Episode 65 – Graham launches his terror campaign in the Zuurveld and Chungwa of the Gqunukhwebe is in his sights
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Show notes
This is episode 65 and we’ll spend time with the amaXhosa, and hear about Lieutenant Colonel John Graham. I mentioned last episode that he was going to introduce what he would call a proper degree of terror in the Zuurveld where the British adopted an ethnic cleansing campaign in 1811 and 1812.
All the important players in this terrible drama have been met – Jacob Cuyler the Uitenhage landdrost, Governor Cradock, Ngqika, Ndlambe, Chungwa of the Gqunukhwebe, Stockenstrom of Graaff-Reinet.
So when Cradock, who’d been dispatched to southern Africa after being removed as commander of the English forces in the Spanish Peninsular, decided to launch his own military excursion, he believed the might of the European musket and military would easily overcome the amaXhosa.
It was now a matter of selecting someone to bring what he called “the horrible savages” to order. Jacob Cuyler was first on the list as the landdrost in the Zuurveld, and a former military man himself. He had experience of the area and was initially thought of as the likely candidate to lead an operation of this kind.
Instead, Cradock selected Lieutenant Colonel John Graham. The Governor had only been in the Cape for three weeks and wanted to personally brief the officer involved – and was also aware of the propensity for the colonials on the frontier to default to cattle raiding instead of conducting a proper war. Because he was in a rush and there would have been no time to head off to Uitenhage, or to have Cuyler come to Cape Town for a briefing, that meant John Graham got the job.
Between 1793 and 1811, Chungwa had managed to negotiate the thorny relationship with three different colonial governments, and with the trekboers. In the 1780s Chungwa and his father Tshaka had firmly established the area between the Fish and the Sunday’s Rivers as Gqunukhwebe territory. Just for orientation, the Sunday’s River flows into Algoa Bay near Port Elizabeth, or Gqeberha as we call it today.
