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IN EARLY I855, shortly after George Grey took up the governorship of the Cape colony in South Africa, a letter arrived from London dispatched by Grey's old friend George Barrow. "If you succeed with the Natives there in any degree approaching to what you have done in New Zealand," Barrow wrote, "what a glorious triumph it will be after all that has been said of the impossibility of doing anything with them."1 By the mid-I85os Grey was widely recognized as one of the most successful colonial governors in the British empire. As Barrow's letter implies, Grey's reputation rested on his apparent success in dealing with the Maori during his governorship of the New Zealand colony in I845-53. Grey's celebrated "native policy" in New Zealand emphasized racial "amalgamation," the systematic assimilation of the Maori to a Western cultural ideal, as well as their rapid incorporation into the labor force. Could a similar policy resolve tensions in South Africa's volatile eastern Cape, thus sparing the British government the expense of another frontier war? Might Grey's amalgamation scheme overcome, as Sir George Napier put it, the white settlers"' "determined hostility to the Coloured races" as well as their "determined prejudice never to admit of the possibility of a Black man becoming equal to a white"?2 The colonial secretary, the duke of Newcastle, believed so. When Newcastle offered Grey the Cape governorship in June I854, he praised Grey's "energy and steadiness of purpose" in New Zealand-a career, the duke judged, affording "a just hope and pledge that the permanent interests of another extensive and increasingly important Colony will surely advance under your government?
With Newcastle's official vote of confidence, Grey embarked on the Cape governorship with a list of programmatic imperatives based on his experience with racial amalgamation in New Zealand. What was the governor's agenda? Grey articulated his guiding principles in I855: "talented and honorable European gentlemen being brought into daily contact with the [Xhosa] chiefs, and interesting themselves hourly in their improvement and advancement will in degrees gain an influence over them which will in the course of time induce them to adopt our customs and laws in place of their own, which the system I propose to introduce will gradually undermine and destroy. "4 In other...