The Missing Link in Theal's Career: The Historian as Labour Agent in the Western Cape
| Autor: | Christopher C. Saunders |
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| Rok vydání: | 1980 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | History in Africa. 7:273-280 |
| ISSN: | 1558-2744 0361-5413 |
| DOI: | 10.2307/3171665 |
| Popis: | his work as a labour agent in the western Cape. Bosman mentioned that he visited Stellenbosch and Tulbagh in 1878, but did not say what he was doing there. Babrow admits that she did not know what his first formal civil service post was.2 Immelman misleadingly suggests that it was a post in the Colonial Treasurer's Department, when in fact he did not join that department until March 1879.3 This ignorance is not altogether surprising for, while Theal himself in his later published work and in the evidence he gave to parliamentary select committees in 1895 and 1906 provided a fair amount of information about his career before May 1878 and after March 1879, he did not say what he had done between those dates, almost as if he did not wish to remember it. In his History of the Boers in South Africa, indeed, he wrote that "when the war was over [referring to the Cape-Xhosa war, which ended in May 1878] I asked for and obtained the charge of the Colonial Archives preserved in Cape Town," which is totally inaccurate. In the relevant volume in his History of South Africa, he mentioned that he was asked to superintend Oba's Xhosa in the Victoria East district in December 1877, and later that he had served as special magistrate at Tamacha in the King William's Town district in 1881, but there are no other references to his own career.5 And yet in this volume he devoted four not wholly accurate paragraphs to the episode with which he was involved in 1878-79, without once hinting that he had had a personal role in it." What, then, was this work that Theal did and why was he so reluctant to mention it in later years? Some of the story can be pieced together from the official letters he wrote in this period, a dozen or more of which survive in the Cape Archives. Further research may in the future enable a fuller story to be told. Towards the end of 1877 the government asked the forty year old Theal, then a senior teacher at Lovedale, to try to secure the loyalty of Oba (or Ngonyama, known for his bravery as "the lion") and his people, at a time when there were fears that all the western Xhosa would rebel. The war did spread to the Ciskei later that month, when the main body of Ngqika went into rebellion |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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