Ward 2 Development Forum

Lord Caledon

Properties3
descriptionDu Pré Alexander, 2nd Earl of Caledon (1777 to 1839), first civil governor of the Cape under British rule, 1807 to 1811. His code of 1809 tied Khoekhoe people to a fixed home and a pass. The town and district of Caledon, which include the valley, carry his name.
tagstheme/heritage, lang/en
aliasesDu Pré Alexander, Earl of Caledon, 2nd Earl of Caledon, Governor Caledon

10 min read

Du Pré Alexander, 2nd Earl of Caledon, was the first civil governor of the Cape after Britain took it for the second time in 1806 [IC]. He governed from 1807 to 1811 [IC]. His proclamation of 1 November 1809, known as the Caledon Code or the Hottentot Proclamation, required every Khoekhoe person to have a fixed place of abode and to carry a pass to move about the colony [IC]. It shaped the lives of Khoekhoe families in this valley for almost twenty years. He also gave Genadendal’s missionaries leave to found a second mission, at Groenekloof, in 1808 [IC]. The town of Caledon, and the district that took in Genadendal and Greyton, were named after him [IC]. He never saw the valley’s later history, but his name is still on its map.

What the letters in square brackets mean

Facts on this page are followed by a tag that shows where they come from.

  • [IC] Independently Corroborated. Confirmed by at least two sources that do not depend on each other, or by an official record such as a law.
  • [MS] Mission-Sourced. Comes from Moravian mission records, including the missionaries’ diaries, or from one party’s own documents or statements.
  • [TBV] To Be Verified. Seems likely, but nobody has confirmed it yet.

Reading this page

The section Reading his rule through TIME is the Forum’s interpretation, and its readings carry no tag. See The Valley Through TIME.

At a glance

Born14 December 1777 [TBV]
Died8 April 1839, at Caledon in County Tyrone, Ireland [TBV]
Known forGoverning the Cape from 1807 to 1811, and the Caledon Code of 1809 [IC]
Link to the valleyHis code governed where Khoekhoe families in the valley could live and move. The town and district of Caledon, in which the valley lay, are named after him [IC].

His life before the Cape

Du Pré Alexander was the son of James Alexander, 1st Earl of Caledon, an Irish peer [TBV]. He went to Eton and to Christ Church, Oxford, and sat briefly in the Irish House of Commons [TBV]. He succeeded his father as Earl of Caledon in 1802 [TBV]. He was 29 when he was appointed to the Cape [TBV].

Governor of the Cape (1807 to 1811)

A colony changing hands

Britain first took the Cape from the Dutch East India Company in 1795, when Abraham Josias Sluysken surrendered it [IC]. It was handed back to the Dutch state, the Batavian Republic, from 1803 to 1806, and taken by Britain again in January 1806, after the fighting at Blaauwberg [IC]. Caledon was appointed governor on 22 May 1807 [TBV]. He was the first civil governor under the new British rule [IC]. The Netherlands formally ceded the Cape in 1814, after he had left [IC].

The end of the slave trade

In 1807 Britain banned the slave trade, and the import of enslaved people to the Cape ended [IC]. Slavery itself went on until 1834 to 1838 [IC]. Farmers who had relied on buying new slaves now looked more to Khoekhoe workers [TBV]. In October 1808 about 340 enslaved people and labourers rose in the Swartland under Louis van Mauritius and marched on Cape Town. They were stopped by troops at Salt River, and their leaders were tried and hanged [TBV].

The Caledon Code (1809)

On 1 November 1809 Caledon issued his proclamation on the Khoekhoe [IC]. Its main rules were these [IC]:

  • Every Khoekhoe person had to have a fixed place of abode.
  • Anyone moving about the country needed a pass. Those without one could be treated as vagrants.
  • Work for a farmer needed a written contract, made out in three copies and registered with a local official.
  • Farmers could not withhold wages or hold a worker for debt, and could be fined for abusing a servant.

The historian Wayne Dooling writes that Caledon meant the code to curb the ill-treatment of Khoekhoe servants by farmers, which earlier orders had failed to stop [TBV]. Another account says it was made “to satisfy the labour needs of white farmers” [IC]. In practice, the pass and the fixed abode tied most Khoekhoe families to the farms, because a farm was the easiest fixed abode to prove [TBV].

In 1812 his successor, Sir John Cradock, added the apprenticeship law, which bound Khoekhoe children raised on a farm to work there from eight to eighteen [IC]. Ordinance 50 of 1828 repealed the code and gave free people of colour legal equality [IC].

The circuit courts (1811)

On 16 May 1811, in his last weeks in office, a proclamation set up circuit courts to hear civil and criminal cases in the country districts [TBV]. They brought public trials and spoken evidence to the countryside, and Khoekhoe workers could use them to complain against employers [IC].

The Moravian missions

In 1808 Caledon gave the Moravian missionaries Johann Philipp Kohrhammer and J.H. Schmitt, who were then working at Genadendal, permission to found a mission at Groenekloof, on the west coast [IC]. It is now called Mamre [IC]. Kohrhammer had come to Baviaanskloof by 1797, and his name is in the missionaries’ diaries until 1805 [MS]. Groenekloof was the second Moravian mission in South Africa, and Genadendal’s first daughter station [TBV].

Leaving the Cape

Caledon resigned in June 1811, after quarrels with the military commander, General Sir Henry Grey, over who held authority in the colony [TBV]. He went home to Ireland, married in October 1811, and served for many years as a representative peer and as Lord Lieutenant of County Tyrone [TBV]. He died at Caledon, in County Tyrone, on 8 April 1839 [TBV].

His name in the valley

The hot springs on the slopes of the Swartberg, east of the valley, had a bath house by 1797, and a village called Swartberg grew up around them [IC]. The missionaries of Baviaanskloof knew it as the warm bath. Hendrik Marsveld stopped to bathe there in March 1793, and its overseer, Negrini, visited the mission and made bellows for Kühnel’s forge in 1796 [MS]. In 1811 a drostdy, the seat of a magistrate, and a church were built there for the growing farming district [TBV]. On 31 December 1813 the village was renamed Caledon, after the former governor [IC]. The district of Caledon took in Genadendal and Greyton [TBV]. Today Caledon is the seat of Theewaterskloof Municipality, of which Ward 2 is a part [IC]. See The Municipality.

Diaries: A363595, lines 2747 to 2792; A363349, lines 16286 to 16293

Reading his rule through TIME

This section is the Forum’s interpretation.

Fixing the Tribes form in place. For centuries the Khoekhoe had lived by moving: kraals of reed-mat houses followed the grazing and the water with the seasons. That was the Tribes form, organised by kin and belonging. The Caledon Code made movement itself a matter for the Institutions form. A person now needed a fixed abode on record and a paper to travel. The kraal that moved with the herds had no place in this law.

Building a labour market by law. Once the slave trade ended, the colony needed another supply of labour. The code answered that need through Institutions: contracts in writing, registered with officials, and passes checked on the road. In the terms of the TIME model, it created a labour market whose workers were not free to leave it. Labour became something exchanged at a price, the Markets form, but the price and the place of work were fenced in by law.

Protection and control in one law. The same code that bound Khoekhoe workers to farms also required written contracts and forbade the withholding of wages. The circuit courts set up in 1811 gave workers a place to complain. Both sides were real. The Institutions form that pinned people down also gave them, for the first time, a written claim against their masters.

The mission as a fixed abode. Under the code, a mission station was one of the few places where Khoekhoe families could have a recognised home without serving a farmer [TBV]. Genadendal, already home to more than 1,000 people by 1806 [MS], became more valuable as a refuge because the law around it grew tighter. Caledon himself let its missionaries found a second such place at Groenekloof. Read this way, the mission was an Institution that gave the Tribes form somewhere to survive: families living together on land held for them, and outside the farm economy.

  • Sir John Cradock. His successor, who added the apprenticeship law of 1812 to the Caledon Code, and the quitrent reform of 1813.
  • Abraham Josias Sluysken. The last head of the Dutch East India Company’s government, who surrendered the Cape to Britain in 1795.
  • The Missionaries of 1792. Their mission at Baviaanskloof was the base from which Kohrhammer and Schmitt went to found Groenekloof in 1808.

His legacy in the valley

  • The pass laws that began with his code were repealed for Khoekhoe people by Ordinance 50 in 1828 [IC]. Pass laws of other kinds shaped South Africa until the 1980s [IC].
  • The town of Caledon, the Caledon district, and the Caledon River in the Free State carry his name [IC].
  • Theewaterskloof Municipality, which governs Ward 2, is seated in Caledon [IC].

What is still open

  • Whether Caledon ever visited Genadendal, and what the mission’s records of 1807 to 1811 say about his code.
  • How the code was enforced in the Overberg, and whether residents of Genadendal needed passes to work on nearby farms.
  • When exactly the Caledon district was formed, and whether Genadendal fell under its magistrate from 1811.
  • How Khoekhoe families in the valley remembered the pass years.

References

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