Zululand : past and present / by H.E. Colenso.

  • Colenso, Harriette Emily, 1847-1932.
Date:
[1890]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Zululand : past and present / by H.E. Colenso. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    transaction, and gave the adventurers the best remaining half of the Zulus and their land, on the ground that—not the Zulus, but that “ tve had allowed the case to go entirely by default” through those two years’ delay. Deputations from the principal Zulu tribes protested in every peaceful way possible against the “ Zulu betrayal,” as we Natal colonists call it; and in February, 1887, a British protectorate was declared over the Zulu remainder, developed five months later into full annexation to the British Empire. This was an act which soothed uneasy English consciences, while it created a new danger and pitfall for the Zulus, by converting them summarily and perforce into British subjects, and thus enabling the officials, anxious to justify by success their own fraudulent proceedings, to put the Zulus in the wrong, to denounce as treason, under the new order of things, against Her Majesty’s Government the valid and dutiful and inevitable protests against dismemberment, made by the chiefs on behalf of their people handed over to the Boers. To the rule of the Queen who had given them back Cetsh- wayo the Zulus made no objection. The Blue Book of February, 1887, contains the official report of the acknowledgment by Cetshwayo’s brother and son of the announcement of British protectorate over them. “ Ndabuko and Dinuzulu,” said this message, “ know that the Zulu chiefs and people and Zululand belong to the English from the time of Tshaka ; ” but it goes on to give notice that “ they think it is their duty, by personal representation to superior authority, to make an effort to obtain restoration of the land awarded to the Boers.” The opposition here was not to the Queen’s authority over them, but to her casting half of them away. This Zulu objection to being cut in two was not the only means at hand for putting them in the wrong. They had hitherto been governed by their chiefs under their own laws, unwritten but well known among them, the growth of many generations. Among official suggestions made a few months only before the annexation, we find the following from Mr. Osborn, who has been in Zululand from 1880, almost from the close of the Zulu war—at first as the only English official with the Zulus, now as the chief official in British Zululand, with the titles of resident commissioner and chief magistrate, with power of life and death, and no appeal therefrom :— “ I would point out,” he says, in November, 1886, “ that native law as administered in Natal is not, in many respects, the same as that prevailing in. Zululand ... It appears to me very doubtful whether it [the Natal law] . . . could be suddenly extended over the people in Zululand without con- siderable dissatisfaction to them, and without incurring the s erious risks attaching to such conditions.”