The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (41 page)

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 Britannic confederacy.
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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 Mashonaland 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.
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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 mining houses that emerged in the 1890s. Rhodes lacked the capital to attempt the great amalgamation he achieved at Kimberley. Nor did the Rand lend itself to the tactics that had worked well with diamonds. It was easy for his rivals to raise money in London. The violent fluctuations in the value of shares, and the scale of speculative activity, ruled out the ‘squaring’ of interests, Rhodes’ favoured technique. Nor would Kruger allow the commercial free rein that Rhodes enjoyed in the Cape. Instead, his sale of concessions, like the dynamite monopoly, his control of the railways and the black labour supply, 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.
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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.
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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 premature. 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 Johannesburg conspirators were rounded up, tried and imprisoned (commuting their death sentences cost Rhodes £300,000).
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Worst of all, Rhodes’ Afrikaner allies in the Cape whom he had kept in ignorance (believing perhaps that they would favour the end while loathing the means), turned against him in rage. His premiership collapsed. The ‘Colossus’ 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 exploiting 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 disengagement adopted after 1881. Amid suspicion that it was implicated in the Jameson Raid, its influence was weaker than ever. An imperial 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
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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 Kaiser's congratulatory telegram to Kruger helped to turn the Uitlander grievances into a political issue in Britain and a nagging index of imperial 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 Chamberlain 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.
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As 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 government down the path of reform, but without drawing in the Imperial government.
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But the Uitlander franchise was out of the question.
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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.’
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By this time, Milner had already begun to drift towards the alliance with Rhodes against which Chamberlain had warned him.
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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.

The key was the north, Rhodes’ private empire in Rhodesia. Foiled on the Rand and frustrated at the Cape, Rhodes’ best hope was to speed up Rhodesia's development and build a grand new colony embracing the Bechuanaland Protectorate (then still under imperial control). The Protectorate would be Rhodesia's land bridge to the Cape. As part of ‘Greater Rhodesia’ it would help surround the Transvaal on two sides. The third stage of Rhodes’ plan was to promote the federal union of the Cape, Natal and Greater Rhodesia. Then ‘the three combined will bring
peaceful
pressure to bear upon the republics to drive them into a S[outh] African federation’.
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Milner proposed to fasten imperial policy once more to Rhodes’ chariot wheels. But, this time, the ‘Colossus’ was to be kept on a leash ‘unless he is to make a shipwreck of his own ambitions and our permanent interests’. The persistent African risings against Rhodes’ Company government cast doubt on his schemes – at least for the moment. It was vital to preserve some imperial control over Rhodesia and to make him wait for the eventual transfer of the Protectorate. ‘His projected game is a good game but…he is desperately anxious to have another slap at old Kruger by “peaceful means”.’
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As Milner recognised, Rhodes ‘was much too strong to be merely used’. His cooperation had to be bought. But his ‘Northern’ strategy was the only shot in the imperial locker. Milner settled in for the long haul, and a ‘qualified success’. ‘A united and loyal S[outh] Africa on the Canadian pattern if it ever comes about is a thing of the very distant future’, he told one of his oldest and closest friends.
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But Britain's strategic interests, thought this ‘civilian soldier of the Empire’ (Milner's self-description), were safe enough: ‘I don't mean in the least that I despair of the maintenance of British supremacy.’
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Cautious pragmatism was the keynote of an imperial policy which waited on the maturing of Rhodes’ schemes. The Transvaal was ‘bound to topple’, Milner told Asquith, the future prime minister.
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There was little point taking up the mine-owners’ main grievance, the dynamite monopoly imposed by Kruger's government. Scarcely three months later, Milner performed an astonishing u-turn. Now he urged an openly aggressive policy towards the Transvaal, and, in a notorious speech (at Graaff Reinet on 3 March 1898), questioned the loyalty of the Cape Afrikaners to the imperial connection. Milner may have been reacting to Kruger's unexpectedly resounding success in the Transvaal's presidential election in February. He may have been anxious about Rhodes’ grip on Rhodesia. But there was another reason for his harder line. Early in 1898, Rhodes too was switching tactics. With the Parliamentary inquiry into the Jameson Raid behind him, and the black revolt in Rhodesia broken, he was ready to re-enter Cape politics. His old alliance with the Bond was irreparable; but he had a new vehicle. He had become the darling of the ‘English’ in the towns. In the Cape's Eastern Province, the South African League had been formed to rally loyalty to the Empire and (by a deft association) to Rhodes. In 1897, the League created the ‘Progressive’ party to campaign for free trade, agrarian improvement and the redistribution of seats – causes carefully identified with imperial loyalty. Before the end of 1897, a private understanding had been reached between the Progressives and Rhodes’ own followers.
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Six days after Milner's speech, Rhodes announced his conversion to the Progressive programme and opened fire on the Bond for its hostility to northern expansion and its resistance to an imperial naval contribution.
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Rhodes, sneered his bitterest enemy in the Cape, wanted a majority ‘not to unify South Africa, but to purchase…the Bulawayo railway and…that very bad egg Rhodesia’.
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But Rhodes was also determined to give urban (and ‘English’) voters a fairer share of seats. His new alliance would bring him the townsmen's vote. With firm control of the Cape Parliament he could tighten the knot round Kruger's neck. Milner had little choice but to follow him.