Diamonds, Gold, and War

The white colonial population, descendants of Dutch, German and French Huguenot settlers, was small, no more than 25,000 in all, scattered across a territory of 100,000 square miles. Most lived in Cape Town and the surrounding farming districts of the Boland, an area favoured with rich soils, a Mediterranean climate and reliable rainfall, renowned for its vineyards and gracious living. The prosperity of the Colony depended heavily on the labour of foreign slaves imported from other enclaves in Africa and from Asia. Almost every European family of standing in the western Cape owned slaves. Cape Town’s population of 16,000 included some 10,000 slaves. White burghers also acted as overlords of the indigenous Khoikhoi, aboriginal pastoralists commonly called Hottentots, who had lost most of their land during 150 years of white occupation and who now served the white community as a labouring class treated no better than the slave population. The total population of the Cape Colony was no more than 75,000.

Beyond the fertile valleys and mountains of the Cape peninsular region lay a vast hinterland of scrub and semi-desert known to the Khoikhoi as the Karoo - the ‘dry country’. Dutch stock farmers - ‘trekboers’, as they were called - had spread across this interior, herding sheep and cattle, living simply in ox-wagons or crude dwellings on farms they had staked out, trading in elephant ivory and animal hides and often clashing with indigenous pastoralists and hunters. In the north, the trekboers had reached the Orange River, 400 miles from the peninsula; a journey by wagon from their frontier farms to Cape Town and back took up to three months. In the east, they had collided with Bantu-speaking Xhosa chiefdoms expanding westwards across the Fish River into the Zuurveld grasslands, 450 miles from Cape Town. Parts of the frontier frequently degenerated into a turmoil of cattle raids and intermittent warfare.

As the Colony’s new rulers, the British set out to impose some form of law and order on the turbulent eastern frontier, despatching regular troops there in 1811 to help burgher militias - commandos, as they were known - expel the Xhosa from the Zuurveld. In his report to London on the success of the mission, the governor, Sir John Cradock, remarked: ‘I am happy to add that in the course of this service there has not been shed more Kaffir blood than would seem necessary to impress on the minds of these savages a proper degree of terror and respect.’ In 1819, in a desperate bid to regain their land, 10,000 Xhosa warriors descended on the frontier village of Graham’s Town intent on driving out the whites. But, once again, they were defeated, losing yet more land to the colonists.

In an attempt to provide the eastern frontier with greater security, the British government devised a plan to populate the area with immigrant settlers from Britain. The plan was presented to Parliament in London as an ‘economy measure’ that would help reduce unemployment and alleviate social unrest prevalent after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Parliament duly voted £50,000 to transport volunteers to the Zuurveld and set them up as agricultural farmers on allotments of about a hundred acres. Some 4,000 men, women and children were chosen from among 80,000 applicants. The majority of the men were urban artisans with no farming experience. What none of them was told, until their arrival in Algoa Bay in 1820, was that the land they had been allocated was in fiercely disputed territory where five frontier wars had previously occurred. The new settlers also discovered that the sour-grass farms of the Zuurveld were unsuitable for cultivation. Within a few years, more than half had abandoned the land and retreated to villages.

Having sponsored the 1820 settlers, the British government was then obliged to ensure their protection in this highly volatile area. To the consternation of the Colonial Office, as the succession of frontier wars with the Xhosa continued, this became an increasingly costly exercise. In his review of the history of British policy at the Cape published in 1853, a former colonial secretary, Earl Grey, concluded that the government’s commitment to British settlement made in 1819 on the grounds of being an economy measure proved to be among the most expensive in the annals of the British empire. What British officials found especially aggravating was that Britain had no vital interest in the Cape other than its naval facilities on the peninsula. ‘Few persons would probably dissent from the opinion that it would be far better for this country if the British territory in South Africa were confined to Cape Town and Simon’s Bay,’ observed Earl Grey. A long-serving senior Colonial Office official, James Stephen, described the Cape interior as ‘the most sterile and worthless in the whole Empire’, with no commercial significance.

Despite the lack of enthusiasm for its colonial charge, the British government introduced a series of substantial reforms designed to bring the Cape into line with British practice elsewhere. Though preoccupied principally with minimising colonial expenditure, it nevertheless felt duty-bound to establish a stronger framework of administration that took greater account of the interests of indigenous populations. British missionaries newly arrived at the Cape campaigned vociferously for civil rights for the Khoikhoi, citing examples of their ill-treatment at the hands of Dutch-speaking trekboers. In 1828, the Cape authorities promulgated Ordinance 50 making ‘Hottentots and other free people of colour’ equal before the law with whites and removing legal restrictions on their movements. In 1834, slavery in the Cape was abolished, in common with the rest of the empire, and some 38,000 slaves were set free, though they were still required to serve four more years of bondage as ‘apprentices’. A new court system was installed using English instead of Dutch as the only official language. What the Colonial Office intended henceforth was to convert the Cape into an English-speaking colony.

These changes aroused deep resentment among the colonists, notably among the Boer population in frontier districts who were long accustomed to living according to their own rules, largely beyond the reach of government authority. Many colonists found the idea that Khoikhoi and slaves could be placed on an equal footing with white Christians repugnant, ‘contrary to the laws of God and the natural distinction of race and religion’. Though slave-owners were entitled to claim compensation for loss of ‘property’, they discovered that the compensation arrangements left them far short of the previous market value of their slaves. They were further aggrieved when the changes led not only to a shortage of labour but also to an outbreak of pilfering and theft. Demanding a new law against vagrancy to deal with it, they were outraged when the British authorities countermanded the legislation they introduced.

Frontier Boers had additional grievances. Once used to expanding eastwards at will to meet their demand for land, they were now blocked by the stubborn resistance of the Xhosa beyond the Fish River. The frontier region, moreover, was still plagued by insecurity. At the end of 1834, Xhosa warriors invaded the Colony, destroying white farms and seizing vast herds of cattle in another attempt to recover land lost in earlier wars. Once more, they were driven back. The British governor in Cape Town, Sir Benjamin D’Urban, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, castigated them as ‘treacherous and irreclaimable savages’ and took it upon himself to annex more Xhosa land in reprisal, intending to make it available for white settlement. But to the fury of the colonists, the British government in London, spurred on by missionary activists, repudiated the annexation and blamed white encroachment as the cause of the conflict. ‘The Caffres had ample justification for the war,’ concluded the colonial secretary, Lord Glenelg.

Determined to cast off British authority, Boer leaders organised the exodus of groups of families across the Orange River border into the highveld beyond, intending to set up their own state and recreate the society of the frontier trekboers as it was before the coming of the British. Reconnaissance parties reported there was land suitable for settlement in two areas to the north: the vast grasslands around the Vaal River; and the coastal hills below the escarpment of the Drakensberg mountains in an area that later became known as Natal. In a ‘Manifesto’ sent to the Graham’s Town Journal, Piet Retief, an emigrant leader, cited a list of grievances including ‘severe losses’ resulting from the emancipation of slaves; and ‘the unjustified odium which has been cast upon us by interested and dishonest persons, under the cloak of religion [missionary activists], whose testimony is believed in England’. He said he hoped that the British government would ‘allow us to govern ourselves without its interference in future’. To forestall British concerns, he disclaimed all practice of slavery, but added, ‘It is our determination to maintain such regulations as may suppress crime, and preserve proper relations between master and servant.’

The emigrants clashed first with Mzilikazi’s Ndebele kingdom on the highveld, then with Dingane’s Zulu kingdom. In 1839 they endeavoured to set up their own embryonic republic on coastal terrain adjacent to Zulu territory, laying claim to all fertile land between the Tugela and Mzimkulu rivers and incorporating a small trading post on the coast set up by British traders in 1824. At first named Port Natal, the trading post was renamed Durban in honour of the Cape Colony’s governor in 1835 in the hope that it might help them win British recognition.

The Republic of Natalia lasted for little more than three years. When trekker leaders attacked neighbouring African chiefdoms to the south, capturing ‘apprentices’, and then extended their territorial claims there, the British government felt obliged to step in and annex Natal, thus acquiring a second colony in southern Africa - though with considerable reluctance. The Colonial Office official James Stephen considered Natal to be as worthless as the Cape. The only strategic interest the British had in Natal was to prevent the port of Durban from falling into the hands of a rival European power. Rather than submit to British rule once more, most of the trekkers streamed back across the Drakensberg to link up with other Boer groups that had remained on the highveld.

As trekker communities on the highveld sought to establish their own states, they fought repeatedly with African adversaries - the Basotho, the Griqua, the Tswana and the Ndebele. Britain intervened, signing treaties with the Basotho and the Griqua, considering itself responsible for the protection of native tribes beyond the colonial border and hoping to maintain peace in the area. But it soon tired of the exercise. Britain’s own frontier problems with the Xhosa were costly enough: a Xhosa war in 1846-47 cost the British Treasury almost £2 million; another Xhosa war in 1851-52 cost a further £3 million. In 1852, William Gladstone, shortly before being appointed chancellor of the exchequer, told the House of Commons:

The two miniature republics were states in little more than name. The small trekker communities there claimed vast areas of land for themselves but were greatly outnumbered by the indigenous black population that occupied much of it. The administrations they set up were weak and disorganised and, unable to raise taxes, were constantly short of funds. The Transvaal, with a white population of 20,000, survived almost entirely on subsistence farming. Officials were often paid for their services in land grants instead of cash. The quest for more land continued relentlessly. African chiefs were often tricked into ceding territory, signing documents without realising the full implications, some believing they had merely entered into ‘alliances’. Tswana chiefdoms were subjected to years of raids and harassment. A Boer commando raiding Tswana country in 1852 attacked David Livingstone’s mission station at Kolobeng, destroying his store of Bibles and medicines. In the Orange Free State, Boer commandos fought a prolonged campaign to wrest the fertile Caledon River valley from the Basotho.

To satisfy the white demand for labour, commandos frequently abducted African children, describing them as ‘apprentices’ - inboekelings - to avoid accusation of overt slavery. The practice was sanctioned in the Transvaal by an Apprentice Act passed by the governing body, the Volksraad. In the 1860s missionaries considered inboekelings provided the main source of labour in the eastern Transvaal. A German missionary at Makapanspoort reported that wagonloads of children were regularly brought to the settlement. In the far north, in the Zoutpansberg district, the trade was known as ‘black ivory’, and soon outstripped the trade in white ivory once the elephant herds there had been decimated.

Both republics remained unstable. The Transvaal’s difficulties were compounded by persistent quarrels between rival Boer factions that threatened to split the republic apart. Under attack from the Venda, the trekker settlements in the Zoutpansberg had to be evacuated, then abandoned. In the Orange Free State, the first president, Josias Hoffman, was ousted by a mob after he gave the Basotho king, Moshoeshoe, a small keg of gunpowder as a diplomatic gesture. Twelve years after the republic’s founding, the Bloemfontein journal De Tijd spelled out how vulnerable the Orange Free State’s population of 25,000 whites remained: ‘Simple people find themselves in a vast land, surrounded in all quarters by enemies, without judges, without soldiers, without money, divided through ignorance and derided by a Colony adjacent to it [the Cape].’

The Cape Colony itself was in dire straits. During the 1860s, it was afflicted by drought, locusts, a slump in wine exports, a fall in the price of wool and a banking crisis. Railway-building ground to a halt seventy miles from Cape Town for lack of money. In Natal, the small white population lived in constant fear of the possibility of an uprising of the local Nguni population or an invasion from Zululand on the other side of the Tugela River. In general, the two southern African colonies were regarded as among the most troublesome, expensive and unprofitable possessions of the British empire.

What followed was a titanic struggle fought by the British to gain supremacy throughout southern Africa and by the Boers to preserve the independence of their republics. It culminated in the costliest, bloodiest and most humiliating war that Britain had waged in nearly a century. Britain provoked the war expecting it to be over within a few months, but it turned into a gruelling campaign lasting two and a half years; required half a million imperial troops to finish it; and left the two Boer republics devastated.

Faced with guerrilla warfare for which they were unprepared, British military commanders resorted to scorched-earth tactics, destroying thousands of farmsteads, razing villages to the ground and slaughtering livestock on a massive scale. Women and children were rounded up and placed in what the British called concentration camps, where conditions were so appalling that some 26,000 died there from disease and malnutrition, most of them under the age of sixteen. All this produced a legacy of hatred and bitterness amongst Afrikaners that endured for generations.

Two men personified this struggle: Cecil Rhodes and Paul Kruger. Rhodes, the son of an English country parson, used his huge fortunes from diamonds and gold to promote the expansion of the British empire as well as his own business interests. A ruthless entrepreneur with command of private armies, he was described by a British editor at the time of his death as the first of a dynasty of ‘money kings’ who had emerged as ‘the real rulers of the world’. Paul Kruger, the Boer leader and landowner, whose only education was the Bible and who believed the earth was flat, defied Britain’s prime ministers and generals for nearly a quarter of a century. British politicians constantly underestimated him. Britain’s colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, a Birmingham screw manufacturer, who was one of the principal architects of the Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902, referred to him as an ‘ignorant, dirty and obstinate man who has known how to feather his nest’. British cartoonists delighted in portraying Kruger as a bigoted peasant, with a barrel chest and a sullen expression, dressed in an ill-fitting frock-coat. Britain’s high commissioner in southern Africa, Sir Alfred Milner, the main architect of the war, predicted that Kruger and the Boers would put up no more than ‘an apology’ of a fight. But, as Britain’s poet of empire, Rudyard Kipling, later observed, the war taught the British ‘no end of a lesson’.

Having overcome Boer resistance at a cost in British lives of 22,000 men, the British government then concluded that self-government might be a better option for its two Boer colonies. By 1907, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State were again self-governing under the control of defeated Boer generals who had signed the terms of surrender five years before. Britain next decided to amalgamate its four colonies into a Union of South Africa in the hope that the Boers and the British might find a way of resolving their differences and merge into a single South African nation.

The black population fared badly from this arrangement. After a hundred years of wars and clashes against both British and Boers, all the African chiefdoms lying within South Africa had succumbed to white rule. Most of their land had been lost through conquest and settlement. Now Africans were excluded from negotiations leading to the founding of the Union of South Africa and denied political rights under its proposed constitution. An African delegation went to London to make representations, protesting at what they regarded as Britain’s betrayal of their interests, but to no avail. The black quest for political rights was to last for the next eighty years.

This book covers the tumultuous period that began with the discovery of the main diamond field in 1871 and culminated in the founding of the modern state of South Africa in 1910. It is a tale of great wealth and raw power, of deceit and corruption, set at a time when Britain was at the height of its imperial might. Politicians and journalists, in London as well as in southern Africa, fell under the spell of Cecil Rhodes’ money and readily lent themselves to the cause of empire and its entrepreneurs. It was all part of what Sir Alfred Milner called ‘winning the great game for mastery in South Africa’. The war that Milner engineered to achieve that mastery and, as he put it, ‘to knock the bottom out of the great Afrikaner nation for ever and ever, Amen’, brought repercussions that lasted for nearly a century. Out of the turmoil came a virulent form of Afrikaner nationalism that eventually took hold of South Africa, setting off yet another titanic struggle, this time between white and black.