The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (44 page)

The terms of what was called significantly a ‘treaty’ bore all the hallmarks of a truce, not an outright British victory. The Boers surrendered 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 traditions of the Afrikaner republics, they were not required to adopt the ‘colour-blind’ franchise of the Cape. With an amiable cynicism the question of whether anyone but whites should be granted the vote was deferred until the return of (white) self-government.
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This was the fragile 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 leaders had avoided a discreditable surrender. It was clear from early on that a determined effort would be needed to force them into the political 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 determined to suspend the Cape Parliament, with its large Bond contingent, until his federal scheme was well under way.
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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 Selborne, as Kamchatka, the darkest corner of Russia's Asian empire.
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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.
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He looked to Rhodes and his Randlord friends to prime the pump of land settlement. 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
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and on which a significant part of his estate would be spent.
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Milner's real hope was that the war had transformed the English into a united community of ‘British South Africans’, the dominant element in his imagined dominion, ‘a united self-governing South Africa wh[ich] shall be British in its political complexion’.
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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’.
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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,
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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 manpower, to neutralise the joker in South African politics: the threat of an armed Afrikaner rebellion.
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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’.
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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.
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The new Transvaal would be the ‘stronghold’ that British influence had always lacked in South Africa.
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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 thousands 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) 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
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and disunited. ‘The party is rotten to the core’, wrote its chief organiser.
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No English Cape politician could fill Rhodes’ shoes. In the Transvaal, Milner's ‘stronghold’, the situation 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.
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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.
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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 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,
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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,
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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.’
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In reality, Botha and Smuts were convinced that only by an alliance with the ‘moderate English sections’ could they hope to defeat the ‘money power’ of the Progressive leaders.
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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.
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Far from adopting the linguistic and cultural 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.
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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 was as convinced as ever that white unity was imperative in the face of the ‘native problem’.
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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 stagnation on which it depended.
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Botha was a ‘Tory’ whose ideas were ‘big’ and who depended on English votes.
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His views on education, railways and agriculture were really like Milner's.
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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.
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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 Liberal 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.
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The radicals would soon alienate the South African English as well as the Afrikaners.
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But closer 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 committed. 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.
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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)
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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.
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With the local consensus on union (not federation) at the Durban convention in 1908, Selborne's colonial bandwagon overcame 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’.