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This is episode 170 and the sound you\u2019re hearing is the cheering and the flaming hot emotion because Sir Harry Smith is back in town!
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\nThe town is Cape Town \u2014 Sir Harry won\u2019t hang around there for too long, he as you know from the previous episode, has returned to South Africa to take up his new position as Governor of the Cape.
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\nSir Harry was the former civil commissioner of the de-annexed Province of Queen Adelaide in the Eastern Cape and in June 1840 he\u2019d left Cape Town to take up a post as Adjutant-General in India. There is this incredibly long history of connection between India and South Africa, and people like Smith were part of that history.
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\nOthers of course are people like Gandhi, but that\u2019s a story for further down the road.
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\nSmith was courageous, whatever other faults he may have had, and was involved in a sensational victory at the Battle of Aliwal in India on 28 January 1846 during the first Anglo-Sikh War.
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\nThat victory led to a promotion to Major General, and he was offered an accepted a baronetcy. The British parliament formally thanked Smith, and then returned to England where the extremely bloated ego he\u2019d developed over the past few decades was further fluffed up.
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\nWhile in England he\u2019d spent a lot of time with the Duke of Wellington who\u2019d defeated Napoleon, and with the Duke\u2019s support, he convinced the British government that the festering sore of the Eastern Cape of South Africa could be healed.
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\nThis expensive disaster after disaster he said could be resolved quickly, and even more importantly, cheaply.
\nWhen he returned to England in 1847, Harry Smith was treated like royalty, greeted at Southampton by artillery salutes, church bells rang, thousands of people cheered him, a special train was laid on to take him to London, where he received the freedom of the Guildhall.
\nHe dined with Queen Victoria, and was pretty much the first authentic military hero of the Victorian era. Waterloo was 30 years earlier, a long way off, and there\u2019d been very little military glory since.
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\nThus, Wellington whispered in the ears of the powerful, and that is how Harry Smith was appointed the new Governor of the Cape, strategically important but infuriatingly complex.
\nAll settlers agreed, the Queen had made a perfect appointment. As we\u2019re going to hear, this was going to be possibly her worst appointment anywhere up to then. All the hero worship was going straight to this little man\u2019s head. He was short, so by little I mean horizontally challenged.
\nDoing the hard work of making sense of negotiations were the translators. These were men, black and white, who had a vast influence on our history. Smith said to Sandile that he should leave Grahamstown and go to his people, whereupon the translators claim Sandile said \u201cNo \u2014 I will stay today near you, my former and best friend\u2026\u201d
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\nHistorians believe these exchanges were embroidered, altered, and added to the misunderstandings. Many of the translators were sons of missionaries, or settlers who\u2019d grown up speaking amaXhosa fluently. But they fed Smith what he wanted to hear.
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\nThe very same translators had been at work when Sandile was taken into Grahamstown to be placed under house arrest so you can see that their editorialising was having an effect on history.