Once the capital of the Province of Queen Adelaide, later British Kaffraria, then Ciskei and now an important centre in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, King William's Town is steeped in both colonial history and the recent history of the struggle for liberation.
Birth of King Williams Town
The establishment of the Buffalo Mission Station on the banks of the Buffalo River, by Scottish missionary John Brownlee of the London Missionary Society, in January 1826, led to the settlement that would later be known as King Williams Town.
But King Williams Town has had a somewhat turbulent history.
Hiccups along the way
Due to warfare between the Xhosa and British during the nineteen century, Xhosa tribes people attacked and destroyed the Buffalo Mission Station in 1835 and drove away the missionaries. Sir Benjamin D'urban, then Governor of the British Cape Colony, intervened and the Rifle Brigade, under the command of Colonel Harry Smith, drove the Xhosa away on 24 May 1835.
Sir Benjamin D'urban then continued to proclaim a new district, the Province of Queen Adelaide, naming the warm valley of the Buffalo River after Queen Adelaide. The settlement at the Buffalo Mission Station was named King Williams Town, after the reigning British Monarch, King William the Fourth, and proclaimed capital of the Province of Queen Adelaide.
However, the new Colonial Secretary of the British Government, Lord Charles Glenelg, reinstated the Xhosa people on 26 December that same year. The British abandoned the Province of Queen Adelaide, and King Williams Town was deserted, even though the Buffalo Mission Station had already been rebuilt.
Missionary John Brownlee returned to the area and once again took up his missionary work. The favourable position of King Williams Town made it a popular destination and base location for traders. Many of these traders eventually settled in the area of King Williams Town.
King Williams Town was again sacked and burned by the Xhosa, during the War of the Axe of 1846. Sir Harry Smith, now the Governor of the Cape Colony, returned to the King Williams Town area and proclaimed the Crown Colony of British Kaffraria, with King Williams Town as capital.
Xhosa Defeat
The British Xhosa clashes continued, and by 1854 the British had stripped the Xhosa chiefs of power. The Xhosa chiefs were now salaried functionaries in the colonial administration. This loss of power and land was a devastating blow for the Xhosa people.
But when a lethal lung infection spread among the Xhosa cattle, and they experienced huge cattle losses. As many as 80 per cent of the Xhosa chiefs' cattle was destroyed by this disease.
Cattle meant wealth to the Xhosa, and Xhosa life revolved around tending the herds. So, as people do in times of crisis, the Xhosa people turned to their religion to find answers and solutions to their collapsed worldview and loss of purpose.
At that time, a sixteen-year-old Xhosa prophetess claimed that she had had a message from the ancestors. They apparently called on Xhosa leaders to create a new beginning for their people, by wiping out the old, and that meant killing the remaining cattle.
"You are to tell the people that the whole community is about to rise again from the dead. Then go on to say to them all the cattle living now must be slaughtered, for they are reared with defiled hands, as the people handle witchcraft.
Say to them there must be no ploughing of lands, rather must the people dig deep pits, erect new huts, set up wide, strongly built cattlefold, make milksacks, and weave doors from buka roots" - The words of the spirits, talking to 16-year-old Nongqawuse, as recorded by W.W. Qqoba in his narrative of the Cattle killing, based on oral sources, quoted by J.B. Peires, in his book The Dead will Arise.
This prophecy caused a rift between the amathamba ('soft' believers who thought that they must obey) and the amagogotya ('hard' unbelievers rejected the culling). But in February 1856, the Xhosa began killing their cattle. A total of 400,000 cattle were reportedly culled.
40,000 Xhosa died as a result of this near tribal suicide. Many of those Xhosa that survived the resulting hardship was forced by their circumstances to work as labourers on farms in Cape Town.
Dr. John Fitzgerald, founder of the Native Hospital in King Williams Town reported that throngs of living skeletons passed from house to house in King Williams Town, and that dead bodies were picked up within and around the limits of the towns in the area. Scarcely a day passed over, that men, women or children were not found in a dying state from starvation."
King Williams Town prospers
Military buildings initially dominated the small town of King Williams Town, because of the constant clashes between Britain and the Xhosa people. But King Williams Town continued to grow slowly, regardless, and after the last frontier war with the Xhosa in 1856, and following the tragic self-sabotage of the Xhosa people, the King Williams Town population grew more rapidly. King Williams Town developed into an important agricultural and commercial centre, through regional trade with the local tribes.
During 1857, when the British German Legion was disbanded, more than two thousand German legionnaires settled in the area, bringing a strong German influence into the King Williams Town area.
King Williams Town remained a garrison until a few years into the 20th century. After the 1861 royal visit by Prince Albert, son of British Queen Victoria, King Williams Town was declared a Royal Borough.
Recent King Williams Town History
King Williams Town's more recent political history has been equally turbulent.
The first black consciousness organisation in South Africa, Imbumba Eliso Lomzi Yabantsundu (Union of Native Vigilance Association), was established in King William's Town in 1887.
Before Bhisho's re-incorporation into South Africa in 1994, scores of protesters were killed in the 'Bhisho massacre'.
King Williams Town was also home to the well-known anti-apartheid activist, Steve Biko, whose grave is a favoured monument for people visiting King Williams Town.
