The coup against the Transvaal was delivered by Sir Theophilus Shepstone, a singleminded colonial bureaucrat with a flair for native languages and a taste for intrigue. While the Boers may have seen him as a saviour, Shepstone saw the occupation of their republic as the prelude to its incorporation into the proposed South African federation. An enthusiast for the federation, Shepstone had convinced himself that measures for its creation could not proceed until the Zulu state had been emasculated. The overthrow of the Zulu kingdom was also the objective of Sir Bartle Frere, the new governor of the Cape, whose Indian experience had taught him that it was dangerous to tolerate the existence of any independent and well-organised native state on an imperial frontier.
During 1878, Frere and Shepstone conspired to engineer a war with the Zulu King Cetshwayo, ignoring the fact that he showed no hostility towards his southern neighbour, Natal. The two proconsuls doctored their reports to the Colonial Office to make Cetshwayo appear a warlike tyrant, and exaggerated the size of his army, which they falsely alleged was a standing force, rather than a body of men who were only mobilised in an emergency. Behind their cynical machinations was the hope that once Cetshwayo’s kingdom had been dismantled, his subjects would become a subservient labour force at the disposal of Natal’s white farmers and the mining companies.11
Having manoeuvred Cetshwayo into a corner, Frere and Shepstone got the war they wanted in January 1879. It started badly thanks to ill-luck and the slipshod generalship of the commander-in-chief, Lord Chelmsford. At the end of the month, a 1,200-strong column of British troops and native auxiliaries was all but wiped out at Isandlwana. Immediately after, and in defiance of Cetshwayo’s orders, an impi of between three and four thousand warriors crossed into Natal and attacked the mission station at Rorke’s Drift, which was defended by 139 men from the 24th Regiment, many of them invalids. In the epic battle which lasted for over twenty-four hours the attackers were repelled with losses of over 500 dead. The Zulus were exhausted and had not eaten for two days, and British fire-power more than compensated for the imbalance in numbers. One survivor, Colour-Sergeant, later Colonel Bourne, remembered how a few Zulus had managed to reach the improvised defences. Those who did, ‘to show their fearlessness and their contempt for red coats and small numbers … tried to leap the parapet, and at times seized our bayonets, only to be shot down.’12 Nonetheless the defenders showed extraordinary steadiness and eleven were awarded the Victoria Cross.
The trouble for the Zulus was that their indunas (generals) were fatally addicted to the traditional headlong charge of assegai-armed warriors. It had succeeded, just, at Isandlwana, but at a cost of 5,000 casualties. Nevertheless, similar tactics were repeated throughout the war, although Cetshwayo urged his commanders to adopt a guerrilla strategy and attack the extended and vulnerable British lines of communication.13 The British government was also disappointed by its servants’ performance and sacked Shepstone, Frere and Chelmsford, who was replaced by the abler and more methodical Sir Garnet Wolseley. He arrived in Zululand too late for the final destruction of the Zulu army at the battle of Ulundi in July. By this time everyone involved knew what to expect; the British deployed in a Napoleonic-style square, the better to concentrate their fire-power, and the Zulus, who had been progressively disheartened, launched their usual charge, but, observers noticed, without much conviction. The overthrow of the Zulu kingdom had required a tremendous effort, which indicated the importance the government attached to the achievement of paramountcy in southern Africa. 17,000 reinforcements had been rushed to Natal and the two invasions of Zululand had required 27,000 oxen, 5,500 mules and 30,000 native porters and labourers.14 The final bill was £4.9 million.15
With Zululand prostrate, Wolseley turned his attention to Sekhukhuni, whose Pedi were defeated by a mixed force of Highlanders and Swazis. The Basotho, who copied the Boers and fought as rifle-armed mounted infantry, proved a harder nut to crack. The result was that Basutoland became a British protectorate governed through local native chiefs. Experiments of a similar kind in Zululand failed and it was finally absorbed by Natal. The campaigns of 1877–9 had achieved their purpose: large-scale black resistance had been extinguished and white supremacy, which would last for just over a hundred years, was confirmed.
The pacification of South Africa’s black population by the British army marked the start of a new power struggle between the British and the Boers. Once it became clear that Britain’s occupation of the Transvaal was not a stopgap measure, but a preparation for its amalgamation into a South African federation, the Boers rebelled. The Transvaal’s war of independence of 1880–81 ended with the defeat of a small British force, which had been trapped on the summit of Majuba Hill in northern Natal. Rapid, long-range rifle fire had done for the British infantrymen, but the Boers celebrated their victory as the judgement of God in favour of His elect and against a race commonly considered impious. The newly-elected Liberal ministry saw the battle as the outcome of an amoral policy, which Gladstone had campaigned against during the general election. Plans for a federation, which the Boers had so forcefully rejected, were dropped and the Transvaal’s independence was restored. And yet, during negotiations at Pretoria in 1881 and London three years later, the government clung to pretensions of sovereignty over the Boer republics, and with it the right to interfere in the shaping of their domestic and foreign policies.
What at the time was no more than an academic legal point assumed enormous significance during the next twenty years. It was a period which witnessed tentative Boer expansion northwards and eastwards, and, after the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886, the transformation of the Transvaal’s economy. Once in production, the Rand mines provided a quarter of the world’s supply of gold and ensured that the centre of economic power in southern Africa shifted away from the Cape to the Transvaal. By 1896 the Transvaal government was the richest in Africa with annual revenues of over £8 million from minerals. British credit underwrote this economic revolution: in 1899 British investment in the Transvaal totalled £350 million, and two-thirds of the Rand’s mines were owned by British stockholders.
The questions which hung over southern Africa during the last two decades of the nineteenth century were, how would the Transvaal’s new wealth be used, and what effect would it have on Britain’s position in the area. This last was very much the concern of Cecil Rhodes, who, while still in his early thirties, had made himself a multi-millionaire by an accumulation of diamond-mining concessions. A shrewd manipulator, he had by 1891 secured a monopoly over the Kimberley diamond fields for his Rhodes De Beers Consolidated Company and had extensive investments on the Rand.
Rhodes became the most famous, many would have said notorious imperialist of his age. He was amoral, instinctively acquisitive (sleeping in the open during the 1884 Bechuanaland campaign, he had contrived to get for himself a blanket he was sharing with a British officer) and a brilliant businessman. His fortune was the servant of his dreams. These were inspired by contemporary Social-Darwinism and the new imperialism, which convinced him that it was the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon races to civilise the world. Nothing could withstand the force of this destiny, certainly not the rights of those who stood in its way. In a revealing episode, he listened to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s complaint that Germany had entered the race for empire too late and that there was nothing worthwhile left for her anywhere. ‘Yes, your Majesty there is,’ Rhodes responded. ‘There is Asia Minor and Mesopotamia.’ That these belonged to Turkey did not trouble Rhodes. The compass of Rhodes’s temerity and ambitions startled contemporaries. Viscount Milner observed, ‘Men are ruled by foibles and Rhodes’s foible is size.’
Like other mavericks, such as Clive, Brooke and, later, T.E. Lawrence, who came to empire-building by chance, Rhodes’s imagination and talents were not apparent in his earlier life. He also shared the former trio’s good luck by being the right man in the right place at the right time and, of course, had the singular advantage of a private fortune with which to fulfil his
dreams. He also had, at every turn, the assistance of successive British governments which, while many of their members did not share Rhodes’s breadth of vision, saw him as an extremely useful instrument for the preservation and extension of Britain’s influence in southern Africa at a time when it was in jeopardy.
Rhodes’s first coup, achieved with the cooperation of Gladstone’s ministry, was the annexation of Bechuanaland in 1884–5. During the past five or so years, parties of Boer settlers had been penetrating this region, where they established the miniature republics of Goschen and Stellaland. Simultaneously, German colonists were moving inland from the embryo settlement of Angra Pequeña, and there were fears in Cape Town and London that they would eventually link up with the Boers. The result would be the blocking of the ‘Missionaries Road’, which ran northwards towards what was then known as Zambesia (roughly modern Zimbabwe and Zambia), a region widely believed to be rich in minerals. There was also, and this caused the greatest anxiety to the British government, the possibility of the emergence of a German-Transvaal axis. In April 1884, when Paul Kruger, the Transvaal’s president, had visited Berlin he had spoken publicly of his people’s affinity with Germany. ‘Just as a child seeks support from his parents so shall the young Transvaal state seek, and hopefully find, protection from its strong and mighty motherland, Germany, and its glorious dynasty.16
This was enough to arouse the British government, already uneasy about the appearance of German settlements in South-West Africa (Namibia), and under pressure from an alliance of Rhodes and the missionary lobby, which feared for the future of the Tswana of Bechuanaland under Boer rule. In December 1884 a small, well-armed force was ordered into the area to evict the Boers and declare a protectorate over Bechuanaland, which it did without resistance.
Rhodes was the ultimate beneficiary from the acquisition of Bechuanaland, a colony of little economic value, which was costing Britain £100,000 a year in subsidies during the 1890s. Bechuanaland was the springboard for Rhodes’s incursion into Zambesia, an undertaking that would be accomplished by his British South Africa Company, which was officially chartered in 1889. This company, like its contemporaries the Royal Niger Company, the British Imperial East Africa Company and the North Borneo Company, represented a revival of seventeenth-century, private enterprise colonisation and trading. The government gained overlordship of new territories on the cheap since their day-to-day administration and policing were in the hands of the company’s staff. The British South Africa Company’s mandate was for farming and mining in Mashonaland, where mineral and settlement rights had been granted by the Ndebele king, Lobengula, in return for a company pension, 1,000 now obsolescent Martini-Henry rifles and a gunboat for the Zambesi River, which was never delivered.
At the end of 1890, the first column of settlers, less than 400 in number but heavily armed with machine-guns and artillery, entered Lobengula’s kingdom. The events of the next ten years paralleled those which had been played out in North America during the previous two centuries. Lobengula gradually realised that by making concessions to the company he had weakened his own authority, which he attempted to reassert in the autumn of 1893 by ordering his impis to raid Shona villages close to British settlements. He played straight into the hands of the company’s chief magistrate, an extremely foxy and belligerent former physician, Dr Leander Starr Jameson. Jameson had long believed that two sources of power could not co-exist in the region, and that the company’s future would never be assured until the formidable Ndebele war machine was dismantled. The raids were therefore just what Jameson wanted and gave him the excuse for a war against Lobengula.
The first Matabele War of 1893–4 was a one-sided affair, for Ndebele generals, like their Zulu counterparts, stuck to traditional frontal attacks. These were suicidal against the company’s Maxim machine-guns, the latest and most deadly of their kind, which fired six hundred rounds of .45 ammunition a minute. The Maxims terrified the Ndebele, who saw them as some awesome kind of magic; a native baby, born at this time and alive in the 1970s, explained his unusual name, Zigga-Zigga, as being based on the sound made by the machine-guns, and therefore believed by his parents as having some supernatural power.17 Ndebele resistance did not end with the overthrow of Lobengula’s state, for there was a further uprising in the spring of 1896, in which settlers and their families were attacked and murdered.
The killing of the colonists generated bitter racial passions in Britain and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), as the company’s territories were now generally known. ‘Permanent peace there cannot be in countries like Mashona and Matabeleland until the blacks are either exterminated or driven back into the centre of Africa,’ proclaimed the Saturday Review.18 Its forthrightness echoed the views of settlers, like the big-game hunter Sir Frederick Selous, who thought that armchair imperialists were mistaken if they expected gratitude from natives who had been freed from oppressive rulers and the powers of the witch-doctors. Only condign chastisement repeatedly applied would teach the Ndebele ‘the uselessness of rebelling against the white man’.19 Delivering these lessons in quietism was a horrifying business. Rifleman John Rose, one of the 1,200 British soldiers hurried to Rhodesia from the Cape, described the storming of a kraal during mopping-up operations in August 1896:
… all over the place it was nothing but dead or dying niggers. We burnt all the huts and a lot of niggers that could not come out were burnt to death, you could hear them screaming, but it served them right. We took about 5 women prisoners, but let them go again; one woman was holding a baby and some one shot the baby through the leg and through the woman’s side, but it was nothing [and] our doctor bandaged the wounds up.20
Details of this nature shocked Liberals and Radicals at home, and there were some sharp exchanges in the Commons between Chamberlain and the company’s critics. Henry Labouchere questioned him on Rhodes’s stated intention of ‘thoroughly thrashing the natives and giving them an everlasting lesson’, executions without trial and village-burning. The last, Chamberlain insisted, was ‘according to the usages of South African warfare’, which must have puzzled those who believed that the advance of Anglo-Saxon civilisation in Africa would bring an end to such practices.21 Parliamentary protests did little to change the nature or the course of the war, which dragged on into 1897, when the last guerrilla groups were finally hunted down.
A secondary, equally bloody campaign of pacification was being fought to the north-west of Rhodesia on the eastern shores of Lake Nyasa. British penetration of this region had followed Livingstone, whose early missions had been superseded by the Scottish Presbyterian African Lakes Company. It received government patronage in its armed struggle against Arab slave-traders, who operated from Zanzibar and supplied slaves to the tribal potentates of Arabia and the Persian Gulf. A British protectorate was declared over the area in 1891 to forestall acquisition by the Portuguese, who were, with good reason, suspected of not pulling their weight in the international effort to suppress Arab slaving. There followed four years of small-scale wars, subsidised by Rhodes, and fought by Sikh troops, commanded by Sir Harry Johnston, and a flotilla of tiny gunboats. Arab slavers and those tribal chiefs who had refused to accept Britain’s paramountcy were successively defeated; the latter were characterised by Johnston as slavers, which made it easier for him to justify his rigorous measures to the Foreign Office.22
Those who took part in the small wars waged across southern Africa during the 1890s believed they were the pathfinders of the vast new British dominion with its own iron racial order. ‘Africa south of the Zambezi must be settled by the white and whitish races,’ claimed Johnston in 1893, ‘and that Africa which is well within the tropics must be ruled by whites, developed by Indians, and worked by blacks.’23 William Brown, an American naturalist-turned-colonist who had been captivated by Rhodes’s dreams and helped to make them reality, believed the process of conquest and settlement was inexorable since it was an expression of ‘the spirit of the age’. This, he insisted, ‘decrees that South
and Central Africa shall become a great English-speaking country’, perhaps another United States, which in time would fulfil ‘the destiny for which Providence seems to have chosen the Anglo-Saxon race’.24
By 1914 the process seemed well underway. Southern Rhodesia had a white population of 34,000, who had their own elected legislative council which lorded it over the 732,000 blacks, half of whom lived in reservations. Many of the whites were Boers, who brought with them the racial prejudices of South Africa. In 1903 a law was made which punished a black man found guilty of raping a white woman with death; a protection not available to black women.25 In Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), where white settlement was sparse, British law obtained under a separate and, by and large, a more humane form of government which owed its form to British rather than South African influence. In 1924 it was taken over by the Colonial Office.
The period that saw the establishment of British supremacy in Rhodesia and Nyasaland was one during which it was under assault in South Africa. The British government continued to regard South Africa as its exclusive sphere of influence, and clung to the hope that its constituent parts would eventually merge in a federation which would, of course, be within the empire. Rhodes was of the same opinion and, on becoming prime minister of the Cape in 1891, he endeavoured by charm and cheque book to convince its Boer population to accept the permanence and value of the British connection. There was, however, an alternative future for South Africa as part of a predominantly Boer federation in which the Transvaal would be paramount.
Such an arrangement was wormwood to Britain. Neither Rosebery’s Liberal ministry (1893–5) nor its Conservative successor under Salisbury could allow a strategically vital region to slip from Britain’s grasp into Germany’s. It was argued that a United States of South Africa under the Transvaal would be too weak to resist German encroachments, and might easily become a German satellite. Much to Britain’s irritation, the Transvaal had now become a pawn in the game of international imperial power politics, which was being played by Germany in order to extract concessions elsewhere. German political interest and investment strengthened the Transvaal’s sense of independence and, seen from both London and Cape Town, were evidence of the urgent need for measures to reassert British prestige and authority.
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire Page 32