by Jan Morris
It was a year to the day since Gordon’s departure from Cairo, and the relieving force had no idea whether he was dead or alive. Rifle fire spattered against the little steamer as it paddled up the river, shells splashed all around, its engine thumped and its flags fluttered, until at last its crew could see, away to the east across the parched blank expanse of Tuti Island, the outline of the palace against the palms. No flag flew from the roof, and on the sandy spit below the river bank hundreds of Sudanese were gathered beneath the banners of the Mahdi. The British were, as they later discovered, just three days too late.
9
Too late! Too late to save him‚
In vain, in vain they tried.
His life was England’s glory,
His death was England’s pride.
So the anti-climax was avoided, and the British Empire achieved its moment of sacrament. The nation was stricken. Society put on its blackest silk, in a hundred cartoons, broadsheets and popular songs Britannia mourned her champion’s death. Not only in London, but in Paris, Berlin and New York too, black-draped portraits of Gordon appeared in shop windows.
At Windsor, when the news reached her, Queen Victoria stalked all in black into the cottage of her lady-in-waiting, Mary Ponsonby, to proclaim sepulchrally ‘Gordon is dead!’ In South Africa Cecil Rhodes said over and over again ‘I’m sorry I was not with him! I’m sorry I was not with him!’ And in the Mahdi’s camp at Omdurman the apostate Rudolf Slatin, sitting in chains outside his tent, was approached by three black soldiers carrying something wrapped up in a cloth, and followed by a crowd of people. Unwrapping the cloth with a mocking air, they revealed to Slatin the head of General Gordon. His famous blue eyes were half open still. His hair was almost white. ‘Is not this the head of your uncle the unbeliever?’ they said. ‘What of it? Slatin replied, at least in reminiscence. ‘A brave soldier who fell at his post; happy is he to have fallen; his sufferings are over’.1
1 A dangerous strategic principle, as Gladstone presciently foresaw. If Britain felt she had special rights along all her strategic communications, it was tantamount to claiming ‘a veto upon all the political arrangements of all the countries and seas which can possibly contribute any one of the routes between England and the East, between two extremities, or nearly such, of the world’.
1 Not much of a war, thought William Butler, who naturally went with Wolseley, ‘but the soldier of today must be content with what he can get’. Wolseley himself called it ‘the tidiest war in British history’, though his army included a general for every 900 men.
1 Which a few faithful followers accept to this day: Gordon’s sites are still shown to visitors in Jerusalem.
1 17.v.: ‘Cursed be the man that trusteth in man … for he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh, but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness….’
2 Gordon’s Journal, whose wayward punctuation I have reproduced exactly, is now in the British Museum. Reading it in the original, its pages still stained with the ink-marks and browned with the sunshine of Khartoum long ago, seemed to me one of the most evocative and moving of all historical experiences.
1 They had formed part of an international force sent by Napoleon III to put down a rebellion in Mexico in 1862.
1 One of the steamers he used at Khartoum may still be seen there, moored near the Palace as a yacht club.
1 I’ve rode in a ship, I’ve rode in a boat,
I’ve rode on a railway train.
I’ve rode in a coach, I’ve rode a moke,
And I hope to ride one again.
But I’m riding now an animal
A Marine never rode before,
Rigged up in spurs and pantaloons,
As one of the Camel Corps.
—Sergeant Eagle, R.M., 1884.
1 Though Wolseley failed in this, his greatest adventure, and for the rest of his life believed it to mark a turn in his fortunes, still his imperial ambitions for the Sudan were satisfied thirteen years later when Kitchener conquered the country and annexed it, in fact if not in theory, to the Empire. Gordon’s presence in Khartoum may still be tellingly evoked by a visit to the roof of the palace, now the home of the President of the Sudanese People’s Republic, which has been rebuilt on the same site, commands the same dun view of Tuti, Omdurman and the Nile, and is still, as it happens, and for similar reasons, fortified with sandbags against attack. Gordon’s memory remains vivid in the city, too. Until Sudanese independence in 1956 a camel-back statue of the hero stood in the main cross-roads of the capital (it is now at the Gordon Boys’ School near Woking in Surrey). A favourite Anglo-Sudanese anecdote concerned the English boy taken by his father every Sunday after morning service to pay homage at this shrine. After several weeks of reverent pilgrimage he ventured to ask his father a question. ‘Who is the man,’ he inquired, ‘on Gordon’s back?’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Scramble for Africa
IN the last week of December, 1895, a curious military force was assembled at a place called Pitsani, in the Bechuanaland Protectorate just across the frontier from the Transvaal Republic—where President Paul Kruger now ruled the destinies of a State transformed by the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand. Pitsani stood on the Missionary Road, the old highway into central Africa from the south, and was now on the route of the railway line being built northwards from Cape Colony. The country around was magnificent open veld, vast and daunting, covered with stubbly rough grass, littered with huge boulders, with the occasional thorn tree in silhouette against the horizon, and the shadows of gulleys here and there. A few small kopjes broke the flat immensity of the scene, and patches of blue and yellow wild flowers lay like stains upon the dun.
Pitsani was 4,400 feet up on the veld. The air was tingling, and was scented only by a faint dry smell of dust. In the daytime the sky was often banked tremendously with white rolling clouds, and the light was so clear that miles away across the plain one could see the distant slow movements of tribespeople with their cattle. At night the sky was tremendous with unfamiliar constellations, and smudged with the mysterious Magellanic Clouds, and through the silence crickets chafed and night-birds abruptly whooped. It was a place for simple romanticism, schoolboy thoughts of fate and infinity, glorious impulses and heady self-delusions.
The commander of the force was not a soldier at all, but a well-known colonial physician, Dr Leander Starr Jameson. He was best known to the world as an intimate of Cecil Rhodes, who was now not only Premier of Cape Colony, but had created his own eponymous British colony, Rhodesia, north of the Transvaal. But the doctor was remarkable enough in his own right. A small, elfin sort of man, with big brown eyes and a disturbing wistfulness of expression, he had graduated from medicine to be Administrator of Rhodesia, and was now, in his tent upon a Pitsani kopje, about to embark upon one of the most fateful of all the imperial adventures. A lifelong gambler, he was soon to stake not merely his own reputation, but the good name of the entire British Empire, upon a once-and-for-all, hit-or-miss stroke of piracy. He hoped to achieve what the British had, during the past half-century of Victoria’s reign, so signally failed to arrange: the inclusion within the Empire of those most resilient of its opponents, the Voortrekker Boers.
By now the Transvaal Republic, though still arguably subject to the suzerainty of the Queen, was defiantly independent once more. In the years since Majuba Hill its circumstances had greatly changed, for thanks to the gold strikes it was now immensely rich. It was also ironically cosmopolitan. Thousands of adventurers, mostly British but representing every nationality under the sun, had poured across its frontiers to the Rand diggings, and they had created in its principal mining centre, Johannesburg, one of the toughest and wildest towns in Africa. It was mostly a shanty town still, and it teemed with every kind of opportunist: peripatetic miners, wandering from gold strike to diamond rush across the world, specialists in land speculation or mineral assay, shady lawyers, ill-defined agents, salo
on keepers, prostitutes, remittance men, money-lenders from many countries in top hats and muddied gaiters, even itinerant actors, musicians and portrait painters. There were able and distinguished men among them, too, most of them living in a kind of enclave at Doorfontein, the most respectable quarter of town. These included English gentlemen-adventurers, well-known Jewish financiers and mining engineers of international standing, and they formed a closely-knit inner community of their own, their houses set in gardens side by side, precisely like the management of some foreign concession.
For though it was set in the innermost keep of the Afrikaner fortress-land, Jo’burg (as even its inhabitants called it) was scarcely a Boer town at all. Its foreigners were known to the Volk simply as Uitlanders, and were looked upon with distaste not unmixed with envy. While they were clearly ungodly, they were also indispensable, for without their skills and enterprises the great gold reef could never be exploited at all. From the stoep of his home in Pretoria, forty miles to the north,1 Kruger looked upon Johannesburg as a more fallible Moses might have looked upon the Golden Calf. He was not prepared to compromise with stiff-necked idolaters, but he was reluctant to destroy the device which had so transformed his indigent pastoral State. He treated Johannesburg as though it were some transient evil from which good might come, but lest it should prove in the end yet another British device to drag the Voortrekkers into the Empire, he assiduously sought friends abroad—the Portuguese, whose African colonies marched with the Transvaal, the Dutch, with whom the Boers still felt a faint and misguided affinity, and the Germans, who had African ambitions of their own.
The Uitlanders were understandably dissatisfied. Though they had created the gold industry of the Rand, and certainly had no intention of fading away again, they had no say in the conduct of the State’s affairs, and felt themselves exploited, oppressed and ostracized. A revolutionary movement came into being in Johannesburg, calling itself simply the Reform Movement, ostensibly committed to gaining the franchise for the Uitlanders, but really hoping to rid the Rand of what was now generally called, for convenience as for camouflage, Krugerdom. It was this vestigial movement, centred upon the Doorfontein enclave, which Dr Jameson now hoped to fire. Surreptitiously backed by Rhodes at Cape Town, conspiratorially awaited by the Reformers in Johannesburg, confident of the tacit approval of the imperial Government in London, he proposed to invade the Transvaal from across the Bechuana frontier: with a hard-riding, straight-shooting, reckless handful of true-blue Britons, he would storm into Johannesburg in the best Elizabethan style, subvert Kruger and his dour government of predikants, and make the whole of southern Africa British at last.
This was something new to Victoria’s Empire. The aim was brasher. The means were more dishonest. There were hints of falsehood in high places which would have repelled Disraeli as much as they would have horrified Gladstone. Big business of a distasteful kind was concerned with the adventure. The evangelical instinct of Empire played no part in it, and the profit motive was blatant. They were not even imperial forces which were camped at Pitsani that December, but were a scratch company of colonial policemen, supplemented by miscellaneous freebooters and led by not very intelligent English gentry. There was no dignity to this gamble. If it succeeded, it would be a triumph of a vulgar kind: if it failed it would be ignominy.
In all this Jameson’s Raid would prove a figure of its time. The imperial theme had now reached its ostentatious climax, and Disraeli’s imperial instinct was fulfilled. British Governments might still be intermittently hesitant about the rights, the values, above all the costs of imperial expansion, but by now the great British public had few reservations. Empire was the grand excitement of the day, bringing into every household, almost every week, intoxicating tales of triumph or heroic disaster. The years since Ruskin’s Oxford lecture had been perhaps the most consistently dramatic in the whole of British history. Wars against the Ashanti, the Afghans, the Boers, the Zulus—the Suez coup—the invasion of Egypt—the Phoenix Park murders—the death of Gordon—the epic of Stanley and Livingstone—the tragedy of Parnell—the great Disraeli-Gladstone duel—all these marvellous events, occurring one after another month after month through the decades, had sustained the British people in a condition of flush, and helped to keep their minds off drabber circumstances at home. It was like one long and thrilling piece of theatre, with scarcely a flat moment, and a scenario of brilliant daring.
This was the New Imperialism, a craze of fin-de-siècle. Backed by its truculent exuberance, the British Empire had embarked upon its climactic enterprise, the scramble for Africa, of which the Jameson Raid was to be at once the epitome and the disillusionment.
2
Empires were fashionable everywhere now. There was little moral opposition to the imperial idea, and the lavish success of the British, who seemed despite economic setbacks to be unquestionably the richest and most virile of the nations, made rival peoples suppose that imperial expansion must be the sine qua non of greatness. Empire was good for a people, it appeared, not just because it made them rich, but because it provided an arena for their best energies—adventure for their manhood, challenge for their skills, action for their ideals and aspirations. Even the Americans sometimes pined for empire now, and did not resent it when the poet Rudyard Kipling advised them to share in the civilizing mission:
Take up the White Man’s Burden—
Have done with childish days—
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged, praise.
The last great field for imperial expansion was Africa. The British were the chief imperial Power in the continent, but they were not unchallenged. The French were active in the north and west, the Germans had a foothold in Tanganyika, the King of the Belgians had a stake in the Congo, the Portuguese had old colonies on both the east and west coasts, and the Italians were in possession of Eritrea—though their attempt to acquire Ethiopia too had been less than successful, many of then soldiers being killed, many castrated and the rest running away. Large tracts of the continent, nevertheless, were still governed by indigenous chiefs and princes, ranging from the resplendent Sultan of Zanzibar, or the mysterious Asantahene, to myriad tufted, beaded and be-fetished petty potentates of the interior. Africa was racked still by its own incessant wars, rivalries and predations—tribe against tribe, trader against slave, Arab against negro, warrior against pastoralist. There were spoils still to come, civilizing duties yet to be fulfilled, and activists in all the imperial countries eyed the continent hungrily, some imagining its map swathed with green from coast to coast, some envisaging slabs of Prussian blue, and many conceiving one long strip of British red, veld to delta, Cape to Cairo.
Sometimes the Powers seemed likely to clash, as their traders, missionaries or troops advanced into the continent, and often diplomatic exchanges between the chanceries of Europe were prompted by episodes on distant reaches of tropic rivers, or in steamy unmapped banyan swamps: but in 1884 Bismarck, Chancellor of the new Federal Germany, perhaps foreseeing the inflammatory properties of Africa, invited all the leading nations of the world to confer in Berlin about its future. Twenty-four nations were invited. Fifteen accepted. No Africans were asked.
In Berlin the rules were laid for the final partition of Africa. It was tacitly agreed there that the civilized Powers had a right to seize, govern and civilize any part of Africa not already imperialized. Powers which held strips of African coastline were specifically authorized to control the relevant hinterland—a word which, taken from the German, entered the English language in the African context (‘a very modern doctrine’, the Daily News called it approvingly in 1891). Views were exchanged, too, on another convenient political conception, the ‘sphere of influence’, and it was sportingly agreed that claims to new acquisitions in Africa should be reported to other interested Powers—for African potentates not uncommonly ceded their territories to several European contenders at the same time.1
The Berlin Conference gave legi
timacy to the scramble for Africa. It did not control the process, but it recognized the reality of this new Great Game, and made it internationally respectable, more or less. At Berlin the Powers agreed that Africans were not exactly people; though they passed some pious resolutions about the slave trade, they made it clear that the kings and nations of the continent were not kings and nations in a true, contemporary sense, bound by treaties like the nations of Europe, and entitled to rights of their own. African desires were not considered at the Berlin Conference. Imperial policies were the issue, and even they were reduced to a less than lofty scale. Richer trade and grander prestige were the aims of the diplomats, together with political success at home, and the tone of the conference was cynical. ‘The whole colonial business is a swindle,’ was Bismarck’s private view, ‘but we need it for the election.’
3
This was nouveau-riche imperialism. It was a far cry from the great days of imperial trusteeship, when British Prime Ministers saw themselves as friends and protectors to the simpler people of the world, and Empire-builders wished their story to be written, as Raffles had said, ‘in characters of light’. Sir James Stephen, Colonial Under-Secretary in the brave days of evangelical imperialism, had been nicknamed ‘Mr Mother-Country’. Lord Knutsford, Colonial Secretary now, was known as ‘Peter Woggy’—the Wog Man.
The idea of Empire was becoming vulgarized, like some fastidious sport cheapened by arrivistes. It had often been brutal in the past, and often misguided, but it had seldom been mean. Even in hypocrisy its aspirations were at least grand, and it had been ennobled always by the lingering vision of the evangelicals. Even in moments of vindictive frenzy its furies could be interpreted as divine, and most of Victoria’s imperialists genuinely believed the British Empire to be an instrument for the general good of the world.