Colonization and Christianity: A popular history of the treatment of the natives by the; Europeans in all their coloniesHowitt, William
History
Colonization and Christianity: A popular history of the treatment of the natives by the; Europeans in all their colonies
Howitt, William
Indians, Treatment of; Indigenous peoples
499_l._ to build a new church, and had also proposed to lay the
foundation of another. In 1833 they paid in taxes 2,300 rix-dollars,
and their settlement was in a most flourishing condition. Dr. Philip,
before the Parliamentary Committee of 1837, stated that their schools
were in admirable order; their infant schools quite equal to anything
to be seen in England; and the Committee closed its evidence on this
remarkable settlement with this striking opinion: “_Had it, indeed,
depended on the Hottentots, we believe the frontier would have been
spared the outrages from which they as well as others have suffered_.”
Of two things in this very interesting relation, we hardly know which
is the most surprising—the avidity with which a people long held in
the basest thraldom grasp at knowledge and civil life, or the blind
selfishness of Englishmen, who, in the face of such splendid scenes
as these, persist in oppression and violence. How easy does it seem
to do good! How beautiful are the results of justice and liberality!
How glorious and how profitable too, beyond all use of whips, and
chains, and muskets, are treating our fellow men with gentleness and
kindness—and yet after this came the Caffre commandoes and the Caffre
war!
Of the same, or a kindred race with the Hottentots, are the Bosjesmen,
or Bushmen, and the Griquas; their treatment, except that they could
not be made slaves of, has been the same. The same injustice, the same
lawlessness, the same hostile irritation, have been practised towards
them by the Dutch and English as towards the Hottentots. The bushmen,
in fact, were Hottentots, who, disdaining slavery and resenting the
usurpations of the Europeans on their lands, took arms, endeavoured
to repel their aggressors, and finding that impracticable, fled to
the woods and the mountains; others, from time to time escaping from
intolerable thraldom, joined them. These bushmen carried on a predatory
warfare from their fastnesses with the oppressors of their race, and
were in return hunted as wild beasts. Commandoes, a sort of military
battu, were set on foot against them. Every one knows what a battu for
game is. The inhabitants of a district assemble at the command of an
officer, civil or military, to clear the country of wild beasts. They
take in a vast circle, beating up the bushes and thickets, while they
gradually contract the circle, till the whole multitude find themselves
inclosing a small area filled with the whole bestial population of the
neighbourhood, on which they make a simultaneous attack, and slaughter
them in one promiscuous mass. A commando is a very similar thing,
except that in it not only the bestial population of the country, but
the human too, are slaughtered by the inhuman. These commandoes, though
they have only acquired at the Cape a modern notoriety, have been used
from the first day of discovery. They were common in the Spanish and
Portuguese colonies, and under the same name, as may be seen in almost
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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