Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress Read Online Free PDF Page A

slaughtering them as they crouched among the reeds of the river bank. It was like a terrible dream of war. ‘Nothing remains in my memory,’ wrote one of the Boers afterwards, ‘except shouting and tumult and lamentation, and a sea of black faces.’ Only three Boers were wounded in the battle, but at least 3,000 Zulus died. They lay on the ground ‘like pumpkins on a fertile piece of garden land’, and so stained the passing river with crimson that it was called Blood River ever afterwards.
    The Boers rode on to Dingaan’s kraal elated, but they found it abandoned. Not a soul was there. They plundered it, destroyed what was left, and reverently examining the remains on the Hill of Execution, discovered Piet Retief’s knapsack. In it, unharmed, was Dingaan’s deed of cession, granting the whole territory of Natal into the possession of the Volk.
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    They built the church they had vowed, in their shanty-capital of Pietermaritzburg, and for ever after they honoured Dingaan’s Day as they had sworn. 1 Now the Republic of Natalia was born. A Volksraad met in formal assembly, and for a time the Voortrekkers seemed to have achieved their Promised Land—‘I will rejoice, I will divide Shekhem and mete out the valley of Succoth.’ Every trekker, it was decreed, was entitled to two farms, and every burgher could take his complaints direct to the elected leaders of the people in the Volksraad. But it was all fruitless. The British Empire, from whose cloying rectitude they had so painfully escaped, could not permit it, and all their sacrifices and hardships, all the horrors of Umgungundhovu and Blood River, came to nothing in the end.
    At first the Boers tolerated the presence of the British at Durban,as Port Natal now called itself. The commander there, Captain Henry Jervis, was concerned chiefly to restore peace to Natal, and he it was who brought Pretorius and Dingaan to terms—unforgiving terms, for Dingaan was forced to withdraw his power far to the north, to the Black Umfulosi River, thus ceding to the Voortrekkers not merely the whole of Natal, but half Zululand too. But once peace was restored and their ascendancy established, the Boers determined that the British must go. They did not recognize the suzerainty of the Crown, they did not need British protection, and they were determined that the Cape Government should not extend its foothold in Natal. They sent Jervis a formal protest at his presence there, recalling in emotive detail the purposes and miseries of their trek—their departure from the Cape ‘insulted, ridiculed and degraded’, their struggles with barbarian tribes with no knowledge of the Great Incomprehensible, their sufferings at the hands of the murderer Dingaan. Now, they said, they were resolved to be their own masters. If British immigrants landed at Durban they would be treated as enemies of the State, and if they were backed by imperial forces the Natal Republic would go to war.
    Unexpectedly the British did withdraw their forces, and it momentarily seemed that the Empire might even recognize the independence of the Republic. But it was only cat and mouse. In September, 1840, the Volksraad wrote to Napier asking that it might ‘graciously please Her Majesty to acknowledge and declare us a free and independent people’: but even as this disarming prayer reached the imperial authorities in London, so there filtered through to the Colonial Office and the evangelical lobby ugly reports of the Republic’s racial policies. It seemed that the Boers still kept slaves, and bullied local chieftains, and in no way honoured the principles of humanitarian imperialism. Besides, the structure of Government, without a Briton at the helm, seemed to be breaking down. Within their Promised Land the trekkers went their own ways incorrigibly. They disregarded their own land laws, they refused to settle where they were told to settle, they squabbled with each other incessantly. Thousands of natives, pouring into