Colony of Natal

• 1. Introduction

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  The Colony of Natal was proclaimed into existence on the 4th of May 1843, carved from territory the British had just seized from a struggling Boer republic on the south-eastern coast of Africa. But the ground beneath that proclamation was anything but settled. Within a year, thousands of Boers would trek back over the Drakensberg mountains rather than accept British rule. Within decades, the colony would be drawn into wars with Zulu kings, a rebellion sparked by a single pound in taxes, and a gold rush that emptied its towns toward the Transvaal. How did a patch of contested coastline become one of the founding provinces of the Union of South Africa? And what happened to the people who were already living there when the British arrived?

• 2. The Traders Who Claimed a Kingdom

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  In 1823, a former Royal Navy lieutenant named Francis Farewell sailed into Port Natal aboard a brig called the Salisbury. He had come looking for trade. What he found convinced him the place was worth far more than a few commercial transactions. He returned with ten companions, among them a young adventurer named Henry Francis Fynn. Most of the party soon retreated to the Cape Colony, but Farewell and Fynn stayed, eventually joined by three sailors: John Cane, Henry Ogle, and Thomas Holstead.

  What followed was extraordinary by any measure. Farewell, Fynn, and the others traveled to the royal kraal of Shaka, king of the Zulus. They cured him of a wound and presented him with gifts. In return, on the 7th of August 1824, they received a document in which Shaka ceded to "F. G. Farewell and Company entire and full possession in perpetuity" of a tract of land that included the port of Natal. Less than three weeks later, on the 27th of August, Farewell declared the territory a British possession.

  For the next decade, the settlement existed in a kind of legal limbo. In 1834, Cape Town merchants petitioned the British government to formalize a colony at Natal, but were told the finances would not allow it. The following year, the settlers around the port named their small town Durban, after Benjamin D'Urban, then governor of the Cape Colony. They numbered about fifty people and sent a memorial to the governor asking for official recognition, a governor, and a council. No official answer came back.

  A naval officer named Allen Francis Gardiner arrived in 1835, motivated chiefly by a desire to evangelize the local population. He founded a mission station on the hill overlooking the bay, and in 1837 the British government granted him authority over the traders. The traders refused to acknowledge it. The Cape government gave him no support. The settlement remained ungoverned in any meaningful sense, and that gap would soon be filled by a very different force entirely.

• 3. Boers, Battles, and Annexation

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  In May 1838, Voortrekkers fleeing British rule in the Cape Colony swept into Port Natal and pushed out the English settlers. They established the Natalia Republic, a state that suffered almost immediately from disorganized government and dangerous relations with the Zulus. Fierce conflict with the Zulu population had already led to the evacuation of Durban once before.

  By December 1841, the British had seen enough. Sir George Thomas Napier, governor of the Cape Colony, issued a proclamation declaring his intent to resume British military occupation of Port Natal. The question of whether Natal would become a formal colony moved to London, where Lord Stanley, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies in the second Peel Administration, wrote to Napier expressing doubt about the commercial prospects but acknowledging that the Boer settlers could not simply be recognized as an independent community. After considerable back-and-forth, Napier's arguments prevailed. In a despatch dated the 13th of December, received in Cape Town on the 23rd of April 1843, Stanley consented to Natal becoming a British colony. A key condition was explicitly stated: there should be no distinction or disqualification in the eyes of the law founded on difference of colour, origin, language, or creed.

  Napier dispatched a lawyer named Henry Cloete as special commissioner to negotiate with the Natal volksraad, the Boer governing council. The mission was treacherous. A substantial faction of Natal Boers, reinforced by men from Winburg and Potchefstroom who crossed the Drakensberg, wanted war rather than submission. Commandant Jan Mocke of Winburg had helped besiege British forces at Durban earlier. There was even a plot to murder Boer leaders like Pretorius and Boshof, who had come to believe that British sovereignty was the only way out of near-total anarchy. Cloete handled the situation with what the sources describe as great tact, persuading the hardliners from Winburg and Potchefstroom to leave by declaring he would recommend the Drakensberg as Natal's northern limit. On the 8th of August 1843, the volksraad unanimously accepted Lord Stanley's terms. By the end of that year, fewer than 500 Dutch families remained in Natal.

• 4. Sugar, Indenture, and a Transformed Colony

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  From 1852 onward, British settlers began introducing tropical and semi-tropical crops along the Natal coastlands: sugar, coffee, cotton, arrowroot, and later tea. Sugar quickly became the dominant industry, but it came with an immediate and fundamental problem. The plantations needed large numbers of workers, and the local Zulu population did not volunteer for plantation labor in sufficient numbers.

  The British solution was to look to India. The first indentured laborers from India arrived in Natal in 1860. Under the terms of their contracts, they were bound laborers for a fixed period; when the contract expired, however, they were permitted to remain in the colony as free settlers. Many did. The Indian population grew rapidly. Former indentured laborers and their descendants became market gardeners, farmers, hawkers, and traders. Among all the states of South Africa, Natal alone at that time offered a formal welcome to Indians.

  By 1893, when a young lawyer named Mohandas K. Gandhi arrived in Durban, Indians already made up nearly half of the non-African population of the colony. By 1904, Indians outnumbered whites in Natal. The 1904 census recorded the full picture: a total population of just over 1,108,754 people, of whom 904,041 were Black, 100,918 Asian, 97,109 white, and 6,686 Coloured. Durban had become, by that point, the home of the largest concentration of Indians outside India itself.

  It was Gandhi who, in 1894, helped establish the Natal Indian Congress, an organization created specifically to fight the legal discrimination that Indians faced in the colony. That founding came one year after the Natal legislature passed a law in 1893 restricting Indians from the vote, a measure that built on suffrage restrictions for Africans dating back to 1865.

• 5. Langalibalele and the Limits of Colonial Law

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  On the 13th of December 1873, colonial authorities captured Chief Langalibalele in northern Natal and transported him to Pietermaritzburg for trial. The episode that led to that arrest began with a bureaucratic demand and escalated into something far more violent.

  Langalibalele was the chief of the Hlubu tribe. He had failed to enforce an 1872 law requiring all Africans in Natal to register their firearms with the local magistrate. When Resident Magistrate John Macfarlane pressed him on the matter, Langalibalele reportedly responded by asking how one could "count the maggots in a piece of beef". He was summoned twice to appear before Theophilus Shepstone, Secretary for Native Affairs, in Pietermaritzburg. Both times he refused.

  The colonial response escalated quickly. On the 30th of October 1873, a corps of volunteer troops moved toward the Hlubi territory. Shepstone issued an order on the 2nd of November giving the Hlubi 24 hours to surrender or face the consequences. Two days later, on the 4th of November, colonial forces and the Hlubi came face to face, and three colonists and one Mosotho man were killed. The colonial forces then dispersed the tribe entirely, seizing cattle and killing not only the men but women and children. The survivors were apprenticed to colonists and removed from their land.

  The Langalibalele affair illustrated how quickly a dispute over firearms registration could become a full colonial military operation. Shepstone himself would be dispatched three years later on a far larger mission: in December 1876, accompanied by just 25 troopers from the Natal Mounted Police, he set out from Pietermaritzburg toward Pretoria to annex the Transvaal on behalf of the British Crown.

• 6. War, Gold, and Turbulent Growth

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  The Witwatersrand Gold Rush of 1884 transformed Natal's economic position almost overnight. Railways had not yet reached the Transvaal border, and Natal offered the nearest overland route for prospectors arriving from the Cape Colony or from Europe. Durban filled with travelers. Pietermaritzburg, then the practical end of the Natal railway line, became the base from which nearly all expeditions toward the goldfields departed. The journey to De Kaap by bullock-wagon took about six weeks, and the business of driving those wagons, called "kurveying," became a substantial industry in itself.

  When the Rand goldfields were proclaimed in 1886, the trade connection with the Transvaal only deepened. Natal colonists were among the first proprietors of the new mines, and for several years many of the largest mining companies kept their chief offices in Pietermaritzburg or Durban. That same year, the railway reached Ladysmith. By 1891 it extended to the Transvaal frontier at Charlestown, opening up the Dundee and Newcastle coalfields along the way.

  The Second Boer War arrived on the 11th of October 1899, when Boer forces seized a Natal train on the Orange Free State border. Boer columns quickly occupied Newcastle. At the Battle of Talana Hill on the 20th of October 1899, British forces under William Penn Symons defeated the Boers outside Dundee but failed to prevent their escape, in part because of what the British described as fraudulent use of Red Cross flags. The British then fell back to Ladysmith, which the Boers surrounded and cut off. The Siege of Ladysmith lasted until the 28th of February 1900, when relief forces under Redvers Buller broke through. In the six weeks before the relief, 200 deaths from disease alone had been recorded; in total, as many as 8,424 people passed through the hospitals. After the war, the districts of Vryheid, Utrecht, and part of Wakkerstroom were transferred from the Transvaal to Natal, adding roughly 7,000 square miles, around 6,000 white inhabitants, and approximately 92,000 native inhabitants to the colony.

• 7. The Bambatha Rebellion

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  In 1905, the Natal legislature imposed a poll tax of one pound sterling on all males over eighteen in the colony, except indentured Indians and Africans paying the existing hut tax of fourteen shillings a year. The tax had been recommended by an inter-colonial Native Affairs Commission that also called for direct taxation of Africans across South Africa. In Natal, it arrived in the context of an already tense relationship between the colonial government and the African population.

  In 1906, the Bambatha Rebellion broke out, with the poll tax serving as the immediate trigger. Bhambatha, a chief in the Greytown district who had been removed from his position for misconduct, kidnapped the regent appointed to replace him, then fled to Zululand where he gathered support. Colonial forces under Colonel Duncan McKenzie, assisted by Transvaal volunteers, pursued and suppressed the uprising. Bhambatha was killed in battle in June 1906; by the end of July, the rebellion had been ended.

  What followed complicated the colony's final years considerably. Dinuzulu, king of the Zulus, was accused by many colonists of having incited the rebellion. He denied any involvement and proclaimed loyalty to the British, though the colonial government grew increasingly convinced that evidence pointed against him. Dinuzulu was no stranger to British punishment: as a young man in 1889 he had been convicted of high treason and exiled, only returning in 1897. Now colonial forces under Duncan McKenzie entered Zululand. Dinuzulu surrendered in December 1907 without resistance and was taken to Pietermaritzburg. His trial did not begin until November 1908, and judgment was not delivered until March 1909. The court found him guilty only on the lesser charge of harbouring rebels. Separately, in February 1908, the governor Matthew Nathan toured Zululand and authorized the release of some 1,500 prisoners taken during the 1906 rebellion.

• 8. Road to Union

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  The question of responsible government had been debated in Natal for years before it was finally settled. In 1882, the colonial government was offered self-rule on the condition that it also take on the costs of self-defense. The colonists declined. In 1883, the legislative council was reorganized into 23 elected and 7 nominated members. By 1890, elections returned a majority favoring self-government, and in 1893 a bill establishing responsible government passed and received imperial approval. At that point the white population of the colony stood at roughly 50,000.

  The first premier under the new arrangement was John Robinson, who had arrived in Natal in 1850, had worked as a journalist, and had served on the legislative council since 1863. Harry Escombe became attorney-general, and F. R. Moor took on native affairs. Robinson remained premier until 1897, the year Zululand was formally annexed to Natal, nearly doubling the colony's size. In 1898, Natal joined the Customs Union already in place between the Cape Colony and the Orange Free State.

  After the Boer War, government changed hands several times in quick succession. George Sutton, described as the founder of the wattle industry in Natal, led a ministry from August 1903. He was replaced in May 1905 by Charles John Smythe, who had previously served as colonial secretary. In November 1906, Frederick Moor took over, and he remained premier until the office ceased to exist. The Native Affairs Commission of 1907 issued a stark assessment: the gap between settlers and the African population had been widening for years, and efforts to reconcile Africans to colonial rule had consistently failed. Its recommendation of a native advisory council with wide powers was partly enacted in 1909, creating four district commissioners and a consultative council. On the 31st of May 1910, the Colony of Natal became Natal Province, one of the four founding provinces of the Union of South Africa.