All this added to the potpourri of disputes and grievances brewing among the uitlander population. Despite the huge profits they were beginning to make, the Randlords constantly moaned about the difficulties the industry faced. Whereas the price of diamonds was variable and had fluctuated wildly in the two decades before De Beers established its monopoly, the price of gold was fixed by international agreement at 85 shillings per fine ounce. The only way for the Randlords to win bigger profits was to cut costs. Yet the problems of cost-cutting proved intractable. Skilled white miners commanded premium salaries. A shortage of black labour meant higher wages were needed to attract workers. With the advent of deep-level mining, the high price of dynamite, fixed by Kruger’s monopoly concession, became an increasing irritant. There was similar resentment over Kruger’s refusal to join a customs union with the Cape and Natal, which resulted in imports for the mining industry being subjected to duties at Cape ports or at the Natal port of Durban, as well as duties imposed by the Transvaal; foodstuffs and beverages were also taxed. High railway charges on the three lines running into Johannesburg – from the Cape, Durban and Lourenço Marques – provided another source of grievance; the railway company given a monopoly of all railway traffic linking the Transvaal to the sea was able to levy exorbitant charges for coal, imported mining machinery and foodstuffs.
At the newly-built Rand Club, the uitlander elite – bankers, financiers, lawyers, engineers and businessmen – gathered to grumble and to plot against Kruger’s republic. Among the most prominent was Cecil Rhodes.
50
THE ROAD TO OPHIR
In 1890, at the age of thirty-seven, Cecil Rhodes reached a pinnacle of wealth and power. As chairman of De Beers, he controlled a virtual monopoly of both diamond production and marketing. His gold-mining venture, grandly named The Gold Fields of South Africa, had established a substantial foothold on the Witwatersrand. His political fortunes had also prospered. By cultivating links with Afrikaner politicians in the Cape Colony, he had gained the post of prime minister.
Moreover, his scheme to extend the realms of the British empire north of the Limpopo and to set up a new business domain there had made significant headway. At Rhodes’s behest, agents had travelled far into the interior, obtaining ‘treaties’ and ‘concessions’ from local chiefs. ‘Take all you can get and ask me afterwards,’ he told Captain Melville Heyman. Rhodes even attempted to snatch Katanga from King Leopold by sending emissaries to Msiri.
Rhodes’s main ambition in the north was to gain control of Zambesia, the lands between the Limpopo and the Zambezi, said to be rich in gold. In 1867, a German geologist Carl Mauch returned from travels in Mashonaland announcing that he had discovered two gold-bearing reefs, one of which he had traced for eighty miles, the other for twenty miles. ‘The vast extent and beauty of these goldfields are such that at a particular spot I stood as if transfixed, riveted to the place, struck with wonder at the sight.’ Mauch suggested that what he had found was the land of Ophir, a city mentioned in the Bible as the place from which King Solomon’s ships brought back gold.
The legend continued to grow. In 1881, a book written by a thirty-year-old elephant hunter, Fred Selous, about his journeys through Matabeleland, stimulated widespread interest in the region. Rider Haggard used Selous as the model for his hero Allan Quatermain when writing his novel King Solomon’s Mines. Published in 1885, King Solomon’s Mines became a bestseller, giving the legend popular status. Rhodes was among many others swept along by the idea. He was convinced he would find in Zambesia a ‘second rand’ even more valuable than the Witwatersrand.
The gateway to Zambesia was controlled by the Ndebele king, Lobengula, a son of Mzilikazi. The Ndebele army, consisting of 15,000 men in forty regiments based around Lobengula’s capital of GuBulawayo – ‘the place of slaughter’ – was feared throughout the region; for years, the Ndebele had raided neighbouring peoples – the Shona of Mashonaland, Tswana groups in northern Bechuanaland and the Lozi, Ila and Tonga to the north of the Zambezi – exacting tribute from them.
Like Mzilikazi, Lobengula was vigilant about the entry of whites into his domain. Military posts were established along the frontier, where all travellers were stopped, interrogated and detained for a week or more until the king allowed them to proceed – in his own phrase, ‘gave them the road’. A handful of missionaries were permitted to operate in Matabeleland. Lobengula tolerated their presence, as his father had done, recognising the advantage of being able to summon men who could read and write letters for him, but otherwise he gave them no encouragement. White hunters too were allowed to enter for limited periods. A handful of traders obtained permission to settle on the outskirts of Bulawayo, but their existence there was always dependent on the king’s whim.
Concession-hunters were given short shrift. They arrived bearing a cornucopia of gifts – rifles, ammunition, saddlery, furniture, household goods, even champagne, for which Lobengula acquired a particular liking – but he resolutely rejected their entreaties. In 1887, a young English adventurer, Frank Johnson, set out from Cape Town on behalf of a business syndicate to ask Lobengula’s permission to search for gold, silver and other minerals. He spent nearly three months at Bulawayo trying to coax him into giving him ‘the road’ to Mashonaland, offering him £100 for permission to prospect and £200 a year while digging lasted. But Lobengula remained suspicious of Johnson’s intentions: ‘You are troublesome people, for when I say there is no gold in my country you do not believe me and insist on going on . . . You speak good words now, but after this there will be trouble.’ However, after further interminable discussions, Lobengula agreed to give Johnson ‘the road’. Johnson travelled as far as the Mazoe Valley in Mashonaland where he came across plenty of evidence of alluvial deposits, but on his return to Bulawayo he found Lobengula in an angry mood. Johnson was accused of spying, murder and showing disrespect to the king. After agreeing to pay a fine of £100, ten blankets and ten tins of gunpowder, he was allowed to leave Matabeleland but travelled back to the Cape empty-handed.
Rhodes realised that if his venture into Zambesia was to succeed, he needed the imprimatur of the British government. The British government was keen to ensure that the interior beyond the Limpopo became accepted as part of Britain’s sphere of influence and did not fall into the hands of the Germans or the Portuguese or Kruger’s Transvaal; but ministers had no appetite for establishing new protectorates like Basutoland and Bechuanaland that were costly to run and provided no revenue. Rhodes’s hope was that the British government could be persuaded to grant him a royal charter to operate in Zambesia as it had done with George Goldie in Nigeria in 1886 and William Mackinnon in east Africa in 1888. In talks with ministers in London in 1888, Rhodes stressed that he would have no problem in securing funds to run a chartered company, thus absolving the government of any potential expense. His difficulty was that he possessed no concession in Matabeleland, or elsewhere in Zambesia, on which to base his plan for a chartered company.
The need for Rhodes to obtain a concession was therefore crucial. ‘If we get Matabeleland we shall get the balance of Africa,’ Rhodes confided to one of his supporters, Sir Sidney Shippard, the British administrator of Bechuanaland. In August 1888, Rhodes sent Charles Rudd, a trusted business partner, and two other associates to Bulawayo to wheedle some sort of concession from Lobengula. They faced stiff competition. Rudd counted some thirty other concession-hunters waiting around the king’s encampment. But by prior arrangement Shippard arrived from Bechuanaland to lend his weight as a British official, telling Lobengula that the Rudd party represented a group with substantial interests and the support of Queen Victoria. Though Lobengula held deep misgivings about a deal and many of his indunas (councillors) were vehemently opposed to one, soon after Shippard’s departure Lobengula decided to make his mark on an agreement.
The concession that Lobengula signed on 30 October 1888 agreeing to assign to Rudd’s party ‘the complete and exclusive charge over all metals and min
erals’ in his domains was highly controversial from the outset. Lobengula signed the document as ‘King of Matabeleland, Mashonaland and certain adjoining territories’, but his rule extended effectively over no more than Matabeleland. Mashonaland and other areas were subject to intermittent military raids but not ruled by him. Moreover, Lobengula was given the impression by Rudd that the concession restricted the amount of mining activity permitted. According to a British missionary, Charles Helm, who acted as interpreter, Rudd promised that no more than ten white men would be brought in to dig in his territory – a promise that was not included in the concession document.
In exchange, Rudd undertook to pay Lobengula and his successors £100 every month and to provide 1,000 Martini-Henry breech-loading rifles, together with 100,000 rounds of ammunition. It was the offer of guns more than any other factor that persuaded Lobengula to sign the concession, believing that it would help protect his independence; without it he had no reason to sign. Yet supplying arms and ammunition to Africans living outside the Cape Colony was not only illegal under Cape law and prohibited under the terms of an international treaty, but in flagrant breach of British policy.
On the basis of the Rudd concession, Rhodes hoped to convince the British government to award him a royal charter. But he still faced formidable difficulties. Rival concession-hunters in Bulawayo warned Lobengula that he had, in effect, ‘sold his country’. Alarmed by such talk, Lobengula announced that he was suspending the concession ‘pending an investigation’ and sent two indunas to London to ascertain whether ‘the Great White Queen’ really supported Rudd as he had claimed. Convinced that he had been tricked, Lobengula repeatedly disavowed the Rudd concession. ‘I will not recognise the paper as it contains neither my words nor the words of those who got it,’ he told the British government by letter. His case was supported in London by the missionary network and an array of critics opposed to Rhodes’s activities. Other claimants presented their own demands. But one by one, through bribes and inducements, Rhodes ‘squared’ them all.
British ministers too harboured doubts about Rhodes. In government circles he was regarded as a troublesome Cape nationalist. But Britain’s prime minister, Lord Salisbury, eventually concluded that Rhodes’s venture – the British South Africa Company – offered the best prospect of extending British hegemony in southern Africa at no cost to the exchequer. It could be used as a financially self-supporting arm of imperial policy.
Accordingly, the British South Africa Company was formally granted a royal charter by Queen Victoria on 29 October 1889, with a remit similar to that of a government. Whereas Lobengula had granted Rudd a concession assigning to him no more than the right to mine metals and minerals, the royal charter empowered the BSA Company to build roads, railways and telegraphs; to establish and authorise banking; to award land grants; to negotiate treaties; to promulgate laws; to maintain a company police force, the BSA police; and to aid and promote immigration.
Once in possession of a royal charter, Rhodes lost no time in organising an armed expedition to Zambesia. Because Lobengula refused to give him ‘the road’ through Bulawayo, he decided instead, after listening to the advice of Fred Selous, to divert the expedition around the eastern fringes of Matabeleland and take a direct route to Mashonaland, avoiding Bulawayo altogether. Selous had recently returned from a prospecting trip to Mashonaland and suggested that the expedition should head for a hill near the source of the Mazoe River that he had named Mount Hampden. The tract of highveld there, he said, was the best-suited area for European occupation that he had encountered in the whole of southern Africa. Rhodes duly hired Selous as the expedition’s chief guide.
In June 1890, the expedition set out from its base camp on the northern bank of the Limpopo in Bechuanaland. It consisted of 186 volunteers – ‘pioneers’, as they were called – and a paramilitary force of 500 police equipped with field guns and machine guns. The pioneers were provided with uniforms and weapons. Each was paid seven shillings and sixpence a day and promised fifteen mining claims and 1,500 morgen (about 3,000 acres) of land. Many were prospectors drawn by stories that gold could be found in abundance, close to the surface, but at Rhodes’s insistence there was a cross-section of other trades and skills. Also in the column was an assortment of African scouts, drivers, artisans, cooks and labourers, numbering nearly a thousand.
After traversing the lowveld of the Limpopo valley, the column climbed up into the open grasslands of Mashonaland, passing by the stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe which the geologist Carl Mauch had suggested could once have been the capital of Ophir. On 12 September, after a journey of 400 miles, the main party of settlers and police reached the vicinity of Mount Hampden. At a ceremony the next day, they hoisted the Union flag up a crooked msasa pole, gave three lusty cheers for the Queen and named the spot Fort Salisbury.
But the land of Ophir turned out to be no more than a myth. The pioneers found plenty of evidence of old gold workings, but few signs of surface gold that they could easily exploit. Torrential summer rains added to their woes. In December, the supply route from Kimberley, 800 miles away, was cut by flooded rivers and impassable wagon tracks. Rhodes’s British South Africa Company was itself in acute difficulty. By March 1891, most of the cash it had raised from the sale of shares – £600,000 – had been spent. In the absence of a gold bonanza, the company’s Mashonaland administrator, Dr Starr Jameson, a crony of Rhodes from Kimberley, handed out land on a wholesale basis to syndicates and speculators on promises that they would plough in investment. By 1893, more than two million acres had been designated as white farmland. But few farms were developed.
Frustrated by the lack of pickings in Mashonaland, white settlers looked covetously at Matabeleland, believing it offered better prospects. Jameson too favoured action against Lobengula’s kingdom. When Lobengula sent a warrior group into Mashonaland to take reprisals against a Shona chief for cattle theft, Jameson used the incident to press the case for a war of conquest. He cabled to Rhodes: ‘We have the excuse for a row over murdered women and children now and the getting of Matabeleland open would give us a tremendous lift in shares and everything else. The cost of the campaign could be kept to a minimum by paying volunteers in land, gold and loot [cattle].’
Rhodes concurred and agreed to sell £50,000 worth of shares to finance the war. Given free rein, Jameson ordered the purchase of a thousand horses from the Transvaal and the Cape Colony and issued contracts to volunteers promising them 3,000 morgen of land (6,350 acres) ‘in any part of Matabeleland’, twenty gold claims and ‘loot’. By October, he had assembled a force of 650 volunteers and 900 Shona auxiliaries.
In Bulawayo, Lobengula sent protests to British officials and to Queen Victoria, repeatedly making clear that he wanted to avoid conflict. But it was to no avail. Armed with machine guns and artillery, Rhodes’s army mowed down Ndebele defenders in their hundreds. Facing defeat, Lobengula ordered the destruction of his capital and fled northwards. He died a few weeks later after drinking poison.
Rhodes arrived in Bulawayo in December and authorised Jameson to hand out cattle, land and mining concessions to the volunteers. A ‘Loot Committee’ was established to manage the distribution of Ndebele cattle. Virtually all the highveld for sixty miles around Bulawayo, the very heart of Ndebele territory, was pegged out as white farmland. The Ndebele themselves were assigned two ‘native reserves’ in outlying areas.
In 1894, the British government recognised the British South Africa Company’s jurisdiction over Matabeleland and left Rhodes to rule there as he saw fit. And in 1895 the company adopted the name of Rhodesia in place of Zambesia to describe its territories there. ‘Well, you know,’ Rhodes told a friend, ‘to have a bit of country named after one is one of the things a man might be proud of.’
51
MARCHING TO PRETORIA
With so much money and power at his disposal, Rhodes’s pursuit of territory became relentless. ‘I would annex the planets if I could,’ he once told a London jou
rnalist. He acquired ‘exclusive mineral rights’ in Barotseland, north of the Zambezi (western Zambia) for a payment of £2,000. He obtained a treaty in Manicaland (eastern Zimbabwe), a hundred miles from the Indian Ocean coastline, conferring not only mineral rights but granting monopolies of public works, including railways; banking; coining money; and the manufacture of arms and ammunition – all for an annual subsidy of £100. He financed the occupation of the Lake Nyasa region (Malawi) to keep it out of Portuguese hands.
He became obsessed with the idea of gaining access to the coast of Mozambique, making repeated efforts to acquire Delagoa Bay from the Portuguese. On his first visit to Pretoria as the Cape’s prime minister in November 1890, he proposed acting in collusion with Kruger to get it.
RHODES: We must work together. I know that the Republic needs a seaport. You must have Delagoa Bay.
KRUGER: How can we work together that way? The port belongs to the Portuguese, and they will never give it up.
RHODES: We must simply take it.
KRUGER: I can’t take the property of other people . . . a curse rests upon ill-gotten goods.
His overall objective, as he explained to an Afrikaner audience in the Cape in 1891, was to establish a union of all southern African states, led by the Cape. ‘The Cape,’ he said, ‘should stretch from Cape Town to the Zambezi with one system of laws, one method of government and one people.’
In a long conversation he had with Queen Victoria in December 1894, he dwelt on the same theme. When she opened the conversation by asking him politely, ‘What are you engaged on at present, Mr Rhodes?’ he replied, ‘I am doing my best to enlarge Your Majesty’s dominions.’ Since they had last met, he said, he had added 12,000 square miles of territory. But there was more to be done. He expressed his belief that the Transvaal – ‘which we ought never to have given up’ – would ultimately return to the Empire, an idea the Queen found gratifying.
The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour Page 47
