A small number of blacks and mixed-race Cape ‘Coloureds’ succeeded in establishing themselves as claim-holders or share-workers managing claims in return for a percentage of profits. They congregated mainly at Bultfontein, otherwise known as the ‘poor man’s diggings’. The British authorities insisted that blacks and Coloureds should be given equal opportunities with white diggers as claim-holders and permitted to buy and sell claims for themselves on the same basis.
But white diggers made clear their opposition to such notions and agitated to restrict the activities of blacks on the diamond fields. They claimed that black diggers possessing the right to sell diamonds acted as conduits for the illegal traffic in gems. What white diggers wanted was black labour, not black competition.
Facing white protests, the British authorities compromised, issuing a new set of rules for labour contracts that required ‘servants’ or employees to carry a pass signed by their ‘masters’ or employers at all times. Anyone found without a pass was liable to a fine, or imprisonment or flogging. In theory, the law was colour-blind, applying equally to all servants or employees. In practice, it applied only to blacks. Blacks who were their own masters, holding claims or cart licences, or engaged as independent traders, were granted ‘protection passes’ to prove their exemption from pass laws – a pass to avoid a pass. The new regime for labour contracts linking them to a system of pass laws became the main device for controlling black labour throughout southern Africa for decades to come.
As the excavations at Kimberley mine deepened, mining operations became increasingly complex. To overcome the problem of collapsing roadways, diggers constructed an elaborate system of cable transport held in place by a series of massive timber stagings erected around the margin of the mine. Hauling ropes attached to windlasses were used to lift buckets up from the claims. By 1874, there were 1,000 windlasses on the stagings. But no sooner had the cable system been devised than more severe problems occurred. As the digging went deeper, the outside walls of the mine, consisting predominantly of black shale or ‘reef’ extending downwards for 300 feet or more, began to disintegrate. Summer storms regularly set off avalanches. Flooding added to the diggers’ woes.
The scale of the problem spelled the end of the age of individual claim-holders. Hitherto, the number of claims that claim-holders could possess had been restricted to protect the interests of individual diggers and prevent mining companies from gaining control. But in 1876 mining authorities concluded that the future of mining belonged to capitalists and companies able to operate sophisticated steam machinery and other modern equipment, and lifted the restrictions.
A new breed of mining entrepreneur emerged. Some came from the ranks of the more successful diggers; some were Kimberley traders who had made their fortunes importing equipment and supplies; the most active group in purchasing claims were diamond merchants. All relied heavily on international connections. Among them were a number of youthful immigrants from Europe who struggled to the top of the pile and amassed great fortunes.
The most colourful of the new entrepreneurs was Barney Barnato, a Jewish diamond trader, born in 1852 in the East End of London, known in Kimberley more for his performance as a music-hall entertainer than for his talent for business. He arrived in the diamond fields in 1873 carrying a box of poor-quality cigars in the hope of starting a business career there and began at the bottom end of the diamond trade working as a ‘kopje-walloper’, itinerant diamond buyers who scoured the mines each day in search of diggers selling small, cheap diamonds they could purchase on the spot. Facing hard times, he moved into a back room in a sleazy hotel, a notorious rendezvous for illicit diamond dealers, that was owned by his brother Harry. Together they managed to accumulate enough money to buy four claims in Kimberley in 1876, risking their entire capital. From such precarious beginnings, the mining interests of the Barnato Brothers began to prosper, albeit under a cloud of suspicion about the origin of their wealth. By 1878, their claims were bringing in an estimated £1,800 a week. By 1880, they had become major players in the diamond trade, with offices in London.
Another central figure was Alfred Beit, the son of a Hamburg merchant who was sent to Kimberley in 1875 at the age of twenty-two as the representative of a German diamond firm. A small, shy and unprepossessing man, he made his first fortune from property deals but became one of Kimberley’s leading experts on diamonds and a financial mastermind. Beit forged a lasting business partnership with Julius Wernher, a young German aristocrat who had arrived in Kimberley in 1873 as the agent for a Paris-based diamond merchant.
A young Englishman, Cecil Rhodes, also gained a foothold in the Griqualand mines. The son of a country parson, Rhodes had been sent from England to Natal in 1870 to work with his brother in a cotton-farming venture but had joined the rush to Griqualand a year later at the age of eighteen. Along with an English partner, Charles Rudd, he built up a stake in a part of De Beer’s mine where claims could be purchased more cheaply than in Kimberley mine. By the age of twenty-two, he was already wealthy, worth about £40,000. Together with a group of other claim-holders, Rhodes then set his sights on gaining control of the entire De Beers mine, launching a joint-stock company in 1880, naming it De Beers Mining Company.
As mining profits soared, Kimberley took on a more staid character. Under British supervision, the grog shops and black prostitutes that had made Saturday nights in Kimberley the stuff of legend were banished. The town boasted churches, chapels, a synagogue, schools, temperance societies and a public library. Streets were regularly watered to keep down the dust. On Main Street, the Craven Club, with its reading-room, card room and billiard room, provided a convenient rendezvous for well-to-do diggers. Nearby, the Varieties Theatre offered entertainment in elegant surroundings. A new residential suburb named Belgravia was laid out in 1875, attracting ‘leading merchants and men of leisure’ who built brick houses with all the trappings and comfort expected of a Victorian bourgeois lifestyle. A telegraph office opened in 1876, providing a direct link to Cape Town.
But Kimberley nevertheless still had the feel of a frontier town. Paying a visit to Kimberley in 1877, the English novelist and travel writer Anthony Trollope was impressed by the riches it produced but complained of the heat, the dust, the flies, the food, the living conditions, the high prices and the barren landscape. ‘There are places to which men are attracted by the desire of gain which seem to be so repulsive that no gain can compensate the miseries incidental to such an habitation,’ he wrote.
35
THE FELLOWSHIP OF AFRIKANERS
Boosted by the diamond bonanza, the Cape Colony in the 1870s enjoyed increased prosperity. Investment in railways, harbours and roads grew apace. The white population reached 250,000. In 1872, the Cape parliament voted to accept Britain’s offer of ‘responsible government’, enhancing local control. With growing confidence, Cape politicians also advocated the expansion of Cape influence further into southern Africa as a means of ensuring law, order and development. During the 1870s, the Cape government took on administrative responsibility for Basutoland and much of the Transkei territories lying between the Cape and Natal.
British officials concurred with the plan for Cape expansion and promoted the idea of establishing a self-governing British dominion in southern Africa that would underpin British supremacy in the region and prevent other European powers from meddling there. The British had become increasingly concerned by determined efforts by the Transvaal to extend its territory eastwards and gain access to the sea at Delagoa Bay that would enable it to escape from commercial dependence on colonial ports and break away from British domination. British supremacy in the interior was regarded as essential to the security of the Cape and Britain’s wider strategic and commercial interests.
In London, Britain’s colonial secretary, the Earl of Carnarvon, drew up plans for a ‘confederation’ of states linking British colonies, Boer republics and an assortment of African chiefdoms. The advantages of confederation, he told the ca
binet, were ‘very obvious’. It would encourage the flow of European immigration and capital; provide a more effective administration at less expense; and reduce the likelihood of demands for aid. Furthermore, it would assist the development of ‘a uniform, wise and strong policy’ towards ‘the native question’.
Carnarvon found few willing collaborators in the region, however. There were too many old grievances, too much distrust. For the Boer republics, cooperation with Britain meant only ‘die juk van Engeland’ – ‘the yoke of England’. Carnarvon managed to cobble together a conference in London in August 1876 attended by a variety of delegates from southern Africa, but made no headway.
But just when the cause of confederation seemed doomed, a dramatic turn of events in the Transvaal gave new life to the idea. In September 1876, President Thomas Burgers launched a war against Sekhukhune’s Pedi chiefdom, in the eastern Transvaal. The Boer attack carried high risks. The Transvaal was barely a functioning state. Its government was virtually bankrupt. Its burghers refused to pay taxes; banks refused to approve any more advances; public officials went unpaid. Land pledged for public and private debt was unsaleable. The Transvaal possessed no army. Its security depended on a commando system that required widely dispersed farming settlements to provide volunteers, arms and ammunition. The reservoir of white manpower was limited: the total population of about 40,000 whites was scattered over a vast terrain, outnumbered at every turn by indigenous Africans and constantly worried about the possibility of a black alliance rising against them. At most, only about 8,000 men, mostly farmers, were available for military service.
Sekhukhune, by contrast, ruled the most powerful chiefdom in the region. His army was fully equipped with guns purchased by Pedi migrant labourers with earnings from the diamond fields of Griqualand. His capital at Tsate in the Leolu mountains was heavily fortified. Nevertheless, responding to clamour from eastern Transvaal settlers for action against Sekhukhune, the Volksraad voted for war. Aware of the risks, Burgers assembled the largest expeditionary force the Transvaal had ever mobilised – 2,000 burghers, 2,400 Swazi warriors and 600 Transvaal African levies – and led it into the field himself, wearing a top hat and presidential sash.
Burgers’ campaign soon disintegrated. After an initial attack on the Pedi capital failed, the commandos streamed home. News of the Boer retreat, by the time it reached Cape Town, suggested that the Transvaal was in danger of imminent collapse. The British high commissioner in Cape Town, Sir Henry Barkly, telegraphed the Colonial Office in London: ‘Army of President totally routed. Deserters pouring into Pretoria.’
Carnarvon immediately saw an opportunity to intervene and ‘acquire at a stroke the whole of the Transvaal’. He appointed a Natal administrator, Theophilus Shepstone, to act as special commissioner to the Transvaal. Shepstone, like Carnarvon, was an ardent imperialist, keen to extend British paramountcy to the Transvaal highveld and convinced of the merits of the scheme for confederation. Shepstone’s remit, ostensibly, was to report on the state of affairs there and to assess the threat that native wars posed to British territories in southern Africa. In secret, he was given instructions to annex the Transvaal and to install himself as the first British governor.
In December 1876, Shepstone set out from the Natal capital of Pietermaritzburg, heading for the Transvaal highveld, accompanied by an escort of twenty-five troopers from the Natal Mounted Police, a small band of officials and an assortment of African grooms and servants. His staff included a twenty-year-old junior official, Rider Haggard. Haggard’s venture into the African interior was to provide him with a wealth of material for his novels, King Solomon’s Mines, She and Allan Quatermain.
Travelling at a leisurely pace, they reached Pretoria six weeks later. The Transvaal capital had begun its existence in 1854 as a kerkplaas, a place where a travelling dominee called at intervals to officiate at weddings and baptisms. It was still little more than a village, with a white population of only 2,000, notable for its simple cottages surrounded by gardens full of roses, willow trees and rows of vegetables. At the centre was Church Square, around which stood the Dutch Reformed Church and public buildings. It was here every three months that far-flung farming families and local residents would gather for nagmaal, a religious and social event when babies were baptised, marriages were celebrated and the square was cluttered with market stalls, tents and wagons. On the south side of the square stood the Raadzaal, a simple, single-storey thatched building where parliament assembled.
To Shepstone’s relief, he was given a cordial reception. The arrival of the British was seen as a welcome defence against the possibility of an attack by Sekhukhune’s army. Moreover, the British affirmed publicly that they intended to respect the Transvaal’s independence. In discussions between the two sides, however, it soon became evident that Shepstone was bent on annexation. He brushed aside a Volksraad resolution angrily rejecting annexation. In a letter to Carnarvon he claimed that he had received petitions from 2,500 residents supporting annexation. Moreover, he said, there were a million natives ‘placed like a dark fringe round a widely spread white population’ who resented Boer rule.
On 9 April, Shepstone informed Burgers that he planned to annex the Transvaal, whereupon Burgers informed Shepstone that he intended to issue a public protest. Two days later, at 11 in the morning, a group of eight British officials assembled in Church Square, amid the jumble of oxen and ox-wagons, to announce the decision, nervous about the reaction that might come. A small crowd, mostly English, gave a few cheers and the officials, breathing a sigh of relief, departed. Immediately afterwards, Burgers’ counter-proclamation was read out in Church Square by a member of the executive council. To avoid violence, he declared, the Transvaal government had agreed under protest to submit to British rule. There was no flag-raising ceremony to mark this latest acquisition of the British Empire. Shepstone thought it prudent to await the arrival of British troops from Natal.
Resentment among the Boer community over Britain’s arbitrary action ran deep, and resistance soon followed. In annexing the Transvaal, the British had united a collection of squabbling Boer factions, hitherto preoccupied with church and family matters, in a common cause to oust them.
The resistance was led by a retired commando leader and landowner, Paul Kruger, a legendary figure among the Boer community whose career epitomised the stubborn, resilient and resourceful character of the trekboers. Born in 1825 on a farm at Bulhoek on the northern frontier of the Cape Colony, he had been taught the Bible but otherwise had little formal education. He became instead a master of the frontier crafts – an expert hunter, horseman and guerrilla fighter. For a period of twenty years, he mixed farming with fighting, taking part in nine major campaigns against African chiefdoms, rising to the rank of the Transvaal’s commandant-general. He had retired in 1873, a respected elder commonly referred to as Oom Paul – Uncle Paul. His guide throughout his life, he maintained, was God and the Bible. He never read any book other than the Bible, knowing much of it by heart. He was convinced of the literal truth of biblical texts and constantly referred to them when making decisions and in everyday life. He belonged to the ‘Dopper’ Church, the Gereformeerde Kerk van Suid-Afrika, the smallest and most conservative of the Dutch Reformed churches in southern Africa, whose members saw themselves as closer to God than other groups and believed they possessed a special understanding of God’s purpose.
From the outset of their dealings with him, the British underestimated Kruger. They regarded him as an uneducated, ill-mannered backveld peasant steeped in bigotry – a takhaar, to use the Afrikaans word. Yet at a time when Britain’s imperial power was at its height, he was able to defy British prime ministers and generals for nearly a quarter of a century.
Kruger’s first tactic was to try to persuade the British government to hold a plebiscite of the white community. He travelled to England in May 1877 to put his case but was rebuffed. He travelled again to England in June 1878, this time armed with petitions signed by 6
,500 burghers demanding their independence back. But again he was rebuffed. Returning to the Transvaal in December 1878, he urged supporters wanting to take up arms to remain patient. The time, he told them, was not yet ripe. For one thing, there was a serious shortage of arms and ammunition.
The wave of anger over Britain’s annexation of the Transvaal meanwhile spread further afield, to the Boer communities of the Orange Free State and the Cape Colony, stimulating old grievances. In the Free State there was lingering resentment over the way the British had intervened in 1868 to annex Basutoland in response to Moshoeshoe’s plea for help just as it was about to be overrun by their own commandos; there was further outrage when the British snatched the diamond fields of Griqualand from its grasp in 1871. The Free State now found itself surrounded by British-run territories, imperilling its own independence.
In the Cape, it gave a huge boost to a nascent cultural and political movement led by Afrikaner intellectuals aggrieved by the growing cultural domination of the British colonial regime, in particular the use of English. English was the only official language of the colony and the language of commerce, law and administration. In 1875, a Dutch Reformed Church minister, Stephanus du Toit, joined several associates to found a society named Die Genootskap Van Regte Afrikaners – the Fellowship of True Afrikaners – dedicated to promoting the use of Afrikaans. Du Toit’s aim was to develop Afrikaans as a landstaal – a national language. Hitherto, Afrikaans had been commonly used only between masters and servants and among the poorer sections of the Boer community. Upper and middle-class Afrikaners, particularly those living in the western Cape, tended to speak ‘High Dutch’, the language of the Church and the Bible, and regarded the Zuid-Afrikaansche taal with disdain, dismissing it as Hotnotstaal, a ‘Hottentot’ language, or a kombuistaal – a kitchen language. They also used English to a considerable extent.
The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour Page 36
