Holding those opinions, Hofmeyr brought the Bond into a political alliance with Cecil Rhodes, one of the most remarkable products of the imperial epoch. Rhodes was determined to use the wealth he was accumulating in the mining industries to promote the expansion of the British Empire in Africa from its base in the Cape Colony along the road to the north through the Tswana chiefdoms, the territories of the Shona and the Ndebele, and onward through the East African highlands to the Nile valley. This was not an unduly original idea, for social Darwinism and Anglo-Saxon racism were the main ingredients in the political fantasies of many of England’s ruling classes in the Victorian age, but Rhodes had exceptional ambition and exceptional means to fulfill it. First, he was rich; second, he was a persuasive talker and a skillful negotiator.
Rhodes, the British imperialist, and Hofmeyr, the Afrikaner colonialist, found many points of agreement. Both wished to foster cooperation between Boer and Briton; to resist British interference in the internal affairs of South Africa; to prevent Africans from dominating South African political systems; and to work toward a South African union, with the British link retained for trade and defense. Based on that alliance, Rhodes, a member of the Cape parliament since 1881, became prime minister of the Cape Colony in 1890, on the understanding that he would promote the interests of the colonial Afrikaner farmers and that Hofmeyr would support his plans for expansion beyond the Limpopo.
The government of the restored Transvaal republic, meanwhile, was having to accommodate the boisterous, volatile mining community in its midst. The gold-mining industry was both a boon and a potential cancer: a boon because it remedied the financial weakness that had contributed to the collapse of the state in 1877,a potential cancer because it was alien and dangerous. The Witwatersrand attracted a massive influx of white men from overseas, as well as from other parts of South Africa. By 1896, the 44,000 white, alien men, who became known as Uitlanders, may have outnumbered the Afrikaner males in the Transvaal. They were a heterogeneous mixture of English, Irish, Scots, continental Europeans, Australians, and North Americans; of artisans, engineers, lawyers, busi-nesspeople, and unskilled workers. Most Uitlanders nevertheless spoke English, and English was the lingua franca of the gold-mining industry. A deep cultural gulf stretched between all those urban, individualistic, raucous Uitlanders and the rural, socially integrated Calvinist Afrikaners.34
The restored Transvaal republic was managed by an elective Volksraad and president. The citizens elected a formidable man as president on four successive occasions. Born in 1825, Paul Kruger had been a boy in the Great Trek and had risen to fame as a commando leader and an opponent of the British annexation. Foreigners underestimated him—misled by his rough style and fundamentalist beliefs. Kruger’s book was the Bible. His earth was so irrevocably flat that when an American told him he had sailed round the world, Kruger called him a liar.35 But he was an extremely skillful politician and an effective representative of his people. The burgers heartily approved of his simple manner and shared his political objectives: to maintain the independence of the republic and to keep it under their control.
Alarmed by the political implications of the foreign immigration, the Volksraad took steps to ensure that Uitlanders should not get control of the State, by limiting the franchise for presidential and Volksraad elections to those white men who, besides being naturalized citizens, had lived in the republic for fourteen years. The Volksraad also created a separate body for which naturalized male citizens could vote two years after arrival, but that body had limited powers and the Volksraad remained the sole sovereign legislature.
The rulers of the Transvaal could not possibly satisfy the expectations of the immigrants from developed industrial countries. Uitlanders complained of high living costs, bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption, and the effects of the government’s granting monopolies to friendly companies for the supply of dynamite, water, and railroad transport to the Witwatersrand. But they were not an oppressed community. Few Uitlanders identified with the Transvaal by becoming citizens, and fewer still were really concerned about the franchise.
The magnates who dominated the mining industry were of varied national and class origins and sympathies, and were responsible to boards located in different European cities. Some made quick profits at minimal cost from the surface deposits; others, when it became known that the gold-bearing reefs extended deep below the surface, made heavy investments for the long term. In spite of these differences, by 1895 the managements of most of the companies—French, German, and British—had come to the conclusion that the republican government was an obstruction. Similarly, the American engineers who predominated in many of the companies came to identify “Britain with economic opportunity and the Boers with’economic restriction” and to favor “a British take-over of the Transvaal in the interests of economic development.”36
The British government and Cecil Rhodes thwarted the Transvaal’s attempts to expand. In 1885, as we have seen, Britain checked its expansion to the west by proclaiming a protectorate over “Bechuanaland” (modern Botswana). In 1889, Rhodes’s agents having extracted a concession from Lobengula, Mzilikazi’s successor as king of the Ndebele, the British government granted Rhodes’s British South Africa Company a charter, empowering it to exercise political and administrative rights under the Crown in a vaguely defined area north of the Limpopo. Two years later, a British South Africa Company force from the Cape Colony occupied the land north of the Limpopo River that became known as Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe).37
Kruger devoted his principal thrust to the east, where, like Hendrik Potgieter before him, he sought to free the republic from British commercial domination by getting independent access to the Indian Ocean. Although the Transvaal did manage to incorporate Swaziland in 1895, Great Britain closed the coastal gap by annexing the strip between Zululand and the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. The British had hemmed the Transvaal in politically, “as it were in a kraal.”38
Even so, by 1895 the Transvaal was loosening the British stranglehold. It was channeling the bulk of its foreign trade through the Mozambique port of Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) at Delagoa Bay, by controlling the Delagoa Bay railroad and giving it preferential rates over the lines from the Cape Colony and Natal. The Transvaal government had also entered into diplomatic relations with Germany, which supported its refusal to enter into a customs union with the British colonies. In fact, in annexing South West Africa and encouraging the Transvaal, the German government had no intention of challenging British supremacy in the region. Trying to coerce Britain into an alliance, it was using the region as a pawn in European diplomacy. But Rhodes and the British government could not be sure of this.39
By that time, British politicians were becoming alarmed about the political dynamics in Southern Africa. The relative decline of British industrial power relative to other Western states; the aggressive diplomacy of Germany; the rise of popular chauvinism in Britain—all these factors coincided with the realization that the Witwatersrand discoveries were the greatest known source of gold in the world. After the Conservatives replaced the Liberals in a general election in June 1895, the problem of the Transvaal republic rose to the top of the political agenda. Lord Salisbury, the aging prime minister, appointed a Birmingham industrialist, Joseph Chamberlain, as secretary of state for the colonies and gave him a great deal of latitude. Chamberlain was a new phenomenon in British politics—self-confident, aggressive, and an avowed imperialist.40
Chamberlain proceeded to facilitate a plot that Rhodes was hatching to force the Transvaal into the British Empire. In Johannesburg, a reform committee was to mobilize the Uitlanders, capture Johannesburg, and proclaim a provisional government. Leander Starr Jameson, a Scottish medical doctor who had been a close associate of Rhodes since he had migrated to Southern Africa in 1878, would assist them from Be-chuanaland with British South Africa Company police. The high commissioner would then go to Pretoria to arbitrate, and the Transvaal would become a British co
lony. The reality was far different. The Johannesburg conspirators bickered among themselves and did not command a mass following. Learning of this, Rhodes tried to stop Jameson, but Jameson ignored his order and invaded the republic with a motley force of five hundred company police. The reform committee then belatedly tried to assume control of Johannesburg but also entered into negotiations with Kruger. On January 2, 1896, Jameson surrendered to Transvaal commandos twenty-five miles short of Johannesburg and the reform committee capitulated. From the point of view of Chamberlain, Rhodes, and the reform committee, the worst had happened—a compromising fiasco; from the point of view of Kruger, the best—the tortoise had stuck out its head and he had chopped it off.41
The Jameson Raid accentuated the polarizing processes in Southern Africa. In the Transvaal, Kruger commuted the death sentences imposed on the five reform committee ringleaders into fines of £25,000 and handed over the members of the invading force to British authorities. He then imported large stocks of arms from Europe, curbed the political activities of the Uitl anders, dismissed his chief justice, who had challenged the validity of Volksraad legislation, tightened his alliance with his sister republic, the Orange Free State, and won an immense majority in the 1898 presidential election. In the Cape Colony, the white electorate split along ethnic lines, and the Afrikaner Bond narrowly won a bitterly contested election in 1898. In Britain, Chamberlain managed to cover up his complicity in the raid by dexterous use of his official position.
The raid having failed, Chamberlain concluded that direct British action was necessary to check the growth of Afrikaner power in Southern Africa. Initially, he was confident that strong and relentless diplomatic pressure on the Transvaal government would suffice, but he made two errors of judgment. First, he exaggerated Afrikaner solidarity and the threat to British interests in Southern Africa. In fact, there were class, regional, and ideological differences among the Afrikaners. The governments of the Orange Free State and the Cape Colony were moderating influences on the Transvaal, where younger members of the government, including State Attorney Jan Christian Smuts, who had been born in the Cape Colony and had had a brilliant career at Cambridge University, were trying to purge it of its worst abuses. Second, Chamberlain underestimated both the Transvaalers’ determination to sustain their independence and the military self-confidence they had gained through their victories over British forces in 1881.
In 1897, Chamberlain appointed Sir Alfred Milner as high commissioner in South Africa. Milner, a talented man who had swept the prizes as a student at Balliol College, Oxford, and had been a senior member of the British administration in Egypt, had an authoritarian personality. He believed that the “British race” had a moral right to rule other people—Asians, Africans, and Afrikaners. He was also keenly aware of the relative decline of British power and the global significance of the Transvaal gold-mining industry. From his perspective, it was his duty to check the centrifugal forces in South Africa, “the weakest link in the imperial chain.”42
Milner made little attempt to comprehend the interests and motivations either of the members of the governments of the Cape Colony and the Orange Free State or of the Afrikaner reformers in the Transvaal, who were fundamentally well disposed toward Britain and extremely eager to preserve the peace.43 Instead, he encouraged the jingoistic elements on the Witwatersrand to agitate for radical reform. They responded by producing a petition with over 21,000 signatures, calling for British intervention, and when the Transvaal government tried to settle the Uitlander problem by direct negotiations with leaders of the mining industry, they were sabotaged by Milner’s confidant, Percy Fitzpatrick, the head of intelligence for Wernher, Beit, the largest gold-mining company. In May 1899, Milner sent Chamberlain a telegram declaring that “the case for intervention is overwhelming,” since “thousands of British subjects [were being] kept permanently in the position of helots.”44
The Cape colonial government tried desperately to ward off a conflict. Although Milner decided to meet Kruger, however, he did so only to demand that he should give the vote to all Uitlanders who had lived in the republic for five years, and he broke off the discussion when Kruger was unwilling to go that far. In a final effort, Smuts agreed to accept Milner’s conference demands, provided that Britain would refrain from further interference in the internal affairs of the republic; but Chamberlain rejected that condition.45
In September, having persuaded the British cabinet to accept the prospect of war, Chamberlain drafted an ultimatum and reinforcements sailed for South Africa. By that time, the Transvaal and Orange Free State governments were convinced that Britain was determined to destroy Transvaal independence. To strike before the reinforcements arrived, Kruger issued his own ultimatum, which expired on October n, 1899. Thus Britain went to war to reestablish British hegemony throughout Southern Africa, the republics to preserve their independence.
Commentators have offered different economic explanations for the origins of this war. An analysis was initiated by J. A. Hobson and generalized by Lenin, who made imperialism and consequent warfare the inexorable product of “the highest stage of capitalism.” Others have identified chauvinistic British public opinion, or the ideas and actions of Joseph Chamberlain or Alfred Milner, as the crucial independent variable. Modern scholarship points to a more complex explanation for this flagrant outburst of British imperialism. At a time of growing economic and military competition from European rivals, especially Germany, powerful British interests were concerned to prevent a region of great, newly discovered material resources from escaping Britain’s century-old hegemony. In that context, British political culture enabled members of the ruling class to maneuver Great Britain into war in the belief that brute force would solve the problem.46
War, Peace, and the Transfer of Power
When the South African War began—the Boer War, as the British called it, the Second War of Freedom to Afrikaners—the British expected an easy victory.47 Although the Transvaal government had imported substantial stocks of artillery and rifles from Europe, once the fighting began they could not replenish their arms, because the Royal Navy controlled the seas and the Portuguese government agreed to forbid the passage of military equipment through Mozambique. Moreover, although North American and European public opinion was largely pro-Boer, no foreign government assisted the republics. There was also a potential numerical disparity. The republics could muster no more than 88,000 fighting men during the war, including 12,000 Cape colonists, and although there were only 20,000 British troops in South Africa at the outset, by the end of the war about 450,000 men in uniform had served on the British side—365,000 British, 53,000 South African colonists, and 31,000 from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Nevertheless, the republics held the British Empire at bay for two and a half years. Most of their men had been bred to the horse and the rifle and had seen commando service against Africans. Expert horsemen and marksmen, they could live off the country, whereas a large proportion of the British troops were tied down in communication and commissariat services. Their loose, democratic commando organization was admirably suited to the needs of a rural people defending their home terrain, whereas the British army was weakened by its textbook orthodoxy, its rigid separation of officers and men, and relatively poor horsemanship and marksmanship. The republican Afrikaners, moreover, believed passionately in the justice of their cause, whereas British Tommies had far less incentive to sacrifice.
The fighting fell into three unequal phases. Republican commandos first took the offensive in three directions—southeastward into Natal, and south and southwestward into the Cape Colony—and in December they repulsed British attacks on all three fronts. But then they lost the initiative and got bogged down in sieges of British forces in Ladysmith (Natal) and Kimberley and Mafeking (northwestern Cape).
The second phase, the year 1900, was marked by British victories. The British relieved the besieged towns, turned back the republican advances, captured four thousan
d men, occupied Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, and Pretoria, drove the aged President Kruger into exile via Loureço Marques (Maputo), and gained control of the entire railway network. In December, the British proclaimed the annexation of the two republics under the names Transvaal and Orange River Colony, and Commander-in-Chief Lord Roberts returned to England, confident that the war was virtually over.
But Roberts miscalculated. The republics resorted to guerrilla warfare. Living off the land, and organized in small, mobile commandos, the Afrikaners seized British supplies, cut railroad tracks, overwhelmed small British units, and eroded the fringe of larger columns. Some commandos penetrated deep inside the Cape Colony, where they tried, not very successfully, to whip up Afrikaner support. To crush this resistance, Roberts’s successor, Lord Kitchener, adopted the scorched earth policy that imperial troops and Afrikaner commandos had been accustomed to using against Africans. He burned Afrikaner crops and destroyed thirty thousand farmsteads. He exiled captured commandos to Saint Helena, Bermuda, and Ceylon and removed the civilian population to camps, where they suffered great hardships under inefficient administrators. Nearly 28,000 Afrikaner civilians, most of them children, died of dysentery, measles, and other diseases in the camps. The British also built eight thousand blockhouses at one-and-a-half-mile intervals along the railway lines and elsewhere, linked them with 3,700 miles of barbed-wire fences, and made a series of sweeps within the perimeters of the fenced areas.
These methods gradually undermined the fighting capacity of the republics. By 1902, eroded by deaths, captures, and desertions, their field strength had declined to about 22,000 men, most of whom were undernourished, ill-clad, exhausted, and dispirited. President Kruger had gone to Europe, where he would die in 1904 without ever having revisited his native land. The gold mines were in production again. Africans were occupying abandoned farms and collaborating with the British forces. Many Afrikaners had surrendered voluntarily and resumed farming operations, and 1,800 Afrikaners, most of them members of the landless class, had gone over to the British side.
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