Episode 245 - Sir Bartle Frere’s Excellent Adventure: A Gentleman’s Guide to Igniting Wars

Sir Bartle Frere had sailed into South Africa in March 1877 - lauded as a great British administrator in India. He arrived just in time to witness Sir Theophilus Shepstone seize, sorry, annex the Transvaal under the noses of the incredulous and in equal amounts, contemptuous Boers.

Frere was another of Carnarvon’s boys, determined to enforce confederation onto south Africa. He was regarded as one of the most effective English civil servants in India, keeping the vital province of Sind quiet during the recent Indian Mutiny, and as Governor of Bombay, now Mumbai, he had been instrumental in upgrading the vast city’s infrastructure.

He was by accounts, a man of integrity and quiet, diffident even as Frank Walsh puts it. The British Royal Family were friends, he was a member of the Privy Council and was showered with honours. India was compared to South Africa, it was diverse, more populous yes, but in India he dealt with sophisticated Indian Rulers and merchants. Carnarvon regarded Sir Bartle Frere as the ideal man to settle the quarrelsome and individualistic South African communities.

But he was Indian in his experience, and not African. By contrast to the sophisticated Indian Rulers, South Africans were and are uncomplicated and pugnacious. All its people were the same then as we are now. Whatever our backgrounds, we remain pugnacious Africans, English, Afrikaners, Blacks, Coloureds, Indians and tick whatever box suits you on form XYZ.

It would take only a few years trying to govern the ungovernable before he disintegrated in delusion, self-deception, irrationality and apparent senility. Frere had barely settled into his governor’s armchair to read Shepstone’s report into the latest challenges in the Transvaal — when the Ninth Frontier War burst into flame in the Eastern Cape.The amaMfengu had taken rapidly to the opportunities afforded by being part of the Cape Colony, and were also taking to urban trade in a revolutionary way. The Gcaleka resented the success of the amaMfengu, as well as their relationship with settlers. The Gcaleka were suffering the effects of the last war, the longest Frontier War and also the most vicious. Across the Kei, alcoholism was spreading, and poverty seeped through every household — made far worse by the actions of Nongqawuse’s cattle killing episode.

What pushed everyone over the edge was mother nature, a series of devastating droughts across the Transkei destabilised the situation further. As Historian De Kiewiet says, in South Africa the heat of drought easily becomes the fever of war.
What was supposed to be a wedding celebration in September 1877 turned into a bar fight when the tensions emerged after Gcaleka harassed the amMfengu in attendance. Things got a lot worse later that day when some Gcaleka men attacked a Cape Colony police outpost manned by amaMfengu in the main.

Just a bit of trival violence said local officials, moving along, let the local police handle the matter. But back in Cape Town, Sir Bartle Frere sensed his moment partly because of his belief that Great Britain was spreading civilisation and eradicating barbarians, extending black rule over blacks, you know old chap, guiding them up the ladder of evolution and improving their standards of living through good administration and economic prosperity.
Chief Mgolombane Sarhili kaHintsa of the amaGcaleka royal line was summoned by Frere but he had seen his ancestors summoned only to be thrown onto Robin Island. He ignored the summons so Sir Bartle promptly declared war on the amaXhosa. This was totally against the advice of the locals. All that Frere’s warning did is prompt the warriors among his people to gather and mobilise. Cape Prime Minister, John Molteno refused to sanction any invasion of the Transkei when he heard that Frere had declared war on Sarhili. At a meeting between Molteno and Frere, the British Governor promised that imperial troops would stay put and not cross into Gcalekaland.