By 1879, when the last of the frontier wars in the Eastern Cape broke out, a new political order was beginning to emerge. There was an increasingly large Xhosa Christian elite developing, for whom the politics of warfare began to seem outmoded and certainly unproductive. The call, made at the end of the war by Isaac Wauchope, to ‘Lay down the spear,/ Come out of the Hoho and Mnyube forests./ Fight with the Pen’ was more generally answered. A new form of modern politics was developing, in which parliamentary politics and the forerunners of the nationalist parties were seen as the way forward. Nevertheless, in the Kat River, the old reflexes were still in play. The following petition reviews the loyalist history of the Kat River Settlement, and returns to their previous grievances, all the way back to the meeting on the Vagrancy Bill fortyfive years earlier. At that meeting, Andries Hatha had sat behind the table recording the speeches that were made. Now in 1879 he once again chaired the meeting.

II. Under this designation they were called out in Kafir patrols, Kafir wars, expeditions, or campaigns, under their own commandants and field-cornets, subject to European generals or superior officers, and did eminent service, especially in the wars of 1835, 1846, and 1851 (and in the late Kafir war, as a militia, furnishing altogether over four hundred men, and now again in the Morosi war two hundred men, consisting of levies and volunteers, for the campaign against that rebel chief), under various commanders or general officers, as their Excellencies the late Sir B. D'Urban, Sir P. Maitland, Sir H. Somerset, Sir A. Stockenström, and many others, as the archives of the Colony may show.