Imperial Networks

Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain

Alan Lester

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415198509
• eBook ISBN: 9781134640041
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Imperial Networks investigates the discourses and practices of British colonialism. It reveals how British colonialism in the Eastern Cape region was informed by, and itself informed, imperial ideas and activities elsewhere, both in Britain and in other colonies.

It examines:

* the origins and development of the three interacting discourses of colonialism - official, humanitarian and settler
* the contests, compromises and interplay between these discourses and their proponents
* the analysis of these discourses in the light of a global humanitarian movement in the aftermath of the antislavery campaign
* the eventual colonisation of the Eastern cape and the construction of colonial settler identities.

For any student or resarcher of this major aspect of history, this will be a staple part of their reading diet.

1 Introduction

Histories of the eastern Cape and postcolonial theory

Most current histories of the nineteenth-century eastern Cape frontier zone, like those of nineteenth-century South Africa more generally, are broadly materialist in orientation. Materialist endeavours to explain British colonisation in the eastern Cape can be dated to the early 1980s. At this time, Martin Legassick, Basil Le Cordeur and Jeff Peires sought to challenge two kinds of established interpretation.¹ On the one hand, they attacked a cluster of ‘settler narratives’, dating from the mid to late nineteenth century, which had proclaimed the beneficial progress of colonial ‘civilisation’, brought by British officials and settlers on the frontier, and its triumph over African ‘barbarism’ or, even worse, ‘savagery’. On the other hand, these revisionists challenged a set of liberal accounts dating from the 1920s, which had argued that the genesis of the white ‘attitudes’ underpinning modern systems of segregation and apartheid lay in early frontier ‘racial relations’.² Critiquing the latter tradition, Legassick emphasised that there did not seem to be a systematic racial ideology among British and Afrikaner farmers on the pre-industrial Cape frontier. He located the construction of such an ideology instead in South Africa's late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ‘mineral revolution’, and traced it to British industrial capitalists based on the Witwatersrand, and the British imperial state, rather than to their early nineteenth-century predecessors.³

Le Cordeur and Peires took a different kind of approach, but one that still focused on material aspects of the eastern Cape's history. Rather than considering the early nineteenth-century colonial frontier only to dismiss its ‘claim’ to be the arena for the development of a modern racial ideology, they held that the British colonisation of the region was significant in its own right. This was because it represented the first penetration of a pre-industrial, agrarian form of capitalism into African territory. For Peires, the 4,000 British settlers located on the frontier in 1820 in particular acted as ‘apostles of free enterprise and free trade’.⁴ It was these settlers who rapidly became agents for the Xhosa's dispossession and subjugation under a regime of settler capitalism. That regime was based above all on the production of wool for the metropolitan market, on white-owned farms, using a subordinated black labour force.⁵

Le Cordeur's and Peires’ emphasis on the British as harbingers of capitalist social relations and Xhosa labour-domination has received new impetus of late. In a review marking his reconsideration of the eastern Cape frontier zone in 1993, Legassick saw the agrarian capitalism of the British as the main reason why ‘the emphasis in the shaping of twentieth-century South Africa is decisively shifted from Afrikaners to British settlers’.⁶ For the same reason, the arrival of the 1820 settlers marks a turning point in Noël Mostert's acclaimed epic narrative of frontier relations, and in Clifton Crais's more theoretical treatment of colonial power and Xhosa resistance.⁷ Finally, British settler capitalism looms large in the more recent, impressive synthesis of the Cape's colonial history written by Timothy Keegan. Keegan argues that it was the British settlers, backed by the colonial state, who undermined Xhosa self-sufficiency, eroded chiefly prerogatives, and re-oriented economic activity to new patterns of [capitalist] production and consumption’.⁸

Peires’ and Le Cordeur's early interest in British activities on the frontier, then, seems to have been vindicated in Keegan's synthesis. If, as Legassick argued, South Africa's modern system of industrial segregation did not have its origins on the frontier, at least one can be confident that some of the first full-blown capitalist relations systematically predicated on racial stratification were constructed there.⁹ The penetration of the eastern Cape by settler capitalism thus played a central role in prefiguring ‘the transformations that were set in motion by the mineral discoveries in South Africa in the last third of the century’.¹⁰

Over the last decade, however, the currents of postcolonial thought, which have affected so many arenas of academic enterprise, have brought challenges to materialist renditions of South African history as a whole. They have initiated, at times, fairly heated debates among South Africanists.¹¹ According to Crais, most historians engaging in these debates ‘have sought dry and safe land far from the dangerous breakers of post-modernism’.¹² Nevertheless, ‘the appearance of studies more closely attuned to questions of culture and the mind ... are beginning to fracture an earlier coherence’.¹³ Postcolonialism challenges the materialist notion of an extraneous capitalist ‘logic’, which, having been imported by European colonisers, underlies racial ‘ideology’ and generates a particular pattern of historical change. Against such a conception, postcolonial scholars have emphasised the more contingent power relations embedded in that ‘congeries of values [and] beliefs . . . that have come to carry the force of nature’, and which are generally referred to as culture.¹⁴

In postcolonial readings, capitalism cannot be thought of as having a logic or structure which exists somehow prior to, or outside of, culture. Culture mediates relations of power across social boundaries that are constructed in relation to one another, rather than ‘given’ by any extraneous framework. Thus, ‘culture is not some sort of residual category, the surface variation left unaccounted for by more powerful economic analyses, but it is the very medium through which social relations are expressed, experienced and contested’.¹⁵ And these social relations consist of far more intricate inter-meshings of race, gender, ethnicity, religion, language and locality than those that a class-based analysis alone can supply.¹⁶

However, I do not believe that the established historiography of capitalist penetration in the eastern Cape on the one hand, and the relational insights of postcolonial theory on the other, are irreconcilable. First, we can recognise that developments within the materialist South African historiographical tradition as a whole, including that portion focusing on the eastern Cape, have led it away from any orthodox and structuralist Marxism and closer to postcolonial conceptions of identity and change. They demonstrate that the social boundaries of class, race, ethnicity and gender are dynamic and flexible creations, generated through contingent power struggles. Some seek to deal with these social boundaries in an integrated way, and, in common with recent analyses of colonial India in particular, they draw attention to the failures as well as the successes of capitalist endeavours.¹⁷

Furthermore, although most South African historians writing of ‘race-prefer to use the more traditional terms ‘racial ideology’ or ‘racial attitudes’, in the ways in which they deploy these terms, they have included many of the meanings that postcolonial scholars invest in the word ‘discourse’.¹⁸ Indeed, they have been engaged in an historically embedded form of discourse analysis for some time, without necessarily theorising it as such.¹⁹ Thus, they write implicitly of ‘race’ as an enframing set of representations, rather than merely as a screen of ‘bias’ or ‘prejudice’ that obscures some objective ‘truth’ about difference or sameness. It is in this unstated rejection of the notion of ideology as ‘false consciousness or an imagined representation of the real conditions for existence’ that we find the clearest connections between current social historical and postcolonial approaches.²⁰

Like the prevailing historiography, this book insists on the significance of the transformations engendered by settler capitalism as a set of practices on the eastern Cape frontier, but it also gives more explicit recognition to three things that are more generally associated, at least overtly, with post-colonial analyses: first, that such practices were culturally conditioned, legitimated and regulated through discourse.²¹ Secondly, this discursive regulation of capitalist practice took place across an extensive imperial terrain connecting Britain's colonies, and its settler colonies in particular, to the metropole. The geographies of flow and connection within a broad imperial network are central to this account. And thirdly, that, for settler capitalist practices to ‘work’ in the eastern Cape they had to be formulated in response to the conditions which settlers found there. Not the least of these conditions was Khoesan resistance to material exploitation and the Xhosa's ‘primary-resistance to the settlers’ very presence in the region.

Without wishing to construct them as being mutually exclusive, three main early nineteenth-century British colonial discourses are identified and analysed in the following chapters – governmentality, humanitarianism and settler capitalism. This book is about their differential and overlapping effects, both in the eastern Cape and in Britain. Although any attempt to delineate these discourses runs the risk of creating artificial boundaries and an unhelpful impression of internal homogeneity, I nevertheless believe that each of them, at least in the early nineteenth century, constituted a particular ‘ensemble of regulated practices’.²² Despite their multiple points of origin, each was internally consistent enough to be considered a broad imperial programme in its own right. These discourses were created initially as a result of competing projects’, devised by differentially situated British interests to be carried out in a variety of colonial spaces.²³ It was the incompatibility between the Colonial Office and its governors’ agendas for producing order at minimal cost, philanthropic and evangelical humanitarians’ schemes of proselytisation among aborigines’ and their eventual assimilation, and settlers’ more targeted visions of capital accumulation and security that brought these discourses into being and into collision with one another. Thereafter, they were continually being refashioned in relation to each other.

Critical to each of these discourses in the Cape (and elsewhere), and to the contests that were waged between them, were representations of'the disputed figure of the African’.²⁴ Within each discourse, Africans were reduced to stereotypes and each such stereotype necessitated a specific set of colonial responses. Governmental discourse, I will argue, produced the Xhosa and Khoesan of the eastern Cape (and to a certain extent the Dutch-speaking colonists too) as unpredictable objects, predisposed to irrational acts of violence – objects to be located, ordered and disciplined in line with the efficient administration of the Cape at minimal expense. Humanitarian discourse tended to produce them as pliant and childlike brothers and sisters, fellow human beings and creations of God awaiting the blessings of Christianity. Within this discourse, the Khoesan and Xhosa were merely one component in a global enterprise aimed at nothing less than the redemption of souls, the extension of legitimate trade and the diffusion from its British heartland of a spiritually and materially progressive Utopia. In settler discourse, these indigenous Others came to feature primarily as a potent, threatening presence, ominously lurking beyond or, even more dangerously, within the colonial frontier, and requiring to be either removed or rendered tame and productive. Only then could mutual prosperity spread, specifically through sheep farming, infrastructural development, labour control, further emigration from Britain and the supply of the British manufacturing market.

We must be careful to remember that the colonial projects identified in this book could converge around particular imperatives which were necessary for any of them to be realised, thus giving the impression of a more unified and totalising colonial discourse. Philanthropic evangelicals, government officials and settlers were all concerned with the effective British ‘management’ of indigenous peoples in the eastern Cape. They agreed on the imperative for orderly, well-regulated behaviour on the part of colonised subjects, and there was consensus that a British example was needed to show ‘natives’ (as well as recalcitrant Afrikaners) how to improve their situation. But while the colonial forces at play in the eastern Cape never worked from irreconcilably different positions’, there was certainly vehement dispute over precisely which British example should be employed.²⁵

On questions of crucial material importance, such as whether ‘natives’ were to retain access to their land, missionaries and settlers might squabble, while officials generally took less principled and more contingently pragmatic approaches. But to state that the combinations and permutations of colonial interests and their discourses were diverse is only to go part way towards denning the complexity of British colonial culture. Not only was it possible for individuals to shift their allegiances, to reproduce other kinds of discourse and pursue other colonial visions; it was also possible for the same individuals to engage with different discourses, reproducing elements of more than one of them at any given time. Thus, during a period of humanitarian political ascendancy in Britain, colonial officials felt the need to legitimate their decisions in the light of humanitarian concerns, and to deploy rhetoric most often associated with humanitarian discourse – even when humanitarians in the Cape disputed those decisions.

In other words, the analytical boundaries between the colonial discourses delineated here were not so clearly defined that individuals were unable to transgress them. Rhetoric from one discourse could be ‘borrowed’ to serve the purposes of antithetical projects and political, military and material expediency allowed the fractures between colonial interests to be crossed in the long-term pursuit of shared colonial ambitions.

Imperial networks

Before proceeding in the next chapter to examine the genealogies of the colonial discourses that interweave throughout this account, it is important to identify one other of their characteristics – one that is deserving of much more attention than any parochial account of the eastern Cape would recognise. Crucially, each of the colonial projects and the discourses associated with them that are identified here was forged not just within the Cape, or even within multiple colonies or the metropole, but across a network linking these sites together. Histories of the Cape such as Keegan's, Bank's, Crais's and most recently Ross's, certainly recognise the material and ideological connections between the colony's frontier and Britain, but in the following account I want to give more emphasis to the ways in which the two sites were knitted together within a global cultural and political fabric. I want to suggest that British colonial discourses were made and remade, rather than simply transferred or imposed, through the ‘geographies of connection’ between Britain and settler colonies like the Cape in particular.²⁶

Colonial and metropolitan sites were connected most obviously through material flows of capital, commodities and labour. By the late eighteenth century, British material culture was already located within intensively developed circuits connecting Western Europe, Africa, Asia and South America.²⁷ As Susan Thorne has pointed out,

The extraordinary scale of British imperial expansion at the end of the nineteenth century has obscured the magnitude of Britain's colonial involvement at the eighteenth century's turn ... By 1820, the British Empire had already absorbed almost a quarter of the world's population, most of whom were incorporated between the Seven Years War, which began in 1756, and the Napoleonic Wars, which ended in 1815....

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Imperial Networks
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Colonial projects and the eastern Cape
• 3 British settlers and the colonisation of the Xhosa
• 4 Queen Adelaide Province and the limits of colonial power
• 5 Obtaining the ‘due observance of justice’: the apotheosis of the humanitarian imagination
• 6 Imperial contests and the conquest of the frontier
• 7 Epilogue and conclusion
• Notes
• Index