Flashman and the Angel of the Lord. George Fraser MacDonald

‘Know how many wars they’ve given us, colonel, thanks to the damned missionaries? Eight – or is it nine? Blessed if you don’t lose count! To say nothin’ o’ the Dutch – not that they haven’t got their hands full, by all accounts, an’ serve the miserable beggars right! They’ll be howlin’ for you redcoats presently, mark my words!’

      ‘You never saw a Boer ask help from a Briton yet!’ scoffs another. ‘Nor they needn’t – they’ll give the Basutos the same pepper they gave John Zulu, if Moshesh don’t mind his manners.’

      ‘You never know,’ laughs a third, ‘maybe the dear Basutos’ll do the decent thing an’ starve themselves to death, what?’

      ‘Not old Moshesh – that’s a Bantu who’s too smart by half, as we’ll find out to our cost one o’ these days.’

      ‘Oh, Grey’ll see to him, never fear – an’ the Boers, if only London will let him alone. Any more word of his goin’?’

      ‘You may bet on it – if the Colonial Office don’t ship him home, the doctor will. I don’t like his colour; the man’s played out.’

      ‘Well, he can go for me. We bade good riddance to Brother Boer years ago – why should we want him back?’

      These are just scraps of talk that I remember, and no doubt they’re as Greek to you as they were to me, but being a curious child I listened, and learned a little, for these fellows – English civilians and merchants mostly, a Cape Rifleman or two, and a couple of trader-hunters down from the frontiers – knew their country, which was a closed book to me, then, bar my brief visit to the Slave Coast, and that was years ago and a world away from the Cape. Truth to tell, Africa’s never been my patch, much; I’ve soldiered on veldt and desert, and seen more of its jungle than I cared for, but like our statesmen I’ve always thought it a dam’ nuisance. Perhaps Dahomey inoculated me against the African bug which has bitten so many, to their cost, for it breeds grand dreams which often as not turn into nightmares.

      It was biting hard at this time, not least on Grey, the Governor, and since he was to play a small but crucial part in my present story, I must tell you something of him – but I can’t do that without first telling you about South Africa, as briefly as may be. It won’t explain the place to you (God Himself couldn’t do that), but it may lead you to wonder if two damned dirty and costly wars mightn’t have been avoided (and who knows what hellish work in the future?) if only those Reform Club buffoons hadn’t thought they knew better than the man on the spot.

      You have to understand that in ’59 Africa was the last great prize and mystery, an unmapped hinterland twice the size of Europe where anything was possible: lost civilisations, hidden cities, strange white tribes – they were no joke then. Real exploration of the dark heart of the continent had just begun; Livingstone had blazed his trails up and down it and across, farther north Dick Burton was making an ass of himself by not finding the source of the Nile, but the broad steady inroad was from the south, where we’d established ourselves. The Dutch settlers, not caring for us much, had trekked north to found their own Boer republics in lands where they met hordes of persevering black gentlemen coming t’other way; they fought the Zulus and Basutos (and each other) while we fought the Kaffirs to the east, and everything was dam’ confused, chiefly because our rulers at home couldn’t make up their minds, annexing territories and then letting ’em go, interfering with the Boers one minute and recognising their independence the next, trying to hold the ring between black and white and whining at the expense, and then sending out Grey, who brought the first touch of common sense – and, if you ask me, the last.

      His great gift, I was told, was that he got on splendidly with savages – even the Boers. He’d been a soldier, explored in Australia, governed there and in New Zealand, and saw at once that the only hope for southern Africa was to reunite Briton and Boer and civilise the blacks within our borders, which he’d begun to do with schools and hospitals and teaching them trades. In this he’d been helped by one of those lunatic starts which happen among primitive folk: in ’57 a troublesome warrior tribe, the ’Zozas, had got the notion that if they destroyed all their crops and cattle, the gods would send them bumper harvests and even fatter herds, and all the white men in Africa would obligingly drown themselves; accordingly, the demented blighters starved themselves to death, which left more space for white settlement, and the surviving ’Zozas were in a fit state to be civilised.⁶ Meanwhile Grey was using his persuasive arts to charm the Boers back under the Union Jack, and since our Dutch friends were beginning to feel the pinch of independence – isolated up yonder, cut off from the sea, worn out with their own internal feuding, and fighting a running war against the Basutos (whose wily chief, Moshesh, had egged on the ’Zozas’s suicide for his own ends) – they were only too ready to return to Britannia’s fold.

      That was the stuff of Grey’s dream, as I gathered from my fellow-guests at the hotel – a united South Africa of Briton, Boer, and black. Most of my informants were all for it, but one or two were dead against the Boers, which put one grizzled old hunter out of all patience.

      ‘I don’t like the Hollanders any better’n you do,’ says he, ‘but if whites won’t stand together, they’ll fall separately. Besides, if we don’t have the Boers under our wing, they’ll go on practisin’ their creed that the only good Bantu’s a dead one – or a slave, an’ we know where that leads – bloody strife till Kingdom Come.’

      ‘And what’s Grey’s style?’ asks a fat civilian. ‘Teach ’em ploughing and the Lord’s Prayer and make ’em wear trowsers? Try that with the Matabele, why don’t you? Or the Zulu, or the Masai.’

      ‘You’ve never seen the Masai!’ snaps the old chap. ‘Anyway, sufficient unto the day. I’m talkin’ about settlin’ the Bantu inside our own borders –’

      ‘We should never ha’ given ’em the vote,’ says a Cape Rifleman. ‘What happens when they outnumber us, tell me that?’ This was an eye-opener to me, I can tell you, but it’s true – every man-jack born on Cape soil had the vote then, whatever his colour; more than could be said for Old England.⁷

      ‘Oh, by then all the Zulu and Mashona will be in tight collars, talking political economy,’ sneers the fat chap. He jabbed his pipe at the hunter. ‘You know it’s humbug! They ain’t like us, they don’t like us, and they’ll pay us out when they can. Hang it all, you were at Blood River, weren’t you? Well, then!’

      ‘Aye, an’ I back Grey ’cos I don’t want Blood River o’er again!’ cries the hunter. ‘An’ that’s what you’ll get, my boy, if the Boers ain’t reined up tight inside our laager! As for the tribes … look here, I don’t say you can civilise a Masai Elmoran now … but they’re a long way off. Given time, an’ peaceful persuasion when we come to ’em – oh, backed up by a few field pieces, if you like – things can be settled with good will. So I reckon Grey’s way is worth a try. It’s that or fight ’em to the death – an’ there’s a hell of a lot o’ black men in Africa.’

      There were murmurs of agreement, but my sympathies were all with the fat chap. I don’t trust enlightened proconsuls, I’d heard no good of the Boers, and fresh from India as I was, the notion of voting niggers was too rich for me. Can’t say my views have changed, either – still, when I look back on the bloody turmoil of southern Africa in my lifetime, which has left Boer and Briton more at loggerheads than ever, the blacks hating us both, and their precious Union fifty years too late, I reckon the old hunter was right: Grey’s scheme was worth a try; God knows it couldn’t have made things worse.

      But of course it never got a try, because the home government had the conniptions at the thought of another vast territory being added to the Empire, which they figured was too big already – odd, ain’t it, that the world should be one-fifth British today, when back in the ’fifties our statesmen were dead set against expansion – Palmerston, Derby, Carnarvon, Gladstone, aye, even D’Israeli, who called South Africa a millstone.

      While I was at the Cape, though, the ball was still in the air; they hadn’t yet scotched Grey’s scheme of union and called him home, and he was fighting tooth