South Africa: better ‘the Hottentot at the hustings’ than ‘the Hottentot in the wilds with his gun on his shoulder’

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the expansion of the British Empire and early political developments in the British settler colonies in South Africa from the late 1830s to around 1870. The British took over the Cape Colony from the Dutch by a combination of military conquest and formal cession by treaty; the colonial annexations of Xhosa land were similarly based on both military conquest and cession by treaties following the various frontier wars. By the 1830s, the British authorities who had taken over the Cape from the Dutch found themselves trying to govern a society that was a complex mixture of ethnic populations, including White settlers, Khoisan, the Xhosa and other African groups. The British Government granted representative government to both the British colonies in South Africa, Cape and Natal, in the 1850s. A comparison of the minority rule of British settlers in the settler colonies of Natal and Cape, and a discussion of the inclusion of colonists and Indigenous people on the basis of property franchise in representative governments, are also presented.