The Boer War

by Martin Bossenbroek

  Leyds was no longer in a position to debunk conspiracy theories of that kind. In that respect, too, he had taken sides. He had committed himself to Kruger’s dream, to the interests of his Amsterdam network and to the Boers’ way of conducting politics. In his own mind he was still committed exclusively to the interests of the Transvaal and the Netherlands, which he considered compatible, but in the eyes of the world he had lost his innocence. He had become part of the system, and from then on the whiff of suspicion that surrounded conflicts of interest clung to him as well. Because it’s not unfair to say that this had become one of the hallmarks of Transvaal politics. However scrupulous the Boers may have been in religious matters, they were lax in political affairs. Or maybe it was just the young republic’s lack of experience. Seizing land from hostile African chiefdoms, using it to graze cattle, sheep and horses and then defending it against British invaders didn’t amount to building a state. That took far more: trade, industry, communications, infrastructure; in short, economic activity. And those didn’t simply happen by themselves; they had to be built up and organised. But where to start?

  Kruger found the answer in the economic model advocated in the early 1880s by—unsurprisingly—Nellmapius. The formula was simple: restrict imports and promote exports. Attract foreign entrepreneurs with capital, who would produce the basics, such as clothing, leather, flour and sugar. Give them concessions and other privileges and protect them with high import duties. That would stimulate exports and bring money in, instead of the other way round. It wasn’t an innovative theory—it recalled the mercantilism of earlier centuries and ran counter to the nineteenth-century principle of free trade—but this was probably the very reason that Kruger embraced it.

  In October 1881, Nellmapius was rewarded with the two monopolies he had applied for, one for producing sugar from maize and beet, the other for distilling alcohol. Eighteen months later, Kruger, himself a teetotaller, personally attended the opening of Nellmapius’s brandy distillery to toast the new venture with a glass of milk. Intemperance couldn’t be condoned, but a shot after a hard day’s work wouldn’t do any harm, and this first factory in the Transvaal—prosaically called the First Factory—received his wholehearted blessing.

  Many others followed Nellmapius’s example, attracted by the favourable terms of the concession system. There were huge interests at stake: factories to produce paper, soap, matches and rope; buildings for markets and abattoirs; the infrastructure for and the delivery of water, gas and electricity. And before long, the most lucrative concession of all, at least potentially: parcels of land, first in and around Barberton, subsequently on the Rand, with rights to mine gold. Then everything that the mining industry entailed: the extraction of coal and iron, the transportation of raw materials and machinery, the supply of gunpowder and dynamite.44

  The concession for gunpowder and dynamite was initially awarded to Nellmapius. Later, towards the end of 1887, after Nellmapius’s infamous court case, it was transferred to Eduard Lippert. But the sector seemed to be jinxed. A few years later Lippert was also involved in a concession scandal and with him, once again, the entire political elite—with Kruger in the lead. It showed how vulnerable the system was to fraud. The multitude of government contracts attracted not only genuine entrepreneurs, but also swindlers and speculators out to make a quick profit. Moreover, the agents responsible for awarding concessions knew little about government finances. There was no independent oversight, no control mechanism, no clear distinction between the public and private domains. Rumours of nepotism, bribery and abuse of power were soon rife, and there was more than a grain of truth to them. The concession system was wide open to corruption.45

  Leyds wasn’t in favour of it, either. As a rule he was ‘opposed to concessions, or more specifically, monopolies’. He felt they ‘harmed rather than benefited a country. Instead of promoting a country’s industry, they have the opposite effect. In my opinion, we should be aiming at free trade and free industry.’ However, ‘there are exceptions to every rule, and that is the case here, too. There are matters which only the State can deal with, which it cannot leave to private individuals, and in these the State should have a monopoly.’ He was referring to matters that impinge on the security of the state, like firearms, gunpowder and dynamite. And, of course, railways.46

  The implication was, however, that conflicts of interest were inherent in a venture like the Netherlands-South African Railway Company. Even during the lengthy and arduous process of establishing it, the justification for its existence had been called into question. By 1884, the Dutch concessionaires had failed to raise even a fraction of the share capital they needed. Thereafter they faced one setback after another. The driving forces behind the venture, Groll and Maarschalk, died early on in the process. The American speculator McMurdo, who held the concession for the Portuguese stretch of the line, continued to be obstructive. The Volksraad became increasingly critical. Most worrying of all was the growing competition on three different fronts. To the south-west, the south and the south-east, steady progress was being made with the construction of a railway to the Transvaal. In 1884, Willem and Louise Leyds had travelled by stagecoach to complete the last 200 kilometres of their journey from Cape Town to Kimberley; a year later the first locomotive steamed triumphantly into the city of diamonds. In the same year, branch lines of the southern railway from the ports of East London and Port Elizabeth were extended up to the border of the Orange Free State. And a year later, the south-eastern line, starting in Durban, had already reached Ladysmith.

  The three new concessionaires of the future Netherlands-South African Railway Company, Rudolf van den Wall Bake, Jacob Cluysenaer and Johannes Groll Jr, had nothing of the kind to show. The project only gained momentum with the spectacular discoveries of gold, which boosted the Transvaal’s economic prospects and consequently the company’s anticipated profitability. Prospective investors gradually gained confidence. In March 1886, urged by Leyds—through Moltzer—the Amsterdam banker Adriaan de Marez Oyens took the initiative to raise a 500,000-guilder loan to the Transvaal. The loan succeeded, Leyds got the credit and Kruger the funds he needed to convert the old loans and lay pipes to supply water to the goldfields.

  This was encouraging and it came just in time to reassure the president that he was still backing the right horse: a line to Lourenço Marques built and run by a Dutch company. Kruger, in the meantime, disheartened by the sluggish development of the project, had briefly entertained the idea of a link to the rail networks in the Cape Colony and Natal. But with the discovery of gold and the promise of a loan, he soon abandoned the notion. He returned to his original plan and pursued it with dogged determination, refusing to submit to the fierce opposition of the Executive Council, or the demands of Johannesburg’s gold diggers, who were lobbying for a rail link to their mother city of Kimberley. The only compromise Kruger was prepared to make in the decisive meeting of the Volksraad was to set a time limit—September 1887—for the establishment of the Dutch company.

  The deadline was met in June, with time to spare, but only with a great deal of outside help. More than two million guilders was needed as start-up capital. Dutch financiers put up only 581,000 guilders; the bulk, once again, came from De Marez Oyens. A further 891,000 guilders came from two German institutions, the Berliner Handels-Gesellschaft and the bankers Robert Warschauer & Co. The remaining balance of 600,000 guilders was pledged on behalf of the South African Republic by Kruger in person. On the face of it, this seemed strange. A year earlier he had been happy with a loan of 500,000 guilders from Amsterdam, and in May 1887 he returned 600,000 guilders to help finance a Dutch railway company. The explanation lay in the four-letter word ‘gold’.

  The Rand’s unprecedented mineral wealth functioned as a flywheel for the economy of the Transvaal, in which respect Nellmapius had been unable to help Kruger. To be fair, however, it was thanks to all the concessions that the state treasury, like everyone else, was now profiting directly and lavishl
y from the business boom. In 1886, government revenue was less than £200,000; in 1887 it tripled. There was enough left over to invest in Kruger’s great dream. The fact that the two directors of the Netherlands-South African Railway Company, Van den Wall Bake and Cluysenaer, were Dutch wasn’t a problem. A board of directors made up of four Dutch and three German bankers, fine. Kruger made do with two government commissioners, Beelaerts van Blokland, the special envoy in the Netherlands, and Leyds in the Transvaal. Anything, as long as that railway was built.47

  Kruger is unlikely to have known Goethe’s Faust, in which the protagonist sells his soul to the devil. The only book he read was the Bible, though even that contains passages that must have given him pause for thought. Three of the four Gospels of the New Testament—Matthew, Mark and Luke—include the story of Jesus casting out devils. The Pharisees knew for certain after the miracle: ‘He casteth out devils through Beelzebub chief of the devils.’ It takes little imagination to see the parallels, not to mention the—let’s say, coincidental—connection between the city’s name and the fourth evangelist, Johannes in Dutch.

  To Kruger, Johannesburg was a city of sin, where people worshipped Mammon, not God. Yet he had no qualms about benefiting from the rock—the devil’s gold—from which it was built. The symbolism even acquired a tangible form. Gold was also found at Paardekraal, the dedicated memorial of the Boer past. In 1887, a settlement developed here which was named—ironically, however well intended—Krugersdorp, after the president. Psychologically, it all seems difficult to reconcile. Nor would Kruger have taken heart from Jesus’s reply to the Pharisees: ‘And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every Kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against itself falleth.’48

  Be that as it may, this wasn’t the way things looked in 1887. On the contrary, the entire country was flourishing because of the gold and the future looked bright. At the beginning of 1888, Louise Leyds boasted to her family in the Netherlands, ‘One might compare the Transvaal to an ugly girl who suddenly gets rich and is courted by suitors who showed no interest in her before. The Cape is as insipid as can be. Everyone’s leaving and streaming in here. In Pretoria houses are sprouting like mushrooms and still there’s a shortage. Across from us, there used to be a shack, but now they’re building a lovely house.’ The apotheosis of the building boom in Pretoria was the new government building in Church Square, of which Kruger had laid the first stone in May 1889. Three magnificent storeys in the neo-Renaissance style. Leyds could hardly wait. ‘I’ve promised my staff a dinner party once we move in. I’ll be happy to leave the dump we’re in now, where we have draughts but no air, dust but no space, not to mention moths, woodworm and rats.’49

  In contrast to all this activity and progress, the railway company had made little headway. A team of five Dutch engineers was sent out as soon as it was officially established in June 1887. In November they started surveying at the eastern end of the line, near the Mozambique border, which proved an unfortunate choice. They arrived at the height of the summer, when malaria is rife and the heat unbearable, especially for Dutchmen unaccustomed to the climate. Two men succumbed soon after starting work, a third resigned and fled. Six months later, when director Cluysenaer arrived in the Transvaal to make a fresh start, he received a piece of bad news. The negotiations with McMurdo’s company regarding tariff agreements were still deadlocked. To keep up the pressure, Kruger—it must have been painful for him—decided to suspend work on the eastern line.

  Fortunately for the railway company, there was an alternative. Though relatively minor and less dramatic, it was of inestimable importance to get a foot in the door. It was about transporting coal, vital to industrial gold mining, to Johannesburg. Some time earlier, mainly on Leyds’s advice, Isaac Lewis and Sammy Marks had been refused a concession for a ‘coal line’ from the south on the grounds that it would pre-empt ‘an extension of the railway line through the Orange Free State to the Vaal River’. And, after all, it was ‘the Government’s policy to build the line from the north to the south’. But there were still two more applications, from Thomas Tancred, the contractor for the Portuguese stretch of the eastern line, and from Lippert of the dynamite monopoly. Both were interested in a link with the coal mines west of Johannesburg. To this, Cluysenaer added an application for a short railway line, more like a tram line, to Boksburg in the east. Coalfields had recently been discovered there, but not all of them had yet been claimed—which Cluysenaer promptly proceeded to do.

  The three applications came before the Volksraad in July 1888. There was a heated debate. Kruger’s partiality towards the Netherlands-South African Railway Company was widely known and he came under attack. Several members accused him of favouring the Dutch. Seething with irritation, he recited Leyds’s patient explanations and in the end managed to win majority support. Construction work began in January 1889. The line was barely 27 kilometres long, but it got the company under way, and managing the railway and the coal mine proved both profitable and instructive.50

  In July 1888, a new opportunity came Leyds’s way. State Secretary Bok’s term of office was due to lapse at the end of the year. Though he was eligible for re-election, Kruger proposed Leyds as a rival candidate. The Volksraad adopted the motion and chose Leyds by 18 votes to 12. Honoured as he was, Leyds had two reservations. He didn’t meet the age requirement—the state secretary had to be at least 30—and he would only be eligible on 1 May 1889. In addition, he thought it unreasonable for a more senior position to be less well paid than the one he already held. Earlier that year, his salary as state attorney had been raised to £1200 (excluding his fee as government commissioner of the railway company), whereas the state secretary was still earning only £1000.

  Many members of the Volksraad were shocked by Leyds’s request for a salary increase, and by his age. Most of them had thought he was older. The debate was postponed until the following session, which gave Kruger time to iron things out. Bok’s term of office was extended by a few months and Leyds replaced him as state secretary on 2 May 1889. A month later the Volksraad agreed to raise his salary to £1200. He was strongly advised, however, to grow his beard again, as he had done five years earlier, when he first arrived in the Transvaal.

  It can rightly be called a lightning career. At 25 Leyds had parachuted into a foreign country as state attorney and, not yet 30, he had been elected state secretary by a clear majority. He was the second man in the political hierarchy, working directly under and in close collaboration with the president. As he himself described his position, ‘There are no set limits to the office of state secretary. The system here is strongly centralised. Ultimately, everything ends up with the government (i.e. the president and the state secretary) which may in some cases refer to the Executive Council. All documents intended for the government are addressed to the state secretary, who also signs all government correspondence and minutes.’51

  It was a demanding job with a lot of responsibility, which he had to tackle alone for the first few months. In mid-May 1889, Louise, little Louis and baby Willemine, who was born at the beginning of February, went to the Netherlands to spend a few months with their family. They had vaguely arranged that Willem would try to fetch them at the end of the year, but there were a few obstacles in the way. There were several matters Kruger was unable or unwilling to handle without him, and some that Leyds wanted to attend to personally.

  Most of them were about linking the Transvaal to the outside world, in other words, railways and harbours. Early in March 1889, Kruger and Leyds had held talks in Potchefstroom with a delegation from the Orange Free State headed by the new president, F.W. Reitz. Three treaties were concluded, with far-reaching consequences. First, a railway agreement, in which Reitz promised that without the Transvaal’s consent the lines from the Cape Colony and Natal would go no further than Bloemfontein and Harrismith. Kruger reciprocated: without prior approval from the Orange Free State, they would not build a link to the
outside world other than to the east, or the south—in other words, to Lourenço Marques or the Free State—and not ‘round about’ to Kimberley. The second treaty was a trade and friendship agreement, while the third established a political and military alliance, which paved the way for a joint struggle against Britain a decade later. The provision in question read: ‘The South African Republic and the Orange Free State hereby enter into a mutual alliance and declare themselves willing to assist one another with all force and means, should the independence of either of the two States be threatened or undermined from outside.’52

  In the short term the railways convention had the most far-reaching implications. It was clear that the ‘British’ lines were again making headway and that the ‘race to the Rand’ had not yet been won. An unexpected stroke of good luck came in late June 1889, when the Portuguese government rallied and showed its more efficient side. In spite of pressure from the British, Lisbon decided to withdraw McMurdo’s concession on the grounds that he had failed to meet the agreed deadline. So the way was clear again. Beelaerts van Blokland immediately resumed talks about a tariff agreement, now directly with the Portuguese authorities. Pending the outcome, just as had happened a year earlier, the Volksraad discussed another local matter concerning the railway. In July 1889, it was about the stretch between Pretoria and Johannesburg, and again there were three applications, including one from the Netherlands-South African Railway Company and one from ‘that wretched Lippert’. This time Kruger and Leyds were unable to get their way. It mattered little that none of the applications was granted and that a proposal to extend the Rand tram by a total of 81 kilometres—to Krugersdorp in the west and Springs in the east—was adopted without any problem. For Kruger personally there was pleasant news as well. The Volksraad approved an increase of his salary from £2000 to £8000 a year.53