‘Forgotten and Neglected’: Settlers, Government and Africans’ Education in Natal

Swartz, Rebecca

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-95909-2_4

Rebecca Swartz⁴

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on how land and labour were situated as central to the education of Africans in Natal. The settler colonial context fundamentally influenced the kinds of education promoted, the amount of funding given, and the level of government involvement in education. Thus, while there might have been broad ideas about the civilisation of Indigenous people throughout the Empire, this came up against a changing relationship between imperial and local governments in Natal. Many of the proposals for increased provision came up against opposition from colonial officials and settlers. By reading these ‘failed’ attempts at African education, I show how local settlers’ voices were increasingly dominant in Natal’s colonial politics. This had implications for the kinds of education that African pupils could access.

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Notes

1.
Scott’s speech opening the Legislative Council, 26.04.1859, Encl. in Scott to Lytton, 09.05.1859, Natal. Copies of correspondence between the Governor of Natal and the Colonial Office with respect to the £ 5000 reserved from the general revenues of the colony for the disposal of the Crown; and, of correspondence on the subject of the growth of cotton as now carried on by the natives, under the auspices of the government of that colony, HC 596 (1860), [Hereafter Native Reserve Correspondence], No. 15, 76.
2.
Alan Lester, ‘British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire’, History Workshop Journal, 54 (2002), 25–48, 30.
3.
John Doheny, ‘Bureaucracy and the Education of the Poor in Nineteenth Century Britain’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 39 (1991), 325–339, 326.
4.
For example, Meghan Healy-Clancy, A World of Their Own: A History of South African Women’s Education (Scotsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2013); Ingie Hovland, Mission Station Christianity: Norwegian Missionaries in Colonial Natal and Zululand (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Linda Chisolm, Between Worlds: German Missionaries and the Transition from Mission to Bantu Education in South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2017).
5.
Catriona Ellis, ‘Education for All: Reassessing the Historiography of Education in Colonial India’, History Compass, 7 (2009), 363–375, 371.
6.
Norman Etherington, ‘Education and Medicine’, in Missions and Empire, ed. by Norman Etherington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 261–284, 269.
7.
Joseph Byrne had travelled throughout the British Empire before finally creating the scheme for the systematic colonization of Natal. See Joseph Byrne, Twelve Years’ Wanderings in the British Colonies. From 1835 to 1847, Vol. 1 and 2 (London: Richard Bentley, 1848).
8.
John Lambert, Betrayed Trust, Africans and the State in Colonial Natal (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1995), 8, 10.
9.
Jeff Guy, Theophilus Shepstone and the Forging of Natal: African Autonomy and Settler Colonialism in the Making of Traditional Authority (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2013), 247.
10.
See Julian Cobbing, ‘The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo’, The Journal of African History, 29 (1988), 487–519. Etherington argues that the Mfengu, recent arrivals to Natal and Zululand after the mfecane, were more likely to adhere to Christian doctrines than the northern Nguni people who had remained settled in that area before European settlement. Norman Etherington, ‘Mission Station Melting Pots as a Factor in the Rise of South African Black Nationalism’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 9 (1976), 592–605, 593n.
11.
Joseph Byrne, Emigrants Guide to Port Natal (London: Effingham Wilson, 1850), 62.
12.
Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 35.
13.
Patrick Harries, ‘Plantations, Passes and Proletarians: Labour and the Colonial State in Nineteenth Century Natal’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 13 (1987), 372–399, 373.
14.
Keletso Atkins, The Moon is Dead! Give Us Our Money! The Cultural Origins of an African Work Ethic, Natal, South Africa, 1843–1900 (London: James Currey Ltd., 1993), 1.
15.
Ibid., 3, 57 and chap. 3.
16.
Bernth Lindfors, ‘Hottentot, Bushman, Kaffir: The Making of Racist Stereotypes in 19th-Century Britain’, in Encounter Images in Meetings between Africa and Europe, ed. by Mai Palmberg (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2001), 54–75, 69.
17.
Norman Etherington, ‘The Missionary Writing Machine in Nineteenth-Century Kwazulu-Natal’, in Mixed Messages: Materiality, Textuality, Missions, ed. by Jamie Scott and Gareth Griffiths (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 37–50, 37.
18.
See Norman Etherington, Preachers, Peasants and Politics in Southeast Africa, 1835–1880 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978), Chap. 2.
19.
Letter from Shepstone to the Acting Secretary of Government, Natal, 9.12.1851, CO 179/20, No. 20. [Hereafter all CO correspondence is from the National Archives at Kew]
20.
Pine to Sir George Grey, 5.09.1854, CO 179/35, No. 58.
21.
On the Queen Adelaide province, see Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001), Chap. 4. Jeremy Martens argues that the Queen Adelaide province provided an important model for colonial rule of Africans in Natal. Jeremy Martens, ‘Decentring Shepstone: The Eastern Cape Frontier and the establishment of Native administration in Natal, 1842–1849’, South African Historical Journal (2015), 1–22.
22.
Guy, Theophilus Shepstone, 97; Instructions to Commissioners, Encl. 1 in Maitland to Gladstone, 16.05.1846, Natal. Correspondence relative to the establishment of the settlement of Natal, [Hereafter Correspondence relative to the establishment of Natal] HC 980 (1847–48), no. 35, 57.
23.
David Welsh, The Roots of Segregation: Native Policy in Colonial Natal, 1845–1910 (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1971), 11. This was in contrast to what the Natal volksraad, the governing body of the Boer republic of Natalia (1839–1843), suggested. They proposed larger locations, which the Commissioners felt would be more difficult to control. Instructions to Commissioners, Correspondence relative to the establishment of Natal, 59.
24.
Report of the Locations Commission, 30.03.1841, Encl. 2 in Pottinger to Earl Grey, Correspondence relative to the establishment of Natal, No. 65, 134.
25.
Report of the Locations Commission, 134.
26.
Earl Grey to Sir Henry Smith, 10.12.1847, Correspondence relative to the establishment of Natal, No. 66, 139.
27.
Jeremy Martens, ‘“So Destructive of Domestic Security and Comfort”: Settler Domesticity, Race and the Regulation of African Behaviour in the Colony of Natal, 1843–1893’ (PhD thesis, Queen’s University, Canada, 2001), 69.
28.
Jeff Guy, ‘Class, Imperialism and Literary Criticism’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 23 (1997), 219–241, 222.
29.
Royal Instructions to Labour Commissioners, Proceedings of the Commission appointed to enquire into the past and present state of the Kafirs in the district of Natal and to report upon their future government, and to suggest such arrangements as will tend to secure the peace and welfare of the District (1852) (Natal: J Archbell and Son, 1852–53).
30.
The Commission was chaired by Walter Harding, Crown Prosecutor, and the committee members included Shepstone, John Bird, the Acting Surveyor General, J.N. Boshoff, Registrar of the District Court, field commanders of the Mooi and Klip River districts, and settlers R.R. Ryley, Addison, Otto, Milner, Henderson, Cato, Struben, Nel, Landman, Potgieter, Morewood, Uys, Spies, Labuscagne, Macfarlane, Moreland, Barter, Boast, with Edward Tatham as Secretary and Henry Francis Fynn as Interpreter.
31.
Guy, Theophilus Shepstone, 198.
32.
Labour Commission, 3.
33.
Ibid., 43.
34.
Jeremy Martens, ‘“Civilised Domesticity”, Race and European Attempts to Regulate African Marriage Practices in Colonial Natal, 1868–1875’, The History of the Family, 14 (2009), 340–355, 354.
35.
Edgar Brookes and Colin Webb, A History of Natal, 2nd edn (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1987), 69.
36.
Labour Commission, 27, 52.
37.
Jeremy Martens discusses settler intervention in African family and gender relationships, and argues that ideas about ‘civilised domesticity’ were central to Natal whites’ views of racial difference. Martens, ‘“Civilised domesticity”’, 355.
38.
Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 273–275.
39.
Labour Commission, 26, 43.
40.
Ibid., 44.
41.
Ibid., 45.
42.
Martens, ‘“Civilised Domesticity”’, 342, 345.
43.
Labour Commission, 46.
44.
Ibid., 53. See also, Welsh, Roots of Segregation, 49.
45.
Ibid., 53.
46.
See Rebecca Swartz, ‘Industrial Education in Natal: The British Imperial Context, 1830–1860’, in Empire and Education in Africa: The Shaping of a Comparative Perspective, ed. by Peter Kallaway and Rebecca Swartz (New York: Peter Lang, 2018), 53–80, 67.
47.
Norman Etherington, ‘Christianity and African Society in Nineteenth Century Natal’, in Natal and Zulul and from Earliest Times to 1910: A New History, ed. by Andrew Duminy and Bill Guest (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1989), 275–300, 286. It is worth pointing out that Christian converts remained subject to African customary law, even though they were resident on mission stations, and actively seeking ‘civilisation’.
48.
Ibid., 285. Etherington cites an example of an angry crowd of settlers accusing a Methodist missionary of stopping their servants from working, and shouting that ‘“Missionary Kaffirs” were the worst in the country’. Many kholwa did demand higher wages.
49.
No author, ‘Kafirs’, in Natal Witness, 06.05.1857, 2.
50.
Etherington, ‘Christianity and African Society’, 286. Similar claims against missionaries were made in the Caribbean in the years before emancipation. Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Oxford: Polity, 2002), 77, 106.
51.
Guy, Theophilus Shepstone, 199.
52.
Scheme for industrial education, sent to Pine by Gray, 17.6.1850, Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand [Hereafter CL], AB 1162/A1.1. I have discussed this scheme in Swartz, ‘Industrial Education in Natal’, 64–67.
53.
Gray to Williamson, 24.06.1850, CL AB 1162/A1.1.
54.
See Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2003).
55.
Letter from Gray to Williamson, 05.06.1850, CL AB 1162/A1.1.
56.
See Pakington to Pine, 11.06.1852, Natal. Further correspondence relative to the settlement of Natal. (In continuation of papers presented July 30, 1851), HC 1697 (1852–53), No. 13.
57.
Bishop Gray’s Journal, CL AB 1161 (1850).
58.
Ibid.
59.
Gray to Williamson, 24.06.1850, CL AB 1162/A1.1.
60.
Acting Lieut-Governor Preston to Pakington, 18.02.1853, Further correspondence relative to the settlement of Natal, No. 31, 95–97.
61.
Ibid., 96.
62.
Ibid.
63.
An enclosed petition from the Wesleyan church expressed their dissatisfaction at the lack of funding. Ibid., 98.
64.
Ibid., 97.
65.
Encl. 3 in ibid., 98.
66.
Barrow to Merivale, 01.06.1853, on Preston to Pine, 18.02.1853, CO 179/28, No. 13.
67.
Newcastle to Pine, 14.07.1853, Natal. Further correspondence relative to the settlement of Natal, No. 36, 140.
68.
The Natal Native Trust was created in 1864, which gave the Lieutenant-Governor and Executive Council control of all African land. Benjamin Kline, Genesis of Apartheid: British African Policy in the Colony of Natal 1845–1893 (Lanham and London: University of America Press, 1988), 54.
69.
Acting Lieutenant-Governor Cooper to Molesworth, 25.01.1856, CO 179/42, No. 9.
70.
Charles Templeton Loram, The Education of the South African Native (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1917), 55.
71.
Cooper to Molesworth, 25.01.1856.
72.
Memorial signed by 172 settlers to the secretary of state for war and the colonies, Encl. in Scott to Molesworth, 25.09.1856, CO 179/42, No. 7.
73.
Ibid.
74.
Loram, The Education of the South African Native, 55; Oscar Emanuelson, ‘A History of Native Education in Natal, between 1835 and 1927’ (M.Ed thesis, University of South Africa, 1927), 46.
75.
Scott to Labouchere, 03.06.1857, Native Reserve Correspondence, No. 46, 5.
76.
While most Australian colonies gained responsible self-government in the 1850s, this was delayed in the Cape, Natal and Western Australia. Zoë Laidlaw, ‘The Victorian State in its Imperial Context’, in The Victorian World, ed. by Martin Hewitt (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 329–345, 332. The Cape achieved representative government in 1853, and similar concerns over the status of Indigenous people were raised in that context, and particularly around non-racial franchise. Anthonie du Toit, The Cape Frontier: A Study of Native Policy with Special Reference to the Years 1847–1866 (Pretoria: Archives Yearbook, Government Printer, 1954), 72.
77.
Scott to Labouchere, 15.10.1858, The reports made for the year 1857 to the Secretary of State having the Department of the Colonies; in continuation of the reports annually made by the governors of the British colonies, with a view to exhibit generally the past and present state of Her Majesty’s colonial possessions. Transmitted with the blue books for the year 1857, HC Session 2, 2567 (1859), No. 30, 192. Once it became a possibility that Africans would be able to meet this property requirement, non-racial franchise was removed in 1865. Brookes and Webb, A History of Natal, 75.
78.
Brookes and Webb, A History of Natal, 75.
79.
Grey to Russell, 24.11.1855, CO 179/37, No. 34. See Welsh, Roots of Segregation, 52.
80.
New Zealand Constitution Act, 1852, (15 & 16 Vict. c. 72). New Zealand gained responsible government in 1856.
81.
Bill to alter and amend a certain clause and certain provisions in the Royal Charter of Natal, 10.04.1858, in Native Reserve Correspondence, No. 35, 39.
82.
Legislative Council to the Queen, 10.04.1858, Encl. 2 in Scott to Labouchere, 28.04.1858, Native Reserve Correspondence, No. 6, 43.
83.
Report of the Select Committee on the Reserve of 5,000 for native purposes, Scott to Bulwer-Lytton, 28.12.1858, Native Reserve Correspondence, No. 84, 59.
84.
‘Bystander’, ‘The £5000 Reserve’, Natal Witness, 26.02.1858, 2.
85.
Bulwer-Lytton to Scott, 19.08.1858, Native Reserve Correspondence, No. 18, 88. Lytton also pointed out that a reserve fund was made in all Charters, and that the Cape had £14,000 set aside for the ‘Border Department (Aborigines)’. This grant was also used for educational purposes. Du Toit, The Cape Frontier, 240.
86.
Bulwer-Lytton to Scott, 24.03.1859, Native Reserve Correspondence, No. 9, 91.
87.
Scott to Stanley, 31.07.1858, Native Reserve Correspondence, No. 55, 49.
88.
Scott to Labouchere, 28.04.1858, Native Reserve Correspondence, No. 36, 40.
89.
Shepstone to Pearse, 13.11.1858, Encl. 1 in No. 9 Scott to Lytton, 28.11.1858, Native Reserve Correspondence, No. 53.
90.
Patrick Kearney, ‘Success and Failure of “Sokululeka”: Bishop Colenso and African Education’, in The Eye of the Storm: Bishop John William Colenso and the Crisis of Biblical Interpretation, ed. by Jonathan Draper (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 2003), 195–206, 201.
91.
Report from Grubbe, Bishopstowe, 03.01.1859, SPG Missionary Reports, Rhodes House Library, E2.
92.
Colenso to Grey, 01.04.1858, Grey collection correspondence, South African Library, No. 52.
93.
Scott’s speech opening the Legislative Council on 26.04.1859, Native Reserve Correspondence, No. 32, 76.
94.
Guy, Theophilus Shepstone, 267.
95.
Scott to Bulwer-Lytton, 30.12.1858, Native Reserve Correspondence, No. 88, 72.
96.
Shepstone to Allison, 22.02.1858, Encl. 3 in Scott to Stanley, 31.07.1858, Native Reserve Correspondence, No. 55, 51.
97.
Scott to Bulwer-Lytton, 30.12.1858, Native Reserve Correspondence, No. 13, 71.
98.
Scott to Bulwer-Lytton, 29.11.1858, Native Reserve Correspondence, No. 9, 52.
99.
Scott to Newcastle, 31.12.1859, CO 179/53, Desp. 113.
100.
Scott to Bulwer-Lytton, 04.04.1859, Native Reserve Correspondence, No. 16, 74; Guy, Theophilus Shepstone, 269.
101.
Scott to Stanley, 31.07.1858, Native Reserve Correspondence, No. 55, 49.
102.
Norman Etherington, ‘Missionaries, Africans and the State in the Development of Education in Colonial Natal, 1836–1910’, in Missionaries, Indigenous People and Cultural Exchange, ed. by Patricia Grimshaw and Andrew May (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2010), 130.
103.
Ann Curthoys and Jeremy Martens, ‘Serious Collisions: Settlers, Indigenous People, and Imperial Policy in Western Australia and Natal’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, 15 (2013), 121–144.
104.
Fitzgerald to Earl Grey, 19.06.1849, CO 18/51, No. 46.
105.
Jessie Mitchell and Ann Curthoys, ‘How Different was Victoria? Aboriginal “Protection” in a Comparative Context’, in Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth Century Victoria, ed. by Leigh Boucher and Lynette Russell (ANU–Epress, 2015), 199.

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Department of History, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa
Rebecca Swartz

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Swartz, R. (2019). ‘Forgotten and Neglected’: Settlers, Government and Africans’ Education in Natal. In: Education and Empire. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95909-2_4

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95909-2_4
Published: 10 January 2019
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