Down in the Boer laager it was Hendrina Joubert, wife of the Commandant-General, who first saw the British on Majuba. Hendrina always accompanied her husband on commando, and it was said that she was the soldier in the family. She had slept badly and at first light had got up, dressed, and gone out of the tent to put a kettle on the fire. Looking up at Majuba, she saw Colley’s men on the rim and ran to rouse her husband: “Piet, come here. There are people on the kop.”
Joubert sounded the alarm, and the laager sprang to life. Nicolaas Smit, one of the bravest and best of the Boer generals, called for volunteers to climb Majuba.
Lieutenant Ian Hamilton, in charge of an advanced piquet outside the basin, saw the first of the volunteers beginning to climb, and he hastened to report to Colley. The general thanked him politely for his information and sent him back. Three times more that morning Hamilton reported the progress of the advancing Boers. The last time he found Colley asleep.
There was a small detached knoll on the east side where Hamilton was stationed, and some of the first Boers to come within rifle range occupied this, pouring a heavy fire into his position. Hamilton was forced to retreat; the Boers gained the rim of the basin. Once more Hamilton dashed back to Colley, now awake, and petitioned him: “I do hope, General, that you will let us have a charge, and that you will not think it presumption on my part to have come up and asked you.”
“No presumption, Mr. Hamilton, but we will wait until the Boers advance on us, then give them a volley and charge.”
Minutes later Colley fell dead, a bullet through his head. The Boers were overrunning the British position. Back with his men, Hamilton seized a rifle, but before he could raise it a bullet shattered his left wrist.
Everywhere the soldiers fled from the Boers. The commands and threats of their officers did nothing to arrest the headlong flight. “I’ll shoot you if you don’t come back,” one officer shouted, but the men ran blindly on. The newspapermen ran too. Thomas Carter found himself racing shoulder to shoulder with a stalwart Highlander. Directly in front of them was the hospital area with the wounded men stretched out on the ground. They swerved around the wounded, and Carter, aware that the Highlander had the inside track, begrudged him the advantage. All around them running men pitched forward as the Boers poured a murderous fire into their backs. Carter heard one cry, “Oh, my God!” as he fell. He leaped over him and pounded on.
At the edge of the rim Carter and the others were forced to pull up. A 40-foot cliff fell away before them. A bullet from the rear toppled one of the men near him, and Carter, fearing a broken neck less than a bullet in the back, dropped to his stomach and launched himself over the side. Clutching at the tufts of heather, he managed to break his fall and land unhurt at the bottom.
He and those who followed his example found themselves in a ravine. They tried to run down it, but the Boers were soon above them sending down a shower of bullets that impinged off the rocks around them. All were forced to surrender. Carter, like the other correspondents, carried a pistol, but he thought it would “look better” if he was found unarmed, and he managed to bury his revolver in the sand before he gave himself up. Among the Boers’ prisoners was Lieutenant Alan Hill of the 58th Foot who only a month earlier had won the Victoria Cross for rescuing two wounded men under heavy fire at Laing’s Nek. Now he was holding a bloody arm, ripped open from the elbow to the wrist.
In the general rout Ian Hamilton also fled, clutching his shattered wrist. Then a spent bullet or chip of rock struck him on the head and he fell unconscious. When he recovered, two boys of about fourteen were turning him over and removing his sword and equipment. They were chased off by an old Boer with a black beard, and when he was on his feet Hamilton was led to identify Colley’s body.
J. H. J. Wessels, one of his captors, attended to Hamilton’s wound, binding his wrist with an improvised splint made from the top of a bully-beef tin and tying it with his own red bandana. Thirty years later Lieutenant General Sir Ian Hamilton again met Mr. Wessels and presented him with a new handkerchief in a silver box.
Hamilton was allowed to wander about, and for a while he carried water to the wounded. He heard one Boer, looking at the shambles around him, piously declare that such was the fate of those who chose to fight on the Sabbath. About dusk he slipped away, tried to climb down the hill and make his way back to camp, but darkness fell, there was a heavy rain, and he lost his way. Exhausted and in pain, he sank down and lost consciousness. A dog’s tongue licking his face roused him; Patch, his fox terrier, had come out with a search party and had found his master. Hamilton’s arm was forever crippled, but at the age of ninety-one he could still say: “Majuba was worth an arm any day.”
Majuba was the last battle of the war. General Evelyn Wood, who now took command of the British forces in South Africa, was ordered to arrange an armistice. The British wanted peace. The Transvaal did not seem important enough to shed blood over it.
Majuba, although a small affair, was particularly mortifying for Britain; never before in its long history had British arms suffered such a humiliating defeat: a group of unsoldierly farm boys had completely routed a British force containing elements of the Royal Navy and regulars from some of the most famous regiments in the British army, and a force, moreover, that was six times larger than that of the Boers and in what ought to have been an impregnable position.
A Royal Commission was appointed to go to Pretoria to treat with the Boers, and on 3 August 1881 the Pretoria Convention, as the peace terms were called, was signed and published. It gave the Transvaalers “complete self-government, subject to suzerainty of Her Majesty.” Britain retained control over external relations, the right to move troops through the country, and a veto over laws affecting the Bantu; the Transvaalers agreed to permit foreigners to enter, live, and work in the country without interference and to exempt from military service British subjects registered with the British Resident.
What the Transvaal Boers had been unable to accomplish with argument they had achieved with buttets—and their bravery, determination, and sheer audacity.
In England reaction to the Pretoria Convention was mixed. Some regarded it as a generous gesture on the part of Gladstone’s government, but most saw it as a shameful capitulation. Conan Doyle said, “It was the height of idealism, and the result has not been such as to encourage its repetition.... the Boers saw neither generosity nor humanity in our conduct, but only fear.”3 Queen Victoria warned her ministers that there would be disastrous results from such a humiliating peace made on the heels of military defeat. The army was thoroughly outraged. Lieutenant Colonel Hugh McCalmont of the 7th Hussars expressed a common feeling when he wrote in a letter home: “Why have Colley and all his men been sacrificed if there was a foregone conclusion of the Government that there was nothing worth fighting about?”
The British inhabitants of South Africa were dismayed. In the market square of Newcastle, Natal, there was “raving, weeping and blaspheming.” In Pretoria loyalists folded a Union Jack in a coffin and held a bitter funeral. C. K. White, president of the Committee of Loyal Inhabitants of the Transvaal, spoke of men crying like children. He sent letters protesting the peace to Gladstone, Lord Kimberley, and the House of Commons together with a petition signed by thirty-four loyalists: “Unless the supremacy of England be vindicated,” it declared, “inhabitants of British descent living in South Africa will be subjected to continual insult and injury, not only from the Boers, but also from native tribes who have witnessed our defeat and humiliation.”4 In reply Gladstone blandly stated that it had been thought that the Transvaalers wanted British rule, but now it was clear they did not and “Her Majesty’s Government have thought it their duty to avail themselves of the earliest indications on the part of the Boers of a disposition to a reasonable adjustment, in order to terminate a war which threatened the most disastrous consequences, not only to the Transvaal but to the whole of South Africa.”5
The First Anglo-Boer War created only a brief
sensation in the world outside South Africa. There were too many other dramatic events following close on the heels of the armistice in 1881: on 12 March the French occupied Tunis; the next day Alexander II, Czar of Russia, was assassinated; Disraeli died on 12 April; and on 2 July James Garfield, newly inaugurated President of the United States, was shot.
Three years after the war, under the terms of the London Convention, the British gave up the right to march troops through the Transvaal and the right to any control over the treatment of the Bantu. Paul Kruger was now president of the new republic, which officially called itself the Republic of South Africa, and at his insistence there was no mention of British suzerainty in the London Convention. Majuba Day was already enshrined as a memorable date among the Boers, but it was evidently a much less significant date for the British, for the London Convention was signed on 27 February 1881, the third anniversary of Britain’s humiliating defeat.
The Boers were now relatively content. The British had removed the menace of the Zulus and the Bapedi, introduced some order into the government, and returned the government to them. A president and volksraad had been elected, and all the trappings of a trekker republic were restored. So things might have remained, and perhaps Boer and Briton would have learned to live side by side had not a disaster struck the Transvaal: gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand.
4
THE JAMESON RAID
The Rand (short for the Witwatersrand—meaning “Ridge of White Water”) is a 60-mile-long ridge running roughly east and west, its centre about 30 miles south of Pretoria. It was, and is, the largest gold field in the world. The uncovering of its buried riches solved the financial difficulties of the South African Republic, but it created tragic problems of its own, and no one foresaw this more clearly than President Paul Kruger, who told his countrymen in a prophetic statement: “Instead of rejoicing you would do better to weep, for this gold will cause our country to be soaked in blood.”
When the gold of the Rand was discovered in 1887 a flood of foreigners—uitlanders, the Boers called them—poured into the country. These gold seekers, many of them footloose adventurers, were a different breed of men from the farmers and small tradesmen who had previously been drawn to the Transvaal, and the government was ill-prepared to cope with them. Less than 15 percent were married men who had brought their families with them and intended to settle. The rest were either single or men who had left their families in their home countries and intended to go back as soon as they had made their fortunes. They congregated in and around Johannesburg, where John Merriman, a Cape politician, described them as “a loafing, drinking, scheming lot” who would, he said, “corrupt an archangel, or at any rate knock a good deal of bloom off its wings.”
The Transvaal government tried to be helpful, but the size of the uitlander population increased so rapidly that it was frightening: they were fast outnumbering the Boers themselves, and they made little or no effort to settle into Boer ways; they were, in fact, strident in their demands for concessions, changes in the laws, even, as they were the most heavily taxed, the right to vote. Most of all, they wanted things done the right way. Their way.
Although most of the uitlanders were of British origin, there were representatives from the United States, Australia, and every country in Europe. Miners, prospectors, and speculators poured in, and behind them came gamblers, businessmen, thieves, financiers, prostitutes, and engineers. There were adventurers of all classes, all eager to make a fortune, all greedy. Some were poor, and some were rich already but wanted more; some were stupid, and a few were very clever indeed. Among the rich and clever was Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902), who had already made a fortune from diamonds at Kimberley and who, in a remarkably short period of time, had become the richest man in the Western world. In 1890, at the age of thirty-seven, he became prime minister of Cape Colony as well.
Rhodes was a man of big dreams, one of which was a united South Africa—united under the Union Jack—and of a British Africa extending from the Cape to Cairo. In 1895 he thought he saw in the complaints of the uitlanders an opportunity for Britain to reannex the Transvaal.
The Boers, too, had a vision of a united South Africa, but of an Afrikaner state under a republican flag. In the course of events the dreams of both were realized, but for neither Boer nor Briton was 1895 the right time.
Within the Transvaal government there were undoubtedly inefficiencies and some corruption, but the causes of the uitlanders’ discontent were annoyances, not oppressions; Conan Doyle’s contention that “their whole lives were darkened by injustice” was a gross exaggeration; their grievances were certainly not adequate excuses for rebellion. Yet there was violent talk, and in Johannesburg a sixty-six-man “Reform Committee” made seditious noises. Rhodes encouraged them. When they determined to revolt, he supplied them with arms, smuggling rifles and ammunition into the country in coal wagons and oil drums of the De Beers Company, which he controlled.
Just over the Transvaal frontier nearest Johannesburg Rhodes stationed a force of some 500 armed and mounted men with instructions to wait until the revolt on the Rand began and then ride in and assure its success. In charge of this operation was Dr. Leander Starr Jameson (1853-1917), Rhodes’s friend, employee, confidant, and sharer of his dreams of empire and glory.
The conspiracy was not very secret. Everyone in Johannesburg knew about it, and naturally Kruger knew too. Sir Hercules Robinson, the British high commissioner in Cape Town, and Joseph Chamberlain, the colonial secretary in London, also knew about it, although they tried to avoid knowing and persisted in pretending that they did not know. When Sir Hercules’s imperial secretary tried to tell him more, he snapped, “The less you and I have to do with these damned conspiracies of Rhodes and Chamberlain the better.” What no one knew, not even the conspirators themselves, was the date. Several dates were fixed, but each time the event was postponed. The plotters were not professional revolutionaries, or even politicians; for the most part they were prospering businessmen and well-paid workmen. Rhodes’s brother, Colonel Frank Rhodes, a British army officer then in the Transvaal, wrote on 25 October 1895 that “so long as people are making money individually in Johannesburg they will endure a great many political wrongs.”
Many of the uitlanders would have preferred to see a reformed Transvaal government rather than British annexation. They disliked Britain’s native policy and the meddling of Parliament and the philanthropic societies, for the uitlanders’ view of the position of nonwhites in society was little different from that of the Boers.c The Americans, of whom there were a goodly number, including eight on the Reform Committee, were almost unanimous in rejecting the idea of British rule, and many refused to participate when they learned that it was intended to hoist the Union Jack. There was much bickering and vacillation. Rhodes was growing impatient, and Jameson, in whom patience was never a plentiful commodity, was growing more so. But old Paul Kruger—Oom (Uncle) Paul, his people called him—was patient, and he counselled patience to his burghers: “Take a tortoise,” he told them. “If you want to kill it you must wait until it puts out its head, and then you cut it off.”
Jameson with his troopers sat on the border in the dusty little village of Pitsani and fretted. He was the same age as Rhodes, but somehow seemed younger. Like Rhodes, he was a bachelor who had no interest in women. He was by nature an adventurer and a gambler who, apparently without qualms, gave up a successful medical practice in Kimberley and succumbed to the dreams of Rhodes. Everyone liked him, for he was a man with charm, and in Rhodes’s cause he charmed nearly everyone. But he did not charm Oom Paul Kruger.
Jameson was sure that if he rode in he could prod the reluctant Reform Committee into action, and, all patience gone, he warned Rhodes: “Unless I hear definitely to the contrary, shall leave tomorrow morning.” Rhodes’s answer—“On no account must you move. I strongly object to such a course”—never arrived, so Jameson mounted and rode over the border with 494 men, eight Maxim machine guns, and t
hree light field pieces.
The Jameson Raid was a fiasco from the beginning. The detail of troopers assigned to cut the telegraph line to the Transvaal got drunk and cut the line to Cape Town instead. Thus, Rhodes did not know what was happening, but Kruger did. A Boer commando surrounded Jameson and his men about 10 miles outside Johannesburg, and on the morning of 2 January 1896 they were forced to surrender.
The uitlanders in Johannesburg had gone so far as to pass out a few of Rhodes’s rifles, nothing more. They had no stomach for fighting. At the invitation of the Transvaal government, they sent a deputation to Pretoria, the capital. There these shrewd Johannesburg businessmen proved themselves the most inept of revolutionaries, for when the Boer officials questioned their credentials and demanded to know whom they represented, they proudly handed over a complete list of the members of the Reform Committee and the other plotters. The Boers, list in hand, arrested them all.
When Rhodes learned of the capture of Jameson he told his friend W. P. Schreiner, attorney general of Cape Colony, “Old Jameson has upset my applecart.... Twenty years we have been friends, and now he goes in and ruins me.” Rhodes was indeed ruined, but he kept his head and acted like a man—which is more than can be said for Joseph Chamberlain, the colonial secretary. Rhodes accepted the blame for his part in the affair, and in spite of heavy pressure to denounce Jameson he refused to turn his back on him.
As soon as the news of the Jameson Raid reached Europe, the Germans began to rattle their sabres. The Kaiser sent a cruiser to Delagoa Bay, and when Jameson was captured he telegraphed congratulations to Kruger on repelling the “armed bands which invaded your country.” This raised a storm of anti-German sentiment in England, and there was a music hall glorification of Jameson as a champion of England against what was regarded as German-Boer intrigue. Still, as far as the British government was concerned, the raid was the cause of acute political embarrassment. “If filibustering fails,” Lord Salisbury told Chamberlain, “it is always disreputable.”
Great Boer War Page 4
