President Thabo Mbeki's official residence in Cape Town, an elegant Cape Dutch mansion known as the Tuynhuis, backs on to the stunning Company's Gardens, a park laid out by the Dutch East India Company shortly after the city's foundation in the 17th century, writes Séamus Martin.
Linking the gardens to the old port and the fortified castle was Cape Town's principal street, the Heerengracht. This remains the city's most important thoroughfare for trade and business but it was renamed Adderley Street in 1850 after a period of riotous instability in which Ireland's role was not insignificant.
Back then the city had a little over 27,000 inhabitants but the threat of further settlement by convicts, as had been the case in Australia, incensed the populace. Riots ensued. The Governor's annual ball had to be protected by troops with fixed bayonets. Dutch and English residents united in opposition to the threat to civilisation as they knew it.
Tension rose even further when people heard that a convict ship, the Neptune, had left the Cape bound for Bermuda to pick up felons who had served part of their sentences and had been given freedom to settle.
On April 5th, 1849 a public meeting was held in Cape Town and all those present were asked to sign a pledge that they would "not employ in any capacity or receive on any terms into our establishments, any one of the convicted felons who are to be transported to our shores and turned loose among us." The ladies of nearby Stellenbosch were moved to plead for help to preserve them from the "dire pollution" which they believed awaited them. Images of the arrival of hardened criminals from the gin parlours of London and other cities were conjured up by a group of activists which included some of the wealthiest merchants of the Cape.
When news arrived that the Neptune was on its way back with 300 convicts, panic spread among the colonists. On May 31st, 38 of the leading merchants and citizens of Cape Town met at the Commercial Exchange building and formed the Anti-Convict Association.
The following pledge was drafted and signed by almost all the white population of the colony: "We hereby solemnly declare and pledge our faith to each other that we will not employ or knowingly admit into our establishments or houses, work with or for, or associate with any convicted felons sent into this Colony under sentence of transportation and that we will discountenance and drop connection with any person who may assist in landing, supporting or employing such convicted felons."
It made little difference to the burghers of Cape Town that the felons on their way to the Cape were not what might be termed today as "ordinary decent criminals" from abysmally deprived areas of the then United Kingdom but Irish political prisoners who had taken part, or had been suspected of taking part, in the pathetic Young Ireland rising of 1848. To the Capetonians, convicts were convicts and might upset the cosy situation in which large profits were made from extremely lowly paid native labour.
The Anti-Convict Association quickly became the most important political force in the colony. From June 1849 to February 1850, the association took on near-dictatorial powers. Its chairman, J.B. Ebden, president of the Cape of Good Hope Bank, member of the Legislative Council and leader of the Commercial Exchange, became the unofficial, autocratic ruler of the region. Anyone who ventured to offend the association under his leadership stood the risk of being ostracised and put out of business.
Meanwhile at Westminster, C.B. Adderley, the Tory member for North Stafford and an advocate of Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy, took up the colonials' case and urged the Colonial Secretary, Early Grey, to revoke his decision to send the convicts.
Adderley and the colonial agitators were successful and the old Heerengracht was renamed in his honour at a great celebratory occasion.
The convicts themselves, it should be said, were not all that keen to be put down in the Cape. One of them, John Mitchel, actually applauded the actions of the colonists in opposing the writ of Westminster.
Their protests could, he wrote in his Jail Journal on board the Neptune at anchor down the Cape peninsula at Simonstown, "transform the sons of English and Dutch fathers into a self-dependent, high-spirited nation of South Africans. . .I drink tonight, with enthusiasm, in red wine of the Cape vines, the health and future of the South African Republic." The South African Republic that Mitchel envisaged as he drank the Cape wine on board the Neptune was to become a reality a hundred years later and developed into the notorious apartheid state overthrown in 1994. Had the Irish rebels been permitted to settle, would their advanced republican views and those of their descendants have changed the history of South Africa?
In this context it is worth noting that when writing of a future republic, Mitchel mentioned only the sons of the English and Dutch, not their daughters, and certainly not the indigenous population. It is worth remembering too that later in his life he fought on the side of slave-owners as an officer of the Confederate Army in the American Civil War.
As for bustling Adderley Street, no Capetonian I asked had any idea why it was so called. Recent moves to rename it after Nelson Mandela appear to have fallen into abeyance.