A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  Insofar as British politicians gave a thought to the future of South Africa, they placed it in the same category as Canada—a region dominated by white settlers of foreign and British origin who had joined to form a federal British dominion in 1867. Following that precedent, the British colonies and Afrikaner republics in South Africa, from the Cape to the Limpopo and perhaps beyond, should amalgamate in a self-governing, white-controlled state under the Crown. Such a state should be strong enough to keep internal law and order and to incorporate the African communities; the Royal Navy would protect it from foreign aggression; British merchants would dominate its foreign trade; and the British government would control its foreign political relations. Also, some politicians would add, the British government should have a say in its treatment of its African inhabitants.

  How was this to be achieved? One way was to give the Cape Colony self-government and have it engross the other states in the region. That method was tried. The Cape Colony acquired responsible government in 1872, but the colony was too weak and its white inhabitants too divided for it to become the instrument of such a policy. Until 1880, the colonial government refused to incorporate Griqualand West, and although it took over Basutoland in 1871, it soon lost control of the Basotho people, so that Britain had to resume responsibility for that territory in 1884.

  Meanwhile, in 1875 Lord Carnarvon, an unusually activist colonial secretary serving in Benjamin Disraeli’s Conservative ministry, had set in motion a series of events that he intended to culminate in a Canadian solution.31 He started by writing a dispatch to the high commissioner in Cape Town, proposing a conference of representatives of the white communities in Southern Africa to discuss native questions, the control of the arms trade, and, perhaps, confederation. The South African responses were not auspicious. The Cape colonial cabinet—the first under responsible government—resented what it construed as imperial interference. In the Orange Free State, the voortrekker spirit had been reinforced by the well-grounded belief that Britain had manipulated the arbitration process that had led to including the Kimberley diamond fields in Griqualand West. In the Transvaal, Afrikaner morale was low because of the weakness of the economy and the unpopularity of the president, Thomas Francois Burgers. When he interviewed Burgers in London, Carnarvon nevertheless deduced that he would support confederation under British auspices, which was foolish because that would have amounted to political suicide by Burgers.

  Rebuffed by the Cape colonial government and, so he thought, deceived by the president of the Transvaal, Carnarvon convened a conference in London after trying to conciliate President Brand of the Orange Free State by granting him ninety thousand pounds’ compensation for the loss of the diamond fields. The conference achieved nothing significant. The Cape and the Transvaal were not represented; Shepstone, a nonelected official, represented Natal; and President Brand was present to make sure that confederation was not discussed.

  Foiled in diplomacy, Carnarvon resorted to more dramatic methods. Using propaganda to exploit missionary charges that the Transvaal practiced slavery, the concerns of British merchants, traders, and bankers about the security of their investments in the Transvaal, and reports about the Pedi defeat of a Transvaal commando, Carnarvon entrusted Shepstone with the task of annexing the republic, preferably with the consent of its Afrikaner citizens. In January 1877, Shepstone entered the Transvaal with a small police escort and settled in Pretoria. There he played a skillful waiting game. Interviewing leading citizens, he exploited their fears of the Zulu, their factionalism, and their dislike of President Burgers and demanded that the Volksraad make financial and administrative reforms. When it had done so, he declared that the reforms were not good enough. The Volksraad eventually adjourned, and so demoralized were the citizens that on April 12, 1877, Shepstone was able peacefully to proclaim the Transvaal a British colony.

  In Pretoria, nobody resisted annexation, but in its final session the Executive Council of the republic appointed a delegation led by Paul Kruger, the senior military officer of the republic, to go to London and protest. Refused an audience by Carnarvon, the delegation returned to the Transvaal, organized petitions against the annexation signed by 6,591 Transvaalers, and traveled back to England, where Carnarvon’s successor in the Colonial Office declined to reopen the question. British officials, meanwhile, had mismanaged the affairs of the Transvaal, alienating their Afrikaner subjects and failing to create an effective coalition in support of their administration. In defeating the Zulu and the Pedi, moreover, the British had alleviated Afrikaner fears of African military power. Consequently, late in 1880, when a Transvaal farmer refused to pay his taxes, his action precipitated an armed rising. Commandos quickly cut off the imperial garrisons in the Transvaal and invaded Natal, where they inflicted a series of defeats on ineptly led British forces. The brief war culminated in February 1881, when a commando stormed Majuba Mountain in broad daylight and virtually annihilated the 280 British soldiers on the summit.

  1. Aboriginal hunters have left Southern Africa a rich legacy of between hunters (San) and African mixed farmers. Evidently a rock paintings and rock engravings. This painting is at Mount fight is on between the smaller hunters who use bows and arrows Hope, 140 miles northeast of Port Elizabeth, in the frontier zone and the larger farmers who carry spears and shields.

  2. In 1706, transhument pastoralists (whom Whites called Hottentots hunt in progress on the left. In the distance, ships ride at anchor off and who called themselves Khoikhoi) still occupied the north shore of Cape Town, the young Dutch colonial capital, which nestles beneath Table Bay for part of the year. The Danish artist shows an elephant the Devil’s Peak, Table Mountain, and the Lion’s Head.

  3. The Tswana people—African mixed farmers—lived in large townships. This scene is in Dithakong (near modern Kuruman), which was the seat of the Tlhaping chiefdom. William Burchell, a British naturalist-artist, spent several weeks there in 1812. The town, he said, occupied “the greater part of a plain of about two miles in diameter.” Burchell estimated that it had five thousand inhabitants or more.

  4. African blacksmiths made hoes, spears, and knives. George French Angas painted a Zulu smithy in 1848. The principal blacksmith works a pair of leather bellows. The bellows are connected by elands’ horns with a clay tube that is thrust into a charcoal fire, where a white heat is kept up while the iron softens. The blacksmith’s assistant removes the heated lumps of iron with a pair of forceps to a flat stone, where another man beats it into shape.

  5. African women made a beer of fermented millet for use on festive occasions. Angas illustrated the process in a Zulu homestead at the Tugela River. “The large earthen jars over the fire contain the beer which, after boiling, is set aside for some days to ferment. One woman is stirring the millet with a calabash spoon, while another is testing its quality in a little cup; a third woman is advancing with a basket of millet on her head, and a fourth is pouring out the liquor in waterproof baskets.”

  6. Willem Adriaan van der Stel, governor of the Cape Colony, became and his cronies are overseeing the slaves alongside the elegant a wealthy landowner. This is a modern, romanticized rendering of his homestead. Van der Stel fell foul of the settlers and was recalled great estate, Vergelegen, thirty miles east of Cape Town. The governor 1705.

  7. George French Angas made this painting of Cape Town in 1847, when its population numbered 21,000. “Nothing,” he wrote, “can exceed the beauty of the scenery in the environs of Cape Town”—“ thriving and flourishing place [with] ... a gay and cheerful aspect”.

  8. Genadendal, seventy miles east of Cape Town, was the principal Moravian mission station in South Africa. Angas noted that it had a “Hottentot” population of 2,837 and contained “268 solid houses, and 266 huts and reed building, all the work of the Christian Hottentots.” The German staff of about ten families included cutlers, cabinetmakers, tanners, and teachers.

  9. In the mid-nineteenth century, white pastoralists (trekboers) and their serv
ants were still living nomadic lives in the arid Cape colonial interior. This farmer and his wife occupy the tented wagon while their servants make do in the open. One of them is knee-haltering the riding horses; the draft oxen are out to pasture.

  10. Ox-wagon travel in roadless, mountainous country was no easy thing. On their Great Trek in 1838, Afrikaner voortrekkers crossed the Drakensberg Mountains from the highveld to Natal with nearly a thousand wagons. Although men held onto thongs fastened to the sides, several wagons crashed on the precipitous slopes.

  11. The first significant number of British settlers—some 5,000—reached South Africa in 1820. Thomas Baines shows them arriving in Algoa Bay, where they founded the town of Port Elizabeth.

  12. Baines found traveling conditions difficult. In April 1848, his oxen got into a chaotic tangle while he was trying to cross a small stream. “The wagon stuck with its disselboom or pole so elevated that the after-oxen could not apply their strength, and turning refractory, they were kicked, lashed, dragged, and twisted by the tail, beaten, cursed and remonstrated with, as if language were actually intelligible to them.”

  13. In 1847, Baines described Grahamstown, the center of the British settlement, as containing “six thousand persons, of whom one fourth were coloured, and houses to the number of seven hundred and fifty.”

  14. During the 1860s, white hunters were taking a heavy toll of the elephant population of the Transvaal and neighboring areas. It was estimated that more than fifty-three tons of ivory were exported annually from the Transvaal. Much of it found its way overseas via the market in Grahamstown in the eastern Cape Colony.

  15 and 16 (overleaf). Soon after Whites discovered diamonds in South Africa in 1867, the diggings began to penetrate the surface. Artists showed the chaos that ensued as individuals and small companies tried to work their holdings independendy. Gradually, amalgamations took place, and by the mid-1890s Cecil Rhodes and his associates dominated the mines. De Beers Consolidated Mines controls the diamond industry to the present day.

  17. Gravel sorting was a delicate step in the process of recovering diamonds. To prevent thefts, the companies confined African workers in closed compounds and subjected them to intimate body searches before permitting them to leave. White workers successfully resisted attempts to impose similar controls over them.

  18. By the mid-1880s, Kimberley, two hundred miles from the coast, was a bustling city of twenty thousand inhabitants. It had modern shops, a library, a hospital, a posh club for the elite, and even electric light. Wagons brought produce to the market square, where auctioneers sold it in lots.

  19. In 1885, gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand. Here is the beginning of work on the surface of the main reef—a reef that has yielded the richest supply of gold the world has known. Today, mines operate at twelve thousand feet below the surface.

  20. By the early 1890s, Johannesburg had surpassed Kimberley as the greatest city in the South African interior, the principal magnet for investment, and the main goal of railroad construction from the ports.

  21. Grahamstown (founded 1812) and Kingwilliamstown (1847) were bases for military operations against the Xhosa. Frederick I’Ons captured the spirit of the campfollowers in this lively painting.

  22. On 30 January 1846, Col. John Hare, a British colonial official, met the Xhosa chief Sandile in Xhosa territory, 110 miles northeast of Port Elizabeth. Sandile had three thousand armed followers; Hare deployed three British regiments and the Cape Mounted Rifles. The negotiations were not a success. War between the British and the Xhosa, waged intermittently since 1811, broke out again two months later.

  23. By March 1853, the British had cleared Xhosa warriors from their mountain fastnesses and had destroyed the homestead of Sarhili, senior chief of all the Xhosa.

  24. In January 1879, the Zulu annihilated an invading British regiment at Isandhlwana, but British forces and colonial volunteers then destroyed the Zulu capital, pulverized the army, banished the king, and divided the Zulu people among thirteen chiefdoms.

  25 and 26. In the last quarter of 1899, Afrikaner commandos defeated British forces in Natal and the Cape Colony and besieged Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking. During 1900 the British relieved the besieged cities, captured Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, and Pretoria, and formally annexed both Boer republics. They then assumed that the “Boer War” was virtually over. They were wrong. Commandos resorted to guerrilla warfare and held out until 31 May 1902. They repeatedly broke the railway network that linked the coast with the interior.

  27. In 1955, 3,000 delegates from all over South Africa—320 indians, 230 Coloured People, 112 Whites, and about 2,300 Africans—met in an open space near Johannesburg. there they adopted a freedom charter, which became the basic policy statement of the african National congress. police broke the meeting up on the second day.

  28. The sjambok (whip) was a major weapon in the hands of the South African police. In June 1959, at Cato Manor near Durban, police used sjamboks to beat African women who were protesting the government’s decision to create a monopoly of beer canteens, thus depriving the women of a customary source of income.

  29. In the 1950s, the government destroyed Sophiatown, an African township four miles west of Johannesburg that had been the center of African resistance to apartheid.

  30. Nelson Mandela set an example for other Africans by burning his “pass” in 1959. Mandela became president of the African National Congress after the death of Albert Luthuli in 1967, but he would spend most of his life as a political prisoner.

  31. On South African farms, white landowners live in modern houses, their black laborers in sordid shacks and cottages.

  32. By 1985, the funerals for black activists killed by the police had become occasions for political demonstrations by the United Democratic front, a coalition of anti-apartheid organizations.

  33. In 1986, the police and African collaborators destroyed Crossroads, a vast African shantytown near Cape Town.

  34. Havoc in the Cape peninsula in 1988!

  35. An elderly couple on the way to vote on April 27, 1994, passes a long line of voters. Thousands waited for hours to cast their ballots in the country’s first nonracial election.

  36. President Nelson Mandela receives the five volumes of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report from Commission Chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu in Pretoria on October 29, 1998. Mandela acknowledged that the TRC alone could not heal the nation.

  37. President Jacob Zuma (center left) and Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe (center right) cut the cake at the ANC centenary celebrations at Mangaung on January 8, 2012.

  38. Police check bodies on the ground after the Marikana Massacre of August 16, 2012. The incident caused international outrage.

  William Gladstone’s Liberal ministry, which had succeeded the Conservatives the previous year, resisted the popular clamor for revenge, and in August 1881 British commissioners signed a convention giving the Transvaal “complete self-government, subject to the Suzerainty of Her Majesty”—a reservation with no precise meaning. That ended the forward movement that Carnarvon had initiated.

  During the ensuing years, Afrikaners adapted in different ways to their changing environments. In the Cape Colony, where most Afrikaners still lived, they were exposed to two distinct paradigms, idealistic and pragmatic. The idealistic paradigm was set out by S. J. du Toit, a rural predikant (Dutch Reformed minister), who created the nucleus of an exclusive ethnic mythology for Afrikaners in a newspaper, Die Afrikaanse patriot, and a book Die geskiendenis van ons land in die taal van ons volk (The history of our country in the language of our people). Afrikaners, according to du Toit, were a distinct people, occupying a distinct fatherland and endowed by God with the destiny to rule South Africa and civilize its heathen inhabitants. This was the first time that an Afrikaner intellectual had adopted the concept of a chosen people. Du Toit’s writings were accessible to his public because he wrote in simple Afrikaans, the language of common speech, as distinct f
rom the stilted High Dutch of the Reformed churches and previous publications in South Africa.32

  The pan-Afrikaner nationalist ideology initiated by du Toit would ultimately triumph in a fateful general election in 1948, but it did not dominate Afrikaner political institutions in the nineteenth century. Although du Toit launched a political organization, the Afrikaner Bond, to give effect to his principles, Presidents Brand and Kruger snuffed it out from the republics, where they were concentrating on consolidating their separate state identities, and the Bond was captured by advocates of a different paradigm in the Cape Colony, led by Jan Hofmeyr. Hofmeyr, a Cape Town journalist, was a pragmatic man. He operated within the colonial system to achieve reforms for his people. He tolerated the British connection, provided it was not onerous, he worked for harmony between the Afrikaner and the British elements in the colonial population by removing Afrikaner grievances, and he looked ultimately to the unification of South Africa on that basis.33