to enter hereafter into any treaties which may be injurious or prejudicial to
the interests of the Orange River Government."60
In London,
the phi-
lanthropic lobby was in decline and the cabinet had concluded that jostling
communities in the Southern African interior lacked the resources to war-
rant the cost of administration.
The pendulum had swung hard over since
the early
I 840S, from a declared policy of protecting black Southern Af-
ricans from disruption
by turbulent
British subjects, to a policy that
amounted
to an alliance with independent
white communities
against
their black neighbors.
The emigrants were free and independent. When Afrikaners began self-
consciously to fashion a national historical tradition toward the end of the
nineteenth
century, they referred to the emigrants as Voortrekkers,
and
their movement as the Great Trek. In 1854, however, they were still poor,
scattered, disunited, politically inexperienced, and virtually surrounded by
Africans.
The British Colony of Natal, I843-r870
After the British conquest,
Natal
became a second focus of British
political authority in Southern Africa. 61While most of the Afrikaners were
trekking back across the Drakensberg Mountains
to the highveld, settlers
were arriving from Britain. Five thousand