Darwin J. The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970

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225 / The weakest link: Britain in South Africa

shattering of Zulu and Pedi power, caution was redundant. In 1880,

colonial control in the Transvaal crumbled rapidly. At Majuba, in

February 1881, Boer commandos destroyed the imperial force sent to

uphold annexation, killing General Colley, the high commissioner for

South East Africa. With this ﬁasco, the Gladstone government threw

in the towel, intimidated by reports that to prolong the struggle would

unite Afrikaners in the Cape and Orange Free State against them.

With

the Convention of Pretoria they scrapped the Transvaal’s annexation

and threw away the federal plan. Shepstone and Natal had been broken

reeds. The coalition of colonial and imperial power had never materi-

alised. As in 1848–52, the Imperial Factor had come, failed and gone.

The interior had kept its autonomy: London fell back on its old strategy

of coastline control. But its hand in the sub-continent was now much

weaker than before. A self-governing Cape Colony, with its (white)

Afrikaner majority, was a sandy foundation for imperial inﬂuence. The

ﬁnal demolition of black independence (though not of all resistance) –

the by-product of forward policy in 1878–80 – left the Boer republics

much stronger by default.

And, by the mid-1880s, French and

German inﬂuence had begun to arrive in the region.

Kruger versus Rhodes

The Convention of Pretoria in 1881 settled the terms on which the

Transvaal was to regain its freedom. The British withdrew, but not

unconditionally. The Transvalers were forced to acknowledge British

‘suzerainty’ – a detached oversight of their internal affairs – and impe-

rial control of their foreign relations. They were encumbered with

debts and, most galling of all, forbidden to encroach on remaining

African territory inside or outside the Transvaal boundary. The mis-

treatment of Africans within the Transvaal could be reported to the

British resident.

It was hardly surprising that, when Kruger became

the Transvaal president in 1883, he was determined to cut down

the scope for imperial meddling and regain the old republican free-

dom conferred in 1852. He had little choice. The social economy of

the Transvaal Boers was inimical to ﬁxed boundaries. The acquisi-

tion of fresh land for speculation was the chief means of accumulat-

ing wealth in an underdeveloped pastoral economy. ‘Encroachment

has been their very life’, observed Lord Salisbury, the scion of an

226 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

encroaching aristocracy.

Indeed, the Convention had hardly been

signed before groups of burghers began to push their way on to African

land to east and west, threatening a new round of frontier disturbance

and missionary outrage.

As Kruger sensed, the British position was getting weaker and

their grip on the interior more tenuous. They had no will to confront the

Boer ﬁlibusters and by 1883 scarcely any means. By 1883, the imperial

garrison in South Africa was a mere 2,100 men. Besieged by Egyptian

anxieties, the Gladstone cabinet had no appetite for quixotic adventures

on the highveld. Most of all, senior ministers in London were now con-

vinced that a false move in Southern Africa would unite all Afrikaners

against them, wrecking what remained of imperial paramountcy and

putting the Cape’s strategic function at risk.

They dared not coerce the

Transvaal Boers and needed Kruger’s help in settling the frontier dis-

putes. So, when Kruger came to London in 1883, it seemed a foregone

conclusion that he would get his way and regain the ‘independence’

conceded in 1852.

Indeed, the Transvaal president got much of what he wanted

and might have got more. In the new Convention of 1884, British

oversight of African interests disappeared. So did all reference to

‘suzerainty’, though the bar to diplomatic freedom (and thus full inde-

pendence) remained. The Transvaal was allowed to resume the grandil-

oquent title of ‘South African Republic’. But, in return, Kruger made

a fateful concession. He agreed to leave a corridor of land between

the Transvaal and the Kalahari desert under British protection. This

green strip, with its forage for oxen, was the ‘Road to the North’, the

vital link between Cape Colony and the great unopened hinterland of

Zambezia beyond the Limpopo. At the last minute, the High

Commissioner in Cape Town had persuaded the Cape ministers to

share the costs of British rule, and tipped the balance against surren-

der to Kruger’s territorial demands. When later the Cape reneged and

the Transvaal Boers violated the new boundary, an embarrassed gov-

ernment in London had no choice but to expel them by force and to

assume the administrative burden of a Bechuanaland protectorate it

had refused to consider before the Convention.

Part of Kruger’s logic in accepting the western frontier of 1884

had been the urgency of debt relief – London’s carrot.

Even in the

mid-1880s, the Transvaal had not thrown off the spectre of bankruptcy.

Its annual revenues were puny: the Cape’s were ﬁfteen times as great.

227 / The weakest link: Britain in South Africa

On any reckoning, the new republic was an impoverished backwater,

a threadbare rufﬁan on the fringe of empire. Its nuisance value was

local, not imperial. Kruger had reasserted the old autonomy of the

South African interior but its persistent economic weakness remained.

Then, in 1886, the discovery of the great gold reef on the Witwaters-

rand signalled a drastic reversal of fortune. Within four years, the

Transvaal’s gold production was worth nearly £2 million a year. By

1892, its revenues had reached half the Cape ﬁgure.

Six years later

they were almost equal. The danger of bankruptcy (and political implo-

sion) vanished. Rising land values created a wealthy ruling class. With

commercial concessions to distribute, Kruger could build a patronage

state among the Transvaal whites and complete the subjugation of the

Transvaal blacks. He could construct a railway to Delagoa Bay. With

open access to the outside world and a gold economy, the half-promise

of 1884 could become the whole-hog of republican freedom.

Historians have made much of the ‘mineral revolution’ which

blew away the old assumptions of imperial strategy and made the rebel-

lious Transvaal the strongest state on the sub-continent. In fact, South-

ern Africa had not one mineral revolution but two. The diamond rush

at Kimberley came ﬁrst (from 1867), and Kimberley became colonial

not republican soil. But, for that other, earlier, revolution, Kruger might

have carried his goldstate to independence and destroyed the remnants

of British primacy in Southern Africa. Instead, he was confronted by a

local rival whose ruthlessness matched his own and whose resources,

leveraged with reckless lack of scruple, built a roadblock in his path.

This rival was Cecil Rhodes.

Rhodes had come to South Africa in 1870.

By 1876, still

only twenty-three, he had made a small fortune in the diamond ﬁelds.

Within a few years more, he emerged as a commanding ﬁgure in this

rough speculative mining world whose voracious demand for imports,

capital, railways and black labour transformed the Southern African

economy. For the rest of his life, Kimberley remained the real centre of

Rhodes’ business and political ventures, the capital of the ‘Rhodesian’

empire. It was here that his wealth was concentrated. It was here that

he met many of those who became his partners, allies and agents. It was

from here that Rhodes looked north towards Zambezia. This jerry-built

outpost of colonial South Africa had become a commercial dynamo. It

was a magnet for capital and enterprise and the natural springboard

for the penetration of the northern interior by traders, prospectors,

228 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

speculators and land-hungry settlers. It was the forward base-camp of

sub-imperialism.

And it was here that Rhodes’ idle fantasies of imperial aggran-

disement took on a local shape. In 1877, the Transvaal’s annexation

promised a new ﬁeld for Kimberley’s inﬂuence. Kruger’s triumph closed

it off; but, six weeks after the battle of Majuba, Rhodes entered the Cape

Parliament. At ﬁrst, he was preoccupied with defending the interest of

the diamond ﬁelds against taxation and state interference. But, by 1883,

Rhodes had grasped the importance of the ‘Road to the North’, the

‘Suez Canal of South Africa’ as he called it, stretching away from Kim-

berley towards Mafeking, Tuli and Bulawayo, capital of Lobengula’s

Ndebele state. By controlling access to this untold hinterland, Kimber-

ley’s ultimate mastery of the north, including Kruger’s obstreperous

Ruritania, would be assured. Under new Kimberley management, Cape

Colony would throw off its rustic myopia and become the head and

centre of a uniﬁed British South Africa.

Like his Canadian counterpart, John A. Macdonald, Rhodes

saw that success depended upon mobilising the colonial state behind the

programme for expansion. In South Africa, geography and economics

demanded state sponsorship for the railway-building without which the

whole sub-imperial plan would be still-born. Once in the Cape Parlia-

ment, Rhodes also grasped the need to win over the Afrikaner members

who, under the leadership of Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr, had made the

Afrikaner Bond the strongest political force in the Colony. The task

seemed difﬁcult. The Bond had emerged from a farmers’ protection

movement in the Western Cape, opposed to free trade; and from the cul-

tural nationalism of the Dutch-speaking clerical elite hostile to the angli-

cising secularising effects of commercial growth.

In fact, the Bond’s

antipathy to British inﬂuence was surprisingly ambivalent. Afrikaners

were prominent in the Cape’s legal and professional elite. They pros-

pered with its new diamond wealth and warmed to its parliamentary

rule. Like the colonial elites in Quebec (or Bengal), they found much to

admire in an imperial system which promised self-government, liberal

culture and material progress.

Rhodes played on this ambivalence with astonishing skill. By

the mid-1880s, he had repositioned himself not as a British ‘imperialist’

nor as a Kimberley capitalist but as a Cape Colony patriot. His pro-

gramme was Cape not British expansion. It was the Cape’s claim to the

north that he touted, a Cape sub-empire that he wanted to win, as a

229 / The weakest link: Britain in South Africa

fair ﬁeld for ‘English’ and Afrikaner alike. Nor were Rhodes’ motives

crudely tactical. In politics as in business his instinct was always fusion.

The ‘great amalgamator’ preferred a merger to an open struggle: rivals

should be ‘squared’ not left to ﬁght a bitter rearguard action. By draw-

ing the Cape Afrikaners into his expansionist project, he hoped to build

a ‘progressive alliance’. Rural interests and cultural prejudice would be

carefully appeased. But new wealth would breed an Anglo-Afrikaner

elite loyal to its own parliamentary institutions and to the Imperial

crown. Proud of their Cape heritage and of the Colony’s growing sta-

tus, they would share Rhodes’ vision of a uniﬁed sub-continent and

dismiss the Kruger republic as an ethnic cul-de-sac. Kimberley and

Stellenbosch (the seedbed of Afrikaner culture) would unite to build a

‘Greater Cape’.

Between 1888 and 1890, the stalemate of South African pol-

itics began to break up. Rhodes was accumulating wealth and power

with sensational rapidity. In 1888, with his close partner, the ﬁnan-

cial ‘genius’ Alfred Beit, he centralised diamond production in a sin-

gle great combine, De Beers Consolidated. Rhodes did not have full

control – especially over the London partners – but at the South African

end his inﬂuence was supreme.

De Beers became the treasure-chest

from which he could fund his political activity and his schemes of sub-

imperial expansion.

It helped provide collateral for the new share

issues, which Rhodes could turn to his own proﬁt and from which he

could reward patrons, friends and allies. In the same year, Rhodes and

another partner, Charles Rudd, persuaded the Ndebele ruler Lobengula

to grant the right to prospect for minerals in his kingdom. This was the

notorious Rudd Concession, largely paid for in riﬂes. Rhodes now had

a long lead over his competitors for the hinterland beyond the Limpopo

and the goldﬁelds it was thought to conceal. But, before he could invade

Zambezia and build a private empire in the North – the ﬁrst stage of

the ‘Greater Cape’ – he needed an imperial licence to sanction politi-

cal control by his agents on the spot. He also needed the promise of

imperial support against any rival territorial claim by Portugal (which

regarded modern Zimbabwe as the natural hinterland of Mozambique),

Germany or the Transvaal republic. He needed a charter.

Rhodes came to England in 1889, a little-known colonial busi-

nessman. He departed (with his charter) as the great white hope of

speculative investors and imperial enthusiasts. It was the turning point

of his career. He had become a promethean ﬁgure in imperial politics:

230 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

the supreme sub-imperialist who combined local power with ready

access to wealth and inﬂuence at home. Rhodes outmanoeuvred his

doubters and critics (including the Colonial Ofﬁce) and squared every

interest. A merger was arranged with his most dangerous rivals.

The

idea of a chartered company to prospect for gold excited the City.

The ‘South Africa Committee’ of parliamentarians, philanthropists and

missionary interests, chaired by Joseph Chamberlain, was expected to

resist the charter as a colonial land-grab. But Rhodes captured two

of its key members for his Company, including the ardent imperial-

ist Albert Grey

and won it over by a promise to help the struggling

missionaries on Lake Nyasa. One of his henchmen, Cawston, had the

effrontery to claim that the charter was intended to beneﬁt the Zam-

bezian blacks.

With the eager support of the High Commissioner in

Cape Town, Rhodes now carried all before him. To Alfred Milner, then

private secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, it seemed obvi-

ous that, like it or not, northern expansion would make Rhodes more

amenable to imperial control.

To the prime minister, Lord Salisbury,

his promise of a British sphere in Central Africa at no public cost was

a strategic windfall in hard times.

It was an extraordinary coup. Rhodes had made his own luck.

But he also deftly exploited a political climate without which he might

have needed much more. Anxiety over Ireland, the vulnerability of

Egypt, and the global pressure exerted by Britain’s imperial rivals cre-

ated a jittery mood, especially among Liberal Unionists (like Milner and

Chamberlain) who were attracted to ideas of imperial federation with

the settlement colonies. To these uneasy imperialists Rhodes offered

a winning combination of imperial patriotism and colonial expan-

sion, uninhibited by the ﬁnancial and diplomatic fetters they found

so galling. Garnished with speculative proﬁt, it was a seductive ver-

sion of the imperial idea. Indeed, Rhodes’ campaign for the charter

and the constituency of admirers he created formed the basis for the

public sympathy in Britain on which he (and Milner) were to draw so

heavily after 1897. In the meantime, Rhodes returned to South Africa to

make his paper empire real. His ‘Pioneer Column’, paid for by De Beers,

trekked into Mashonaland and founded ‘Salisbury’ – now Harare. In the

Cape, Rhodes was now the undisputed supremo. 1890 was his annus

mirabilis. He was already managing director of De Beers, the greatest

fount of wealth in the Colony, and of the British South Africa Company,

231 / The weakest link: Britain in South Africa

over whose domain in Zambezia (soon ‘Rhodesia’) his authority was

absolute. Now he became Cape premier as well.

Over the next four years Rhodes used this remarkable portfolio

of political, ﬁnancial and territorial power to drive forward his aim of

Cape supremacy and strangle the Transvaal’s independence. His system

seemed unstoppable. In the Cape, his alliance with the Bond was sealed

by the artful distribution of his company shares at par. Rhodes made no

secret of his dislike of Downing Street. This was the usual language of

British settler politicians from New Zealand to British Columbia: but

it was soothing syrup to Afrikaner opinion. Rhodes identiﬁed himself

with the Cape Dutch origins of South Africa’s ‘manifest destiny’ as a

‘white man’s country’. His enthusiasm for Cape Dutch architecture, his

purchase and restoration of Groote Schuur, his interest in agriculture,

and his Afrikaner associates were all a reﬂection of his half-formed

project for an Anglo-Afrikaner ‘middle nation’ within a wider Britan-

nic confederacy.

As Cape premier, Rhodes oversaw the extension

of the Colony’s railway to the Rand, the great inland market. As the

uncrowned king of Rhodesia, he approved the Ndbele war of 1893 by

which white rule was somewhat precariously extended from Mashona-

land to Matabeleland. He pressed for the hand-over of Bechuanaland

to the Chartered Company as the land bridge from the Cape to its new

inland empire. He made an abortive attempt to buy Delagoa Bay and

also the railway that Kruger was building to the last accessible harbour

outside British territory.

But, by 1894, it was becoming clear that he had over-reached

himself. There was a critical weakness in his grand geopolitical design.

Seizing Rhodesia had been meant to give him a stranglehold on the

Boer republics. A great gold reef in the Chartered territory would draw

in a torrent of capital and migrants from Britain, boosting the trade

and revenues of the Cape. It would drive home the lesson that it was

futile to stand out against a Cape-led South Africa. Kimberley would

revenge Majuba. This was Rhodes’ gamble: but it did not come off.

By 1894, he knew that there was no great reef to be found: Rhodesia

would not eclipse the Rand.

Nor could Rhodes and his allies exert

economic control over Kruger by their grip on the Rand.

The Rand in fact was Rhodes’ nemesis. Preoccupied by the

struggle for De Beers, Rhodes had failed to foresee the Rand’s vast

potential. His company, ‘Goldﬁelds’, was only one among several large

232 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

mining houses that emerged in the 1890s. Rhodes lacked the capi-

tal to attempt the great amalgamation he achieved at Kimberley. Nor

did the Rand lend itself to the tactics that had worked well with dia-

monds. It was easy for his rivals to raise money in London. The vio-

lent ﬂuctuations in the value of shares, and the scale of speculative

activity, ruled out the ‘squaring’ of interests, Rhodes’ favoured tech-

nique. Nor would Kruger allow the commercial free rein that Rhodes

enjoyed in the Cape. Instead, his sale of concessions, like the dyna-

mite monopoly, his control of the railways and the black labour sup-

ply, and his canny restriction of political rights, kept the gold-mining

houses in a state of grudging dependence. Rhodes’ best hope was

to use his connections with the ‘Corner House’, the largest mining

house on the Rand and controlled by two of his partners in De Beers,

Wernher and Beit, to foment opposition to Kruger. The danger was

that the mining interests and the immigrant population – the Uitlanders

or foreigners – would prefer an independent republic to domination by

Rhodes’ Cape conglomerate. This was what made the defeat of Kruger

so urgent; this was why his overthrow had to be staged by rebels loyal to

Rhodes.

The Jameson Raid in December 1895 was Rhodes’ attempt to

seize control of the anti-Kruger movement in Johannesburg and master-

mind the transfer of power in the Transvaal. Rhodes hoped to exploit

the tacit sympathy of the Imperial government in London for Uitlander

grievances and its willingness to intervene once Kruger’s authority had

been successfully challenged.

Jameson, Rhodes’ closest henchman,

was meant to arrive in Johannesburg in a show of solidarity with the

local rebellion, but really to stamp on it Rhodes’ authority. A complicit

High Commissioner at the Cape would rule in his favour. By a dazzling

coup, rather than slow attrition, the grand design would be forged.

Notoriously, everything went wrong. The Johannesburg conspirators

were tardy and disorganised, so that Jameson’s ‘raid’ was recklessly pre-

mature. Kruger was forewarned. Jameson’s force was no match for the

Boer commandos who caught up with him before he reached the city.

The High Commissioner and Imperial government (both implicated in

the original plan) disavowed Rhodes’ crude ﬁlibuster. The Johannes-

burg conspirators were rounded up, tried and imprisoned (commuting

their death sentences cost Rhodes £300,000).

Worst of all, Rhodes’

Afrikaner allies in the Cape whom he had kept in ignorance (believ-

ing perhaps that they would favour the end while loathing the means),

233 / The weakest link: Britain in South Africa

turned against him in rage. His premiership collapsed. The ‘Colos-

sus’ had suffered a huge reversal of fortune. Far from succumbing to

the Rhodesian juggernaut, Kruger now seemed stronger than ever. His

internal position was secure. And, after Rhodes’ treachery, he could

be sure that the Cape Afrikaners would block any move to coerce

him again. As the competition between rival imperialisms reached its

climax in Afro-Asia, Kruger’s chances of wriggling out of the British

sphere seemed better than ever.

The decision for war, 1896–9

In his bid to pull Kruger down and absorb the Transvaal, Rhodes had

wanted to keep the Imperial government at arm’s length, while exploit-

ing the authority of its agent (the High Commissioner) in his intended

coup on the Rand. Rhodes intended to remake South Africa to his

design not Downing Street’s. To this aim the disastrous outcome of the

Jameson Raid was a massive but not fatal setback. It forced Rhodes and

his local allies into partnership with the Imperial Factor since London

alone had the power to coerce Kruger. But whether London would be

willing to do so was another matter entirely.

Indeed, it might have been expected that, after the Jameson

Raid, the Imperial government would revert to the policy of disen-

gagement adopted after 1881. Amid suspicion that it was implicated

in the Jameson Raid, its inﬂuence was weaker than ever. An impe-

rial initiative to promote federation was out of the question. In fact,

whatever its inclinations, the Salisbury cabinet was drawn deeper and

deeper into the thicket of South African politics. Chamberlain’s own

prestige was invested heavily in preventing Kruger from exploiting

his triumph. Threatening language and a squadron in Delagoa Bay

served notice that Britain’s claim to regional primacy was undiminished.

Chamberlain’s deputy, Lord Selborne (the prime minister’s son-in-law),

was imbued with a ‘Rhodesian’ outlook. His memorandum of March

1896 warning against a secessionist ‘United States of South Africa’

forming around a cosmopolitan English-speaking Transvaal republic

was inspired by the High Commissioner, Sir Hercules Robinson, and

derived almost certainly from Rhodes. Nor, for all its absurdity, had

the Jameson Raid failed to leave its mark on British policy. The furore

over the Parliamentary enquiry into the Raid and indignation over the

234 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

Kaiser’s congratulatory telegram to Kruger helped to turn the Uitlander

grievances into a political issue in Britain and a nagging index of impe-

rial prestige. In South Africa, the ironic legacy of Rhodes’ fall had

been the deliberate mobilisation of ‘English’ sentiment in Cape Colony

behind a demand for imperial self-assertion against the Transvaal. Cool

British detachment from South African affairs was hardly an option.

For Chamberlain, the immediate need was a capable proconsul:

to watch Kruger closely against any breach of the Convention, especially

the ban on his diplomatic freedom; to press the Uitlanders’ case; and to

avoid the dependence on Rhodes to which Robinson had succumbed.

His choice was Sir Alfred Milner, then chairman of the Board of Inland

Revenue. This was not as eccentric as it seemed. Like Chamberlain,

Milner was a Liberal Unionist who had rebelled against the Irish Home

Rule bill in 1886. He was deeply sympathetic to the idea of closer union

between the settlement colonies of ‘Greater Britain’ to which Chamber-

lain was privately committed. He shared Chamberlain’s concern that a

uniﬁed ‘British South Africa’ should form part of this larger imperial

association. He had served under Cromer in Egypt (1889–92) and had

published an inﬂuential defence of the imperial ‘mission’ there.

a safe pair of hands with wide friendships in both political camps, he

enjoyed the prestige to place the government’s South African policy on

a fresh footing. The question was: what could he do?

To Milner himself, the immediate answer seemed not very

much. He would do his best to persuade the Transvaal govern-

ment down the path of reform, but without drawing in the Imperial

government.

But the Uitlander franchise was out of the question.

The best hope was that the irrepressible growth of Johannesburg would

force a change. Part of the difﬁculty lay in Cape politics where Rhodes’

sudden removal had brought confusion. ‘At present they are all dwarfs’,

Milner told his old political mentor, George Goschen, ‘except Rhodes

who is a really big man but thoroughly untrustworthy.’

By this time,

Milner had already begun to drift towards the alliance with Rhodes

against which Chamberlain had warned him.

He had little choice.

Rhodes was the ‘real’ head of the Cape government, and the premier,

Sprigg, his mouthpiece. More to the point, for all the disaster of the

Jameson Raid, only Rhodes had the means to push forward the grand

project which Milner saw as the real purpose of his proconsulship:

the uniﬁcation of British South Africa and the re-absorption of the

Transvaal.