D
AMARALAND& O
VAMBOLANDI make bold to state that out of a given number of white bachelors, who have been transported from their own country and transplanted in a black man’s land, nine-tenths of them in less than five years will take to, and practise miscegenation with black women.1
Robert Grendon’s declamation may seem passé today, but when first read by race- obsessed South Africans in 1914, it touched a raw nerve. The editor of the mission- owned newspaper ought to have anticipated a howl of protest from readers. It came.
Grendon’s ideological adversary was Lewis Eccles Hertslet—a young white churchman and vociferous segregationist. His book, The Native Problem: Some of Its Points and Phases—self-published from his rural home in northern Natal—had recently emerged.2 Hertslet deplored his opponent’s ‘specious arguments’ and ‘the low moral standard of his doctrines’.3
Others scrambled to the fray. ‘Student’ considered Grendon’s letters of ‘doubtful taste’, while ‘Lover of Decency’ protested that he had not meant his subscription to cover ‘such very unedifying effusions’.4 The editorial response was predictable, overdue, and conveyed in a single line:
This correspondence is now closed.5
But Grendon, the advocate of ‘honourable and upright miscegenation’,6 had had his say. He might be gagged through the exercise of an editor’s prerogative, but he
1 ‘Miscegenation’, Izwe la Kiti 3:82 (15 April 1914) 6.
2 The date of publication, although not shown, must have been c.1912, since the Native Industrial Exhibition, 1911, is mentioned in the text as having taken place (29), and the newspaper, Izwe la Kiti, published in Dundee from 1912–14, is described as about to be launched (45).
3 Izwe la Kiti 3:89 (3 June 1914) 5.
4 Izwe la Kiti 3:90 (10 June 1914) 6; 3:86 (13 May 1914) 6.
5 Izwe la Kiti 3:89 (3 June 1914) 5.
6 Izwe la Kiti 3:84 (29 April 1914) 6.
could not be cowed. He stood unassailable on the high ground, because he spoke from personal knowledge, which no barrage of prudery or moral outrage could gainsay.
In this polemic which raged from February to June 1914, Grendon makes the claim that most bachelors—white or black—repudiate fastidious pretensions to racial
‘purity’ when the special exigencies of time and space conduce to their forming mixed-race sexual unions. He also pours scorn upon Hertslet’s contention that
‘miscegenation’ is anathema throughout Africa. On the contrary, it has been ‘the policy of nearly every Bantu Chief’ to seal alliances with white interlopers by marrying to them females from within their own extended households.
He proceeds to marshal historical precedents in support of this assertion: the manikongo of Kongo kingdom in the earliest period of Portuguese intrusion into west central Africa (late 15th–early 16th century); King Mbandzeni of the Swazi (c.1857–
89); King Cetshwayo of the Zulu (c.1826–84). These African potentates, he maintains, sanctioned or actively encouraged marriage alliances with white intruders.
He reiterates the quintessential case of John Dunn, polygamous ‘white chief’ of Zululand.1
But there is another example of equivalent weight that he seems studiously to avoid: it is Herero chieftain Maharero (c.1820–90; plate 2a), near whose Okahandja werft in southwest Africa, Robert Grendon passed much of his childhood in the 1870s. Even as an adult, Grendon’s mind cannot have failed to gravitate to his early impressions of ‘Damaraland’—the name by which Hereroland was commonly called in the nineteenth century. Robert knew that in taking to wife Maria—a Herero woman—his Irish father was in no way exceptional among the traders, hunters, and missionaries of that region, or indeed of any part of Africa beyond the ambit of colonial strictures. Robert’s failure to cite Maharero’s case as empirical evidence is rendered poignant by a family tradition that identifies Maharero as none other than Robert’s own grandfather.2
1 Izwe la Kiti 3:82 (15 April 1914) 6.
2 J. Hoskins notebook 1.
Joseph William Grendon (1834–1926) is a prime example of the nine-tenths of
‘white bachelors’ who—according to his son—choose to cohabit with African women when left to follow their instincts in ‘a black man’s land’. Maharero in turn is one of those traditional African leaders who for reasons of policy countenance, or actively encourage, the practice of ‘miscegenation’ within their domain. Diplomatic alliance through marriage was Maharero’s favoured strategy for extending and consolidating his influence.1 In all, he personally took more than sixty wives, and by this means,
‘any chiefs who had been outside the circle [of his influence] were drawn into it’.2 When white swashbucklers muscled into Damaraland, he may well have attempted to neutralize any potential threat they posed through similar marriages.
Wolfram Hartmann has made a study of the sexual encounter between white males and black females in precolonial and colonial Namibia, and finds ‘a close connection between friendship, diplomatic and economic ties and the offering of women by indigenous men of authority to white men’.3 He foregrounds the agency of indigenous leaders in actively drawing white traders and hunters into the traditional oupanga institution—a covenant of friendship between males, often sealed when one party furnished the other with females for sexual purposes. This was part of a wider programme of alliance and reciprocal hospitality that ‘seems to have been a part of the social fabric’ in precolonial times.4
Hartmann is backed up by documentary evidence. The traveller Francis Galton, for instance, complains that ‘it is really a great drawback to African explorings that a traveller cannot become friendly with a chief without being requested and teased to receive a spare wife or a daughter in marriage, and umbrage taken if he does not consent’. Galton finds the Herero ‘very hospitable in this way’.5
Any children conceived as the result of an oupanga relationship would be regarded
‘as legitimate offspring by the acknowledged husbands, the social fathers’, although on occasion the biological father might request and receive legal paternity of his child
1 Pool, Samuel Maharero, 28.
2 Vedder, South West Africa, 325–26.
3 Hartmann, ‘Sexual Encounters’, 152.
4 Hartmann, ‘Sexual Encounters’, 140.
5 Galton, quoted in Hartmann, ‘Sexual Encounters’, 141–42.
with a gift of cattle to his friend.1 Maharero evidently looked upon the offspring of an oupanga partner—such as Joseph Grendon appears to have been—as belonging properly to him. In 1876, he complained to a visiting diplomat from the Cape Colony, that ‘whites come into the country, as they represent, by consent of British Government, “marry” Damara [or, properly, Herero] women, have children, and then leave them, taking away the children, and paying the mother something by way of compensation’.2 It is noteworthy that the chief voices no objection to white males begetting progeny by African women: rather it is their abandonment of these women and the unlawful removal of their children that he finds objectionable.
Prior to Germany’s imperial land-grab of southwest Africa in the 1880s, perhaps the majority of white males there cohabited with Khoi, Oorlams, Baster, Herero, or Ovambo wives. Mixed-race unions drew little adverse criticism—except from those missionaries who considered them immoral. Besides Kongo kingdom, Swaziland, and Zululand, Robert Grendon might have cited the apposite case of his childhood home, Damaraland, in rebuttal of Hertslet’s unsubstantiated claim that ‘the great bulk of the natives dislike, and are opposed to miscegenation’.3 Perhaps he avoids doing so for fear that a lapse into autobiography would result, which might mar the air of objective detachment his polemic needs if it is to accomplish its aim.
Throughout his life, in Damaraland and elsewhere, Robert Grendon’s observations on the interplay of sexuality, race, and politics were firsthand and penetrating. He could with justice avow: ‘I know and I have seen more on that score than Dr Hertslet professes to define or reveal’.4 Personal observation, together with his study of precolonial African history, persuaded him that, ‘with few exceptions the history of Bantudom … has been one steady course of miscegenation’.5
1 Hartmann, ‘Sexual Encounters’, 145.
2 Palgrave, Commissions, 12.
3 ‘Miscegenation’, Izwe la Kiti 3:82 (15 April 1914) 6.
4 ‘Miscegenation’, Izwe la Kiti 3:81 (8 April 1914) 6. Emphasis in original.
5 ‘Miscegenation’, Izwe la Kiti 3:82 (15 April 1914) 6.
Joseph Grendon was born in Dublin in 1834.1 He grew up a native of St Thomas Parish in Dublin County.2 His surname—originally ‘de Grendon’—points suggestively to the Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland, and so, like his son Robert, Joseph may have had to deal with a culturally- and politically-ambivalent identity. He appears to have been Anglican rather than Catholic.3 There is also no reason to believe that he flaunted ‘the green’; yet he could not conceal his Irish origin, and it was observed by others. The Swede, Capt. T. G. Een, who met Grendon in Ovamboland in 1866, notes that he was Irish as does the missionary, Carl Hugo Hahn.4 Hahn’s wife, Emma (1814–80), who fostered Grendon’s children from 1870 to 1872, refers to his ‘Irish enthusiasm’.5 On the other hand, Grendon’s occasional employer, C. J. Andersson, who makes several references to him in his diaries, passes over his Irishness, while he describes another Irish employee as a ‘highly imaginative native of the Emerald Isle’.6
According to Julinda Hoskins (1917–2005), her great-grandfather Joseph Grendon left Ireland when he was ‘only eighteen years of age’—i.e., circa 1852 or 1853, or a few years after the Potato Famine (1845–47).7 This detail dovetails nicely with British Army records, which indicate that he enlisted at Liverpool on 18 October 1853.8 In the nineteenth century, burgeoning Liverpool was the first port of call for many emigrant Irish. The same document describes Joseph’s occupation as that of
‘labourer’—which fact, along with his junior rank, would seem to debunk the oral
1 Joseph Grendon’s death notice gives his age as ‘92 years 6 months’ at the time of his death on 9 Sept.
1926. He was therefore born around March 1834 (KAB, MOOC 6/9/3022 ref. 12486). This document is slightly at odds with Grendon’s discharge papers from the British Army in India, where his age in late 1859 is shown as twenty-four. If the latter document is followed, his year of birth is 1835. I have followed the death notice in the Cape Town Archives, because of its greater precision.
2 Grendon, Joseph. Military discharge papers, 1859–60. (British Library: India Office Records IOR/L/MIL/11/281/674).
3 Wolfram Hartmann (‘Sexual Encounters’, 157) believes Grendon to have been Catholic, but he presents no evidence to this effect. Grendon’s sons are entered as adherents of the ‘English Church’ in the Zonnebloem College admission register (Zonnebloem Papers, D1.2). His daughter, Mary Ann, was
‘very Church of England’, according to her grandniece, Lena Maryann Dunnett (Interview, 9 Nov.
2005). In view of the role played in Irish history by William of Orange, it seems unlikely that an Irish Catholic would have named one of his sons William, as Grendon did.
4 Een, Memories, 68 (The editors of the English translation point out that through the mistaken typesetting of a single character in the original Swedish edition, Grendon’s nationality is given as Icelandic, but the author clearly means Irish); ‘Quellen zur Geschichte von Südwest Afrika’, vol. xxvi, 358: Tagebuch über die Reise zu den Ovambo im Jahre 1866 von Missionar C. Hugo Hahn.
5 E. S. Hahn, Letters, 348: Emma to her sister Matilda, Okahandja, 23 Sept. 1872.
6 Andersson, Notes of Travel, 95.
7 J. Hoskins notebook 2. Apparently ignorant of the years that he spent in India, Mrs Hoskins is mistaken in thinking that Joseph Grendon went directly to Damaraland.
8 Grendon, Joseph. Military discharge papers, 1859–60 (British Library: India Office Records IOR/L/MIL/11/281/674).
tradition that he hailed from a ‘Grendon Hall’ or ‘Grendon Castle’ in Ireland.1 By the same token, he is unlikely to have been a remittance man, as suggested by one of his descendents.2
Grendon served six years in ‘Her Majesty’s Indian Army’, and so was stationed in India during the Indian (Sepoy) Mutiny of 1857–58. That campaign over, he claimed his discharge in 1859, ‘being unwilling to serve in H. M.’s Indian Forces’. The last date on his discharge is 26 January 1860. He had served in the 3rd Madras European Regiment (also known as the 3rd Madras Fusiliers), and his discharge was signed at Fort St George, Madras. His ‘general conduct as a Soldier’ is described as having been ‘Good’, and his physical appearance is reduced to four elements: height (5 feet 55/8 inches), hair complexion (light brown), visage (fresh), and eyes (grey). He was still a private (No. 478 of his Regiment), when along with more than 50,000 others, he received the Indian Mutiny medal. The Prince of Wales remarked upon this medal when he spotted Grendon wearing it—presumably at a parade of military veterans—
during a Royal Visit to Cape Town in the 1920s.3
The white and coloured branches of the Grendon family both remember that their ancestor was a soldier before settling in Damaraland. Cape Town’s Grendons remember their ancestor’s involvement in the Indian Mutiny, but Julinda Hoskins of Pietermaritzburg, although she states that ‘when he left the army, he went to Damaraland’, confuses the British Army with the German, no doubt assuming that since Damaraland subsequently fell under the German Imperial yoke, the Army to which her great-aunt Mary Ann Grendon used to refer when recalling the family’s history must have been German.4
Prior to the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869, shipping between Britain and her eastern possessions rounded Africa at the Cape of Good Hope. It is quite possible
1 The fact that this legend survives quite independently among descendents of both Joseph Grendon’s white and his coloured families—who lost contact with each other three or four generations ago—
suggests that it originated in Joseph Grendon himself. To be fair to Joseph, the possibility should be recognized that he did not mean to associate himself personally with the eponymous ‘Hall’ or ‘Castle’.
He may merely have intended to indicate that his family were a sept of an ancient family that once lived there. There is a Grendon Hall in Northamptonshire; I have not been able to trace one in Ireland.
2 Interview: John Grendon, 4 Oct. 2006; interview: Jane Mackenzie, 27 May 2006.
3 Grendon, Joseph. Military discharge papers, 1859–60 (British Library: India Office Records IOR/L/MIL/11/281/674); Day, ‘Indian Mutiny Medal Roll’ (online); interview: John Grendon, 4 Oct.
2006.
4 J. Hoskins notebook 1.
that Grendon went ashore at Cape Town on his ‘homeward’ journey from India.
Perhaps it was here where he learned that gainful employment might be had in
‘Damaraland’, then still ‘a black man’s land’—to use his son Robert’s expression—in southwest Africa (present-day Namibia).
Several Cape Town merchants built their business empires by outfitting hunting and trading expeditions to regions beyond the Colony’s borders. Snug behind respectable façades, they accrued and dispensed the venture capital necessary to launch these costly undertakings. They supplied the ‘kafir truck’ (trade goods), the Cape brandy, the guns, and the ammunition. They also doubled as wholesale purchasers of ivory, hides, feathers, guano, and copper, etc. At a later period, Joseph Grendon describes these Cape entrepreneurs as ‘hav[ing] made their fortunes’ by running ‘brandy and other intoxicating liquors from the Cape for trading purposes with the natives, chiefly Hottentots and Bastards’, of southwest Africa. While these men luxuriated within Table Mountain’s reassuring shadow, ‘the poor trader’ in the remote interior ‘went to the wall’,1 although it was he who had borne the burden and the heat of the long day.
A motley assortment of white newcomers turned up in southwest Africa in the mid-nineteenth century. Some came to win souls for Christ; others to strip the region of its marketable natural products—pre-eminently ivory, but also guano, cattle, hides, ostrich feathers, and copper.2 Some made fortunes—and lost them with equal facility.
Many married—or merely cohabited with—local black women. The adventurers, who treated the centrally-located Otjimbingwe mission station as their base, ranged as far afield as southern Angola, the Okavango delta, the Zambezi River, and Lake Ngami.
In general, they were a rough, hard-living, heavy-drinking, larger-than-life lot, who dramatically increased the potential for violence in southwest Africa through their wholesale importation of guns, ammunition, and intoxicants. Emma Hahn refers to them as ‘a certain class of white men [whose] loss will rather be a blessing than otherwise to baptised and heathen’.3
1 Cape, Damaraland Affairs, 40.
2 Diamonds were discovered at a later period.
3 E. S. Hahn, Letters, 349: Emma to her sister Matilda, Okahandja, 23 Sept. 1872.
Joseph Grendon was about twenty-five when he arrived in Damaraland in 1860.1 His first employer on record was the big-game hunter Smuts, a Cape colonial.2 From February to April 1861, Smuts was at Otjimbingwe, at which time Grendon was likely in his employ. In July, the explorer-artist, Thomas Baines complains that Smuts and Cator have allowed an Oorlams chief to bully them into paying ‘for liberty to pass through’ his territory. They have been ‘coerced’ despite their earlier bravado about never succumbing to extortion. Because of their ‘unmanly submission’, they have
‘establish[ed] a precedent which the Hottentots will not be slow to understand and make use of’.3 Later in the year, Smuts and his partner Cator hunted in the interior.
Grendon may have accompanied them on that occasion; alternatively Smuts may have detailed him to look after his interests at or near Otjimbingwe.4
In evidence given before a Cape Colonial commission of enquiry into the ‘Affairs of Damaraland’ in 1881, Grendon narrated an incident that occurred shortly after his arrival in Damaraland—most probably in 1861.5 The narrative is framed, in that Grendon repeats how he recounted it in about 1869 to ‘Amadamap’—the Nama name for Riarua (c.1825–99; plates 2a, 2b), Maharero’s half-brother, one of his chief councillors, and the captain of his troops.6 (The missionary Viehe calls him Maharero’s ‘Bismarck’.7) Grendon reminded Amadamap of the occasion of his first visit to Okahandja, then dominated by the Afrikaner Oorlams—partly-Westernized Khoi immigrants from the Cape Colony who treated some of the Herero tribes as vassals:
I was a servant to a white man. In the evening my master desired me to make coffee, put stools,
&c., for the Hottentot [i.e., Khoi] Chief and people when they came down to visit him. You, Maharero, and your brothers came down also, but did not come near the wagon, fearing the
1 Since he left Damaraland for good in January 1878, and claimed to have been ‘seventeen or eighteen years in the country’, his arrival in Damaraland cannot postdate 1860 (Cape, Damaraland Affairs, 40, 42). Since he was discharged from the British Army in India early in 1860, his arrival in Damaraland cannot predate that year.
2 Andersson records that Grendon was in Smuts’s service in 1861 (Andersson Papers: Diary, 26 Dec.
1861).
3 Baines, Explorations, 49–50, 72–73.
4 Tabler, Pioneers, 99.
5 Since Maharero abandoned Okahandja in 1863, the incident cannot postdate that year. Grendon’s employer seems to have been Smuts, whose employ he left late in 1861 (Cape, Damaraland Affairs, 43; Andersson Papers: Diary, 26 Dec. 1861).
6 Vedder, South West Africa, 438, 506.
7 Pool, Samuel Maharero, 31.
Hottentots, your masters; but when they left you came to the wagon and begged tobacco, &c., of the white man, even from me you begged.1
The old kaptein (chief) of the Afrikaner tribe,2 Jonker Afrikaner, died on 18 August 1861, and the ‘Hottentot Chief’ to whom Grendon refers may have been his son, Christian Afrikaner. Grendon’s employer—probably Smuts—was at Okahandja in order to trade with the Afrikaner ‘Hottentots’.
Maharero, then a relatively minor Herero chief, had reason for ‘fearing the Hottentots’. The traveller James Chapman states that the Afrikaner Oorlams ‘often butcher whole villages of these wretched [Herero] people, who are scarcely ever known to resist’.3 In the massacre of Okahandja (1850), perpetrated by Jonker and his men, only the village of Tjamuaha—Maharero’s father, who died in 1861—was spared, on account of a pact he had made with the Afrikaners.4 Emma Hahn was present in the country when ‘no less than 31 villages of Ovaherero’ were annihilated by the Afrikaners.5 The carnage was terrible. While alive, Herero women had their hands and feet hacked off so that the Oorlams and their allies might more easily remove their copper bangles.6 By allying themselves with the enemy, Tjamuaha’s people purchased a reprieve, but a very insecure one.
Maharero deemed the begging of tobacco in no wise demeaning of his chiefly status. The missionary Brincker remembered that Maharero frequently entreated him to supply it.7 In his conversation with Amadamap, Grendon makes the point that even though he was himself no more than a personal servant at the time of his first visit to Okahandja, Maharero and his principal men had thought nothing of harassing him for tobacco. Their act seems to him to betoken the debased condition of Maharero’s people under Oorlams suzerainty. Such was their abject state when he arrived in Damaraland.
1 Cape, Damaraland Affairs, 43.
2 I am aware that Brigitte Lau (‘Emergence of Kommando Politics in Namaland’, 23, 26, 30, 37, etc.) takes issue with the use of ‘tribe’ to describe restructured social groupings of nineteenth-century Namibia. She does not, however, offer any viable alternative.
3 Chapman, Travels i:330.
4 Vedder, South West Africa, 218–19.
5 E. S. Hahn, Letters, 117: Emma to her sister Rose, New Barmen, 6 Dec. 1850. Some revisionist historiographers dispute the objectivity of primary texts from this period.
6 C. H. Hahn, Tagebücher, iv:945: 25 Dec. 1856; Chapman, Travels, i:334.
7 Pool, Samuel Maharero, 28.