Abstract
The first visible effects of the British annexation of Basutoland was the appearance of a detachment of Cape Frontier Armed and Mounted Police under Sir Walter Currie as High Commissioner’s Agent, sent to give effect to the annexation. These were followed in April by the High Commissioner in person, accompanied by the Reverend John Daniel, the Wesleyan Methodist missionary from Aliwal North, who was to act as interpreter.
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Notes
This was a more radical suggestion than it sounds. As E. H. Ashton says: ‘In the old days, recognized doctors, officially attached to the chief as rainmakers, diviners, or keepers of war medicine, ranked next to the chief himself in importance’. See ‘Medicine, Magic, and Sorcery among the Southern Sotho’, Communications of the School of African Studies, University of Cape Town, new series, 10 (Dec. 1943) 3.
C. W. Mackintosh, Coillard of the Zambesi, (London, 1907) p. 193.
A. Sachs, Justice in South Africa, (London, 1973) p. 57.
G. M. Theal, History of South Africa, 1854–1872, (London, 1900) pp. 312–13, n. 2.
Tylden, The Rise of the Basuto, p. 114; Brookes, History of Native Policy, p. 186. The regulations of 1871, to which Tylden and Brookes both refer, were identical on this point to the 1870 regulations.
This was not interpreted to include rainmakers, despite Rolland’s recommendation in his memorandum. See J. Widdicombe, Fourteen Years in Basutoland, (London, 1891) p. 63.
Only Cape law had been officially recognised in the Ciskei, with the result that the Africans there had generally ignored the magistrates’ courts and continued to take their cases to the chiefs’ ‘illegal’ courts. See S. B. Burman, ‘Cape Policies Towards African Law in Cape Tribal Territories, 1872–1883’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1973).
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© 1981 Sandra Burman
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Burman, S. (1981). Interregnum. In: Chiefdom Politics and Alien Law: Basutoland under Cape Rule, 1871–1884. St Antony’s/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04639-3_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04639-3_4
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