Chapter XII: The Europeans in South Africa, 1854-95 (2)

To these arguments it was replied that the annexation had been made, and the earlier refusals to reverse it pronounced, under a complete misapprehension as to the facts. The representatives of the Colonial Office in South Africa had reported, partly through insufficient knowledge, partly because their views were influenced by their feelings, that there was no such passion for independence among the Boers as events had shown to exist.[31] Once the true facts were known, did it not become not merely unjust to deprive the Transvaal people of the freedom they prized so highly, but also impolitic to retain by force those who would have been disaffected and troublesome subjects? A free nation which professes to be everywhere the friend of freedom is bound--so it was argued--to recognize the principles it maintains even when they work against itself; and if these considerations went to show that the retrocession of the Transvaal was a proper course, was it either wise or humane to prolong the war and crush the Boer resistance at the cost of much slaughter, merely in order to avenge defeats and vindicate a military superiority which the immensely greater forces of Britain made self-evident? A great country is strong enough to be magnanimous, and shows her greatness better by justice and lenity than by a sanguinary revenge. These moral arguments, which affect different minds differently, were reinforced by a strong ground of policy. The Boers of the Orange Free State had sympathised warmly with their kinsfolk in the Transvaal, and were with difficulty kept from crossing the border to join them. The President of the Free State, a sagacious man, anxious to secure peace, had made himself prominent as a mediator, but it was not certain that his citizens might not, even against his advice, join in the fighting. Among the Africander Dutch of Cape Colony and Natal the feeling for the Transvaal Boers was hardly less strong, and the accentuation of Dutch sentiment, caused by the events of 1880 and 1881, has ever since been a main factor in the politics of Cape Colony. The British government were advised from the Cape that the invasion of the Transvaal might probably light up a civil war through the two Colonies. The power of Great Britain would of course have prevailed, even against the whole Dutch-speaking population of South Africa; but it would have prevailed only after much bloodshed, and at the cost of an intense embitterment of feeling, which would have destroyed the prospects of the peace and welfare of the two Colonies for many years to come. The loss of the Transvaal seemed a slight evil in comparison.

Whether such a race conflict would in fact have broken out all over South Africa is a question on which opinion is still divided, and about which men may dispute for ever. The British government, however, deemed the risk of it a real one, and by that view their action was mainly governed. After careful inquiries from those best qualified to judge, I am inclined to think that they were right. It must, however, be admitted that the event belied some of their hopes. They had expected that the Transvaal people would appreciate the generosity of the retrocession, as well as the humanity which was willing to forgo vengeance for the tarnished lustre of British arms. The Boers, however, saw neither generosity nor humanity in their conduct, but only fear. Jubilant over their victories, and (like the Kafirs in the South Coast wars) not realizing the overwhelming force which could have been brought against them, they fancied themselves entitled to add some measure of contempt to the dislike they already cherished to the English, and they have ever since shown themselves unpleasant neighbours. The English in South Africa, on their part, have continued to resent the concession of independence to the Transvaal, and especially the method in which it was conceded. Those who had recently settled in the Republic, relying on the declarations repeatedly made that it would for ever remain British, complained that no proper compensation was made to them, and that they had much to suffer from the Boers. Those who live in the two Colonies hold that the disgrace (as they term it) of Majuba Hill ought to have been wiped out by a march to Pretoria, and that the Boers should have been made to recognize that Britain is, and will remain, the paramount power in fact as well as in name. They feel aggrieved to this day that the terms of peace were settled at Laing's Nek, within the territory of Natal, while it was still held by the Boers. Even in Cape Colony, where the feeling is perhaps less strong than it is in Natal, the average Englishman has neither forgotten nor forgiven the events of 1881.

I have dwelt fully upon these events because they are, next to the Great Trek of 1836, the most important in the internal history of South Africa, and those which have most materially affected the present political situation. The few years that followed may be more briefly dismissed. The Transvaal State emerged from its war of independence penniless and unorganized, but with a redoubled sense of Divine favour and a reinvigorated consciousness of national life. The old constitution was set to work; the Volksraad again met; Mr. Stephen John Paul Kruger, who had been the leading figure in the triumvirate, was chosen by the people to be President, and has subsequently been thrice re-elected to that office. Undismayed by the scantiness of his State resources, he formed bold and far-reaching plans of advance on the three sides which lay open to him. To the north a trek was projected, and some years later was nearly carried out, for the occupation of Mashonaland. To the south bands of Boer adventurers entered Zululand, the first of them as trekkers, the rest as auxiliaries to one of the native chiefs, who were at war with one another. These adventurers established a sort of republic in the northern districts, and would probably have seized the whole had not the British government at last interfered and confined them to a territory of nearly three thousand square miles, which was recognized in 1886 under the name of the New Republic, and which in 1888 merged itself in the Transvaal. To the west, other bands of Boer raiders entered Bechuanaland, seized land or obtained grants of land by the usual devices, required the chiefs to acknowledge their supremacy, and proceeded to establish two petty republics, one called Stellaland, round the village of Vryburg, north of Kimberley, and the other, farther north, called Goshen. These violent proceedings, which were not only injurious to the natives, but were obviously part of a plan to add Bechuanaland to the Transvaal territories, and close against the English the path to those northern regions in which Britain was already interested, roused the British Government. In the end of 1884 an expedition led by Sir Charles Warren entered Bechuanaland. The freebooters of the two Republics retired before it, and the districts they had occupied were erected into a Crown Colony under the name of British Bechuanaland. In 1895 this territory was annexed to Cape Colony. In order to prevent the Boers from playing the same game in the country still farther north, where their aggressions had so far back as 1876 led Khama, chief of the Bamangwato, to ask for British protection, a British protectorate was proclaimed (March, 1885) over the whole country as far as the borders of Matabililand; and a few years later, in 1888, a treaty was concluded with Lo Bengula, the Matabili king, whereby he undertook not to cede territory to, or make a treaty with, any foreign power without the consent of the British High Commissioner. The west was thus secured against the further advance of the Boers, while on the eastern shore the hoisting of the British flag at St. Lucia Bay in 1884 (a spot already ceded by Panda in 1843), followed by the conclusion (in 1887) of a treaty with the Tonga chiefs, by which they undertook not to make any treaty with any other power, announced the resolution of the British crown to hold the coast line up to the Portuguese territories.

This policy of preventing the extension of Boer dominion over the natives was, however, accompanied by a willingness to oblige the Transvaal people in other ways. Though they had not observed the conditions of the Convention of 1881, the Boers had continued to importune the British government for an ampler measure of independence. In 1884 they succeeded in inducing Lord Derby, then Colonial Secretary, to agree to a new Convention, which thereafter defined the relations between the British crown and the South African Republic, a title now at last formally conceded. By this instrument (called the Convention of London),[32] whose articles were substituted for the articles of the Convention of 1881, the control of foreign policy stipulated for in the Pretoria Convention of 1881 was cut down to a provision that the Republic should "conclude no treaty with any State or nation other than the Orange Free State, nor with any native tribe to the eastward or westward of the Republic," without the approval of the Queen. The declarations of the two previous Conventions (of 1852 and 1881) against slavery were renewed, and there was a "most favoured nation" clause with provisions for the good treatment of strangers entering the Republic. Nothing was said as to the "suzerainty of her Majesty" mentioned in the Convention of 1881. The Boers have contended that this omission is equivalent to a renunciation, but to this it has been (among other things) replied that as that suzerainty was recognized not in the "articles" of the instrument of 1881, but in its introductory paragraph, it has not been renounced, and still subsists.[33]

A few years later, the amity which this Convention was meant to secure was endangered by the plan formed by a body of Boer farmers and adventurers to carry out an idea previously formed by Mr. Kruger, and trek northward into the country beyond the Limpopo River, a country where the natives were feeble and disunited, raided on one side by the Matabili and on the other by Gungunhana. This trek would have brought the emigrants into collision with the English settlers who had shortly before entered Mashonaland. President Kruger, however, being pressed by the imperial government, undertook to check the movement, and so far succeeded that the waggons which crossed the Limpopo were but few and were easily turned back. Prevented from expanding to the north, the Boers were all the more eager to acquire Swaziland, a small but rich territory which lies to the east of their Republic, and is inhabited by a warlike Kafir race, numbering about 70,000, near of kin to the Zulus, but for many years hostile to them. Both the Boers and Cetewayo had formerly claimed supremacy over this region. The British government had never admitted the Boer claim, but when the head chief of the Swazis had, by a series of improvident concessions, granted away to adventurers, most of them Boers, nearly all the best land and minerals the country contained, it was found extremely difficult to continue the system of joint administration by the High Commissioner and the Transvaal government which had been provisionally established, and all the more difficult because by the concession to the New Republic (which had by this time become incorporated with the Transvaal) of the part of Zululand which adjoined Swaziland, direct communication between Natal and Swaziland had become difficult, especially in the malarious season. Accordingly, after long negotiations, an arrangement was concluded, in 1894, which placed the Swazi nation and territory under the control of the South African Republic, subject to full guarantees for the protection of the natives. A previous Convention (of 1890) had given the South African Republic certain rights of making a railway to the coast at Kosi Bay through the low and malarious region which lies between Swaziland and the sea, and the earlier negotiations had proceeded on the assumption that these rights were to be adjusted and renewed in the same instrument which was destined to settle the Swaziland question. The Boer government, however, ultimately declined to include such an adjustment in the new Convention, and as this new Convention superseded and extinguished the former one of 1890, those provisions for access to the sea necessarily lapsed. The British government promptly availed itself of the freedom its rivals had thus tendered to it, and with the consent of the three chiefs (of Tonga race) who rule in the region referred to, proclaimed a protectorate over the strip of land which lies between Swaziland and the sea, as far north as the frontiers of Portuguese territory. Thus the door has been finally closed on the schemes which the Boers have so often sought to carry out for the acquisition of a railway communication with the coast entirely under their own control. It was an object unfavourable to the interests of the paramount power, for it would not only have disturbed the commercial relations of the interior with the British coast ports, but would also have favoured the wish of the Boer government to establish political ties with other European powers. The accomplishment of that design was no doubt subjected by the London Convention of 1884 to the veto of Britain. But in diplomacy facts as well as treaties have their force, and a Power which has a seaport, and can fly a flag on the ocean, is in a very different position from one cut off by intervening territories from those whose support it is supposed to seek. Thus the establishment of the protectorate over these petty Tonga chiefs may be justly deemed one of the most important events in recent South African history.

Down to 1884 Great Britain and Portugal had been the only European powers established in South Africa. For some time before that year there had been German mission stations in parts of the region which lies between the Orange River and the West African possessions of Portugal, and in 1883 a Bremen merchant named Luederitz established a trading factory at the bay of Angra Pequena, which lies on the Atlantic coast about one hundred and fifty miles north of the mouth of that river, and obtained from a neighbouring chief a cession of a piece of territory there, which the German government a few months later recognized as a German Colony. Five years earlier, in 1878, Walfish Bay, which lies farther north, and is the best haven (or rather roadstead) on the coast, had been annexed to Cape Colony; but though it was generally understood both in the Colony and in England, that the whole of the west coast up to the Portuguese boundary was in some vague way subject to British influence, nothing had been done to claim any distinct right, much less to perfect that right by occupation. The Colony had always declined or omitted to vote money for the purpose, and the home government had not cared to spend any. When the colonists knew that Germany was really establishing herself as their neighbour on the north, they were much annoyed; but it was now too late to resist, and in 1884, after a long correspondence, not creditable to the foresight or promptitude of the late Lord Derby, who was then Colonial Secretary, the protectorate of Germany was formally recognized, while in 1890 the boundaries of the German and British "spheres of influence" farther north were defined by a formal agreement--the same agreement which settled the respective "spheres of influence" of the two powers in Eastern Africa, between the Zambesi and the upper Nile. Although the people of Cape Colony continue to express their regret at having a great European power conterminous with them on the north, there has been really little or no practical contact between the Germans and the colonists, for while the northern part of the Colony, lying along the lower course of the Orange River, is so arid as to be very thinly peopled, the southern part of the German territory, called Great Namaqualand, is a wilderness inhabited only by wandering Hottentots (though parts of it are good pasture land), while, to the east, Namaqualand is separated from the habitable parts of British Bechuanaland by the great Kalahari Desert.

The new impulse for colonial expansion which had prompted the Germans to occupy Damaraland and the Cameroons on the western, and the Zanzibar coasts on the eastern, side of Africa was now telling on other European powers, and made them all join in the scramble for Africa, a continent which a few years before had been deemed worthless. Italy and France entered the field in the north-east, France in the north-west; and Britain, which had in earlier days moved with such slow and wavering steps in the far south, was roused by the competition to a swifter advance. Within nine years from the assumption of the protectorate over British Bechuanaland, which the action of the Boers had brought about in 1885, the whole unappropriated country up to the Zambesi came under British control.

In 1888 a treaty made with Lo Bengula extended the range of British influence and claim not only over Matabililand proper, but over Mashonaland and an undefined territory to the eastward, whereof Lo Bengula claimed to be suzerain. Next came, in 1889, the grant of a royal charter to a company, known as the British South Africa Company, which had been formed to develop this eastern side of Lo Bengula's dominion, and to work the gold mines believed to exist there, an undertaking chiefly due to the bold and forceful spirit of Mr. Cecil Rhodes, who perceived that if Britain did not speedily establish some right to the country, the Transvaal Boers would trek in and acquire it. In 1890 the pioneer British settlers moved up through Bechuanaland into Mashonaland, and the Company, which, like the East India Company of the eighteenth century, was to be a ruling and administering power as well as a trading association, established itself along the eastern part of the great plateau and began to build forts. Here it came into collision with the Portuguese, who, stimulated by the activity of other nations, had been re-asserting their dormant claims to the interior and sending up expeditions to occupy the country. A skirmish which occurred near Massikessi, in Manicaland, ended in the repulse of the Portuguese, and the capture of their commanders, who were, however, soon after released by Dr. Jameson, the newly appointed administrator of the Company; and another conflict in May, 1891, in which the Portuguese again suffered severely, hastened the conclusion of a treaty (June, 1891) between Great Britain and Portugal, by which the boundary between the Portuguese territories and those included in the British "sphere of influence" was fixed. By this treaty a vast region in the interior which lies along the Upper Zambesi west of Portuguese territory and south of the Congo Free State was recognized by Portugal as within the British sphere. An agreement of the preceding year between Germany and Great Britain (July 1, 1890) had defined the limits of German and British influence on the east side of the continent; and as Germany, Portugal, and the Congo State were the only civilized powers conterminous with Great Britain in this part of the world, these treaties, together with the instrument--to which Great Britain had been a party--that determined the limits of the Congo State, settled finally all these questions of the interior, and gave to Great Britain a legal title to her share of it.

That title, however, like the other titles by which the European powers held their new African possessions, was a paper title, and valid only as against other neighbouring European powers. It had nothing whatever to do with the Kafir tribes who dwelt in the country. What are called the rights of a civilized Power as against the natives rests in some cases upon treaties made with the chiefs, treaties of whose effect the chiefs are often ignorant, and in others on the mere will of the European power which proclaims to the world that it claims the country; and it is held that the Power which makes the claim must, at least in the latter class of cases, perfect its claim by actual occupation. In the case of these new British territories treaties were made with a certain number of chiefs. One already existed with Lo Bengula, king of the Matabili; but it merely bound him not to league himself with any other power, and did not make him a British vassal. It was clear, however, that with so restless and warlike a race as the Matabili this state of things could not last long. Lo Bengula had been annoyed at the march of the pioneers into Mashonaland, and tried to stop them, but was foiled by the swiftness of their movements. Once they were established there he seems to have desired to keep the peace; but his young warriors would not suffer him to do so. They had been accustomed to go raiding among the feeble and disunited Mashonas, whom they slaughtered and plundered to their hearts' content. When they found that the Company resented these attacks, collisions occurred, and the reluctance to fight which Lo Bengula probably felt counted for little. What he could do he did: he protected with scrupulous care not only the missionaries, but other Europeans at his kraal, and, after the war had broken out, he sent envoys to treat, two of whom, by a deplorable error, were killed by the advancing column of Bechuanaland imperial police, for as the Company's officers were not at the moment prepared, either in money or in men, for a conflict, the imperial government sent a force northward from Bechuanaland to co-operate with that which the Company had in Mashonaland. A raid by Matabili warriors on the Mashonas living near Fort Victoria, whom they called their slaves, precipitated hostilities (July to October, 1893). The Matabili, whose vain confidence in their own prowess led them to attack in the open when they ought to have resorted to bush fighting, were defeated in two battles by the Company's men. Lo Bengula fled towards the Zambesi and died there (January, 1894) of fever and despair, as Shere Ali Khan had died when chased out of Kabul by the British in 1878; while his indunas and the bulk of the Matabili people submitted with little further resistance. Matabililand was now occupied by the Company, which shortly afterwards took possession of the northern part of its sphere of operations by running a telegraph wire across the Zambesi and by placing officers on the shore of Lake Tanganyika. In March, 1896, the Matabili and some of the Mashona chiefs revolted, but after five months' fighting, in which many lives were lost, peace was restored, and the subsequent construction of two railways into the heart of the country of these tribes has given a great, if not complete, security against a renewal of like troubles.[34]

By the establishment of the British South Africa Company to the north of the Transvaal that State had now become inclosed in British territory on every side except the east; nor could it advance to Delagoa Bay, because Portugal was bound by the Arbitration Treaty of 1872 to allow Great Britain a right of pre-emption over her territory there. Meantime new forces had begun to work within the Republic. Between 1867 and 1872 gold had been found in several places on the eastern side of the country, but in quantities so small that no one attached much importance to the discovery. After 1882, however, it began to be pretty largely worked. In 1885 the conglomerate or _banket_ beds of the Witwatersrand were discovered,[35] and the influx of strangers, which had been considerable from 1882 onward, increased immensely, till in 1895 the number of recent immigrants, most of whom were adult males, had risen to a number (roughly estimated at 100,000) largely exceeding that of the whole Boer population. Although the first result of the working of the gold mines and the growth of the towns had been to swell the revenues of the previously impecunious Republic, President Kruger and the Boers generally were alarmed at seeing a tide of aliens from the British colonies and Europe and the United States, most of them British subjects, and nearly all speaking English, rise up around and threaten to submerge them. They proceeded to defend themselves by restricting the electoral franchise, which had theretofore been easily acquirable by immigrants. Laws were passed which, by excluding the newcomers, kept the native Boer element in a safe majority; and even when in 1890 a concession was made by the creation of a second Legislative Chamber, based on a more extended franchise, its powers were carefully restricted, and the election not only of the First Raad (the principal Chamber), but also of the President and Executive Council, remained confined to those who had full citizenship under the previous statutes. Discontent spread among the new-comers, who complained both of their exclusion from political rights and of various grievances which they and the mining industry suffered at the hands of the government. A reform association was formed in 1892. In 1894 the visit of the British High Commissioner, who had come from the Cape to negotiate with the President on Swaziland and other pending questions, led to a vehement pro-British and anti-Boer demonstration at Pretoria, and thenceforward feeling ran high at Johannesburg, the new centre of the Rand mining district and of the immigrant population. Finally, in December, 1895, a rising took place at Johannesburg, the circumstances attending which must be set forth in the briefest way, for the uncontroverted facts are fresh in every one's recollection, while an attempt to discuss the controverted ones would lead me from the field of history into that of contemporary politics.[36] It is enough to say while a large section of the Uitlanders (as the new alien immigrants are called) in Johannesburg were preparing to press their claims for reforms upon the government, and to provide themselves with arms for that purpose, an outbreak was precipitated by the entry into Transvaal territory from Pitsani in Bechuanaland of a force of about five hundred men, mostly in the service of the British South Africa Company as police, and led by the Company's Administrator, with whom (and with Mr. Rhodes, the managing director of the Company) a prior arrangement had been made by the reform leaders, that in case of trouble at Johannesburg he should, if summoned, come to the aid of the Uitlander movement. A question as to the flag under which the movement was to be made caused a postponement of the day previously fixed for making it. The leaders of the force at Pitsani, however, became impatient, thinking that the Boer government was beginning to suspect their intentions; and thus, though requested to remain quiet, the force started on the evening of December 29. Had they been able, as they expected, to get through without fighting, they might probably have reached Johannesburg in three or four days' march, for the distance is only 170 miles. But while the High Commissioner issued a proclamation disavowing their action and ordering them to retire, they found themselves opposed by the now rapidly gathering Boer levies, were repulsed at Krugersdorp, and ultimately forced to surrender on the forenoon of January 1, 1896, at a place called Doornkop. The Johannesburg Uitlanders, who, though unprepared for any such sudden movement, had risen in sympathy at the news of the inroad, laid down their arms a few days later.[37]

I have given the bare outline of these latest events in South African history for the sake of bringing the narrative down to the date when I began to write. But as I was at Pretoria and Johannesburg immediately before the rising of December 1895 took place, and had good opportunities of seeing what forces were at work, and in what direction the currents of opinion were setting, I propose to give in a subsequent chapter (Chapter XXV) a somewhat fuller description of the state of things in the Transvaal at the end of 1895, and to reserve for a still later chapter some general reflections on the course of South African history.

[Footnote 23: It has been stated (see Mr. Molteno's _Federal South Africa_, p. 87) that Portugal was then prepared to sell her rights for a small sum--according to report, for L12,000.]

[Footnote 24: In 1891 the southern boundary of Portuguese territory was fixed by a treaty with Great Britain at a point on the coast named Kosi Bay, about seventy miles south of Lourenco Marques.]

[Footnote 25: See especially the case of Brown _vs._ Leyds, decided in January, 1897 by the High Court of the South African Republic. An English translation of the Grondwet has been published by Mr. W. A. Macfadyen of Pretoria, in a little volume entitled _The Political Laws of the South African Republic_.]

[Footnote 26: Some extracts from the narrative, vindicating his conduct, which he had prepared and which was published after his death (in 1882), may be found in Mr. John Nixon's _Complete Story of the Transvaal_, an interesting book, though written in a spirit far from judicial.]

[Footnote 27: Although there is some reason to think that if Sir T. Shepstone had waited a few weeks or months, the Boers would have been driven by their difficulties to ask to be annexed.]

[Footnote 28: See above, p. 120.]

[Footnote 29: A description of Majuba Hill will be found in Chapter XVIII.]

[Footnote 30: The Convention of 1881 will be found in the Appendix to this volume.]

[Footnote 31: Sir B. Frere reported after meeting the leaders of the discontented Boers in April, 1879, that the agitation, though more serious than he supposed, was largely "sentimental," and that the quieter people were being coerced by the more violent into opposition.]

[Footnote 32: This Convention will be found in the Appendix to this volume.]

[Footnote 33: Arguments on this question may be found in a Parliamentary paper.]

[Footnote 34: See further as to this rising some remarks in Chapter XV.]

[Footnote 35: See Chapter XVIII. for an account of these beds.]

[Footnote 36: The salient facts may be found in the evidence taken by the committee of inquiry appointed by the Cape Assembly in 1896. The much more copious evidence taken by a Select Committee of the British House of Commons in 1897 adds comparatively little of importance to what the Cape Committee had ascertained.]

[Footnote 37: Of the many accounts of the incidents that led to this rising which have appeared, the clearest I have met with is contained in the book of M. Mermeix, _La Revolution de Johannesburg_. A simple and graphic sketch has been given by an American lady (Mrs. J. H. Hammond), in her little book entitled _A Woman's Part in a Revolution_.]