CAPE TOWN AND BEYOND: 1822-1825.
Itwas Pringle's great misfortune - as it was of many others - to cross the path of Lord Charles Somerset, the plenipotentiary figure of British authority at the Cape. Somerset, who had been governor since 1814, was a British aristocrat with a military and court
background. In a letter to the Colonial Secretary Bathurst in 1815 he declared his intention to run the colony as an "outwork to India" and to "sacrifice local considerations to the needs of that great Empire" (quoted in Edwards 1934:19). Such imperial anachronism dominated Somerset's career at the Cape and became increasingly untenable as both global and local developments necessitated changes he was incapable of responding to. CA. Bayly has described British colonial governorships of this period as "proconsular regimes"
dominated by an adherence to "loyalism, royalism and aristocratic virtue" (1989: 194) and Somerset's style of government reflected this ethos: it was entirely autocratic, with all effective power invested either in himself or those appointed by him; even judicially, Somerset's role as Judge of the Court of Appeal meant that he had the final say in any matters that involved infringements of the law. His aristocratic intransigence in the face of demands for judicial and other reforms, precipitated largely by the arrival of the British emigrants, eventually proved his downfall and in 1827, under pressure both from the Whig lobby in parliament and disaffected settlers in the Cape, he resigned. Ironically, Pringle had at first benefited from Somerset's patronage: he approved generous grants of land to the Pringle party on the frontier, and when Pringle made his way to the Cape toward the end of 1822 it was to take up a government post set up for him by Somerset. Pringle's
subsequent falling out with the governor was swift and brutal and came at a time when Somerset's affronted megalomania was at its worst.
Pringle had never envisaged his stay on the frontier as being permanent; even before the Scottish party arrived at their settlement, he had used his letters of introduction to petition colonial officials for employment in Cape Town. Once he was in a position to relinquish his frontier obligations he did so; nor did he ever return there on any serious basis. There is every reason to believe that he did not find living on the frontier a congenial experience.
For a person ofPringle's background - university educated, a poet of genteel and antiquarian tendencies, the first member of his family to rise above their agricultural
inheritance - settlement on a "remote and exposed part of the frontier" (1966:77) must have presented itself as absolute death to all his ambitions. Itis little wonder that, in a letter to Scott, he archly described his location as "this forlorn fag end of the universe" (QBSAL, June 1952: 112). Pringle was also aware that he was placed in a situation where all the 'advancement' and 'improvement' of his native land was now quite literally being wound backwards. In another letter written to Scott within a few months of arrival on the settlement he showed a level awareness of this: "we shall never be (at least for some generations) entirely removed from the state of borderers" (SAL, Eric Pringle Ms:7). Itis not hard to see that Cape Town must have seemed an attractive prospect to Pringle; here, at least, was a chance to exercise those abilities education and experience had fitted him for. A letter to Fairbairn shortly after his arrival in Cape Town is droll about life on the frontier and full of anticipation for the future:
You must understand my good friend that having tired of herding nowt (?)& hunting lions and Bushmen I accepted of an appointment offered me lately by the Governor -&I came down hither about two weeks ago to take charge of a public library lately instituted in the Town by the Government. The situation is quite to my wish - only the salary is rather small -& therefore to make out a more comfortable livelihood I have been inducedtoreceive pupils which have been actually pressed upon me from the most respected families in the colony. .. a good seminary here would be certain when once established to attract pupils from India - on very liberal terms&altogether thereisscope for both you and me to make our fortunes if we can seize the "time and tide" ... I am happy to find myselfinconsiderable repute here,&really see or think I have a fairer prospect of making an independence than I have ever before had before me. (FB: 1:2)
In another part of the letter Pringle also raises the possibility of "a magazine to enlighten South Africa". All these plans of Pringle's might well have gained him the security of employment he sought had they not fallen foul of a governor reluctantto cede even the smallest amount of control over the colony. Pringle's colonial endeavours were perfectly respectable ones; there is no trace of any 'radical' intent in his desiretointroduce into the Cape Colony rudimentary forms of civil society such as a press and a school. As we shall see, these ambitions for civic improvement were located very much within the mainstream of Whig reformist politics, just as they were consonant, as Kirsten McKenzie has argued, with
"a wider shift in the mechanisms of power and the conceptions of politics in the colonial world"(1998/9: 91). We might think of colonialism and modernity as synonymous or at least coterminous terms, but the clashes between Somerset and his colonial critics instantiate the internal differentiations within colonialism itself - for these were fundamentally clashes over whether the colony should remain fixed in a pre-Enlightenment, absolutist mode of governance, or whether it should embrace the civil forms and institutions of an emergent modernity.
The professional activities Pringle engaged in after his arrival in Cape Town very quickly expanded from his duties as a librarian, which were in any case not very onerous, to include the setting up of a school, the establishment of a journal, and the founding of the colony's first independent newspaper. Inthese endeavours Pringle was joined by his friend and fellow Scott, John Fairbairn, who, lured by Pringle's epistolatory praises of the prospects offered by the Cape, arrived in October 1823. The journalistic writing produced by Pringle and Fairbairn during this period is of historical interest insofar as it initiates the emergence of a rudimentary public sphere in the colony; for our purposes, however, this writing offers valuable, and critically neglected, insight into the initial stages of Pringle's understanding of the colonial process. The evolution of this understanding, as we shall discover, was
characterized by change and even contradiction and not the continuity of humanitarian intent so often ascribed to Pringle.
Pringle and Fairbairn's thoughts about colonization at the Cape were set out in editorial and article form in two publications: the South African Commercial Advertiser, which began publication in January 1824, and The South African Journal, which appeared twice (in March and May 1824) before being proscribed.Itwas never revived. TheAdvertiser, a bi- weekly, ran for 17 issues before suffering a similar fate. Two years later Fairbairn
recommenced publishing and he would act as the editor of theAdvertiseruntil his
retirement in December 1859. In what follows I concentrate on the two issues of theJournal and the original editions of theAdvertiser. these two publications contain extensive
commentary on the state of the Colony, and recommendations for its future development.
Both Pringle and Fairbairn were enthusiastic advocates of British imperial expansion, and it is within this overarching context that their prescriptions for colonial advancement at the Cape are articulated. In the "General Introduction" to the first number of the South African Journal, for example, Fairbairn locates developments at the Cape within the world-historical trajectory of a progressive, enlightened modernity sweeping away the "rubbish of tyrannical systems" and, enabling "all the tribes of the earth [to rise] into superior modes of existence ... in the grand concourse of improvement"(l824:7). In this vision of imperial expansion, Scottish 'improvement' joins hands with empire and the colonies are scripted as undergoing acceleration into the final stages of a stadial narrative of global proportions. The motors driving this vision of universal progress are "the enterprising Spirit of modern Christianity"
(5) and "the active spirit of commerce, with all the arts in its train" (6). The enthusiasm for the improving mission of imperialism is matched by an effusive patriotism; the penultimate paragraph extols British achievements and institutions and concludes with an unashamed endorsement of national greatness: "[W]ith a noble spirit of love for the whole human family diffused through the mass of her population; - in calm wisdom and conscious strength, Britain stands at the head of the history, - of the reality, - almost of the hopes of Man" (7).
This insistence on British superiority was typical, Linda Colley argues, of an aggressively affirmative British patriotism which understood imperial expansion as elective destiny: "God had entrusted Britons with empire ... so as to further the worldwide spread of the gospel and as a testimony to their status as the Protestant Israel"(1992: 368-9). In the "Prospectus" to the
Journal, the imperial appeal to the extension of British standards works in conjunction with an agenda of local as well as global 'improvement': "In Cape Town, and throughout the thriving and better settled portions of the colony, a surprising improvement in the conversation, manners, and general aspect of society", they write, "is obvious to every capable and candid observer" (1824: np). They announce their intention to assist this "cause of human improvement" by bringing to the colony a "ready and respectable medium" for the dissemination of information modeled on European magazines and reviews. The
"Prospectus" makesitplain that its eventual intention is to create an enlightened body of opinion that, along with cognate developments, will create an incipient civil society or public sphere, "the root and flower of a People's strength".l For all its optimism, this is a strongly exogamous politics that does not seek, or even envisage, any rapprochement with indigenous custom or lore.
The one article in the two issues of the Journal that elaborates on actually existing colonial conditions, however, suggests that the progress of an enlightened modernity is not as inexorable as the "Prospectus" and the "General Introduction" suggest. "On the Present State and Prospects of the English Emigrants in South Africa" was written by Pringle and recapitulates many of the issues we are familiar with from a previous chapter: the decline in fortune of the "landed" settlers and the relative prosperity of the artisanal class, the
mismanagement of settler affairs by the Cape government, inadequate protection against frontier incursions, and so on. But the article goes beyond criticism of settler policy to outline views on trade and slavery that are derived from Adam Smith and which reveal Pringle just as much an economic modernizer as he was a sociocultural one. Of particular importance here is Pringle's Smithian conviction that the capstones of a prosperous state are an unimpeded flow of capital and minimal government interference in private enterprise:
"Capital and free government are essential to the success of colonization" (159). For Pringle Cape society is disfigured by the persistence of monopolistic practices that derived from its original status as a way-station to India: "The very peculiar state of society existing at the Cape, has been produced by the unnatural and injurious restrictions of the monopolizing
system of the Dutch East India Company" (158). Pringle cites as an example of such
restraints on trade the government's monopolization of the supply of forage and vegetables to troops based in Grahamstown and the frontier posts (155). He also complains that prohibitive legislation, such as "the emigrants being bound like serfs to their locations by absurd regulations" (159) is stifling the "natural progress of accumulation". His views on slavery are also framed within an argument for greater economic flexibility and profit: "[I]t is an unquestionable fact", he writes, "that the colonists are suffering more or less in
proportion as they are possessed of slaves or, in other words, are receiving a smaller return from their capital, than if it was otherwise invested" (156).
Such 'economism' from Pringle is by no means inconsistent with his humanitarian ideals: it is of a piece with them, just as it frames his understanding of 'rude' societies such as the indigenous peoples of Southern Africa. The general matrix of these ideas lies, as we have already seen, in the moral philosophers and political economists of the Scottish
Enlightenment. Pringle's prescriptions for the 'improvement' of the Cape derive from these sources; they also served as the principal ideological buttress for John Philip, who would very soon become Pringle's humanitarian mentor (see Ross 1986: 24-26)). We tend to think of colonial reformers like Pringle, Fairbairn and Philip in terms that do not always take into account, to quote W omack again, "the seamless unity of religious, political, economic and cultural themes"( 1989:5) Philip was an ardent propagator of the civilisational benefits of unrestrained trade, particularly its ability to entrain indigenous peoples in its wake:
"Wherever the missionary places his standard among a savage tribe, their prejudice against the colonial government gives way, their dependence on the colony is increased by artificial wants; confidence is restored; intercourse with the colony is established; industry, trade, and agriculture spring up" (l828:x). Similarly, writing in his editorial capacity in the South African Commercial Advertiser (the very name of this paper proclaims the links between a free press and free trade), Fairbairn too stated the case for the colonial benefits oflaissez- faire capitalism: "To stimulate Industry, to encourage Civilisation, and to convert the natives into friendly Customers, is ... a more profitable speculation than to exterminate or reduce
them to Slavery" (quoted in Keegan 1996:98). Such views would have been entirely shared by Pringle, and it is necessary not to lose sight of these interlinked attitudes towards
different aspects of colonial life.Itis misleading simply to abstract one set of attitudes, let us say moral objections to slavery, from another set of attitudes which sees slavery as a counter- productive economic practice. Any omission of implication across different contexts runs the risk of curtailing our understanding of colonial writings of this period; this is especially true of Pringle's poetry, particularly the later poetry of 'protest', which is very often read with an immediacy that ignores its shifting affiliations with larger structural issues.2
The editorials written by Pringle and Fairbairn for theAdvertiser are, as I have indicated and as we might expect, informed by a similar set of preoccupations. One notable difference is a concern in theAdvertiser that the colony might be considered inferior to other imperial settlements. In an editorial on 4 February 1824, for example, comparison is made between
"the colony we inhabit" and "other countries in a like state of immaturity and probation".
Though the editorial concedes that the colony has "been too long mismanaged", it again insists that 'improvement' is now the order of the day: "We have much improved our manners ... and in the points wherein we are still most defective, if we are below some of our elders, we may venture to maintain that we are at least equal or superior to several of our compeers". The relative colonial status of the Cape is a recurrent topic in these early editorials and signals an incipient nationalism and a regional imperial patriotism as well as an anxiety that the Cape not be seen as losing colonial rank. As an allied concern, the editorials also stress the need for "the cordial and complete amalgamation of the Dutch and English Colonists" (5 May1824: 145), and repeatedly repudiate the "contemptuous and
revolting account" of the Dutch colonists expressed in John Barrow's Travels in South Africa.
This "amalgamation" is, however, to be accomplished only on British terms. We are not accustomed to thinking of Pringle as a colonial loyalist, but there is no sign in these editorials that either he or Fairbairn could be considered in any way critical of the
fundamental tenets of the imperial mission. Their first and primary ambition was to promote the establishment of a social order that reproduced the lineaments of British civil society
while developing a distinctive identity of its own. In summary, we might say of these early editorials that, for the most part, they are social commentary in the subjunctive mode, envisaging a society that, as it happened, never really came to pass. The fullest statement of this projected community may be found in the editorial for the 17 March:
Whatever we are, whether born in the Northern or Southern
hemisphere, in England, in Holland, or in Africa,ifwe have made Africa our home, and feel a common interest in the prosperity of the Colony, we are all Africans.
Ifwe do as we ought - we will love, respect, and promote the welfare first of our families, friends and connections - secondly, that ofthe Colony we inhabit - next of the Empire of which it forms a part - and lastly of the whole human race.
This vision of expanding social concentricity which has at its centre an African identity excludes any but Europeans from its membership; it is as though indigenous people are still awaiting the processes that might carry them to full citizenship. The paper's motto was taken from Dr. Johnson, "The mass of every People must be barbarous where there is no
PRINTING", and the express purpose of the Advertiserwas to create, to use Benedict
Anderson's word, a "modular" form of Scottish civil society, in which a 'free' press acts as the catalyst for the formation of a colonial bourgeoisie. In seeking to create a Cape identity of this sort, the Advertiser editorials also recognized the importance of allied institutions such as public schools, which were approved as "nurseries of vigorous intellect and pure morals"
(25 April 1824) Like the South African Journal, the Advertiser sought to place itself in the forefront of an evolving and improving colonial society and in pursuing this objective, and in appealing for their readers' support, Pringle and Fairbairn explicitly invoked the notion of
"the people" as the final arbiters of social justice:
A knowledge of the real character of man, then, is not to be obtained from history ... seeing it is chiefly occupied with the paltry intrigues of Courts, the rage, the falsehood, and treachery of party men, or the ravages of military violence. From this body of Actors ... compared with the mass of mankind, and the calm retired observers, Orators, Moralists and Divines have been accustomed to draw all their opinions and their commonplace topics of abuse respecting the depravity of our nature Matters are now completely changed. The people are now united and combined together by ten thousand ties which no created arm can break asunder, and can,ifso disposed - and, owing to their great intelligence, no cause but a good and great cause can so dispose them - in a few hours