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Publications & Reports

Bleek writes that, despite not being a war of secession, the Free State War resembles aspects of the late American Civil War. In both wars, the victor's progress was so slow and uncertain that spectators struggled to forecast the outcome. The best thing left for the burgher government is to pursue peace with the Basuto at any cost. As a conduit for unnamed others, Governor Wodehouse declares the outcome a disgrace that has destroyed value for a state plagued by cattle-lifting and fear. Bleek disagrees that the Free State is now worse off than when the fighting began. Plunder is immaterial compared to the burghers' ongoing occupation of the enemy's most fertile lands, the main object of the war. The Basutos' situation is unclear, but Bleek suspects they are in some unpleasant predicament. He likens the Basutos to the Confederates, reasoning they will survive by marauding. The European population will not be driven from the Free State, abandoning their fine farms to the Basutos -- who maintain hereditary claims upon the territory as a pretext for their seizure. Bleek thinks that independent Negro states emerging as Haiti (Hayti) did are impossible in South Africa's interior. The singular territory is too fertile and climatically ideal to be squandered by natives and would be better used by Europeans. It is unfair to condemn the Free Staters, with their meagre resources and untrained personnel, for failing to subjugate a disciplined group as well armed as the Basuto when the Imperial Government took two and a half years to finish the last Kaffir War (the Eighth Xhosa War?) while using imperial resources. They now hold the fertile plains surrounding Thaba Bosiu. Moshesh will soon exhaust his provisions, but possessing the mountain is unnecessary. President Brand has proposed terms for peace to Moshesh, with Bleek advising the burghers to control the narrative. He digresses to church matters, submitting that for women and clergymen to live sincerely in the world they must not be sheltered from its realities to the point of ignorance to preserve a false innocence conflated with (blind) faith by orthodoxy (e.g. through obscurantism), discouraging the sharing of experience and resulting wisdom which might inform a healthier, more moral way of living. He then turns to the Governor's native policy, supported by The Standard (now the Evening Standard), and how it recounts his successful handling of native affairs involving the amaXhosa and Griqua. Wodehouse is competent but occupies the wrong office for his particular skill set. Lastly, on postal matters, he queries the placement of uncollected letters on shelves too close to the collection window as the cause of recent mail theft by a coloured woman named Doortje.

Printed newsprint glued on paper

25/01/1866

Two cut out columns of newsprint text, positioned vertically parallel, pasted onto a plus-sized A4 unlined sheet with visible warping. No title was subsequently handwritten onto the mount/paper backing.

Curiously, Bleek either suspected the burghers loss (which would have been hard for him to discern given his admission to delayed reports on the attempt to take Thaba Bosigu) to the Basotho and maintained a false narrative of pro-burgher encouragement confidently stating their overwhelming potential for victory (going so far as to devise how best to partition the spoils of plunder) or he is reluctantly covering for his (shared) false prediction. Being openly critical of the burgehrs would have sounded unpatriotic and seemed like an attempt to decrease morale. It's hazy and perhaps such speculation is merely slight optimisim about the writer of these words. There is a misprint of the year (still featured as 1865 rather than 1866) of publication below the publication title which has been subsequently marked in the authors hand (?). Despite Bleek dismissing the emergence of independent Negro states in the region, the Basuto Rebellion against the British Cape Colony would transpire between September 13th, 1880 and April 29th, 1881.