, cited in ibid., p. 52.
42. Peires, “Central Beliefs,” p. 57. Peires argues that despite the widespread
familiarity with such beliefs, the missionaries had gained few formal
Christian converts among the Xhosa by this time.
43. Ibid., passim. The population of British Kaffraria declined from 105,000 at
the beginning of 1857 to 26,000 by the end of 1858. The Xhosa also lost
more than 600,000 acres of land during this same period. Ibid., p. 319. For
a thoughtful critique of Peires from the point of view of a historical
materialist, see Jack Lewis, “Materialism and Idealism in the
Historiography of the Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement 1856–7,” South
African Historical Review 27 (1991): 244–68.
44. Cited in J. B. Peires, “ ‘Soft’ Believers and ‘Hard’ Unbelievers in the Xhosa
Cattle-Killing,” Journal of South African History 27 (1986): 455.
45. Ibid., pp. 443–61.
46. Grey to Maclean, 6 December 1857, GH 30/4, CA. See Peires, “Late Great
Plot,” pp. 253–79.
47. Grey to Maclean, 28 August 1856, GH 30/4, CA.
48. The British government assisted the settlement of more than 6,000
German soldiers and their families on confiscated lands in British
Kaffraria between 1856 and 1859. See Crais, White Supremacy and Black
Resistance, p. 197.
49. Legassick, “The State, Racism and the Rise of Capitalism,” pp. 363–64.
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50. Grey to Labouchere, 12 March 1857, GH 23/27, CA.
51. Grey to Labouchere, 25 May 1857, cited in Anthonie Eduard de Toit, “The
Cape Frontier: A Study of Native Policy with Special Reference to the
Years 1847–1866” (D.Phil. thesis, University of Pretoria, 1949), p. 185.
52. Constance Gail Weldon, “The Interaction between the Missionaries of the
Cape Eastern Frontier and the Colonial Authorities in the Era of Sir
George Grey, 1854–1861” (M.A. thesis, University of NatalPietermaritzburg, 1984), pp. 184–85.
53. By the late 1850s the European population of New Zealand
(approximately 60,000) roughly equaled the Maori population for the first
time since colonization had begun. Between 1840 and 1901, the Maori
population was in a state of both relative and absolute decline. Using
approximate figures, the Maori population declined from 80,000 in 1840
to 45,000 by 1901. Given this dynamic, by the late nineteenth century
many commentators referred to the Maori as a “dying race.” One finds a
similar rhetoric at this time concerning the American Indian. For a
discussion of Maori population trends, see Ian Pool, Te Iwi Maori: A New
Zealand Population Past, Present and Projected (Auckland: Auckland
University Press, 1991).
54. On the Maori King Movement, see M. P. K. Sorrenson, “The Maori King
Movement, 1858–1885,” in Studies of a Small Democracy: Essays in Honour of
Willis Airey, ed. Robert Chapman and Keith Sinclair (Auckland:
Blackwood and Janet Paul, 1963), pp. 33–55.
55. The terminology derives from the Pai Marire belief that repetition of the
word Hau elicited divine protection. The classic discussion on Pai Marire
doctrine is Robin W. Winks, “The Doctrine of Hau-Hauism,” Journal of the
Polynesian Society 62 (September 1953): 199– 236.
56. Paul Clark, “Hauhau”: The Pai Marire Search for Maori Identity (Auckland:
University of Auckland Press, 1975), pp. 5–11.
57. By the eve of the Anglo-Maori Wars, the majority of Maori had converted
to Christianity, but most had adapted it to their traditional beliefs. In
addition, many of the prophetic movements, including Hauhauism,
identified especially with the Jews of the Old Testament. As James Belich
describes the situation, “the Maori did convert to Christianity, but they
also converted it. This was not what Pakeha evangelists, old or new, had
in mind” (“Governors and the Maori,” p. 78).
58. Cited in Buddy Mikaere, Te Maiharoa and the Promised Land (Auckland:
Heinemann, 1988), p. 58.
59. Ibid., p. 59.
60. Clark, “Hauhau,” chap. 2.
61. Ibid., p. 100.
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62. James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial
Conflict (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1986; reprint, Auckland:
Penguin Books, 1988), p. 205. 63 Also known as the “Runanga system,”
the “new institutions” scheme offered Maori villages a limited form of
self-government.
64. Newcastle’s memorandum to Grey: Grey to Newcastle, 24 November
1862, BPP, vol. 38.
65. Upon his return to New Zealand in 1861, Grey obtained approval for the
construction of a military road from Auckland to Waikato.
66. Cited in Alan D. Ward, “The Origins of the Anglo-Maori Wars: A
Reconsideration,” New Zealand Journal of History 1 (October 1967): 153–54.
67. Rutherford, George Grey, p. 481.
68. Grey to Newcastle, 10 October 1862, BPP, vol. 38.
69. Belich, New Zealand Wars, p. 120.
70. Ward, “Origins of the Anglo-Maori Wars,” p. 156.
71. Later nearly half of this land was paid for or returned.
72. Grey to Aborigines Protection Society, 7 April 1864, in Appendices to the
Journals of the House of Representatives (hereafter cited as AJHR), 1864, E-2,
17.
73. Major-General Chute, A Campaign on the West Coast of New Zealand
(Wanganui: Times Office, 1866), pp. 31–32.
74. Quoted in Rutherford, George Grey, p. 554.
75. Belich, New Zealand Wars, p. 306.
76. Peires, Dead Will Rise, p. 324.
77. See Rutherford, George Grey, chap. 35.
78. Grey to Edward Cardwell, 2 February 1866, AJHR, A-1, 66.
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