THE BECHUANA REBELS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XCVIII, Issue 11424, 12 November 1897, Page 4

THE BECHUANA REBELS.

It may be that the trial for sedition and the sentence to long terms of imprisonment of a Bechuana chief and fifty-five of his followers, of which news has just been received, marks the beginning of hatter things in English dealings with the natives of South Africa; hut we confess that the proceedings do not greatly impress us in that direction, more especially as the accused men are said to have pleaded guilty of the offence with which they were charged. Untutored aborigines, as we know from New Zealand experience, have little conception of civilised methods of trial, and frequently plead guilty because their chief has done so, and accept imprisonment as a kind of treat. In the case of the Bechuana rebels, there is evidence that numbers of them have been treated cruelly by their captors, and that batches of them have been dealt with indiscriminately. We find it stated, for example, in an English paper of a few weeks back that an entire tribe—men, women and children was being deported from its home, with a view to having all its members “ apprenticed ” for five years to Cape farmers. A batch of a hundred and thirty men had arrived at Capo Town, and had been waited upon by Mr Hose Innes, Acting Minister of Native Affairs. That gentleman asked the “ rebels ” if they knew -why they h&n been brought to Cape Town, if they knew they were to be apprenticed to the farmers for wages, and if they preferred the means which had been adopted for disposal of them to any other. According to the Cope Town, Press, the answer in each case was, “Yea, baas.” Moffat,,

the well-known missionary, describes this apprenticeship system as “ mere veiled slavery,” and we can quite well understand this to be a correct description of the fate of those natives who are allotted to Dutch farmers, who, as a class, refuse to concede human rights to black men. A memorial was addressed by a number of ladies of Cape Colony to Sir James Sievwright, protesting against the deportation of the “rebels” and their distribution among the Cape farmers as “ labour apprentices.” The memorialists urged that the punishment was indiscriminate and, therefore, unfair; unlawful, in the absence of trial and verdict; contrary to civilised usage in the treatment of prisoners of war; and that the apprenticeship penalty is virtually slavery. This method of dealing with men whose rebellion would be called lofty patriotism if it had succeeded, bad as it is, has been surpassed in atrocity by other recent dealings with the Bechuanas, if the testimony of two indignant Englishmen is to be relied on. Mr B. Crouch, a member of the Langberg Expedition, has made allegations of gross cruelty to old and dying natives, and of three men being shot dead when caught in the act of driving away cattle. The Rev Algernon Andrews, Congregational minister at Yryburg, in a letter to the Cape Times of September ,2, stated that of the Bechuana “ rebels ” en route for Cape Town, the lepers, aged and deformed, were shot out of hand, and that the authorities had not provided any shelter for more than one thousand captive women and children at Vryburg. At the date of the last mail from Cape Town these shocking charges were being investigated by the Government, and seven men were in custody in connection with them. It is to be hoped, for the credit of the British name, either that the allegations were disproved, or that the authors of the atrocities received well-merited punishment. The formal trial of a number of the rebels has probably been resolved upon in deference to the protests and appeals of English men and women whose moral sense was outraged by the summary and questionable proceedings formerly pursued. The Kaffir race, to which the Bechuanas belong, has many admirable qualities, which render its members deserving of better treatment than shooting at sight or condemnation without trial to exile and semi-slavery.