The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  But Rhodes’s vaulting ambition was to lead to disaster and humiliation. When he realised that Zambesia was not going to deliver another gold bonanza, he turned his attention to Kruger’s Transvaal. Gold revenues had made the Transvaal the richest state in southern Africa, enabling Kruger to challenge British hegemony in the region and thwart Rhodes’s plan for a confederation of British-ruled states. A potent new factor had been added to the mêlée of disputes and grievances festering among the uitlander population and foreign mining companies: to counteract British pressure on the Transvaal, Kruger began to cultivate links with Germany, encouraging German investment and German immigration. At a banquet to mark Kaiser Wilhelm’s birthday in 1895, Kruger spoke of cementing ties with Germany. His growing friendship rattled not only Rhodes in the Cape but British politicians in London. In collusion with British ministers, Rhodes set out to remove Kruger.

  Having recently captured Matabeleland with little difficulty, Rhodes assumed that the overthrow of Kruger’s regime would be similarly straightforward. He was convinced that the uitlander population on the Witwatersrand was ready and willing to rebel against Kruger. His plan was to assemble a group of Johannesburg conspirators, supply them with arms for an insurrection smuggled in from the Cape and to support their uprising with a column of armed volunteers from his private army, the British South Africa Police, sent to Johannesburg from a staging post on the Bechuanaland border, only 170 miles away. Rhodes gave command of this enterprise to his old friend Starr Jameson. An inveterate gambler, Jameson took on the task with schoolboy enthusiasm.

  As part of the plan, Rhodes importuned Britain’s colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, a fervent imperialist, to grant the BSA Company ‘a strip of land’ along the Bechuanaland border which he could use as a military base to prepare for the invasion. Well aware of Rhodes’s intentions, Chamberlain approved the land grant.

  Rhodes’s attempt at a coup soon degenerated into a fiasco. However disgruntled they were, the uitlander population showed no appetite for participating in an uprising. Even leading conspirators changed their minds and urged Rhodes to postpone the escapade. British officials in the Cape made similar pleas. Yet Rhodes still believed he could succeed. And Jameson was hell-bent on action. Ignoring all messages for him to hold back, he led the invasion force of 500 men across the border from Bechuanaland into the Transvaal on 30 December 1895, confident he could reach Johannesburg within three days. But he was soon surrounded by Kruger’s commandos and forced to surrender.

  The Jameson Raid, as it became known, caused uproar. Faced with yet another example of British aggression, Afrikaners across southern Africa – in the Cape, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State – rallied behind Kruger. Rhodes was obliged to resign as prime minister of the Cape Colony. Cape Afrikaners never forgave him for his treachery. The working alliance between Afrikaners and English-speakers that had prevailed for decades in the Cape was irretrievably damaged. In the Transvaal, the depth of Afrikaner distrust of British intentions ran even deeper. Rhodes and Jameson were exposed as the main culprits behind the conspiracy. But Kruger believed Chamberlain to be equally culpable for the attempt to overthrow him.

  There were other ramifications. By withdrawing units of the British South Africa Police from Rhodesia to participate in his invasion of the Transvaal, Rhodes had left the white settlers of Matabeleland and Mashonaland at considerable risk. The Ndebele, deprived of most of their cattle and much of their best land, subjected to forced labour and harsh treatment, were seething with discontent. Drought, locusts and rinderpest, a cattle disease, added to their grievances. Once it became known that Jameson’s force had been defeated in the Transvaal and locked up in a Pretoria prison, the Ndebele seized the opportunity to revolt. The Shona too, resentful over the loss of land, hut taxes and maltreatment, followed suit, turning on the whites with greater ferocity than any resistance they had previously shown against the Ndebele. Only with the assistance of British imperial forces did Rhodes manage to suppress the revolts and secure his private kingdom.

  Although Rhodes had been thwarted in his bid to take over the Transvaal, Chamberlain pursued the same aim ruthlessly. He considered the rise of the Transvaal as a wealthy, independent state to represent a threat not only to Britain’s hold on southern Africa but to its standing as an imperial power. He feared that because of its economic strength, the Transvaaal would become the dominant power in southern Africa, drawing into its orbit other territories in the region – the Cape Colony, Natal and the Orange Free State – and leading them into an independent union outside the realms of the British empire. He was willing to risk a war with Kruger to avert this outcome and ensure that British supremacy reigned throughout southern Africa.

  To bolster his strategy, Chamberlain in 1897 appointed Sir Alfred Milner, an imperial zealot, to the post of British high commissioner in Cape Town. Milner’s objective was what he called ‘winning the great game for mastery in South Africa’. He was soon convinced that only war would bring an end to the ‘Transvaal oligarchy’ and set out to engineer one. In a private letter to Chamberlain, he suggested he should ‘work up a crisis’. Aided and abetted by British officials in Cape Town and Pretoria, a ‘jingo’ movement among uitlanders in the Transvaal began to agitate for British intervention.

  In Pretoria, Kruger reacted to signs of British belligerence by strengthening the Transvaal’s defences. He ordered a vast array of modern military equipment from Germany and France – field guns, siege guns, Maxim guns, howitzers and modern rifles. Fortresses were constructed in Johannesburg and Pretoria. Between 1896 and 1899, more than one-third of the Transvaal’s revenues were allocated to defence expenditure. Kruger also drew closer to the Orange Free State, signing a defence treaty that pledged mutual support ‘when the independence of one of the two States may be threatened or attacked’. In a series of public speeches, he also conceded that changes to citizenship laws were needed to accommodate ‘aliens’ and ‘strangers’.

  But Milner ensured that uitlander agitation against Kruger was kept at fever pitch and organised press campaigns to support their cause. He persuaded Chamberlain to publish a ‘Blue Book’ setting out in detail the background to the uitlander crisis so that it could ‘get rubbed into the public mind’. In his own contribution to the Blue Book, he claimed that thousands of British subjects were ‘kept permanently in the position of helots’ – suggesting their plight was comparable to that of the slaves of ancient Greece. The case for intervention on their behalf, Milner insisted, was overwhelming. Britain’s reputation as an imperial power was at stake.

  As talk of the possibility of war swirled around southern Africa, a group of prominent Afrikaners in the Cape intervened as intermediaries, proposing a face-to-face meeting between Kruger and Milner to avert confrontation. Though little was expected from it, the meeting took place in Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State, in June 1899. Milner focused on the single issue of the franchise, seeing it as the means to ‘break the mould’ of Transvaal politics and wrest the Transvaal from Boer control. He demanded ‘immediate and substantial’ representation for the uitlanders. After much prevarication, Kruger offered the uitlanders a sliding scale varying from two to seven years’ residence. But Milner raised a host of objections. He had no intention of negotiating over the matter and broke off the talks. The only settlement Milner had in mind was a victory for British supremacy. As Kruger kept repeating in his last encounter with Milner: ‘It is our country you want.’

  The drumbeat for war grew ever louder. In England, Chamberlain made clear to the public that what was really at stake was not the issue of the franchise but ‘the power and authority of the British Empire’. He argued that Britain had the right to intervene in the Transvaal not just because of its obligation to protect British subjects but because of its position ‘as suzerain Power’ in southern Africa. When Kruger improved his offer over the franchise, Chamberlain rebuffed him. What was needed, said Chamberlain, was to establish ‘once and for all�
�� who was ‘the paramount power in South Africa’.

  The war that Britain provoked was expected to last no longer than a few months. Milner confidently predicted the Boers would put up no more than ‘an apology’ of a fight. London newspapers envisaged a ‘tea-time’ war that would be finished by Christmas. But it turned into the costliest, bloodiest and most humiliating war that Britain had waged in nearly a century. From the outset, the British campaign suffered one military defeat after another. It took a British expeditionary army eight months to reach Johannesburg and Pretoria and another two years before the war was finally over. Having lost control of the towns, the Boer armies of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State resorted to guerrilla warfare, sabotaging railway lines, ambushing supply columns, destroying bridges, severing telegraph wires and raiding depots, running rings around British forces with hit-and-run tactics.

  Ill-prepared for this kind of war, British military commanders resorted to scorched-earth tactics, destroying thousands of farmsteads, razing villages to the ground and slaughtering livestock on such a scale that by the end of the war the Boers of the Orange Free State had lost half their herds, those in the Transvaal three-quarters. Reporting back to London in a dispatch in 1901, Milner described the Orange Free State as ‘virtually a desert’. To make sure that captured burghers would not fight again, the British deported thousands to prison camps overseas. Women and children were rounded up and placed in what the British called concentration camps, where conditions were so appalling that some 26,000 died there from disease and malnutrition, most of them under the age of sixteen. In London, an opposition politician, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, accused Britain in its conduct of the war of employing ‘methods of barbarism’. All this became part of a Boer heritage passed in anger from one generation to the next. The war formally ended on 31 May 1902 when Boer generals agreed to a peace treaty that consigned the Transvaal and the Orange Free State to become colonies of the British empire. But many Boers mourned the loss of their republics.

  In the words of Rudyard Kipling, Britain’s poet of empire, the war taught the British ‘no end of a lesson’. It had required the deployment of 450,000 imperial troops and cost the British exchequer £217 million, far beyond the original estimate of £10 million. The British military lost 22,000 dead – two-thirds of them from disease and illness. Only five years later, the British government concluded that self-government might be a better option for its two Boer colonies. By 1907, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State were again self-governing under the control of defeated Boer generals who had signed the terms of surrender. Britain next decided to amalgamate its four colonies into a Union of South Africa in the hope that the Boers and the British might find a way of resolving their differences and merge into a single South African nation.

  The black population fared badly out of this arrangement. After a hundred years of wars and clashes against the British and the Boers, all the African chiefdoms lying within South Africa had succumbed to white rule. Most of their land had been lost through conquest and settlement. During the Anglo-Boer war, some 116,000 Africans were caught up in the sweeps carried out by British military commanders to ‘scour’ rural districts of all means of support for Boer guerrillas and sent to their own concentration camps where some 14,000 died, most of them children. In the aftermath of the war, African leaders had confidently expected that British rule would lead to improved political rights for the black population. But Britain’s priority was to facilitate reconciliation between the Boers and the British which meant ignoring African demands. Africans were excluded from negotiations leading to the founding of the Union of South Africa and denied political rights under its proposed constitution. An African delegation went to London to make representations, protesting at what they regarded as Britain’s betrayal of their interests, but to no avail.

  The Union of South Africa was launched in 1910 with much good will. But fear and resentment of British domination ran deep in the two Boer colonies. The war had destroyed much that could not be reconstructed and reduced most of the Boer population there to an impoverished rural people. A growing number drifted to the towns, hoping to find work. But the towns were the citadels of British commerce and culture where Boers from the platteland, possessing no skills or education, found themselves scorned and despised for their poverty, their country ways and their language. Out of the maelstrom of degradation came a virulent form of Afrikaner nationalism that eventually took hold of South Africa.

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  THE EXTERMINATION ORDER

  The vast stretch of south-west Africa between the Orange and Kunene rivers that Germany claimed as a colony proved to be a disappointment to Germany’s colonial enthusiasts. Much of it was desert: in the west, extending along the coastline, lay the Namib; in the east spread the barren wastes of the Omaheke and the Kalahari. The arid grasslands of the central plateau were inhabited by Herero and Nama pastoralists who showed little interest in German ‘protection’. Geological expeditions sent to find diamonds and gold returned empty-handed. So meagre were the prospects of German South-West Africa that Kaiser Wilhelm discussed the idea of abandoning it to the British. A secret memorandum, drawn up in 1891 and kept in a sealed envelope by the Director of the Colonial Department in Berlin, stated: ‘The Emperor is prepared to give up South-West Africa if necessary, so that all energies may be focused on East Africa.’

  An outbreak of pastoral warfare between Herero and Nama clans, however, provided an opportunity for the Germans to exploit the conflict and expand into the central plateau. In 1890, the colony’s military commander, Captain Curt von François, moved his headquarters from a site on the edge of the Namib Desert to a broad valley known by the Dutch name of Windhoek that lay in the fertile heart of Hereroland. Von François built a fort there and encouraged German farmers to settle in the neighbourhood. In 1891 the white population of German South-West Africa reached 139.

  Von François also took sides in the Herero–Nama conflict, offering a treaty of protection to the Herero and help in defeating the Nama. The Nama leader, Hendrik Witbooi, recognising the real purpose of German intervention, tried to warn his Herero rival, Tjimuaha, of the likely consequences:

  You think you will retain your independent Chieftainship after I have been destroyed . . . but, my dear Kapitein, you will eternally regret your action in having handed over to the White man the right to govern your country. This war between us is not nearly as heavy a burden as you seem to have thought when you did this momentous thing.

  In June 1892, von François, worried about the possibility of an alliance between the Herero and Witbooi’s Nama clan, travelled to Witbooi’s mountain encampment at Hoornkrans, a hundred miles south of Windhoek, hoping to lure him into a protection treaty. Aware of the risk of war with German forces, Witbooi nevertheless rebuffed him. ‘I see no truth or sense,’ he told von François, ‘in the suggestion that a chief who has surrendered may keep his autonomy and do as he likes.’

  After receiving reinforcements for his Schutztruppe from Germany, von François launched a dawn raid on Hoornkrans in April 1893. Taken by surprise, Witbooi ordered his men to flee, leaving behind women and children on the assumption that they would be unharmed. But instead of pursuing Witbooi’s men, the Schutztruppe butchered women, children and the elderly indiscriminately. The death toll included seventy-eight women and children. Eighty other Witbooi women were taken to the German fort at Windhoek and distributed as house slaves. Von François reported to the Colonial Department: ‘Any further resistance on the part of Witbooi is out of the question.’

  But far from being defeated, Witbooi led a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the Germans, cutting Windhoek’s supply lines to the coast and forcing von François to appeal for more reinforcements. After eighteen months of fighting, the two sides reached a peace deal which left Witbooi in control of his land, obliged all whites living there to ‘adhere’ to local laws and customs, and allowed him to keep his arms.

  But just as the He
rero and Nama were beginning to absorb the impact of German colonisation, they were struck by a series of other calamities. In 1897, the rinderpest cattle plague which had wiped out whole herds in east and central Africa reached the south-west of the continent. By the end of the epidemic, many Herero communities had lost their main livelihood. In desperation, they sold land to German settlers and sought work as labourers. They were also struck by outbreaks of typhoid fever and malaria.

  All this opened the way for further German encroachment. In 1902, the Germans completed construction of a railway between the new port of Swakopmund and the capital at Windhoek, attracting yet more immigrants. By 1903, the white population had climbed to 4,700. The Herero, meanwhile, were assigned ‘reserves’.

  The harsh treatment meted out by German settlers and soldiers and their contemptuous attitude towards the indigenous population produced a groundswell of resentment and hostility. Official reports recorded numerous incidents of flogging, rape and murder. White culprits often went unpunished or were given lenient sentences. The governor, Theodor von Leutwein, privately described the conduct of settlers as ‘barbarous’. Schutztruppe units, consisting almost entirely of white soldiers, were notorious for random brutality. In the Herero capital of Okahandja, there was particular outrage at the desecration of Herero graves and attempts at land-grabbing.

  A single incident set Hereroland ablaze. In January 1904, a column of a hundred Herero horsemen arrived in Okahandja to seek the arbitration of Paramount Chief Samuel Maherero over an inheritance dispute. The local garrison commander, Lieutenant Ralph Zürn, a figure of hate among the Herero, interpreted their arrival as the prelude to a rebellion, ordered all whites in Okahandja to evacuate their homes and take shelter in the Schutztruppe fort, ranged his guns over the town and sent a telegram to Berlin warning that an uprising was underway.