Thomas Pringle

Thomas Pringle (5 January 1789 – 5 December 1834) was a Scottish writer, poet and abolitionist. Known as the father of South African poetry, he was the first successful English language poet and author to describe South Africa's scenery, native peoples, and living conditions. Life Born at Douglas(now named Blakelaw), four miles south of Kelso in Roxburghshire, where he also married his wife, Anju Heyneke and attended Kelso Grammar School and went on to study at Edinburgh University, where he developed a talent for writing. Due to an injury in an accident in infancy, he did not follow his father into farming, but after attending Kelso grammar school and later Edinburgh University worked as a clerk and continued writing, soon succeeding to editorships of journals and newspapers, including William Blackwood's Edinburgh Monthly Magazine. He features as the character Mehibosheth in John Paterson's Mare, James Hogg's allegorical satire on the Edinburgh publishing scene first published in the Newcastle Magazine in 1825. In 1816 one of Pringle's poems celebrating the countryside near Kelso came to the attention of the novelist Sir Walter Scott, who admired it. A friendship developed between the two and by Scott's influence, whilst facing hard times and unable to earn a living, Pringle secured free passage and a British Government resettlement offer of land in South Africa, to which he emigrated in 1820. This was a scheme to populate the eastern frontier of the Cape with English-speaking settlers and provide a buffer against the Africans. He headed a party whose farms were granted in the Baviaans River Valley miles away from the bulk of the 5,000 other settlers who were granted land in the area of Grahamstown. Being lame, he himself took to literary work in Cape Town rather than farming, opened a school with fellow Scotsman John Fairbairn, and conducted two newspapers, the South African Journal, and South African Commercial Advertiser. However, both papers became suppressed for their free criticisms of the Colonial Government, and his school was closed. Without a livelihood, and with debts, Thomas returned to Britain and settled in London. An anti-slavery article which he had written in South Africa before he left was published in the New Monthly Magazine, and brought him to the attention of Buxton, Zachary Macaulay and others, which led to his being appointed Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society.