REVIEW by Malcolm Jack in Chronicles of Western Cape Life
‘The itch of scribbling’
Samuel Eusebius Hudson tells us that he wrote too much, but that it was impossible for him to “allay the itch of scribbling”. A settler in the Cape in the early British period, which in 1795 followed the long occupation of the Dutch East India Company, he was addicted to diary writing. According to his descendant Edward Hudson, editor of the latest volume from Historical Publications of South Africa (formerly the Van Riebeek Society, whose scholarly volumes have been produced for more than 100 years), Samuel Hudson poured out as many as 600,000 words in his diaries.
He arrived in the Cape in 1797 to take up a clerical post in the customs department. That meant paying close attention to trade matters as well as the political set-up of the new colony. The most significant political event that he records is the growing opposition in the 1820s to the régime of Lord Charles Somerset, who had arrived as governor in 1814. The two leading liberal voices raised against him were those of Thomas Pringle and John Fairbairn. Together they had established the South African Journal, but Pringle, later secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society in London, decided to close it down in 1824 rather than put up with censorship of their criticisms of the government. Hudson records his sympathy with the campaign against a governor whom he labels a “hypocrite”, though he laments the printed standard of the Journal. He also expresses satisfaction when Somerset is eventually forced out of office in 1826.
Not all of his commentary is directed at public affairs. His diaries are a chronicle of Cape life of the period. While he sets out details of trade difficulties, particularly of the importing of goods from Europe, we also learn about the building of new churches, of theatre performances he attends and of the gossip in the coffee houses. Not all of Hudson’s views are pleasant – he records that slaves are becoming daily more “vile and incorrigible”, and that and other worries keep him awake at night.
Edward Hudson has produced a carefully composed selection of the diaries, with a glossary of local terms and idiosyncrasies used by this Pepysian author, as well as detailed notes and a full index. It is a fine addition to the impressive HiPSA volumes on Cape and South African history.