The outside world, however, regarded them—and Kruger—as ultraconservative and uncouth. Leyds seems to have been indifferent to the perceived shortcomings attributed to the man he was employed to serve. His letters in the first few months were about his heavy workload, his primitive working conditions or Du Toit’s intrigues. There wasn’t a bad word about Kruger as a person. In fact there was an unexpected compliment after Leyds had attended a church service. ‘We sang Psalm 25 verse 8. The President read it out. I have to say it was splendid. Rarely have I heard anyone recite so beautifully.’18
Hunger for land
Veertienstroom, January 1885
Leyds’s baptism by fire in the world of diplomacy put his stamina to the test. In January 1885 Kruger decided that the situation on the south-west border of the Transvaal needed his personal attention. He wanted his state attorney to accompany him to the disputed territory to attend to the finer points of law; high-ranking British officials were also involved. It was hard work in spartan conditions, with ‘always meat’ that smelt foul and ‘never vegetables, bread that’s mostly rock hard’ and ‘always something they pass off as coffee’. This was diplomacy out in the bush.
Kruger was in his element. The highveld, the wide open spaces on either side of the Vaal: this was his natural habitat. He had shot his first lion here, at the age of 14, led his first military commando at 17 and lost his left thumb when his rifle exploded. In peacetime he had built farms and churches, grazed cattle, sheep and horses, hunted elephant and rhinoceros. In their many clashes with black adversaries he had always led the way into battle. Once the personification of strength, at 60 he still cut a powerful figure, with scars as badges of honour.
For Leyds, just six months in office, the whole experience was new. Though he had been born in the East Indies and was no stranger to the outdoors, playing on a veranda under the watchful eye of his babu was something entirely different. A city-dweller, he was a nobody (in spite of the beard he grew from time to time) in the presence of this man of the earth. Physically, he had never been a weakling. At school he had excelled not only academically but also at gymnastics. At university he had studied music but learned fencing and marksmanship as well. And here on the highveld he furnished proof of his sound constitution. It wasn’t easy ‘but I shouldn’t think a little draught will do me too much harm’, he wrote to Louise.19
Kruger and Leyds were to meet their British adversaries at the end of January in the far south-west of the Transvaal. The place can best be described as a tongue of land surrounded by three political entities, the Boer Republic of the Orange Free State to the east, the British Cape Colony to the south and Bechuanaland to the west. Bechuanaland was at the centre of the dispute. It was not yet a state in the European sense. As long as anyone could remember, it had been inhabited by Khoikhoi and Bantu speakers dispersed among several rival empires. Some years earlier a few small groups of trekboers had left the Transvaal to settle there, by their own account at the request of two of the warring chiefs, Moswete in the north and Mosweu in the south. In return, the white colonists claimed autonomy over the land they lived on, which in 1882 and 1883 they declared the republics of Goshen and Stellaland respectively.
The new mini-states were a thorn in the side of the British. London regarded any expansion of Transvaal territory to the west as a threat to its own strategic position. It would enable the Boers to block the only open trade route to the north and continue unimpeded to push through to the west, perhaps all the way to the Atlantic coast. Decisive action was called for. The London Convention, signed in 1884, provided an opportunity to establish the south-west border of the Transvaal. Three months later the British reached an agreement with two other black chiefs in the region, Montshioa and Mankuroane, whereby the entire southern part of Bechuanaland, down to the Molopo River, became a British Protectorate. As from May 1884 that territory was officially called British Bechuanaland.
That seemed to spell the end of Goshen and Stellaland. But Stephanus du Toit had other ideas. Assigned to Goshen as special commissioner, he announced in September of that year that the Transvaal would give ‘its protection’ to both Moswete and Montshioa. In other words, the tiny Boer Republic of Goshen was suddenly annexed to its big brother. At a ceremony to mark the transition, Du Toit had the Transvaal flag hoisted in the capital, Rooi-Grond, ‘without having received instructions to that effect,’ Leyds noted with disapproval. More than that, when word reached Pretoria, Du Toit was given immediate orders ‘not to do so, and if he already had, to lower the flag’.
But the damage had been done. The British protested to the Transvaal government in the strongest terms. This was after all a double violation of the London Convention: unilateral territorial expansion and entering into an agreement with African chiefs without the consent of the British. It was all the more serious, because in the meantime Germany had formally entered the southern African arena in August 1884 with its protectorate over Angra Pequena and its surroundings. A willingness to compromise apparently wasn’t one of the qualities required of the British negotiators who were sent to meet Kruger and Leyds in January 1885.
The team was led by Lieutenant-General Charles ‘Jerusalem’ Warren. The nickname had nothing to do with Warren’s piety but alluded to his involvement in important excavations in Palestine—Warren was a professional archaeologist as well. Apart from that, he was as arrogant and stubborn as only a British senior officer can be. Fifteen years later he flaunted these qualities again in the Battle of Spion Kop, one of the most devastating British defeats in the Boer War. It didn’t come to an armed conflict in Bechuanaland but that wasn’t due to Sir Charles. He was itching to teach the ‘Republics of Robbers’ a lesson one way or another. For that contingency he had brought with him 4000 troops and a ‘Native corps’. Non-whites bearing arms, according to Leyds, ‘caused many to shake their heads’, that is, many Boers.
They were already shaking their heads over John Mackenzie, the second member of the British delegation. To the Boers he was the personification of slander, the missionary possessed by the devil, who for years had accused them of racism, murder, homicide and exploitation. To supporters of the London Missionary Society, he was a hero who performed a sacred mission among the Africans and used political means to promote their rights at the same time. Earlier, he had made life difficult for the Transvaal delegation in London by turning public opinion against them. Back in South Africa, he was appointed to serve as the first deputy commissioner in the new Protectorate of British Bechuanaland. That didn’t last long. He turned out to be less competent as an administrator than a preacher, but Warren insisted that he attend the talks with the Boers.
The third member of the delegation was someone Warren would rather have done without, but he had no choice. Cecil Rhodes, aged 31, had made a fortune and a name for himself in Kimberley and Cape Town. He was destined for even greater wealth and fame, and would eventually achieve the ultimate honour of giving his name to the new state of Rhodesia, since renamed Zimbabwe. In January 1885, Rhodes was a member of parliament in the Cape Colony and Mackenzie’s successor as deputy commissioner. Warren thought him far too reasonable. Leyds saw him as someone he could do business with. ‘Rhodes has honoured our agreement to the letter, unlike Warren.’ After the meeting Kruger was sure he would be seeing more of ‘this young man’ in the future.
And he was right. In the end the Boers would curse the ground Rhodes walked on, but that was only later. In the tents in Veertienstroom and Blignautspont where they met the three British negotiators, Warren was the hardest nut to crack. They didn’t succeed. His troops were a valuable trump and he knew he could count on the support of the high commissioner, Sir Hercules Robinson, in Cape Town and the secretary for the colonies, Lord Derby, in London. Warren wouldn’t budge an inch. There were lesser issues they managed to trade off, such as accusations of cattle theft, from both sides, by the pro-British Mankuroane and the Boers’ ally Mosweu. But as far as the border was concerned, they ma
de no progress at all. Neither Kruger’s razor-sharp arguments nor all of Leyds’s shrewdness could change that. ‘Just what a statesman wants,’ he wrote to Louise, ‘especially when he’s defending a weak case.’ And that’s what it was. There was simply no way to save Goshen and Stellaland, not on legal grounds and not by force.
The outcome was that the British upgraded the southern part of Bechuanaland from a protectorate to a Crown colony, governed from Cape Town. The territory above the Molopo River became a new British protectorate. The British had secured their corridor to the north and preempted the Transvaal’s expansion to the west.
Leyds returned to Pretoria in poor health. The tainted meat had got to him.20
What happened in Bechuanaland in 1884 and 1885 was nothing new under the southern African sun. Since the 1820s the region had seen a proliferation of new states, accompanied by the inevitable clashes between expanding white and black empires. The stakes were control of land, human labour, cattle, trade and strategic positions. Land for pasturage and agriculture, or mining. Labour to do the hard work, or conquer new territory. Cattle for subsistence and as symbols of wealth. Trade to make money, buy arms and win prestige. Strategic positions to protect whatever one already possessed and to acquire what one still wanted. Power, fame, wealth, status: these were the personal aspirations. And they were combined with a spirit of enterprise, a desire for freedom, religious zeal and patriotism. What had begun as a patchwork of informal settlements developed in the course of the nineteenth century into large competing territories with firmly demarcated frontiers.
The process can best be understood by looking at two points on the map, one in the south-west and the other in the east. In demographic terms it was about an expanding white population core in the Cape Colony and a dynamic black power centre in what is now KwaZulu-Natal.
The south-west coastal area around Cape Town was the point from which white colonists fanned out to other parts of the country. In the early nineteenth century, this territory was inhabited by two rival groups. The Dutch-speaking community claimed the right of first arrival. They had been there since Jan van Riebeeck established a refreshment station in 1652. Although they had subsequently produced offspring with German and French immigrants and non-white slaves, they had maintained their allegiance to their predominantly Dutch roots and the faith of their seventeenth-century forefathers. The second group were white colonists of British descent. They had come in the wake of the British troops who had taken the Cape Colony from the Netherlands, first from 1795 to 1802 and then permanently in 1806. The English-speaking newcomers had become increasingly dominant, partly by implementing a targeted immigration policy. They upheld the values and principles of the Enlightenment and considered themselves the heirs of a superior culture—to the indignation of the descendants of the Dutch.
These two groups of white colonists in the Cape were also in competition with a number of indigenous communities. They can be divided into three main categories based on origin and language. The oldest inhabitants were the Bushmen, or San, who lived in small groups as hunters and gatherers. Over the years they were driven deeper into mountainous terrain or semidesert regions such as the Karoo. The second group were the Khoikhoi, a nomadic people who, with their cattle, sheep and goats, roamed vast tracts of land, covering most of the western half of present-day South Africa. The white colonists called them Hottentots, imitating the sound of their language to Dutch ears. The last group differed from the first two in lifestyle and skin colour. The Bantu were cattle and crop famers and darker in appearance than the San or Khoikhoi. They fell into three subcategories, according to their territorial dispersal. The Damara and the Ovambo lived in the north-west, the Tswana and Sotho on the highveld in the interior, while the largest groups, the Xhosa, the Swazi and the Zulu, occupied the eastern strip from north to south.
In reality the distinctions between the various groups were less clear-cut than this description suggests. Besides being rivals, the different groups also had other forms of contact. The Griqua, for example, originated from intermarriages and sexual relations between European colonists and Khoikhoi. They were recognised as a distinct subgroup by the early nineteenth century. It must be said, however, that intimate relations between whites and members of other groups were rarely consensual. Violence in general was rife. In the eastern part of the Cape Colony, first the Dutch and later the British colonists clashed with the Xhosa so many times that the ‘border wars’ were assigned numbers. By 1818 they had reached the fifth.
But all of this was still in the area south of the Orange River, or Gariep in the language of the Khoikhoi. The Orange is the longest river in South Africa and runs from the Drakensberg to the Atlantic Ocean, covering a distance of more than 1800 kilometres. The most militant black resistance to white expansionism emerged in the area east of the Drakensberg in the 1820s.
Shaka, the king of that territory, ruthlessly laid the foundations of the legendary Zulu kingdom in Natal. His regiments, or impis, sowed death and destruction along the entire coast of the Indian Ocean. His rivals scattered in all directions and wherever they had taken refuge proceeded to build their own empires, in turn generating new flows of migration. Mzilikazi headed west, crossed the Drakensberg and continued to the basin of the Vaal River on the highveld, where he established the Ndebele kingdom. Moshoeshoe settled in an impenetrable fortress in the high mountains of Basutoland, now Lesotho. In 1828 Shaka was assassinated by his brother Dingane, but the fearsome military prowess of the Zulu kingdom remained a force to be reckoned with.21
The white colonists of predominantly Dutch descent who trekked north from the Cape Colony in the 1830s experienced all this at first hand. The term Afrikaner was already in use, but when they established a permanent settlement the Dutch colonists were called Boers. Collectively this group of pioneers was known as Trekkers or, among themselves, Voortrekkers. They migrated in a bid to regain their independence, escape the yoke of the British, stake out pastures wherever their oxwagons might take them and keep their coloured servants subordinate, just as they had always done in the past. That was their idea of independence. They left in waves, ultimately about 15,000 people in all, men, women and children, on a Great Trek that branched out in several directions. Some crossed the Orange River, some continued further and crossed the Vaal, while others headed east, crossed the Drakensberg and ended up in Natal.
That last group ran into Dingane in February 1838. The encounter was horrific. Their invitation to Dingane’s quarters ended in a bloodbath, with hundreds of casualties among the Trekker families and their Khoikhoi servants. In December the Boers got their revenge. At the Ncome River their rifles and laager (a circular configuration of wagons joined together) proved a deadly combination. Out of 10,000 Zulu warriors armed with assegais, 3000 lost their lives. Only four of the Boers were wounded, among them their leader, Andries Pretorius. They renamed the Ncome ‘Blood River’ and declared 16 December Dingane’s Day. The Zulu king fled north and was removed from the throne. The Boers established the Republic of Natalia, with Pietermaritzburg as its capital.
In the Transvaal the confrontation between the white newcomers and the established black rulers ended in much the same way. Here it was Mzilikazi who sent his impis to attack the Trekkers, one of whom was the 12-year-old Paul Kruger. And again the assegai proved no match for the rifle and laager. Moreover, the Boers received support from their allies, the Griqua and the Tswana. When they attacked Mzilikazi’s flank, he and his Ndebele followers fled north, beyond the Limpopo River.
The success of the Great Trek stirred the British to action as well. They were concerned about the young Boer republic in Natal. The change in the status quo in the region was a risk to the security of the British trading post of Port Natal on the Indian Ocean, known today as Durban. The situation caused consternation in the Cape Colony and even more so in England. If there was one aspect of the South African power game that the government in London considered important, it was the safety of s
ea routes to Asia, particularly to British India. Halfway ports such as Cape Town and Port Natal played a vital part in that strategic plan. That was why they dispatched the Royal Navy frigate, the Southampton, with sufficient reinforcements on board to conquer Natal. The territory was annexed in 1843 and became a British colony.
British rule again—that was a bitter pill for most of the Boers in Natal. Led by Andries Pretorius, they moved on, or rather back west, and crossed the Drakensberg again, finally to settle on the highveld between the Orange River and the Vaal. But even there they remained in the grip of the British. Once again the British argued that the Trekkers were a threat to the prevailing balance of power. The government in Cape Town was anxious to avoid unrest along its colonial frontiers, so in 1848 the Boers’ new domain was annexed as well. It was called the Orange River Sovereignty.
The annexation didn’t have the desired effect. The British administration reluctantly became embroiled in local conflicts between the Boers and the Sotho under Moshoeshoe; the region was still troubled and it was costing a lot of money. The British didn’t have the military resources to deal with the problem, as they were soon tied up in yet another border war—the eighth—with the Xhosa (1850–53). Retreat was the only way out. They left the highveld to the Voortrekkers. To Pretorius the Sand River Convention of 1852 felt like a personal atonement. Great Britain recognised the autonomy of the area north of the Vaal, which became the South African Republic, unofficially known as the Transvaal. In 1854 the Bloemfontein Convention established the same rights for the territory between the Orange and the Vaal. The Orange River Sovereignty became the Orange Free State.22
The Boer War Page 5
