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Updated: June 12, 2025
In this document he informs the Secretary of State that Cetywayo's rule was resolutely built up "without any of the ordinary and lawful foundations of authority, and by the mere vigour and vitality of an individual character." It is difficult to understand what Sir Garnet means in this passage.
Information of Cetywayo's doings and of his secret plans reached Pretoria shortly before the Annexation, and confirmed the mind of the Special Commissioner as to the absolute necessity of that measure to save the citizens of the Republic from coming to a violent end, and South Africa from being plunged into a native war of unexampled magnitude.
But as there are interests involved in the question of his reinstatement which are, I think, more important than Cetywayo's personal proportions of mind or body, and as the results of such a step would necessarily be very marked and far-reaching, it is as well to try and understand the matter in all its bearing before anything is done.
On the other hand, it is perfectly ludicrous to observe the way in which Cetywayo's advocates overshoot the mark in arguing this and similar points; especially his lady advocates, whose writings upon these subjects bear about the same resemblance to the truth that the speech to the jury by the counsel for the defence in a hopeless murder case does to the summing up of the judge.
Sir T. Shepstone's message reached Zululand not a day too soon. Had the Annexation of the Transvaal been delayed by a few weeks even and this is a point which I earnestly beg Englishmen to remember in connection with that act Cetywayo's armies would have entered the Transvaal, carrying death before them, and leaving a wilderness behind them.
But this gallant charge availed Umbelazi but little, and by degrees Cetywayo's forces pressed his men back to the banks of the Tugela, and finally into it. Thousands fell upon the field and thousands perished in the river. When my friend swam back that night, he had nothing to fear from the alligators: they were too well fed.
If the fact of being the rightful and generally accepted occupant of the throne is not an "ordinary and lawful foundation of authority," what is? As regards Cetywayo having built up his rule by the "mere vigour and vitality of an individual character," he is surely in error. Cetywayo's position was not different to that of his immediate predecessors.
Were not Cetywayo's impis gathered against the land, and was it not because it became the Queen's land that at your word he sent them murmuring to their kraals? To save bloodshed you annexed the country beyond the Vaal. Perhaps it had been better to leave it, since "Death chooses for himself," and after all there was killing of our own people, and with the killing, shame.
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