CHAPTER II.

NATIVE POLICY IN NATAL. LAWS, CUSTOMS, AND RELIGION OF THE ZULUS.

The protection of the natives was the professed object of the British Government in taking possession of Natal. The conquests of Chaka had driven no fewer than 100,000 fugitives to the westward of the Tugela river, and how to rule this vast and fast increasing number of natives soon became a problem fraught both with difficulty and danger. Mr. Theophilus Shepstone, son of a Wesleyan missionary, thoroughly conversant with the Kafir language, customs, manners, and habits, was appointed to take charge of the numerous natives of Natal. His policy can be very briefly described. It was to keep all the coloured races entirely distinct from the white population. They were collected in locations, and governed by their own laws, through their own chiefs, under Mr. Shepstone as the great chief. Large tracts of country, rugged and mountainous, were set apart for the various tribes, and there, in an Italian climate, and in the lap of a most productive and generous soil, they increased and multiplied. Christianity and real civilization were ignored, and a most dangerous imperium in imperio created. The wretched refugees who fled from the Zulu tyrant found their lot in Natal incomparably more happy than in the precarious existence of former days. Their easy, savage, sensuous life made them useless citizens, and when labour was required for the sugar plantations on the coast, it had to be obtained from India. However smoothly and well the native policy seemed to work, it soon became very evident that the 20,000 white people of Natal were really seated on a political volcano. Three hundred thousand heathen savages of an alien race had the power to rise and destroy them at any moment, and it was impossible to be sure that they might not at any time have the inclination. All the checks which religion and civilization place on men had been deliberately cast aside. No doubt the Zulu monarch was feared; but there can be no doubt also that if the dread paramount ruler of the Zulu race had at any time crossed the Tugela as a conqueror, tens of thousands of his own race in the colony would have joined him out of fear, and hastened to prove their loyalty by the massacre of every white inhabitant of Natal. This is no fanciful idea, but sober earnest fact.[8]

There was no difficulty at first in subjecting to proper control the broken, dispirited bands of refugees, who sought shelter, food, and protection in Natal; and if right methods had been adopted, one of the finest races of the African continent would have been raised from a state of loathsome degradation to one of civilization—saved from heathenism themselves to become coadjutors with the white races in raising the country to real prosperity. In place of this, the cruel slavery of polygamy was permitted, which allows the men to live in independent idleness by means of the severe drudgery of their oppressed wives. Grossly impure and inhuman laws and practices, including the vile superstitions of witchcraft, were tolerated and allowed. No country could advance under such circumstances, and the colony of Natal, therefore, remains at the present day what it has always been—immeasurably behind the Cape of Good Hope; a land of samples in which nothing really succeeds, and where sugar, which forms its principal export, is even now a doubtful experiment, on which labour imported from India at enormous cost has to be employed; a lovely country, whose fertility is almost as great as its beauty, but cursed by a most unchristian, wicked, and foolish system of government, so far as the great bulk of the population is concerned. It would have been very easy at the outset to establish comparatively small locations, presided over by British magistrates, who would have administered justice according to British law. If, in addition, title-deeds had been given in such a manner as to give individual rights, then, in the words of the Rev. W. C. Holden,[9] the large number of natives within the colony might have been converted into men who would take a real interest in the country and soil, for the defence of which they would fight and die. They would have become a strong wall of defence against the Zulu on the east, and the Amaxosa on the west, instead of a source of continual danger and alarm.[10] Slavery was abolished everywhere throughout the British dominions, with the one exception of Natal. There 50,000 women were sold for wives to the highest bidder, as horses, cattle, and goods at an auction mart, under the special sanction and special arrangement of the Queen's Government.

Before proceeding further, it is necessary to pass briefly in review the laws, manners, and customs of the Zulu race. Without a knowledge of this subject it will be perfectly impossible to appreciate the policy of Sir Bartle Frere, or to understand either the real causes of the war, or of many events in its progress. We have seen that Chaka, the Zulu conqueror, formed a great military nation. His successors were specially warriors, and as the people chose similar weapons to those with which the ancient Romans conquered the world, so, like that people, were they fully animated with the feeling that virtus, or the highest possible merit, consisted in bravery in the field of battle. The Boers despised the enemy, and hundreds of their bravest men fell victims. Almost about the same time, the English settlers at D'Urban made the same mistake, and 2000 of their Kafir allies, as well as several of their own number, were slaughtered and left to be devoured by beasts of prey on the hills of Zululand. History repeats itself: Lord Chelmsford made the same mistake, which was expiated in the blood of hundreds of British soldiers on the field of Isandhlwana.

Among the Zulus every female child is so much property, and in this respect