The Boer War
Page 12
Well, the whole of the Transvaal? There was still that exotic enclave 50 kilometres south of the capital. A tented camp in 1886, a city with a population of 100,000 less than a decade later, Johannesburg was an emerging metropolis. There were different ways of looking at it. In the eyes of Lady Sarah Wilson, Lord Randolph Churchill’s sister, it was ‘a wonderful town’. Its bustling streets, the restless eyes, the breathless rush, all reminded her of the City of London. To South Africa’s first female intellectual, Olive Schreiner, it was ‘a great, fiendish, hell of a city’, an empty shell of corruption, with its palatial mansions, brothels and gambling halls.82 And these were women of the world. To the average Boer, Johannesburg was a different planet altogether, with an atmosphere unfit to sustain human life.
On his first visit to Johannesburg, in February 1887, Kruger disliked the city and its gold diggers. He returned a few times afterwards, but never enjoyed it. In March 1890 he had an unpleasant experience on his way to a meeting with Sir Henry Loch at Blignautspont. It was during the pyrite crisis and the city, normally bursting with confidence, was on edge. A hostile crowd had gathered and, while waiting for Kruger to arrive, they tore down and trampled the red, white, blue and green flag of the Transvaal to the strains of ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘God Save the Queen’. A less courageous man might have been apprehensive. Kruger turned the incident into a parable. The demonstrators reminded him of a baboon he had once kept, he told Sir Henry later at Blignautspont. The creature loved him and allowed no one else to touch it. Then one day it burned its tail in a campfire and turned on him. The people of Johannesburg behaved in the same way. They had burned their fingers speculating and were now taking it out on Paul Kruger.
He didn’t say what became of the baboon. But it was soon clear that Johannesburg would never rise in his esteem. Exclusion and curtailment of rights were the only measures he could come up with to control what he regarded as a horde of shifty intruders. Until then, newcomers to the Transvaal had been eligible for naturalisation after five years’ residence and on payment of £25. Adult males were then also entitled to vote in presidential and parliamentary elections. It must be said that this applied only to whites. In the Transvaal, unlike the Cape Colony, civil rights were not accorded to blacks, no matter whether they were locals or immigrants. Nor, for that matter, were they accorded to coloureds or Asians. As Leyds explained to the young activist Mohandas Gandhi, ‘though the culture of a Brahmin is on a totally different plane, the Kaffirs would not understand that difference. For them it is an easy division: blacks and whites.’83
In 1890 Kruger felt it was time to start classifying the different groups that made up the white population as well. The term Uitlander, or foreigner, had already become generally accepted, but for future newcomers acceptance as citizens would take longer. The waiting time to acquire citizenship and voting rights was increased to 14 years and the voting age to 40. To soften the blow, the Uitlanders would be able to vote for their own, separate parliament after four years. This new body would be competent to deal with a range of economic issues, but not with strategic matters such as currency, banking, taxation, concessions or railways. Johannesburg would not receive its own municipal council. Its inhabitants would have to settle for a health committee, instituted in 1887, in which Dutch was the official language. The South African Republic Police (commonly known as the Zarps), a force established specifically for the goldfields, was administered from Pretoria. It recruited only burghers—people with citizenship rights—many of them landless Boers, or bywoners, ‘who had sought their fortune in Johannesburg without success’.
In August 1892 the Uitlanders responded by establishing the Transvaal National Union, chaired by the advocate Charles Leonard. Addressing the public at the inauguration, he asked, ‘Who made the Transvaal?’ Who had made the economic boom possible? The answer was not unexpected. ‘We! Yet we are regarded as birds of passage, and because they were here before us, we have no rights.’ The National Union intended to change that. Year after year they submitted petitions bearing thousands of signatures to Pretoria, all to no avail. The only response was a summons sent in May 1894 to a number of Uitlanders—of British, Dutch and German descent—to join a punitive expedition against an African chief in the north-east of the Transvaal. Five British ‘conscripts’ refused. They were arrested, sentenced and escorted by armed guards to the battlefield in the Zoutpansberg district.
The National Union cast them as martyrs for the cause. No vote, no conscription. The British, including the government in London, were outraged. The secretary for the colonies, Lord Ripon, sent the high commissioner, Sir Henry Loch, to Pretoria to discuss the matter. His arrival exposed Kruger to an experience even more mortifying than the incident in Johannesburg four years earlier. In his own capital, the Boers’ ultimate citadel, the old president was made to witness the welcome extended to Sir Henry at the station by an enthusiastic throng cheering for Queen and Country. That alone was distressing, but worse was still to come on the way to his hotel. Someone in the crowd hurled a Union Jack into the president’s carriage. Kruger thrashed about with his cane, but wasn’t able to remove the flag draped over his shoulders. And this time, he could think of no anecdote to ease his embarrassment.
The symbolism spoke volumes, but the matter itself was settled amicably. In the meantime, London had requested that British citizens be exempted from commando service. Leyds was in favour of this, mainly because it would involve changing the London Convention, which he could present to the British government as a trade-off for an ‘amendment to other provisions’—article 4, in particular, which was the basis for the British claim to suzerainty. The Volksraad agreed. In future, residents who did not possess civil rights would be allowed to buy off their obligation to serve in the army.84
But that did not address the Uitlanders’ main grievance. They were still disadvantaged when it came to political rights, whereas they were the driving force behind the Republic’s economy. This applied to workers in the gold-mining industry and equally to their employers, the Randlords—or at least that was the view of the Randlords. They too had established an organisation, the exclusive Chamber of Mines, with Kruger as its honorary—and ever absent—president. The first active president was Hermann Eckstein of Corner House. All the large mining companies were represented. Their grievances against Kruger and Leyds were confined to only one aspect of official policies, but it happened to be the cornerstone: economic protectionism and especially that lousy concession system. For everything they needed in order to extract gold, the mine barons came up against unassailable monopolies, licences and tariffs—for labour, water, food, wood, chemicals, tools, machinery and, most of all, coal, dynamite and rail transport. They had to get Pretoria’s approval for the lot. The Rand was at the mercy of the tight network of the friends, family and business associates around Kruger and his Hollanders. For everything they acquired, the mining companies felt—and were often able to prove—that they were paying more than they would in a free market.
The abuses inherent in the system were illustrated by the dynamite dispute, which flared up intermittently over a number of years. Towards the end of 1887 Eduard Lippert had taken over the explosives monopoly from Nellmapius. The concession was for manufacturing dynamite, but not importing it. However, it came to light in 1892 that Lippert’s South
African Company for Explosive Substances was importing not the raw materials for explosives but the ready-made end product, which he then sold to the mining companies at a 200 per cent profit. It was a scandal. Kruger and Leyds took the full blast and the concession was withdrawn. But it was not the end of Lippert. A new concession was issued in 1894, after endless consultations in the Volksraad. The Chamber of Mines applied for the concession, but so did Lippert, and to everyone’s amazement, he won it. The South African Company for Explosive Substances opened its doors again, with a 15-year monopoly on the manufacture of dynamite, gunpowder and munitions. What only emerged subsequently, and sparked off
another scandal a few years later, was that Lippert had done a deal with one of the biggest dynamite producers in the world, the Nobel Trust Dynamite Company, now a German–British concern. Once again the Randlords had been taken for a ride.85
The next head-on collision between the interests of the Transvaal state and the commercial interests of the Rand came soon afterwards. This time it wasn’t only between Pretoria and Johannesburg. Cape Town was also involved. Technically, that is where the instigator was. John Laing, Sivewright’s successor as commissioner for public works under Rhodes, triggered a tariff war with the Netherlands-South African Railway Company in January 1895.
For two years the southern line, run by the Cape, had been the only rail link with the Rand, which of course brought economic advantages. On 1 January 1895 the eastern line came into service, administered by the Netherlands-South African Railway Company, which also took over the management of the 78-kilometre Transvaal section of the southern line. The same would happen with the south-eastern line, which was expected to be completed before the end of the year. The tables would then be turned. The railway company would be holding all the trumps, with the added advantage that the eastern and south-eastern lines were strategically in the strongest position. Johannesburg was 630 rail kilometres from Lourenço Marques and 770 from Durban. The three ports in the Cape Colony—East London, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town—were further away, 1070, 1150 and 1630 kilometres respectively. Laing thought of two ways to prevent the Cape line from being forced out of business by the competition. They could either negotiate a fixed market share—such as half of all rail transport to the Rand—or lower their tariffs.
The railway company wasn’t interested in a fifty-fifty deal. In any case, according to the director, Middelberg, the Capetonians were no longer in a position to make demands. Van den Wall Bake, in Amsterdam, agreed. ‘We need to shift our focus and not let the British take the decisions. Making money is secondary to that, but the two will have to go hand in hand if both competitors believe that we’re trying to lay down the law.’ After years of being browbeaten, the directors of the railway company had finally gained the upper hand. They refused to offer more than a third share for each line.86
When the talks broke down, Laing tried the alternative scenario of lowering tariffs. He didn’t have to wait long for an answer from the railway company: a tariff increase on the Transvaal section of the southern line, at least for goods coming from overseas. Now things were getting serious. The next move looked like a step backwards. From then on, goods coming from the Cape Colony were transferred to old-fashioned oxwagons when they reached the Transvaal border. From there, they could cross the Vaal at two fords (or drifts as they are called in South Africa)—Viljoen’s Drift and Sand Drift—and continue to the Rand. Scores of them every day. It was a time-consuming but effective enough manoeuvre for Middelberg to insist that the Transvaal government take counter-measures. Kruger was in favour and Leyds backed him. In late August Kruger announced that the drifts on the Vaal would be closed to overseas goods as from 1 October 1895.
That was the start of the ‘drifts crisis’. Cape Town protested vehemently and so did Johannesburg, whose umpteenth application for voting rights for the Uitlanders had just been turned down. For Rhodes this was reason enough for another attempt to form a power bloc against the obstructive Boers—this time with force. After his turbulent visit to Pretoria in May 1894, Sir Henry Loch had hatched a plot which involved an uprising among the Uitlanders, followed by an invasion by British colonial troops. He had even submitted the idea as a formal proposal to London, but the secretary for the colonies, Lord Ripon, had dismissed it as being too risky.
By August 1895 the cast had changed. Sir Henry had been replaced by his predecessor, Sir Hercules Robinson, then in his seventies and in poor health. Rhodes could expect little of him and had nothing to fear from him. Lord Ripon, on the other hand, had made way for a new breed of politician after the elections.
As far as background was concerned, Joseph Chamberlain was something of an outsider in a Cabinet in which the prime minister and foreign secretary, Lord Salisbury, had surrounded himself with Conservative aristocrats from his own circle—and his own family. ‘Joe’ Chamberlain came from industrial Birmingham. A self-made entrepreneur who had made a fortune by manufacturing screws, he went into politics filled with ambition. First as mayor, then as a member of parliament and still a confirmed Liberal, he had opposed Gladstone’s plans for Irish self-determination and joined the Liberal Unionists. He was a firm believer in the organic unity of the United Kingdom and, by extension, in the lofty mission of the British Empire. Given his view of the world, Chamberlain’s move to join Salisbury’s Conservative government was not illogical.
Chamberlain was the first British secretary for the colonies with a coherent imperialist ideology. He believed ‘the British race is the greatest of the governing races that the world has ever seen’. And that brought with it the obligation to act with honour. Overseas territorial expansion alone wasn’t enough. ‘It is the duty of a landlord to develop his estate.’ That was music to Rhodes’s ears. Moreover, Chamberlain was a man of action. His first decision as state secretary was to renovate the drab Colonial Office. Carpets, wallpaper, furniture and especially charts and globes, everything had to be new, including electricity instead of gaslight. A switch to modern times.
That was good news for Rhodes and very bad news for the Boers. Rhodes had challenged the closure of the drifts, which he claimed was a violation of the London Convention. Article 13 denied the Transvaal the right to accord different treatment to goods ‘coming from any part of Her Majesty’s dominions’. Chamberlain took the same line and put Pretoria in a spot. If Kruger failed to reopen the drifts, a British colonial expedition would see to it. To make the point clear, troopships en route to British India were rerouted and ordered to make for Cape Town. The railway tariff dispute was about to erupt into a real war.
Leyds, surprisingly, was prepared to take the risk. He felt that giving in would be ‘a sign of weakness’. Kruger saw things differently. He decided on a tactical retreat. The drifts were opened in early November 1895. The fight over tariffs had not been resolved, but the prospect of a military confrontation between the British and the Boers had been averted—for the time being.87
Leyds’s stance should not be taken for belligerence. He had underestimated the seriousness of the situation. In the second half of 1895 his judgment was clouded and he seemed to be out of touch with reality. It had been a tough year, with uneven results. He had put a lot of energy into the preparations for the festivities in Lourenço Marques. There were the difficulties of acquiring protectorate rights over Swaziland, and then in March the damper of the British annexation of Tsongaland. On the positive side, the eastern line had come into service, and there had been the conspicuous display of support from their powerful new ally, Germany. Yet it seems to have been precisely those triumphs that gave him a rosetinted view of the Transvaal’s influence in economic and diplomatic affairs. Kruger had the same problem, but he soon came to his senses when Chamberlain forced him to show his hand. Right up to November Leyds kept telegraphing Pretoria, trying to persuade Kruger not to give in.
That in itself reveals one of the reasons for Leyds’s distorted view of reality. At the time of the ‘drifts crisis’ he was not at his post, but in Natal for talks about the railways—with hosts who were more sympathetic to the Transvaal’s point of view than that of the Cape Colony. So Leyds obviously didn’t have all the information that would have reached him in Pretoria. As a result, he interpreted the matter from a purely legal perspective—he believed the closure of the drifts was not in violation of the London Convention—and underestimated the international political dimension.88
But that wasn’t the only reason. His physical and mental state was also a factor. Leyds was exhausted and exasperated. Early in 1895 he had complained about this to his mentor and friend Moltzer. It wasn’t only Louise and Louis who had health
problems; he, too, was under the weather. First, a ‘prolonged bout of parrot disease (that’s what the Portuguese call diarrhoea)’ and after that his ‘throat wouldn’t come right’. He knew the cause. ‘It’s because of my condition in general; I need to get fitter and rest for a while. I feel I need it. I’ve worked hard from childhood, without rest, mostly on Sundays as well, often twenty hours a day.’ He was also getting more irritated with Kruger. ‘The older he gets, the worse it is. He’s turning deaf, slow-witted, bossier than ever (if that’s possible) and more cantankerous and ill-mannered towards the public, especially foreigners . . . He has this typical Afrikaner quirk of misplacing trust and distrust, and mixing them up in the most amazing way, and it’s getting worse.’ Leyds had ‘to navigate my way through everything, but it isn’t easy or pleasant . . . Sometimes I just want to get away from it all. Heavens, what a miserable job.’89
His mood did not improve. In July 1895 he was embarrassed by Kruger’s behaviour at the celebrations in Lourenço Marques. He quarrelled with him over the visit to Lippert’s new dynamite factory and clashed over the awarding of a coal concession. He began to have serious doubts about staying on in the Transvaal. Moltzer had just exchanged his chair in Amsterdam for a seat in the Council of State, and Leyds toyed with the idea of trying to get Moltzer’s old job. By the time he reached a decision and heard that Moltzer wanted to propose him as a candidate, the opportunity had passed. Louise had this to say, ‘If you don’t go to Holland, I would write and tell M. [Moltzer] what you really consider best for yourself. If you find your work inspiring and enjoy it in spite of the mundane side of it, I would certainly stay here. If not, and you want something different, I would write and tell M. so at least some people in Holland know what you’re looking for. This professorship may have led to a political career in Holland. But if no one knows about your circumstances, nothing will happen and they’ll leave you here with your ideals.’90