In the history of the city of East London, Chief Zwelinyandila Phato’s name is barely mentioned and yet it is located on his land.
He was a shrewd political strategist (some would say a collaborator of a sort), but remained a committed Africanist seeking a middle road for his people.
He was not a war hero, but his story is interesting because it offers the hope that there might be another way.
The myth of the vacant land
When Governor Sir Harry Smith in 1848 declared “little England” around the mouth of the Buffalo River guarded by the coloniser’s Fort Glamorgan and called it a paradise for English settlers, he insisted that East London and the surrounding area was vacant land just waiting for civilising British settlement and improvement.
This colonial myth has persisted. No-one seems to talk about who occupied the area before the British, and when we do, most people are obsessed with the House of Phalo and the ethnic purity of the Xhosa nation.
This became an issue with the renaming of the old Ben Schoeman airport in East London — it quickly became the King Phalo airport.
Just as the names East London and kuGompo present opposites, so too did the shift from the old Ben Schoeman and King Phalo Airport in 2021 invoke a binary, one pure nation against another.
But what if the history of the city and its immediate hinterland is less about heroic wars and the pursuit of ethnic purity (compared to its wider hinterland), and more about hybrid socio-political formations, cross-over cultures and politics of strategy, survival and alliance.
To be clear, I am not denying the history of the region as a story of war and great opposition nationalisms, but rather suggest that the city does not fit into this history in the same way as other places, where the blood of warriors and redcoats lay thick on the ground.
So, who lived here and how did they manage the colonial encounter?
Chief Phato and the Gqunukhwebe
The historical record shows that in the 19th century, the Gqunukhwebe polity was made up of fragments of old Khoi chieftaincies and Xhosa clans who lived in and around the territory known today as Buffalo City.
The nation was forged under the reign of King Tshiwo (1670-1702) of the ama-Xhosa, who pulled together smaller Khoi chieftaincies of the Gonaqua, Hoenheniqua, Inqua and others into the amaGqunukhwebe nation that later incorporated Mfengu refugees, too.
Colonial maps from the early 19th century suggest that Buffalo River, on which East London was located, was a dividing line between the amaGqunukhwebe to the west and the amaNdlambe people to the east.
However, by the mid-19th century the Gqunukhwebe had moved beyond the Buffalo River and dominated the whole current city landscape, while the Ndlambe shifted further east, closer to the Kei River.
In fact, when East London was created as a port town in 1847, Gqunukhwebe kraals were spotted around the river mouth on the land that was later to become West Bank.
The land was thus not vacant, as the British colonists alleged, but occupied and used by indigenous inhabitants before the British reached an agreement with Phato to use the land between the Buffalo and Nahoon rivers in exchange for recognising African independence outside the town.
After this, the focus for the new town’s development moved away from the original West Bank settlement and fortifications at the river mouth to the land to the east, which was used for suburban allotments and small-scale farm allotments.
The 19th century history of the Gqunukhwebe is associated with the reign of Paramount Chief Phato, who lived to the west of Buffalo River and led the nation in the 19th century.
Phato and his brothers, Kobe and Kama, moved across the Keiskamma River from the Zuurveld as they lost land to settlers.
Phato’s ancestors had been occupying the coastal belt between Port Elizabeth and Port Alfred for at least 100 years before the arrival of large groups of British colonists settled in the area by the government in London and the Cape Colony.
The nation was pushed eastwards with the conquest of the Zuurveld and the eastward movement of the British colonial frontier.
The amaNdlambe nation was pushed further eastwards as the Gqunukhwebe were pushed back towards and beyond the Buffalo River.
In the early 19th century, Chief Phato had set up his Great Place to the west of Buffalo River near Kidd’s Beach, inside the current municipal boundaries of the Buffalo City.
The chieftaincies of his brothers, Kobe and Kama, lay further west in the so-called “ceded territory” — the buffer strip created by the British on the frontier in the 1820s.
Even though his Great Place lay beyond the colonial frontier at this time, Phato felt that it would be wise for him to invite white missionaries to work among his people, so that they would be better equipped to negotiate with the invading British colonists and their settler regime.
This paved the way for the arrival of Wesleyan missionary, Rev William Shaw, who built a mission station and church adjacent to Phato’s Great Place, and another in Gqunukhwebe territory near Mount Coke and the colonial military outpost of Fort Murray, also in the current municipal boundaries of Buffalo City.
The presence and influence of Shaw and his followers among the Gqunukhwebe meant that there was no attempt to expropriate Phato’s land before the end of the 19th century.
It was only after the re-annexation of British Kaffraria in 1866 that the threat of expropriation of land along the coast started to threaten Gqunukhwebe sovereignty and settlement.
The coastal belt between Buffalo River and Qonce (King William’s Town) was not a settler farming zone at that stage, but a strategic corridor for the transit of goods, troops and arms from the river mouth to Qonce, which stood on the frontier in the Amathole Basin.
While Phato held his own in this space, a key political turning point came in the 1840s before the War of the Axe of 1846-47 when his brother, Kama, turned down the hand in marriage of a Ndlambe princess, who would have become his second wife.
Kama refused the offer of marriage on the grounds that he was now a devout Christian who rejected the Xhosa tradition of polygamy.
This shamed Phato. He was not a Christian and he disowned Kama to hold onto his alliance with the Ndlambe. His brother then left the coastal plains for colonial protection at Middledrift, beyond Qonce.
In the literature, Kama is recognised as the first fully Christianised Xhosa chief on the frontier. This meant that Kama was now favoured by the colonialists over his “pagan brother”.
Phato was also criticised by his own people for allowing the nation to split because of colonial intervention.
Growing internal divisions sharpened at the time of the Xhosa Cattle Killing of 1856-57, when many of Phato’s followers fell under the influence of the Ndlambe prophetess and “believer” Nkosi.
Many Gqunukhwebe joined the Ndlambe in killing their cattle and destroying their crops. The devastation that the cattle killing wrought in British Kaffraria was extraordinary as the population of the region declined from more than 100,000 to 37,000 between January and December 1857.
The power of Phato was crushed and the colonists now seized land and forced poor, starving Gqunukhwebe and Ndlambe into wage labour on public works such as the colonial railways, or on the farms that had been newly created by white landowners.
These conditions now made it possible for the British to invite German settlers to open up the coastal plains with new farms and towns, such as Berlin and Stutterheim.
In the last quarter of the 19th century Phato was arrested by the colonial government on trumped-up charges, and sent to Robben Island, where he joined other Xhosa chiefs, including Maqoma, in jail.
It was also at this time that his chieftaincy on the coastal belt around Buffalo City was divided among settler farmers and mission stations, leaving only small pockets of African-owned land.
Hybrid histories and the Modern City
I find the story of Chief Phato and his political style fascinating — how he rejected colonial acculturation, the civilising mission (unlike Kama), the lure of liberalism and the temptation of war in his efforts to defend the culture, livelihood and the rights of his people.
He was smart in the way he accommodated the missionaries by sending an early invitation to Rev William Shaw to settle close to his Great Place, but not for the sake of conversion, as happened to his Christianised brother Kama. His purpose was observation, preservation, protection and diplomacy.
His followers were a diverse grouping. Many were refugees from the wars on the Zuurveld, but also a proud nation which absorbed strangers and accommodated the traditions and outlooks of others.
They combined Khoi and Xhosa traditions and beliefs, with the new Christian visions of the Wesleyans and the Mfengu people.
Chief Phato remained the dominant African political figure on the coastal plains from the 1820s through to the 1880s.
He was a shrewd, principled Africanist, who chose the way of the pen rather than the sword in most of his dealings with the colonial government.
He was a negotiator and avid protector of sovereignty and self-determination; and used the colonial idea of a “confederacy of chieftaincies” on the frontier to hold onto the land and independence of his people.
In the 1850s, he also did not fall under the spell of the Ndlambe prophetess, Nkosi, ally of Nongqawuse, and the madness of the Xhosa chieftains across the Kei River.
There is something in Phato’s acumen, determined Africanism and his pursuit and imagination of building a hybrid nation of many talents and traditions that might be of greater service to the struggling city of KuGompo and its people than a symbolic return to the heroic image of a pure, do-or-die Xhosa warrior nation, staring at their foes across the scorched earth.
Phato and his people, despite all their complexities and lack of purity, are potentially a great source of hope in the current world.
Appreciating his role may help the city escape destructive and self-righteous oppositional nationalisms.
It might help leaders to recognise that the future lies less in African purity than in hybridity.
It is an image of the city which liberation icon Steve Bantu Biko, whose statue stands in front of City Hall, would probably have strongly endorsed.
Tale of two very different leaders
King Phalo and Phato were separate historical figures with very different roles in Xhosa history.
King Phalo was a paramount ruler of the amaXhosa in the early 18th century.
He led a unified Xhosa kingdom long before large-scale European settlement in the Eastern Cape.
Phalo is regarded as a foundational king in Xhosa royal lineage, and his descendants include the Gcaleka and Rharhabe royal houses.
Because of his status and historical significance, his name has been used for major public landmarks, including East London’s King Phalo Airport.
Phato was paramount chief of the amaGqunukhwebe, a group that occupied parts of the coastal region near present-day East London.
While an important local leader, he was not king of the Xhosa nation.
Confusion between the two names has led to historical inaccuracies.
— with additional historical research by Ndiphiwe (Ndira) Mkuzo.
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