Western University

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Aboriginal Policy Research Consortium International (APRCi)

2000

The Aborigines protection society, 1837–1909

Charles Swaisland

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Swaisland, Charles, "The Aborigines protection society, 1837–1909" (2000). Aboriginal Policy Research Consortium International
(APRCi). 327.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/aprci/327
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The Aborigines protection society, 1837–1909

Charles Swaisland
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To cite this article: Charles Swaisland (2000): The Aborigines protection society, 1837–1909, Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of
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 The Aborigines Protection Society,
1837-1909

CHARLES SWAISLAND

For many in the abolition movement the Emancipation Act of 1833 seemed
the end of a long road. Certainly it was the end of the mass movement,' but
for the battle-hardened leadership it was no more than a significant milestone
in a much longer journey. Slavery was still legal in some countries and their
dependencies, and the slave trade still carried on in ships under their flags.
Although now illegal in British colonies, had slavery stopped in all of them?
In reality not, for slavery-like conditions prevailed in many parts, encouraged
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by the periods of apprenticeship imposed by the Act.2

The campaigners regrouped, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery
Society' being formed to combat continuing chattel slavery and, in direct
response to the report of the Parliamentary Committee on Aborigines
(British Settlement) 1834-37, the Aborigines Protection Society (APS) was
established to oppose the exploitation of indigenous peoples in British
colonies. For 70 years until they amalgamated in 1909, the two Societies
worked together, usually in harmony, but with divergent viewpoints on
some issues and occasional acerbity as their secretaries sought to defend
from threatened encroachment the interests and territories they considered
their own.4
One reason for the infrequency of such clashes was the early sharing out
of the world. The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS)
concentrated on the continuing slave trade and slavery outside the British
Empire, while the APS mainly addressed problems caused by British
imperialism. There was some overlap; for historical reasons the BFASS
retained the main interest in the West Indies and, in 1890, the APS was
active in famine relief on the Red Sea coast of the Sudan, territory over
which the sister organization had long campaigned. Both were engaged in
the south Pacific, where labour recruitment had started before Britain had
any political authority in the region, and where practices were sometimes
indistinguishable from slave-raiding. Indian matters were left to the British
India Society,5 until the traffic in indentured labour became a major
movement and brought both in.
Organization and methods were similar and the two Societies shared not
a few members. Each had a world-wide network of correspondents, some of
 266 AFTER SLAVERY: EMANCIPATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

whom supplied information to both. Members of Parliament were lobbied6

and representations, often cocooned in sonorous generality,7 were made to
Secretaries of State. The chance was rarely lost of writing long, closely-
reasoned letters to newspapers. Most of their activity was reported in the
The Anti-Slavery Reporter and The Aborigines Friend together with, in the
latter, the text of correspondence with the Colonial Office.8
Who were the people mounting a challenge to the government of Empire
by setting up and belonging to a body of ill-defined membership and an
annual income of three to four hundred pounds? Some of the anti-slavery
bodies and other groups at work before abolition had enjoyed royal and
aristocratic patronage. The short-lived African Civilisation Society had the
Queen's husband at its head and the BFASS would one day have the King
of England as its patron. The APS never had such connections. One or two
relatively minor peers associated themselves with it from time to time over
particular matters, as did a few bishops, while a sprinkling of baronets and
knights of the shires gave more constant service. But beyond them the
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membership was largely made up of middle-class professionals and others

in commerce and industry. In religious affiliation they were mostly
Nonconformist or, if Anglican, evangelical. Most voted Liberal in general
elections.
A more fruitful question is: who provided and maintained motivation in
the work? Two men were of particular importance in the history of the
Society. Indeed, the minutes of correspondence in Colonial Office files
justly claim that each in turn was the Society." The two men were its
successive secretaries. Frederick William Chesson (1855-88) had spent
some of his adolescent years in New York State where the case of a fugitive
slave made him a committed abolitionist. Henry Richard Fox Bourne
(1889-1909), who had once been a clerk in the War Office, was the son of
a magistrate in the West Indies.
Next in importance in the work was the network of correspondents.
Most representation and much of the content of The Aborigines Friend was
based on the information they supplied. Except where the person was too
well known,10 identities were kept secret even from other correspondents in
the territory. That was a help in testing the reliability and independence of
the reporting. After one or two unhappy experiences when the Colonial
Office, in communicating with governors, had not respected confidential
disclosure, identification of sources was firmly refused. Unfortunately, in
Whitehall and colonial secretariats that was often used as an excuse for not
taking effective action.
Correspondents came from many walks of life. There were traders and
clerics, the latter mainly missionaries from Britain. Two prominent clerics,
whose integrity was never in question, were Bishop John William Colenso
 THE AISORIGINES PROTECTION SOCIETY, 1837-1909 267

of Natal, whose voluminous correspondence was maintained by members of

his family after his death in 1883, and the African Bishop James Johnson of
Lagos, whose letters also lack any suggestion of self-interest. Most
correspondents were European, but there were some highly educated West
Africans and a much smaller number of South Africans. Tengo Jabavu and
Kirkland Soga, both newspaper men, sent material from the Eastern Cape,
while Dr Abdullah Abdurahman organized and sent petitions from Cape
Town calling for votes for non-white citizens when South Africa became a
Union. Maori majors of militia, men from St. Helena having problems in
Durban finding schools for their children and mixed-race people being
harassed by pass laws in Johannesburg were able to handle their own
correspondence, as were some Indians in Mauritius, but the quality of the
English in letters signed by petitioners of the humbler sort showed that they
were written by English-speaking amanuenses."
A particularly interesting class of correspondent consisted of colonial
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civil servants in touch with the APS; some like Sir Henry Barkly, former
Governor of the Cape of Good Hope and High Commissioner in South
Africa, and Sir Benson Maxwell, former Chief Justice of Malaya,
collaborated only after retirement, but most were in touch while in service.
Sir Arthur Gordon12 and Sir John Pope Hennessy,'3 both sent Chesson copies
of their confidential dispatches to Whitehall so that questions inconvenient
to the Colonial Secretary could be asked in Parliament.
Despite the spirit of reform affecting the Home Civil Service, patronage
still ruled colonial appointments, and most of their colonial service
correspondents at some time sought the secretary's help when seeking an
advantage in their careers. Some had roots in Scotland and Ireland and may
have felt disadvantaged when it came to postings and promotion. There are
indications that Chesson could sometimes help.
The Aborigines Protection Society was born out of concern for the
welfare of indigenous peoples under pressure from growing emigration
from western Europe, carried by power of steam and possessing
increasingly powerful weapons. Reaching foreign shores in large numbers,
the immigrants were equipped to despoil the inhabitants of land and compel
their labour. The Society never resolved the tension between a Darwinian
belief in the inevitability of emigration to distant and seemingly more
spacious lands'4 and the manifest detriment to the interests and welfare of
the indigenous inhabitants. Thus, Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, grandson of
the first president, speaking in 1889, said:
There is one tendency which we cannot forget and that is, those vast
spaces of unoccupied and unused territory in South Africa and other
parts of the world cannot remain as they are with the human race
 268 AFTER SLAVERY: EMANCIPATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

increasing ... the space will be filled up ... [and all that government
can do] is to control and direct it, and see that the progress goes on
with as little mischief as possible to all concerned.15
The following year Fox Bourne, in a paper delivered at the Universal
Peace Congress in Westminster Town Hall, went even further:
We are confronted at starting by the great natural law of the 'survival
of the fittest' which applies to human beings no less than to the rest of
animal creation. ... All we dare hope for and strive after is that the
encroachments shall be effected under conditions most equitable, or
least inequitable, to the natives....16

The Indian Coolies

Because of their involvement in commerce and industry as well as religious
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persuasion, most members associated personal and social virtue with honest
toil backed by responsible capital. When the latter had an overtly
humanitarian motive, such as the African Civilisation Society's Niger
venture of 1841, the appeal was strong indeed. Belief was never lost in
commerce, first as the supplanter of the slave trade and then as a vehicle of
civilization, though the activities of chartered companies were to test it.
A small, idealistic settlement up the Niger, a suggestion that American
humanitarians should establish a similar settlement to Liberia on the East
African coast," and a proposal for a joint Anglo-Irish-Maltese colony in
Cyrenaica18 were not seen at the time as a threat to Africa. What made the
idea acceptable was the assumption that the settlers would be using their
own muscle power, as had been the case in New England and on the Cape
Frontier in 1820. But in tropical countries immigrants soon sought to
become landlords needing labour. Former slaves in Mauritius and the West
Indian colonies were reluctant to carry on working in conditions differing
little from their former state, so a regular and biddable replacement had to
be found. Only rarely could local people supply what was wanted, either
because they were few in number or had a social organization that did not
fit in with regular employment. The answer was indentured labour mainly
recruited from India, China and the South Sea Islands." The way in which
it was recruited, transported and employed occasioned much abuse.20 If
settlement was not a clear-cut issue for the Society, abuses stemming from
it were and the most extensive of these related to harsh conditions of
employment. The successors of the abolitionists were back at a business
they understood well.
The APS took an interest in the conditions in the West Indies of Indian
labour and the Carib remnant, and the welfare of Chinese labourers in Latin
 THE AIIORIGINES PROTECTION SOCIETY, 1837-1909 269

America, whether on Cuban plantations or in Peru, where it was said a

thousand had been killed near Santa Rosa by 'a body of Negroes'.21
Questions were asked about Dutch plantations in Surinam and even more
pointed ones about Indian labour conditions in Cayenne, Martinique and
Guadeloupe in 1897,22 as well as about the five-year indenturing to farmers
offered by the Cape Government in 1897 to alleged Bechuana rebels as an
alternative to their being tried for treason. All these inspired a vigorous but
unsuccessful campaign for imperial intervention. Their main labour
concerns, however, were Indians in Réunion and Mauritius, traffic in Pacific
Islands labour to Queensland, the importation of Chinese on to the Rand and
the appalling conditions discovered in the Congo Free State.
There was little the APS could do about the recruitment in India,
although one or two representations were made about reducing the length of
contract from five to three years for labourers working within India.23 They
were also concerned about conditions in the Assam tea gardens.24 When Sir
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Arthur Gordon, in his last governorship, was able to pay to Tamil labourers
from public funds wages owed by a bankrupt tea estate in Ceylon, they
warmly approved.23
The Indian Ocean traffic was on a large scale, with most of the labourers
coming from Madras. When Chesson and Sir Charles Wingfield
interviewed William Adam, Governor of the province, in London he
claimed that 138,535 had left Madras between 1842 and 1870, 110,825
bound for Mauritius. Arrivals on the island in 1879 numbered 1,500 and a
like total was expected in 1880.26
There were 40,000 Indians in Réunion in 1881,27 a particularly large
number having been recruited the year before because of a threatened
suspension of recruitment. That threat, made from time to time and
occasionally carried out because of bad conditions on the plantations, had
unfortunate consequences.28 Pre-emptive over-recruitment brought down
wages and placed extra strains on medical and other facilities. Entry was
denied to one shipload reaching Réunion because there was no market for
their labour and the Marguerite sailed into Port Louis in the hope of
disposing of the men to Mauritian estates. According to the Mauritian
Mercantile Record and Commercial Gazette, the 400 people aboard had
been 'kidnapped' from all over British India and shipped from Pondicherry
contrary to the terms of the Anglo-French convention of 1861.29
The convention allowing French recruitment from British India was said
to be the price paid for the abolition of a revived slave trade from east
Africa, principally Mozambique.30 It required that, before a labourer left
India, there had to exist a contract either with a receiving government or a
designated owner of the soil to be worked, and there were conditions
applying to the accommodation aboard ship. An anomaly in the latter was
 270 AFTER SLAVERY: EMANCIPATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

discovered when Chesson took up with the India Office the plight of some
time-expired labourers on their way home from Réunion. They were landed
in the Seychelles from the leaking 380-ton barque Francis, a ship with a
capacity of 200 passengers but with 400 aboard on arrival. When the 400-
ton Jacques arrived to collect them, even she was not big enough and 67
were left behind when the voyage to Pondicherry was resumed.31 The
convention prescribed conditions on the outward journey, but said nothing
about them on the way home.32
The Society was handicapped in dealing with the situation in Réunion
for want of reliable information. What they had, suggested that conditions
were bad, but there was no intention on the part of the French of making it
easy for foreigners to investigate. Even Victor Schoelcher, an ardent,
French, anti-slavery campaigner with whom the Society enjoyed a co-
operative relationship, told Chesson that not only would French planters in
Réunion and the West Indies as well as the French government refuse
inspection of the plantations by a British consul, but, 'despite my hatred of
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immigration, I would be the first to oppose our Government if it agreed to

it'.33 Consequently, reliable reports from Réunion were scarce, the India
Office being unable to furnish official consular reports for the years
1872-74. In 1871 Colonel Seagrave, the British Consul, had received 771
complaints from or about Indians, of whom a third, he said, were in prison
at any one time.
Conditions in Mauritius were not much better, as letters from many
correspondents made clear, though the report of the Royal Commission,
received in April 1875, surprisingly said that they were rather better on the
estates than was commonly supposed.34 All was far from well, however.
There were arrangements for a quarter of every shipload to be made up of
women which, even if the requirement were fully met, meant a serious
imbalance of population. As Colonel O'Brien, Inspector of Police,
remarked, it made polyandry almost an acknowledged system.35 Medical
cover was also inadequate, hospital accommodation on the two d'Arifat
estates at Flacq being cited because the mortality rate there had been higher
than average.36 J J. Daly, a Canadian barrister and magistrate as well as an
APS correspondent, conducted three inquiries between 1877 and 1879 into
hospital and labour regulations and found that conditions had improved
since the report appeared and a new labour ordinance had come into
operation.37
In Mauritius it was those known as 'Old Immigrants' who were the most
disadvantaged. Having completed their indentured time and lacking in
many cases the money to get home, they were stranded, for Mauritian
planters had managed to get contracts lacking provision for return
passages.38 To survive, many were forced into a further period of indentured
 THE AliORIGINES PROTECTION SOCIETY, 1837-1909 271

labour. Their plight was brought to government and APS notice in 1871 by
a pamphlet written by Adolph de Plevitz, a former Prussian Army officer
and then a planter in Mauritius, who had helped 9,401 Indians to address a
petition to Sir Arthur Gordon.39 It was a catalogue of their complaints,
starting with criticism of the recruiting system in India, of wages paid
sometimes six months in arrears and, when their time was done, liability to
arrest as vagrants if they were found without a costly ticket bearing a
photograph and a pass valid only for one district unless it had been endorsed
by a police inspector for wider use. If the fine could not be paid,
imprisonment followed.
The punishment of offenders could be harsh. Heavy fines and costs sent
many a person to gaol, where punishment for an offence against prison
discipline could be caning. Corporal punishment was all too common. W.
Kennedy, Superintendent of Prisons, claimed that over a ten-year period
there liad been more than 500 floggings in what he thought were
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inappropriate cases. A commission set up to inquire into practice found that

caning was administered to unfit persons and that the punishment in Port
Louis prison was sanctioned by a disciplinary committee without its hearing
the evidence.40
Planters may have welcomed a stranded pool of experienced labour
harried back into employment by a draconian vagrancy law, but a few
perceptive observers saw beyond the present scene. One such was Owen
O'Connor of the Immigration Department. Of the estimated Mauritian
population of 325,000 in 1872, 225,000 were Indian. O'Connor noted that
many of the latter had become small proprietors and within 10 to 15 years
they would become influential. Even he could not have imagined that they
would one day supplant the plantocracy as the island's rulers.41

Boer 'Slavery'
The Great Trek convinced the APS that Boers leaving the Cape Colony
were seeking freedom to practise the slavery they had recently been
required by the 1833 Emancipation Act to give up. It was a view of the
Boers they were to hold tenaciously almost to the end. Writing to Lord
Glenelg, the Secretary of State, Thomas Hodgkin was astonished that the
colonial government had allowed so large an armed force to trek, even
though he agreed that they had suffered grievous provocation at the hands
of that government and from the unjust arrangement for paying slave
compensation only in London.42 The Society, having warmly applauded the
abandonment, on instructions from London, of the ceded Queen Adelaide
territory in 1836, pressed Glenelg to annexe Port Natal temporarily to bar
further Boer expansion.43 Sir Harry Smith's proclamation of the Orange
 272 AFTER SLAVERY: EMANCIPATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

River State in 1848 passed without comment in The Aborigines Friend, but
on the abandonment of the territory six years later it was noted that 'this
territory ... having been unjustly acquired has been recklessly thrown
away'.44 'A piece of egregious folly', the editor called it. The annexation of
the Transvaal in 1877 was welcomed and the retrocession in 1881 deplored,
lest it lead to a resurgence of slavery or, as Lord Shaftesbury put it at the
Society's Annual General Meeting in May 1881, the Boers planting 'their
tyrannous foot on the necks of the native races'.45
Not only did the APS petition the British government but, from time to
time, Boer leaders were also addressed. There is no evidence of how
Andries Pretorius took it when the Society observed, 'with deep regret, that
the inhabitants of the Transvaal Republic have been seriously deficient in
their duty to their weaker fellow men...'.46 The father's generation
seemingly persisting in the hardness of their hearts, the Secretary next tried
with the son, Marthinus Wessel Pretorius, successively President of the
Orange Free State and the Transvaal.41 He too ignored them. But the
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Transvaalers bided their time and the chance came. On 26 June 1880 Kruger
and Joubert wrote to Leonard Courtney, MP, who had opposed Transvaal
annexation in 1877, circulating copies of their letter to newspapers in South
Africa: 'Even now calumny gains the ear of the Colonial Secretary who the
other day was told by a deputation of the Aborigines Protection Society that
slavery still exists in the Transvaal.'48
It was a British official who gave the Boer leaders their opening.
Melmoth Osborn, Sir Theophilus Shepstone's successor as Administrator of
the annexed Transvaal, had apprenticed 800 children orphaned in the
renewed attack on Sekhukhuni. A Volksraad Select Committee, in recording
the fact, said that this was 'slavery according to Mr Chesson ... carried on
by the English Government ... Never under the Republic was a child
apprenticed without the consent of the parents...'.49 As G.W. Steyn, a
former landdrost of Potchefstroom, in a letter to The Friend of the Free
State asked, how many of the 4,000 or more sold in the Transvaal since
1850 had been orphans unless they had been made so 'by the bullet of some
ruffian of a Boer'.50
In The Times of 13 November 1883 the Transvaal delegates then in
London to negotiate the London Convention launched another attack in an
open letter addressed to the members of both the Anti-Slavery and the
Aborigines Protection Society. It was a curious document, quaintly
constructed and revealing that, if the APS had failed to understand the
outlook of the Boers, the misunderstanding was mutual. The authors
claimed to be 'most deeply hurt ... there still prevails the opinion that the
Transvaal Christians understand less thoroughly than Christians in this
country the duty which they owe to Kaffirs ...' They wrote that they heartily
 THE AHORIGINES PROTECTION SOCIETY, 1837-1909 273

approved of the Society's principles and most desirable objectives and it

was not for them to judge whether its influence had always prevented
colonial officials in South Africa from interfering with native lives.
The painful accusation is brought against us that we not only keep the
natives in a degraded position but also encroach on their person
liberty,... We cannot refrain from demanding of you, on behalf of the
Transvaal, a share of the same human compassion which you devote
so largely to our aboriginal neighbours in Africa."
It was nauseating and it was inept. The readership of The Times included
many critics of the APS and the editor had long deplored the Society's
attitude towards settlers, but that tissue of lachrymose self-pity was going to
recruit few of them to the Boer cause. It is no wonder that R.N. Fowler, then
Lord Mayor of London and treasurer of the Society, four days later
administered the almost unprecedented snub to foreign leaders of refusing
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to receive them at the Mansion House.

Later in the century the Society's correspondence and the pages of The
Aborigines Friend mellowed. Sir Richard Southey, an occasional
correspondent of the Society," when both in and out of office, Saul
Solomon, Cape politician and J.H. Froude, Carnarvon's informal emissary
on South African federation, all thought Boer attitudes improving as British
behaviour in South Africa deteriorated. Even disillusioned African opinion
was shifting. Tengo Jabavu, a Mfengu journalist, as early as 1881 told
Chesson that the natives were beginning to have confidence in the 'Dutch'
section of the community.53
Such moderating views received sceptical acceptance in APS circles, but
by 1899 Fox Bourne went so far as to admit the APS's failure to be fair to
the two republics.54 It was the performance of foreign capital which forced
the grudging admission. The Boers, it was said, were not as harsh as the
Uitlanders on the Rand. Two years later he wrote to The Times:
The Boer policy towards natives ... is notoriously degraded in theory
and often cruel in practice ... [but they have] dealt more leniently than
Cape colonists and newcomers from Europe with the great majority of
natives outside their actual purview ... All the special and oppressive
legislation introduced into Transvaal since 1884 has been at the behest
of Uitlanders.53

Chinese Labour in the Transvaal

The employment of Chinese labour was a matter of great controversy in
South Africa, with reverberations in the British general election of 1906. It
 274 AFTER SLAVERY: EMANCIPATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

might have been expected that the Boers would have had much to say about
it but they were tactically silent, for General Botha hoped that the reaction
of others would hasten the return to self-government in the province.
The Aborigines Protection Society was far from silent. When the
proposal was first made to meet the labour demands of the 300 mining
companies on the Rand after the war, they manned the ramparts. As early as
1872 they had condemned the traffic in Chinese coolie labour as 'an
insidious form of slavery'.56 The campaign they waged showed traces of
unusual racial prejudice. Fox Bourne wrote, 'Whatever his merits the
Chinaman has habits and methods which render his influence on the
"inferior" races of other lands altogether pernicious'.57
Later that year, in a letter to Alfred Lyttleton, the Colonial Secretary,
he wrote Grievous and incurable injuries will be inflicted on the
natives of South Africa, in addition to the inconveniences and wrongs
to which some of the whites in contact with them will be liable, unless
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they are safeguarded against the bodily disease and social corruption
from which the Chinese immigrants for short terms are being
brought.58
The social and moral aspects of importation concerned the Archbishop
of Canterbury and other churchmen, as well as the APS. Sir Frank
Swettenham, Governor of Malaya, had been consulted by the Colonial
Office and had warned that a labourer could not be held a virtual prisoner in
the mining compound during the whole period of his indenture without
problems arising. Fox Bourne was more explicit; 50,000 or more Chinese
could not be kept in enforced celibacy 'without monstrous abuses
growing'.5' Swettenham had referred to the men's need to find occasional
solace in brothels in the compounds,60 but no Colonial Secretary was able
politically to give countenance to licensed prostitution. The problem was
never satisfactorily solved. Men did get out of the compounds, some in the
hope of making their way back to China. Inevitably there were violent
incidents when Chinese associated with African women in kraals.
For once the Society was on the side of the big battalions. Trade unions,
churchmen and a host of voluntary societies in the United Kingdom and
South Africa and, eventually, the Liberal Party in Britain, united in
opposition to the system. Once South African public opinion in general had
been mobilized it was brought down. Even though siding with powerful
interests, the Society's still managed to be a dissenting voice. Their fear was
that if the battle cry of 'Chinese slavery' rang out too clearly, the system
might survive if mine owners found the labour so profitable that they purged
it of the grossest abuses. That would deny Africans the chance of selling
their labour. After all, time-expired, indentured Indians leaving the Natal
 THE ABORIGINES PROTECTION SOCIETY, 1837-1909 275

sugar-cane fields had elbowed Zulus out of many aspects of the local
economy. Sir Percy Fitzpatrick and a few others who favoured importation
also saw the danger, and at the 1903 Bloemfontein Customs Conference
succeeded in obtaining a resolution that there should be terminal
repatriation after an indenture period limited to three years.61 Importation
ceased at the end of 1905, but the last labourers sailed homeward past
Durban Head only in March 1910.

King Leopold's Estate

If the part played by the Society over the importation of Chinese labour on
to the Rand was of limited effect, the same cannot be said of their opposition
to King Leopold's Congo fiefdom.
Before they clashed there was more than a decade of harmonious
relationship. Early in 1878 the Society wished to acknowledge Leopold's
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avowed scientific interest in central Africa and invited him to become their
patron. The canny monarch was pleased, but declined.62 As late as January
1890 in the wake of the Brussels Conference on the Slave Trade they
congratulated him on his efforts on behalf of the Congo natives. But H.M.
Stanley's In Darkest Africa" appeared in June and on 12 December Dr
Grattan Guiness of the Regions Beyond Missionary Union spoke at a
meeting the APS had convened at the Westminster Palace Hotel. It was clear
that much was amiss in the Congo basin.64 From then on the Society
maintained pressure on the Foreign Office in the hope of stirring the
government to exercise their treaty rights under the Berlin General Act of
1885, and eventually to press a reluctant Belgian government to take over
the Congo Free State.
Credit is usually given to Edmund Dene Morel, editor of the West
African Mail, for the success of the campaign. Rightly so, because it was his
knowledge of West African trade and ability to marshal the facts, as well as
the founding and directing of the Congo Reform Association, which built up
the relentless pressure which achieved the objective. But the APS were
active forerunners and Fox Bourne's Civilisation in Congoland,65 a seminal
work, preceded Morel's King Leopold's Rule in Africa66 by almost two
years. Both men wielded powerful pens, though Morel's style, when
compared with Fox Bourne's sonorous rotundity of phrase, was a precursor
of tabloid journalism. It was no surprise when Roger Casement, whose idea
the Congo Reform Association was, invited the two men to join in
organizing it, that Fox Bourne refused or rather argued that, if he were do
so, it would have to be on his own terms. He thought Liverpool not close
enough to the centre of government and that Morel had too many irons in
the fire - as though he himself had not! Why, he asked, was a separate body
 276 AFTER SLAVERY: EMANCIPATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

needed? Why not a co-ordinating committee like the many Chesson had set
up in his day, working from the APS office with himself as secretary?
Eventually Sir Charles Dilke and Casement overcame his opposition and
the Congo Reform Association (CRA) was set up in Liverpool with Morel
as its executive and Fox Bourne a respected member of the committee. In
the APS annual report for 1908 he told members that CRA activity made it
unnecessary for the Society to keep up the pressure on His Majesty's
Government, especially as he and many of his readers were members of
both bodies.67

Conclusions
'It surely behoves the British public that the colonial rule of Britain be no
longer such as to stain her name with the reproach of cruelty and injustice.'68
That was written in 1839 in the report to the Society's second annual
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general meeting. It was the introduction to what would now be called the
'mission statement' of a pressure group. For 72 years they remonstrated
with, cajoled and, when allowed, cooperated with governments, chartered
companies and settlers in measures to achieve that goal. How effective were
their efforts? They asked themselves that in 1874 and were forced to
conclude that:
Our predecessors vainly hoped that, in successfully fighting against
slavery and the slave trade in the British dominions, they had forever
put an end to the two greatest evils that had cursed their day and
generation. It has been our fate to realise that ... institutions may
change their form, and yet be animated by the same principles of
oppression.69
It is a fair judgement that by the time the Society amalgamated with the
Anti-Slavery Society they had achieved far less than they had dared to hope
in 1837, but more than in 1909 they dared to believe. There were no great
achievements, no landmarks such as the Emancipation Act to point to; just
a few cases of individual hardship alleviated and petty wrongs righted.
Their work may have seemed successful on those occasions when they were
moving with the political current and, at other times, things might have gone
harder with their clients if the vigil had not been kept. They never turned the
Colonial Office from the pursuit of a British interest and rarely goaded them
into action if the Secretary of State and his officials saw no national interest
to be served by it. But such a summary does not supply a full answer to the
question.
The single-minded pursuit of an objective held to be as valid at the end
as at the beginning does not imply that the Society's thinking was static and
 THE AHORIGINES PROTECTION SOCIETY, 1837-1909 277

their outlook unchanged. From a base in evangelical Christianity and a

belief in Western civilization as the vehicle to carry its supreme values to
the unenlightened of other lands and faiths, they moved towards a more
secular view. In earlier years British citizenship with all its rights was seen
as a blessing to which everyone in the Empire was entitled. By 1909, while
still holding to the right of everyone wanting it to have it, Fox Bourne also
believed in the right of others to reject it.70
There were shifts in political thinking, too, from Little Englanderism,
through two decades of belief in responsible imperialism and then a drift
back to the earlier belief. Between 1869 and 1888 Fiji, Basutoland, the Gold
Coast and Bechuanaland came under British control with the Society's
urging and they campaigned vigorously against the proposed cession of the
Gambia to France. Indeed, there were so many calls for intervention and
control in those years that it seemed to the Colonial Office and many
humanitarians that the Society was a leading exponent of imperial
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expansion. They certainly made it more acceptable in Noncomformist

circles and, to some extent, in constituency Liberal parties. In the last
decade of the century, when, the settler dominions were self-governing and
beyond Colonial Office control and while France and Britain were pressing
their interests in West Africa, the APS once again took up a stance against
imperial expansion.
The most valuable service rendered by the Society was not its political
advocacy, for much of that inevitably consisted of generalities with which
many of their critics could agree, but the provision of a second channel of
communication from the colonies to the Colonial Office and, if need be,
beyond to Parliament. Lord Carnarvon once remarked that the APS called
the Department's attention to many points which they might have
overlooked if left entirely to themselves.71 The rules of petition to the
Secretary of State were well established, the matter being submitted through
every step in the bureaucratic hierarchy, with each official having the right
to comment. The petitioner had neither the opportunity nor the right to see
comments, and so had no redress against error, or even malice. When it
reached Whitehall it faced another hazard. As Mr Justice Gome in
Mauritius pointed out, the Colonial Office usually backed their men in the
field.72 A problem for the Society was tainted sources of information. So
often a complainant had a sense of grievance without it having substance,
or it was a matter which had been properly dealt with in the colony, but not
to his or her liking. Such cases given forceful support - particularly by Fox
Bourne - did the Society's standing no good.
The Colonial Office accepted the APS as a fact of political life, a
regrettable one by and large, but certainly one never to be ignored. Dealing
with their submissions was an exercise in fine judgement. Say too much in
 278 AFTER SLAVERY: EMANCIPATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

reply and the Secretary came back with further argument; say too little and
there could be an awkward question in Parliament.73
In his classic work on the Indian Civil Service, Philip Woodruff
observed that 'a permanent opposition is bound to display a certain amount
of permanent perversity'.74 It was so with the Society; like trees bent by the
prevailing wind, they were set in a posture of opposition, yet, if the Colonial
Office or a Governor sought their help, it was willingly, almost eagerly,
given. Although the Colonial Office were wary in dealing with them,
judgement on the value of their work was expressed by two other members
of the Colonial Office in minutes which, because they were not expected to
see the light of day, were perhaps more telling than Lord Carnarvon's
pronouncement. R. Antrobus, First Class Clerk, wrote: 'Mr Fox Bourne is
continually bringing false and unreasonable accusations against the
Government, but he and his Society do a certain amount of good in keeping
us all up to the mark.'75
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It was to be expected and not unfitting that, when the Parliamentary

Under-Secretary said much the same thing a few years earlier, there was
more of an oratorical flourish to it: "The APS and kindred societies [though]
sometimes, perhaps often, weak as to their facts, help by their criticisms to
keep Governors and Captains up to the mark of a high level of humanity.'76

NOTES
Abbreviations
AF The Aborigines Friend
ASC APS Correspondence in the Rhodes House Library, Oxford G refers to items in boxes.
Where there is no letter before the number, the item is to be found in a bound volume in
the C series.
CO Colonial Office files in the Public Record Office
PP.C 'Blue Books' (Parliamentary Papers)

1. I.N. Crumpston, Indians Overseas in British Territories 1834-1854 (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1953), p.169. The author was surprised that the abolitionists could still
attract 3,000 people to meetings in the 1840s. The APS never had that sort of support.
2. Six years for field workers, four for domestic servants.
3. Now Anti-Slavery International.
4. One such disagreement spilled over into the letter columns of The Times. The Anti-Slavery
Society committee thought it would inhibit anti-slavery progress in Africa at the Brussels
Conference in 1890 to consider also the arms and liquor trades. As payment for slaves was
often made in these commodities it made sense to the APS to deal with them together. C.H.
Allen to The Times, 20 Jan. 1890, p.10 and subsequenl letters.
5. Founded 1839.
6. At one time there were 80 Liberal MPs willing to ask questions in the House of Commons
for the APS.
7. 'The Society loves to deal in generality and leave the harder task of getting at and stating the
facts'. APS to Chamberlain, 15 February 1901, minute by G. Grindle, C0417/339. That was
hardly fair; much detail was sometimes furnished only to have the matter taken less seriously
by the Colonial Office for some minor inaccuracy.
 THE AnORIGINES PROTECTION SOCIETY, 1837-1909 279

8. For a few years The Aborigines Friend was called The Colonial Intelligencer and
occasionally both.
9. In coming to that conclusion they were not alone, William Cadbury, writing on 18 December
1907 to John Harris, Organising Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, was 'pretty satisfied
that [Fox Bourne] has run the whole business for the last year or two, and [the Committee]
has meekly followed in his wake'. ASC G486.
10. The Colenso family in Natal and Bishop James Johnson were examples. Episcopal status was
also thought to give warranty to facts alleged.
11. Cetewayo, the Zulu king, learned to sign his name during imprisonment in Cape Town
Castle.
12. Gordon held governerships in New Brunswick, Trinidad, Mauritius, Fiji, New Zealand and
Ceylon.
13. Pope Hennessy held governerships in Labuan, West Africa, West Indies, Hong Kong and
Mauritius. On retirement he (a Roman Catholic) became Nationalist MP for Kilkenny and a
member of the APS committee.
14. Dr Thomas Hodgkin, virtual founder of the APS, was co-founder in 1843 of the Ethnological
Society.
15. AF, June 1889, p.581.
16. AF, April 1891, p.170 et seq.
17. E.D. Parkes to T. Hodgkin, undated, ASC 122/50.
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18. T. Hodgkin to G.G.S. Lefevre, undated, ASC 122/72.

19. 'Coolie labour obtained either in India or China, is the chief element in the industrial system
of several of our most important colonies, notably of Mauritius and Guiana'. F.W. Chesson
at a conference on Colonial Questions, 21 July 1871. Report in AF, Dec. 1871, p.344.
20. 'Experience has shown ... in colonies steeped in traditions of slavery [that] immigration
under labour contracts, in spite of attempted safeguards, ever led to gross abuse, and tended
to reduce the immigrants to a servile condition'. Sir Charles Wingfield speaking when a
deputation called on Lord Salisbury at the India Office, 3 Aug. 1875. AF, Nov. 1875, p.233.
21. AF, Aug. 1881, p.379 fn.
22. Chesson and Fox Bourne were both fluent in French, but that did not eliminate an anti-
French bias which persisted throughout the Society's history. Except in its anxiety to prevent
passage to the north being cut in South Africa by collusion between the Germans and the
Boers, there was no obvious feeling against the Germans.
23. Hartington to APS, 19 April 1882, ASC 164/260.
24. Cross to APS, 16 Feb. 1887, ASC 164/262.
25. GorJon - S/S Colonial Office, 3 Oct. 1887, ASC 164/242, enclosed with CO to APS, 11 Nov
1887, ASC 164/241.
26. AF, Jan. 1881, p.315.
27. AF, Aug. 1881.
28. AF, April 1880, p.228.
29. 14 Sept. 1880, APS to Hartington 30 Oct. 1880. Hartington to APS, 23 Nov. 1880, ASC
164/258.
30. Madagascar domestic slaves were angered when their Queen on 30 June 1877 emancipated
the Mozambiquan slaves but kept them in slavery. AF, Jan. 1878, p.468. The Gazety
Malagasy of 12 June 1885 reported that three dhows had landed Mozambiquans at Sakalawa,
selling men at £8 and women at £6-12 to Frenchmen, probably to send to Réunion. AF, Nov.
1885, p.228. The AF for Oct.-Dec. 1858 had reported the kidnapping of a number of the
islanders from the Kingswill Islands in the Pacific for work in Réunion, p.500.
31. AF, April 1882, p.489.
32. J.F. Kelsey to Chesson, 27 Dec. 1881, ASC 139/138.
33. Schoolcher to Chesson, 17 March 1882, ASC 146/125.
34. The planters were pleased and not least because it was they who had asked for a commission
of enquiry to be appointed.
35. Reported in AF, Nov. 1875, p.237.
36. William Seed to Chesson, April 1876, ASC 146/138.
37. The Daly Reports, ASC G35/B2, Items 1-3.
 280 AFTER SLAVERY: EMANCIPATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

38. In his dispatch No. 26 of 11 March 1875 [C-1188], Carnarvon virtually instructed Sir Arthur
Phayre, the Governor of Mauritius, to include in a new labour ordinance contractual
provision of return passages. On 19 July, when speaking in the House of Lords, he claimed
that every coolie was entitled to a passage back to his country, Lords Hansard, XXCCV,
col. 1639, yet the revised labour law was not introduced for almost another three years.
39. The Old Immigrants of Mauritius. On its publication planters demanded that de Plevitz be
deported. Gordon refused, but a year later he left Mauritius for good, making his way to Fiji
where, after he had failed to make a living, he was eventually helped by Sir Arthur Gordon and
William Seed, both of whom had known him in Mauritius, by being made a sergeant of police.
40. Pope-Hennessy to Chesson, 8 June 1884, ASC 137/240 and O'Connor to Chesson, 15 March
1884, ASC 144/7.
41. O'Connor to Chesson, 15 March 1884, ASC 144/7.
42. APS to Glenelg, 7 Aug. 1838, reproduced in APS Extracts, Vol.3, p.74. The Emancipation
Act 1833 provided £20 million for compensating owners for the loss of their slaves, but it
could only be collected in London. Even then only two-fifths of the assessed value would be
paid, part in cash and the rest in government stock. Few Boers were in a position to collect
in person and so sold their claims at heavy discount to travelling agents.
43. CO 48/197 and APS Extracts, Vol.3, p.74.
44. APS address to Sir G. Grey, Colonial Secretary, 8 July 1854, AF, July-Dec. 1854, p.341.
45. AF, Aug. 1881, p.388.
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46. AF, April-Sept. 1856, p.128. Undated reference. Andreas Pretorius died 23 July 1853!
47. 6 Dec. 1867, AF, March 1868, p.62. Once again the document was reported as addressed to
Andreas Pretorius.
48. Copy in the Cape Argus, 3 July 1880.
49. South African newspaper cutting, undated. ASC G12/5, Item 6 and AF, Dec. 1881, p.430 and
De Volksstem, 10 Dec. 1881.
50. 13 March 1866. AF, Feb. 1871, p.301.
51. 12 Nov. 1883. The rimes, 13 Nov. 1883, p.8.
52. Colonial Secretary, Cape Colony 1864-1872. Lieutenant Governor, Griqualand West 1873-75.
53. Jabavu to Chesson, 18 May 1881, ASC 139/2.
54. H.R. Fox Bourne, The Aborigines Protection Society - Chapters in its History, Jan. 1899.
55. 24 Aug. 1901; The Times, 26 Aug. 1901, p.9.
56. Report of the AGM 1872, p.9.
57. AF, Feb. 1904, p.15.
58. Fox Bourne to Lyttleton, 15 Dec. 1904, CO 291/78.
59. AF, Oct. 1905, p.415.
60. Swettenham's opinions are to be found in CO 291/79.
61. 10-23 March 1903; AF, Aug. 1903, p.427.
62. A. Couvrier to APS, 18 Feb. 1878, ASC 129/115.
63. In Darkest Africa (London: Sampson Low, 1890).
64. For an eminently readable account see Ruth Slade, King Leopold's Congo (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1962).
65. P.S. King and Son, Jan. 1903.
66. Heineman, 1904.
67. Annual Report 1908, p.11.
68. Report on 2nd AGM, 21 May 1839, p.28.
69. Annual Report 1874, p.121.
70. Report of 3rd AGM, 23 June 1840 and AF, Oct. 1908, p.188.
71. Carnarvon was addressing a deputation which called upon him on 6 March 1874. He added
that they should be credible cases supported by accurate facts. AF, May 1874, pp.60-70.
72. Gorrie to Chesson, 12 Nov. 1875, ASC 135/127.
73. Fox Bourne to Chamberlain, 24 Dec. 1897. Minute by Graham, CO 48/536.
74. The Men Who Ruled India, Vol. 2, The Guardians (London: Cape, 1954) p.167.
75. On Fox Bourne to Chamberlain, 2 March 1896, CO 96/284, R. Antrobus.
76. APS to Ripon, 13 Feb. 1893. Minute by Sydney Buxton (Parliamentary Under-Secretary
1892-95), CO 147/92.