The Demographics of Empire: The Colonial Order and the Creation of Knowledge

4. Makwerekwere: Separating Immigrants and Natives in Early Colonial Natal

113 4 Makwerekwere Separating Immigrants and Natives in Early Colonial Natal thomas v. mcclendon Modern colonial states found themselves in one of two anxiety-provoking situations .In what Philip Curtin calls“true empire”colonies,small numbers of officials from the imperial center attempted to rule overwhelming numbers of indigenes, who responded with varying degrees of cooperation and resistance. In what Curtin calls “settlement empire” colonies, relatively small numbers of settlers from Europe expropriated land from indigenous peoples, either by conquest or submission or through the decimation of local populations as a result of introduced diseases.1 In its early stages, the southern African British colony of Natal combined characteristics of both colonial models. In the late 1830s, Dutch-speaking emigrants from Britain’s Cape Colony occupied the area and carved out a niche for themselves in the region by defeating the Zulu kingdom, whose heartland lay to the northeast. A few years later, Britain annexed the territory claimed by the Dutch-speakers. Britain then encouraged the immigration of Anglophone white settlers in a movement comparable to the immigration of 1820, when Cape officials encouraged Anglophone settlement along the eastern frontier of its recently acquired Cape Colony. But Natal’s officials continued to rule over an indeterminate number—perceived to be rapidly growing—of Africans who had never formally submitted or been conquered and who were not especially vulnerable to European-borne diseases. From the earliest stages of white settlement and rule in Natal, then, officials and settlers alike frequently expressed their worries over 114 thomas v. mcclendon the origins, identities, customs, and location of indigenous people.These anxieties reflected fundamentally ambiguous attitudes about the presence of Africans and the expansion of African populations. The colonies and settler republics that became today’s South Africa considerably predated the imposition of European empires on most of Africa in the late nineteenth century, and they differed from all but a handful of the later colonies by encouraging permanent European settlement.The southern African colonies and settler republics were all descendants of the Cape Colony, which became part of the British Empire in 1806, during the NapoleonicWars.The Cape Colony was in turn an outgrowth of the Dutch East India Company’s seventeenth-century settlement at Cape Town, where the Mediterranean climate enabled the cultivation of grains and fruits in the European repertoire just as it precluded the introduction of standard African crops. Although the first century and a half of white settlement in the Western Cape had resulted in the political and social devastation of indigenous Khoisan-speaking herding and foraging populations,by the time the British arrived Figure 4.1. Colonial Natal 115 Makwerekwere: Separating Immigrants and Natives in Early Colonial Natal on the scene considerable numbers of white and brown settlers were penetrating inland, raiding cattle, and seeking labor from larger-scale Bantu-speaking farming and cattle-keeping societies to the east and north. On the eastern frontier, this migration of settlers led especially to a series of wars between colonial forces and Xhosa-speaking peoples. In addition, the British arrived in southern Africa in the midst of their own debates about slavery and freedom.Although the debates centered mainly on sugarproducing islands in the Caribbean, they played out in the empire as a whole. As a result, the British takeover of the Cape Colony had a significant impact on labor polices, and the empire’s ability to mobilize decisive military power allowed the colony to strengthen or expand its borders in the drive to absorb more land and labor. Both Britain’s abolition of the international slave trade in 1807 and its emancipation of slaves in 1838 therefore had significant impacts in southernAfrica, as settlers were forced increasingly to look to local populations for labor. At the same time, those local populations stood in the way of the settlers’ desires to exert exclusive control over vast stretches of land. Natal was no exception in regard to colonial anxieties and ambiguities about Africans within and beyond colonial borders, and this is reflected in a key problem in the historiography of early colonial Natal.White observers broadly agreed that from the late 1830s, after white settlement of the region that became Natal colony, the African population increased rapidly.They disagreed, however, about whether this population growth stemmed from communities returning to lands they had fled in the “wars of Shaka,” who founded the Zulu kingdom in the generation before white...