Colonial capital
05 Nov 2009

'The Capital', today rather a tongue-in-cheek phrase, has real meaning in the historical growth of Pietermaritzburg. 'Port Natal' - Durban - could just as easily have become the principal administrative centre; and Pietermaritzburg might then have languished as a struggling country town, with little to distinguish it from Richmond, Ladysmith, Greytown, and half a dozen other rural market villages in the colonial uplands of Natal. Instead, its position as the seat of government gave it an immediate primacy in many facets of Natal's development. From the beginning, the political, legal, social, spiritual and even - to a lesser extent - economic life in this remote comer of the Empire came thus to revolve round Pietermaritzburg.

By October 1838 a Voortrekker decision had named the new town and identified it as the control-point of the Republic of Natalia. The consequences were momentous; for when the British formally reimposed imperial authority upon their free-wheeling Boer emigrants in 1842-3, it had naturally to be in, and from, Pietermaritzburg. Yet the process proved difficult and complex, because the Boers did not easily knuckle down to the authority of mere 'captains' and 'commissioners', such as the early agents of British transfrontier authority, Smith and Cloete, respectively were. Nor were the imperial authorities in far-off Cape Town and London in any hurry to pick up their newest hot potato! Though nominally annexed on 8 June 1843, Natal did not learn that its position would be that of an outlying district of the Cape before mid-1845; and its first Lieutenant-Governor, Martin West, arrived in his 'district capital' of Pietermaritzburg only on 4 December. Yet 13 guns properly saluted him, because the military, at least, had literally entrenched its own position at Fort Napier a good two years before the civilian administration had been able to follow.

Early civil government functioned upon a minimal establishment. There were only West and several industrious officials, such as William Stanger as Surveyor General, and Theophilus Shepstone, who began humbly as 'Diplomatic Agent to the Native Tribes' before becoming the grander 'Secretary for Native Affairs' . But titular modesty here concealed the future centrality of this key post. From Pietermaritzburg Shepstone was to traverse and retraverse the length and breadth of Natal in order to settle returning black refugees in the half dozen 'locations' demarcated by a commission of 1846 - on which, incidentally, he also served. In the locations he reinstituted the elements of a traditional structure of chiefly authority that pyramided up, through himself, to the Lieutenant Governor as 'Supreme Chief. He also began devising a loose-knit system of 'native law' to supply a practical solution to the legal incompatibilities between the juxtaposed European and African communities. From its earliest days as colonial capital Pietermaritzburg therefore both taxed and governed much more than the small white community of Natal. Being initially a mere district centre of the greater Cape Colony established certain further precedents that were to determine the relations of the infant Capital with other parts of South Africa and the Empire till at least the end of the nineteenth century. These relations are nowhere more clearly foreshadowed than in the British Secretary of State's declaration in May 1844 that 'the affairs of the whole of South Africa are so intimately connected together' that he had to have 'the assistance of the Governor of the Cape . . . with the power of control over the neighbouring but inferior colony of Natal'. And soon Sir Harry Smith, who arrived in Pietermaritzburg from the interior in 1848, was invoking just such an authority - as Cape 'High Commissioner' - to exercise control in matters of Natal land policy over an insubordinate Lieutenant-Governor West. But from 1850 onward West's successor, Sir Benjamin Pine, was at least able to assert Natal's right of separate correspondence with Downing Street - though by 1855 another Cape High Commissioner, Sir George Grey, was busy in Pine's new Government House at the top end of Longmarket Street with planning the limited form of 'representative government' constitution that was to apply from the following year.

Above: Lieutenant-Governor John Scott (1856-1864) in full uniform about to mount his steed at Government House before an imperial ceremony.

In the 1850s the system of colonial government in the newly created 'City' of Pietermaritzburg had therefore advanced beyond simple executive domination. While the Natal Colonial Secretary, Treasurer, Attorney-General, and Secretary for Native Affairs remained influential if not entirely ascendant, they had now to share some of their law-making power under the Charter of 1856 with twelve elected members in the public proceedings and debates that henceforth resounded across the Legislative Council Room near the comer of Longmarket and Chapel Streets. Shepstone's attempts to wall off 'native policy' were a particular source of resentment to members claiming to express the popular voice of the white colonists (the multiracial character of the Natal franchise was never more than nominal). And even Lieutenant-Governor Pine found this newly strident popular criticism, in the form of D.D. Buchanan's Natal Witness, pursuing his executive policies into the recesses of his own Government House!

Left: Governor Sir Walter Hely-Hutchinson (1893-1901) wearing the resplendent Civil Uniform.

The judiciary, too, was more of a bridle upon executive assertiveness. For instance, Lieutenant-Governor Scott's angry suspension of a judicial critic of his prerogative actions in 1859 was to harm the reputation of his administration, and its revenue (in the form of a court suit), rather more than it did the Bench. Between 1873 and 1882 a cumulative series of events was to prick the bubble of adolescent political pretension that marked Pietermaritzburg's early times as colonial capital. The elaborate charade of Chief Langalibalele's show 'trial' for defiance of the Natal Government's arms regulations took place in 1873 amid much panoply in a marquee in Government House grounds. Soon, these irregular proceedings issued in a trial of strength between a disapproving imperial authority, initially represented by Barkly as Cape High Commissioner, and the Natal executive council, with its desire to exert independent power not only over black affairs in the Colony itself but far beyond, over most of south-east Africa. Alas, there was neither the moral right nor the real power to sustain this exalted plan to make Pietermaritzburg's role that of a 'sub-continental' capital.

Just how hollow it all was emerged when Sir Gamet Wolseley arrived in 1875 to assert as Administrator what was, in effect, the overriding imperial power of a kind of 'sub-High Commission'. But ending Natal's maverick behaviour as prelude to her incorporation as a docile unit of sub-continental confederation involved persuading the colonial legislature to accept as many as eight nominated non-official members into a slightly enlarged Council. Here Wolseley's cynical eye summed up political Pietermaritzburg's desire to see something of a colonial court flourish at Government House, not least after Prince Alfred's royal visit in 1860 had enhanced the City's perception of itself. Pine had set early precedents for official entertainments; Scott had fallen sadly short; and Keate after a good start had spent too much on bricks and mortar rather than public relations. Wolseley knew better: soon, he had deployed his 'sherry and champagne' as well as he ever placed his redcoats, though, as he confessed to his wife, he resented seeing his 'good wine disappearing down the guzzling throats' of the 'pettifogging politicians' whom he so much despised! Pietermaritzburg's surrender to such blandishments would, however, cost her dear; for Wolseley's manipulations were soon to be replaced, in 1878-9, by the more formidable directing power of the Cape High Commissioner himself, Sir Bartle Frere.

During the Anglo-Zulu War which Frere provoked in 1879 in bland contradiction to objections cogently urged by Natal's own Lieutenant-Governor, Bulwer, Pietermaritzburg was to learn that being a capital 'in the front line' held its dangers. Several dozen young white and black men from the City and outlying Edendale were to pay the supreme penalty at Isandlwana; and the laager in the town centre created a siege atmosphere that was to be re-experienced on two subsequent occasions, during the First and Second Anglo-Boer Wars. And when the 'captains and kings' had departed (not least the sad cortege of the Prince Imperial), the Capital would feel strangely deserted.

Right: C. J . Bird, Principal Under-Secretary in the Colonial Office, at his desk in the first Colonial Buildings in 1897.

Though now full 'Governor' of Natal, Wolseley in 1879-80 held the Governorship of the Transvaal and the High Commissionership for South-East Africa as well; so he would be largely an absentee while attending to the more demanding affairs of the Zulu, Boer and Pedi peoples. At least his successor as Governor, Sir George Colley, and the latter's presentable wife were more to be seen in Pietermaritzburg - for example, at the grand opening of the rail connection with Durban. But the trio of poor Colley, the newly established full Governorship, and its linked High Commission were all to come abruptly to an end on the battlefield atop Majuba Hill in February 1881. Instead, Pietermaritzburg learnt to its dismay that it would once more house only a mere Lieutenant-Governor, and that this personage would be a lowly unknighted Mr Sendall! But the experiences of the previous decade had at least taught both Colony and Capital to put a more realistic value on their worth. Pietermaritzburg now knew what it was to be an important decision-point of empire. Prancing 'High Commissioned' proconsuls like Frere and Wolseley spelt trouble; but an appropriate gubernatorial status was non-negotiable! Pietermaritzburg's resulting agitation was therefore orchestrated to play up Sendall's appointment as a permutation of outdated imperial jobbery which a self-respecting colonial public opinion would not tolerate.

 

Surprised and startled, Gladstone himself had to accept that, as British Prime Minister, he could no longer allow his Colonial Office to ride roughshod over Natal sensibilities. But the colonists were also more sober; the heady days when Wolseley had seemed about to cast Pietermaritzburg as 'Capital of South-East Africa' were over. In a more dangerous sub-continent, where political and, soon, economic restructuring was taking the form of Afrikaner republican nation-building upon a base of gold revenues, the City valued the imperial connection in its existing - reassuring - form of the garrison at Fort Napier. And if the price of retaining the redcoats had to be a moratorium on the creation of a 'responsible' executive of colonists, then so be it! In the meantime - and in anticipation - the Capital could go about raising a new Parliament House next door to the current 'borrowed quarters' in the Supreme Court Building. In 1889 Governor Havelock opened the Council's new home. Four years later, when Sir John Robinson's campaign for 'responsible government' did end successfully, the newly elaborated legislative and executive arrangements required further provision for sittings of the upper chamber and for the work of the colonial civil service. During the Second Anglo-Boer War these extensions of the governing complex in the centre of the Capital were taken into service in the shape of the Upper House Building and the Colonial Office Buildings. Both physically and figuratively the Governor's old locus of power at the top end of town had become remote from the new reality...

Above: A suitably grandiose setting for the bureaucrats of Empire: the second Colonial Buildings, opened in 1900.

Between 1897 and 1902 Pietermaritzburg extended its sway as colonial capital over Zululand and over the conquered northern districts of Utrecht and Vryheid. Now, not only Dinuzulu as scion of the Shakan royal house, but also former Transvaal republicans might find themselves petitioning assistance or answering charges in what must have seemed to them the alien environment of an English speaking Victorian colonial city. Yet in spite of this minor 'empire-building', the importance of Pietermaritzburg in relation to the other centres of power in South Africa had paradoxically declined between these years of 1897 and 1902. At first, the Governor of Natal, Hely-Hutchinson, and Hime's colonial ministry had been essential props to the strategy that the High Commissioner, Milner, pursued against Kruger's republic. In October 1899 that strategy passed from a diplomatic to a military character; and Pietermaritzburg came once more into the front line as Buller's force passed northward through it to try to relieve beleaguered Ladysmith. But in 1900 the Roberts/Kitchener 'steamroller' scored a deep new axis of power beyond the Drakensberg; and Milner's subsequent appearance in Johannesburg as virtual ruler of South Africa spelt the end of the importance that he attached to the Natal connection.

Henceforth, Pietermaritzburg would know only apprehension over how favourably - or unfavourably - he or the succeeding Transvaal responsible government would assess the claims of its rail route to the Witwatersrand in relation to the competing Cape and Delagoa Bay lines. To this nagging erosion of confidence the 'Bambatha Rebellion' of 1906 would also add a deluge. When Union was first under debate in 1908, the Natal holiday resort of Durban and not the Capital, Pietermaritzburg, housed the National Convention; and no amount of referendum campaigning by the City's newspaper and politicians could prevent the rest of Natal (and, sad to tell, some of its 'very own') from voting solidly for Union - and an end, in effect, to really significant decision-making and administration in the resplendent government buildings that had so recently come to adorn the City centre. By 1910 power lay in Pretoria; sadly, Pietermaritzburg's days as colonial capital were over though their atmosphere lingers...

SOURCE: Pietermaritzburg 1838–1988: a new portrait of an African city, edited by John Laband and Robert Haswell (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press and Shuter & Shooter, 1988), pp. 86–9.