The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (39 page)

This was the setting for the prolonged struggle over the political control of Southern Africa which reached its crisis between 1895 and 1909. To all the main protagonists, cabinet ministers, proconsuls, British settlers, blacks and Boers, interests of fundamental importance seemed at stake: imperial safety, economic progress, personal liberty, political freedom, cultural survival. In the longer view, the outcome of the struggle, the unification of South Africa as a self-governing, British dominion rather than its secession, or balkanisation into competing states, created a vital adjunct of British world power in the century of global wars. But the more immediate question, as Southern Africa entered its time of troubles, was whether imperial power could reshape the sub-continent to its own design even at the point of the bayonet. The lessons of the South African past were not encouraging.

Supremacy or stalemate

The British seized the Cape from the Dutch in 1795, returned it, and took it again for good in 1806. The halfway house to India could not be left in the hands of an enfeebled client of France, which the Netherlands had become. For the British, what mattered was Table Bay and the naval base at Simonstown on the Indian Ocean side of Cape Point. But this southern Gibraltar had a straggling hinterland. Beyond the mountains around Cape Town lay a sprawling, thinly populated pastoral colony that stretched away for seven hundred miles to the north. Wandering trekboers lived by transhumance and practised slavery.
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On the Cape's eastern frontier they had clashed since the 1770s with Nguni (or Xhosa) peoples moving south in search of pastures. Even before British rule began, friction between Boer frontiersmen and the colonial authorities in Cape Town had sparked a local rebellion.
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After 1806, British efforts to pacify the frontier, reduce their military costs and outlaw slavery compounded Boer resentment at alien rule and its anglicising tendency.

Already there were early signs of the imperial dilemma. Should the British push forward and take control of the turbulent zone where whites and blacks raided and counter-raided? Could they impose a real separation between the quarrelsome frontier communities? Were Boer and black misdeeds to be punished with an even hand? Should the colonial government in Cape Town seek treaty partners among the Xhosa chiefs and extend protection to its African allies? Behind all this was the question of whether control of the South African Cape required command of the South African interior. But, after 1836, it was no longer just a matter of the Eastern Cape and its border wars. The British had to define their imperial interest across the whole sub-continent.

For by that time a double revolution was transforming the nature of the imperial problem. The drastic consolidation of the Zulu state under Shaka (c.1787–1828) had released a huge wave of demographic turmoil affecting much of modern South Africa and beyond: the
mfecane
or ‘crushing’.
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Communities and tribes were disrupted, defeated and displaced. As Shaka's victims sought safety beyond his reach, they invaded new neighbourhoods and provoked fresh conflicts. Over a vast swathe of the interior highveld, the
mfecane
unleashed a chaotic process of forced migration and ethnic conflict. As old communities fragmented, rival leaders competed to build a following, claim land and assert their rule. The effects were felt all along the porous frontier of the Cape. As a result, white traders, trekkers and missionaries, as well as runaway slaves and servants, moved easily into the masterless realm beyond the Orange. Then, in the later 1830s, a large movement of Cape farmers from the embattled Eastern Province – some 15,000 between 1834 and 1840 – trekked north and east to found a Boer republic in Natal. Between them, the
mfecane
and the Great Trek sucked the Colony's human frontier deep into the interior. In a few short years, the zone of imperial concern had been driven north from the Orange to the Limpopo, and was on its way to the Zambezi.

To a succession of governors in Cape Town, the case for extending their imperial mandate over the whole sub-continent seemed unanswerable. The Cape's strategic value would be lost if any harbour in the region was controlled by independent whites: sooner or later they would solicit the presence of a foreign power. On this argument, Natal, with its magnificent port, was annexed in 1844, persuading the disgruntled trekkers to seek republican freedom on the interior highveld. Maritime supremacy was easy enough. But there was also a case for dogging the steps of the emigrant Boers wherever they went. For it soon became clear that the wars of expansion between the trekkers and rival statebuilders in the
mfecane
aftermath – like the Sotho ruler Moshesh or the Griqua captains Kok and Waterboer
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– destabilised the whole frontier. Endless border wars forced up the imperial garrison but held back the Cape Colony's commercial and political growth. Without an inland paramountcy to impose order on all its warring communities, the sub-continent would remain a costly colonial backwater, a constant embarrassment to the humanitarian conscience and an inconvenient, perhaps dangerous, drain on the scarce resource of military power.

The argument was persuasive but the means were lacking. Governor after governor claimed that peace and plenty would follow an extended paramountcy. One proposed an elaborate scheme of treaties, magistrates and police beyond the Orange.
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Three years later, Sir Harry Smith swept aside chiefly rule in Xhosaland and annexed the whole northern frontier up to the Vaal, to bring the Boers back under British rule. ‘My position’, he declared in a revealing analogy,

has been analogous to that of every Governor General who has proceeded to India. All have been fully impressed with the weakness of that Policy which extended the Company's possessions…[F]ew…especially the men of more gifted talents, have ever resigned…without having done that, which…circumstances demanded and imperatively imposed upon them. Such has been my case.
⁶

The Colonial Secretary gave reluctant sanction: enlargement, he said, was inevitable.
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But, in 1851, after spending millions, the Colonial Office called a halt. The Boers were in revolt. The Eighth Xhosa War, provoked by Smith's policy, had been a military shambles hastily abandoned by Smith's successor. Further north, the Zulu state still loomed over the tiny colony in Natal. With black resistance unbroken, further coercion of the independent Boers beyond the Orange was politically futile and militarily dangerous. London made the best of a bad job. In 1852–4, in the conventions of Sand River and Bloemfontein, it conceded the Boer republics practical autonomy and patched up peace on the Cape frontier. A further advance under Governor Grey aimed to incorporate the whole border zone between the Cape's eastern frontier and Natal. It was aborted by the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny, and the hasty removal of much of Grey's force, and then by the deepening crisis in New Zealand to where Grey himself was transferred – although not before the great Xhosa cattle-killing of 1857 (a despairing act of self-immolation) had allowed him to push the settler frontier forward to the river Kei.
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But, for nearly twenty years, the Imperial Factor withdrew from the South African interior, on the argument that, with the coast (mostly) under British control, the inland republics were no threat to the strategic command that was the
ultima ratio
of the imperial presence.

The ‘conventions policy’ was a grudging recognition of the underlying weakness vitiating all attempts to make the sub-continent as ‘British’ as Canada or Australia, or to master it imperially as the British had mastered India. The Imperial government would not finance a vast campaign of territorial conquest in Southern Africa. There (as elsewhere) imperial expansion waited on local agents to create a framework of information, order and opportunity: without it, reinforcements of capital and manpower were hard to attract. Nor was British military power a decisive weapon without the follow-through of local force. But, in South Africa, the coastal colonies in the Cape and Natal were cripplingly weak. They had no great staples like timber, wheat or wool (though wool came closest), attracted few migrants and borrowed little capital. Overland transport was costly and slow. The interior yielded few commodities. The commercial energy that drove forward the settler frontier elsewhere was in short supply. As a settler society, South Africa was a pale shadow of Canada. Nor, despite Sir Harry Smith, could it be a second India. There was no peasant economy to tax, no sepoy army to recruit, and no means to pay for the ‘hire’ of imperial troops – the three conditions which had allowed Anglo-Indian sub-imperialism to flourish unchecked by London's veto. Far from being the dominant force in Southern Africa, the coastal colonies found themselves in frustrating equipoise with the interior states, white and black. Black societies could be harassed and threatened, but they were mobile, resilient and difficult to incorporate – partly because, in the primitive state of the colonial economy, that meant seizing their land by force and conscripting their labour. The Boer republics were an even harder nut to crack.

It was easy to mistake the crudity of the Boer states for weakness. But the Boers had developed a highly effective means of ‘primitive accumulation’ to complement their social and military system.
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On the highveld grassland and around its margins, their horse-borne mobility and firepower allowed them to capture African cattle, land and labour far more easily than in the dense bush and deep valleys of the old Cape borderlands. The Boer states existed to seize this wealth and redistribute it among their citizen-warriors organised into the key unit of their social and political life, the commando. The Boer elite were the commandants who had first pick of the spoils and on whose military prowess their followers depended. Boer institutions may have been simple,
¹⁰
but their pastoral economy, drawing labour and foodcrops from black dependants, allowed a thinly spread but highly effective occupation of the highveld to be imposed in less than twenty years. Boer warfare was perfectly adapted to the open veld. Against it, the square and the infantry charge, the standard British tactics, were largely ineffective.

Stalemate was thus the rule in South African politics. When the British tried again to break it in the 1870s, the outcome was crushing failure. Once more, the reason for a forward move was the chorus of settler and official alarm at growing black resistance in the cockpit of peoples between the Cape, Natal and the Boer republics. Once more the blame was laid on disunity and competition among the whites. Federal union of the white settler states, British and Boer, favoured by Cape governors as the acceptable face of annexation, was endorsed by official opinion in London.
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Cape Colony was given Responsible (self-) Government in 1872 in the hope that its leaders would take up the federal cause. They refused, fearing that the whole burden of frontier control would fall on them. The Colonial Secretary, Lord Carnarvon, turned instead to the junior colony, Natal, and to Sir Theophilus Shepstone.
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Shepstone was the son of a British settler in the Eastern Cape. He became an official interpreter and, in the border warfare of the 1830s, rose quickly to be the government's spokesman among the Xhosa chiefs. By 1846, he was ‘diplomatic agent’ to the Africans in Natal and to the Zulu kingdom beyond the Tugela. A large, impassive, secretive man, Shepstone became the uncrowned king of Natal. He was an imperial official, but a colonial patriot: an unrelenting Natal sub-imperialist, a proto-Rhodes without the diamonds. His aim was to build a greater Natal: to find new ‘locations’ for its blacks; to free more land for its whites; to annex the northern coast; to control the northern trade to the Zambezi; to conquer Zululand. Carnarvon's rebuff at the Cape gave him his chance, for London was now willing to throw the Imperial Factor and its army into his puny settler bridgehead. Natal would be the springboard for colonial federation. Shepstone's local influence, his mastery of frontier politics, his command of ‘native policy’, made him the obvious choice as the new supremo of the northern interior. At first all went well. Worsted in its war against the Pedi, the Transvaal in 1876 was bankrupt, divided and demoralised. Shepstone talked its dejected president into surrendering independence and conjured up a petition for annexation which he declared in February 1877.
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The Pedi were defeated with imperial help.
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Then, in the second stage of Shepstone's grand design, the army Carnarvon had sent invaded Zululand, and (after the disaster at Isandhlwana) decisively broke its power. In a single forward movement, the British had broken the cycle of frustration and transformed the geopolitics of Southern Africa. Or so it seemed.

The moment of triumph was short. There was barely time to broach federation before the Transvaal Boers began to throw off their new colonial state with its courts and taxes. Paul Kruger's fame as a frontier fighter made him the natural leader of revolt. With the 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.
¹⁵
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 materialised. 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.
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And, by the mid-1880s, French and German influence had begun to arrive in the region.