By Alec Hogg
Yesterday, for the first time, I came across John Bardwell Ebden, the businessman and politician who dominated the Cape Colony for most of the mid 1800s. An uneducated sailor from Suffolk, at 19 he arrived in the Mother City in 1806 and stayed to found the once dominant Cape of Good Hope Bank, create the Cape’s Commercial Exchange and serve for a dozen years as President of the Chamber of Commerce.
As a member of the legislature, Ebden played a key role in preventing the shipping of British convicts to the Cape (they went to Australia instead). For almost half a century until his death in 1873, there was no more powerful man in the city. Yet here we are, less than a century and a half later, and for 99.9% of those who followed, the name means nothing.
Despite his current anonymity, mankind may one day remember Ebden with some affection. Not because of his own achievements. But, rather, because of his sponsored scholarship to Cambridge, won in 1891 by one Jan Christiaan Smuts.
It was Smuts’s gifted mind, honed by his legal studies at the great university, which bequeathed us the theory of holism. With society everywhere in turmoil, holism is being rediscovered as a solution to the world’s most challenging questions. What a shame it has taken almost a century to do so.
