The Victorians
Page 76
This was a world which was stiflingly, overpoweringly male. The army and navy, the civil service, the Houses of Parliament were all male. The Imperial adventurers who pushed back the frontiers of, and the local commissioners and governors who pacified and administered, the Empire were all male. It is an obvious fact, but it can hardly be overstated. Rather than thinking we have explained Kipling or Baden-Powell by uncovering homoeroticism in their psyche, we can, in our efforts to catch their accents and learn their language, only wonder at the maleness of their world. Kipling and Baden-Powell were friends. In the year of the siege of Mafeking, Kipling published his classic story of public-school life Stalky and Co. (‘India’s full of Stalkies – the Cheltenham and Haileybury and Marlborough chaps – that we don’t know anything about and the surprises will begin when there is a really big row on.’)10 You can see in Kipling’s story the origins of the Scout movement which Baden-Powell would start after the Boer War: ‘In summer all right-minded boys built huts in the furze-hill behind the College – little lairs whittled out of the heart of the prickly bushes, full of stumps, odd root-ends and spikes.’11 It is in a sense true that ‘towards the end of the 1890s, Kipling invented Baden-Powell’,12 and certainly no surprise that Kipling wrote songs for the scout movement, most notably, ‘All Patrols, Look Out’.
The Empire was the creation, in Kipling’s devastatingly honest phrase, of ‘flannelled fools at the wicket and muddied oafs at the goal’, or to put it as politely as A.C. Benson (author of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’), those ‘well-groomed, well-mannered, rational manly boys all taking the same view of things, all doing the same things, smiling politely at the eccentricity of anyone who finds matter for serious interest in books, art or music’.13
Its philistine boyishness is part of the innocence of the British Imperial world, and part of the charm that those young enough to have no part in post-colonial guilt or angst can enjoy in the schoolboy yarns of G.A. Henty or, a little later, in the adventure stories of John Buchan.
Perhaps the most exciting, and at the same time definitive, ripping yarn in this genre was Rider Haggard’s (1856–1925) King Solomon’s Mines (1885). It is a classic quest-story. Allan Quatermain, the hero of several of Haggard’s tales, is a big-game hunter and explorer in Africa. Page one promises a narrative of pure joy – ‘I am laid up here at Durban with the pain in my left leg. Ever since that confounded lion got hold of me I have been liable to this trouble …’ And no reader need fear that what is on offer is for girls or cissies – ‘I can safely say that there is not a petticoat in the whole history.’ In fact, once the adventure is under way and the Europeans, with the help of an old sixteenth-century map and letter left by a Portuguese explorer, have set out in search of the lost treasures of King Solomon, one of the party, rightly named Good, falls in love with an African woman. She conveniently dies, with the words, ‘Say to my lord, Bongwan, that – I love him, and that I am glad to die because I know that he cannot cumber his life with such as I am, for the sun may not mate with darkness, nor the white with the black.’14
The African guide, Umbopa, turns out to be Ignosi, the true king of the Kukuana tribe, and he it is, after their hair-raising adventures, in which they see the remarkable mines and very nearly get trapped there forever among the frozen stalagmites, who delivers the damning verdict:
‘Now do I learn,’ said Ignosi bitterly, and with flashing eyes, ‘that ye love the bright stones more than me, your friend. Ye have the stones; now ye would go to Natal and across the moving black water and sell them, and be rich, as it is the desire of a white man’s heart to be. Cursed for your sake be the white stones, and cursed be he who seeks them. Death shall it be to him who sets foot in the place of Death to find them. I have spoken. White men, ye can go.’15
Writing about Haggard’s mythopoetic masterpiece She, V.S. Pritchett coined a magnificent phrase. Whereas E.M. Forster had once spoken of the novelist sending down a bucket into the unconscious, Haggard, Pritchett said, ‘installed a suction pump. He drained the whole reservoir of the public’s desires.’16 If this is true of the eternal woman – She Who Must Be Obeyed, which, while remaining a popular page-turner, comes close to being a great work of art and is a great work of myth-making – it is to a lesser extent true of King Solomon’s Mines.
It was published when Haggard, the son of a Suffolk squire, was twenty-nine years old. It was the first popular novel in English to treat of Africa. The Scramble for Africa was in full swing and the Jingoistic public were thrilled by Haggard’s story of a group of intrepid English gentlemen confronting the mysterious cultures of contemporary Africa and of lost antiquity. But it is not simply a tale of derring-do. Even though King Solomon’s treasures remain sealed inside the mountain, Quatermain and his friends manage to scramble out with enough stones stuffed into their pockets to make them rich for life.
The novel nicely balances the heroism of the explorers, the avarice which prompted them to venture into the dark continent, and the piety they feel about the superiority of their own culture to that of the African. To this degree one sees why J.K. Stephen linked Haggard to the unofficial Laureate of Imperialism, looking forward to a time ‘when the Rudyards cease from Kipling and the Haggards Ride no more’. Kipling spent more and more time in Africa – South Africa – and liked not merely the landscape and the climate but the attitude of the whites. He was to write ‘Recessional’, the great hymn for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and saw it as part of the British duty to subdue ‘lesser breeds without the Law’. That was – to use another of his phrases which entered the language – ‘the White Man’s Burden’.
Many of Kipling’s ideals – and those of his generation – were incarnate in a young man who had made himself a millionaire from diamonds. When Kipling was introduced to him, this pudgy mustachioed figure, prematurely aged, asked Kipling, ‘What is your dream?’ ‘You are part of it,’ Kipling replied.17
Cecil Rhodes, the son of a Hertfordshire parson, first sailed for Africa – the east coast – when he was seventeen, in 1870. It was in the fates that he would give his name to two great African countries, Northern and Southern Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe). Whether he actually placed his hand on the map of Africa and said, ‘That is my dream – all British’18 – or in another version, ‘all red’19 – he certainly believed that in an ideal universe, Britain would hold dominion not merely over the Dark Continent, but over the world itself. In his ‘Confession’, written when he was a very young man, Rhodes even dreamed of the readmission of the United States to the Empire. True, ‘without the low-class Irish and German emigrants’ that great nation would be a greater asset. ‘If we had retained America there would … be millions more of English living … Since we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.’20
It is probably safe to say that there is no one alive on the planet who now thinks as Rhodes thought. Of course, there are those who, in an attempt to shock or amuse, might pretend to be British Imperialist, though with only a few outposts of rock in St Helena, Gibraltar or the Falkland Islands remaining of the Empire, it must be difficult, even as an affectation, to sustain the Rhodesian vision. Equally, there would be those, in far larger numbers, and not merely British or white, who might wish for a balanced view of the Empire. They might say, ‘True, attitudes were expressed by the Empire-builders which shock a modern sensibility; and some unpleasant things happened; but the Empire brought good as well as bad to almost all the countries under its sway. There were countries which positively benefited from the educational system or the railway or the administrative skills into which they were initiated by the well-meaning British.’ But while these views in themselves would be shocking to many of our contemporaries, they come nowhere near Rhodes’s almost mystic sense that the British would inherit the Earth. Benson’s great anthem, however, ‘Wider still and wider, shall thy bounds be set! God who made thee mighty – make thee mightier yet!’ – bellowed now with so
me irony at the Last Night of the Prom Concerts each year in the Albert Hall – was once sung seriously. It was a creed for two generations of Englishmen, and fashioned the foreign policy of British governments and the general attitude of the British public down until 1945.
Those who witnessed the demolition of the statue of Rhodes in the middle of Harare (formerly Salisbury, the capital of Southern Rhodesia) in August 1980 saw something which in the Western world was comparable to the removal of the representations first of Stalin, next of Lenin in the old Soviet Union. To many a young Russian, it must seem hard to understand how the older generation were ‘brainwashed’ into admiring Lenin; it would be harder for him or her to see that by absorbing the new anti-communist ideology they had also submitted to a set of doctrines – for example that capitalism spells freedom – which might seem quaint to a later generation.
Likewise the post-colonial Britain is in a poor position to understand Rhodes and his generation, not least because though popular with the majority, he and his vision of Empire were deplored by some of his contemporaries. ‘Rhodes had no principles whatever to give to the world. He had only a hasty but elaborate machinery for spreading the principles he had not got. What he called his ideals were the dregs of Darwinism which had already grown not only stagnant but poisonous’ – G.K. Chesterton.21 Beatrice Webb, though she believed war, when it came, inevitable, blamed it on ‘the impossible combination in British policy of Gladstonian sentimental Christianity with the blackguardism of Rhodes and Jameson’.22
The diamonds which so fired Rider Haggard’s imagination had begun to be discovered on Afrikaner farms in 1866. Between 1870 and 1880, gems of vast size and value had been found in the midst of country farmed for generations by Dutch settlers. Of course, ownership of the diamonds was contested, and of the land in which they were found. By 1870 5,000 diamond-seekers had arrived to look for jewels in the rivers. Cecil Rhodes arrived at the diggings in 1871, coming from his brother’s cotton farm in Natal. Within months of establishing himself at the mine (named Kimberley after the British secretary of state for the colonies) Rhodes had gone into partnership with a man called Charles Rudd. In 1873 they had an ice-making machine in operation, in 1874 they imported heavy-duty pumping machinery from Britain, transporting it 600 miles by ox wagon from the Cape. They won the water-pumping contract for the whole mine. By 1887 Rhodes’s De Beers Mining Company had full control of the large De Beers Mine, and he soon had control of the Kimberley mines too.
The pickings, or winnings, were prodigious. In 1886 there had been a rumour of gold, discovered along the ridge known by the Afrikaners as the Witwatersrand (white water ridge) near Pretoria. In fact the ore was low-grade, but the Kimberley diamond magnates could afford to invest in heavy machinery to mine at a depth of two and a half thousand feet where the best gold was found. Rhodes was there, forming the Consolidated Goldfields of South Africa in 1892.
Rhodes and Rudd wanted to exploit the gold potential in Matabeleland, and they approached King Lobengula with the so-called Rudd Concession. They agreed to pay the king and his heirs £100 per month, as well as 1,000 Martini-Henry breech-loading rifles and cartridges and a steamboat with guns, in effectual exchange for all the mineral wealth in his territory.
You can measure Rhodes’s achievement by surveying the map of Southern Africa in 1870 and comparing it with the same in 1895, when he had annexed, with the blessing of the British government and Crown, Mashonaland, Matabeleland, all the territory which is now Zambia and Zimbabwe. He also notoriously had his eye on the Afrikaner territories in Bechuanaland, where the unsuccessful Jameson raid took place at the end of 1895. It was the beginning of the end for Rhodes – he was forced to resign as prime minister of the Cape. But in another sense, it did his career and reputation no harm at home. The public was openly pro-Jameson. The new colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, encouraged Rhodes to create the new territories of Rhodesia and to move towards the dominance of South Africa as a whole. It is not surprising that the Boers, the descendants of those Dutch settlers who had first come to the Cape in 1652, should have viewed with dismay those they called outsiders or Uitlanders.
The Afrikaners, back in the 1830s, had made a mass exodus from the Cape Colony. About 10,000 of them had made their way to the Transvaal for an independent life. Those who had made the Great Trek were known as the Voortrekkers, the pioneers. One of these Voortrekkers, who had left the Cape Colony with his parents in 1835 when he was ten years old, was the formidable president of the Transvaal: Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger, a strange giant of a man who with his hooded eyes, his whiskers, his stoop and his air of religious melancholy bears in some photographs a striking resemblance to Lord Salisbury himself. Whereas Salisbury was a High Church Anglican, who irritated Archbishop Benson by his cynicism and flippancy, Kruger was a fervent adherent of the ‘Doppers’, the most uncompromising of the three South African Reformed Churches. He knew much of the Bible by heart and believed in the literal truth of its every word. The annexation of the Transvaal by the British in 1877 had been a bitter blow to him, and independence of them had been his long-cherished political ambition.
With the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand, biblical images of blessing must have flickered through his mind; and when the little mining camp of Johannesburg sprang up into being a multinational town (‘a kind of Dodge City on the veld’) other biblical metaphors might have been supplied – of tribes inimical to the Lord being put to the sword, or consumed by divine wrath for their iniquity. For by 1898 the gold mines of the Transvaal were producing £15 million worth of gold each year. In 1899 this would be £20 million, with reserves conservatively estimated at £700 million. A British minister said it was ‘the richest spot on earth’. In fifteen years, what had been a row of tents had become a city with 50,000 European inhabitants. Then the mines became organized. The gold rush died and an industrial pattern asserted itself. In the rich part of the town where the richer whites lived, there were broad gaslit pavements, big houses, theatres, hotels, nightclubs, brothels. In the poorer industrial hinterland 88,000 Africans lived in appalling conditions where typhoid and pneumonia were rife and home-made liquor, often literally deadly, was the only narcotic to numb the pain of existence. For all its mixture, Boer and Jew, black and brown, Johannesburg mysteriously felt British – both in its cruelly depressed slums, and in the street names of its salubrious quarters: Anderson Street and Commissioner Street.
No wonder Kruger and his government wished to deprive these invaders, these intruders, of as much as possible of their plunder by taxation: no wonder he wanted to withhold from them any political rights, such as a vote. And no wonder the British yearned to be the sole masters of the gold, as of the diamonds: the lords of a united South Africa under the British flag.
That is what the Boer War was about. The Jameson Raid of 1895 was a hasty, illegal operation for which the perpetrator received a token prison sentence in Holloway. But Rhodes and Jameson had only done with vulgar haste what Chamberlain – and Salisbury – wanted to do by negotiation or conquest: acquire Johannesburg. This is, as Rhodes wrote in a secret letter to Alfred Beit in 1895, ‘the big idea which makes England dominant in Africa, in fact gives England the African continent’.23
Not many of Kipling’s ‘flannelled fools at the wicket’ would have been students of contemporary philosophy; it is possible, nonetheless, to see the British Empire as yet another extension of the Idealist belief that if anything is real, then everything is one. Many Idealist philosophers were in fact keen defenders of the Imperial scheme.24
In the days when the British Empire was still growing, or when people could conceive of it coming into being in a fit of absence of mind,25 then individual losses of face or territory in different parts of the globe could be shrugged off. Paradoxically, when the idea of Rhodes took hold – that Britain should rule not just some parts of the Earth, but the entire planet – then even the smallest rebellion here, military disaster there, could be seen as a threat to t
he whole. This perhaps explains in part, if anything can explain it, the growing ruthlessness of the British Imperial machine as it reached its zenith. Compare Gordon’s campaign in Khartoum in 1884 and Kitchener’s in 1898. Gladstone’s government had sent Gordon to Khartoum not as a soldier but as a governor, with instructions to evacuate in the face of the Mahdi’s insurgent popularity. Salisbury’s Unionist government, with Chamberlain as colonial secretary, had very different ideas. So did Sir Herbert Kitchener (as he then was) who, against the advice of Lord Cromer, the consul-general in Cairo, wanted to reconquer the Sudan in the face of Dervish fighting against European forces.
Presumably if Kitchener’s campaign in the Sudan happened today there would be an international tribunal and he would be summoned to The Hague to answer charges of war crimes and genocide. As far as the British public was concerned he was the gallant conqueror of Khartoum. The Dervishes fought with rifles and bayonets and spears. Kitchener’s army had machine guns, which could explain the casualties. At the battle of Atbara Kitchener’s force lost 125 white men, and 443 blacks. The Dervish Khalifa’s army lost 2,000 dead, and a further 2,000 were taken prisoner.
The coolness and pluck with which the enemy contained themselves during the bombardment proved that the Dervish was truly brave, not merely when fired with enthusiasm in a fanatical rush but when face to face with death, without hope of escaping or of killing his foe. Many unfortunate blacks were found chained by both hands and legs in the trenches, with a gun in their hands and with their faces to their foes – some with forked sticks behind their backs.
The second Sudan War was a locus classicus of the new Imperialism. No one doubted that the system of the Khalifa, based on slavery, was cruel. Few doubted that in the best of all possible worlds, the Dervishes would be converted to Western Liberal Agnosticism, with a devotion to Free Trade and Cricket. What was new was the preparedness not merely to fight, but to eliminate the enemies of the Empire. At the battle of Omdurman the Dervishes had two machine guns, Kitchener fifty-five. His forces were transported by steamer and railroad, which was just as well, since the boots issued were unwearable and had fallen to pieces on arrival. (Many British soldiers in Kitchener’s army marched barefoot in this campaign.)26 By the evening of 2 September 1898, Kitchener thanked ‘the Lord of Hosts who had brought him victory at such small cost in British blood’. The casualties were 23 British dead, 434 wounded, and a staggering 11,000 dead Dervishes. A further 16,000 Dervishes, many of them wounded, were taken prisoner.27