Plans for creating
Black Englishmen

The Mlanjeni War was eventually extinguished during the Honourable Sir George Cathcart's term of office, but the conflagration had cost the British Treasury a small fortune. The Colonial Office therefore needed a complete rethink on the future of Southern Africa.

It arrived at a multifaceted solution. This included recognising the Boers beyond the Vaal River as independent, abandoning the Orange River Sovereignty, and making the Cape Colony more responsible for its actions by granting the colonists a Representative Government.

The responsibility for ushering in the new system was then handed to Sir George Grey, the imperial blue-eyed boy who was at that moment wallowing in the confidence of the Colonial Office after his apparent New Zealand success.

When he arrived at the Cape, however, Sir George was already armed with his own personal programme for British Kaffraria — even without visiting the frontier. It seems that he had done his homework well — but his plan was one based largely on his earlier arrangements with the Maoris of New Zealand.

He wanted to convert the amaXhosa to his own ideal of civilization and Christianity. To do this, he argued, he needed to "open up" the territory and create employment. This would make the indigenous people dependent upon the British style of economy and at the same time would break the power of the Chiefs.

For all this to happen, however, he needed institutions of what he termed a "civil character" — schools, hospitals and mission stations — which he believed would have a dramatic acculturating effect.

Yet the key feature of Sir George's conception — and around which all else revolved — was an intense immigration scheme. The Governor ultimately wanted some 5,000 retired British military officers — with their wives and children — to settle in British Kaffraria.

Not only would that create a White population of some 25,000 people in the region — once the women and children were included — but the men, being ex-soldiers, would form the nucleus of a frontier army should it be needed.

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