The Boer War

by Martin Bossenbroek

  Leyds saw the Jubilee festivities in the same light. The whole celebration was meant ‘to arouse the patriotism of the English’. In that it succeeded, mainly because of the Naval Review, which was ‘splendid’, he had to admit. But he was less impressed by the Jubilee Procession. It was nothing more than ‘a parade of soldiers’. The British wanted to ‘prove, or delude the world and themselves into believing, that they’re not just any power with any army’. Except that they didn’t succeed at all. In this respect, Leyds considered the parade ‘a testimonium paupertatis’.131

  He believed that ‘Britain would not easily resort to war’. The mood in the country was less militant than when he had arrived three months earlier. He saw no immediate danger of a British invasion of the Transvaal, although it was important not to relax ‘all vigilance, care and precautions. In relation to Britain, that would be unwise, always and in all circumstances.’132

  Leyds only discovered how true those words were shortly before he went back to South Africa. He spent the last weeks with his family in The Hague, recovering from all the stress. Early in August 1897, a week before he was due to sail, Chamberlain came up with a nasty surprise. Actually, a double surprise, just as one would expect of him. First he publicly announced that the British government would not punish Cecil Rhodes. Then he proclaimed in the Commons that the London Convention was an agreement ‘between the suzerain and the subordinate power’.133

  A parting of ways

  Pretoria, February 1898

  ‘And the President’s foul temper on top of it all.’ Leyds was distraught. ‘It’s sad to see what old age is doing to him. He’s losing his integrity.’ He had been unable to write about it ‘for several hours... I was trembling from suppressed indignation and rage.’ Kruger ‘has no compunction about telling stupid, barefaced lies. It doesn’t trouble him in the least, as long as he gets what he wants.’

  The president and the state secretary had clashed in the past, but this time there were no holds barred. Leyds was badly shaken, even a day later when he wrote to Louise. The row was sparked off by the most recent of a series of slanderous newspaper articles. Leyds was accustomed to insults and slurs, particularly from a sleazy opposition paper like Land en Volk. Now they had raked up the old canard about him being an atheist. Leyds had just shrugged it off, but Kruger insisted on having an official denial from Leyds published in the paper. Otherwise, he added, the Volksraad might be difficult about Leyds’s diplomatic appointment.

  Normally he could control his feelings, but this time Leyds exploded. Did the president think he was going to Europe for his own pleasure? If the Volksraad didn’t trust him after all those years he had dedicated to the Boer cause, they would just have to vote against him. In any event, he refused to write anything for ‘a malicious rag like Land en Volk ... which would twist things or hush them up and then trot them out again later, whether I deny them or not’. Kruger wouldn’t budge. The end of the story was that he got someone else to write the denial.134

  Leyds’s anger gradually subsided, but he still had trouble dealing with Kruger. Oom Paul to his people, a tyrant to everyone around him. Kruger had never been the most civil of men and he became more difficult with age. But he was the undisputed leader of the Boers, after all, especially after the Jameson Raid. In early February 1898, at the age of 72, he was re-elected as president for the fourth time. The results said it all: almost 13,000 votes, more than twice as many as his rivals Schalk Burger and the ‘eternal loser’ Joubert put together.

  Reassured by his support from the Boer population, Kruger continued on the same political course. Chief Judge Kotzé lost his job and no more concessions went to the Rand barons or Uitlanders. Burger had been more sympathetic to their demands. He was chairman of the industrial commission made up of government officials and members of the Chamber of Mines. The commission had been looking into the needs of the mining industry since April 1897, and three months later made far-reaching recommendations to the Transvaal government: break the dynamite monopoly, lower the prices of coal and dynamite, nationalise the Netherlands-South African Railway Company and facilitate the recruitment of cheap black labour.

  After Leyds’s return from Europe early in September 1897, the Volksraad debated the industrial commission’s report. Ending the dynamite monopoly was too big a step for Kruger, but he was willing to adopt some of the other recommendations, at least to some extent. The price of dynamite went down, as did several of the railway company tariffs, the latter to the tune of £200,000 a year. He saw no benefit in nationalising the company overnight. It would cost an estimated £7 or £8 million and the government lacked the resources to run an enterprise of that magnitude. At Leyds’s suggestion it was decided to take over the company in stages by buying up shares until the company automatically became a state enterprise. The government also helped to expand the labour reserve for the mining industry. In October 1897, Leyds signed an agreement with the Portuguese governor, allowing the recruitment of labour from Mozambique.135

  It was more than nothing, but less than the industrial commission had recommended. The opposition wasn’t happy, but as far as Leyds was concerned, they could take it or leave it. After Kruger’s re-election he was mainly preoccupied with two issues: a suitable response to Chamberlain’s suzerainty claim, and preparations for his posting overseas.

  Chamberlain didn’t stop at his address to the House of Commons. More than two months later, on 16 October 1897, he had repeated Britain’s claim to suzerainty in a letter to the Transvaal government. Leyds had been brooding over a response ever since. At the end of March 1898, he was ready. He wrote about it to Louise, who had gone ahead to their children in the Netherlands. He had made ‘a wonderful discovery in some old documents’, he announced proudly, which would ‘trash’ Chamberlain’s case. He was meticulous about the wording. The drafts he received from his assistants were never good enough. ‘I want this dispatch to reveal, here and there, my own thoughts and hand.’136

  It did. The letter he sent to Chamberlain on 16 April 1898 on behalf of the Transvaal government opened with a detailed account of the events leading up to the signing of the London Convention. Unlike the preceding Pretoria Convention (1881), the London document did not contain the word ‘suzerain’. It had been removed deliberately, Leyds argued. That was apparent if one compared the texts and it was also clear from oral and written testimonies. The British signatory, Sir Hercules Robinson, then high commissioner and now known as Lord Rosmead, had conceded this explicitly in a newspaper interview. That was Leyds’s ‘wonderful discovery’. Since then, moreover, Great Britain and the South African Republic had exchanged consular representatives. That was only possible between independent states, and the same applied to the settlement of disputes by arbitration. The latter had once been invoked over a provision of the London Convention. The dispute concerned the ‘coolie question’, whether or not Asians from the British colonies enjoyed rights of residence, among other things the right to render services. The arbitrator—the Supreme Court of the Orange Free State—had ruled in favour of the Transvaal and the British government had respected its judgment. These were powerful arguments. Convinced that his case was airtight, Leyds sent copies of Chamberlain’s letter and his own reply to the governments of the Netherlands, Germany, France, Portugal, Switzerland and the United States.137

  The final arrangements for Leyds’s appointment as diplomatic envoy were being made around the same time. After his experience in 1897, he had initially appealed for a larger diplomatic service, with agents in London, Paris, Berlin and Lisbon. Kruger and the rest of the Executive Council considered this too expensive. They would keep it to a single envoy, with offices in each of the four capital cities, plus The Hague and Brussels. The consulates there would remain open, as would the ones in London, Amsterdam and Frankfurt. All of this for a total of £15,000 a year, which included £4000 for the envoy’s salary. He would also get an allowance for business trips, six weeks’ annual leave and a trip to Pre
toria for consultations once a year, or every two years. Leyds chose Brussels as his base. He preferred it to The Hague because he couldn’t stand all ‘that gossip, those snide remarks! About clothes, about everything.’138

  Behind closed doors, the Executive Council approved Leyds’s appointment in April 1898. But there were still two small matters to resolve. Not only had the rumour about Leyds’s atheism continued to circulate, but fingers were being pointed at him for another reason as well. It was alleged that he had received £500 from the dynamite company: in short, a bribe. It was best for him and for the government as a whole to clear his name before he resigned as state secretary and started work as the country’s envoy. This time Leyds was prepared to issue a formal denial. He was charged with bribery and acquitted by the Supreme Court. He furnished the Executive Council with proof that he had been christened in Magelang, Java, and was a registered member of the Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk in Pretoria. On 20 May 1898, Willem Johannes Leyds was officially appointed special envoy and minister plenipotentiary of the South African Republic.139

  Kruger’s re-election was bad news for Cape Town. Sir Alfred Milner, the new high commissioner, had seen enough of him. Another five years of Boer dictatorship and the Transvaal would be ruined for good. Worse than that, ‘the richest spot on earth’ would drag the rest of the southern African subcontinent down; it would drift away from the British Empire. It was already ‘the weakest link in the Imperial chain’. What had happened in America was imminent here. No dominion under the British flag, but an independent state. Not a Canada, but a United States of South Africa. What had become of Chamberlain’s Grand Scheme or their shared belief in the superiority of the British race? His conclusion was straightforward. ‘The waiting game’ didn’t work. Something had to change, for better or worse.

  Absolute dedication to the British Empire: to that he owed his appointment as high commissioner in South Africa and governor of the Cape Colony. Alfred Milner was driven by a fanatical, almost zealous nationalism. Overcompensating for his German background, critics said. His grandmother was German, he had been born in Hesse and raised in Baden-Württemberg. But everything came together in Oxford. He got his education and found his vocation there: a knowledge of the classics, political acumen, social commitment and imperialist ideals. He was a brilliant student in all subjects. After a few years in journalism, as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, Milner gained his first experience in colonial administration in Egypt. He spent three years there as minister of finance. At the end of his term he enumerated the blessings of British administration in England and Egypt. The book was an instant success. It established his reputation as a writer and administrator but, most of all, as an imperialist in heart and soul. Back in England Milner occupied a senior position at the ministry of finance. In 1894 he became a Companion of the Order of the Bath and in 1895 Knight Commander in the same order. This was appropriate for his new position. Sir Hercules was succeeded by Sir Alfred. He arrived in Cape Town in May 1897.

  Milner allowed himself time to grow accustomed to his role. Not that he was patient—on the contrary—but these were Chamberlain’s orders. The Jameson Raid had stirred up a lot of bad blood among the Afrikaners in the Cape Colony. Milner had to avoid acting in haste, like Rhodes. ‘Wait and see’ was his watchword for the time being, and hope that the internal opposition to Kruger would gather momentum. In the meantime he travelled in order to get to know the country and its people and to decide on the best way to proceed.

  After Kruger’s re-election he was ready. In a personal letter he sent Chamberlain in late February 1898, Milner proposed giving Kruger two options: either reforms in the Transvaal or war. With the old tyrant at the helm in Pretoria, reform was not going to happen. The Boers quarrelled among themselves, but over jobs and contracts, not political issues. There was nothing to do but prepare for a crisis: step up the pressure systematically and not be distracted by details. During the drifts crisis of 1895 they had found that threats of violence yielded results. Kruger had considered backing down and making concessions. The same would happen this time as well. If not, then war. It couldn’t last long and there was no doubt the British would win.140

  It meant that everyone on the British side would have to close ranks. Henry Binns, the governor of Natal, found himself in trouble for sending Kruger a congratulatory telegram after his re-election. How could he? The point now was to separate the wheat from the chaff. It wasn’t so much between ‘the English and the Dutch’ as between supporters and opponents of the despotic regime in Pretoria. It was time for everyone living in the Cape Colony and Natal to take sides ‘as loyal citizens of a free British Community’.

  The message was clear, and Milner emphasised it in public three weeks later. On 3 March 1898 he delivered a speech in Graaff-Reinet, a town about 600 kilometres north-east of Cape Town, at the opening of a new railway line. His audience comprised mainly Afrikaners and he addressed himself to them, in terms that left nothing to the imagination. They were living in the Cape Colony, in peace and prosperity, enjoying all the fruits of British colonial rule: freedom, justice, equality and selfgovernment. Those were precisely the conditions that did not exist in the South African Republic. In spite of that, there were many Cape Afrikaners who sympathised with their clansmen in the Transvaal. Sympathy he could understand. But anyone who put the independence of the Boer republic above the honour and interests of their own country, no. In Milner’s view, they were betraying their own flag. If they truly wanted a peaceful solution for the whole of South Africa, they should try to influence Pretoria to introduce reforms, to make the Transvaal government more open to change.141

  Milner’s words were not subtle. Everyone, friend and foe, knew what he was driving at. He had spent almost a year checking out the lie of the land. Now he took a position. He was forcing every white South African to make a choice: for or against the enlightened British regime, for or against Kruger’s dictatorship. Those were the only options.

  Milner’s Graaff-Reinet speech had the effect of polarising the two parties, and the situation worsened a few days later when a familiar face reappeared on the scene. An interview in the Cape Times and a public appearance at the Good Hope Hall on 12 March 1898 removed any doubt. Cecil Rhodes was back in town. The Jameson Raid and the uprisings in Rhodesia had dulled the Colossus’s sheen, but he hadn’t fallen from his pedestal. Elections for the Cape parliament were due in September 1898, and he was aiming for the premiership again. His political programme was still basically the same, and so was his campaign strategy. He still had enough money to buy supporters and pay off his adversaries. He still had his vision of a federation of the whole of southern Africa, united under the Union Jack. Except that this time he was targeting a different group of voters. The Jameson Raid had severed his ties with Jan Hofmeyr and his Afrikaner Bond. Rhodes had traded them in for a more natural ally, the South African League. Founded in May 1896, it was the new hub for British nationalists in South Africa. Besides the Cape Colony and Natal, it also had a branch in the Transvaal. In the motherland it was called the South African Association.

  So Rhodes was back in the political arena, this time openly as the champion of ‘jingoism’. It was also Rhodes who coined the memorable slogan ‘Equal rights for every civilised man south of the Zambezi’. It must have raised his opponents’ hackles. It wasn’t just money he flung around, but also old-fashioned mud. His election campaign was dirty and a cliff-hanger all the way through. The result came as a surprise. Rhodes didn’t win. By a small margin the victory went to the South Africa Party, led by William Schreiner. With the support of the Afrikaner Bond, Schreiner became the new prime minister.

  Politically, he was a moderate. Like his sister Olive, the writer, Schreiner had once been an admirer of Rhodes, but the Jameson Raid was the breaking point for him too. He considered himself a loyal subject of Queen Victoria, but at the same time an advocate of the Boer republics’ right to decide their own future. That wasn’t what Milner and Rhod
es wanted to hear. They would have to find a way to deal with him.142

  Leyds’s transfer from the backwaters of Boer society to the rarefied world of diplomacy was a big step in his life. On the one hand it was a relief. Coming from a respectable, bourgeois background, he was offended by the lack of refinement and decorum in the Transvaal. He had never grown accustomed to it and never wanted to. A sense of proportion and respect for authority were hard to find in Pretoria. The Boer cause had become important to him, but the Boers themselves were a different matter. For 14 years he had lived among them, shared their hopes and their fears, but never had he become one of them. As dedicated as he was, he remained an outsider.

  Leyds was a vain man, proud of his accomplishments and privileges. He enjoyed wearing his decorations at the opening of the Volksraad and on other official occasions. As state attorney he had received a Portuguese knighthood and, as state secretary, honours from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France. Land en Volk called him ‘the man with the medals’. Like any diplomat, he wore a uniform, somewhat ‘festooned with gilt’ by his predecessor, Beelaerts van Blokland. But then this wasn’t inappropriate for an envoy of the world’s biggest producer of gold.143

  There was also a downside to his life as a diplomat. In the nineteenth century, the diplomatic corps was a bastion of aristocracy and old money. Men of lowlier birth weren’t welcomed with open arms. Even worse, he represented a nouveau riche on the international scene, an insignificant Boer republic which, on top of it, was at loggerheads with the most powerful nation on earth. All in all, he was not well placed to make his entrée into the courts of Europe. He was an outsider there, too. The difference was that this time he actually wanted to belong.