The British resigned themselves to the situation until the 1870s and left the South African Republic and the Orange Free State in peace. There were still fewer than 30,000 Boers living there, in relative isolation. Their only connection to the civilised world was the trail of their wagon wheels to the south. The Boer republics were nominally independent, but in terms of political state-building and economic growth they lagged far behind the Cape Colony. If necessary, the British thought, they could always take them over.
When diamonds were discovered they proved to be right. The whole power game changed dramatically. So far, expansion had been driven by the quest for grazing or agricultural land, or strategic security. As of 1867, there was a new and supremely powerful incentive: the craving for minerals. Diamonds had been discovered around the confluence of the Vaal and the Orange, first near Hopetown and subsequently in other places in the area. In 1870 and 1871, they were found in dazzling profusion on and around Colesberg Kopje, where miners discovered four volcanic pipes of molten lava containing diamonds, near the surface. A month later, thousands of delirious prospectors were digging on hundreds of parcels of land. Their chaotic, rapidly expanding encampment was called New Rush. The name was appropriate. In 1873, with a population of 13,000 whites and 30,000 blacks, New Rush was South Africa’s second largest city, after Cape Town. Colesberg Kopje disappeared from the face of the earth. It was excavated hundreds of metres deep and transformed into an immense crater. This was the Big Hole that Willem and Louise Leyds had looked forward to seeing on their journey to Pretoria.
The diamond-mining industry had a tremendous impact. A dynamic city emerged out of nothing in the midst of a rural community, all because of a single activity: large-scale and increasingly industrialised mining. The diamond fields boosted the Cape’s economy and attracted tens of thousands of migrant labourers, which again altered the balance of political power.
The diamonds were discovered in the vicinity of disputed territorial borders. There were claims pending from the Transvaal, the Orange Free State and Griqualand West, a territory that had been allocated to the Griqua people in the 1830s. In the chaos and anarchy resulting from the sudden influx of thousands of fortune-hunters, Nicolaas Waterboer, ‘captain’ of the Griqua, turned to the British for help. Not in vain. In October 1871 the governor of the Cape Colony, Sir Henry Barkly, without waiting for approval from London, declared Griqualand West a British Crown colony. At the same time, he officially established its border with the Orange Free State, carefully drawing it ever so slightly east of the diamond fields. The two Boer republics protested, but were unable to support their claims. In July 1873, New Rush was renamed Kimberley after the incumbent British secretary of state for the colonies. The point was made.23
Barkly’s successor, Lord Carnarvon, continued to make every effort to annex the territory, now with support from London. The new Disraeli government had explicitly imperialist ambitions. Lord Carnarvon’s ideal for South Africa was a confederation, such as he had created in Canada. The Boers could object as much as they liked. They had also grumbled about the diamond fields being incorporated into the Cape Colony, only to resign themselves to the situation subsequently. There was also Burgers, the president of the Transvaal since 1872, who was hatching a plan which the British weren’t happy with. He wanted to end the South African Republic’s isolation, in the first place by building a railway to the sea at Delagoa Bay in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. On a journey through Europe he had managed to secure diplomatic and financial support for that purpose. The idea conflicted with Lord Carnarvon’s dream of a united South Africa. He needed a pretext to annex the Transvaal, and now one presented itself.
In 1876, a Boer attack against Sekhukhune, king of the Pedi in the eastern Transvaal, had ended badly. Burgers was held responsible, as he was for the financial bankruptcy his projects had led to. The Boers were divided and incapacitated as a result. Lord Carnarvon saw his chance. Twenty-five mounted police officers from Natal under the command of Theophilus Shepstone were all it took to put an end to 25 years of independence. The Transvaal was annexed on 12 April 1877.
This easy victory put the British in a winning mood. The new high commissioner, Sir Bartle Frere, who had just arrived in Cape Town, was a hard-core imperialist like Lord Carnarvon but far less patient. He saw the remaining independent black kingdoms as the main obstacle in the way of his plans for federation and decided to take them on, one by one. British troops defeated the Xhosa in the ninth—and last—border war. Next, they quelled a series of ‘uprisings’ in various parts of the region, including Griqualand East and West. At this point Bartle Frere felt it was time for a final showdown with the Zulu, whose kingdom he considered the biggest threat to British supremacy in South Africa.
Since the 1830s, the Zulu kingdom had diminished in size, but its military prowess was still fearsome. The implicit declaration of war that Bartle Frere sent King Cetshwayo in December 1878 took considerable courage. Stupidity, many said, when the first battle ended in disaster. On 22 January 1879, a contingent of British troops was overwhelmed by 20,000 Zulu warriors at Isandhlwana. More than 1000 men were lost on both sides. It was the most crushing defeat in Britain’s entire colonial history.
Such a humiliation could not go unavenged. The British raised reinforcements as quickly as possible and appointed a new commander. General Sir Garnet Wolseley had gained a reputation in India, Russia, China, Canada and West Africa. He was a living legend, ‘our only general’, according to the British press. But the Zulu War was over even before he arrived. His predecessor, Lord Chelmsford, was determined to settle the score for Isandhlwana himself and he succeeded in doing so at the very last minute. On 4 July 1879 he led a decisive attack on the royal capital at Ulundi. It was now up to Wolseley to decide on the future of the Zulu empire. Wolseley was ruthless. Cetshwayo was taken prisoner and his empire divided into a patchwork of 13 territories. The mighty Zulu kingdom ceased to exist.
In the same year Wolseley made a clean sweep in the eastern Transvaal. With a superior force of regular and other troops, including some 8000 Swazi, he defeated the Pedi and captured their king, Sekhukhune, putting an end to all organised armed resistance from the African population. The British were lord and master of the whole of South Africa. They could proceed to create a confederation.
But that was not to be, firstly because of a change of guard in the British camp. In April 1880, Prime Minister Disraeli was succeeded by William Gladstone, who opposed colonial expansion. Lord Carnarvon disappeared from the London scene, Bartle Frere was recalled from Cape Town and Wolseley’s presence was needed at another flashpoint, this time in Egypt.
The disappearance of these diehard imperialists opened up new avenues for the Boers, although this wasn’t evident at first. They were divided and overwhelmed by Shepstone’s coup in April 1877, but they had never resigned themselves to the annexation. Twice, their representatives, among them Paul Kruger, had pleaded their cause in London, but to no avail. Gladstone was expected to be more sympathetic. In June 1880, when Gladstone made it known that he wasn’t prepared to change course, the Boers lost hope of a peaceful solution. Thanks to Chelmsford and Wolseley, they had been delivered from the Zulu and the Pedi, their most formidable black adversaries. Now there were only the British themselves to deal with. Under the command of Kruger, Piet Joubert and Marthinus Pretorius, the Boers prepared for war. At a huge gathering in Paardekraal this triumvirate restored the republic. On 20 December 1880, it became clear that they were in earnest.
The first real contest between the Boer and the British forces took place near Bronkhorstspruit, 50 kilometres east of Pretoria. It was a memorable occasion. The two rival white communities in South Africa had been waging wars for decades, but so far their encounters had always been against black opponents, rifles against assegais. Among themselves, it had never gone beyond posturing. Never before had they challenged each other in battle. Now for the first time, it was white against white, rifle against rif
le.
The British had the most difficulty with this situation. Their officers couldn’t bring themselves to see the Boers as a real adversary. Buffoons, they thought, in those corduroy trousers and floppy hats. It brought out the worst of their legendary arrogance, and they ended up making elementary tactical errors. It had happened to Colonel Philip Anstruther at Bronkhorstspruit and to Major-General Sir George Pomeroy Colley, three times over at Laing’s Nek, Ingogo and finally Majuba Hill on 27 February 1881. That last, decisive battle took the lives of 92 Britons, including Colley, and left 134 wounded. The Boers suffered one fatality and five wounded.
Their losses were smaller than at Isandhlwana, but the humiliation was no less bitter. Queen Victoria and the Conservative Opposition demanded revenge. Now, however, it was clear that it did matter—very much—who was in government. Gladstone was anxious to prevent the conflict from spreading to the rest of southern Africa and decided to cut his losses. As a result, the campaign was limited to four battles, waged in a little over two months. The Boers gained a conclusive victory at what later came to be known as the First Boer or Anglo-Boer War.24
Restoring peace was far more difficult. It took the Boers another three years, and Kruger a third visit to London, to rid themselves of formal British suzerainty. In return, under the London Convention, they would agree to fixed borders. On that point Gladstone was adamant, as Kruger and Leyds discovered in Bechuanaland in January 1885. The South African Republic had regained its independence internally, but it would be unable to expand any further, so it seemed.
Gold
Johannesburg, January 1887
The family in Amsterdam must have been astounded. What was all this about gold in the Transvaal? At the beginning of August 1886, Louise Leyds wrote that she and Willem were thinking about ‘going to the Barberton goldfields, where there is a lot of excitement at the moment’. In late September she again mentioned Barberton, 350 kilometres east of Pretoria, not far from the Mozambique border. She described it as ‘the centre of the goldfields’, which had been ‘transformed from a small town into a city in the space of just a few months’. Four months later it transpired that the journey had taken them somewhere completely different. ‘We went on a wonderful excursion to the goldfields,’ she said in a letter dated Friday 4 February 1887. ‘We went in our own horsedriven coach’ and ‘arrived on the Witwatersrand around eleven o’clock’. Witwatersrand? Wasn’t that an escarpment south of Pretoria, no more than 50 kilometres away? Where exactly was this gold?25
It wasn’t only outsiders who were puzzled. The experts, too, had a lot to think about when it came to the Transvaal’s mineral resources. Everyone had known for decades that there were gold deposits in the ground—the samples found in many parts of the area looked promising. The only question was how to extract it profitably.
Some saw mountains of gold in every shimmering riverbed, but time and again the geological facts shattered their illusions. That is, until 1883, when a commercially viable artery was discovered in De Kaap, a valley in the eastern Transvaal. More deposits were found in 1884, followed a year later by the spectacular discovery of the Sheba Reef. All in all, it was enough to trigger a massive gold rush and inevitably a boom town—Barberton—to go with it. What had happened after the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley in 1871 was now being repeated here. In no time at all, a bustling city rose from the ground, built on the hopes and dreams of thousands of fortune-seekers. Barberton had it all: offices, shops, bars, hotels, clubs, music halls, brothels and of course a stock exchange, where speculators traded frantically from dawn to dusk, hoping for even more fabulous discoveries.
Kimberley and London traded with the same fervour. On the London Stock Exchange the price of shares in the Barberton gold mines went through the roof, increasing a hundredfold. Mining companies with nothing but a glossy prospectus to offer had no trouble raising share capital. It was pure speculation, a calculated risk and nothing to do with production. As we know, this can go terribly wrong, and indeed it did. It was soon clear that investors had been living in cloud cuckoo land and the Barberton bubble burst with a vengeance. Only five out of thousands of claims ultimately developed into viable mines. The rest vanished into thin air, along with the fortunes that had been invested in them. Transvaal gold had turned out to be an extremely risky investment.
That was one of the reasons why technical and financial experts became more cautious when new deposits were discovered on the Witwatersrand in the course of 1886. The other reason was related to the unusual nature of the gold on the Rand, as the escarpment was generally called. It didn’t occur in clumps or as threads of ore in quartz crystals, but was buried in a subterranean channel, mostly in low concentrations. This disadvantage was, however, more than compensated for by the sheer magnitude of the goldfield. It covered a vast stretch of land, 200 kilometres long, scores of kilometres wide and in parts four kilometres deep.
The full extent was obviously unknown at the time, and even where the reef emerged at the surface it wasn’t always recognised for what it was. The famous American mining engineer Gardner Williams made a blunder he was never allowed to forget. After a ten-day reconnaissance of all the gold-bearing sites known at the time, Gardner announced, ‘If I rode over these reefs in America I would not get off my horse to look at them. In my opinion they are not worth Hell room.’ And there he was, standing on the largest reserve of gold in the world.26
Besides the sceptics, there were others, including engineers and investors, who were prepared to stake their lives on the Rand’s potential. Here, as in Barberton, the diamond magnates of Kimberley stepped into the limelight. J.B. Robinson, originally from the Cape Colony, was a notoriously tough businessman. Though up to his neck in debt, he arrived on the Rand in July 1886 with enough capital to buy up huge parcels of land, laying the foundations for an untold fortune. His financier, Alfred Beit, born in Hamburg and educated in Amsterdam, had emerged in Kimberley as the wealthiest and most astute diamond merchant of them all. He and his two German colleagues, Julius Wernher and Hermann Eckstein, had started out in the employ of Jules Porgès & Cie, an international dealer based in Paris. Its founder, too, born as Yehuda Porgès in Vienna and raised in Prague, had abandoned the city of lights a decade earlier in favour of the city of diamonds. And now he had set his sights on the fledgling city of gold.
The company wouldn’t have been complete without Cecil Rhodes and his partner Charles Rudd. Rhodes was known in Kimberley as a man who bought everything from everyone or, rather, the man who bought everything and everyone. Diamonds, pumping equipment, horses, competitors, it was all the same to him. The one principle he did uphold was that of consolidation—providing he was at the helm. He had achieved success by wheeling and dealing. With financial support from the Rothschilds, he was determined to put the jewel in the crown of his career: a total monopoly of diamonds for the business he had founded, the De Beers Mining Company, named after the brothers from whom he had bought the land. He had already brought in Beit, and in 1888 the last serious rival followed. This was the clownish but shrewd Barney Barnato, born in London as Barnet Isaacs, who haggled but in the end was seduced by Rhodes’s offer of membership of the Kimberley Club, a seat in the parliament of the Cape Colony and 7000 shares in the newly established De Beers Consolidated Mines, ‘the richest, the greatest, and the most powerful company the world has ever seen’. Barnato used the millions he made from that deal to invest in the Rand.27
This, then, was the select and already fabulously wealthy consortium that laid the foundations for organised gold mining on the Witwatersrand. They started off cautiously, given the recent fiasco in Barberton, but with enough conviction to unleash another gold rush and see the rise of another boom town—on the highveld, 1800 metres above sea level, and this time for good. In October 1886, a patch of land known as the Randjeslaagte was reserved to accommodate the huge influx of fortune-hunters. It was called Johannesburg. No one remembers why.28
Three months later, when
Willem and Louise Leyds came to see the mining camp, it was ‘a bustling village, already so large that you couldn’t get from one end to the other on foot. Of course, everything is still quite primitive. One sees e.g. a house of thatch and clay being built in a single day. There are signboards saying Standard Bank or Transvaal Hotel etc.’ There was also a wooden building, ‘the mine commissioner’s office, which houses the post office as well’. Three months later, in April 1887, it had been transformed. ‘It’s amazing how quickly places like Johannesburg are being built,’ Louise wrote to her family. ‘Six months ago it was still a barren piece of land.’ They had seen only ‘tents and clay huts’ and ‘now it’s a sprawling town with lots of buildings and new ones going up all the time’.29
And that was only the beginning. Right from the start there was no shortage of capital or labour on the Rand, but mining had to be industrialised and this demanded careful planning. Dynamite was needed to blast the rock, wood to support shafts and coal to fire the steam engines that drove the drills and stamping mills. The pulverised ore was washed over mercury-coated copper sheets, causing the fine particles of gold to form an amalgam with the mercury. The particles were then separated by heating and what remained was pure gold. The technical process wasn’t particularly complicated but the logistics of getting the raw materials and equipment to the site were time-consuming. Once the operation was up and running, in the course of 1888, Johannesburg began to boom.
There was just one last hurdle. It turned out that the gold ore found beneath a depth of 60 or 70 metres was mixed with pyrite, the ‘fool’s gold’ that every miner dreaded. Mercury was of no use at all. As a result, the growth of the gold-mining industry and the influx of immigrants stagnated after 1890. But no time was lost in seeking a solution and it came in the form of potassium cyanide, which produced the necessary chemical reaction. The technique was developed in Glasgow, and tested and applied soon afterwards by Wernher, Beit & Co., the successor of Jules Porgès & Cie. And in fact it was far more effective than the old method. Potassium cyanide extracted the gold residue that mercury left behind. In 1892, confidence was restored and the streets were again teeming with newcomers. Nothing stood in the way of Johannesburg’s expansion, not in South Africa, nor anywhere in the world. By 1896, a decade after it was founded, Johannesburg had a population of 100,000. More than 40,000 were African immigrants from all corners of the southern African subcontinent. They performed the physical, unskilled labour, above and below ground. There were also 5000 coloureds and over 50,000 whites, who took the semi-skilled jobs, providing technical, administrative or financial services. Only 6000 of them were born in the Transvaal. Twothirds were English-speaking, from the Cape Colony and Great Britain; the remainder were a hotchpotch from all parts of the globe: Russian Jews, Germans, Hollanders. The vast majority of them were single young men. Bars, gambling halls and brothels did a roaring trade. Johannesburg had evolved into a hybrid between Monte Carlo and Sodom and Gomorrah.30
The Boer War Page 6
