The British government, however, spurned their demands, insisting that the Transvaal remain a part of the British empire. All that ministers were prepared to concede was a form of self-government, a proposal that Kruger dismissed out of hand. ‘I will try to explain to you what this self-government, in my opinion, means,’ he told his supporters. ‘They say to you, “First put your head quietly in the noose, so that I can hang you up: then you may kick your legs about as much as you please!” That is what they call self-government.’
Having made no progress, Kruger concluded that war was inevitable. ‘The general conviction was now arrived at that further meetings and friendly protests were useless,’ he said in his memoirs. ‘The best course appeared to be to set quietly to work and to prepare for the worst by the purchase of arms and ammunition. The great prudence and the strictest secrecy had to be observed in order to avoid suspicion.’
Oblivious of the danger, convinced of British superiority, British officials continued to stamp their authority on the Transvaal, making determined efforts to enforce tax-collection measures. Boer resistance to paying taxes had been commonplace even during the days of Boer rule. Now British taxation demands became the trigger for full-scale rebellion.
In December 1880, some 5,000 burghers assembled at a farm called Paardekraal, near present-day Krugersdorp, spoiling for a fight. After three days of deliberation and a pause in the proceedings on the Sabbath, they resolved to proclaim the Transvaal’s independence, to reconstitute the old Volksraad and to establish a republican government. At its head was an executive triumvirate that included Kruger. Before the burghers dispersed, they built a memorial to the new unity of the volk. Each man gathered a stone from the hillside and one by one, walking by in single file, laid the stone to form a huge cairn around a pole bearing the old republican flag, the Vierkleur, each stone a symbol that the burghers had sworn loyalty to each other to fight to the death in the republic’s defence.
A copy of the proclamation declaring a republic was sent to British officials, together with a covering letter written in diplomatic terms:
We declare in the most solemn manner that we have no desire to spill blood, and that from our side we do not wish war. It lies in your hands to force us to appeal to arms in self-defence, which may God forbid. If it comes so far, we will do so with the deepest reverence for Her Majesty the Queen of England and her flag . . .
The Boer plan was to establish a new temporary capital at the small highveld town of Heidelberg, sixty miles south of Pretoria, guard the frontier with Natal and lay siege to British garrisons across the Transvaal. Boer commanders estimated that they could count on 7,000 mounted burghers. Kruger hoped that volunteers from the Orange Free State would also enlist and wrote to President Brand and the Volksraad in Bloemfontein appealing for support. ‘Whether we conquer or die, freedom will come to Africa as surely as the sun rises through tomorrow’s clouds – as freedom reigns in the United States. Then shall it be from the Zambesi to Simon’s Bay, Africa for the Afrikanders.’
The war of independence, as the Boers called it, amounted to little more than one ambush and three skirmishes. After a column of British troops was ambushed on its way to Pretoria, the British commander, General Sir George Colley, assembled a field force from units in Natal – consisting of 1,400 men, an 80-strong naval brigade, artillery and Gatling guns – and led it to a strategic pass on the Natal-Transvaal border called Laing’s Nek. Colley’s assault on Boer positions there ended in disarray, with heavy casualties. A second engagement to protect his supply lines resulted in more heavy casualties. In the space of ten days, he lost a quarter of his field force, either dead or wounded.
Hoping to retrieve his reputation, Colley ignored the chance of an armistice and conceived the idea of seizing the summit of a massive flat-topped hill called Majuba that overlooked Laing’s Nek and commanded the country for miles around. He prepared his plan largely in secret, informing only two officers, and made no proper reconnaissance of the area. Colley’s force reached the summit just before dawn without difficulty, but Boer forces also managed to scale the heights during the day, largely unseen. Under Boer fire, the British perimeter began to crumble then collapsed. As panic took hold, terrified soldiers sprinted for the rear, then fled down the hillside. In yet another humiliating episode, the British were swept off the summit within thirty minutes. Elite units had been routed by irregulars dressed in civilian corduroy trousers and floppy-brimmed hats.
Despite clamour at home to ‘Avenge Majuba’, the British government had no appetite for further conflict. Majuba had brought an end to Britain’s ‘forward’ policy. In March, Britain reached a preliminary agreement with Kruger conceding independence, subject only to a vague and ill-defined reservation about ‘the suzerainty of Her Majesty’. A final agreement was publicly announced on 3 August 1881 at a ceremony in Church Square, Pretoria. The announcement was made by the new British high commissioner, Sir Hercules Robinson, speaking perched on a hastily built platform of planks and straw bales, dressed in full pro-consular attire and plumed hat. Despite the pomp, all that it amounted to was a device to extricate Britain from the Transvaal with minimum embarrassment.
To celebrate the return of the Transvaal’s independence, Kruger organised a four-day ‘festival of thanksgiving’ at Paardekraal, using the occasion to promote the Calvinist concept of national calling and destiny. Speaking before a crowd of 12,000 Boers, he reminded them of the early struggle of the voortrekkers and of how each time God had guided them onward. The Great Trek, he said, was like the journey of the Israelites of the Old Testament leaving Egypt to escape the pharaoh’s yoke and he cited it as evidence that God had summoned the Boers on a similar mission to establish a promised land in southern Africa. They were thus a chosen people. The Boer victory in 1881, he said, was a sign of God’s continuing commitment to them.
Elected as president of the Transvaal in 1883, Kruger retained a simple lifestyle. At his house on Church Street in Pretoria, set back only six feet from the road outside, he kept the front door wide open during the day ready to welcome all who came to see him, friends and strangers alike. Much business was conducted on the stoep, or veranda, at the front of the house. The back stoep was used to store biltong – dried meat. In the back garden, Kruger kept cows.
His ambitions for the Transvaal were similarly modest. The government’s finances remained precarious. It depended for revenue on a pastoral economy and a small gold-mining industry in the Lydenburg district of the eastern Transvaal. The first ‘payable’ gold discoveries had been made there in 1872 near the eastern escarpment, where the great Transvaal plateau breaks and drops away to the lowveld and the coast. Diggers poured in from Delagoa Bay, the nearest port, traversing a stretch of wild, disease-ridden bushland to get there. But the gold finds were limited and the revenue they generated was meagre.
Short of funds, Kruger was persuaded by an enterprising Hungarian adventurer, Hugo Nellmapius, that a useful method for the state to raise money was to sell monopoly concessions to independent businessmen. What the Transvaal needed, Nellmapius said, was its own industries producing basic products such as clothing, blankets, leather, flour and sugar, protected by high tariff walls to ensure their viability. What was lacking was entrepreneurial initiative. Any new enterprise involved high risk. But the government could overcome this by offering ‘privileges, patents, monopolies, bonuses et cetera’.
Nellmapius proposed only a small beginning, but the idea he put forward, once it took hold, was to have momentous consequences. He asked for two monopolies, one for distilling liquor from local grain and other raw materials, the other for producing sugar from beets and maize. Since the cost of building and operating a factory would be at least £100,000, he said, his concession would have to last for at least fifteen years. In return, he was prepared to make an annual contribution to the Treasury of £1,000, paid in advance. Nellmapius’s scheme for a fifteen-year liquor concession was duly approved by the executive council and th
e Volksraad.
The Transvaal’s first factory – built to produce liquor – began production in 1883. Despite Kruger’s abhorrence of liquor, he nevertheless agreed to preside over the opening ceremony. While other guests indulged in champagne and sampled the distillery’s first output – a rough, fiery gin – Kruger sipped milk. He remarked that although he himself disliked liquor, he did not regard its production as a sin. He spoke of the factory as ‘De Volks-Hoop’ – the people’s hope – providing employment for burghers and encouragement for agricultural producers. A large poster decorating one of the walls read: ‘A Concession Policy is the Making of the Country’.
Kruger was also persuaded of the need to recruit foreign expertise to bolster the Transvaal’s administration. Though determined to protect the Boer character of the Transvaal from foreign influence, he recognised that, with only a limited pool of trained manpower available among Transvaalers, foreign recruitment was unavoidable. His solution was to appeal for immigrants from Holland. ‘I apprehend the least danger from an invasion from Holland,’ he said. Over the course of the next fifteen years, more than 5,000 Dutch immigrants arrived in the Transvaal, reinforcing the ranks of civil servants and teachers.
But Kruger was allowed little respite from the attention of foreigners. In 1885, news arrived in Pretoria of a major gold discovery on the eastern border of the Transvaal. The editor of the Pretoria Press, Leo Weinthal, recorded Kruger’s reaction. After remaining silent, lost in thought, Kruger remarked, with Old Testament fervour:
Do not talk to me of gold, the element which brings more dissension, misfortune and unexpected plagues in its trails than benefits. Pray to God, as I am doing, that the curse connected with its coming may not overshadow our dear land just after it has come again to us and our children. Pray and implore Him who has stood by us that He will continue to do so, for I tell you today that every ounce of gold taken from the bowels of our soil will yet have to be weighed up with rivers of tears.
The gold strike at the village of Barberton prompted a rush of fortune-seekers from all over the world. Barberton rapidly turned into a boom town, becoming the largest centre of population in the Transvaal. Thousands of claims were pegged; new companies were launched by the score; and millions of share certificates were sold. From dawn until late at night, the Barberton stock exchange was the scene of frantic activity. Investors in Britain scrambled to buy Barberton gold shares.
But the boom soon turned to bust. Most companies never produced so much as an ounce of gold; many were straight swindles, set up to lure investors with bogus prospectuses. Though there were exceptionally rich pockets of gold scattered about the Barberton field, only five mines proved to be viable. Hundreds of fortune-seekers who had arrived with hope and enthusiasm trudged back penniless to Pretoria and Cape Town, some in rags. London investors lost huge sums. After such a disastrous debut on world markets, South African gold shares were viewed with deep distrust.
Then in 1886, an itinerant English prospector, George Harrison, who had worked in the goldfields of Australia as well as the eastern Transvaal, stumbled across a gold-bearing rocky outcrop on a farm called Langlaagte – Long Shallow Valley – in an area that Boer farmers called the Witwatersrand. Together with a colleague, George Walker, a former Lancashire coal miner, Harrison had been heading on foot to Barberton when he was offered work building a cottage on Langlaagte for a Boer widow, Petronella Oosthuizen. In April, Harrison and Walker signed a contract with the Oosthuizen family permitting them to prospect for gold. In May, Harrison hurried to Pretoria to secure a prospecting licence, taking with him a sample of gold-bearing rock which he showed to Kruger. He was duly named the ‘zoeker’ – the discoverer – of the find and awarded a free claim. But Harrison decided to move on, selling his claim for £10. Beneath lay the richest goldfield ever discovered.
38
THE MOST POWERFUL COMPANY IN THE WORLD
A new phase in diamond mining at Kimberley opened in 1885 that was to transform the industry’s prospects. After years of grappling with devastating reef falls in open-cast pits, mining companies began to experiment with underground operations, constructing shafts and tunnels to reach deep-level diggings. Though the costs of establishing underground operations were high, production and profits soared. The deep-level diggings, moreover, proved to contain even richer diamond deposits.
The introduction of underground mining, together with the increasing use of steam engines and other machinery, brought major changes to the organisation of the labour force. Rather than using white overseers, mining companies needed skilled miners. They were recruited from the coal mines of Cumberland and the tin mines of Cornwall; shaft sinkers came from Lancashire; artisans from the factories of Scotland and England. The number of colonial whites employed in the mines fell to just 10 per cent of the white labour force.
New laws were approved introducing a legal colour bar between white and black employees. Whereas British administrators had previously resisted legal discrimination, mining legislation in 1883 decreed that ‘no native is to be permitted to manipulate explosives or prepare the same for blasting or other purposes’. Blasting had to be carried on ‘under the supervision of a European’. Subsequent legislation ruled that: ‘No native shall work or be allowed to work in any mine, whether in open or underground workings, excepting under the responsible charge of some particular white man as his master or “baas”’.
To ensure a more reliable supply of black labour, mining companies organised their own system of recruitment. Recruits were required to agree to contracts running for six to twelve months rather than three to six. Their living conditions also changed. Originally, diggers had accommodated black workers on their compounds or encampments in tents or sheds. Subsequently, they were housed in barracks. From 1885, mining companies required black workers to live in fenced and guarded compounds on their property for the entire term of their contract. Closed compounds had the advantage of preventing diamond theft. They also provided mineowners with greater control of the labour force.
By 1889, all 10,000 black mineworkers in Kimberley were accommodated in closed compounds. Some discussion ensued about the idea of incorporating white employees into the compound system. But the idea was not pursued. Whites were permitted to live in the town, leaving blacks confined to segregated compounds.
The success of underground operations, however, raised once more a spectre that had overshadowed the industry since the 1870s: increases in production eventually led to price falls and declining profitability. As companies competed to raise production to gain higher profits, so simultaneously did they increase the risks of wiping out profits altogether.
The solution had long been foreseen: a monopoly company in control of the entire industry. Several attempts at amalgamation were made, but none succeeded. The only option left was for the major companies to fight it out among themselves for control. By 1885, the total number of companies had been reduced to about one hundred: nineteen in Kimberley mine; ten in De Beers; thirty-seven in Dutoitspan; and thirty-two in Bultfontein.
Two companies emerged as the most likely nuclei for a diamond mining monopoly: Kimberley Central, in which Alfred Beit was involved, and De Beers, Cecil Rhodes’s main vehicle. Both companies set about crushing smaller rivals by producing as many diamonds as possible. In 1886, Kimberley Central alone produced more stones than either the Dutoitspan or the Bultfontein mines and almost as many as the entire De Beers mine, boosting Central’s revenues but keeping carat prices low. De Beers developed its operations at breakneck speed, doubling the amount of ground it excavated in the process, showing, according to a bank report, ‘a reckless disregard for human life’. With accidents multiplying and disease rife, the death rate in the mine reached 150 per thousand employed.
Appointed chairman of De Beers in 1886, Rhodes relentlessly pursued the surviving independent companies in the De Beers mine. In 1887, in collaboration with Beit, he gained control of the last one left. De Beers thus became the
first mine in Griqualand West to come under the control of a single company. In his report to the De Beers annual meeting in May 1887, Rhodes declared that amalgamation would enable the diamond industry to gain the position it ought to occupy, ‘that is, not at the mercy of the buyers, but the buyers under the control of the producers’.
Alongside his business activities, Cecil Rhodes developed political ambitions. His initial foray was to stand as one of the members of parliament for Griqualand West, soon after it was incorporated as a new province of the Cape Colony in 1880. His main purpose was to get the Cape government to build a railway linking Kimberley to the ports to alleviate mining company costs. A prominent politician in the Cape parliament, Thomas Fuller, remembered Rhodes in 1881, at the age of twenty-seven, as a ‘tall, broad-shouldered man, with face and figure of somewhat loose formation’:
His hair was auburn, carelessly flung over his forehead, his eyes of bluish-grey, dreamy but kindly. But the mouth – aye, that was the ‘unruly member’ of his face. With deep lines following the curve of the moustache, it had a determined, masterful and sometimes scornful expression. Men cannot, of course, think or feel with their mouths, but the thoughts and feelings of Cecil Rhodes soon found their way to that part of his face. At its best it expressed determined purpose – at its worst, well, I have seen storms of passion gather about it and twist it into unlovely shapes.
As well as campaigning for a rail link for Kimberley, he was active in pressing for legislation to suit the interests of large mining companies such as De Beers. To ensure that his speeches were well reported and hoping to influence public opinion, Rhodes bought a controlling interest in the Cape Argus, the main newspaper in the Cape. The deal cost him £6,000. It was concluded in the utmost secrecy. Rhodes wanted the Argus to support him but to retain the semblance of an independent newspaper.
The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour Page 38
