Episode 170 - Harry Smith returns as the conquering hero and humiliates Maqoma while translators muddle along
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Show notes
This is episode 170 and the sound you’re hearing is the cheering and the flaming hot emotion because Sir Harry Smith is back in town!
The town is Cape Town — Sir Harry won’t hang around there for too long, he as you know from the previous episode, has returned to South Africa to take up his new position as Governor of the Cape.
Sir Harry was the former civil commissioner of the de-annexed Province of Queen Adelaide in the Eastern Cape and in June 1840 he’d left Cape Town to take up a post as Adjutant-General in India. There is this incredibly long history of connection between India and South Africa, and people like Smith were part of that history.
Others of course are people like Gandhi, but that’s a story for further down the road.
Smith was courageous, whatever other faults he may have had, and was involved in a sensational victory at the Battle of Aliwal in India on 28 January 1846 during the first Anglo-Sikh War.
That victory led to a promotion to Major General, and he was offered an accepted a baronetcy. The British parliament formally thanked Smith, and then returned to England where the extremely bloated ego he’d developed over the past few decades was further fluffed up.
While in England he’d spent a lot of time with the Duke of Wellington who’d defeated Napoleon, and with the Duke’s support, he convinced the British government that the festering sore of the Eastern Cape of South Africa could be healed.
This expensive disaster after disaster he said could be resolved quickly, and even more importantly, cheaply.
When he returned to England in 1847, Harry Smith was treated like royalty, greeted at Southampton by artillery salutes, church bells rang, thousands of people cheered him, a special train was laid on to take him to London, where he received the freedom of the Guildhall.
He dined with Queen Victoria, and was pretty much the first authentic military hero of the Victorian era. Waterloo was 30 years earlier, a long way off, and there’d been very little military glory since.
Thus, Wellington whispered in the ears of the powerful, and that is how Harry Smith was appointed the new Governor of the Cape, strategically important but infuriatingly complex.
All settlers agreed, the Queen had made a perfect appointment. As we’re going to hear, this was going to be possibly her worst appointment anywhere up to then. All the hero worship was going straight to this little man’s head. He was short, so by little I mean horizontally challenged.
Doing the hard work of making sense of negotiations were the translators. These were men, black and white, who had a vast influence on our history. Smith said to Sandile that he should leave Grahamstown and go to his people, whereupon the translators claim Sandile said “No — I will stay today near you, my former and best friend…”
Historians believe these exchanges were embroidered, altered, and added to the misunderstandings. Many of the translators were sons of missionaries, or settlers who’d grown up speaking amaXhosa fluently. But they fed Smith what he wanted to hear.
The very same translators had been at work when Sandile was taken into Grahamstown to be placed under house arrest so you can see that their editorialising was having an effect on history.
