OCR Rendition - approximate

326 SIR H. B. FRERE.•-On the Laws affecting the offshoot from the Great Namaqua family, and mixed up with them, Griquas and Bastards, and other mixed races, whose chief interest to our present enquiry consists in the evidence their history during the past eighty years affords, that such mixed races, moving in front of the advancing wave of European coloni sation, form tribes with a novel organisation of their own, partly European, especially in its official aspects, but claiming tribal rights and a national existence, on the same grounds and to the same extent as if they belonged to an ancient dynasty ruling over a tribe of historical importance. Thus the Griquas, both of Eastern and Western Griqualand, are clearly of very modern origin, having grown up within this century from mixed and broken tribes, chiefly Namaqua, Hottentot, and Koranna, but with a considerable mixture of Bechuana and other Kaffir and negro blood, and some Dutch blood ; with much Dutch and English training from missionaries and frontier farmers, traders, and Europeans of various kinds. Their principal chiefs generally trace back their pedigree to a grandfather, or great grandfather at furthest, who is known to have been in the service of some Dutch colonial family as slave, or hired servant. The possession of a few horses or guns by a man of energy and intelligence superior to his fellows was sufficient to found a chiefship, and to form the nucleus of a tribe which gathered round from waifs and strays of the Colony and broken border tribes. Sooner or later European adventurers appeared, and attached themselves to the chief, sometimes as traders, or as secretaries and advisers. If the chief was prudent and successful, he generally invited 'a missionary to settle with, or near him, and he seems always to have felt that his power was not firmly established unless he persuaded some European with less interested motives than the itinerant trader, or loafing adventurer, to throw in his lot with the new dynasty. In a few years the new-fledged chief would have, besides his missionary and private secretary, his "Staats Secretary, who often were all Europeans, and in addition to his councillors, the indispensible appendages to any native chiefs, he had his " Raad," or legislature, and surveyors, and land registrars, and, in two instances, an elaborately written constitution, on the European model. It may be owing to the incongruous materials employed, and perhaps to untoward circumstances, but none of these constitutional experiments have survived the original projectors, and in more than one instance, when the chief grew old, he recognised the instability of the edifice he had attempted to rear, and surrendered his power during his own lifetime into other hands.