ABSTRACT
THE main problems of the Cape Colony in 1841 were frontier problems. The Capetown petition of that year for a representative assembly was a mere isolated incident. Lord Stanley rejected the prayer of the petition, supported though it was by the Governor himself, for various reasons—the weakness of the Executive which Canadian experience seemed to foreshadow, the peculiar dispersion of the population, above all the danger that power might be used by a dominant caste for ‘promoting their own interests and prejudices, at the expense of those of other and less powerful classes’ 1 —and the petitioners were silenced. The status of the Hottentots and other coloured inhabitants of the colony, recently a burning question, had lost something of its inflammatory quality: the Masters and Servants Ordinance of 1842 made no distinctions of colour, but it was not complained against. The perennial question of the relations of the border colonists and the tribes beyond the border, on the other hand, was very much alive, and it had recently been complicated by the Great Trek, which had made the whole of the modern Union a borderland of the Cape.
