The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (40 page)

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 imperial 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 mistreatment of Africans within the Transvaal could be reported to the British resident.
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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 freedom conferred in 1852. He had little choice. The social economy of the Transvaal Boers was inimical to fixed boundaries. The acquisition of fresh land for speculation was the chief means of accumulating wealth in an underdeveloped pastoral economy. ‘Encroachment has been their very life’, observed Lord Salisbury, the scion of an encroaching aristocracy.
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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 convinced 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.
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They dared not coerce the Transvaal Boers and needed Kruger's help in settling the frontier disputes. 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 independence) remained. The Transvaal was allowed to resume the grandiloquent 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 surrender to Kruger's territorial demands. When later the Cape reneged and the Transvaal Boers violated the new boundary, an embarrassed government 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.
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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. 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 Witwatersrand 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.
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Six years later they were almost equal. The danger of bankruptcy (and political implosion) 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 rebellious Transvaal the strongest state on the sub-continent. In fact, Southern 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.
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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, speculators and land-hungry settlers. It was the forward base-camp of sub-imperialism.

And it was here that Rhodes’ idle fantasies of imperial aggrandisement 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 Kimberley towards Mafeking, Tuli and Bulawayo, capital of Lobengula's Ndebele state. By controlling access to this untold hinterland, Kimberley'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 Parliament, 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 cultural nationalism of the Dutch-speaking clerical elite hostile to the anglicising secularising effects of commercial growth.
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In fact, the Bond's antipathy to British influence was surprisingly ambivalent. Afrikaners were prominent in the Cape's legal and professional elite. They prospered 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 programme 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 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 drawing 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 status, 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 politics began to break up. Rhodes was accumulating wealth and power with sensational rapidity. In 1888, with his close partner, the financial ‘genius’ Alfred Beit, he centralised diamond production in a single 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.
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De Beers became the treasure-chest from which he could fund his political activity and his schemes of sub-imperial expansion.
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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 political 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 businessman. 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: 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.
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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 imperialist Albert Grey
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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 Zambezian blacks.
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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 obvious that, like it or not, northern expansion would make Rhodes more amenable to imperial control.
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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 created 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 expansion, uninhibited by the financial and diplomatic fetters they found so galling. Garnished with speculative profit, it was a seductive version 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, over whose domain in Zambezia (soon ‘Rhodesia’) his authority was absolute. Now he became Cape premier as well.