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This book is a full-length study of the role of the Scots from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It highlights the interaction of Scots with African peoples, the manner in which missions and schools were credited with producing ‘Black Scotsmen’ and the ways in which they pursued many distinctive policies. The book also deals with the inter-weaving of issues of gender, class and race, as well as with the means by which Scots clung to their ethnicity through founding various social and cultural societies. It contributes to both Scottish and South African history, and, in the process, illuminates a significant field of the Scottish Diaspora that has so far received little attention.
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book deals with migration, diasporas, issues of identity, and related questions of opposition to empire itself. It opens with Stephen Howe's carefully nuanced assessment of anti-colonial ideas within Scotland, which argues that a great deal of material and the attitudes of its originators remain to be surveyed. The book offers a fascinating insight into the role of Scottish migrants in left-wing activity, in the maintenance and development of identities, as well as in gender and racial politics, in a specific province of Canada, British Columbia (BC). It demonstrates the ways in which the invocation of the name of Livingstone, as an appeal to a highly instrumental ancestor figure, became vital in so many political causes in the twentieth century.
This chapter begins with a discussion of Scottish involvement in the British Empire. It then considers whether there was a distinct Scottish identity which was maintained, promoted or even developed at the so-called periphery of empire, and argues that, for good or ill, Scots contributed more powerfully than their numbers would suggest to the processes of westernisation and modernisation in southern Africa. Through their linguistic and ethnographic activities, particularly in the context of the frontier missions, they had a considerable influence upon attitudes to African peoples, to the classic nineteenth-century activity, derived from the Enlightenment, of creating taxonomies and stereotypes for humans as much as for the phenomena of the natural world. Such activities led to strong, though inevitably diverse, ideas about the frontier, African administration, labour policy and much else.
Scots did not wait until the first British capture of the Cape in 1795 to be engaged in the establishment of a white community at the southern tip of Africa. In this respect, they were following a long-standing propensity to be involved in commercial ventures throughout the North Sea and Baltic regions. Thus, when such ventures reached out into the South Atlantic, they were soon there too. This chapter discusses prominent Scots in the British occupations, the Moodie settlement and the 1820 settlement.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Cape had acquired the full range of literary, philosophical, educational and scientific institutions, all supported by a flourishing periodical and press sector. With the exception, perhaps, of the Royal Observatory, directed in this period by a Cumbrian and an Irishman, Scots had been central to all these developments. Moreover the college, library, museum, garden and observatory were more or less connected with wider international networks of learning, in which Scots could be found working in many other territories of the British Empire. Despite the continuation of forms of autocratic colonial government in the early part of the period, the 1820s were an extraordinary decade in the development of the intellectual, press, educational and scientific institutions of the colony, laying the foundations, sometimes firm, sometimes tentative, for the more significant developments of subsequent decades.
The experience of Scots missionaries on the Eastern Cape frontier was an extraordinarily ambivalent one. They arrived with a number of convictions: that Christianity was the essential concomitant of civilisation; that their message was so overwhelmingly liberating that it would blow down ‘barbarism’ like the walls of Jericho; and that, in the process, they would free women from drudgery and oppression, men from warfare and violence, as well as create enlightened agriculture, introduce the elevating forces of the market, and use science and medicine to free Africans of ‘superstition’. The landscape would be domesticated through the use of Scottish names, and the planting of trees and gardens. The reality was very different. The Scots missionaries encountered hostility from those they had come to ‘save’ as well as from the colonists who were supposedly their co-religionists, and were frequently overcome by war, frustrated by official policy and intimidated by an intractable environment. Many experienced geographical, meteorological and ethnic dislocation, which helped to compound their isolation, melancholia and depression.
The mineral revolution and the ensuing boom stimulated a remarkable migration from Scotland. A sudden rise took place in 1889, and in the 1890s, South Africa was the most popular destination for Scots apart from the United States. The first census of the Union of South Africa in 1911 revealed that there were 1,276,242 whites in South Africa. Of these 181,891 were born in the United Kingdom, over 20 per cent of them from Scotland. Scots were more likely to migrate to South Africa than the Irish or Welsh. This partly reflects the propensity of Scots to migrate; it also reveals the extent to which colonial authorities in South Africa had set out to recruit Scots for specific professions. It is perhaps no wonder that this period became one in which the various badges of Scots identity, in societies, sports and Presbyterian churches, proliferated.
This chapter focuses on the successful Scots, charting the ways in which key professions were often dominated by those who were educated in Scotland. In migrating to southern Africa, they invariably aspired to positions of power and influence that might have been beyond their reach in Scotland itself. The Church and education is examined.
This chapter focuses on the successful Scots, charting the ways in which key professions were often dominated by those who were educated in Scotland. In migrating to southern Africa, they invariably aspired to positions of power and influence that might have been beyond their reach in Scotland itself. The Church and education is examined.
This chapter examines the various ways in which Scots declared their identity in the second half of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries. Caledonian Societies emerged throughout southern Africa. The totemic days of the Scottish calendar were widely celebrated. Highland games were instituted as major sporting and cultural events, matching their counterparts in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.