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History of South Africa podcast

By: Desmond Latham
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  • Summary

  • A series that seeks to tell the story of the South Africa in some depth. Presented by experienced broadcaster/podcaster Des Latham and updated weekly, the episodes will take a listener through the various epochs that have made up the story of South Africa.
    Desmond Latham
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Episodes
  • Episode 177 - The Missionaries position on sex and British administrators refuse to learn

    Episode 177 - The Missionaries position on sex and British administrators refuse to learn
    Jun 30 2024
    We’re plunging into the developments of the 1850s now and this is episode 177.
    In numerology the digits 1 and 7 are significant,1 represents new beginnings and leadership, while 7 is often associated with spirituality and introspection.
    So it’s no mistake this this episode probes spirituality and introspection - and leadership.
    Not that I necessarily ascribe to the tenets of numerology, but its a useful way into a sensitive subject.
    By mid-19th Century, most of the game of the Cape, from the north, the east to the south, had been shot out. The amaXhosa had been driven across the Fish River in 1812, out of the Kat River Valley in 1829, then right past the Keiskamma River in 1847.

    None of the land they lived on west of the Kei was secure, no longer did the sons of the chiefs leave their dad’s homesteads to seek out their own virgin territory because there was none left.
    In the old days, when a man died his hometead was burned down and vacated where as now and the new cattle enclosure was built back to back with the old one. Dwellings were clustered closer together, and not everyone lived near a river unlike the century before.

    This was change, and now drought took on calamatous forms. Before the people could move to water now they were stuck on the landscape. So it was not surprising that given the pressures of people and animals, the first great cattle lungsickness to be registered in this region followed hard on the land losses of 1850 to 1853.

    The amaXhosa men were now labouring for the very people who had supplanted them, deprived of their means of subsistence and independence. Many amaXhosa had worked for the farmers and settlers before this time, and contrary to most reports, many were quite happy to do so because they earned cash, and left when they felt like it.

    The standard of living on these farms determined how long the workers remained at least until this period of our history. The option of leaving at their own discretion eroded rapidly as the access to cattle as wealth eroded. The smaller Xhosaland could no longer support the population. Even within Xhosaland the men and women were now unconsciously working for the settlers by growing forage they sold to the farms, and then making some money to buy textiles and pots and pans.

    Here is the crux of the contradiction in colonialism. That the people who bought the clothing preferred to buy this clothing than manufacture their skin karosses of yore, and yet, by doing so, they were becoming dependent on the cash they made from their labour.

    As colonial intervention increased, a seachange in Xhosa politics took place. The petty rivalries of the various chiefs was encouraged by some of colonial officials, the divide and rule precursor and the new governor Sir Harry Smith was particularly active in his attempts to divide the royal line of the amaXhosa and the commoners.

    This was not working. He’d try to ban lobola, he’d tried to usurp the power of the chiefs, but the commoners did not buy into the British plan. It was such a cynical move that the commoners despite little access to power, preferred their chiefs and an age of proper resistance to colonialism began.
    This is the period that saw the rise of leaders who would be recalled all the way through the struggle period during apartheid, names like Hintsa, Sarhili, Ndlambe, Chungwa, Maqoma, Tyhali and Sandile.
    As I’ve pointed out through this series, the grafting of two types of cosmology together, the ancient African legends and power ethos, with a salvation tale through the story of the cross, featured throughout our history of connection.
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    20 mins
  • Episode 176 - Cape Conservatives vs Radicals in 1850, a synopsis of souls and climate dystopia

    Episode 176 - Cape Conservatives vs Radicals in 1850, a synopsis of souls and climate dystopia
    Jun 22 2024
    This is the period of the utilitarian liberal, not of the democrat, it’s 1850 and in the Cape, a newly ninted constitution had been drafted by the attorney general, William Porter.

    This was based on a nonracial qualified franchise - all adult males who had occupied property worth at least twenty five pounds for a year were eligible to vote. Porter had toiled on the draft of this document for the also newly minted Governor, Sir Harry Smith, who sent it to London.

    Porter later in 1850 had a complete change of heart as utilitarian liberals tend to do, he denounced the option of univesal suffrage — at least for men of all colours — as threatening to the colony with its in his words, “communism, socialisms, and red republicanism which had caused so much mischief in France….”

    There had been an attempted major communist revolution in France in 1848, which spilled over into other parts of western Europe including the land that would become known as Germany. This horrified utilitarians everywhere, no less so in the Cape Colony.

    As the ship bearing Smith’s new constitution headed north, another was heading south and crossed each other somewhere out there on the wild untamed ocean. It was a dispatch from Colonial Secretary Earl Grey who proposed sending Irish convicts to the Cape.

    Smith announced this proposal to the horrified residents of Cape Town and immediately aroused a storm of agitation against the Governor. The settlers had been considering representative government for some time and this suggestion of Irish convicts arriving backfired — driving many more of the moderate thinkers into the arms of those who were agitating for some form of independent governance.
    The colonists regarded the Irish as a threat to their respectability and citizens used the concept as a weapon to attaack the oligarchy that ran the Cape at the time. It was a legislative council, nominated by Governors not elected by the people so it had been tainted constantly by allegations of corruption, nepotism, and a host of other maladies associated with power wielded too long by men who were mostly too greedy.

    The convicts duly arrived on a ship called Neptune, but they were refused entry to Cape Town, and the men sat in chains in Simon’s Bay for five months. Eventually in 1850 the ship was ordered to sail away.

    One of the main antagonists in this crazy story was a man called John Montagu. He had been alarmed by how the Irish convict idea had radicalised even his mild-mannered friends, and so he demanded that Smith reimpose some kind of authority and stop this movement towards representative government.

    Montagu argued that the whole idea was anti-English, not what the British should be supporting, so Smith delayed the implementation.

    But what was going on was very very interesting. The hullabaloo had revealed two very distinct political movements inside the Cape. One was conservative, pro-English and pro-British government, led by Montagu, joined by the big merchants of Cape Town. They were also joined by the Eastern Cape settlers led by their flag bearer, Grahamstown Journal Editor and land speculator Robert Godlonton. Another powerful figure joined this conservative echelon, and that was the newly arrived Anglican Bishop, Robert Gray.

    A newspaper called the Cape Monitor was launched in October 1850 by these conservatives.

    The second political movement were the radicals, both British and Afrikaner, led by John Fairbairn, Christoffel Brand, Francis William Reitz and Andries Stockenstrom. They regarded the conservatives as a corrupt bunch of nepotists, an oligarchy, but they were divided by what to do about frontier policy. Fairbairn used his newspaper the South African Advertiser to defend the rights of blacks, while Brand preferred to defend the rights of the Dutch descendents against the oppression of old-English money elites. Stockenstrom had his own varied approach to both.
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    21 mins
  • Episode 175 - A whip around the world in 1849 and a wide-angle view of Cape Society

    Episode 175 - A whip around the world in 1849 and a wide-angle view of Cape Society
    Jun 16 2024
    This is episode 175 - and we’re back in the Cape circa 1849 and thereabouts.

    Before we dive into the latest incidents and events, let’s take a look at what was going on globally as everything is connected.

    In France, citizens are able to use postage stamps for the very first time, a series called Ceres, which is also a place in the Western Cape. The Austrian Army invades Hungary entering the countries two capitals, which back in 1849 were called Buda and Pest. Next door, Romanian paramilitaries laid into Hungarian civilians, killing 600 in what we’d call ethnic cleansing.

    The second Anglo-Sikh war was on the go in India, and the British suffered a defeat at the Battle of Tooele, while across the ocean in Canada, the Colony of Vancouver Island was established. This is important because that’s where one of my ancestors eloped later in the 19th Century for the metropolis that was Beaufort West.

    Elizabeth Blackwell was awarded her M.D, thus becoming the first women doctor in the United States, and the Corn Laws were officially repealed by the UK Parliament. These were tariffs and trade resctrictions on imported food — including all grains like Barley, wheat and oats. I mention this because the repeal spelled the death knell to British mercantilism — skewing the value of land in the UK, raised food prices there artificially, and hampered the growth of manufacturing.

    The Great Famine of Ireland between 1845 and 1852 had also revealed a real need to produce alternative food supplies through imports. It was this change that led to free trade finally being ushered into Britain — and of course this created opportunities for Southern African farmers.

    It’s also the year the first Kennedy arrives in America, a refugee of the Irish Famine.

    More prosaic perhaps, in New York on a cold February day, President James Knox Polk became the first president to have his photograph taken, while Minnesota became a formal US territory and the settlement of Fort Worth in Texas is founded.

    In July, a slave revolt at the Charleston Workhouse breaks out led by Nicholas Kelly, but plantation owners manage to suppress the revolt and hang 3 of the leaders including Kelly. Later in September, African-American abolitionist and hero Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery.
    And importantly for our story, Sir Benjamin D’Urban, after whom Durban in KZN is named and one of the Governors of the Cape, died in Montreal, Canada.

    Back to the Cape, because the anger at Harry Smith’s new policies were curing, nay, ripening, stewing, brewing amongst the amaXhosa.

    Arriving in the Eastern Cape, Harry was committed to reinstating the D’Urban system with which he had been associated - and which Lord Glenelg back in the colonial office has rejected.

    But now Earl Grey was in the colonial hot seat back home and he gave the thumbs up. Smith set to work sorting out the administration, appointing members of the settler elite to official positions including Richard Southey as his personal secretary. AS a close colleague of Grahamstown Journal Editor and rabid anti-Xhosa Robert Godlonton, he was chosen for his anti-black bias.

    If you remember how Smith had arrived, placing his foot on amaXhosa chief Maqoma’s neck, and his new edicts including the creation of British Caffraria — the previously known ceded territory —you can imagine how he was regarded further east.
    What is not common knowledge these days is that there was great demand for children under the age of ten to work in the Western Cape. Of course, this was not a proper labour environment, and the shift meant that these young boys and girls, and their mothers and fathers, were being turned into indentured labourers. This was a free market situation of the amaXhosa being able to hawk their labour for a fair price.

    Many were told they would be paid a wage, only to find that the terms of contract were vague, they were now receiving unspecified promises and the fabric of rural life based on marriage and female
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    20 mins
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Profile Image for Rosie J

Gripping History expertly narrated

Excellent history lesson from beginning to end, wry commentary on a subject that I as a Brit knew very little about. Its a really worthwhile listen, great stuff !

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