Buxton’s most prolific colonial correspondent during the 1830s was Philip in the Cape Colony. With his son-in-law John Fairbairn, editor of the Cape Town-based South African Commercial Advertiser, Philip denounced the policies, including pass controls and compulsory apprenticeship, which bolstered colonial masters’ control over their Khoisan labour force. In 1822 he met Buxton and Wilberforce in London, and with their assistance brought his campaign to a head in 1828, the same year he published his Researches in South Africa, which caused a furore in the Cape and Britain. During the controversy Buxton raised the issue of the Khoisan in Parliament. Two days later the Acting Governor of the Cape, Sir Richard Bourke, passed Ordinance 50 abolishing the pass laws, releasing the Khoisan from apprenticeship requirements, and acknowledging their right to own land.
British settlers established on the eastern frontier in 1820 regarded Ordinance 50 as a disaster. Thomas Stubbs, for example, denounced ‘that abominable false philanthropy which made [the Khoisan] free and ruined them . . . They were a people that required to be under control, both for their own benefit and the public; the same as the slaves in this country.’ J. C. Chase blamed ‘the pious but gulled John Bull' for letting himselfbe duped by Philip and his allies. Seemingly oblivious, Buxton moved on, backing an LMS scheme for promoting Christianization and civilization through the Kat River settlement for freed Khoisan labourers. After reading one of John Philip's letters about progress at Kat River, Buxton was seen by his daughter walking ‘up and down the room, almost shedding tears of joy to hear of the prosperity and well-being of these dear people’. Buxton later used the improving tale of the settlement in parliamentary debates as evidence of what might be achieved by ending ex-slaves' apprenticeships in the West Indies. White colonists, in contrast, set energetically about proving that Kat River had failed. T. J. Biddulph described it as ‘the most transparent piece of humbug ever practised upon the public to serve the purposes of unscrupulous, intriguing people’, and the Cape’s new governor from 1847, Sir Henry Pottinger, characterized the settlement as ‘a concourse of rebellious, idle paupers’. It is not surprising that many of the settlement’s inhabitants rebelled during the 1850-2 frontier war between colonial and Xhosa forces and that the settlement was eventually broken up by the local government. It was a story to be repeated in other settlement colonies where white farmers determined that no agricultural schemes for indigenous people should be allowed to succeed. (See pp. 270-71.)
Philip’s next crusade, to prevent the extension of white settlement into Xhosa territory, also came to grief, though not without a mighty struggle. In the early 1830s British settlers were allocated land taken from the Ndlambe Xhosa chiefdom in the hope that they might act as a buffer against Xhosa raids into the Cape Colony. Having been subjected to a number of such raids by the early 1830s, prominent settlers, and notably Robert Godlonton, editor of the Graham’s Town Journal, were beginning to orchestrate a representation of the ‘typical’ Xhosa as a rapacious cattle thief. Such a representation helped to legitimize calls for the Xhosa’s further punitive dispossession in order to allow for the expansion of newly profitable settler sheep farms.
Philip and Fairbairn visited the frontier in 1830 and spoke with Xhosa chiefs, as well as missionaries of the LMS and Glasgow Missionary Society. Most of these missionaries would become vital channels for relaying Xhosa grievances through Philip to Buxton. By the early 1830s Fairbairn’s South African Commercial Advertiser was increasingly coming into conflict with Godlonton’s Graham’s Town Journal as a result of their different visions of ‘progress’ along the frontier. The Advertiser saw Godlonton’s programme of land appropriation and Xhosa punishment as a betrayal of Britain’s civilizing and Christianizing mission. The contest between humanitarian and settler agendas in the Cape was brought to a head in the years 1834-6, when all-out war raged along on the eastern frontier. As Philip was keen to point out, the Xhosa attack that initiated the war had been provoked by a series of colonial aggressions, which the Xhosa associated with the British settler presence. Twenty-four of the settlers were killed in the first onslaught. This ‘Sixth’ Frontier War soon had its counterpart in a discursive war between the settlers and their evangelical critics. It became a test of strength for the postemancipation humanitarian nexus as a whole, as prominent settlers declared that ‘many of the missionaries have been labouring under the greatest delusion and although living for years amongst the Kafirs, they have not been able to form anything like a correct estimate of the character of the people around them’.
Not all missionaries in the Cape united in opposition to settler projects or participated in Buxton’s humanitarian network, particularly the frustrated Wesleyan missionaries, some of whom had themselves been settlers. Bitter at widespread resistance to his evangelical efforts, the Revd Shrewsbury—the same man who had been ejected from Barbados by planters for his alleged correspondence with Buxton—declared even before the war, ‘were it not that I desire to promote the salvation of their souls, I would not dwell amongst such a wretched people another hour’. Much to the embarrassment of the WMMS Directors in London, whose meetings were chaired by Buxton, Shrewsbury advocated execution of any Xhosa who had taken colonial lives and the tagging of others so that they could be monitored during ‘merciful’ hard labour on colonial roads. The Cape Governor, General Sir Benjamin D’Urban, who had pronounced the Xhosa ‘irreclaimable savages’, annexed 7,000 square miles of Xhosa land before the end of hostilities and declared it open to white settlement as Queen Adelaide Province in 1835.