History of South Africa podcast

• Episode 221 - Free State Judges, the Transvaal Civil War and the Architecture of Deliberation

  This is episode 221, 1863, the midst of the Transvaal Civil War. As you heard in episode 220, this was the making of a new president and one who’d take the Trekker Republics into the 20th Century, albeit in the midst of the Anglo-Boer War. There had been a rapid and real effect — as the farmers took up arms against each other, the Transvaal’s economy collapsed. This weakened the government’s ability to back up its stated authority. By now the tiny independent States of Lydenburg and Utrecht had joined the Transvaal accepting the authority of the Transvaal. They had been outliers since the trekkers first arrived in those regions, fifteen years earlier. To recap - In 1859, Transvaal President, Marthinus Wessel Pretorius, was invited to stand for President in the Orange Free State, many burghers there now wanted to unify with the Transvaal. They were mainly worried about how to deal with King Moshoeshoe of the Basotho. The Transvaal constitution that he had just enacted made it illegal to hold office abroad, still Pretorius won the Transvaal election, then Volksraad attempted to side-step the constitutional problems by granting Pretorius half-a-year of leave. They hoped some kind of solution would be found — Pretorius left for Bloemfontein and appointed Johannes Hermanus Grobler to be acting president in his absence. Up stepped Stephanus Schoeman from the Marico region who unsuccessfully attempted to use force to supplant Johannes Grobler as acting president. Schoeman believed that the presidency should have been granted to him as the new Transvaal constitution stipulated that in the case of the president's dismissal or death, the presidency should be granted to the oldest member of the Executive Council. Schoeman was three years older than Grobler. Forward fast to 1863, Kruger had defeated Schoeman at a skirmish outside Potchefstroom. He had also managed to convince some of the supporters of rebel in the Heidelberg district to switch sides, and had ridden back to Pretoria with a local farmer of high standing, Jan Marais. There a council of war determined that rebels like Schoeman were taking advantage of a disagreement between the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The two fledgling Boer Republics could not agree on where the boundary lay between them. Transvaal President Van Rensburg duly assigned Kruger the duty of riding to the Free State to settle the question of the border - and he left almost immediately, taking a group of burghers with him as security. Further West, the Marico district was a hotbed of rebel activity and the commandant there, Jan Viljoen, heard about Kruger’s mission and organised a commando. On the way to Potch, a spy warned Kruger about what awaited. He changed course, and set off with a small detachment to confront Viljoen while Kruger’s 2 IC, Veld kornet Sarel Eloff dashed forward to seize a nearby kopje - the all important high ground. Viljoen is so happened, was also on his way to the very same kopje. One of the aspects of this conflict which is interesting is how Kruger used his spies or messengers as he called them. They were feeding him information daily, information about what Schoeman and Viljoen were up to. The capacity to recon an enemy was one of the defining strengths of the Boer military system, and would be sharpened constantly over the coming century and a half. Folks, there are remarkable resonances in this apparently distant little civil war. When the Union of South Africa was achieved, Bloemfontein was nominated as the seat of the Supreme Court of the union. Cape Town and Pretoria shared power, parliament in Cape Town, Pretoria the seat of government. The Free State is slap bang in the middle — so they got the Supreme Court. These historical instances reflect a legal and political philosophy that, in the aftermath of internal conflict, prioritising national healing through amnesty can be more beneficial than widespread punitive actions.

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• Episode 220 - The Transvaal Civil War of 1862-1864 and Paul Kruger’s Dopping Doppers

  All manner of things are going on — thanks to those folks out there who’ve been sending me notes and support, much appreciated. Episode 220 deals with the start of the Transvaal Civil War, and quite a bit about Paul Kruger’s early life. The American civil war was raging in 1862, and there’s nothing like a war to trigger innovation — if you excuse the pun. Richard Jordan Gatling patented his terrifying Gatling gun featuring multiple rotating barrels driven by a hand crank, allowing operators to unleash a relentless hailstorm of bullets—up to several hundred rounds per minute. Its distinctive mechanical whirr echoed across battlefields, marking a chilling shift toward modern, industrialized warfare. While undoubtedly efficient, the Gatling gun also embodied a grim reality: the age when technology would reshape combat forever had arrived. Just in time to cause more chaos in the already bloody American Civil War. What is less known these days is that there was another Civil War involving descendants of Europeans, and this was going on in South Africa. The AmaZulu had just wrapped up their own recent Civil War as you’ve heard. All manner of brutal and uncivil conduct marked this period in South African history, as neighbour turned against neighbour and the bonds of society frayed. The Boer Republics had been riven by conflict since the days of the Voortrekkers, but in 1862 perhaps inspired in part by the American civil War, the Boer Republics went from squabbling to skirmishing. There’s no proof that the carnage of the United States directly influenced South Africa, but there is proof that the Boers knew about it. Later, during the apartheid period of National Party Rule, this Transvaal Civil War was deposited in historical file 13, almost expunged, because it contradicted the prevailing political ideology where it was all the whites against all the blacks. Anything that detracted from this nationalist agenda was taboo. The modern architects of African nationalism, too, often reshape the past to suit their narratives, discarding inconvenient histories into their own version of "file 13."Compared to the carnage in America, where an estimated 750 000 people died, the South African version was far less bloody. A few dozen dead and wounded. A handful of skirmishes was the real effect, which took place in what is now Gauteng, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and the North West Province - but at the same time as the American Civil War which ran from 1861 to 1865. The Transvaal Civil War started in 1862 and ended in 1864. While less gory, it was emblematic of the frontier streak embedded in the first generation descendants of the Voortrekkers. According to the constitution of the Republic, the Hervormde Church was the state church. Its members alone were entitled to exercise any influence in public affairs. Whoever was not a member of the Hervormde Church was not a fully-qualified burgher. Paul Kruger belonged to the Christelljk-Gereformeerde Kerk founded recently, in 1859, by Dr. Postma, at Rustenburg. This church became known in South Africa as the Dopper, or partly Canting Church. The derivation of the word Dopper is not completely clear, but it was believed to have come from the word dop, a damper or extinguisher for putting out Candles.

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• Episode 219 - The Snarled Chronicle of John Orr, Wodehouse Blues and Mercantile Matters

  This is episode 219 — a new Governor has sailed into Table Bay. Sir Philip Edmond Wodehouse, born in 1811, eldest child of Edmond Wodehouse who married his first cousin Lucy, daughter of Philip Wodehouse, uncle Philip to Sir Philip Edmond. How very Victorian. Queen Victoria herself, who married her first cousin Prince Albert—did allow and even encourage cousin marriage, particularly among royalty and the upper classes to consolidate power, property, and lineage. But it also increased the risk of birth defects by 2 percent, and if both parents carry a recessive gene mutation, their child has a 25 percent chance of expressing the disorder. Scientists have a well-worn phrase for this — its called inbreeding. Wodehouse junior entered the Ceylon Civil Service in 1828, and was installed as superintendent of British Honduras between 1851 to 1854. From there he sailed to British Guiana where he served as Governor between 1854 to 1861 — before heading to the Cape in 1862. It’s illuminating to touch on Sir Philip Wodehouse’s disastrous time in British Guiana. Two years after he took office in the South American country, the Angel Gabriel riots broke out. His implacable opponent was John Sayers Orr, whose nom de guerre was the Angel Gabriel, was half Scottish, half African. Edinburgh’s Caledonian Newspaper of the time reported that his mother Mary Ann Orr was a respectable coloured woman and married to a respectable Scot — John Orr senior. Young John Sayer Orr was rabidly anti-papal, hated the Pope and had an anti-Catholic obsession. He took to the Guianese streets with bullhorn in hand, whereupon the distant Glasgow Herald noted he spoke “rampant anti-papist froth and lies..” Between 1850 and 1851 he popped up in Boston, then New York, Bath in Maine, and Manchester in New Hampshire. In 1854 he was hustled off by police in Boston. Apart from the usual racial insults levelled at him, the Boston police report says he had more impudence than brains .. “…who with a three cornered hat and a cockade on his head, and old brass horn .. took advantage of the political excitement .. travelled around the city …tooting his horn … collecting crowds in the streets, delivering what he called his political lectures and passing around the hat for contributions…” Sounds like a modern political influencer, the bullhorn, the disinformation, the extreme rhetoric, not to mention his hat which is literally crowd sourcing. He was arrested at least 20 times for what was called his international harangues tour — where he’d shout confusing messages like “Scorn be those who rob us of our rights — purgatory for popery and the Pope — Freedom to man be he black or white — Rule Britannia…!!” Bizarrely, the resonances to today’s crazy politics continued, Orr was associated with the fantastically named Know Nothing Party in America. Wait to hear about this bunch, you’ll recognise bits of modern USA. Members of the movement were required to say "I know nothing" whenever they were asked about its specifics by outsiders, and that providing the group with its colloquial name. Before you wonder aloud what relevance all this has, let me quickly point out that the so-called Know Nothing Party had 43 representatives in Congress at the height of its power in the late 1850s. In 1855 this strange 19th Century character pitched up in British Guiana, and Sir Philip Wodehouse had his work cut out. Soon Orr was up to his old tricks, walking about with his bull horn, carrying a flag and a British imperial badge, followed by a group of …. Well .. followers. They were not repeating they Knew Nothing, but attacking the British establishment. We'll also hear about the Angel Gabriel riots. By 1862 Wodehouse who survived a public stoning in Guiana, had arrived in the Cape as Governor. Here he was to face the implacable enemies - the Westerners and the Easterners. Two parts of the Cape that did not get along.

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• Episode 218 - Lifestyle Update 1861 and an Ode to Landscape Motion Intensity and Physiology

  We’re doing a little different thing today, having wondered our way through a few thousand years its time to reflect on a few things. How did people go about their day to day lives, and what was life really like by the mid-19th Century South Africa? This period was dominated by agriculture, it was before the discoveries of most of the valuable minerals that turned the region from a sleepy agrarian backwater into one of the most dynamic economies in the world. Cape Town had been the fulcrum around which all European expansion rotated, the southern tip of Africa had to be navigated by all the empires of Europe, first Portuguese, then Dutch, then English. So naturally Cape Town had developed quite a sense of self importance. Some vicious and malicious Joburgers claim it continues to suffer from a superiority complex today. All in good spirit of course. It was a distant port, and if a Voortrekker or AmaZulu king travelled to Cape Town overland, it was like setting sail into an insecure future. The slow wagons cruising overland from the Waterberg to Cape Town took about as long as the maritime trip from Liverpool to Cape Town — two to three months. Both routes - whether sea or land — were rife with danger. During this perilous chapter of history, seafaring was still a high risk venture. Meanwhile, those who braved the land faced their own litany of dangers — wagons toppled on treacherous trails, lions prowled the edges of camps, venomous snakes struck without warning, and bandits lurked in the shadows. The veld itself, like the capricious ocean, seemed to conspire against the traveller, offering up a relentless gauntlet of threats to navigate. This experience meant the journey men and women were hardy, a tough breed. Most actually walked the trip, sometimes riding their horse, but mostly leading the oxen as the wagon creaked and squeaked, rumbled and tinkled over rocky landscape. African migrants walked from the transOrangia and deeper, into what is now Botswana, all the way to Cape Town to work on farms. That took weeks, sometimes, months. AmaZulu kings like Shaka thought nothing of walking 300 kilometres to visit his distant homesteads, taking a fortnight to recon his land. Physiology was actually different — people had straighter spines at this time in world history — there were fewer eye problems, stronger limbs. But they lived shorter lives in general, medicine was a distant luxury for most. 19th-century Southern Africans, like many pre-industrial populations globally, generally had better postural alignment and physical conditioning compared to sedentary modern denizens of the ethernet. Ethnographic and missionary accounts from the era—such as those by Dr. David Livingstone and Thomas Baines—frequently remark on the exceptional physical endurance of local populations. Many African societies, particularly among pastoralist and hunter-gatherer communities like the San, Tswana, and Zulu, were noted for their upright posture and ease of movement over long distances. The strength needed to walk along the tracks and slopes of southern Africa is well known, the pursuit is replicated today with the wonderful trails around the countryside. But it wasn’t all milk and honey, of course. The fatality rate remained high until the end of the 19th Century, although in South Africa, people were generally living longer, particularly in the Cape.

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• Episode 217 - Lovedale, amaXhosa Chiefs Languish on Robben Island and the American Civil War

  A quick thank you to all those who’ve been donating towards the upkeep of this series, particularly Chereen and Gerhard, your continued support is making a difference. And Adi the winemaker, dankie meneer, and Seyi who’s trying to get Paypal sorted, thanks! Not to mention Chris whose significant support means I can host the series long term on iono.fm - and also a shout out, very modern that, a shout out, to Francois at iono.fm who has patiently helped me out when technical blapses creep in.ventually on April 12 1861, the American Civil War began with the bombardment of Fort Sumner in South Carolina. In sunny South Africa, the American Civil War was going to reverberate in many ways. Firstly, the War created a Cotton Crisis and helped foster investments in Natal cotton farms. Before the war, most of Britain’s cotton came from the Southern U.S., the slave plantations of the south. But the civil war disrupted these supplies, leading to a massive shortage. British textile mills were scrambling by year-end, and south Africa was on the radar along with other regions. The Natal government encouraged cotton growing, and for a brief moment in time, it was seen as a cash crop to grow. But the reality was, the soils, climate and shortage of labour made it unsustainable long term. Importantly, the British reassessed their strategic imperial priorities, and realised that the American Civil War exposed their fragile imperial control in distant lands. Despite the fact that a liberal Government was in power in the Britain, the Cape Colony and Natal became more strategically important as London sought to secure shipping routes and resources. The Suez Canal was still being constructed, the only way to India was around the Cape. It was the influence of slavery and labour policy that had a profound ideological impact on southern Africans. It led to a future connection, and Confederate influence inside South Africa. This is prescient, but important. The Boer Republics in particular took a great deal of interest in the break-away American states. The mindset, the republicanism, and sympathies with the pro-slavery states of the Confederacy all resonated with the Republics, particularly the ZAR. By 1860 Sir George Grey had thrown virtually the entire amaXhosa leadership into prison — Robben Island to be precise. Maqoma, Mhala, Xayimpi who’d overrun the military villages in the Eighth Frontier War, Silo, Xoxo, Stokwe. There were many amaThembu amaGqunukhwebe, Ndlambe, Ngqika chiefs and councillors marooned on Robben Island, where the winter winds howled across the flat land, where there was little protection from the extreme weather.

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