Mind Your Colour

The 'Coloured' Stereotype in South African Literature

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Appendix II
Thomas Pringle

The poetry and prose of Thomas Pringle, one of the most outstanding figures among the 1820 settlers, contrast strongly with the emergent Afrikaans fiction of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While Pringle himself is worthy of more than a mere Appendix - he was the main actor in the struggle for the freedom of the press, the major opponent of the then Governor, Lord Charles Somerset - our interest is in his writings concerning the Khoisan and ‘coloured’ peoples, as well as in his anti-slavery activities. Pringle became secretary of the anti-slavery movement upon his return to England in July 1826.

His observations of the inhabitants of colour within South Africa are illuminating and harrowing at times. His first visit to Bethelsdorp, a mission station for ‘Hottentots’, singularly disturbed his peace of mind. Here, he was confronted with ‘God's Step-children’,

groups of woolly-haired, swarthy complexioned natives, many of them still dressed in the old sheep-skin mantle or caross; the swarms of naked or half-naked children...the strange words of the evening salutation (goedenavond)...the uncouth clucking sounds of the Hottentot language [all of which served to remind him that he was] at length in the Land of the Hottentot.¹

Pringle's description of the conditions of the jail which he visited while on his way to Cape Town in 1822, to me is still one of the great passages against tyranny.²

The tronk consisted of a single apartment, of about twenty feet by twelve or fourteen broad; and for the purposes of light and ventilation, had only one small grated opening, in the shape of a loop-hole, at a considerable height in the wall. Into this apartment were crowded about thirty human beings, of both sexes,

1 Thomas Pringle, Narrative of a Residence in South Africa (Cape Town, 1966), 14-15.

2 Ibid., 167-8.

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of all ages, and of almost every hue, - except white....The condition of the gaol was dreadful. On the door being opened, the clergyman requested me to wait a few minutes until a freer ventilation had somewhat purified the noisome atmosphere within - for the effluvia on the first opening of the door, was too horrible to be encountered.

This factual account is in stark contrast to the poetry and prose of the early Afrikaans tradition. Pringle gives other such examples of the horror of slavery. There is, for example, his encounter with a Malay slave from Cape Town, in the village of Graaff-Reinet in the Eastern Cape, who bewailed his miserable lot and related how he was tricked and then sold into slavery. In the words of Pringle:³

But such occurrences as these were, at no remote period, of almost every-day occurrence, and sink into insignificance when compared with the revolting cases which stain the judicial records of the colony.

Of the purported mildness of slavery at the Cape, he observes:⁴

I had long been convinced, from sad observation, of the utter fallacy of the allegation then so constantly heard both in the colony and in England, that slavery at the Cape was ‘so mild as to be nominal’. I had seen it, on the contrary, continually overflowing with misery, cruelty and debasement.

Pringle was particularly concerned with the de-humanizing effect the pernicious system of slavery had on the slave-holder. He considered ‘European countrymen, who thus made captives of harmless women and children...in reality greater barbarians than the savage natives of Caffraria.’⁵

His preoccupation with the South African virus of colour was to find reflection in his poetry and his prose. His Narrative of a Residence in South Africa, initially published as part II of African Sketches (1834), which included his poems, translated into German and Dutch, becomes a very important first-hand account of life on the eastern frontier, of the ‘coloured’ people and the fauna and flora of South Africa.

Considering the Afrikaans view of the Khoisan as comical, and the total absence in Afrikaans writings of the brutalizing effect of slavery, the poems of Pringle become even more remarkable. But then it must be added, that he was an exponent of the liberal, Christian Humanitarianism of the Abolitionist Movement. His hatred of oppression comes out very strongly in his sonnet To Oppression, written in 1826:⁶

3 Ibid., 218.

4 Ibid., 217.

5 Ibid., 16.

6 Thomas Pringle, Poems Illustrative of South Africa (Cape Town, 1970), 108.

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I swear, while life-blood warms my throbbing veins,

 

Still to oppose and thwart with heart and hand

 

Thy brutalising sway - till Afric's chains

 

Are burst, and Freedom rules the rescued land, -

 

Trampling Oppression and his iron rod.

 

- Such is the vow I take - So help me God:

One of the most impressive poems on the subject of slavery and the slave-holder is The Slave Dealer. In it, Pringle gives a picture of Africa swaying under the yoke of tyranny. His slave dealer is consumed with doubt and fear. The poem is Macbethian in parts, with an ancient Mariner-like quality that fascinates and abhors:⁷

There's blood upon my hands! he said

Which water cannot wash;

It was not shed where warriors bled -

It dropped from the gory lash,

As I whirled it o'er and o'er my head,

And with each stroke left a gash.

With every stroke I left a gash

While Negro blood sprang high;

And now all ocean cannot wash

My soul from murder's dye;

Not e'en thy prayer, dear Mother, quash

That Woman's wild death-cry!

His sonnet on Slavery, written in 1823, portrays the slave-holder as the victim and not the victor in this trade in human flesh:⁸

Oh Slavery! thou art a bitter draught!
And twice accursed is thy poisoned bowl,
Which taints with leprosy the White Man's soul,
Not less than his by whom its dregs are quaffed.
The Slave sinks down, o'ercome by cruel craft,
Like beast of burthen on the earth to roll.
The Master, though in luxury's lap he loll,
Feels the foul venom, like a rankling shaft,
Strike through his veins. As if a demon laughed,
He, laughing, treads his victims in the dust -
The victim of his avarice, rage or lust.
But the poor Captive's moan the whirlwind waft
To Heaven - not unavenged: the Oppressor quakes
With secret dread, and shares the hell he makes!

Pringle gives us some of the best, and most race-free depictions of the early and original inhabitants of South Africa, which in Afrikaans

7 Ibid., 86.

8 Ibid., 98.

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literature is either absent or an object of comic embellishment, scorn and ridicule. This becomes even more striking in view of the image of the Khoisan as it unfolds in Jakob Platjie and the first Afrikaans Language Movement in chapter 1. Within the Afrikaner ethos, there was no room, as yet, for the non-white as a full-blooded character, or even as a noble savage, with all its implications of lost innocence. There was no social criticism of Christian barbarity and white encroachment. The anti-slave trade lobbyist, with his abolitionist rhetoric, also contributed to the African being enshrined as a ‘good negro’, as is so clearly illustrated in the anti-slave trade poem, The Dying Negro, written by Thomas Day and John Blicknell in London in 1773.

Pringle, too, employs the noble savage to portray the Khoisan. In The Brown Hunter's Song he sketches a picture of idyllic bliss in the best noble savage tradition:⁹

Under the Didima lies a green dell,
Where fresh from the forest the blue waters swell;
And fast by that brook stands a yellow-wood tree,
Which shelters the spot that is dearest to me.

Down by the streamlet my heifers are grazing;
In the pool of the guanas the herd-boy is gazing;
Under the shade my Amána is singing -
The shade of the tree where her cradle is swinging.

When I come from upland as daylight is fading,
Though spent with the chase, and the game for my lading,
My nerves are new-strung, and my fond heart is swelling,
As I gaze from the cliff on the wood-circled dwelling.

Down the steep mountain, and through the brown forest,
I haste like a hart when his thirst is the sorest;
I bound o'er the swift brook that skirts the savannah,
And clasp my fist-born in the arms of Amána.

The Khoi becomes someone who is ‘mild and melancholy and sedate’, the white man a person who is harsh and oppressive:¹⁰

The Hottentot

Mild, melancholy and sedate, he stands,
Tending another's flock upon the fields,
His father's once, where now the White Man builds
His home, and issues forth his proud commands.
His dark eye flashes not; his listless hands
Lean on the shepherd's staff; no more he wields

9 Ibid., 62-3.

10 Ibid., 95.

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The Libyan bow - but to th' oppressor yields

 

Submissively his freedom and his lands.

 

Has he no courage? Once he had - but, lo!

 

Harsh Servitude hath worn him to the bone.

 

No enterprise? Alas! the brand, the blow,

 

Have humbled him to dust - even hope is gone!

 

‘He's a base-hearted hound - not worth his food’ -

 

His Master cries - ‘he has no gratitude!’

In his poem The Bushman, there is a picture of lost innocence as opposed to civilized barbarity not encountered in early Afrikaans literature:¹¹

The Bushman sleeps within his black-browed den,
In the lone wilderness. Around him lie
His wife and little ones unfearingly -
For they are far away from ‘Christian-Men’.
No herds, loud lowing, call him down the glen:
He fears no foe but famine; and may try
To wear away the hot noon slumberingly;
Then rise to search for roots - and dance again.
But he shall dance no more! His secret lair,
Surrounded, echoes to the thundering gun,
And the wild shriek of anguish and despair!
He dies - yet, ere life's ebbing sands are run,
Leaves to his sons a curse, should they be friends
With the proud ‘Christian-Men’ - for they are fiends!

By enshrining the ‘Bushman’ as a noble savage in The Song of the Wild Bushman, the ‘coloured’ inhabitants are salvaged from the anthropoid, homo ludens categories:¹²

Let the proud White Man boast his flocks,
And fields of foodful grain;
My home is mid the mountain rocks,
The Desert my domain.
I plant no herbs nor pleasant fruits,
I toil not for my cheer;
The Desert yields me juicy roots,
And herds of bounding deer.

The last two lines in particular recall those by Chaucer in The Former Age:¹³

A Blysful lyf, a paisible and a swete,
ledden the peples in the former age.
They held hem payed of the fruites that they ete,
Which that the feldes yave hem by usage.

11 Ibid., 97.

12 Ibid., 13.

13 G. Chaucer, The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (ed. F.N. Robinson, London, 1957²), 534.

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Compare for instance the poem Jan Bantjies, during the period of the first Language Movement, about a Khoi who often goes to the races, and is then actually responsible for one of the horses winning. But it all goes to his head and he ends up drinking heavily. The same comic note is struck when the ‘coloured’ character in Du Toit's poem Hoe die Hollanders die Kaap ingeneem het¹⁴ (How the Dutch got hold of the Cape) relates the story of this take-over.

Rightly, then, Pringle is accorded the honour of being the first South African poet, and his name lives forth in the prize for English Literature. Nowhere in Dutch Afrikaans during the early to mid-or-late nineteenth century, does one find the indigenous Khoisan so beautifully portrayed.

14 D.J. Opperman, Groot Verseboek (Kaapstad, 1964²), 9-10.