Page:South Africa (1878 Volume 2).djvu/308

This page needs to be proofread.

was needed, as at the date of the notice such sanction could hardly have been received. This is a matter which I do not profess to understand, but the present Governor of the Cape Colony,—who in this war acts as High Commissioner and in that capacity is not responsible to his Ministers,—is certainly not the man to take such a step without proper authority. I hope we are not counting our chickens before they are hatched. I feel little doubt myself but that the hatching will at last be complete.

Though the disturbance has hardly been a war,—if a war, it would have to be reckoned as the sixth Kafir war,—it may be well to say a few words as to its commencement. To do so it will be necessary to bring another tribe under the reader's notice. These are the Fingos, who among South African natives are the special friends of the Britisher,—having precedence in this respect even of the Basutos. They appear to have been originally,—as originally, at least, as we can trace them back,—inhabitants of some portion of the country now called Natal, and to have been driven by Chaka, the great King of the Zulus, down among the Galekas. Here they were absolutely enslaved, and in the time of Hintsa, the father of Kreli, were called the Kafirs' dogs. Their original name I do not know, but Fingo means a dog. After one of the Kafir wars, in 1834, they were taken out from among the Galekas by British authority, relieved from the condition of slavery, and settled on locations which were given to them. They were first placed near the coast between the Great Fish River and the Keiskamma; but many were subsequently moved up to a