D1.8.44: [Untitled]

D1.8.44: [Untitled]

Newspaper Clippings

Bleek discusses Wodehouse's prorogation speech, reluctantly acknowledging Responsible Government's inevitability in the current political climate and that institutions cannot be representative until the executive branch is made responsible to the legislature. Wodehouse concedes that 'good and efficient government' would be unlikely without it. Opposing the system expedites the necessary change, while uncritical compliance prolongs a suboptimal system often only maintainable under popular leadership. The Cape's loyalty is conditional upon appeasing these selfish demands for independence. The governor must sincerely understand the governed to actualise the colonists' vision. There is a cultural politics of emotion that the governor is external to and remains alienated from. The Act of Imperial Parliament forcibly incorporating British Kaffraria into the Cape Colony undermines representative institutional mandates and trivialises the colony's public will by voiding their agency with no means of appeal. To withhold supplies in defiance would complicate the colony's position. Local interest-led factionalism cheapens deliberation and worsens Wodehouse's standing as his opponents highlight his failure to counteract division. The prevailing southeasterly summer wind at the Cape, better known locally as the South-Easter or 'Cape Doctor', gives Bleek cause to hope for the Cape's possible immunity, as he believes it will clear away cholera-carrying 'miasma'. Bleek reads the hysteria-stricken Cape government's treatment of the Renown's passengers as ungracious and cowardly.

Printed newsprint glued on paper

12 October 1865

One cut-out column of printed newsprint mounted on foolscap folio (warped).

Cholera (is a disease), quarantine (for cholera), South-Easters (strong winds), Renown (new clothes in a nearby boat)

Pressed clippings of Victorian current affairs opinion pieces by Wilhelm Bleek. Published in Het Volksblad on Thursday, October 12th, 1865.

Van de Sandt de Villiers & Co.