PRINGLE, THOMAS
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Thomas Pringle (January 5, 1789-December 5, 1834) was a poet and essayist whose powerful writings about the Africans of the Eastern Cape found practical expression in his work for the emancipation of slaves.
PHOTO CAPTION: Pringle Thomas. SOURCE: EA Library.
Born in Kelso (Scotland), Pringle was lamed as a child, an accident which made him meditative, though he was also apparently of cheerful disposition. At Edinburgh University, he proved studious, but not brilliant, and soon turned to writing.
He served for a time as co-editor of the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine and editor of the Edinburgh Magazine and a newspaper, the Star. When he found it impossible to maintain his young wife and family, he emigrated with them to South Africa. He was almost unique among the 1820 Settlers from Britain: he hated oppression and was much affected by the treatment the whites meted out to the inhabitants of the country.
He learned Dutch in order to be able to converse with the Khoi (whom the whites called Hottentots) and, when his Dutch neighbours visited him and found they must sit down with Hottentots, they came no more. Despite being crippled, he traveled widely and wrote lively descriptions of the country and the people. But his most moving work, in verse and prose, centered on Makhanda, Xhosa warrior-chief-prophet, who was tricked by the British into captivity on Robben Island.
Pringle soon moved to the small settlement of Cape Town, where he joined John Fairbairn in 1824 in establishing a school and producing the first “free” newspaper, the South African Commercial Advertiser. Such were their civilised and advanced ideas that the Governor used all his influence to ruin this “seminary of sedition,” and Pringle was also forced to abandon the newspaper. Only in 1828 would the colony be granted freedom of the press.
In 1826 he returned to Britain and there was associated with William Wilberforce and Samuel Coleridge. He became secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. At the time of his sudden death, at the age of 46, it was said that “from India, America and Africa, people joined in lament; in the wide sphere of humanity, he was revered as the advocate and protector of the oppressed.”
MARY BENSON
