The shortage of farm animals was crucial. Milner arranged to import long-horned steers and two-year-old heifers from the United States and, after weeks of haggling, managed to purchase from the army 80,000 oxen, mules, and donkeys. Seeds, building materials, ploughs, horses, sheep, harnesses, and wagons were offered to the Boers by the Repatriation Department at cost without charge for administration or delivery. But many of the animals obtained from the army were in wretched condition; when glanders broke out among the mules, the results were disastrous. The most urgent need was for ploughing cattle, and even though teams of government animals were sent round to plough a certain number of acres on farms that lacked draft animals, there were never enough.
In spite of the severe winter and the hardships, the people were anxious to go back to the land, and day after day clouds of dust blew over the veld, stirred up by wagon trains pulled by mules or oxen moving away from the concentration camps and repatriation centres, carrying families, their possessions, one month’s rations, and materials for a new start in life. Packed in somehow were the broken bits of furniture and personal possessions that had been saved from their former lives, the curios bought or made by the men while in prison camps, and the toys and new schoolbooks of the children.
Milner had hoped to have the farms reestablished and the people settled within a year, but this proved impossible. When the wagons arrived at the blackened ruins of the old homestead the goods were offloaded and the wagons of the Repatriation Department lumbered off to move another family. Left to themselves on their land, despondency must have overwhelmed many as they looked about them. Strong hands and hearts were needed if families were to survive. Most Boer families possessed both, but in spite of this, and in spite of the energetic efforts of the government, it became obvious, even before the first winter was over, that more British aid would be needed, and for a longer period, if the landscape was not to be strewn with starving families. Milner recognized this: despite the grumblings of those inside and outside the government at home, he pushed ahead with his resettlement program. He spent lavishly; far more than the £3,000,000 promised in the peace agreement was expended on reconstruction and repatriation, and millions more were made available for loans.
It is impossible to see how Milner could have done more than he did, given the existing political atmosphere, the prevailing Victorian attitudes towards charity, the lack of understanding in England of conditions on the veld, and the resentment of the British taxpayers towards the use of their money to help their former enemies. It must be remembered that this was the first time in history that a conqueror had ever attempted such a mass repatriation and rehabilitation of a conquered people. It was altogether a new thing.
The attitude of the Boers to their new rulers varied: some could never suppress their hatred for the British and did not want to; others wanted to forget the war and get on with the business of rebuilding their farms and their lives. Stompie van Rensburg, surrendering at the end of the war, carried his rifle in his left hand as he walked up to a soldier and, holding out his right, said, “Englishman, here is my rifle and here is my hand.”
Although he and others were willing to come to terms with the British, few indeed were willing to forgive those of their own countrymen who had sided with the enemy. One who did was Jozua Joubert, the commandant who had drawn the lot which placed him on Hlangwane at the battle of Colenso. Joubert had come home from the war without his right arm to find his farmhouse burned and all that he possessed destroyed. Yet he was able to confront his neighbour, a hands-upper responsible for the destruction, by holding out his remaining hand and saying: “Revenge belongs to God, not to man, so we must shake hands and be friends.”
Jozua Joubert was a remarkable man, by no means typical. Stompie van Rensburg lived for more than forty years after the war without speaking to a former friend on an adjoining farm who had been a hands-upper and, he claimed, had tried to betray him.
Although the hands-uppers and National Scouts had chosen the winning side in the war, their place in postwar society was unenviable. Their fellow countrymen regarded them as traitors, and the feeling against them was intense. They were socially ostracised, insulted, boycotted, and even banned from churches unless they publicly admitted their guilt and repented. In some areas it was a disgrace to have an unburned farmhouse. (Even today, farmhouses built before 1902 are pointed out as belonging to the families of hands-uppers.) The political influence to which such men as Piet de Wet and A. P. J. Cronjé might have aspired was denied them by the fact that the peace treaty, made with the fighting burghers without reference to them, gave unstated but effective recognition to the bitter-end guerrilla leaders, not the hands-uppers, as the true representatives of the Afrikaner people in the new colonies.
After the war the army regarded those Boers who had fought on their side simply as irregulars to be paid off and forgotten; the civil administration saw them only as more Boers to be resettled. Thanks to the efforts of a staff officer who recognised their peculiar status, Kitchener was persuaded to pay them an extra month’s salary and to give each of them a pony, saddle, and bridle; further, wagons, rations, and tents were offered at moderate prices and a fund was established for their benefit.
Many of the National Scouts and ORC Volunteers had come from the lower strata of Boer society. A large proportion had been bywoners, squatters without land of their own, who now that the war was over had no place to go, for few of the farmers would allow them back on their land. A group of former leaders of the National Scouts formed a Farmers Association and rented land near Standerton where some might settle. The venture seemed so promising that other associations and settlements were formed, but unfortunately this well-intentioned scheme came to grief.
The bywoners were not made of the sternest stuff—which is perhaps why they went over to the British in the first place. Many were shiftless and most were too easily discouraged. The associations themselves, private ventures, suffered from mismanagement and actual dishonesty. In the Orange River Colony little effort was made to settle the bywoners on the land; instead, a system of public works projects was initiated and they were employed as manual labourers.
Boers who owned their own lands, however, were determined to remain on the veld, to rebuild their farms, and, in spite of all difficulties, they persevered. But not until the closing weeks of 1903 was there a good rainfall, and not until 1904 did a degree of normalcy return to the veld. By 1905, however, only three years after Vereeniging, there were few reminders that this was a land recently aflame with war—only a few blockhouses to be seen; some fences along the railways festooned with rusting tins, the pebbles inside causing them to tinkle when the wind blew; and, of course, the scattered graves on the veld.
To make the new colonies bright jewels in the crown of Empire was Milner’s great ambition, and he was not to be distracted from his single-minded devotion to his task. When in 1903 Chamberlain resigned from the Cabinet on the issue of Imperial preference and the post of colonial secretary was offered to Milner, he refused—perhaps wisely, for he was not a politician; still, there were few other men who would have given up an opportunity to be a key Cabinet minister in order to be proconsul for a pair of devastated colonies inhabited by truculent and ungrateful subjects for whom they had no affection.
In spite of a chronic shortage of labour, the mines increased their production, but they were unable to reach their prewar level. This vast land, never overpopulous and now depopulated by war, needed hands and brains if it was to grow and develop. Even before the end of the war Milner had pleaded for government encouragement of emigration to the new colonies. In a dispatch written 25 January 1902 he wrote:
If we do nothing, we shall be confronted, sooner or later, with an industrial urban population, rapidly increasing, and almost wholly British in sentiment, and, on the other hand, a rural population, wholly Dutch, agriculturally unprogressive. It is not possible to contemplate such a state of affairs without grave misgivings.1
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It had been Milner’s fond hope that swarms of British emigrants would come to settle in the new colonies. Conan Doyle even suggested that the Boers be put on reservations to make room for them: “Let them live there as Basutos live in Basutoland, or Indians in Indian territory, or the inhabitants of a protected state in India.”2
Some Britons did come, but not nearly enough to fulfill Milner’s dream of making the Boers a minority. Many of the new colonists, not having the knack of raising crops and livestock on the veld, soon became discouraged and left.
What Milner feared is exactly what happened. Even today, the urban white population, controlling commerce and industry, is predominately Anglo-Saxon; the rural white population, controlling agriculture and the government, is predominately Afrikaner. Milner’s failure to change the composition of the white population to assure a predominance of Anglo-Saxons was a bitter disappointment to him, for in his mind this was the prime purpose of all his schemes, the justification of the war itself.
There were few problems in repopulating the towns with whites. Most of the uitlanders had returned to the Rand before the end of the war, and Johannesburg, the largest town in the new colonies, quickly returned to its prewar white population level. Milner even had some success in redressing the imbalance of sexes: he persuaded the British Emigration Association in Britain to form a South African Expansion Committee, and through their efforts some 4,000 women were sent out between 1902 and 1908. He established a Women’s Immigration Department in the Transvaal which contributed to the women’s transportation costs, received the immigrants at government hostels when they arrived, and undertook to find employment for them until they found husbands.
The hand of Milner was everywhere, and certainly he deserved much credit for his part in revitalising the colonies. But this credit was denied him. To say that he and his good works were unappreciated is to understate the case. Smuts called his administration “the darkest period in the history of the Transvaal”; “Milnerism” became a pejorative term. Since Plato, intellectuals have been puzzled by men’s rejection of intellectuals as rulers. Milner provided honest, intelligent, and efficient government, failing to realise that in spite of the lip service paid to these virtues they are really low on any candid list of political desiderata. What people most want is a “voice”; they would rather have the opportunity of expressing their views on all manner of political problems, to make their own decisions, to decide their own fate, than to be given the best solutions, the best government, by the wisest of autocratic rulers. And of all peoples, this was most true of the Boers, now denied all voice in their political affairs.
There was an appointed legislative council in the Transvaal, and in January 1903 Milner invited Botha, De la Rey, and Smuts to serve on it. They refused. The British were still regarded as the enemy, and they would not collaborate with them. Smuts, whose views probably influenced the others, answered for the three of them, telling Milner that they would serve on a legislative body only if it was elected by the people. Botha continued to sit on his stoep and listen sympathetically to the discontented, talk of what he would do, make friends, and solidify his political foundations. Smuts, the intellectual, became Milner’s gadfly—a very noisy, persistent, stinging gadfly.
The Boers were not alone in their feelings about Milner. Even the uitlanders turned against him. They had greeted him as their champion, one who would give them the preferential treatment they felt they deserved and exact from the Boers all the penalties of defeat. They were disappointed. Milner was fair, just, and placed administrative efficiency above political expediency. He disliked the Boers, but he saw no purpose in persecuting them; on the contrary, he saw how necessary it was to the well-being of the country that they be helped. The uitlanders, taxed to support their recent enemies (Milner slapped a 10 percent tax on gold mining profits—double that which the republic had imposed) and as completely shut out of the business of running the country as were the Boers, were soon loud in their complaints against Milner and his “imported bureaucracy.” They formed the Transvaal Political Association, the avowed purpose of which was to support the government by criticising it. It was not, Milner felt, the kind of support he needed.
Others were also under the impression that with British victory the millennium had arrived. They were quickly and rudely disillusioned. Asiatics, mostly Indians, had been pro-British and supportive during the war; many speeches had been made, some by responsible members of government in London, that led the Indians to believe they would no longer be considered second-class subjects; in particular they anticipated that they would no longer be forced to live in segregated areas and would be allowed freedom to trade wherever they chose. Nothing of the sort happened, and Indian discontent grew.
The Bantu had also helped the British; they had heard the British talk of improving the lot of the natives, and many had believed it. They too had lived in expectation of a better life after the war, but their condition was, in fact, little altered. The Times History put the matter succinctly:
The natives had in many instances become insolent, owing to unduly high wages and to the familiarity with which the soldiers had treated them. They expected the Boers to be treated as a conquered race, to whom they would no longer stand in a dependent relation. But they soon discovered that the British conquest, though it might give the black man greater security against oppression and more clearly defined rights, involved no essential alteration in the superior status of the white man, be he Briton or Boer.3
The British continued the system of registration, and each Bantu was required to have a pass. They were herded into compounds, put to breaking stones, and doled out to various companies and work projects. At the beginning of the war the Boers had reduced wages to £1 per month; the Bantu expected the British to raise this to at least prewar levels, but in this they were disappointed. Many simply refused to work.
Not even all the Britons whom Milner tried so hard to lure to the new colonies were happy with him, nor was he particularly happy with all of them: one was Emily Hobhouse, who in May 1903 came there to live and to help the Boer people in the difficult work of reconstruction. She founded a school which taught home industries for women and girls at Philippolis, and she travelled through the devastated countryside, writing letters and reports on the sufferings of the Boer families she found on the veld, making herself a constant irritant.
Many South Africans in Natal and Cape Colony, as well as patriots in England, grumbled at the expense of Milner’s programs and what they regarded as the coddling of the Boers. The final verse of Kipling’s “Piet” spoke for them:
No more I’ll ‘ear ’is rifle crack
Along the block‘ouse fence—
The beggar’s on the peaceful tack,
Regardless of expense;
For countin’ what ‘e eats an’ draws,
An’ gifts and loans as well,
’E’s gettin’ ’alf the Earth, because
’E didn’t give us ’Ell!
Ah there, Piet! with your brand-new English plough!
Your gratis tents an’ cattle, an’ your most ungrateful frow,
You’ve made the British taxpayer rebuild your country-seat-
I’ve known some pet battalions charge a dam’ sight less than Piet.4
So in the end Milner satisfied no one. For his part in instigating a destructive, expensive, profitless war he had won acclaim and had been raised to the peerage; for all his splendid efforts under difficult circumstances to put the country right again afterwards he was denounced and vilified.
It was the Chinese, in the end, who brought about Milner’s downfall.
In spite of every effort—short of raising wages and improving working conditions—the mines were unable to attract a sufficient number of Bantu labourers. At the very end of the war Milner had appointed Dr. C. L. Sansom to investigate the treatment of native labourers, and the result was a horrifying report of men crowded into compounds with filthy quarters, suppli
ed with food unfit for human consumption, of lamentably inadequate medical treatment and poor hospitals. The mortality rates were enormous. When Milner put pressure on the Randlords to improve conditions—further exasperating them—the mine owners countered by demanding that the government find cheap labour for them. Finally, after much debate, it was decided to make an agreement with the Chinese government for the importation of coolies to work in the mines. The scheme was imaginative, it relieved the labour shortage and the output of the mines more than doubled in two years, but it was unsound for a number of reasons.
With the fantastic mixture of races already in South Africa and the tensions which invariably developed among them, the last thing this corner of the world needed was the introduction of another race. The importation of Chinese coolies, which began in June 1904, was the most bizarre episode in the history of the reconstruction era.
By March 1905 there were 34,355 Chinese in the Transvaal, and by January 1907 their numbers had increased to 53,856. Naturally among so many, a number of outrages occurred, murders and robberies, which somehow seemed more terrifying than the same crimes committed by whites or blacks, especially when made sensational by the press. Those not afraid of the Chinese were afraid for them. Milner unwisely sanctioned flogging as a punishment at the mines, and the cry went up in England that Britain had instituted slavery in South Africa. In Britain, South Africa, and indeed throughout the Empire, the Chinese question created an uproar. Even the Australians indignantly protested, seeing the importation of Chinese into a “white colony” as a dangerous precedent.
Great Boer War Page 67