Monday 25 Aug: Over the weekend I’ve been thinking about the broad contours of our work on the Pringle papers, which were largely written in the period of the 1830s to the 1870s. One key feature of the collection is very clear, as a conversation with Sue (much further into the papers than I am) confirms. This is its prevailing silence, that it has little in it that is grist to the WWW mill in any direct way, in the sense that there are almost no mentions of, let alone any descriptive or evaluative comments about, the black people of the Eastern Cape area where these white folks were living, apart from in one very specific way. These white people lived, socialised, bought and sold goods, wrote to each other, and sometimes family and kin back in Britain wrote to them and vice versa, and in doing so they could be almost anywhere, for their letters and related writings do not record the ‘other people’, just their own doings. But then, from time to time, there are ‘Troubles’ in which the ‘Savage Enemy’ erupts into their letters and mentions of ‘Caffers’ and ‘Kafirs’ (and other variant spellings, but always in capitalised and ethnic group terms) also occur.
Rumour occurs too and is commented on in various letters as often taking highly exaggerated forms almost designed to produce dismay and fear. There were also real horrors. For instance, in the events known as the Eighth Frontier War (and see blog 38 and others for issues in this nomenclature), the husband of Maria Hockly (younger sister of Elizabeth Townsend and daughter of Harriet Hockly), James Brownlee, was captured and tortured, his hands cut off, and he was decapitated; and there are many other examples, some at scale. Such things occurred on both sides, and while those committed by whites were more rarely commented on (because surpressed), General Seymour certainly thought that one of the settler commandos intended to massacre some 400 ‘Hottentot’ women and children in the Graaff Reinet area and that his arrival there had prevented this.
What was happening was that many erstwhile friendly and collaborating black and coloured groups joined the ‘rebels’ (this term implies legitimate power on the part of the settlers and the troops defending them, which was precisely what was being denied by the people concerned) and fought in skirmishes, raids, pitch-battles, moving about and usually attacking weak points in the settler/army armoury. The problem then became, as one letter puts it, that it was impossible for white people to tell who was approaching them to ask for work or to trade some goods and who was doing so to attack or kill them.
But the governing silence commented on above both pre-dates and post-dates the Eighth Frontier War. And it is indeed precisely governing, for there is next to nothing in letters or other documents about the people who surely lived and worked with these white people, apart from in a few small and in passing mentions which occur so rarely as almost to be slips of the pen – paying a tax for Anna, an indentured worker, someone ordering goods mentioning that their maids need handkerchiefs, a comment that a ‘Hottentot’ is taking a letter and parcel. There is little else apart from these few sparse mentions.
How different this is from the Forbes papers, which start in 1850 and concern a family figuration living first in Natal and then the Eastern Transvaal near the Swaziland border. These give a very clear sense of the Forbes (also Scots, like the Pringles, and from the same bit of the class structure back in Britain) living among and sharing work with various groups of local black people and especially Swazis. These people are variously strangers, people known, close familiars, and how they are referred to and named is modulated accordingly, as it is with the white people who are strangers or known or familiars. At points there is some unrest in the Eastern Transvaal that the Forbes letter-writers comment on, and they also recognise this is often more rumour than actual fighting and also largely involves the Swazis and other black groups and polities. There is however no sense of ‘Savage Enemy’ at all, and while there is the prevalence in these records of ethnic identifiers, and over time some of these take on tones of irritation or dismissal, the complete separation coupled with occasional demonisation that comes through in the Pringle papers is just not there. The absence and silence in the Pringle writings is distinctive and resounds, and is almost certainly not confined to the Pringles as such but concerns white people in these environs more generally.
Is this a case of ‘the Frontier’ as explanation? Ho-hum ho-hum. I don’t like ‘one size fits all’ kinds of explanations, for there are always many exceptions to be found, and in the Eastern frontier case I mention only Dr John Philip, Andries Stockenstrom and Charles Lennox Stretch in this respect (please look them up, no time to explain). Also I don’t like determinist explanations, and the frontier explanation has been a particularly simplistic annoyance in the South African context (eg. the Boers were racist because they were on the frontier with the Savage Enemy) and shouldn’t be reverted to in the case of frontier English-speaking settlers. In addition, the Pringles and the Forbes are not the universe even regarding the small number of whites in South Africa over this period, and alongside each of these collections the writings of many other white people need to be placed and the genealogies of their living and writing explored systematically. But there certainly seems to be something that produces different kinds of patterning in how matters of ethnicity and ‘race’ are inscribed by these different figurations of white folks.
Last updated: 25 August 2014
