This seemed a good time for Leyds to discuss his leave with the president. But Kruger turned the conversation to the subject of the eastern frontier. Two territories to the south of Mozambique, Swaziland and Tsongaland, had no international status. Kruger was in favour of annexing them. That would give the Transvaal an independent link to the sea and its own harbour, Kosi Bay. Leyds wasn’t enthusiastic. Kosi Bay had less potential than Delagoa Bay. In the meantime, however, a Transvaal delegation had gone there to negotiate with the British. Kruger wanted his state secretary close at hand in case anything came of it, though he might have known that the British would never let the Transvaal have a harbour of their own. They were simply keeping him dangling.
That was one of the drawbacks of Leyds’s new position. Before long he discovered another: bribery, whether subtle or not. In July 1889, for instance, he received a concession proposal accompanied by a personal letter with a £10 cheque tucked inside. He was furious. He wrote to Louise, ‘I received another insulting letter today from a chap who wanted to bribe me. I’ll send you a copy of it and of my reply. I won’t write it today because I’m still too upset. What bothers me most is that, after five years of honest work, I haven’t managed to convince everyone that I am a man who cannot be bribed.’ He would just have to live with it. Having accepted the appointment as government commissioner of the railway company, he found the odds were stacked against him. To some, being partisan meant being open to bribery.
There were advantages, too, such as tributes that boosted his ego. Many of those came his way in the course of his political career, but the first was something special. About 300 kilometres north of Barberton, known for the first gold rush, another promising artery was found. This was to become the Selati goldfield. The settlement that developed there, Leydsdorp, was named after him. Leyds was quite proud of it, he told Louise. ‘I’m curious to know how the village named after me will develop. Of course, there’s a bit of vanity there, but then everyone has their foibles. I certainly feel my name should continue to be associated with this country, with the gold industry in particular.’54
He probably didn’t mean it like that, but the symbolism is unmistakable. After Krugersdorp, now Leydsdorp, surrounded by goldfields. No ideals without compromises, huge compromises. Fight the devil with his own gold. Mix personal interests with the interests of the state. All for the ‘Great Cause’.
On 19 September 1889, Leyds received a telegram from Beelaerts van Blokland saying that the tariff agreement with Portugal was in place. The moratorium on the construction of the eastern line was cancelled on the spot and the railway company could go ahead. Leyds was keener than ever to take a break. He wanted ‘to get away because it would do me good, physically and mentally’. What if he were to combine his visit to Europe with business meetings, but still keep it officially a private trip? Kruger relented and gave his consent on 8 October. Three weeks later Leyds boarded the Grantully Castle in Cape Town.55
Boers and Hollanders, love and hate
Amsterdam, November 1889
They hadn’t seen each other for six months and Louise was longing to have her husband all to herself. ‘When you get here you must spend time with me, and not keep rushing off to all those people,’ she implored. With her, and with the children, of course. Louis ‘is starting to talk’ and he would ‘absolutely fall in love’ with little Willemine, ‘so contented and sweet with her dark eyes’. Willem had also looked forward to being reunited with his family, but he knew beforehand that he wouldn’t be able to devote himself solely to them. He had been granted leave only on condition that his trip would serve a political purpose as well.56
That is, harbours and railways. He arrived in Amsterdam in mid-November, and in early December he was expected in Lisbon. Since the Portuguese had withdrawn McMurdo’s concession six months earlier, all sorts of wild schemes had been doing the rounds concerning the critically strategic southern coast of Mozambique. Not only in London and Cape Town, but in Pretoria too. Even so, the deep harbour of Delagoa Bay had far more going for it than Kosi Bay with its sandbanks. Perhaps it would still be possible to work something out with the Portuguese?
Arrangements were soon made for Leyds to visit Lisbon, ‘secretly’, so that the Portuguese government would have ‘less trouble with pressure from Britain’. The news inevitably leaked, but by then Leyds already knew what he wanted to know. It was clear that the more unconventional plans stood no chance. ‘The Portuguese are afraid of being driven into the sea,’ he reported to Kruger. They were against the idea of selling a strip of land in Mozambique to the Transvaal to provide a corridor to the sea. The same applied to the railway company having its own cargo depot in the harbour of Lourenço Marques. His conclusion was that Portugal ‘needs to be reassured about our intentions; that they understand that we want to work with them, not against them’. The message he himself conveyed in Lisbon was that the Transvaal government would consider it ‘a hostile act’ if special privileges were given to ‘others’, for which read ‘Britain’.57
This wasn’t Leyds’s only mission in Europe. After Portugal he visited France and Belgium in the vain hope of arousing their interest in establishing a Transvaal steamship company. In the Netherlands he had mainly matters pertaining to the railway to discuss, not only with old acquaintances like Beelaerts van Blokland and Moltzer, but also with the railway company’s new executive board. He had met a few of its members before: financier De Marez Oyens to start with, and directors Van den Wall Bake and Gerrit Middelberg, the latter having succeeded Cluysenaer on 1 January 1890.
Leyds also wanted to find out what the Dutch thought of the Transvaal. At the time of his departure, more than five years earlier, the Boers were held in high regard. Their successful war of independence against the British was still fresh in people’s minds. In February 1884, Kruger, Smit and Du Toit had been given a hero’s welcome throughout the country, although the acclaim they received was unfortunately not matched by anything more substantial. People waved flags in abundance, but not chequebooks. Leyds soon realised that little had changed. Pompous speeches about kinship, but no funds when it came to investing in the South African Republic. The spectacular discoveries of gold had made almost no impression at all.
In that respect, the difficulty he experienced in raising funds for the railway company spoke volumes. Amsterdam’s high finance preferred to invest their capital in the Dutch East Indies, where they held the strings in their own trusted hands and where the government gave the business sector all the legroom it needed. Compared with that tropical entrepreneurs’ paradise, the risks and returns in the Boer republic were far more difficult to calculate. There was relatively little Dutch economic activity in the Transvaal apart from the Netherlands-South African Railway Company and two financial institutions, the Netherlands Bank and Credit Union of South Africa (Nederlandsche Bank en Credietvereeniging voor Zuid-Afrika) and the Pretoria Mortgage Company (Pretoria Hypotheek-Maatschappij), and this wasn’t going to change.58
It was no different with the public. The Dutch South African Association made numerous efforts to promote emigration to the Transvaal, but they proved futile. The supply didn’t match the demand. Employment was available only for certain occupations such as teachers, civil servants and church ministers. The motherland had little to offer in the way of skilled labour for the mining industry, the Transvaal’s major growth sector, and no substantial mining enterprise existed in the Netherlands to recruit and train people locally. The importance of this last factor was evident from the—again exceptional—example of the railway company. The Dutch had no special reputation in the field of railway construction, yet the company managed to recruit more than half its workforce in the Netherlands.59
So the Netherlands hadn’t achieved much in the way of strengthening its relations with the South African Republic over the previous five years.
But they continued to dream about the Transvaal. Their Afrikaner ‘cousins’ still held a romantic attraction, ho
wever fanciful, in the nationalistic imagination of the Dutch intellectual elite, united, or rather, fragmented as they were in a range of pro-Boer associations. Their infatuation with the Boers may not have been blind, but it was at best short-sighted. The Boers’ difficult relationship with modern times looked better through rosecoloured spectacles. And few people in the Netherlands were even aware of the schisms and animosities that divided them.
An interesting example emerged from Du Toit’s visit to the Netherlands in early October 1889, more than a month before Leyds returned to his native soil. It was a rather strange situation. Du Toit had come to discuss the possibility of establishing a university in the Transvaal, a mission for which he wasn’t ideally suited. He had been a co-founder of the Afrikaner Bond, and fiercely resented the Dutch influence in the Transvaal. He was also one of Leyds’s harshest critics. The only reason Kruger had chosen him was his supposed good relationship with the Anti-Revolutionary Party leader, Kuyper, founder of the Vrije Universiteit. Yet it was Kuyper, of all people, who stalled, while the board of the Dutch South African Association welcomed Du Toit with open arms. There was a festive reception complete with carriage, garlands and national anthem.
Louise Leyds, who was also in Amsterdam but not at the reception, considered it ‘an absolute scandal’. Bristling with indignation, she fulminated to Willem that ‘their display of respect for that man, who has flung so much mud at us Hollanders, reveals a lack of all sense of national honour’. And to think De Marez Oyens was involved in organising it! She went so far as to raise the matter in person with the secretary of the Dutch South African Association, the Amsterdam professor of philosophy Bellaar Spruyt, at the home of Moltzer, who—‘thank God’—hadn’t been present at the reception. Louise could just picture Du Toit ‘alone in his room afterwards, holding his sides with laughter and thinking “those good old Hollanders—you can kick them around as much as you like and they’ll still lick your hand”’.60
A bit melodramatic, perhaps, but Louise Leyds’s outrage is easy to understand. Not long before, Willem himself had referred to Du Toit as ‘that damned hypocrite’. He was stung to think that Du Toit had received such hospitality in the Netherlands from the very people he regarded as his allies. That was also the most important lesson he learned after five years’ absence from his fatherland. The attitude in the Netherlands towards the Boers and their republic could best be summed up as: maintain cordial relations but steer clear of business. Over the previous few years Leyds had moved in exactly the opposite direction. His commitment to the Boer cause had deepened, but his personal relations with the Boer leaders had remained cool and critical.61
Nor did they improve when Leyds and his family returned to Pretoria in March 1890. He was confronted soon afterwards with a personal attack by P.J. Scherpenseel, with D.H. Schmüll as an unwitting accomplice. The two men had been eligible for appointment as consuls of the South African Republic in Belgium and the Netherlands respectively, but their hopes had gone up in smoke—Beelaerts van Blokland had dismissed them as not up to standard—and Scherpenseel wanted to settle the score. Moreover, he was the representative of a Franco-Belgian railway syndicate angling for concessions in the Transvaal, that is, a rival of the Netherlands-South African Railway Company. Reason enough to take it out on Leyds. The weapon was a letter from Leyds himself. Written in 1886, it was addressed to Schmüll, who had forwarded a copy to Scherpenseel. At the time, Leyds had still been on close terms with Schmüll, and preoccupied with the Nellmapius affair. He had been frank in his views about the Boer leaders, notably General Smit and the vice-president, Commandant-General Piet Joubert. ‘Be wary about trusting General Smit,’ he wrote, and ‘the reason for Piet Joubert’s conduct is his jealousy of the President. Back then he was a serious contender for the presidency and it hurts every time he has to say “President” to someone else. On top of that, he has a deep-seated hatred of Hollanders.’
Those weren’t nice things to say about one’s colleagues, and when the letter found its way to the Transvaal Advertiser Leyds was in trouble. The Volksraad received memorandums demanding a thorough investigation, the press speculated about his imminent resignation, and an angry Kruger demanded an explanation. Leyds was obliged to offer a written apology to the two aggrieved generals and to Kruger himself. He did so in all humility. ‘It was 1886 at the time and it is now 1890. In the intervening period I have come to know both General Smit and General Joubert better. I have had the privilege of working with them on a daily basis and I deeply regret having spoken of them in that spirit and in those terms. Whatever decision might be taken, I hope in any event that it will be in the interests of this Republic, which for years I have served to the best of my ability and which I have come to love so deeply.’
Kruger, Smit and Joubert accepted the apology. The threat to Leyds’s political career had passed. The Volksraad continued to grumble, but Kruger rose firmly to his defence. As a Christian he had forgiven Leyds and he appealed to the honourable members to do the same. Everyone makes a mistake once in a while.62
Forgiven he was, but the letter was never forgotten. Leyds’s critics were quick to invoke it whenever anti-Dutch sentiment flared up. As state secretary, he was after all the undisputed figurehead of the Dutch in the Transvaal and therefore the perfect target for those who disliked the Dutch. There were more of them than the Boer-lovers in the Netherlands realised. What upset people most was the ‘haughtiness’ of the Dutch—Willem and Louise Leyds not being exempt. Their disdain for the unsophisticated Boers was obvious. They refused to speak Afrikaans, attended church infrequently, if at all, and socialised only with their own kind. As a result, and in spite of their good intentions, the Boers and the Dutch remained strangers to one another and never became true compatriots. The resentment was strongest among Kruger’s conservative, devout Calvinist following. In less orthodox circles, united around Vice-President Joubert, the grievances against the Dutch related mainly to the disproportionately influential position they allegedly occupied under Paul Kruger. The argument was that they took jobs away from no less talented candidates from the Transvaal, the Orange Free State and the Cape, and so undermined the Afrikaner quest for unity. There were several reasons for this antipathy towards the Dutch in Johannesburg and its surroundings. The predominantly English-speaking and pro-British immigrants in the gold-mining industry saw them as Kruger’s inner circle, the clique responsible for their continuing status as second-class citizens, foreigners, or Uitlanders, as the Boers called them.63
All things considered, this probably gave undue credit to the Dutch in the Transvaal. In the first place, there were relatively few of them. On the other hand, they were strongly represented in certain fields, in education, the church and, most prominently, in government service, especially in senior positions. Between 15 and 20 per cent of civil servants in the state secretariat and the education department were Dutch-speaking. It was mainly their high visibility in key administrative positions, Leyds being the most obvious example, that gave the impression of a Dutch power bloc in Pretoria.64
Plus of course that supreme Dutch bulwark, the Netherlands-South African Railway Company. If there was one institution that fed into anti-Dutch sentiment, it was the railway company, which was gradually gathering momentum. None of that changed with the inauguration of the Rand tram in March 1890, or the appointment of its new director. Gerrit Middelberg, an experienced engineer educated in Germany and England, was a devout Calvinist and a regular churchgoer. He was good at dealing with people, in the boardroom or on the work floor. The right man in the right place. Yet even he was unable to improve the company’s image.
This was partly due to the large contingent of Hollanders on his staff whose standards of moral propriety differed from those of the Boers. But then piety and abstinence weren’t high on the list of qualifications for recruitment in the Netherlands. Behind it all, however, was economic and political rivalry. The company held one of the most coveted concessions in the entire Transva
al and it had been a bone of contention for years. The Cape Colony and Natal wanted to extend their own government lines to the north and then complete the line in the Transvaal. Tariffs were left to the whims of a monopolist, and the Uitlanders on the Rand were unable to do anything about it. And everyone knew that the company enjoyed the patronage of Kruger—and of course Leyds. The president pinned all his hopes on the railway company, which was to become the most powerful instrument in his quest for an independent link to the sea. The railway to the Indian Ocean would be the lifeblood of the Transvaal, the engine for independent development, free from Britain, unconnected to the struggle for Afrikaner unity and beyond the grasp of the Randlords. The railway company was in every respect a political venture.65
It was therefore also the pawn in a political struggle, with all the give and take this entails, as became apparent in the course of 1890. The company came under fire again around the same time as the personal attack on Leyds. It was no coincidence that Vice-President Joubert was at the forefront. In two lengthy open letters he raised questions about the company’s operations. Kruger realised that something had to be done. To some extent the criticism was justified. They would have to make a concession of some kind to take the wind out of the opposition’s sails.
The Boer War Page 9
