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Discuss the first article in a new Series by @Youngmarshall here.
Also, when it comes to Southern Africa the thing that probably gets brought up the least is the fact that there were a great many within the Cape Colony who, once it had been granted Responsible Government, weren't particularly keen on annexing more land full of Black People because they wanted to maintain a nice coherent majority-white (or at least majority white/coloured) colony.
I feel like there's a Graphic Novel/comedy series to be made in Sechele's creative interpretation of what Livingstone's trying to teach him there.
Also, when it comes to Southern Africa the thing that probably gets brought up the least is the fact that there were a great many within the Cape Colony who, once it had been granted Responsible Government, weren't particularly keen on annexing more land full of Black People because they wanted to maintain a nice coherent majority-white (or at least majority white/coloured) colony.
I tried to highlight this in LTTW via, in the absence of Britain taking over the Cape, there still being a conflict between those two groups. Of course, things then got more complicated with what happened to the Netherlands.Having said that their was a general split between the Afrikaners of the Cape and the Boers out in their various Republics. All Boers were Afrikaners; not all Afrikaners were Boers.
I tried to highlight this in LTTW via, in the absence of Britain taking over the Cape, there still being a conflict between those two groups. Of course, things then got more complicated with what happened to the Netherlands.
Yes, this is an important point. A lot of the British adventurism in the region was either driven by the efforts of individuals from outside the region with greater ambitious (Rhodes, Bartle Frere) or by the fact the Boers were already there and so London wanting to check them (which is the case in Botswana which Kruger had claimed control over). There was as much if not more division and conflict between the southern African whites as between the whites and blacks.
I have something of a loathing for Bartle-Frere. The man seemed to have this amazing ability to utterly destroy any semblance of good relations with everyone in the region. Like it genuinely feels like you could have averted the later Xhosa Wars, Zulu Wars and Boer Wars without him. Which is probably overegging it a bit on reflection but still.
At the very least, he does seem like the only person on earth who actually wanted the anglo-zulu war (the next subject I'll cover) to happen.
It's not just that the Zulus desperately wanted peace. It's not just that the settlers on the ground largely did. It's that the British Government were repeatedly sending him desperate telegrams reminding him that they didn't want to fight another war.
There's interesting mileage in 'no Anglo-Zulu war, the next conflict is both allied against the Boers' methinks.
Sechele seems a fascinating character and much more adept at taking into account cultural differences like the Jesuits did in China and Japan, than Livingstone was who I don't know much about other than he seems to have been the original fire-breathing Victorian, hence the success of one and not the other.
Biographies of Livingstone often tend to end with something like this.
"Being a naturally modest man, Livingstone considered himself a failure as a missionary. But in actual fact, he was directly responsible for thousands of conversations and the spread of Christianity into new areas. So he was really a huge success."
And well yeah, kind of. He supplied Sechele with a bible and then baptised him. And then Sechele converted everyone else.
But like, also not at all.
Sounds to me that he played a role which should not be neglected but that by his own standards he was indeed a failure and that trying to say he wasn't also runs into denying Sechele his agency as is all too often the case when it comes to history of places running into the orbit of colonisers.
But it's different because it's Dr Livingstone, I presume.Anywhere else you'd get a 'it would fall to other to carry on his legacy' summing up.