Episode 114 - The British clamber up the slopes of the Amatolas chasing Xhosa ghosts and the mysterious Mfengu
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Show notes
We’re going to hear about a man called John Ayliff - a man who has gone down in the annals of South African history about as mixed as a box of smarties.
His mission station at Butterworth across the Kei River had been a place of refuge for the Mfengu people - a mysterious group of refugees who had left northern Zululand during the times of Zwide - and over the next twenty years had been buffeted from place to place like the chosen people of Israel, finally arriving in the green rolling hills alongside Butterworth mission where they heard the biblical messages from men in black like Ayliff - and these resonated.
Weren’t they of the same - these people who’d been kicked out of their land by the Zulu pharaoh and then sent from pillar to post, first into the hinterland through what we know as the Free State today, then down the side of the Basutho, finally wedged alongside Hintsa; of the Gcaleka.
The amaXhosa chief gave them protection, thousands eventually settled, the Ngwane people had found their home.
But things were unstable - next door in the Ceded territories, Albany, the former Zuurveld, along the Amatola’s, in the Kei River ravines, the British and the Rharhabe Xhosa were fighting the Sixth frontier war. The Mfengu however were in danger.
It was ugly, in Grahamstown in March 1835. Military reinforcements had arrived, the Xhosa had retreated, the hotheads in the town became noisy, a powerful mixture of hatred, connivance and corruption.
Ah yes, dear friends, that old South African tradition - now fully restored by our latest government. Corruption. It rolls off the tongue like a rolling blackout does it not?
The settlers who had found their voice gathered and looked with decided laser like focus on the recently vacated Xhosa land, particularly the watered slopes of the Amatola Mountains.
Holden Bowker wanted this land - and wrote later that
“It was far superior to other parts .. far too good for such a race of runaways as the …blacks…”
He used a pejorative term here. Even though they were on a war footing, the Grahamstonians decided to light their lamps, shining in the Eastern Cape dark as a sign of their confidence that the amaXhosa had been beaten.
After many weeks of hesitation, Sir Benjamin D’Urban finally decided it was time to move into the Amatolas in force. You’ve heard how Colonel Smith had been bush there already, but it was this much bigger army that the British thought was required to finally subjugate the Xhosa.
He arrived at the Base Camp of Fort Willshire on 28th March 1835, then the lumbering wagons rolled off towards the Amatolas on the 30th - his convoy stretching five miles which was quite mad because the Amatolas were only 20 miles away.
