Note Back to Main Text — Chapter I

The facts of Frere's supersession and recall are notorious: the story is too recent to need telling at length. We know now that, apart from the actual discovery of the Witwatersrand gold-mines, all that he foresaw and foretold has been realised in the events which culminated, twenty years later, in the great South African War. The military power which at that time (1877-80) stood in the way of South African unity under the British flag was the Zulu people. The whole adult male population of the tribe had been trained for war, and organised by Ketshwayo into a fighting machine. With this formidable military instrument at his command Ketshwayo proposed to emulate the sanguinary career of conquest pursued by his grandfather Tshaka;[7] and he had prepared the way for the half-subdued military Bantu throughout South Africa to co-operate with him in a general revolt against the growing supremacy of the white man. Frere removed this obstacle. But in doing so he, or rather the general entrusted with the command of the military operations, lost a British regiment at Isandlhwana. This revelation of the strength of the Zulu army was, in fact, a complete confirmation of the correctness of Frere's diagnosis of the South African situation. His contention was that England must give evidence of both her capacity and her intention to control the native population of South Africa before she could reasonably ask the republican Dutch to surrender their independence and reunite with the British colonies in a federal system under the British flag. A native power, organised solely for aggressive warfare against one of two possible white neighbours, constituted therefore, in his opinion, not only a perpetual menace to the safety of Natal, but an insuperable obstacle to the effective discharge of a duty by the paramount Power, the successful performance of which was a condition precedent to the reunion of the European communities. The only point in dispute was the question whether the powers of Ketshwayo's impis had been exaggerated. To this question the disaster of Isandlhwana returned an emphatic "No."