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

by Martin Meredith

  The Mahdi demanded that his followers adhere to a strict and austere lifestyle. He forbade alcoholic drinks and tobacco, banned marriage festivities and dancing, and ordered women to cover their faces. Other prohibitions included ‘the clapping of hands’; ‘improper signs with the eyes’; ‘tears and lamentations at the bed of the dead’; ‘slanderous language’; and ‘the company of strange women’. A common punishment for transgression was flogging: ‘A woman with uncovered hair, even for the blink of an eye, deserves twenty-seven lashes’; ‘Smoking, chewing or sniffing tobacco – all deserve eighty lashes’. Thieves had their right hand cut off for a first offence, their left foot for a second.

  In January 1883, El Obeid finally surrendered, giving the Mahdi control of Kordofan. Having initially dismissed his revolt as a minor disturbance, Khedive Tawfiq belatedly realised that unless he took decisive action to crush it, it might spread to other areas of the Sudan and threaten Egypt’s hold over the whole region. With Britain’s permission, he sent a large expeditionary army southwards, hiring a retired British officer, William Hicks, to command it; a former Indian Army colonel, Hicks had neither experience of the Sudan nor any knowledge of Arabic. Moreover, his 11,000 men, though well-equipped, suffered from low morale and poor discipline; most were unwilling conscripts. Advancing from Khartoum towards El Obeid in November 1883, they were annihilated in the forest of Shaykan in Kordofan. Fewer than 300 men escaped with their lives. A lone messenger carried the news to Khartoum.

  The Mahdi’s victory at Shaykan persuaded other provinces that the time was ripe to join his rebellion. In December 1883, Darfur fell to the Mahdi; in April 1884, Bahr al-Ghazal. The revolt spread to the Beja tribes of the eastern Sudan, severing the caravan route from the Red Sea port of Suakin to Berber on the Nile. Foreign residents in Khartoum – merchants, missionaries and consuls – departed in droves down the river for Egypt to escape trouble.

  In Cairo, when news of the disaster at Shaykan reached the British embassy, Sir Evelyn Baring, the consul-general and effective ruler of Egypt, concluded that it sounded the death-knell of sixty years of Egyptian rule in the Sudan. He saw no benefit in trying to hold on there and favoured a full evacuation of all Egyptian garrisons, retaining only the Red Sea port of Suakin. When Tawfiq’s Council of Ministers objected, Baring forced their resignation and installed more amenable ministers.

  In London, the British government concurred with Baring but called in General Gordon, the former governor-general, regarded as an expert on the Sudan, for consultation. Gordon had already made clear his views in a recent press interview. He argued that the Mahdi had only limited support; the revolt underway, he claimed, was the result of Egyptian mismanagement since his departure. What was needed was the appointment of a new governor-general in Khartoum with the remit to relieve the garrisons there, not to evacuate them. British ministers were determined to avoid any direct military involvement in the Sudan. They also harboured misgivings about Gordon’s impulsive nature. But they believed he would be ‘useful’ if sent on a reporting mission to the Sudan. In a meeting with ministers in January 1884, Gordon was given instructions to report on the best way of withdrawing the garrisons and to provide any further assistance that might be required. He was told that under no circumstances would a relief expedition to be sent to the Sudan.

  Gordon arrived in Cairo one week later. At an audience with Khedive Tawfiq, he apologised for referring to him in a press interview as ‘a little snake’ and was duly elevated to the rank of governor-general of the Sudan, a role that had the prior approval of the British government. He was furnished with a firman proclaiming the khedive’s intention of evacuating the Sudan. ‘We have decided,’ it read, ‘to restore to the families of the kings of the Sudan their former independence.’ It was left to Gordon to decide under what circumstances the firman should be made public.

  Leaving Cairo on 28 January, Gordon crossed the Nubian desert by camel, reached the town of Berber and decided to issue the proclamation then and there. It was a fatal error. Gordon had expected that he would win support by announcing the end of an Egyptian regime that was widely detested. But he merely cut the ground from under his own feet. For the Nile tribes now had no reason to oppose the coming of the Mahdi and thereby expose themselves to retaliation once the Egyptians had departed.

  By the time Gordon arrived in Khartoum on board a river steamer on 18 February 1884, accompanied by a lone British officer, the noose around the town was already beginning to tighten. Tribal leaders to the north decided to join the Mahdi’s campaign. Khartoum itself had been infiltrated by Ansar agents in a bid to foment rebellion among its 26,000 residents. On 12 March, Ansar forces occupied Halfaya, nine miles north of Khartoum, and cut the telegraph-line to Berber, severing Gordon’s main communications link to the outside world. In April, an emissary from the Mahdi stirred revolt in the province of Berber; in May, the provincial capital of Berber fell, leaving Khartoum isolated.

  Gordon held out for nearly a year in Khartoum, sending out messengers on foot and by boat with urgent appeals to Cairo and to London for assistance. Standing on the flat roof of the governor-general’s palace, with its commanding views of the surrounding countryside, he scanned the horizon with his telescope day after day for any sign that a relief expedition was coming up the Nile to the rescue. With a garrison of 8,000 men under his command, he built defences around the city, fortified a small fleet of paddle steamers and organised raiding parties for food supplies. He was determined to remain in Khartoum rather than attempt to escape.

  For month after month, no relief expedition came. In London, ministers dithered, anxious above all not to become embroiled in a war in the Sudan. Public opinion, however, eventually forced the British government to act. In September, an expeditionary army of 10,000 men – the Gordon Relief Expedition – was assembled in Cairo to make the 1,500-mile journey to Khartoum. Its orders were simply to ‘bring away General Gordon’ and avoid any further ‘offensive operations’.

  By then, Gordon’s position had become far more perilous. In September, an advance force of the Mahdi’s army began to take up siege positions on the outskirts of Khartoum. The Mahdi himself arrived in October and established his headquarters close to Omdurman, on the west bank of the White Nile. He sent a letter urging Gordon to surrender before it was too late: ‘For after the beginning of the battle were you to surrender, it would be from fear, and that will not be accepted.’ Gordon retorted: ‘I am here, like iron.’

  Gordon was aware that a relief expedition was heading towards him, but as it lumbered its way slowly up the Nile, fighting desert battles along the way, his frustration mounted and the messages he managed to smuggle out of Khartoum became increasingly desperate. By the end of December, the town had run out of maize supplies and its occupants were reduced to eating dogs, donkeys, monkeys and rats. Adding to the misery of starvation and dysentery was constant bombardment. Hundreds lay dead on the streets. By mid-January, the nearest British column was still a hundred miles away.

  Warned by messengers that British troops were preparing to advance on Khartoum, the Mahdi ordered his army to attack. In the early hours of 26 January, under cover of darkness, thousands of Ansar warriors swarmed into the town, overrunning its defences, massacring men, women and children in an orgy of violence. Gordon died in the governor-general’s palace, fighting to the last. His head was cut off and taken to the Mahdi’s camp.

  When two paddle steamers from the British expeditionary force fought their way to Khartoum on a reconnaissance mission two days later, they discovered the town had fallen and pulled out, running the gauntlet of fire once more as they headed downstream. Rather than commit itself to another war, the British government decided to cut its losses and withdraw from the Sudan altogether.

  The Mahdi was left in control of virtually the whole of the Egyptian Sudan. All that remained in Egyptian hands were the port of Suakin and a handful of garrisons in Equatoria, protected by the vast swamps of the sudd. Disliking Khart
oum, the Mahdi transferred his headquarters to Omdurman. He had ambitions to carry his holy war to Egypt and the Muslim world beyond. But on 22 June 1885, after a sudden and short illness, he died. His designated successor, Khalifa Abdallahi, made the announcement to a stunned congregation at the mosque in Omdurman.

  The Mahdi was buried beneath the room where he died. A magnificent tomb with an eighty-foot dome was built there and became a shrine for visitors from afar. Thirteen years later, it would be demolished on the orders of a British general.

  PART IX

  34

  DIAMOND FEVER

  As diamond fever spread throughout southern Africa and beyond, the rush to the diamond fields of Griqualand turned into a frantic escapade that one Cape Town newspaper likened to ‘a dangerous madness’. In their thousands, shopkeepers, tradesmen, clerks and farmers set out in ox-wagons and mule carts, heading for the desolate patch of sun-baked scrubland in Griqualand where diamonds had been discovered, excited by the prospect of sudden riches; some travelled on foot, walking from as far away as Cape Town, a journey of 600 miles across the great thirstland of the Karoo. They were joined by a horde of foreign adventurers: seasoned diggers from the Australian goldfields; fortyniners from California; Cockney traders from the backstreets of London; Irish dissidents; German speculators; army officers on furlough; ships deserters; rogue lawyers and quack doctors.

  The first scramble in 1869 was for alluvial diamonds discovered along the Vaal and Harts rivers. By late 1870, some 5,000 fortune-seekers had flocked there. Then in 1871, prospectors found the main diamond field on three Boer farms twenty miles south of the Vaal River: Du Toit’s Pan; Bultfontein; and Vooruitzigt, owned by Johannes de Beer and his brother. The rush there turned into a stampede. Beneath the farms lay four diamondiferous ‘pipes’, or necks, of long-extinct volcanoes, extending far below the surface and containing unimaginable riches.

  In the early days, diggers using picks and shovels were able to scrape up diamonds lying close to the surface. Some made fortunes in a matter of days. Below an upper layer of limestone, they found ‘yellow ground’ – a yellowish, decomposed breccia which proved to contain diamond deposits even richer than those close to the surface. Beneath the yellow ground they came across ‘blue ground’ – a hard, compact blue-coloured ground that at first was believed to contain no diamonds. To many diggers it seemed that ‘the party was over’. But then they discovered that that blue ground was not rock-hard but friable, decomposing rapidly once exposed to weather. Moreover, it contained an even higher density of diamonds than yellow ground.

  Within weeks, the main mine sites were transformed into a sprawling mass of tents, wagons, mud heaps and mining debris. The air was thick with fine dust stirred up by the constant digging, sifting and sorting of dirt that went on from morning until night. New arrivals were immediately struck by the stench and squalor of the settlements. The approach roads were lined with the carcasses of exhausted pack animals left to rot where they had fallen. Open trenches served as public latrines, sited at random amid the haphazard jumble of diggers’ tents. Flies swarmed everywhere. An acute shortage of water meant that most diggers were rarely able to wash; the nearest river for bathing was twenty miles away. In summer, the grey, cindery plains of Griqualand were like an oven; in winter, the nights were bitterly cold. When the rains came, ‘camp fever’ – mainly dysentery – took hold, striking down diggers by the score.

  Working conditions were hazardous. At Colesberg Kopje, the diamond pipe on the De Beers’ farm that later became known as the ‘Big Hole’ of Kimberley, thousands of white diggers and their black labourers were crammed into a labyrinth of pits, endlessly filling buckets and sacks with broken ground and hauling them up and down ladders or on pulleys to the surface. The roadways above were permanently choked with carts and mules taking ‘stuff’ to sieves and sorting tables on the edge of the mine. Every day, some tumbled down into the pits below. The hazards became increasingly severe as the pits reached eighty feet or more below ground-level without support: roadways linking the pits to the mine edge frequently collapsed, leaving claims beneath buried under tons of soil.

  Moreover, for most diggers the rewards were meagre. Some scraped away with picks and shovels for weeks on end finding nothing of value. Hundreds of claims were abandoned every month when diggers ran out of money to pay the required licence fee. Just as every day brought wagonloads of new arrivals brimming with hope and expectation, so in the other direction destitute men in ragged clothes trudged dejectedly away from ‘the Fields’, unable to afford the fare back to their homes. Everything depended on luck.

  Nevertheless, the output of diamonds continued to soar. By the end of 1871, a small stretch of Griqualand, covering in all no more than fifty-eight square miles of scrubland, had become one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in the world. It was also the place that marked the beginning of an industrial revolution in Africa.

  The discovery of diamonds in Griqualand precipitated a tussle between Britain, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal for control of the territory. Hitherto a backwater of little interest to any of its neighbours, its borders and status had remained ill-defined. In a treaty signed in 1834, the Cape Colony had accorded due recognition to the Griqua kaptyn, Andries Waterboer, as an independent chief of the area. But Boer farmers had subsequently obtained farm leases in Waterboer’s territory, registering their titles with authorities in the Orange Free State. The Free State had then laid claim to a large part of Griqualand. When the diamond rush to the first alluvial diggings in the Vaal River began in 1869, the Free State claimed sovereignty there and then extended their claims to the ‘dry’ diggings to the south, sending a landdrost to the mining settlements around Colesberg Kopje to supervise diggers’ committees and collect a portion of licence fees. Other claims to the area were made by Nicholas Waterboer, the son of Andries Waterboer; by a Tlhaping chief named Mahura; and by the Transvaal government.

  Britain’s interest in the diamond fields was equally keen. Officials in Cape Town were determined that Britain should gain possession of the territory and prompted Waterboer to appeal to the Cape government for ‘protection’. On a tour of the diamond fields in February 1871, the new British high commissioner and governor of the Cape, Sir Henry Barkly, quickly realised that what was at stake was not just a frontier dispute over land ownership but the whole issue of political leadership in southern Africa. He resolved that Waterboer’s claims to the diamond fields needed to be supported, regardless of their merit, to ensure the supremacy of British interests. The British duly set up an enquiry which ruled in favour of Waterboer’s claims. Waterboer promptly asked Barkly to take over the territory. Without waiting for approval from London, Barkly proclaimed the annexation of Griqualand West on 27 October 1871 in the name of the British Crown. Griqualand’s eastern border with the Orange Free State was realigned to ensure that the whole of the diamond fields fell within its jurisdiction.

  Resentment over Britain’s annexation of Griqualand festered for years. In Bloemfontein, President Brand issued a counter-proclamation and continued to protest year after year at the dispossession of territory he considered belonged to the Free State. As a sop to the Free State, the British government eventually agreed in 1876 to make a payment of £90,000.

  With the coming of British rule, names were changed. The colonial secretary, Lord Kimberley, complained that he could neither spell ‘Vooruitzigt’ (‘Foresight’), nor pronounce it. What was needed, said Kimberley, were ‘English-sounding names’. Accordingly, a proclamation was issued, renaming the mining encampments on Vooruitzigt as Kimberley; the diamond-bearing blue ground became known technically as kimberlite.

  Kimberley by 1873 was fast growing into the second largest town in southern Africa, boasting a population of some 13,000 whites and 30,000 blacks; two miles away, Dutoitspan added a further 6,000 to the total. At the town centre, amid a chaotic jumble of tents and canvas-covered frame houses, stood Market Square, a vast open space crowded
by day with wagons and Cape carts, where diggers, their families, diamond dealers, tradesmen and merchants gathered to peruse piles of goods for sale and exchange gossip and rumours. Each morning, Boer farmers drove wagonloads of their produce to the square. Other wagons piled with mining equipment, building materials, household utensils, provisions and liquor arrived from Cape Town and other coastal ports, having survived the journey of hundreds of miles over rough tracks. Adjoining Market Square was Main Street, a business thoroughfare lined with stores, canteens, bars and the frame tents of diamond ‘koopers’. Scattered around Kimberley was an array of rough hotels, boarding houses, billiard halls and gambling ‘hells’. Drinking, gambling and sex were the town’s main diversions.

  The diamond boom attracted a steady flow of black migrants from across southern Africa. Many travelled for weeks on foot to get to the diamond fields, arriving exhausted and emaciated. The largest number came from Pediland in the Transvaal region 500 miles away, encouraged by the Pedi paramount chief, Sekhukhune, to earn money for the purchase of guns. Tsonga migrants (‘Shangaan’) walked from Gaza territory north of the Limpopo nearly 1,000 miles away. Zulus arrived from Natal and ‘Moshoeshoe’s people’ from Basutoland. In all, the mines drew more than 50,000 Africans each year in the early 1870s.

  Most stayed for periods of between three and six months, working as labourers for white diggers or finding other work in the camps. They earned usually about 10 shillings a week and a further 10 shillings in the form of food, leaving for home once they had saved enough cash to buy cattle or a plough or a gun. An old muzzle-loading Enfield discarded by the British army could be bought for £3; a breech-loading Snider cost £12. Between April 1873 and June 1874, some 75,000 guns were sold in Kimberley. Gun sales provided a striking spectacle. ‘At knock-off time,’ wrote one pioneer digger, ‘our Kaffirs used to pass down streets of tented shops owned by white traders and presided over by yelling black salesmen whirling guns above their heads. These they discharged in the air crying: “Reka, reka, mona mtskeka” [Buy, buy, a gun] A deafening din. A sight never to be forgotten.’