Illuminating Lives Read online

  Longfellow’s recently published ‘The Song of Hiawatha’ may have had strong resonances for Soga on his return to British Kaffraria in 1857. Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England was a narrative of improvement and told how after ‘years of enmity’, Scotland and England were united ‘by indissoluble ties of interest and affection’.40 Joachim Neander and Edward Gibbon showed that Christianity and civilisation came to different societies at different times, and that England itself had not always been prosperous or technologically advanced. Both James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (Soga’s favourite book, according to Chalmers) and The Wrongs of the Caffre Nation by Justus (also read by Soga) showed that it was possible to be critical of what Johnson on occasion referred to as the imbecility of government policy while remaining loyal to the state itself. That tirade against British colonial policy by Presbyterian minister William Anderson at Soga’s ordination in Scotland was a further exemplar in this respect.

  On returning to southern Africa in 1857, Soga personally experienced settler racism on several recorded occasions, including those cries of ‘Shame on Scotland’ that were aimed accusingly at Janet for having married him. His second letter to the King William’s Town Gazette was a complaint against the rudeness of a local white tollkeeper and his assistant: ‘they think they must take them [black men] down for aiming at being fine gentlemen … They might do this on some black men with impunity, but not upon all.’41 Yet no action was taken against the offenders. Chalmers mentions several other incidents in his biography. These included Soga being arrested by mounted police demanding his pass ‘as if he had been any ordinary coloured man’ and being sworn at by a white military officer who found he had to share a hotel bedroom with Soga and demanded to know what he was doing there. Chalmers wrote that Soga dealt with such occasions ‘well and bravely; but … they were bitter drops in his cup, and took not a little joy out of one of the most useful and precious lives in South Africa.’42

  Yet there were still powerful voices in favour of non-racial Cape liberalism in the mid-nineteenth century. These included two newspapers: the Port Elizabeth Telegraph and Cape Argus. Saul Solomon, owner of both and whom Soga met, was an influential member of the Cape Parliament. Equally, and despite extensive racism that was especially prevalent in the eastern Cape, Soga was still able to preach to predominantly white congregations in places like Grahamstown, Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage, as well as in Cape Town; and local white traders and their families attended the English services he held in Mgwali and Somerville-Tutuka.

  Soga had further reason to believe that British civic nationality could prevail over its racist kith-and-kin ethnic counterpart. He had experienced cordial meetings with the governor, Sir George Grey, and Prince Alfred, and he had accompanied them on the prince’s warship Euryalus to Cape Town in 1860, attending the ceremony to inaugurate the building of its harbour. Soga noted that Sir George Grey ‘was affable to everyone, cheerful and communicative’, whereas sixteen-year-old Alfred was ‘possessed of a modesty that approaches to something like timidity’ and will ‘make a noble man’.43 Soga was, of course, married to a white woman, and he had seemingly close white friends and colleagues with whom he stayed in Scotland and the Cape. In 1866, he stayed for a month with a Mr Best, ‘the English church catechist and schoolmaster’, and his family in Kalk Bay. Soga enthused over their kindness. They had offered him accommodation while he was attempting to recover from illness. Soga regarded Mr Best as ‘one of the finest Christian men whom I have met’. The feeling was mutual. Best wrote that Soga was a ‘thorough gentleman’ and that his stay was one of ‘unfeigned pleasure … the happiest period of my life’. Just before parting, Soga acted as best man at the wedding of one of his host’s daughters. His gift to her was ‘a very handsome china breakfast service’.44

  British Kaffraria’s incorporation that same year of 1866 into the Cape Colony might have bolstered Soga’s hope that progress was achievable. He reported enthusiastically on his acquaintanceship with the superintendent of Cape Education, Langham Dale, who, at least at the time, still believed that colour prejudice in education and in society more generally was wrong. Chalmers used a satirical poem by Dale that was against such prejudice in order to preface a chapter intended to demonstrate that Soga was above all a gentleman and a Christian. The lines he quoted read as follows:

  ‘Ne crede colori,’ the Poet erst sang –

  Appearances ever delude;

  But white is the hue that to us is genteel,

  The black one, of course, is tabooed.45

  So Soga’s death in 1871 preceded the era when British betrayal and abandonment of creolised black African elites both in South Africa and in the Empire at large were to be more visible. Perceiving oneself as a black British person became more challenging towards the end of the nineteenth century, in the era of high imperialism. Pseudoscientific racism greatly strengthened ethnic rather than civic notions of British nationhood. This was reflected in the Constitution of the Union of South Africa in 1910, which reserved membership of Parliament for whites and thus guaranteed white electoral supremacy. Even then, many members of the black elite still clung (in the face of white settler racism and power) to the hope of British government or royal intervention. In Soga’s lifetime, this political exclusion lay in the future. Yet, given his own experience of settler racism, he was constantly reminded that he was a Xhosa. In defence of his personal honour, he needed to defend himself as Xhosa, as well as to record and affirm selected precolonial elements of Xhosa culture that did not contradict what he saw as progress. As Chalmers remarked, ‘few men possessed his degree of self-respect’.46 Soga hoped that his sons would have a similar sense of purpose and personal honour. To this end, part of the advice he left them went as follows:

  I have got to a point of respectability in society, to which many considered impossible for a black man, yet it never was impossible [Soga’s emphasis] … God has made from creation no race of men mentally and morally superior to other races. They are all equal in these respects; but education, civilization, and the blessings of Christianity have made the differences among men.47

  Soga, it would seem, thought that these values and beliefs were best protected and advanced by British sovereignty, hence his bolstered-by-John-Bunyan loyalism. Propagating these values was central to his personal and career choices and was in keeping with what he judged, from a historical reading, to be the most likely outcome of this fateful period of colonial encounter. He saw no contradiction between his Xhosaness and adherence to British civic nationality. Yet he was no jingo and, according to Chalmers, Soga disliked the ‘vain glory’ of Rule Britannia: ‘he, as one of the conquered race, felt that it exulted over a crushed foe’.48

  One can conclude that, for Soga, values trumped nationalism. Chalmers commented that Soga ‘had a quiet and growing contempt for men who allowed colour of skin to rule their treatment of others’. A key sentence in Soga’s advice to his sons was, and is, unlikely to be included by someone wishing to claim him for any exclusive racial nationalism, past or lamentably still present. His words may serve as a fitting epitaph: ‘No man should dislike others, because they are not like himself, or are not his countrymen.’49

  Further reading

  Soga’s journal and correspondence is available in Donovan Williams (ed.), The Journal and Selected Writings of the Reverend Tiyo Soga (Grahamstown: A.A. Balkema, 1983). The fullest and most intimate account of Soga’s life, written from the perspective of a co-missionary and friend, is John A. Chalmers, Tiyo Soga: A Page of South African Missionary Work (Edinburgh: Andrew Elliot, 1878). All subsequent portrayals whether long or short, including this one, have leaned on it heavily for information albeit offering a variety of interpretations. As suggested in the piece above, Donovan Williams, Umfundisi: A Biography of Tiyo Soga, 1829–1871 (Alice: Lovedale Press, 1978), concludes that Soga was a ‘Black Nationalist’, a conclusion in keeping perhaps with the time and location that produced it and one followed
by many others since. For those interested in the broader Eastern Cape, Noel Mostert’s Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992) provides a compelling narrative account of epic proportions, while Jeff Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawase and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856–7 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1989), is a pioneering and fascinating exploration of this extraordinary historical episode.

  John Montagu: Master spirit of the colony

  Nigel Penn

  * * *

  For most contemporary South Africans, the name Montagu is associated with a small town in the Klein Karoo, affectionately celebrated by the balladeer David Kramer of District Six: The Musical fame in a song on his album Jis Jis Jis. The better informed may be aware that the town was named after John Montagu, a colonial secretary in the Cape between 1842 and 1853. But few will know that for more than a decade, John Montagu was the de facto governor of the Cape and, simultaneously, the most praised and reviled public figure in the colony.

  Montagu was held in the highest esteem by his superiors in the Colonial Office, as well as by the four governors under whom he served. Yet he was unjustly blamed by a diverse grouping of colonial subjects for approving the transportation of British and Irish convicts to the Cape, which was threatening to turn into a ‘convict colony’. He thus found himself treated as an object of opprobrium by many Cape inhabitants, ‘the popular party’, who launched a lengthy, violent and unprecedented campaign of civil disobedience against his administration through an Anti-Convict Association. No sooner had this anti-convict agitation subsided (the British government bowed to the pressure and transported the convicts to Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, instead) than Montagu became embroiled in further controversy over the possible introduction of representative government. He was again portrayed by many as being opposed to the popular will. His resignation was demanded, both in London and the Cape, by thousands of petitioners. Bankrupt and in broken health, he returned to England on sick leave and died shortly afterwards. So unpopular was he that when the head of the Colonial Office, the Duke of Newcastle, wrote a letter to the governor of the Cape, Sir George Cathcart, requesting that the Cape’s House of Assembly consider a proposal to grant a pension to Montagu’s widow and children in recognition of Montagu’s services, the Assembly refused to do so.

  This was a particularly ungrateful slight, since nobody had ever worked harder for the welfare of the colony than John Montagu. He had, in fact, worked himself to death for the public good at the early age of fifty-six. Among his achievements were the complete reform of the Cape’s finances and the implementation of a solution that liquidated the colony’s debt. He also improved the colony’s administrative and justice systems, while creating a local convict labour system that was the admiration of the British Empire, seemingly fulfilling the dual goals of punishment and reform while proving to be of great economic benefit. As chair of the Road Board, Montagu was able to direct the labour of these convicts towards the construction of a succession of roads and spectacular mountain passes (one of which, Montagu Pass, behind George, still bears his name) that linked the agricultural regions of the interior to the coastal plains. On the coast, he encouraged the development of harbours, most notably initiating the breakwater in Table Bay. A further contribution to improving communications in the Cape was Montagu’s reform of the colony’s postal system.1

  Montagu also helped to bolster Britain’s control of the Cape. As chair of the board for superintending immigration from Britain, he encouraged the growth of the Cape’s British population. During the Frontier War of 1850–51 (Mlanjeni’s War, or the Eighth Frontier War), when Governor Harry Smith was besieged at Fort Cox and the colonial forces were in danger of being overwhelmed, Montagu was able to enlist, equip, train and dispatch 1 260 men by sea to the mouth of the Buffalo River within the record time of seventeen days. The arrival of these levies (joined by some 500 more over the next few days) saved Sir Harry and his troops from defeat by the Xhosa and earned him the profound gratitude and admiration of the commander-in-chief.

  There was also the routine business for Montagu of answering the hundreds of letters that crossed his desk every day in the overburdened Cape Colonial Office. The British annexation of Natal in 1843 had substantially added to this workload, since the new colony was administered from the Cape. Montagu habitually worked fourteen hours a day. He travelled thousands of miles on horseback to inspect road constructions. While supervising the building of the Hard Road between Stellenbosch and Cape Town, Montagu took regular early morning rides to see if it was covered by sand or whether the Australian trees that he had introduced to stabilise the Cape Flats’ dunes were taking effect. He was, in biographer W.A. Newman’s words, ‘the master spirit of the colony’.2

  John Montagu, an energetic and controversial colonial administrator

  All the governors that Montagu worked for – Napier, Maitland, Pottinger and Smith – relied heavily upon him and were grateful for his efforts. For example, when Sir Henry Pottinger retired as governor in 1848, he wrote the following: ‘I have never in any part of the world met with a public servant, who struck me as being so eminently qualified for his duties, and … without Mr. Montagu’s able and zealous aid, I could never have got through the labour I had to perform.’3 In 1851, Pottinger’s successor, Sir Harry Smith, who spent most of his time at the frontier, revealed that he had been forced ‘to leave much to Mr. Montagu’s judgment and discretion, which has previously never been wanting’.4 Those who worked under Montagu were equally impressed by his abilities. An assistant secretary, who had worked with Montagu for nine years in Van Diemen’s Land, commented that Montagu’s memory contained ‘a retentiveness so remarkable that when it has been necessary to get up official subjects and particular papers have been missing, he has been accustomed to give their dates, a description of their appearance, and particular expressions they have contained. When the documents have turned up Mr. Montagu has invariably proved to be correct.’5

  Montagu, then, was a model civil servant: hard-working, efficient, knowledgeable, of superior intelligence, capable of taking initiative when necessary and giving sound advice when it was called for. He was also widely acknowledged to be a gentleman who was invariably polite and correct in his manners. He was conservative, a staunch supporter of the Church of England and loyal to his country, the British Empire and its government. Unfortunately for Montagu, it was these very qualities that contributed to his great unpopularity among those who were or are today opposed to what he represented, or seemed to represent, whether in the Cape or in Van Diemen’s Land, where he had also been colonial secretary before his Cape appointment. These attributes also help to explain why he was, and is, a controversial figure among both South African and Australian historians. In a recent academic article, for instance, he has been described as ‘one of the most sinister and repellent figures in the whole of South African history’,6 while generations of Australian historians have vied with each other in depicting him as an insolent, underhanded and self-serving liar. This is despite the overwhelmingly positive assessment of Montagu in the two major monographs about him by W.A. Newman and J.J. Breitenbach, in 1855 and 1959, respectively.7 One of the objectives of my exploration here is to understand why such divergent views exist and to explain why it is necessary to adopt an imperial perspective in considering his sad and tragic history.

  Although Montagu’s Australian years may not be considered by South African readers to be of much significance to his Cape career, they serve as a reminder that individual lives, identities and careers there could be shaped by a variety of transnational influences. This was especially true of those who were, like Montagu, officials serving in different colonies without ceasing to be aware that they were British and part of a network of administrators running a global empire. But it was not only individuals who were shaped by the transnational nature of empire. A consideration of Montagu’s life re
veals that events and policies in the Cape and the Australian colonies were far more closely interlinked than may be supposed and that nowhere was this more evident than in the vexed issue of convict labour.

  * * *

  John Montagu was born in India on 21 August 1797 into a prominent British family. Two of his uncles were admirals, and his family tree included Henry Montagu, first Earl of Manchester. John’s father, Edward Montagu, was a lieutenant colonel in the English East India Company forces who had married Barbara Fleetwood, John’s mother, in India in 1792. Edward was fatally struck by a cannonball while commanding the Bengal Artillery at the Battle of Seringapatam in 1799 against the forces of Tipu, Sultan of Mysore. Thus, John was less than two years old when his father died. He was sent back to England to be educated privately, and in 1814 – at the young age of seventeen – he was appointed to the rank of ensign in the 52nd (Oxfordshire) Regiment of Foot. The following year, he was present at the Battle of Waterloo.

  A great number of those who served as rulers of what became known as the Second British Empire (the Empire after the loss of the American colonies) had either participated in the Napoleonic Wars or, more particularly, served in the Peninsula Campaign or fought at Waterloo with the Duke of Wellington. Fortunately for Montagu, he had joined this exclusive club in the nick of time. His biographer Newman, who was dean of Cape Town in the 1850s and knew Montagu personally, relates that the young ensign had been assigned, immediately before Waterloo, to escort a group of invalids to safety in Brussels. But Montagu palmed off this responsibility to an even more junior ensign and returned to participate in the battle. The 52nd Foot, or Light Infantry, was one of the most famous in the British Army – ‘a regiment never surpassed in arms since arms were first borne by men’, according to Sir William Napier – and won further glory that day by forcing the French Imperial Guard to retreat from the battlefield.8