Queen Adelaide Province consisted of some 7,000 square miles of
Rarabe
Xhosa territory annexed by the British Cape colonial government in May
1835 during the Sixth Frontier War. The province was held only until the
end of 1836 when it was abandoned under pressure from the imperial
government, but it represented the first British attempt to extend direct
control over a large body of formerly independent Africans. No such
ambitious scheme had ever been attempted before in the Cape, and no such
scheme was to be attempted elsewhere in Africa until the late nineteenth
century.Given its short-lived nature, Queen Adelaide Province has not been
extensively analysed in any of the prominent histories of the eastern Cape.
However, while the treatment is brief, its significance has been widely
recognized. This early, temporary colonization of Xhosa territory has served
as a lens through which to view colonial extension in the eastern Cape
as a
whole. In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century settler histories
of
George Cory and George McCall Theal, the annexation of Queen Adelaide
Province represents a temporary advance within a much broader colonial
progress. One episode in the epic attempt to extend colonial civilization
across ‘Kaffraria’, expansion within the province was unfortunately
thwarted
by misguided Cape and metropolitan philanthropy. In W. M. Macmillan's
liberal critique of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the disputes over the
province between the land-hungry settlers, the strategically-minded
Governor D'Urban and the humanitarian Secretary of State for the Colonies,
Lord Glenelg, are again viewed as part of a much broader struggle. But
rather than Cory's struggle between civilization and savagery, this
is seen as
a contest between malicious and benign conceptions of colonialism. The
province represents an early collision between, on the one hand, evangelical
and humanitarian versions of cultural colonization that guaranteed Xhosa
access to their land (a kind of trusteeship that Macmillan advocated for
his
own times) and, on the other hand, the practice of colonization founded
upon
settler-led conquest and dispossession.
The vicissitudes of herbalism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain
