This was the last straw for the Boers on the frontier. Away they trekked, beyond the Orange River and the Vaal, into new, seemingly empty territory where they could govern themselves – and handle the natives – as they thought fit. By 1837 these pioneers numbered five thousand, although the great majority of Afrikaans-speaking colonists remained at the Cape. The voortrekkers, as the pioneers became known, were organized on military lines, and included one young boy who would become famous, Paul Kruger. They took everything they needed with them, as they set off in their covered wagons across the endless brown veld: their sheep and their cattle, enough guns and gunpowder to subdue the natives, and enough resentment against England to last a century. So began the great exodus – a kind of inverted rebellion – that passed into folklore as the Great Trek, and created the two voortrekker republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, as a national home for the Boers.22
D’Urban had blundered, that was clear; and D’Urban was recalled. But the blunder was shared by the Colonial Secretary, who failed to support the ‘forward’ policy in the Cabinet. This, at any rate, was the moral to be drawn by later imperialists like Milner.23
The same mistake, as Milner must have seen it, was made on the next occasion when the forward policy was tried – by another Peninsular general-turned-governor, Sir Harry Smith. At first, after D’Urban’s recall, it was decided to let the voortrekkers stew in their own juice. No steps were taken to stop them crossing the fords of the Orange River, which would have been easy, nor was trade with them forbidden. Instead, the Cape government issued a fiery proclamation reasserting authority over the erring Boers – and took good care not to enforce it.24
But by 1847, when Smith took over, events had prodded Britain once more into facing the Boer problem. In their progress north, the voortrekkers had stirred up a hornet’s nest in Natal, till then the preserve of the Zulus. The Boers crushed Dingaan and his Zulu warriors at the Battle of Blood River on 16 December 1838. But their handling of African tribes elsewhere threatened to be a source of permanent unrest. Reluctantly, Whitehall was persuaded that a British colony of Natal, expensive as it might prove for the Crown, was at least a lesser evil than another Boer republic. For Natal was not in the middle of nowhere like the other Boer territories. It was plumb on the trade route to India. In 1843 it was annexed by Britain and the chief port was renamed after D’Urban.25 (In contrast, the main town in the Zulu country to the north of the Tugela River was called after Lady Smith, the Spanish bride whom dashing Sir Harry had carried off from the Peninsula.)
As a British general, Sir Harry had seized Natal for the Crown. As a British governor, he now proceeded to outplay the Boer expansionists at their own game. He doubled the size of the Cape Colony, pushing out the frontier to the Atlantic on the north-west, and across the Kei River to the east. A still greater coup was to annex the voortrekkers’ territory across the Orange and the Vaal Rivers. When their neighbours in the Transvaal, led by Pretorius, marched against him, Sir Harry dealt them a resounding defeat at the Battle of Boomplaatz. The result was political chaos in the Transvaal. Its annexation seemed certain to follow.
But just then the Westminster see-saw came down with a bump, unseating Sir Harry and miraculously restoring the power of the voortrekkers. New British governments, successively led by Lord John Russell and Lord Derby, decided to take a firm stand against colonial adventures. Sir Harry was recalled and his conquests were repudiated. By the Sand (Zand) River Convention of 1852 and the Bloemfontein Convention of 1854, the internal independence of the two Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State was guaranteed by Britain.26
Why the sudden reversion to a policy of compromise? This time the forward policy was not repudiated for humanitarian reasons, as at the time of D’Urban’s débâcle. The pressure came not from the missionaries of Exeter Hall but from the Lords of the Treasury whose aim was financial retrenchment. The new government was determined to economize as much as possible on the Empire. For this was the heyday of Lord Palmerston and Free Trade. Britain had grown rich by exploiting markets in regions, like Europe and the United States, where she had no political control. Why pay for an empire, when Britain had free access to the markets of the world? In 1872 Cape Colony followed Canada, New Zealand and the Australian colonies in being granted ‘responsible government’ – in other words, internal autonomy. And at the same time a discovery was made that seemed to set the seal on the success of this policy: the discovery of the world’s largest pipe of diamonds at Kimberley in the Free State, close to the Cape frontier.
The ensuing diamond boom in the Cape (which had, by some smart map-reading, hastily incorporated Kimberley in its territory) transformed the economy of the region. Trade flourished. Railways spread across the veld. At last Britain’s Cinderella colony had goods to sell to the mother country and the money to buy her goods.27 For her part, the mother country responded by returning once more to the attack on the problem of the Boers.
The aim this time was a good deal more sophisticated than the fumblings of D’Urban or the buccaneering of Sir Harry Smith. It had long struck British statesmen that the central problem of South Africa – to impose British control, despite the Afrikaners at the Cape and the Boers of the Transvaal – had analogies with the problem of the French in Canada. In Canada, it was true, the British settlers had soon swamped the French, whereas the Afrikaners would remain in the majority at the Cape for the foreseeable future. But a federal constitution had worked wonders in the French Canadian provinces. What about a federal constitution for all four South African states, the two British colonies and the two Boer republics? This was the plan of the new High Commissioner in 1877, Sir Bartle Frere.
Strange to say, it was not the Boer republics that seemed the chief obstacles to this scheme. The Boers in the Transvaal were in such a desperate state at this time – hemmed in by the Zulus, their treasury bankrupt – that they seemed prepared to acquiesce in becoming a British colony. The real obstacle was the degree of colonial nationalism at the Cape that had been stimulated both by responsible government and the diamond boom. In a reckless fit of impatience, the British tried to force the hand of the Cape government by annexing the Transvaal before federation was agreed. It was back to a forward policy with a vengeance.28
Hence the third great blunder, which culminated in Majuba. At least Frere did not begin by making the mistake committed by his predecessors, of acting without authority from home. Together, he and the Tory Colonial Secretary, Lord Carnarvon, concerted their scheme. The first step was to woo the Boers with the same tactic as D’Urban had used: letting loose the British army on the Boers’ African adversaries.
Accordingly, the British precipitated the Zulu War of 1879, which, despite some initial success for the Zulus, resulted in their extinction as a military nation (and a peerage for the British commander, Sir Garnet Wolseley). Meanwhile, without firing a shot, the British army had marched north to Pretoria. By 1877 the Union Jack was flying over the government buildings of the new British colony of the Transvaal.29
For a moment it looked like a triumph of the forward policy. Pretoria occupied, its loyalty secure, the Free State sure to follow, soon the great federation of British South Africa. But the verge of triumph was the verge of the abyss. The Conservatives had not managed to secure full Liberal support for the annexation, and now Gladstone thundered at Midlothian: he would repudiate the take-over. His arguments were based as much on financial orthodoxy (that is, economy) as on political radicalism. It became clear that the Liberals were as deeply divided on South Africa as they were on Ireland. The British annexation was left in the air. Sir Bartle Frere was recalled under a cloud. No money was invested in the colony, there were no improvements in business or administration to offset the loss of political independence for the Boers. Accordingly, the Boers’ powerful tradition of nationalism, temporarily paralysed by an empty treasury and the Zulu menace, was suddenly given new life.
In 1880 the Boers under Paul
Kruger rose in revolt against their new government, and within a few weeks inflicted three small, but shattering, reverses on the British army, culminating in the Battle of Majuba in British territory just inside the frontiers of Natal.30
By this time, Gladstone, Grand Old Man, was back in the seat for his third term. He was quick to seize on a compromise. He agreed to withdraw the large British force now hurrying to the rescue, led by Sir Fred Roberts, the hero of the march to Kandahar. He agreed to restore complete internal self-government to the Boers. There was one major qualification: Britain would reserve for herself ultimate control over the Transvaal’s foreign affairs. Constitutionally it was an unusual, though not unique, arrangement. Britain was continuing to claim her status as paramount power in South Africa, although she did not claim the Transvaal as a colony or even as a member of her Empire.
Under pressure from well-wishers in Cape Colony and the Free State, Kruger consented to this arrangement, which was given the form of an international treaty in the Convention of Pretoria of 1881 and the Convention of London of 1884. But Kruger, who became President of the restored Transvaal Republic, did not conceal the fact that he was signing under protest, and would do his best to negotiate a third convention which would remove the shadow of British paramountcy from the Transvaal’s independence. On their part, many British soldiers under Roberts felt deeply humiliated by the settlement. Moreover, it served to quicken, as soon emerged, the rising spirit of Jingoism.31
Such was the Abyss of Blunders.
To Milner the talk of avenging Majuba seemed distastefully crude. The battle itself was a conventional enough disaster: a poor tactical position, a diminutive force, a half-baked general. It was the whole annexation that had been hopelessly bungled. Frere had fumbled. Westminster had undermined him. The Treasury had ensured his failure. As for Gladstone’s settlement, Milner could only wince at the thought. By settling for ‘peace-under-defeat’ before the main British army could arrive, Gladstone had taken one more step in confirming the Transvaal as that dangerous anachronism, a quasi-independent nation in Africa.32
What was to be done? It was here that the ‘great game’ for South Africa emerged as part of a much greater game – the struggle for world supremacy.
The phrases used – ‘imperial unity’ and ‘consolidating the Empire’ – were vague, conveniently vague. Milner himself knew what he meant by them. He prided himself on his realism – on the fact that he had no illusions about the true state of the British Empire. He was not misled, like the cruder kind of jingos, by the flag-waving and the drum-beating.33 He shrank from these theatricals – ‘walking on stilts’, he called his job as viceroy.34 He ridiculed the philosophy of the Gatling gun and the Last Stand. What he was interested in was power. Not merely for himself, but for England and the English race. This was the love of his life – English ‘race patriotism’, as he called it – pursued with the passion that he denied himself in most other ways.35 But the power of the English race was not, as he saw it, at its climax. It was already in decline.
The years of drift and compromise in South Africa were part of this general decline. Indeed, in the other settler colonies, for half a century there had not even been an attempt at a forward policy; all policy had been weak and negative. And gradually British power was eroded as, one by one, these white colonies were granted internal self-government. It was true that the colonies themselves had grown richer and more powerful. It was also true that Britain had made vast new tropical conquests – especially during the recent scramble for Africa.
But were these new black colonies to be a source of either wealth or power? Until they were developed, no one could say. In Milner’s eyes, as indeed in the eyes of all the more sophisticated imperialists, Britain’s main concern was not with adding to or even developing the black Empire. It was with reasserting her power in the white Empire. Could the Empire now be made into a reality as a federal Greater Britain? Could it become the supreme world-state, with defence and trade controlled by a single grand imperial parliament? Or was the white Empire doomed to dissolve into a medley of nation-states, no closer to Britain than the first great ex-colony, America?
It was in South Africa, Milner believed, that the answer to this question would be found, one way or the other.36 He thought he knew the dangers. In his personal philosophy of aiming for the ‘Big Things of life’, risks were unavoidable – and big risks, too.37 Perhaps it was already too late. Perhaps the Empire, not the Transvaal, was the anachronism. Perhaps he was one himself. Time would show.38 Of one thing Milner was certain. The present policy of compromise in South Africa – the backward policy – offered no chance of restoring Britain’s power. In 1886 gold had been discovered in the Transvaal hills called Witwatersrand – the Rand. It was gold that had lured Rhodes and Beit in 1895 to try to re-annex the Transvaal to the British Empire – a scheme in which Chamberlain and the imperial government (so they claimed) had played no part. To the folly of Majuba had now been added the fiasco of the Raid.
Milner’s own feelings towards the Raid and its political results were understandably more complicated than towards the earlier blunders.39 In a sense he owed everything to the disaster. But for Jameson, he might have still been sitting in his office at Somerset House hiding his yawns as Chairman of the Inland Revenue. And there were aspects of the Raid, total fiasco though it had been, which offered, Milner thought, hopeful lessons for the future.
What no one, least of all Kruger, could have foreseen when the London Convention had been signed in 1884 was that the Rand would be discovered two years later. The resulting explosion in the wealth of the Transvaal had an explosive political result. Quite suddenly the Cape and Transvaal seemed to be exchanging roles, as political leadership of the sub-continent passed to the Transvaal. There was now a double anomaly about the two states. The Cape was a British colony, though the majority of the white inhabitants were Afrikaners; the Transvaal was still a Boer republic, though it appeared that the majority of its inhabitants were, by the mid-1890s, British, for the gold-rush had sucked in so many British immigrants. Who, then, was to control the Transvaal, richest state in Africa?40 This was the question which Jameson tried to answer with his madcap ride across the veld.
When the Raid was imminent the old President declared, ‘I shall wait until the tortoise puts out its head, then I shall cut it off.’41 In the event he was far too clever to do anything of the sort. He had the tortoise wrapped up, so to speak, and sent to London as a gift for the Queen. It was to London that he sent Dr Jameson and the Raiders; to be sentenced by a Crown court, to the great embarrassment of all concerned, to terms ranging from fifteen months in gaol. Worse, Rhodes was revealed as the arch-plotter and arch-bungler of the whole affair. This was proved by two official enquiries and two public trials, in London and South Africa. It could not be denied, once Kruger had published to the world the amazing collection of code telegrams and other secret documents found on the battlefield of Doornkop.42
It was at the enquiry held by the Cape government that there emerged the answer to the central puzzle: why had the Johannesburg rising, organized by Rhodes, collapsed so ignominiously? As the man who had then been Prime Minister at the Cape, as well as Chairman of the Chartered Company, Rhodes himself was forced to testify – and a wretched figure he cut during the two days he was in the witness box. It turned out that he and his multi-millionaire backer, Alfred Beit, had hopelessly overestimated the strength of the opposition to Kruger among the Uitlanders. A large minority were not British at all, but were Afrikaners from the Cape, Germans, Frenchmen, even Americans. Of course, they had their grievances, including their lack of political rights. But they were earning good money in the gold mines, and were in no great hurry to overthrow the government. The same applied to many of the independent capitalists who had stakes in the Rand gold-fields. And even the Johannesburg ‘Reformers’ (the cardboard revolutionaries) had not been able to agree on the crucial question: once they had toppled Kruger’s republic of the Tr
ansvaal, what would they put in its place? An Uitlander republic? Or, as Rhodes and Beit wanted, a British colony under the British flag?43.
While the Reformers had pleaded for time to patch up their differences, Rhodes and Beit had kept their heads well buried in the sand. In Beit’s case this was almost literally the case; he took a seaside holiday at Muizenberg during the crucial weekend when Jameson was due to set off. Rhodes had remained hovering about Groote Schuur, his palace in the pine woods above Cape Town, postponing the decision to recall Jameson, although the invasion was immediately repudiated by both the British and Cape governments.44 William Schreiner, the Cape’s Attorney-General, gave the Cape enquiry an account of an interview with Rhodes during that period: Rhodes utterly broken down by the fiasco of the rising; Rhodes blurting out that Jameson ‘had upset his applecart’; Rhodes refusing to try to stop him with the abject excuse ‘poor Jameson, we’ve been friends for twenty years, how can I ruin him now?’ Yet it also emerged that Rhodes did try to ruin Jameson a few days later. He had sent a message to him in Pretoria gaol instructing him to take the whole blame.45
The Boer War Page 4
