Darwin J. The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970
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245 / The weakest link: Britain in South Africa
The conclusion seemed obvious. The Uitlander leadership
would use the franchise to widen the scope for Imperial influence.
The League would take its orders from Kimberley. Kruger’s dilemma
was acute. As we have seen, he needed to defuse the feverish mood
Milner and Rhodes had created and head off an Imperial coup. But he
had to avoid a concession that would expose him to the ‘salami tac-
tics’ of which Chamberlain, Milner and Rhodes were suspected. Smuts
and Kruger may both have believed that the inherent strength of their
strategic niche would deter Imperial aggression as long as they avoided
the outright provocation of British opinion. Smuts’ offer was designed
to remove the excuse for Imperial intervention now and its warrant in
future. The end of suzerainty would block future petitions to the Crown
and erode the sense of common identity on which Milner and Rhodes
had played so successfully. But this attempt to outflank the Britannic
nationalism he distrusted roused the deepest fear of all in British lead-
ers. A cabinet cynical of Uitlander grievances united round the threat
to British supremacy that Smuts had let slip.
Imperial supremacy, Transvaal state-building and Britannic
nationalism were a volatile mixture. What made them explosive was the
extreme uncertainty created by the speed of South Africa’s economic
transformation. It was widely assumed that the pace of change would
increase. The Transvaal would be richer and stronger. But it could also
be swamped by a flood-tide of migrants. The Afrikaner state might
dominate the region – or be drowned in the attempt. Yet it was only in
the last months before the war that the issue seemed so stark. For all
the efforts of Milner, the great impresario of imperial politics, there is
little sign before July 1899 that British ministers were impressed by his
apocalyptic vision of a united Afrikanerdom and a vanished supremacy.
Chamberlain may have shared Milner’s hopes for a new dominion of
‘British South Africa’. But he had no idea how to achieve it. Instead,
it was the insurgent force of Britannic nationalism on the Rand and in
the Cape which exposed the race for power and brought Kruger and
Smuts at last to their desperate remedy.
A British South Africa?
The decision by Kruger and Steyn, the Orange Free State president,
to launch a pre-emptive attack upon the British may have smacked
246 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’
of desperation, but it was not uncalculated. Smuts had made much of
Britain’s strategic weaknesses: her multiple commitments; the chance of
interference by her imperial rivals; the restlessness of colonial popula-
tions everywhere.
83
Military intervention in South Africa would come
at a high price for a far-flung empire. Kruger’s reputation had been
made by his skilful adaptation of South Africa’s peculiar geopolitics
in 1880–1. For both men, it was tempting to believe that the same
combination of geographical remoteness and the political sympathy of
Cape Afrikanerdom would stop the Imperial coercion of the republics
in its tracks. In fact, the Boer leaders intended to make London’s task
even harder. By moving first, they aimed to capture Durban (the nearest
port from which the Transvaal could be invaded) and Kimberley, the
great inland centre of the Cape. With these in their hands, the Boers
would hold the strategic initiative. Faced with a long war to battle their
way into the South African interior, Salisbury and Chamberlain would
begin to see reason. The result would be not the surrender that Milner
demanded but a new convention.
They were too optimistic. The invasion of Natal was indeci-
sive and Kimberley withstood their siege. The humiliating defeats they
inflicted on British troops in the dreadful ‘Black Week’ of December
1899 created alarm and anger in Britain not indifference or resignation.
Twenty years earlier, the interior could be abandoned after Majuba.
But, in 1899, the fate of Kimberley, Rhodesia and the Rand itself all
turned on victory; so did Britain’s reputation as a military power. The
response was a steady build-up of military strength and a crushing
advance that gradually overwhelmed the Boer armies. By the end of
1900, the Boer capitals had been occupied, the Rand brought under
Imperial rule, and the republics annexed to the British Crown.
The Boers’ collapse in the face of British military power was
a brilliant vindication of the hopes of Milner and Rhodes. But it was
also a mirage. By early 1901, it was plain that the Boer commandos
intended to fight a war much more to their taste than the sieges and
set-pieces in which they had been worsted. In the new guerrilla conflict
that stretched from the Transvaal to Cape Colony, mobility, veldcraft
and local sympathy made them more than a match for the Imperial
forces sent to hunt them down. Far from disintegrating with the depar-
ture of the ‘Kruger gang’ (Kruger had escaped to Europe), Afrikaner
patriotism was strengthened by comradeship and the racial bitterness of
a total war. As the guerrilla struggle intensified, the Boer War became
247 / The weakest link: Britain in South Africa
a civil war.
84
Ten thousand Cape Afrikaners, subjects of the Crown,
turned rebel and joined the commandos. More than 50,000 ‘loyalists’
were mobilised against them.
85
Several thousand ‘poor white’ Afrikan-
ers in the republics changed sides to fight for the British as ‘National
Scouts’.
86
Black communities seized the moment to recover lost lands.
87
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of blacks and (mixed race) coloureds,
serving as British auxiliaries, or suspected of British sympathies, were
murdered by Boer commandos.
88
The rural economy of the highveld
was devastated by British farm-burning, while the terrible mortality
(both white and black) of the civilian prison ‘concentration’ camps
sowed a tradition of ethnic martyrdom among Afrikaners.
On the British side, as the ‘expedition’ that Milner had first
imagined turned into a long war, public sympathy began to flag. March-
ing to Pretoria was one thing. A messy, inconclusive war of attri-
tion, punctuated by defeats and compromised by ‘barbarism’ was quite
another. The eagerness of British leaders for peace was sharpened by
the sense of strategic vulnerability on which Smuts had counted. With
their army and reserves tied down in South Africa, and a long oceanic
supply line to guard, ministers could only hope that no emergency arose
in the defence of India or of British interests in the ethnic cauldron of
the Near East. The crisis in China over the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and
the threat that a partition would follow was a brusque reminder that a
long war in South Africa was a strategic luxury that London could ill
afford. Kitchener, who had taken over as commander-in-chief in South
Africa when Roberts went home, was willing to make peace with the
Boers for little more than recognition of British sovereignty
89
–acon-
dition they rejected at the Middelburg negotiations of March 1901.It
was only after a further year of war, with no hope of victory or of help
from abroad, and amid the rising fear that their rural society might be
permanently damaged, that the Boer leaders agreed at Vereeniging in
May 1902 to give up the struggle.
90
The terms of what was called significantly a ‘treaty’ bore all the
hallmarks of a truce, not an outright British victory. The Boers surren-
dered their claim to independence. But, in return, they were promised
that self-government (under the Crown) would be quickly restored.
They kept their weapons. A substantial sum was granted to make good
the damage the war had caused. And, in deference to the political tra-
ditions of the Afrikaner republics, they were not required to adopt
the ‘colour-blind’ franchise of the Cape. With an amiable cynicism the
248 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’
question of whether anyone but whites should be granted the vote was
deferred until the return of (white) self-government.
91
This was the frag-
ile constitutional platform on which Milner now tried to build a united
dominion of ‘British South Africa’, and bury forever the remnants of
‘Krugerism’. The political omens could hardly have been worse. War
weariness in Britain made further coercion of the Boers unlikely. The
Boers themselves had preserved their political solidarity and their lead-
ers had avoided a discreditable surrender. It was clear from early on
that a determined effort would be needed to force them into the polit-
ical mould that Milner had in mind. Three years of war had adjusted
the old sub-continental balance of power, but not overthrown it.
For Milner, the war was to be the crucible of a new British
South Africa. His immediate aim was to hold the ring until a new
British majority (among the whites) was ready to govern. Ideally, he
thought, a new federal parliament should be created first, to prevent
the return of self-rule from reviving the old divisions. He was also deter-
mined to suspend the Cape Parliament, with its large Bond contingent,
until his federal scheme was well under way.
92
Secondly, he planned a
large influx of British settlement, much of it meant for the land. The
settlers would dilute the rural Afrikaners, and open up the fastnesses
that were as impenetrable to British influence, as Milner later told Sel-
borne, as Kamchatka, the darkest corner of Russia’s Asian empire.
93
Thirdly, to create the right conditions for immigration and federation,
he was eager to revive the economy as quickly as possible, especially the
gold mines. The Rand was the engine-room of the new South Africa:
without its rapid recovery, Milner’s own plans would be so much
waste paper.
Milner realised from the beginning that his programme
depended upon the support of the ‘English’ whose race patriotism he
and Rhodes had worked to arouse before the war. To suspend the
Cape constitution, he counted on Rhodes’ support and that of his allies
in the Progressive party and the South African League.
94
He looked
to Rhodes and his Randlord friends to prime the pump of land set-
tlement. They were to buy land discreetly in the ex-republics ready
for sale to British settlers – a plan of which Rhodes himself was an
ardent supporter
95
and on which a significant part of his estate would
be spent.
96
Milner’s real hope was that the war had transformed the
English into a united community of ‘British South Africans’, the domi-
nant element in his imagined dominion, ‘a united self-governing South
249 / The weakest link: Britain in South Africa
Africa wh[ich] shall be British in its political complexion’.
97
It was
the loyalists, he told Chamberlain, who best understood the point of
the war. ‘They are among the most devoted adherents of the Imperial
cause’, and were convinced that ‘British supremacy and . . . one political
system from Cape Town to the Zambezi is . . . the only salvation for men
of their own race as well as for others’.
98
It was they who had grasped,
far better than opinion at home, that there should be no compromise
peace that permitted the recovery of Afrikaner national feeling. In the
new state that Milner envisaged, the Uitlander meek would inherit the
earth. With its British institutions, British civil service, British settlers
on the land, British ownership of the mines, a British majority among
whites,
99
and English as the language of education and government, the
Afrikaners would be faced with a stark choice. They could choose to
assimilate to the new South Africa, or retreat into impoverished rural
isolation on the platteland as the stranded relics of a failed culture.
Milner even planned a local colonial army, mainly English in man-
power, to neutralise the joker in South African politics: the threat
of an armed Afrikaner rebellion.
100
Thus the South African English
would make up for the flabbiness of opinion at home. The South
African League would become a ‘national’ movement, gluing the
‘English together behind a single programme’.
101
Even if the Cape
remained stubbornly Afrikaner in sympathy, mining and commerce
would make the Transvaal British. ‘A great Johannesburg . . . means
a British Transvaal’, said Milner.
102
The new Transvaal would be the
‘stronghold’ that British influence had always lacked in South Africa.
103
The Milnerite vision was an imperial fantasy. The local triumph
of Britannic nationalism, on which he had counted, was postponed
indefinitely. For all his energy, Milner could not transcend the racial
dynamic of white South African society and the limits it placed (as so
often before) on the imperial initiative and proconsular power. The core
of Milner’s plan was a tide of British migration to reverse its old deficit.
In a decade when emigration from Britain reached its secular peak,
Milner’s needs were modest. But his hopes were crushed, in part by
the depth of the post-war depression (which discouraged immigrants
with capital) but most of all by the great fact of a black majority –
a low-wage workforce whose exploitation had already turned thou-
sands of unskilled ‘Europeans’ (the South African term for whites) into
the ‘poor white problem’ that haunted South African politics for a
generation or more. It was this black majority that (by a cruel irony)
250 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’
guarded Afrikanerdom against an influx of British. Worse still, the
more that Milner struggled to impose his programme, the more he
united the Afrikaners and (bitter twist) divided the English. The first
sign of this was the hostility of some English politicians in the Cape
(including Sprigg, the prime minister) to suspending the constitution.
With Rhodes’ death in March 1902, before the war ended, the Cape
Progressives were rudderless
104
and disunited. ‘The party is rotten to
the core’, wrote its chief organiser.
105
No English Cape politician could
fill Rhodes’ shoes. In the Transvaal, Milner’s ‘stronghold’, the situa-
tion was no better. There the Progressive leaders, George Farrar and
Percy Fitzpatrick, were closely identified with the Randlords, whose
prime aim was to drive down the cost of mine labour. Their alliance
with Milner to delay self-government and ‘solve’ the labour problem
affronted the tenets of Britannic nationalism. For, at the Randlords’
behest, Milner proposed to bring in indentured labour from China to
kick-start recovery. ‘Lord Milner is our salvation’, wrote Lionel Phillips,
head of the largest mining house on the Rand.
106
The result was uproar.
‘Chinese slavery’ offended humanitarian feeling in Britain. Much more
dangerously, it roused the fear of English labour on the Rand that it
would be displaced by ‘Asiatics’ – the same kind of fear that lay behind
‘White Australia’. It now suspected Milner’s motives for delaying self-
government and found common cause with the Afrikaner campaign to
end direct rule. The racial bond uniting whites against blacks, Indians
or Chinese was much too strong for the Imperial loyalism or British
race patriotism on which Milner had counted so heavily.
By 1905, Milner’s time was running out. Against the discontent
of both English and Afrikaners, he needed strong backing from London.
But Balfour’s government was falling apart. Chamberlain had resigned
in 1903 (over tariff reform) and war had broken out in the Unionist
party. With the Liberals reunited behind the defence of free trade and
against ‘Chinese slavery’ – Milner’s gift to the opposition – their return
to office seemed certain. When they did, guessed Milner, they would
tear up his policy root and branch.
107
Liberal dislike of the Randlords,
their sympathy for white labour, and their ear to English as well as
Afrikaner demands for self-rule would sweep away what remained of
Milnerite state-building. Before that could happen, Milner himself had
resigned, and the emergence of the new Afrikaner party, Het Volk,
under Louis Botha and Jan Smuts signalled the end of his hope that
a British Transvaal would make a ‘British South Africa’. Instead, the
251 / The weakest link: Britain in South Africa
prompt concession of responsible government by the incoming Liberals
brought Boer governments to power in the Orange Free State and (with
the help of English voters) Transvaal by 1907. With the prospect of
tension between the mining industry and its new political masters over
non-white labour,
108
the discord between the South African states
over their share of railway and customs revenue, and the furious row
over Natal’s repression of a black uprising in 1906,
109
the familiar
cycle of South African politics seemed once more in full swing. After a
brief frenzy of activity (as in 1878–81), Imperial influence had shrivelled
in a winter of colonial discontent.
This prognosis proved too gloomy. It was easy to see the
Transvaal movement under the two ‘bitter-ender’ generals as a portent
of a revived ‘Krugerism’. There was, Fitzpatrick had warned in 1904,a
‘very powerful, silent, solid, organised party against us . . . [T]he Boers
are politically irreconcilable . . . and will remain so until we completely
and permanently outnumber them.’
110
In reality, Botha and Smuts were
convinced that only by an alliance with the ‘moderate English sec-
tions’ could they hope to defeat the ‘money power’ of the Progressive
leaders.
111
They were determined to prevent the ‘race’ card being used
to rally the English vote, as Rhodes and Milner had used it before
the war. Despite the Randlords’ fears, they were much too cautious
to risk the mining economy by imposing the all-white labour policy
urged by labour leaders.
112
Far from adopting the linguistic and cul-
tural nationalism of the Afrikaner leaders in the Cape and Free State,
or championing the rural platteland against the Rand, the Het Volk
government was careful to conciliate both English capital and English
labour, in case their reunion let loose the power that had brought down
Kruger’s republic.
More to the point, both Botha and Smuts were in favour of
South African union. Not the united British South Africa under English
control that Milner had wanted, but a union nonetheless. Botha had
deduced from the war that there was no room for two peoples and
two flags in the sub-continent: ‘let us . . . have one government . . . let us
now leave the past’, he had told Fitzpatrick in 1902.
113
Botha may have
reasoned that, after the war, the Transvaal Afrikaners would not be able
to hold their own. Even with self-government, they would face a surge
of English numbers and influence brought by the growth of the Rand.
For Smuts, the case for union was even more urgent. He was, after all,
a Cape Afrikaner and an early supporter of Rhodes. After 1902,he
252 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’
was as convinced as ever that white unity was imperative in the face
of the ‘native problem’.
114
The fragility of white power on the African
continent obsessed Smuts all his life. But, like other Afrikaners, Smuts
had a second, complementary, purpose. For him, the gravest threat to
white unity and supremacy came from imperial interference: dividing
the whites with its siren call of race and imperial loyalty; imposing
the prejudices of missionaries and humanitarians. Union would squeeze
out the influence that the Imperial government exerted through the
High Commissioner, end the Imperial claim to be the trustee of the
black majority, and install a ‘national’ government with the status and
prestige of the Canadian, Australian and New Zealand dominions.
It was far from clear that early union along these lines
would get London’s support. In Milner’s terms, it was premature. But
Milner’s successor took a different view. Selborne had been Milner’s
old ally at the Colonial Office in the prelude to war. But he arrived
in South Africa (in 1905) after five years at the Admiralty. He knew
at first hand the strategic anxieties behind the Anglo-Japanese alliance
of 1902, and the entente made with France in 1904. His view of Boer
politics was also much more optimistic than Milner’s. Krugerism was
finished, he insisted. Commerce and education were dispelling the stag-
nation on which it depended.
115
Botha was a ‘Tory’ whose ideas were
‘big’ and who depended on English votes.
116
His views on education,
railways and agriculture were really like Milner’s.
117
Far from seeing
the Transvaal under Botha as a threat to British interests, Selborne
saw it as the engine of progress for the whole of South Africa. Union
was vital to economic development (by breaking down differences over
tariffs and railways). Economic development would draw more British
migrants. More British migrants would speed the advance of modernity,
dilute Afrikaner solidity and encourage Botha’s non-racial politics. By
an indirect route, Milner’s great goal of ‘British South Africa’ would be
reached after all.
118
Selborne had a second reason to press union forward. The real
danger to Britain’s influence, so he began to argue, was the gulf between
white opinion in South Africa and radicalism at home. With the Lib-
eral triumph at the 1906 election, the radical phalanx in the House of
Commons was pressing for change in India and Egypt as well as South
Africa, where Liberal attacks on Natal (over its treatment of the Zulu
rising in 1906) were fiercely resented.
119
The radicals would soon alien-
ate the South African English as well as the Afrikaners.
120
But closer
253 / The weakest link: Britain in South Africa
union would keep the radicals’ trouble-making out of South Africa,
and pave the way towards the grander aim of Imperial Federation,
to which Selborne, like Milner and Chamberlain, was deeply commit-
ted. The ‘Selborne Memorandum’, issued ostensibly at the request of
the Cape prime minister (the rehabilitated Jameson, Rhodes’ political
heir), was a coded call to arms for white unity against an overbearing
metropole.
121
Selborne’s ‘kindergarten’ promoted the federal idea in a
propaganda campaign. Selborne’s own contribution was to push the
divided and leaderless English (Jameson was no Rhodes)
122
towards
a union which (to some Transvaal Progressives) exchanged the distant
hope of a ‘British’ Transvaal for the immediate certainty of an Afrikaner
South Africa.
123
With the local consensus on union (not federation) at
the Durban convention in 1908, Selborne’s colonial bandwagon over-
came all resistance in London. The South Africa Act of 1909 removed
Imperial control over internal affairs, including ‘native’ rights. Its only
concession to Liberal unease was the exclusion (temporary, so it was
thought) of the ‘High Commission territories’ of Basutoland (Lesotho),
Bechuanaland (Botswana) and Swaziland from the new dominion. In
1910, a (mainly) Afrikaner ministry took office in Pretoria. Imperial
policy became ‘trust Botha’.
It was a strange inconclusive finale to the greatest crisis of late-
Victorian imperialism. But it was also a sign that the British connection
was bound to depend on the scale and vigour of its local bridgehead.
For much of the nineteenth century, the undecided struggle between
whites and blacks for the South African interior had given significant
leverage to the Imperial Factor and strengthened its grip on the coastal
colonies. After the setback of 1881, the expanding influence of the
Anglo-commercial elite had been the best hope of keeping the whole
sub-continent within the British orbit. In 1898, Rhodes and Milner
had fallen back on race loyalty and Britannic nationalism. After 1902,
Milner had hoped to build his British South Africa on the surer foun-
dation of a British majority. By 1908, even his staunchest friend among
the South African English, Percy Fitzpatrick, acknowledged that, in the
short term at least, there was no choice but to work with the ‘moderate’
Boers, Botha and Smuts, to prevent the revival of full-blooded repub-
licanism – a view shared by Jameson. It is tempting to conclude that
British blood and treasure had been spent in vain: that Britain’s hold on
South Africa was more dependent than ever upon Afrikaner goodwill.
That would be mistaken.
254 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’
In fact, Botha and Smuts understood how limited and condi-
tional was their tenure of power. In theory, they could disavow their
allegiance to the Imperial crown and secede from the Empire. In prac-
tice, loyalty was the only option. This was not because rebellion would
be punished by a British invasion – though imperial intervention could
not be ruled out. Nor because it would freeze the mineral economy
with its close ties to London – though financial disruption would have
followed. The real check on republican nationalism was more brutal.
What Botha and Smuts feared most of all was a return to the ‘racial
politics’ of 1899, and an English party united against them under Rand-
lord leadership, under the banner of ‘the Empire in danger’. If that were
to happen, then ‘Krugerism’ would also revive: and their centre would
not hold. They could hardly doubt the results of repudiating the British
connection: at best the break-up of the Union; at worst a civil war, pit-
ting loyalist veterans against Boer commandos. This was the real legacy
of the South African War: not the failure of Milner or the breaking
of Kruger, but the entrenchment of the South African English, forged
by the war and its prelude into a self-conscious ‘Britannic’ commu-
nity within a brittle, gimcrack, settler state. Divided as they were by
class and region and personal antagonisms, they were strong enough
to exclude Afrikaner republicanism from practical politics. It was not
what Milner and Rhodes had intended; but it proved curiously durable
all the same.