Episode 279 - Dean Williams and Bishop Merriman compete for Anglican Souls as De Villiers Graaff Ponders
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We’re up to the early 1880s where world events are intersecting in various ways with southern African events.
The mere ratification of the Pretoria Convention in 1881 failed to bring peace and prosperity to South Africa. The frenzied speculation in diamond shares reached it’s height in 1881, and war expenditure had swelled the tide of fictitious prosperity which had flowed from Table Bay to Lydenburg.
Now the troops and the glory departed, Natal after the pomp and ceremony of the Wolseley period, drifted into a political backwater — and yet clamoured for responsible government and an augmented imperial garrison.
In the Cape, the overcapitalised diamond companies began to topple, and banks shortened credit and in 1882, the crash came. John Scanlen the Cape Prime Minister succumbed to what some called retrenchment mania and laid off judges amongst other members of the bureaucracy.
Times were bad, and growing worse, with Phylloxera visiting the Western Cape vineyards, drought had smote the land and red-water fever the cattle. It was old testament level pestilence and suffering, at least if you read the journals of the time.
Did I mention the outbreak of smallpox as well? How remiss.
It scoured Cape Town first, this pestilence, from whence it followed the railway and wagon route to the diamond fields of Kimberley, and from there into the Orange Free State and Basotholand.
Plagues of locusts chewed through what was left. For anyone who would return to an earlier epoch in South African history, believing these were golden years, perhaps the reality I’ve just outlined would make you recalibrate your Time Machine.
SJ Du Toit launched his pro-Afrikaans campaign by the early 1880s, railing against die Engelse and the elites in the Cape who were determined to keep speaking high Dutch instead of this new form which was disparagingly called Kitchen Dutch. Emerging at this messy moment to influence South Africa forever was a lawyer who eventually became known as Lord De Villiers.
It’s difficult to understand this these days — in the 1880s South Africa was still a mishmash of rebels, settlers, African chiefdoms, Khoesan raiders, dirt tracker miners and trekboers, wild Baltic and Nordic merchants, American and Australian frontiersmen. Every geographical locale was represented by a different language so folks like De Villiers who obsessed over federal ideas were outliers.
Self-government meant they leaned towards the Union Jack, the English, for defence, but not the Union Jack as a cloak for interference in the internal affairs of the Cape.
The quarrels divided the Anglican community particularly in Natal into adherents of the Church of England, and the Church of the Province of South Africa.
The two main questions were these: Must Anglican Bishops in South Africa be appointed by Letters consecrated by the Archbishop of Centebury, and secondly, was the Church in South Africa bound by acts of an Imperial Parliament in England far far away or mainly independent?
De Villiers was going to decide both questions — and in doing so — would set the scene for a future South African Republic while also setting in stone, some of our concepts in South Africa of the right to practice the religion we prefer.
The mere ratification of the Pretoria Convention in 1881 failed to bring peace and prosperity to South Africa. The frenzied speculation in diamond shares reached it’s height in 1881, and war expenditure had swelled the tide of fictitious prosperity which had flowed from Table Bay to Lydenburg.
Now the troops and the glory departed, Natal after the pomp and ceremony of the Wolseley period, drifted into a political backwater — and yet clamoured for responsible government and an augmented imperial garrison.
In the Cape, the overcapitalised diamond companies began to topple, and banks shortened credit and in 1882, the crash came. John Scanlen the Cape Prime Minister succumbed to what some called retrenchment mania and laid off judges amongst other members of the bureaucracy.
Times were bad, and growing worse, with Phylloxera visiting the Western Cape vineyards, drought had smote the land and red-water fever the cattle. It was old testament level pestilence and suffering, at least if you read the journals of the time.
Did I mention the outbreak of smallpox as well? How remiss.
It scoured Cape Town first, this pestilence, from whence it followed the railway and wagon route to the diamond fields of Kimberley, and from there into the Orange Free State and Basotholand.
Plagues of locusts chewed through what was left. For anyone who would return to an earlier epoch in South African history, believing these were golden years, perhaps the reality I’ve just outlined would make you recalibrate your Time Machine.
SJ Du Toit launched his pro-Afrikaans campaign by the early 1880s, railing against die Engelse and the elites in the Cape who were determined to keep speaking high Dutch instead of this new form which was disparagingly called Kitchen Dutch. Emerging at this messy moment to influence South Africa forever was a lawyer who eventually became known as Lord De Villiers.
It’s difficult to understand this these days — in the 1880s South Africa was still a mishmash of rebels, settlers, African chiefdoms, Khoesan raiders, dirt tracker miners and trekboers, wild Baltic and Nordic merchants, American and Australian frontiersmen. Every geographical locale was represented by a different language so folks like De Villiers who obsessed over federal ideas were outliers.
Self-government meant they leaned towards the Union Jack, the English, for defence, but not the Union Jack as a cloak for interference in the internal affairs of the Cape.
The quarrels divided the Anglican community particularly in Natal into adherents of the Church of England, and the Church of the Province of South Africa.
The two main questions were these: Must Anglican Bishops in South Africa be appointed by Letters consecrated by the Archbishop of Centebury, and secondly, was the Church in South Africa bound by acts of an Imperial Parliament in England far far away or mainly independent?
De Villiers was going to decide both questions — and in doing so — would set the scene for a future South African Republic while also setting in stone, some of our concepts in South Africa of the right to practice the religion we prefer.
