True, when the call came, the burghers had answered it in their fashion. As Joubert reported: ‘When the telegram was received that Jameson had crossed the border I would not believe it possible, but I sent round the country calling the men to arms. Each man jumps on his pony and rides off. He does not wait… but goes as he is.’ Of course, it was easy for the six thousand burghers who had mobilized to round up Jameson’s six hundred. But what if a real army had invaded the country? What if the British government had supported Jameson? The facts that the Raid brought to light were a scandal. By law, every burgher had to provide himself with a rifle and ammunition. Of the 24,238 burghers liable to be commandeered, 9,996 were found to have no rifle; the rest had old rifles or new rifles of an old pattern. There was only enough ammunition to make war for a fortnight. The country, concluded Kruger, was ‘practically defenceless’ at the time of the Raid; ‘the burghers had neglected their sacred duty to arm themselves’.27
Now it was Kruger who proceeded to re-equip the Transvaal army at a cost of over £1 million. Joubert had stupidly ordered thirty-six thousand British Martini-Henry single shot rifles and six thousand Austrian Guedes rifles.28 These had been superseded nearly ten years before by the new small-bore magazine rifles, the Lee Metford in Britain and the Mauser in Germany. Kruger told Joubert to buy a second rifle for each burgher, and made him import thirty-seven thousand Mausers from Krupp’s factory in Germany.29
The best that could be said for Joubert was that he was building up an excellent artillery corps. He was to order twenty-two of the most modern pieces of artillery from Europe: from Creusot in France, four of the latest 155-mm heavy guns (later to be known as ‘Long Toms’) and six of the 75-mm field guns; from Krupp’s, four of their 120-mm howitzers and eight of the 75-mm field guns. He was also buying from Maxim-Nordenfeld in Britain twenty of the experimental 1-pounders (‘Pom-Poms’) that were not yet in service with the British army.30 But the State Artillery Corps was still a midget by European standards. Joubert was told they needed another eight of the 75-mm Creusots. He procrastinated till it was too late. ‘What can I do with more guns?’ he asked when pressed in the Raad, ‘Have we not already more than we can use?’31
Kruger on his part had made some equally strange decisions. He commissioned those four elephantine fortresses, Despoort, Klapperkop, Schanzkop and Wonderboompoort, commanding Pretoria and the Rand. They cost over £300,000 – £1½ million according to one estimate.32 What were they for? Militarily, it was hard to imagine. They offended the first principle of Boer tactics: mobility above all. Kruger’s object seems to have been political: to overawe the Uitlanders. But the fortresses at Johannesburg had become the symbol of ‘Krugerism’, and the lesson the Uitlanders drew was the one Kruger least of all wished them to draw. They were too weak to beat Kruger alone, they must summon the help of the imperial government.33
Despite this blunder, and despite Joubert’s bungling, Kruger had transformed the Transvaal’s army since the Raid – just as Milner had warned Chamberlain. The burghers could mobilize in a week: twenty-odd commandos armed with the most modern guns and rifles, an effective force of over twenty-five thousand fighting men – forty thousand including their allies from the Free State. The combined army was four times the size of the British garrisons in the two colonies and the largest modern army in the entire sub-continent.34
These, then, were the main results of the Raid, as it affected Kruger: to strengthen his grip on the Transvaal, to rally the Free State to his side, to make his country a real military power. Yet the future was still ominous. The Raid had given him a breathing space, but the basic dilemmas remained. He must modernize the republic without alienating his deeply conservative burghers. He must make concessions to the Uitlanders without risking his country’s independence. Above all, he needed a new convention with the British government in order to realize the voortrekkers’ dream of fully independent nationhood.
His first task was to try to sweep clean what Milner described (and many Progressive Boers would have echoed him) as the ‘Augean Stables’ of the Transvaal administration.35 Jan Smuts was the man on whom Kruger now relied to help with the task. That year, 1898, Kruger had displaced one of the Hollander immigrants and Smuts was appointed State Attorney, chief legal adviser to the government. It was a bold appointment; Smuts was only twenty-seven and totally inexperienced. But he had a reputation for academic brilliance combined with tact; though a stranger to both qualities, Kruger held no prejudice against them.36 Smuts would now have to work fast if he was to pre-empt the attack of the Progressives, the Uitlanders and the imperial government. In fact, nothing would have astonished Milner and delighted Chamberlain more, had they known that Kruger, like Chamberlain, believed time fought on the side of the British.
Kruger’s choice of Smuts showed all the old President’s shrewdness. Yet how incongruous the partnership appeared. Smuts was an Afrikaner from the Cape; his first language, for the purpose of writing, was English, his favourite poets were Shelley, Shakespeare and Walt Whitman. He was tall and slight and absurdly young-looking, with his curly flaxen hair and a complexion that was always ready to flush like a girl’s. His introduction to Kruger had been chilling. Smuts had just married his childhood sweetheart, Isie, and brought her to the President’s house to meet him. ‘Whatever were you doing to marry such an ugly woman?’ asked Kruger. A moment passed before Smuts realized this was a sample of the old man’s elephantine humour. It was impossible to imagine Smuts himself playing the fool. There was a frightening intensity about him; the grey-blue eyes were strained and hard.37
As for his intellectual qualities, he had a record as dazzling as Milner’s. Like other clever colonials, he had gone to Cambridge; there he earned a string of prizes, and took a double First in Law. These were golden years for Cambridge. It was the Cambridge of the philosophers Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore. But little of this gold had rubbed off on Smuts, and he had lived for nothing but work. When he came home at last, he embarked on a legal career, writing political articles in his spare time. The keystone of his political faith, like that of other Afrikaners at the Cape, had been the idea of South African unity under the British flag.38 Here was the ‘great Temple of Peace and Unity’ in which both white races would assemble, ‘joyfully’ accepting their differences, until they finally coalesced into a single great white nation spanning South Africa from the Zambezi to the Cape. And Rhodes was the man, Smuts had fondly imagined, who would help build the foundations of the temple.39
When it turned out that Rhodes was after all what his enemies claimed – a plotter and a traitor – Smuts’s feelings can well be imagined. ‘The man we had followed, who was to lead us to victory, had not only deserted us; he had … betrayed us.’40 Overnight Smuts transferred his hero-worship to Kruger. He shook the dust of the Cape off his feet and headed north to the Transvaal, where he practised at the Johannesburg Bar.41
By December 1898 Smuts had been State Attorney for six months. He flung himself into the work with his usual single-mindedness. As chief legal adviser to the government, he had to attend all the meetings of the Volksraad and most of those of the Executive Council, as well as to advise all the government departments. In fact, he had become the general factotum, not merely the legal adviser, to the government. But his main task, as Smuts saw it, was reform, and the first priority was to try to tackle the shortcomings in the administration – to ‘clean up’ the place, as he put it bluntly in a letter to a friend.42
How far and how fast could Smuts go in cleaning up corruption? The trouble was that, at the root of most of the corruption and inefficiency, was the system of monopolies and concessions. This system was, in Kruger’s eyes, not a means of feathering his own nest, or his supporters’; it was, as he said, a ‘cornerstone of his country’s independence’. There was a purpose in allowing most of the £2 million profits of the dynamite monopoly to pass to German and French dynamite rings. By this means Kruger had built up one of the largest explosive factories in th
e world at Johannesburg. And apart from the military potential of this industry, Kruger could point to the useful political friends he had bought with that £2 million: German and French Uitlanders, foreign financiers and their governments. Kruger had in fact played off one set of Uitlanders, and one set of governments, against another.43 Smuts decided to try to arrange for the question of monopolies to be settled as part of a great deal with the capitalists of the Rand.44
In another field Smuts could act swiftly: towards the regular Transvaal police. ‘The new State Attorney,’ one government-sponsored newspaper cautiously announced that autumn, ‘is clearly bent on checking the indiscriminate reckless firing by foolish constables.’45 In fact, there had been several recent instances when the ‘Zarps’, as the police were called (‘Zuid Afrika Republik’ was written on their shoulder flashes), had shot unarmed men when making arrests, and their victims were not confined to Kaffirs. Part of the trouble was that the six hundred Zarps were recruited almost exclusively from the poorest of urban poor whites. Obviously raw Boers of this particular minority – the six thousand-odd landless Boers in Johannesburg – would need tight discipline if they were to serve as police in a city whose other population numbered over forty thousand Uitlanders and fifty thousand black and coloured workers. In general, as one would expect, the Zarps reserved the worst of their treatment for the latter. That autumn the Zarps were alleged to have raided and beaten up a number of Cape Coloureds in Johannesburg. Smuts immediately suspended the official responsible. In the government enquiry that followed unpleasant facts came to light: forty coloured people had been dragged from their homes in the middle of the night, accused of breaking the pass law; some of them had been ill-treated; a sick girl had died, possibly as a result of the raid. The enquiry conceded that certain ‘irregularities’ had been committed. But no action was taken against the official responsible.46
Smuts now had a new political problem. The cause of the coloured people, who were British subjects, had been taken up by the acting British Agent in Pretoria, Edmund Fraser. Smuts decided to go and see Fraser about the matter and try to settle it man to man. He could hardly have guessed the extraordinary course the interview would take.
The two men met in Pretoria on 23 December 1898, the same day as the great victory banquet given for General Joubert.47 Smuts must have been in a friendly mood, as there was a report in the Pretoria newspapers about a most conciliatory speech delivered in Grahamstown by General Sir William Butler, who was holding the fort while Milner was away on leave in London. Butler was quoted as saying, ‘Unity is strength, but it should be a union of hearts, not a union forced by outside pressure…. To my mind South Africa needs no surgical operations, it needs rest and peace….’48 The sentiments would have been unexceptional in most countries. But it was strange to hear such conciliatory talk from a British High Commissioner – and the not-so-veiled reference to the Raid. Smuts was all the more unprepared for his interview with Fraser.
After the two men had discussed the affair of the Cape Coloureds amicably enough, Fraser suddenly launched into an extraordinary outburst. The course of the dialogue, according to Smuts’s notes, went something like this:
Fraser: ‘We have now sat still for two years because our own officials put us in a false position in the Raid. The time has now come to take action.’
Smuts: ‘Action? Could you explain what you mean?’
Fraser: ‘Well, you see. Gladstone made a great mistake in handing you back the Transvaal after Majuba and before [instead of] defeating your army. It encouraged your idea of a great Afrikaner republic throughout South Africa. If you ask my opinion the time has come for us to end this nonsense by striking a blow. We’ve got to show who’s the boss in South Africa….
Smuts: ‘But, whatever would give you occasion for this?’
Fraser: ‘England’s fed up with the maladministration in this country, and especially with the ill-treatment of British subjects. This is the point on which England will take action. I know perfectly well that England won’t go to war over abstract subjects like suzerainty – that means nothing to the man in the street. She’ll go to war about things that everyone can understand.’49
Go to war…. Smuts was left gasping by the interview. What was the meaning of these threats? Had Fraser gone mad, or was this a hint of the opening of a new and extremely dangerous phase in the endless wrangle between the two governments? Were the British looking for a casus belli? If so, this could not be the ill-treatment of coloured British subjects, whose plight would hardly wring the heart of everyone in England, let alone of their allies in South Africa.50
Smuts had not long to wait to learn the meaning of the puzzle. Already reports were reaching his desk of a great protest meeting arranged to take place next day in Johannesburg. The British Uitlanders were in uproar. A young Englishman called Edgar had been shot by a trigger-happy Zarp.51 But that was not all. The Uitlanders intended to petition the British government to intervene on their behalf.
It was little in itself, but it was the pebble that starts the avalanche.
CHAPTER 4
‘Voetsak’
Johannesburg,
23 December 1898 – 28 March 1899
‘He has lost all confidence in Kruger…. He said we must at first present our case to the world in a dignified & strong manner & that if no attention is paid to it, the only way to work on is a kind of revolution …’
Georges Rouliot to Julius Wernher, 21 January 1899, describing a talk that week with J. B. Robinson, one of the Uitlander millionaires who had previously sided with Kruger
The news of the shooting of Tom Edgar had reached the leading Uitlanders a few hours before it came to Smuts. This was the weekend before Christmas and a party had gathered at Hohenheim, the suburban villa of Percy Fitzpatrick, a Cape-born Uitlander who worked for the great mining house of Wernher-Beit. There was a heatwave that weekend – it was almost too hot for tennis. The guests played croquet, or they sat in the shade of the jacaranda trees. Perhaps they discussed that strangely conciliatory speech by Milner’s stand-in as High Commissioner at the Cape, General Sir William Butler; Butler, an Irishman, must be a ‘Krugerite’. The burning topic was the great demonstration to be held that afternoon to protest at the killing of Edgar.1
Hohenheim might have belonged to a Surrey stockbroker. Built in ‘Rand-lords Gothic’, it commanded the hillside on which lay Johannesburg. In the old days no one had bothered about this brown, windy hillside. The place was not even close to the stage-coach route from the Cape to Pretoria. There was no village, just a couple of whitewashed farmhouses and a kraal for the Kaffirs. And there was nothing much to see from the ridge – a splash of mealies, perhaps, and an occasional clump of eucalyptus. Otherwise there was just the veld, the great inland sea, quiet, poetic, melancholy.2
That was before the discovery of the gold-fields. Today, people who came to Hohenheim saw one of the sights of Africa: an archipelago of townships, of red-brick slums and green suburbs; a line of mine-wheels, mine-batteries and mine-chimneys spouting smoke and steam across thirty miles of the Rand.3
It was a geological phenomenon – too good to be true, it seemed at first. The other great gold-fields so far discovered – in the Klondyke, in California, and in Australia – were notoriously fickle. The ore of the Rand conglomerate (nicknamed ‘bankét’ after a local sweet, a kind of almond rock) was not of a high grade, but its quality was uniquely uniform. And the sheer size of the ore body beggared belief. The main reefs stretched for thirty miles along the Rand; the outliers would be traced for 130 miles. But what was most extraordinary about the reefs was their depth. After a short interruption, the gold-bearing beds continued again downwards, 1,500 feet, 2,000 feet – and the mines followed them down.
The Rand seemed, almost literally, to be a bottomless pit. Although it was the outcrop mines that accounted for most of the marvellous increase in output (and the equally marvellous increase in dividends; from £2.5 million in 1897 to £4.8 milli
on in 1898), it was becoming clear that the future lay with the deep-level mines. Already the gold mines of the Transvaal, producing £15 million worth in the current year, 1898, had left the diamond mines of the Cape far behind. Internationally, too, the Transvaal had broken every record at a time when monetary policies had transformed the world’s demand for gold. By 1898, the Transvaal had overtaken Russia, Australia and even America. Now it was the greatest gold power in the world, expected to produce over £20 million in 1899, with reserves conservatively estimated at £700 million – of which £200 million would be clear profit for someone.4 It was, said a British minister, accurately enough, the ‘richest spot on earth.’5
And nature, so prodigal with her gold in the Transvaal, had added other largesse: a vast coalfield around Johannesburg, a vast pool of black and brown labourers all over South Africa.
If the Rand was a prodigy, so was Johannesburg – an infant prodigy of a city. After fifteen years its population exceeded fifty-thousand Europeans, and there were perhaps as many again living in the townships scattered over the Rand. It was the greatest concentration of Europeans in the whole sub-continent. The place had begun as a mining camp, a kind of Dodge City on the veld. White tents sprang up beside the diggings. The diggers looked as diggers should – big men in riding-boots and shirt-sleeves with wide-awake hats and revolvers in their belts. There were cheap hotels with pretty wooden balconies, and even prettier hostesses. But all that was soon changed once the mines became organized. The gold-rush died – to be replaced by an orderly stream of emigrants, pale-faced clerks and artisans from the depressed industrial towns of Britain, and Jewish shopkeepers from the ghettoes of Eastern Europe. Almost overnight the mining camp became an industrial centre, Dodge City became Salford.
The Boer War Page 8
