Violence, Moral Imperialism and Colonial Borderlands,
1770s–1820s: Some contradictions of humanitarianism
Elizabeth Elbourne
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Volume 17, Number 1, Spring
2016, (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2016.0003
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/613282
Accessed 18 Jun 2017 03:18 GMT
Violence, Moral Imperialism and Colonial Borderlands,
1770s–1820s: Some contradictions of humanitarianism
Elizabeth Elbourne
McGill University
Abstract
This article argues that the genealogy of a politics of non-violence might usefully
consider the promotion of moral imperialism as a precursor that in turn highlights the
structural difficulties of a truly non-violent humanitarianism. In the imperial case
studies examined from colonial borderlands in the British empire from the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, humanitarian intervention tended to be
about working out how to manage violence, or the threat of violence, most
appropriately. This in turn helps explain tight linkages between early nineteenth
century philanthropy and colonialism, not least the transition from abolition to
interventionist arguments. On colonial frontiers states were themselves violent, or at
least always potentially violent.
Therefore those who saw themselves as
philanthropists or as humanitarian were often forced, sometimes reluctantly but more
usually with conviction, into the position that empire should be made sufficiently
moral to deserve a monopoly of violence. For Indigenous groups (and individuals)
this often meant that they ultimately had to choose sides and thus a particular form of
violence, rather than to escape from violence altogether.
At the same time,
international humanitarians, notably missionaries and abolitionists, often struggled
with how overtly they should work within colonial structures and were often under
pressure to serve as unofficial colonial bureaucracies. It is thus helpful to trouble
somewhat the implicit paradigm of triangular relationships between individual agents
of violence, individual victims of violence, and humanitarians who sought to protect
the victims in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, even though there are
important ways in which this was also true. Such “moral imperialism” not
infrequently placed pressure on colonized men, in particular, to choose one form of
violence over another, rather than to have the luxury of eschewing violence that was
more readily available to the white humanitarian.
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
A number of scholars have argued that there arose in late eighteenth-century Western
Europe a new concern for the bodies of suffering strangers.
According to this
narrative, Enlightenment sensibility was characterized by empathy for the bodily pain
of others, and by the conviction that empathy was a mark of cultivation and
refinement. Sensibility was lent weight by the conviction that it might be possible to
alleviate such pain, even if occurring at a distance.1 In the meantime, transnational
evangelical Christianity urgently presented the related claims of the souls of strangers.
Such ideas were also, more pragmatically, undergirded by an explosion of print
culture that made images of the suffering of distant others available to an empathetic
domestic humanitarian audience, and played a key role in movements to abolish the
slave trade and slavery (achieved in 1807 and in 1833 respectively), and in the
promotion of the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel as well as of a
wider evangelical Protestant missionary movement that took root from the 1790s
onwards.2
For Michael Barnett, who has recently written a magisterial overview of the
history of international humanitarianism, the late eighteenth century, and particularly
the campaign to abolish first the slave trade and then slavery itself, marked a
“humanitarian big bang.” 3 Although this narrative might be contested, British
historians do generally use the word “humanitarian” to describe the efforts to help
distant others that took on particular force at this period. Among such “humanitarian”
attempts was an early “Aborigines protection movement,” including the creation of a
parliamentary committee on the treatment of Indigenous peoples in the British settler
empire by abolitionist leader Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, reporting in 1836 and in
1837, as well as the foundation of the Aborigines Protection Society in 1837. Indeed,
this movement played a key role in creating and promoting the very idea of
“Aborigines” as a transnational category. Missionaries also expressed concern over
Indigenous welfare, although there was great variation in the stances that individuals
and societies were willing to take. Quakers organized committees of sufferings and
sent missions of inquiry, such as the tour of Australian colonies by James Backhouse
and George Washington Walker.
Running through all such activity was deep
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
commitment to the ending of the physical abuse of Indigenous peoples. Nonetheless,
as Claire McLisky has perceptively argued in a critique of Australian historian Henry
Reynolds, the use of the term “humanitarian” to describe both current and past
practice can create a false sense of continuity.4 This is perhaps particularly true with
respect to the humanitarian ideal (at least rhetorically) of transcending national and
party political division and protecting bodies from violence. This essay argues that
early missionaries and advocates for Indigenous “rights” (in a particular guise) and for
the protection of Indigenous peoples often genuinely sought to espouse non-violence,
in line with these broader trends, but often became trapped instead in promoting
choices between forms of violence, of a greater and less ordered sort.
It was in fact very difficult to be a humanitarian in what we might think of as a
modern guise, promoting non-violence and espousing detachment from the state
(typified by the Geneva Convention and the 1863 formation of the Red Cross, or by
the ideals of Amnesty International today) in the violent borderlands of the late
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British Empire. The continuity of the term
“humanitarian” in fact hides considerable differences between the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries and the present.
The idea of a constitutively
nongovernmental actor was in important ways alien to early modern empires—and
imperial officials often saw sectarian religious groups such as Quakers that espoused
this distinction as dangerously disruptive. Maverick missionaries might similarly be
seen as dangerous, even as colonial governments struggled to convert independent
missionaries into reliable partners. The entanglement of religion, imperial governance
and “humanitarianism” was particularly starkly apparent on the contested borderlands
of the British settler empire.
Here Indigenous and settler claims to land and
sovereignty overlapped, violence was widely used to resolve disputes, and colonial
states struggled to ensure that they had monopolies of violence. Indigenous people
were often pushed to choose between forms of violence. Converts, allies and those
who sought “protection” helped satisfy the insatiable appetite of the colonial state for
soldiers and “native police,” for example, while at times of war, entire communities
were often expected to mobilize on the imperial side. This was, however, a form of
participation in violence that was often invisible to white philanthropists, who
naturalized such activity as loyalty and saw it as intrinsically virtuous.5
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
Missionaries, some imperial officials and British people we might loosely (if
controversially) term Indigenous rights activists tended to promote “moral
imperialism” and the extension of protection to Indigenous peoples in exchange for
the implicit promise of loyalty and military alliance. It was this dominant paradigm
that influenced early ideas of Aboriginal “rights,” with problematic implications for
the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty that continue to the present.6 At the same
time, in borderlands or areas of unclear authority such as the lands between Iroquoia
and colonial New York in the 1770s or contested lands across the Orange River
beyond the Cape Colony in southern Africa in the early nineteenth century—
“anomolous legal zones” as Lauren Benton has termed them—it was fairly common
for Indigenous peoples to try to form new polities, sometimes using Christianity as a
means to create group cohesion, to communicate with the imperial state, to carve out
new areas of sovereignty in the face of external threats, including settler colonialism,
or indeed to reduce violence.7 This did not, however, necessarily mean acceptance of
imperial terms.
It is not surprising, perhaps, that as frontier zones closed and
borderlands were overtaken by powerful states, misunderstandings and tensions
emerged between humanitarians and Indigenous groups and individuals over what
Indigenous sovereignty meant and what the military obligations of Indigenous peoples
were to imperial and settler states.
In recent work, Alan Lester and Fae Dussart suggest that most historians of
humanitarianism see the “penetration of humanitarian ideals and rhetoric into
governance” as a recent phenomenon, and that this is incorrect.8 Instead, Lester and
Dussart convincingly argue, there is in fact a long history of “humanitarian
governance” as an integral part of the British colonial project. They trace its history
back to at least the early nineteenth century, and demonstrate that efforts at
humanitarian governance flourished in white settler colonies side by side with the
dispossession of Indigenous peoples and violence against them. I agree with Lester
and Dussart’s broad argument. I would, however, also frame it in the opposite
direction: governance has long been an integral part of “humanitarianism” and it has
been a significant innovation to attempt to separate them.
In the remainder of this essay I examine examples of the blurred lines between
imperialism and humanitarianism and the processes that often entrapped people in
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
violence despite ideals of non-violence. These examples also trace a transnational
narrative though time. I begin with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in
North America before and during the American Revolution: the SPG was in theory an
independent missionary society but as a product of the established church it had close
links to imperial administrators and to the military in particular. I move to consider
Saxe Bannister, an interstitial figure between government and the voluntary sector in
Australia. The remainder of the paper looks in more detail at pressures on one
London Missionary Society Indigenous missionary, Jan Hendricks, in southern Africa
in the early 1820s. In all cases, Indigenous men were often forced to choose between
types of violence.
I.
It is telling that at least some metropolitan philanthropists in the 1820s and 30s, such
as Saxe Bannister, a tireless critic of colonial policies towards Indigenous peoples,
looked back to partnerships between Amerindians and British during the American
Revolution and the War of 1812 as models of possibility.9 This fit into an Anglican
narrative about British virtue in the aftermath of the revolution, as well as reflecting
post-revolution anxiety about the morality and feasibility of British rule that a number
of scholars have recently explored. 10
The American example also, however,
demonstrates the importance of military alliances to such politics of partnership—as
well as, of course, the limits to rhetoric in practice, even if this paper does not have
space to discuss the multiple betrayals of British Indian policy. The example of New
York illustrates the close interconnection of religion and violence.
In the northeastern regions of colonial North America in the late eighteenth
century, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) was closely aligned with
the imperial state—far more than would be the case with later Protestant missionary
societies.11 This reflected the close relationship between Anglicanism and the British
state, but also what Rowan Strong has termed the emergence of a public theology of
empire, articulated by the Anglican Church over the eighteenth century.12 Rival
missionary activities promoted by settlers, however few and far between, on the eve
of the Revolution tended actively to seek to work against Anglican influence with
Amerindians. During the war, Presbyterians and dissenters would seek to foment
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
alliances between settlers and Indigenous groups against the British state and to
minimize Anglican influence. In the meantime, missionaries and military officials
alike had the French example firmly in mind: New France was seen as having created
and consolidated effective military alliances through the mechanism of religion,
particularly Jesuit missions.13
Internal critics of the laxity of SPG efforts, such as William Johnson,
“Superintendent of Indians” in northeastern North America from 1756 to 1774,
complained bitterly (problematically assuming Amerindian plasticity) that the British
neglected such possibilities.14 Johnson was in essence a military officer, whose most
important responsibility from a British perspective was to mobilize Amerindian allies
at times of war. He also eagerly promoted Anglicanism, and tried to spur the SPG to
greater efforts. Shortly after becoming a member of the SPG, Johnson attempted to
combine his interests in land, religion and military alliance by offering to donate to
the Church twenty thousand acres to enable the creation of a North American
episcopate on formerly Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) land, “out of a grant for which I am
now soliciting his Majesty.”15 Johnson (ironically originally from an Irish Catholic
family whose male members converted to Anglicanism to work for the empire) fused
Anglicanism and astute land dealings to maintain his own regional hegemony, while
also building close ties with the Kanienkehaka through patronage, as well as through
his partnership with Mary Brant, with whom he had eight children.16 He eventually
arranged to fund a chapel on Haudenosaunee land: tellingly, the church doubled as a
fort.
From an Amerindian perspective, “conversion” to Christianity in the early
modern period was arguably understood in part in terms of alliance relationships and
the enforcement of obligation on alliance partners, including military obligation, and
thus both rejected and courted on that basis, and managed very cautiously, just as
Amerindians similarly attempted to seal alliances by involving Christians in their own
ritual practices.17 This is neatly encapsulated in the example of wampum belts, often
used to seal diplomatic exchanges, being sent to the SPG in London by Kanienkehaka
elders petitioning for a missionary in 1770. 18 Christianity also coexisted and
interacted with powerful nativist movements that repudiated Christian practice, sought
to revitalize Indigenous society and spirituality and often mobilized spiritual
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
techniques to military ends, notably in Pontiac’s war in the immediate aftermath of
the British conquest of New France.19
Spiritual belief and practice were thus closely enlaced with warfare and
political alliance.
Once civil war began in the region that is today New York,
Christian groups competed to mobilize converts, even if many converts themselves
tried to remain neutral. Presbyterian missionary to the Oneida and Tuscarora (two of
the nations of the Six Nations confederacy) Samuel Kirkland attempted to persuade
these communities to side with the Americans during the Revolution, for example,
while the Anglican minister John Stuart, SPG missionary to the Kanienkehaka, was
closely allied to the Johnson family, who were rapidly targeted by Patriot rebels.20
The Revolution in rural New York saw many human rights abuses, to use an
anachronistic language, and blew apart such fragile social links between Whites and
Amerindians as existed in the Mohawk Valley. Indeed, it is important that the
language of “human rights” was anachronistic, and more particularly that the notion
of civilian “rights” in wartime would not be enshrined in international law until the
twentieth century. On all sides, civilians, both White and Indigenous, were redefined
as combatants and thus as legitimate targets. Warfare often destroyed relationships
between those who knew one another. Both Patriot (or pro-American) and Loyalist
troops burnt villages to the ground and killed men, and sometimes women and
children. When American troops destroyed Onaqdaga, a Six Nations settlement and a
loyalist military base, they bayoneted children they found hiding in the long corn as
they burned the fields.21 At Cherry Valley, also a village with a fort, the Seneca came
looking for revenge: a combined White–Six Nations force, including in a more
peripheral (and disputed) role Mohawk warriors under the leadership of Joseph Brant,
killed thirty-two civilians, including women and children. 22 The Cherry Valley
killings became in turn justification for the scorched-earth Sullivan expedition of
1779, which sought to drive the Haundenosaunee from New York.
This is not to say that this was an all-out war of atrocities. Both sides were in
fact conscious of their international reputation, and struggled at various times to be
seen to act within the parameters of gentlemanly warfare. Nonetheless, violence
trumped humanitarianism, and the central logic of warfare in borderlands regions of
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
New York was that of guerilla warfare involving civilians. In this sense, it was a
typical colonial war, conducive to massacre at one extreme, and more routinely to the
burning of food and houses in struggles to drive particular ethnic groups from their
lands.
Religion and violence were in sum so intertwined, if one defines violence in a
broad sense, that most religious groups advocated allegiance to one side or the other
rather than nonviolence, while imperial policy makers factored religion into their
calculations. This sheds light on how difficult it was to advocate actual nonviolence,
as Quakers frequently discovered. Philadelphia Quakers were persecuted for trying to
advocate nonviolence and thus non-support for the revolution, for example, going to
the extent of refusing to use the paper currency that funded the war effort. Two
Quaker men were ultimately hanged for treason, and many others were detained.23
The principled advocacy of neutrality was even harder for Amerindians, who were
attacked on both sides and faced very severe consequences for making the wrong
choices, or even just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The most notorious
example may be the Gnadenhutten massacre of 1782 when an American militia killed
all members of a settlement of Lenape Amerindians at the Moravian missionary
village of Gnadenhutten in modern-day Ohio who believed that they had a treaty of
alliance with the Americans but whom the Americans suspected of alliance with the
British.
At the same time, the British military’s use of Amerindian allies became a
flash point for criticism in Britain. Parliamentary critics claimed that it was abusive
to turn supposedly savage and cruel Amerindian warriors against white settlers.24
Here perhaps, one might argue, was a notion of rights, framed, however, in terms of
the right of an enemy combatant not to be exposed to certain “weapons” and methods
of war, rather than in terms of the right of an Amerindian ally to refuse engagement.
For a while, the Indian Department was out of favor.
Daniel Claus, the
superintendent of Canadian Indians and son-in-law of the late William Johnson, was
fired and a new cadre of officers, led by Guy Carleton, were sent over who were not
committed to Amerindian alliances; fairly quickly, however, driven by military
necessity, the British reverted to military alliances with Amerindians.
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
At the same time, Anglican leaders presented the church as promoting peace
and as itself the victim of Patriot violence. According to Anglican cleric Charles
Inglis, later the first Bishop of Nova Scotia, who sent a bulletin from the front in New
York City back to the home society in October 1776, the church had everywhere
sought to promote a “spirit of loyalty.” Nonetheless, the Patriots refused to allow
neutrality. “The Clergy were everywhere threatened; often reviled with the most
opprobrious Language; sometimes treated with brutal Violence.”25 Inglis’ long letter
concluded with a description of the burning of New York by rebels (or so Inglis
thought), acting on a “diabolical purpose of destroying the City.” Inglis’ overall
perspective was that the church sought to protect its adherents, including converts,
from violence, but had been overwhelmed by rebel misbehavior.
II.
This general line of argument would be taken up by Anglicans in other contexts,
moving forward into the nineteenth century. In Upper Canada, as Alan Taylor has
argued, a generation of clergymen and administrators looked back fearfully to the
American Revolution. 26 They also, however, sought to explain and justify the
political motives of their Amerindian allies, defending British honor before American
critiques.
As a result, political conservatives (some slaveholders) penned robust
defenses of Amerindian land claims and attacks on settler violence that might have
seemed unlikely in other contexts.
For example, in the early nineteenth century the Reverend John Strachan, who
also opposed slavery, attacked injustice against Amerindians, despite being a
conservative cleric and member of Upper Canada’s so-called family compact.
Strachan argued in 1811 in a memoir of Mohawk leader Joseph Brant that the British
had always treated Amerindian peoples with humanity and deference to their customs,
in contrast to the Americans: “The policy of that government, instead of civilizing, is
to exterminate the natives; and it has not hesitated, on many occasions, to massacre
whole villages.”27 Amerindians fought for the British because they had been pushed
into it by American aggression, “driven from their villages by the insurgents—their
houses burnt, their crops destroyed, their apple trees cut down, and the aged and
infirm, who could not escape, murdered or burnt. This foolish policy forced the
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
natives to join the king, and to make incursions into the settled parts of the country, in
order to live.”28
Such attacks, both on the American treatment of Amerindians and on
slaveholding, became a way for some British paternalists to criticize American
democracy and, in a broader sense, question the legitimacy of the revolution.
Moreover, much of the emotional energy of this critique came from the fact that
Amerindians had fought side by side with British soldiers and with settler loyalists.
North American events, and in particular the loyalist trauma of the American
Revolution followed by the French, helped create some elite willingness not only to
repudiate what they saw as the violence of working-class white men, but also (briefly)
to ally with Indigenous elites.29 The assumption nonetheless was that well-treated
Indigenous peoples would become both Christian and loyalist allies.
Saxe Bannister extrapolated from what he understood of Amerindian alliances
to argue for the possibility of partnerships with Indigenous peoples rather than
violence. Bannister was in fact peripherally involved in the 1821–22 visit of John
Brant, the son of a key British Mohawk ally to London, in a land claims dispute.
Bannister subsequently proposed a (never realized) Commission of Inquiry in Upper
Canada “intended to produce information adapted to improve intercourse with the
aborigines of North America in union or alliance with us.” 30 He brought such
assumptions about the possibility and fertility of alliance politics to New South Wales,
where he was the first Attorney General in 1824. As Bannister later put it, he wanted
to make the Aboriginal peoples of Australia “useful allies, and very rapidly good
fellow citizens, instead of converting, as we are likely to do, in the first place, a
million of friendly beings into deadly enemies and then into wretched outcasts.”31
This proved difficult. The repertoire of violence on frontier farms confronted
with land wars included the use of exemplary terror against Indigenous insurgents,
including the killing of women and children. Bannister twice used arguments from
alliance to contend that frontier warfare (in the first instance at Bathurst and in the
second Hunter Valley) should be resolved through the declaration of martial law
rather than through allowing shepherds and farmers to kill Indigenous people
themselves.
In the case of Hunter Valley, Bannister claimed that the people
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
concerned had been living with the settlers, and “to a considerable extent mixed with
them; so that war could not be declared as between nations.” He pointed out that one
of the men involved had previously been working as a “sort of Constable,” and he
urged that Aboriginal men might in the future be employed as policemen.32 This was
in sum a claim that Indigenous peoples were subjects within the ambit of British law,
rather than foreigners with whom the state was at war. As Lisa Ford has pointed out
this debate was a key moment in the evolution of British claims to legal sovereignty
over Indigenous peoples.33 Julie Evans similarly argues that martial law opened a
“legal” space of violence.34 And it was cast in the language of humanitarianism, at
least for Bannister and at least in his initial conception.
The true extent of the violence at Bathurst in particular has been a subject of
heated dispute in Australia; David Roberts argues, for example that it is impossible to
know whether a local oral tradition that there was a large-scale massacre of
Aboriginal people who were forced off a cliff at gunpoint applies to this period and is
literally true, or expresses rather a general memory of massacre.35 Much of this
debate has assumed that the violence took place after the declaration of martial law
and was indeed occasioned by it. At the time, both Bannister and Brisbane claimed
that martial law had limited the violence; Roberts terms this a cover-up but it is
possible Bannister at least believed this. It is possible that martial law was less
determinative than historians have assumed, if exemplary killings were routine. Be
that as it may, the example fits the general paradigm for which I am arguing: that
humanitarians responded to what might be seen as out-of-control violence by arguing
for the imperial state to have a more managed monopoly of violence.36 It also
reinforces a related argument: that such arguments ignored the determinative role of
the imperial state in itself generating violence. And finally, it is important that some
men from New South Wales fought on the colonial side in the so-called “Black War”
in Tasmania, which in turn was also supported at key moments by the declaration of
marital law.
Well into the nineteenth century, British missionaries, Indigenous rights
activists and colonial officials alike all tended to blur the lines between being
protected and being obliged to provide military service.
Christianity was also
presented as a means to both peace and alliance. This arguably involved a different
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
type of “rights” talk, eventually to be carried forward by the APS, which argued for
the right of Indigenous peoples to be protected against oppression, on the assumption
that those left free to develop as they chose would in fact choose Christianity. In
other words, one might see at work a view of positive liberty, in Isaiah Berlin’s terms:
the freedom to realize a collective identity or to become one’s “true” self.37 The
inaugural 1839 issue of Extracts from the papers and proceedings of the Aborigines
Protection Society claimed, for example, that the society advocated for the cause of
“the free Aborigines of remote countries, whom experience proves, when justly and
kindly treated, to be capable of receiving the benefits of civilization and Christianity,
while they urgently require protection in their increasing conflicts against
oppression.”38
This view of an Aboriginal right as the right to protection (by an implied third
party) from oppression found further expression in the movement to create protectors
of Indigenous peoples in the Australias in the 1830s and 40s. Indeed, the notion of
protection had a long history.
The “protection” of slaves was espoused by the
Spanish and taken up by the British in the eighteenth century; it was a core element of
the focus of British abolitionists on amelioration in the early nineteenth century.39
Protectors of slaves were introduced during the amelioration period of slavery in the
West Indies, in Mauritius and at the Cape in the early nineteenth century.40 The
Aborigines Protection Society, founded in Britain in 1837, enshrined the notion of
protection in its very name. “Protection” did not, however, involve protection from
warfare.
III.
The final section of this paper moves from this more abstract discussion to look at
some of the difficulties confronted by people defined in these British debates as
“Aboriginal” in the actual context of colonial frontier zones, through a brief case
study of a single man, Jan Hendricks, Griqua politician and London Missionary
Society evangelist in a turbulent borderland beyond the Cape Colony, on the mission
station of Kuruman between 1818 and 1821. My interest here is in the distance
between theory and practice, the involvement of missionaries themselves in violent
structures, and the difficulties this posed for Indigenous men trying to work with
missionaries and British humanitarians. This is necessarily only a brief snapshot, but
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
I want to use a more textured local example to suggest that there was considerable
distance between the more abstract arguments of British interlocutors and the
complexities of violence in colonial contexts.
Like the Kanienkehaka, the Griqua would be presented to an Anglophone
“humanitarian” public sphere as agents of Christianity and civilization, and their
settlements as key elements of stability in the turbulent regions just beyond the Cape
Colony, as John Philip, southern African superintendent of the London Missionary
Society, would argue in his important 1828 political tract, Researches in South
Africa.41 Southern African borderlands are no easier to describe succinctly (or even
fully understand) than those of North America or Australia. Complicated conflicts are
hard to reconstruct; certainly the nature, extent and roots of a lengthy period of
disruption in modern-day KwaZulu-Natal have occasioned significant debate. There
was a wide zone of very serious conflict and resource scarcity beyond the Cape
Colony in the early nineteenth century with its epicenter in the northeast. Violence
was exacerbated by British and Portuguese colonialism, by regional trade in arms and
slaves, and by drought and hunger as well as by the aggressive expansion of African
kingdoms, notably the Zulu, leading to large-scale refugee movements and formation
of new polities.42 On the fringes of this conflict zone, in the region of Transorangia,
the Griqua, who included many people with mixed Khoekhoe and White ancestry
who had fled the oppressions of the Cape Colony, used the colonial technologies of
guns and horses aggressively to carve out new territories for themselves, in the
neighborhood of seTswana speakers.
The LMS attempted to Christianize these
groups and had a measure of success by the 1810s. This was part of a wider drive to
Christianization among people of Khoekhoe descent who in turn became key agents
of Christian missionary activity in southern Africa. Christian Griqua settlements,
notably Griquatown, were proclaimed by the LMS as a means to bring peace and
civilization to the region, despite extensive internecine disputes among the Griqua.
Meanwhile, the colonial state tried (disastrously) to bring them under control,
including experimenting with conscripting Griqua men into the colonial militia. The
closer one looks the greater the strain appears. Meanwhile, the San (hunter gatherers
without cattle) were victims of genocidal attacks by Afrikaners and also by other
African groups, and themselves raided extensively for cattle.
A covert trade in
children existed in this conflict zone.43
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
In 1814, the London Missionary Society under the direction of then-acting
head and leading critic of colonial violence James Read, “set apart” several “native
missionaries.” Hendricks was designated for the nascent mission to the Tswana,
eventually to become the Kuruman mission, near Griqua territory. The role of “native
teachers” was recognized in missionary materials of the time, even though they would
subsequently be fairly firmly written out of LMS internal accounts, including by the
self-aggrandizing missionary Robert Moffat.44
Hendricks was not, however, an insubstantial figure. He had earlier been
elected as one of four deacons of the Griqua Town church. He was also elected as
one of nine men to sit on the “Court of Justice.”45 He was thus a solid citizen of
Griqua Town and a beneficiary of the positions that the LMS was able to bestow.
Several native agents subsequently became important Griqua leaders. In additional to
spiritual benefits, to be employed as a missionary also lent access to weapons, trade
goods and horses, through trade connections with the LMS and with the colony.
Hendricks was remembered as an effective preacher. Visiting LMS director,
John Campbell was sufficiently impressed on hearing Hendricks preach to record the
content of his address on Zacchaeus:
He remarked that when Christ called him to come down from the tree,
he must have come down with such haste as to make all the leaves to
shake—that when we increased in high thoughts of ourselves, instead
of resembling a person coming down a tree to Christ, we were
climbing up a tree, away from Christ. That repentance was not within
a man’s cloaths, it was within the man himself.46
Hendricks did not keep a diary himself. However, his white colleague Robert
Hamilton did keep a journal when Hamilton, Hendricks and other “native agents”
were running the mission station Kuruman at a time of accelerating conflict.
Difficulties with this English-language source by an outsider need to be
acknowledged, but the reader nonetheless catches glimpses of Hendricks struggling to
be a neutral and nonviolent humanitarian agent in a violent borderland. His non-white
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
status made it much harder than it would be for white missionaries to refuse to
participate in violence.
The ba Thlaping Tswana leader Mothibi tolerated the LMS mission, and
enjoyed the links that it gave him with the regionally powerful Griqua, but was often
criticized by other Tswana leaders and by some of his own people for this alliance
with “the Dutch” (reflecting the group’s lingua franca). Predatory bands roved the
countryside, rain was scarce and hunger reigned. The mission would probably have
been unsustainable without the arms and horses of the Khoekhoe men and the
protection of the neighboring armed camp of Griqua Town. Native agents were called
upon to act as both Christian evangelists and, occasionally, gunmen. In southern
Africa, as in New South Wales, horses and guns were key to power. In New South
Wales, settlers had a monopoly of guns and horses and Indigenous death rates were
astronomically higher than White; in southern African by the early nineteenth century,
guns and horses were crucial to White power but were no longer a monopoly; Griqua
access to arms skewed power dynamics in Transorangia, and the quest for arms was
an urgent preoccupation of other African groups.
By 1818, the popular founding missionary James Read had been recalled to
Cape Town, to face discipline for having fathered an illegitimate child with the
daughter of one of his own deacons in the Cape mission station of Bethelsdorp.47 A
persistent shadow fell over the mission in the shape of violence and theft. San
warriors raided for cattle, an extremely serious crime at a time of widespread hunger;
the Kuruman Tswana launched commandoes (or armed retaliatory groups seeking to
regain cattle and kill raiders) against the San in revenge. Afrikaner settlers had also
been waging their own genocidal warfare against the San for many years, and the
commando was well established as a key technique of frequently eliminationist settler
warfare against San groups.48 On the raids documented in LMS papers in the late
1810s, Tswana warriors appear to have killed as many people as possible, including
women and children, presumably using guns some of which had been obtained
through missionary networks. Hamilton’s papers suggest that the Khoekhoe men on
the station were expected by Tswana leaders to go on commando as well, unlike white
missionaries.
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
On August 5, 1819, Jan Hendricks realized that some of his cattle had been
stolen by San raiders, and one killed. He gave pursuit but had to return without
finding the San or the cattle.49 The following day, “the Boshesmen that live near to
Mateebe came & informed him that they knew where the cattle were and who had
taken them.” Mothibi ordered out a commando against the San. When they reached
the San dwelling place they found it to be a “dreadfull deep Cave,” surrounded by
bushes.
Hendricks tried to shoot over their heads.
In the meantime, however,
“Andries Stuffels [sic] one of our people fired his musket into the trees and made a
splinter from a tree wound one of them on the head, they then went further into the
cave.” Hendricks tried to play a mediating role, according to Hamilton’s account. He
called out the women and children with a promise of safety. Immediately, however,
the Tswana on commando wanted to kill them all. The deterioration of events and the
incapacity of Hendricks to control the others are evident in what happened next:
One [San] man sprang out and escaped, John called out the others with
the intention of bringing them home, two came out and sat by John,
one who was wounded sat by John, one who was wounded removed
thither, Tyso the Betchauna (Tswana) Captain wished to kill one of
them. John refused and said that the Cattle were his and that he had a
right to do with the Boshesmen what he pleased. But nothing would
restrain them, they fell upon them and killed them both. John got back
one of his Cattle, two were killed in the Cave but not eaten.50
Despite this lack of relative power, Hendricks was still deeply resented for
hampering the Tswana captains who wanted to kill the women and children and not
obeying orders on commando. They returned “much discontented” and threatened to
move the town. Shortly thereafter, Mothibi called a general meeting, the aim of
which was at least in part to impress upon the Khoekhoe and the white missionary
that the Tswana were in control. At the meeting, the men who been on commando
first paraded through the town in amour, clearly seeking to intimidate the Khoekhoe
and the missionaries. They then returned to Mothibi’s homestead and “went through
the action of war.” Mothibi demanded that first the Tswana and then the “Dutch” sit
down, and then harangued the crowd at great length about his authority.
The
missionaries and their Khoekhoe allies ultimately agreed that the attacks on the San
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
were matters of internal policy. Those Tswana men who had killed went to be
cleansed; “we Dutch people,” he said, however, “were people that prayed and the
wind did blow away all our uncleanness.”51
In the meantime, there was tension over the combined impact of the Griqua and
of Afrikaner settlers in the region. Earlier in 1819, before Hendricks’ involvement in
the controversial commando, Hamilton described the arrival of a massed army of five
“nations,” led by “Sobele Hamareta,” who sought to go, so a messenger told him, “to
the town of Thunder and Lightening—Griqua Town,” where they would “see those
men who ride on Wild Horses, who carry thunder on there [sic] Shoulders, and be
revenged on them for killing their friends.”
On Mothibi’s urging, Hamilton
immediately rode to Griqua Town for a fresh supply of gunpowder, suggesting how
far the missionaries were becoming embroiled in regional politics.
The tensions around the killing of San women and children appear to have been
unresolvable. It is arguable that Hendricks genuinely wanted to spare the San people
against whom he rode on commando. Not killing women and children was probably
also a condition of maintaining the LMS alliance. Hendricks seems to have been
identified with peace by the Tswana captains. He successfully pleaded that on a later
commando raid, the life of a woman covered in scars might be spared. This time the
Tswana agreed. Significantly, they sent the woman to Hendricks to be healed, and he
took care of her in his house. Equally significantly, Hamilton later found out that the
woman had been sent back to her community with a piece of bewitched wood that
was designed to cause harm to all who touched it. In sum, Hendricks was a reluctant
peacemaker who was quite unable to make his will prevail.
The question of commando raids continued to hang over the mission.
In
Hamilton’s journal, accounts of killing are interwoven with accounts of religious
experience and conversion, sometimes in the same paragraph, as the missionaries
continued to chase the elusive conversion narrative. In October 1819, for example, a
Tswana group went after San raiders: when they came in sight of them, the San killed
all the cattle, whereupon the Tswana “killed all the Boschismen men women and
children.” A few days later Anderson informed the Kuruman missionaries that the
San were collecting with Jephoth, a Griqua, to steal Tswana cattle; Hamilton and
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
Read informed Mothibi, who thanked them profusely. Some weeks later, the San
attacked the Tswana at old Latakoo (Dithakong), trying to drive them away, and
killed Tswana women and children.
The Griqua were also involved in brutal warfare with the San. In 1820, after
Campbell and Read had left Griqua Town, “short Adam Kok,” who had been left as
captain at Griqua Town ostentatiously (and unrealistically) sent out two commandoes
with instructions not to kill San cattle raiders but to bring thieves back for public trial
in the Cape Colony. “The first Commando shot two Boshemen [sic] after having
retaken all the cattle, the second Commando murdered 5 men 6 women and 2 children
by beating out thire [sic] brains with stones, after they had given themselves up as
prisoners, five of those men were Church Members who are to be excluded from the
church.”52 It was in this general atmosphere that in December 1819 Hamilton and
Hendricks rode out to claim a piece of land belonging to Mothibi: “In the presence of
John Hendrick and the other people, I took possession of it in the name of the
Missionary Society London for the Boschemen.”53 Hamilton refused to send men out
on commando, to Mothibi’s fury, unless the policy of killing women and children was
dropped (leaving the door open, of course, to the killing of men). Later in 1820, a
deputation from the colony led by Graaf Reinet Landdrost Andies Stockenstrom (and
including “Miss Stockenstrom”) travelled into the interior, to meet with Mothibi’s
Tswana. Stockenstrom encouraged the Tswana to kill only men in raids against the
San. Mothibi replied that children would grow up to steal as well. Stockenstrom
replied, “if they would bring them to him in the Colony he would pay them for it and
they should trouble them no more.” Later, when Mothibi bargained for, among other
things, horses, guns, powder, and lead, Stockenstrom said “that if they would not kill
women and Children of the Boschesemen that he would speak to the governor, about
what they asked, which they at last consented to.”
We are clearly plunged into the midst of the violent world that was part of
devastating, much wider regional disruptions that would only worsen in the 1820s.
Stockenstrom’s offer is of particular interest because of the light it sheds on a possible
slave trade into the Cape Colony, albeit one that might be seen by some participants
as humanitarian. Robert Hamilton occupied a similar moral grey zone. In 1820,
Hamilton recorded that three of the oxen of a travelling LMS party had been stolen in
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
the night by the San. His men traced the oxen and brought in a young boy and an old
man, who tried to escape at dawn: “We judged him and ordered him to be flogged,
which was done and let him go, the boy Mr. Campbell took with him.” It is not clear
what happened to the child. This was designed to be a humanitarian alternative to
summary execution.
Hamilton’s diary for 1820 does close with a refusal of violence. A delegation
came in December to ask Mothibi’s men to participate in a commando against a
nation to the east. Mothibi responded that “they must look to that white house (that
was the church) that since that was built they had given up all Commandoes.” In
discussion on a following day, the captain who had brought the message accused the
baThlaping of being motivated by fear, not God’s word, and not really following
Christianity. Whatever the truth, it is still noteworthy that Mothibi added that “if it
was true what the Dutch people said, that there was a great fire, that those who went
on commandos were in a bad way.”54 In this case, Christianity may have provided a
language that people needed to seek to make peace. The kinds of moral compromises
and small shifts that these two examples suggest seem to me to be more typical of
frontier zones than the kind of large-scale imposition of peace through Christianity
and imperial loyalty that John Philip saw the Griqua state as heralding, or that Saxe
Bannister thought was possible in New South Wales through judicial reform.
IV.
The overall collection of which this essay is part examines the linked genealogies of
humanitarianism (including international humanitarianism) and of the politics of
nonviolence. I have suggested that it is helpful to consider the promotion of peace in
an imperial context as part of that project. Analyzing moral imperialism arguably
highlights the structural difficulties of a truly nonviolent humanitarianism.
On
colonial frontiers and in contested borderlands, states were themselves violent, or at
least always potentially violent, and violence was often seen as a currency of survival.
Self-proclaimed philanthropists, including many missionaries, were often forced,
sometimes reluctantly but more usually with conviction, into the position that empire
should be made sufficiently moral to deserve a monopoly of violence. For Indigenous
groups (and individuals) this often meant, however, that they ultimately had to choose
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
sides and thus a particular form of violence, rather than to escape from violence
altogether.
It might in fact be possible to trace a genealogy of moral imperialism and its
attitudes to violence, distinguishing it from more absolutist approaches such as the
Quaker refusal of violence altogether. Almost necessarily, “moral imperialism” and
“humanitarianism” were closely linked in the British imperial context.
Moral
colonialists in a British context decried settler violence as well as significant abuses
such as slavery and corvée labour. Nonetheless, absolute nonviolence was a difficult
structural possibility along colonial frontiers and in contested borderlands in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Indigenous men, in particular, faced
enormous pressures from multiple directions to carry out various forms of violence,
not only from colonial states but also at times from within their own societies,
including to fight against aggressors. In this light, questions of when and how the
advocacy of nonviolence became structurally feasible on a large scale, and what
institutions undergirded this possibility, are of key importance.
For correspondence: [email protected]. I would like to thank Penny
Edmonds and the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial
History for invaluable feedback, as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada.
Notes
1
For example, Lynn Hunt, The Invention of Human Rights: A history (London: W.W.
Norton, 2008); Thomas Laqueur, “Bodies, Details and the Humanitarian Narrative,”
in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1989), 176–204; Laura Stevens, The Poor Indians: British
missionaries, Native Americans and colonial sensibility (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Rob Skinner and Alan Lester, “Humanitarianism and
Empire: New research agendas,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History
40/5 (Dec. 2012): 732–33.
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
2
On the example of the missionary press: Stevens, Poor Indians; Anna Johnson,
Missionary Writing and Empire 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008).
3
Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A history of humanitarianism (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2011)
4
Claire McLisky, “‘Due Observance of Justice, and the Protection of their Rights’:
Philanthropy, humanitarianism and moral purpose in the Aborigines Protection
Society, circa 1837 and its portrayal in Australian historiography, 1883–2003,”
Limina 11 (2005): 57–66.
5
The equation of loyalty, virtue and military service was surely consolidated in an
eighteenth-century context by Vattelian notions of the virtuous nation as one that
cultivated the natural law virtues of, as Ian Hunter puts it, “agriculture, commerce,
(Protestant) religion, policing and military service.” Ian Hunter, “Vattel in
Revolutionary America: From the rules of war to the rule of law,” in Between
Indigenous and Settler Governance, ed. Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse (New York and
London: Routledge, 2013), 13.
6
Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political life across the borders of settler
states (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014).
7
Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and geography in European empires,
1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 30; Jeremy Adelman
and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, nation states and the
people in between in North American history,” The American Historical Review
104/3 (June 1999): 814–44.
8
Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian
Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the British Empire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1–2.
9
Saxe Bannister, Remarks on the Indians of North America, in a Letter to an
Edinburgh Reviewer (London: Thomas and George Underwood, 1822); Saliha
Belmessous, Assimilation and Empire: Uniformity in French and British colonies,
1541–1954 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Elizabeth Elbourne, “The
Bannisters and Their Colonial World: Family networks and colonialism in the early
nineteenth century,” in Within and Without the Nation: Canadian History as
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
Transnational History, ed. Karen Dubinsky, Adele Perry and Henry Yu (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2015).
10
Nicholas Dirks, Scandal of Empire: India and the creation of imperial Britain
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Matthew Wyman-McCarthy,
“Rethinking Global Empire: The imperial origins and legacies of abolitionism” (PhD
thesis, McGill University, 2015); Christopher Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of
British abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
11
As Troy Bickham argues was the case for all of eighteenth century British North
America: Bickham, Savages within the Empire: Representations of American Indians
in eighteenth-century Britain (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006),
210–11. After 1965, the SPG became the United Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel, and its archives are housed under that name at Rhodes House, Oxford.
12
Rowan Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire, c. 1700–1850 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007)
13
On French theories of sovereignty and alliance, and their relationship to conversion,
Gilles Harvard, “‘Protection’ and ‘Unequal Alliance’: The French conception of
sovereignty over Indians in New France,” in French and Indians: In the Heart of
North America, 1630-1815, ed. Robert Engelbert and Guillaume Teasdale (East
Lansing: Michigan State University Press and Winnipeg: University of Manitoba
Press, 2013), 113–37.
14
He contrasted Anglicans to the French “who sacrificed their Ease, Connections &
the Comforts of Life to reside in the most distant of Ind[ia]n Villages and conform to
the way of living of the Inhabitants without which in fact little could be done.”
Rhodes House, Oxford, United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel archives
[henceforward SPG]: North America, series 2, folio 86, William Johnson to Dr.
Burder, “Johnson Hall,” 8 October 1766.
15
SPG, NA, series 2, folio 88: William Johnson to Burder, “Johnson Hall,”
23December, 1767.
16
The most recent biography of Johnson is Fintan O’Toole, White Savage: William
Johnson and the invention of America (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2005); O’Toole emphasizes Johnson’s Catholic Irish roots.
17
For an example of the latter at a time of crisis among the Wendat, Kathryn Magee
Labelle, “‘Faire la chaudière’: The Wendat Feast of Souls, 1636,” in French and
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
Indians: In the Heart of North America, 1630-1815, ed. Robert Engelbert and
Guillaume Teasdale (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press and Winnipeg:
University of Manitoba Press, 2013), 1–20.
18
SPG, NA, Series B: Charles Inglis to SPG, 1770
19
Gregory Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian struggle for
unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1992); Gregory Dowd, War
Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations and the British Empire (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Press, 2002).
20
Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, settlers and the northern borderland of
the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).
21
Colin Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian country, 124–25, citing
Samuel Preston, “Journey to Harmony,” in Samuel Preston, ed. Patricia Christian,
100–101.
22
Copy of M. Richey to [?], 24 November, 1778, transcribed by Lyman Draper in
Draper papers, Series F, vol. 5, pp. 30(1) - 30(4). Draper added: “also in Continental
Journal Dec 31, 1778.”
23
Jack D. Marietta, The Reformation of American Quakerism, 1748–1783
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984); Sheila Jones, “The Other Side
of the Revolution: A look at the treatment of Philadelphia Quakers during the
revolutionary war,” Proceedings of the Ohio Academy of History (2004): 31–48.
24
Bickham, Savages within the Empire.
25
SPG, NA, ser 2: Charles Inglis to SPG, New York, 31 October 1776.
26
Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American citizens, British subjects, Irish
rebels and Indian allies (New York: Random House, 2010).
27
James Strachan [ghosted by John Strachan], A Visit to the Province of Upper
Canada in 1819 (Aberdeen: D. Chalmers & Co), 147–48.
28
Strachan, “Life of Captain Brant,” in Strachan, Visit to Upper Canada, 157.
29
An example is the relationship between Six Nations elites and the Duke of
Northumberland., e.g. Alnwick Castle: Percy family papers, MS DNP 63, Joseph
Brant to Duke of Northumberland, Grand River, 24 Jan 1806, f. 5–6 (British Library
microfilm 313). Here Brant refers to his “brother soldiers” in Britain, before whom
he wishes to clear his character in the wake of attacks from other members of the Six
Nations.
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
30
“Copy of a letter from Mr. Saxe Bannister to Mr. Horton,” Lincoln’s Inn [London],
21 August 1823 in Correspondence of Wilmot Horton, Derbyshire County Record
Office, D3155, WH2744.
31
Saxe Bannister, Statements and Documents relating to Proceedings in New South
Wales, In 1824, 1825, and 1826, Intended to support an appeal to the king by the
Attorney General of the Colony (Cape Town: Printed by W. Bridekirk, Heeregracht,
1827), 121.
32
Saxe Bannister, Statements and documents relating to proceedings in New South
Wales, 57
33
Ford, Settler Sovereignty, 173–74.
34
Julie Evans, “Where Lawlessness is Law: The settler-colonial frontier as a legal
space of violence,” Australian Feminist Law Journal, Australian Feminist Law
Foundation, 30/1: (2009): 1–22.
35
David Andrew Roberts, “The Bells Falls Massacre and Oral Tradition,” in Frontier
Conflict: The Australian Experience, ed. Bain Attwood and Stephen Foster (Canberra:
National Museum of Australia, 2003), 150–58; Roberts, “Bells Falls Massacre and
Bathurst’s History of Violence.”
36
On this key point, see also Evans, “Where Lawlessness is Law.”
37
Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1969).
38
Extracts from the Papers and Proceedings of the Aborigines Protection Society, no.
1, May 1839 (London: William Ball, Arnold and Co, 1839), 3
39
Caroline Quarrier Spence, “Ameliorating Empire: Slavery and protection in the
British colonies, 1783–1865” (PhD thesis, Harvard University, 2014).
40
John Edwin Mason, Social Death and Resurrection: Slavery and emancipation in
South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003); Lester and Dussart,
Colonization.
41
John Philip, Researches in South Africa, 2 vols, (London: James Duncan, 1828),
especially vol. 2, pp. 55–77, 226–43. See also David Johnson, Imagining the Cape
Colony: History, literature and the South African nation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2011), 158–78.
42
Carolyn Hamilton (ed.), The Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive debates in
Southern African history (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995);
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
Julian Cobbing. "The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo",
Journal of African History 29/3 (1988): 487–519; Norman Etherington, Great Treks:
The transformation of Southern Africa, 1815–1854 (London: Longman-Pearson,
2001).
43
Elizabeth Eldredge and Fred Morton, eds., Slavery in South Africa: Captive labour
on the Dutch frontier (Boulder: Westview Press and Pietermaritzburg: University of
Natal Press, 1994); Robert Ross, Adam Kok’s Griquas: A Study in the development of
stratification in South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Martin
Legassick, The Politics of a South African Frontier: The Griqua, the Sotho-Tswana
and the missionaries, 1780–1840 (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2010).
44
Robert Moffat, Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa (1842), 235 and
240.
45
School of Oriental and African Studies, Council for World Mission Archives,
London Missionary Society, South Africa [henceforward annotated as CWM-SA],
Incoming Correspondence: William Anderson to George Burder, Griqua Town, 14
January 1814.
46
South African Library, Cape Town: transcript of the diary of John Campbell, vol. 3,
p. 121, 15 July 1819.
47
CWM-SA 7/2/C: “Minutes of Missionary Deputies,” August 1817.
48
Mohamed Adhikari, Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The extermination of
the Cape San peoples (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011); Nigel Penn, The
Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape’s northern frontier in the
eighteenth century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005).
49
CWM-SA, LMS Journals Box 3, file 68: Journal of Robert Hamilton, 5 August
1818
50
CWM-SA, LMS Journals Box 3, file 68: Journal of Robert Hamilton, 10 August
1818
51
CWM-SA, LMS Journals Box 3, file 68: Journal of Robert Hamilton, 5 August
1818
52
CWM-SA, LMS Journals Box 3, file 68: Journal of Robert Hamilton, 30 April 1820.
53
CWM-SA, LMS Journals Box 3, file 68: Journal of Robert Hamilton, 26 December
1819.
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press
54
CWM-SA, LMS Journals Box 3, file 68: 1820 Journal of Robert Hamilton, 8 and
11 December 1820.
© 2016 Elizabeth Elbourne and The Johns Hopkins University Press