Trapido

Introduction to
“Imperialism, Settler Identities and Colonial Capitalism:
The Hundred Year Origins of the 1899 South African War”

In this paper, written as a chapter for the forthcoming Cambridge History

of South Africa, Stanley Trapido puts forward an interpretation of the
causes of the South African War that integrates context with agency. In
the course of emphasising the struggle’s long and short-term contexts (the
title’s echo of Smuts’ Century of Wrong is quite deliberate), it seeks to
infuse motive with context, so as to give meaning to the responsibility for
war assiduously sought by generations of liberal historians. With
exquisite subtlety, Trapido traces the making, and establishes the
meanings of “Krugerism”, even as he stresses the pivotal role of the
Selborne Memorandum, a document as often misrepresented as
misunderstood by historians, as well as the key part played by Percy
Fitzpatrick in overcoming the inertia and caution characteristic of much
mining house behaviour. Such were the overlapping ideological
complexities of the moment that Trapido is moved to question those
identities and interests previously assumed to be fixed:
If we examine the claims of those who believed themselves to be in an
empire imperilled by Krugerism alongside the claims of those
perceiving themselves as the victims of “a century’s wrong”, do we
arrive at conclusions which are more than the sum of two sets of
assertions? Moreover, if there was a threat to Empire in South Africa,
was it only Afrikaners who made that threat? We know that it did not
come from those Cape Afrikaners who were loyalists, asserting that
they spoke the “Queens’s Dutch”. Nor can we confidently say that all
British “Afrikanders” were loyal to the empire. So what impact did
these sometimes blurred loyalties have on either Krugerism or
imperialism?

For Trapido, it was the British “Afrikander”, Fitzpatrick, who

helped to set the stage on which Milner acted. Yet the setting was highly
contingent and unlikely to last. It is an argument whose overall
conclusions attempt to avoid the polarised positions adopted by so many
accounts of the causes of the war. Rather than having us choose between
a political and strategic set of explanations on the one hand, or the
economic determinism of gold and gold mining’s imperatives on the
other, Stanley Trapido argues for the convergence of both, particularly in
the decisive period between 1895 and 1899.

Ian Phimister
University of Sheffield

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Imperialism, Settler Identities and Colonial Capitalism:

The Hundred Year Origins of the 1899 South African War

Stanley Trapido

The South African War of 1899-1902 was the culmination – if not inevitably so – of a
hundred years of British domination of the region. That domination began with the
seizure of the Cape of Good Hope from the Dutch in 1795, beginning an economic,
ideological as well as political hegemony. Britain’s presence in South Africa
followed from strategic assumptions born of its need to defend Indian Ocean interests.
Strategic considerations meant that the British, like the Dutch before them, had to
provision the Indian Ocean’s naval and mercantile fleets. Settler expansion into more
and more distant hinterlands – to secure ecological zones where crops or stock could
be raised – not only had to be allowed but had to be furthered with Imperial troops.
British rule in South Africa, with Downing Street’s power and Whitehall’s
administration, willy-nilly, turned social structures in the Cape, and beyond, into a
series of new and changing collaborations, alliances, oppositions, and identities.
Expansion required conquering African territories and, thereafter, the distribution of
African land and labour. This was a process which mostly favoured British merchants
and traders at the expense of Dutch-Afrikander settlers in the interior. Eventually
local ethnic and regional groupings were provoked into a new assertiveness and began
to acquire objectives of their own. In this way sub-imperialisms emerged. Then, in
the last quarter of the century, the region was further transformed by the discovery of
diamonds and thereafter, gold. Out of these latter discoveries came a powerful and
confident mining capitalism embedded in South Africa but linked to the world’s
major financial centre which was the City of London. Determining how these
transformations took place and how interactions between the Imperial state, settler
ambitions and capitalist enclaves eventually erupted into war is the major purpose of
this chapter. The analysis and the narrative which traces these developments have a
well-known and considerable, if contentious, literature. It stretches from the
contemporary observers of empire and imperialism to the analysts and the analysis
operating before and after the South African War. The first section of what follows
examines the many forces shaping the political economy of southern Africa in the
period up to the mid-1890s. Section two concentrates on the tumultuous years
between circa 1895 and 1899, from the moment when the discovery of “deep levels”
of gold underneath the first Rand caused the pace of events to quicken throughout the
region.

The Cape Colony

European colonisation of the Cape – the Dutch between 1652 and 1795, the British
occupation beginning in the nineteenth century – was secured to further Britain’s
strategic-cum-mercantile preoccupations in India and east Asia. These strategic
objectives led the colonising power to hold not only the region’s coastline and safe
harbours but to secure inland agricultural lands. To reduce costs they found
collaborators who would help secure their primary purpose, guarding the Cape against

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the designs of other European powers. Although indigenous Khoi peoples were
employed in military roles, Britain chose its own settlers, and the inaccurately named
Cape Dutch, as its principal collaborators. In practice, however, British settlers
immediately became a strategic liability and they required additional military
intervention to ensure their security. But in addition to the military support which
Britain gave its settlers, it bestowed upon them economic, political and ideological
power. Settlers, old and new, building on this authority, rapidly acquired additional
aspirations of their own and several settler identities, associated with separate
economic and partisan objectives, emerged. These settlers came to be known as
Afrikanders – either Dutch or British – each with interests of their own and varying
degrees of antagonism to the imperial power.

To begin with Dutch-Afrikander society in the western Cape, settled since the
mid-seventeenth century – included prosperous landowners and an urban population
of administrators, lawyers, other professionals, as well as merchants, Reformed
Church clergymen and newspaper editors. Also encapsulated within this wider
society was a population drawn in part from freed and manumitted slaves, some of
whom were craftsmen, as well as petty traders and labouring poor of various ethnic
origins. Those nearest the rising harbour-cum-town were involved in the cultivation
of arable land, the wealthiest among them being slave and land-owners. Landowners
enclosed tenants and servants to establish settled existences. Property and wealth
defined these stratified communities and gave rise to administrative and church
focused villages such as Stellenbosch and Paarl. Credit was rooted in community and
the worst effects of economic cycles of depression and expansion were contained by
ensuring that landed property did not pass to outsiders. This was a moral economy
which underpinned the commercial and social activities of Dutch-Afrikander society.

British occupation and settler economics

As the British occupation began, the Dutch-speaking elite of Cape Town were on the
verge of a cultural transformation. They created a theatre, together with historical,
intellectual and linguistic associations which sought to advance a new colonial Dutch
identity. These activities, combined with an agitation for self-rule, kindled a Cape
Dutch nationalism in the 1830s although that was not a name which stemmed from
that identity. At first the West’s affluent Dutch-Afrikanders, styled a gentry by some,
seemed to be developing an anti-British identity but by the 1840s they began to
develop a pragmatic loyalty to the British regime which was to last for most of the
nineteenth century. Beyond the arable western lands were districts made up mostly of
impoverished pastoralists although those with connections to the monopolists and
traders of Cape Town acquired a degree of prosperity. By the end of the eighteenth
century these several populations had developed diverging identities and patois in
separate parts of the settlement.

The arrival of the British saw the establishment not only of an Imperial
administrative-cum-military cast attached to Britain but a merchant circle gradually
developing local roots and interests. This was followed by the fostering of additional
settler communities, evolving their own social and political identities. British settlers
not only obeyed the laws of the market but attached themselves to imperial strategic
objectives although they quickly sought to ensure that these helped foster their own

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material well being. The strategic imperatives of British policy makers, we have
noted, might have confined the occupation of the Cape to such coastal havens as the
subcontinent offered. Those policy makers had, however, to recognise - as their
Dutch counterparts had done before them - that the region’s ecology required cattle be
reared at a considerable distance from the colony’s only major town and harbour,
Kabo turned into Cape Town. At the same time we should not underestimate the
economic importance of the colony’s provisioning role. The early nineteenth century
Cape may not have exported tropical crops to Europe as other colonies were doing but
its exports were consumed on board ship without ever needing to be off-loaded.

An eastward and a northern movement of colonists was condoned and even

encouraged, and colonial settlement was propelled further and further inland. So
much so that one of the earliest decisions taken by the new Imperial authorities in
1819 was to introduce four thousand British settlers into territory seized from Xhosa
occupants. These British newcomers were meant to defend the region against recently
dispossessed Khoisan and Xhosa clans in an eastern district known for its pasturage.
It was called the Zuurveld by Dutch-Afrikanders and then Albany by the latest
(British) occupiers. These latter settlers were supposed to act as a first line of defence
against African polities but they were also seen as a means of assimilating old
colonists into a British political culture.

In the 1820s and 1830s two related ideological quests nourished and sustained
that British culture in its colonial setting. The first of these emerged from the
evangelical movement which announced that “providence” was “marking out” Britain
to be the “great mother of Empires”. Britons had displaced the original inhabitants of
the land but that was God’s will. The second great ideological venture was,
inevitably, the anti-slavery movement. British settlers in Cape Town and Albany held
public dinners to celebrate the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. They were
not only doing God’s work but they must have brought discomfort to Dutch-
Afrikanders, the only legal slave-owners in South Africa. British settlers were
forbidden slaves from the beginning of their settlement. It is claimed that British
employers supported the abolition of the other serfdom which controlled the lives of
Cape Khoisan because it freed workers for equally harsh wage labour for which they
sought a remorseless vagrancy law.5

Settlers could, of course, only come by the territory they occupied by

plundering the land and the cattle of the people whom they conquered. There were
some who saw that such despoliation must lead to bitter resistance. For a moment, in
the mid-1830s, Andries Stockenström the Cape born Lieutenant Governor, and the
Evangelical “Saints” in the British Parliament, recognised the vicious circle which
was created by conquest and resistance. They set about persuading the British
government to reverse aspects of its Cape frontier policy. As a result some land was
returned to the Xhosa and diplomatic negotiations replaced retribution. But the
majority of Albany’s settlers vehemently opposed such changes and the British
army’s officer corps, and a part of the colonial administration, sabotaged efforts at
liberal transformation. Policy reverted to its earlier course and the circle of despoliation,

5. S. Newton King, “The Labour Market of the Cape Colony, 1807-1828’, in S. Marks &
A. Atmore (eds), Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa (Longman,
London & New York, 1980).

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retaliation and counter-retaliation continued. Now as the pillaged and the plundered
tried to defend themselves they became the murderers and the destroyers. The victims
had become the source of their own victimhood and this became a central feature of
settler ideology. For the rest of the century most of Albion’s settlers concurred in
Britain’s frontier policy, strategic and economic, both proclaiming that they were
serving the others’ interests.

The Dutch Afrikanders

By contrast, in the 1830s and 1840s, in the eastern and northern districts of the
Colony, a far less affluent class of Dutch-Afrikander notables, sustained by their
moral economy, presided over communities of landless and impoverished clients.
British rule, their leaders concluded, could not alleviate their land shortage nor allow
them to control their labour. They could only hope to prosper by breaking away from
Imperial control. These notables reinforced other dissatisfactions among their
dependents, intensifying an urge among them to break completely with British rule.
Those leading this break came to seek not only a political but a mercantile and
diplomatic independence from Britain. The Colonial Office allowed internal
independence to two such Dutch-Afrikander settler groups – the Oranje Vrystaat
(OVS) and the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) – but almost immediately it
regretted this decision. Thereafter, external connections, whether diplomatic or
commercial were prevented because they were seen as a threat to Britain’s purpose
and presence in South Africa. It also became British policy to prevent the Dutch-
Afrikander polities gaining access to economic activities which would generate fiscal
resources and allow them to challenge British power. This undoubtedly lay behind
the exclusion of both the ZAR and the OVS from oversight of the diamond fields in
the 1870s. The effect of this action was to inhibit the economic growth of the ZAR
but not without spurring its leadership to make a number of attempts to break out of
this imperial grip. From the earliest beginnings of these Afrikander states, therefore,
attempts were made to acquire outlets to the sea and to build either a substantial
wagon road or, from the 1870s, a railway which would connect the ZAR to the sea.

But it was not only the Imperial government whose actions inhibited the
economic well being of the citizens, the burghers, of the ZAR. The intrusion into the
ZAR and OVS of British merchants, traders and even peddlers, rapidly led to them
dominating the economy of these fledgling Dutch-Afrikander states. These traders
were directly linked to the commercial houses of the Cape and Natal and had access to
credit and information which played a considerable part in restricting the growth of an
Afrikander trading class. So great was this coastal-merchant domination that the
villages and towns of the republican states were largely English-speaking enclaves.
Moreover, absentee land speculators from Britain and the two British Colonies rapidly
bought up sizeable tracts of land in the two Republics. And this despite statutory attempts
by the ZAR to prohibit the presence of foreign traders and landowners within its state.

Whilst some citizens of the ZAR employed land consigned to them to raise
crops, and they used its water for their stock, much of the land claimed by the ZAR
was occupied by African inhabitants. Often, those with titles to land could not
enforce occupation and, at best, they might be able to claim rent from their “farms”.
There was, however, a speculative market in land and those holding rights to land
were able to sell holdings at a profit in the belief that minerals or other resources

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might increase the value of their property. The products of the hunt were another
source of income and increasingly those with land title refused to allow outsiders,
even burghers, to hunt on their property. Increasingly impoverishment was associated
with the presence of land speculators and they were identified with English-speakers.

British hegemony in South Africa was not, of course, universally to the

disadvantage of Dutch-Afrikanders. The Cape’s economy grew briskly and many of
the Colony’s Dutch-Afrikanders, prospered under British rule. The vast increase in
British commercial and naval – Asia bound – ocean traffic added substantially to the
colonial provisioning trade. But Cape agriculture began to expand beyond that trade,
however successful it might be. At mid-century entrepreneurial activities of its
merchants began to bind the colony to the metropolitan economy. This was so even
when its merchant houses were not British in origin. The appeal of the manufacturers
or traders of Liverpool or Glasgow made them identify with Britain’s ever-growing
economic and political power. By the 1840s a family of recently established
merchants began to build a trading infrastructure for a new South African pastoral
industry, wool farming. The Cape’s land-owning capitalists, encouraged by the
Jewish-German brothers Mosenthal, completed the conversion from fat-tailed mutton
sheep into the far more profitable wool bearing breeds. In 1839 and 1840 the brothers
Joseph and Adolph Mosenthal arrived in Cape Town from Germany, initially as clerks
to a Frankfurt-am-Main firm. They soon set themselves up as general merchants in
their own right and seeing the need for marketing facilities for the colony’s primary
products – wool, hides and skins, ostrich feathers, established a succession of trading-
posts at district centres throughout the Colony.

Port Elizabeth became the focus of their activities and as early as 1856 they
had opened offices in London. The prosperity of the Mosenthals paralleled the
growth of the Colony’s trade. Between 1822 and 1855 Cape wool exported to Britain
grew from 20 000 lbs valued at £2 000 to 15 million lbs valued at £643 000. It
exceeded a £1 000 000 by 1860 and £2 000 000 by 1866. There was however,
another conversion taking place, as significant as the move from fat-tail to Merino
sheep or Angora goats which the firm brought to the Colony. With their major market
in Britain some of the second generation of Mosenthals began to associate themselves
with a British loyalism which led them to London’s West End and the country house
in the Home Counties. Such a route was to be taken by others of continental
European origin as their economic activities brought them closer and closer to the
wool merchants of Bradford but also to the financial markets of the City of London.
By the 1870s one branch of the Mosenthal family became involved in a new
enterprise, diamonds. This was to lead Harry Mosenthal into a partnership with the
likes of Rhodes, the Beits, and Julius Wernher (see below). The Cape was generating
its own class of “millionaires”.

The ZAR, by contrast, we have seen was descending into further and further
impoverishment and economic backwardness. With a limit on land, and on labour,
Dutch-Afrikanders turned to coercing African peoples living in the regions they were
attempting to occupy.6 Such compulsion strained relationships between the ZAR and
the contiguous African societies and ultimately led to an unsuccessful war with the

6. S. Trapido, “Land, Office and Wealth in the South African Republic”, in Marks &
Atmore, Economy and Society, p 358.

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Pedi. Unsurprisingly, the Imperial authorities were alarmed by the disruptive effects
of this Dutch-Afrikander behaviour and it was to become a justification for British
intervention in the ZAR. Moreover, it was not only the inhabitants of societies
contiguous to the ZAR that suffered from such raiding. It also became a practice for
officials of the ZAR to waylay Africans moving between their homes in distant
polities and the plantations of the Natal Colony and the diamond fields of the territory
which became known as Griqualand West. Such behaviour brought the ZAR into
conflict with colonial merchants, plantation owners, mining prospectors and the
Imperial and colonial governments because it drastically diminished the labour
available to them. African clansmen from independent polities complied with their
role as workers – partly because decisions were mostly made for them by superiors
and rulers – and they travelled from all over the subcontinent to work on the diamond
fields. A similar outcome awaited those who moved through Mozambique and the
Zulu polity placing further obstacles to labour reaching the British colonies.

Colonial policy and diamond economics

This assault on the sources of mining and plantation labour was to transform the
behaviour of British policy makers concerned with South Africa. Between 1850 and
1870 Britain limited itself to reacting to the specific actions of the Afrikander
republics. If these disturbed Britain’s Indian Ocean strategy or destabilised the
Southern African continent’s interior then they were likely to be forced to restore the
status quo. But no new policy was created. Then, in the mid-1870s, that procedure
changed and the Colonial Office in London and its South African assistants began to
devise a strategy which would initiate proceedings and anticipate events. In part this
was the result of the growing importance to Britain of the South African economy.
The Indian Ocean provisioning trade played some part in that increased importance
but, as we have noted, Cape agriculture began to expand independently of that trade.
At that moment came the discovery of diamonds in the region which was to become
Griqualand-West and the new mining centre that took its name from a Colonial
Secretary, Kimberley. What followed was Britain’s determination to ensure that the
fiscal potential of the diamond fields would not facilitate the efforts of the Dutch-
Afrikander states to break free of the imperial grip.

The Imperial annexation of diamond fields was far from welcomed by the
immigrant and settler-prospector population who flocked to Kimberley. These were
the diggers, the mainly British or colonial hopefuls – but there were also Europeans
and Americans in their number. They had come to the fields in what would be the
vain hope that they would restore fortunes which the new structures of world
capitalism was in the process of denying them. This ragbag of humanity would have
preferred the less effective control of the Dutch-Afrikander states. They favoured the
indifferent administrative capacity of the republican states with their inherent
opposition to African diggers. However, if the diamond output was to be sustained as
a profitable enterprise the production and sale of gems needed to be controlled but this
required a degree of cooperation for which the initially anarchic social relations of the
diamond fields did not allow. Instead the racism of white diggers, traders,
entrepreneurs and the vast array of those living by their wits, turned upon African and
Coloured prospectors and workers. The latter group were accused of supplying
diamonds illegally to unauthorised dealers.

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Hostility to African and Coloured prospectors led the white diamond fields
population to form populist mobs which attacked the source of their anger and they
attempted to coerce the colony’s lieutenant governor, Richard Southey, into denying
digger’s licences to African and Coloured men. The social unrest which followed led
the imperial authorities to send a military detachment to the diamond fields to make it
plain that ultimate British authority could not be challenged. Nevertheless, Southey,
who had supported a non-racial prospecting class was recalled and the right to
prospect was withdrawn from African and Coloured men. White diggers, workers
and the traders counted Southey’s removal as a triumph but it was to be a pyrrhic
victory.7 The new administration altered the rules determining the number of
“claims”, or diggings, individual prospectors could hold.

The resulting structure of ownership was now determined by parallel

geological and financial considerations. Geology determined that the search and
excavation of diamonds could not be continued by the existing exploration of discrete,
single, “claims”. Not only did prospectors spread into each other’s ground but
unresolvable problems were created as the walls of “diggings” began to collapse into
each other, threatening life and limb. If the search for diamonds was not to be limited
to scratching the surface, underground mining would have to take place. Not only
would mining boundaries have to far exceed the single claim but shafts had to be
sunk, tunnels excavated, waste disposed of, flooding prevented and all the other tasks
associated with mining at depth, undertaken. It followed, therefore, that if the
structure of ownership had to take note of the geological features of the fields these
were also going to impose financial characteristics upon diamond mining.

New economic organisations had to be brought into being. To be effective

these had to be consolidated, requiring the most successful of the “diggers”, as well as
their financial collaborators – usually diamond buyers, increasingly with City of
London connections – to combine in acquiring substantial numbers of claims.
Financial as well as engineering skills had, therefore, to be united and these had to be
merged with managerial and administrative capacities. This returns us to the earliest
problem associated with the search for diamonds. We have seen that diamonds were
so easily unearthed that mining them could not be left to supply and demand.
Abundance meant that a “true” market price would hardly make mining profitable.
Large scale excavators and vendors of diamonds set out, therefore, to create an
artificial scarcity.

From the outset of the rush to find diamonds attempts were made to limit their
sale and purchase to a small and exclusive coterie. At first this was barely successful.
Transactions outside this group were made illegal but were nevertheless widespread.
Illegal sales were initiated by both immigrant diggers and African labourers alike.
The former group was inhibited by the imprisonment which followed a conviction for
participating in illegal transactions. Attempts were made to search white miners but
their resistance prevented employers from imposing such intimate and personal
examinations. African miners, already subjected to imprisonment, were in addition,
placed in closed compounds to prevent them from becoming unsanctioned vendors. In

7. R. Turrell, “Kimberley: Labour and Compounds, 1871-1888”, in S. Marks and

R. Rathbone, Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa (Longman, New York,
1982), pp 45-76.

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addition to inhibiting illegal diamond sales these closed compounds limited the capacity
of African workers to challenge their employers. White workers, with experience of
political participation and trade union membership, were less restrained than their African
counterparts, but they were constantly undermined by the mine-owners’ economic and
political rule of Kimberly-town. Every aspect of the mineworkers’ lives was controlled
by his employer so that the ability to resist mine-owners’ regulation was increasingly
whittled away. Moreover, between mining conditions which imposed the consolidation
of diamond claims and marketing circumstances which determined diamond sales, the
industry evolved from chaotic individual holdings to joint stock companies to a cartel,
known as the De Beers Company.

This cartel was sanctioned by the Cape government in 1889. The Cape
Colony had succeeded the Imperial government in administering the diamond fields in
1880. As Cape rule came into operation on the diamond fields it began, increasingly,
to be influenced, and then dominated, by a prime mover in the diamonds saga, Cecil
Rhodes. But Rhodes was only the most visible of a new class of mining capitalists
who were to over shadow the South African economic and political landscape for the
next half century and more. Nevertheless, Rhodes was unique in the way he
combined his economic, ideological and political roles. In the decade after 1880 he
played a significant but local role in the politics of the diamond fields and its
contingent territories. Since these extended into modern day Botswana and beyond,
into Central Africa, he began securing this region for the joint hegemony of his
capitalist conferees and his imperialist allies. All the while he was developing a naive
but astonishing ideology of empire creating a unique role for what he called the
“English race”. As we shall see, however, Rhodes was above all a pragmatist and an
opportunist, transferring his allegiances from imperial to settler interests and back
again. He, and his diamond fields colleagues even more so, moved from Kimberley
to the new stage that was to become Johannesburg and then to London and then to the
colonial world once more. With the ability of Kimberley workers – white and black –
to organise and bargain for better conditions largely overwhelmed, the greater part of
the white working class sought every opportunity to break away from the diamond
cartel’s influence. Many mineworkers deserting Kimberley made their way to the
new mining districts of Lydenburg, Barberton and above all the Witwatersrand.
These migrants took with them a deep mistrust of both centralised capitalism and
imperial and colonial power.

Events on the diamond fields created radically new classes and new identities
and these were to transform the dynamics of economy and society/polity in
South Africa. But even where the influence of the diamond fields was excluded, as in
the case of the ZAR, there were consequences and repercussions. The endless poverty
of the ZAR, and its frustration at being excluded from the diamond fields, was
accompanied by the constant efforts of its notables to break out of that poverty.
Above all they made incessant efforts to search for what was their great chimera; they
wanted a port of their own to which they would construct an all-weather road from
their land locked republic to the ocean. In the 1860s the ZAR’s president,
M.W. Pretorius, attempted to annex half the east coast of southern Africa as well as
trying to acquire the legendary Tati gold fields. He succeeded in mobilising the
hostility of Natal’s merchants and intensifying the antipathy of the British government
but he achieved nothing else. And he was outwitted by British agents when he

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attempted to claim the diamond fields for the ZAR. The search began, therefore,
among Dutch-Afrikander notables, for a different kind of leader whose experience
and understanding of the outside world might enable him to deal, not only with settler
societies and the imperial power, but also with leading politicians and bankers in
continental Europe.
ZAR politics and policy

The first choice of the ZAR’s notables was J.H. Brand, the President of the OVS and
scion of a progressive Cape Dutch-Afrikander family. The ZAR’s leadership wanted
Brand to establish a federal union between the two republics but he was unwilling to
take on that dual post. Instead, he recommended Thomas Francois Burgers – a Cape
Dutch Reformed (NGK) minister and also a member of a leading Graaff-Reinet
family – as president of the ZAR, Burger was taught in English at his Graaff-Reinet
school in the 1850s. He was then a student at the University of Utrecht, where he
came under the influence of a liberal theologian. Burgers came away rejecting a
literal interpretation of the scriptures, doubting the resurrection and original sin and
was convinced of the perfectibility of human nature. He returned to the Cape to
become the NGK minister at Hanover in the Karoo in 1859 but his liberal theology
led him into conflict with his congregation and the Cape Synod. In 1862 Burgers was
found guilty of heresy.

Although the Privy Council overthrew this verdict Burgers was an improbable
presidential candidate to find favour among a population largely committed to the
literal interpretation of the Old Testament as well as having a complete conviction in
the doctrine of the resurrection. While Burgers had the support of some clergymen,
most were opposed to him as were such notables as the acting President D.J. Erasmus
and the Commandant-General, S.J.P. Kruger, the latter a leading landowner and a key
figure in the most fundamentalist wing of the Reformed Church, the so-called
“Doppers”. This circle nominated William Robinson, the son of an 1820 settler as
their candidate but factional politics played an essential part in his defeat and Burgers’
election. The view that the presidency should go to a candidate who could be
described as “learned” was of considerable importance to the unofficial electoral
college of the ZAR. Burgers, in accepting the nomination which would allow him to
run for office in the ZAR, asserted that he would awaken
... the patriotism of the nation as a whole to its great destiny, and to attain for
the South African Republic an honourable place among the States of South
Africa to enable her to play an important role in the union of the South
African people and to enter into an honourable Federation or federal
relationship with the Sister Republic whose interests are identical to those of
the Transvaal.

Once he was elected, Burgers set about expounding a radical economic,

political and even ideological programme intended to modernise the ZAR.8 Early on
he proposed that the ZAR should raise capital in Europe with which to build a rail link
to Delagoa Bay. This was a scheme with deep political as well as economic
objectives and he feared that the British would try to purchase or annexe the Bay in

8. C.W. de Kiewiet, The Imperial Factor in South Africa a Study in Politics and
Economics (Cass, London, 1965), pp 94-95.

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order to frustrate the ZAR’s objectives. He therefore entered into negotiations with
the OVS to begin mobilising an international opposition to Britain. His modernising
design, he also recognised, would need a cadre of educated non-British and Dutch-
speaking administrators and it was he who began the pivotal process of recruiting men
from the Netherlands to serve the ZAR’s state. In similar fashion he also began to
create an educational system, not only by establishing the Republic’s first secondary
school, but by again turning to the Netherlands to recruit instructors. In 1873 – to
advance his modernising ambition – he launched the first newspaper in the ZAR, the
De Volksstem. He also recognised that if the economy was to make headway it was
necessary to transform the state’s currency by underwriting its value. Burgers,
therefore, negotiated a bank loan by borrowing £60 000 from the Cape Commercial
Bank. Moreover, under his aegis the first South African coins were minted from gold
extracted from the recently opened diggings at Lydenburg. In addition, the five
hundred English-speaking prospectors at that diggings were brought into the ZAR’s
political system by granting them two Volksraad seats. Unfortunately, his ambitious
economic and constitutional objectives took him away from the everyday factional
politics of his adopted state making him vulnerable to their conspiracies. However,
what was to undo Burgers was the ZAR’s relationship with the Pedi state. In the clash
between the two polities Burgers was deserted by his militia and he had to retreat in
disarray. At this point the Imperial power chose to intervene. But this was the
occasion rather than the cause of this intervention.

Shepstone and the annexation of the ZAR

The annexation of the ZAR had long been proposed as the solution to the problems it
created and was favoured by both Natal’s merchants and its colonial administrators.
De Kiewiet observed that as early as 1866 the Natal Mercury reported “We have got
into the way of looking upon the vast states of the interior, as being almost part of
ourselves. They rank amongst the mainstays of our prosperity.”9 Equally,
interference with its labour supplies (and its trade) had repeatedly moved Natal
officials to urge that the Republic be annexed by Britain. Others could find
philanthropic and magnanimous motives for wanting to extend British power. Such
an extension, wrote Natal’s Lieutenant Governor R.W. Keate, would ensure “the
advancement of civilization, enlightenment and good government in this part of the
world.”10 Moreover, from the mid-1860s Colonial Secretaries and High
Commissioners also began to claim, in private, that South Africa would be better
governed under a British dominated state. As High Commissioner Wodehouse
asserted, Britain must be the “paramount power” in South Africa.11 For the next ten
years, however, it was neither appropriate nor propitious for federation to become
explicit imperial policy. That moment came in 1876 when the political economy and
an array of Imperial developments, cabinet and parliamentary opportunities and
opportunisms, as well as settler interests and ambitions combined to allow federalism
to be acknowledged as Britain’s design for South Africa.12 This combination allowed

9. Natal Mercury, 24 October 1866, cited in C.W. de Kiewiet, British Colonial Policy and
the South African Republics, 1848-1872 (Longmans, Green, New York, 1929), p 258.
10. British Blue Book 4140, pp 123-127.
11. De Kiewiet, British Colonial Policy, p 161.
12. R.E. Robinson and J. Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians the Official Mind of
Imperialism (William Blackwood & Sons, London, 1961), pp 61-62.

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federalism to be officially promulgated as policy for the first time and the work of
Richard Cope and Norman Etherington has demonstrated that it was the labour supply
of the region, rather than strategic concerns, which prompted Imperial policy.13

The Natal government created the occasion which brought federalism to life
when it sent Theophilis Shepstone to London to counter claims being made that its
militia had been guilty of atrocities in the Colony. Shepstone took advantage of his
ready access to the Colonial Secretary to put forward a proposal which would advance
long held ambitions. This was the overthrow of Dutch-Afrikander rule in the ZAR to
promote a grand economic project which would have an unimpaired labour supply.
Shepstone was best able to advocate this proposal because he combined being a
diplomatic agent with the role of continent wide labour recruiter. In addition he and
his family had their own commercial interests in imposing British rule in the interior
of the continent. Lord Carnarvon, the Colonial Secretary, with his own designs
already formulated, listened with interest to Shepstone’s views on the obstacles which
the ZAR placed in the way of economic growth in South Africa. Shepstone’s additional
warning, made on the basis of information collected by his agents, that there was a strong
possibility that the independent African kingdoms were planning their own confederation
in order to wage war against the settler societies, would also have encouraged British
interference in the affairs of those states. Carnarvon found all this information
conveniently suited his already designed purpose and Shepstone was at last given
permission to annexe the Afrikander republic. Finally he had found a Colonial Secretary
who was willing to advance a federal blueprint drawn up to his own specifications.

Nevertheless, Carnarvon’s policy has often been seen as part of a purely

strategic programme. The lawlessness and turbulence of the region and the insecurity
it generated prompted the Colonial Secretary to propose building a “loyal Dominion
behind the bastion of Simon’s Bay.” Or so said C.F. Goodfellow, the most recent
historian of Confederation to argue that this British policy was prompted by purely
strategic considerations.14 Others have found different motives. R.L. Cope pointed to
the memorandum drawn up by Robert Herbert, Permanent Under-Secretary at the
Colonial Office (and Carnarvon’s cousin). Herbert’s memorandum was not published
but circulated instead to explain “easily” to the Cabinet the “leading questions now
existing in South Africa.” Central to Herbert’s scheme was the necessity to replace
“small and isolated governments, whose financial solvency [was] questionable, and
where there [was] no adequate security for property or confidence in prudent
legislation”. Instead of those impotent governments Britain should install an
efficiently administered state capable of attracting capital and immigrants which were
necessary to develop the country. But Herbert’s policy went beyond bringing law and
order to the ZAR. There was, he noted, the need “to train the natives to the ways of
civilized industry.” In this respect the policy of the Dutch-Afrikander states should
get Britain’s “attentive consideration.” There could be no doubt, Herbert informed
the Cabinet, that “a Kafir should be compelled, as the Dutch compel him, to work”. A

13. R.L. Cope, “Strategic and Socio-economic explanations for Carnarvon’s

South African Confederation Policy”, History in Africa, 13, 1986, pp 13-34;
N.A. Etherington, “Labour Supply and the Genesis of South African Confederation in
the 1870s”, Journal of African History, 20, 1979, pp 235-253.
14. C.F. Goodfellow, Great Britain and South African Federation, 1870-1881 (Oxford
University Press, Cape Town, 1966), p 70.

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less senior official added the supposedly mitigating minute: “The problem is how to
make him work, and yet to make him work so that his work shall be of profit to
himself and not solely of profit to his white masters.” Herbert’s memorandum also
pointed to the “precarious position of civilization and British rule in Natal”, the equal
“native danger” in the Transvaal, and the urgent need for unity to break the power of
the Chiefs and disarm Africans generally to ensure the power of several Colonial and
republican states. More broadly the memorandum pointed to the establishment of “a
great South African Dominion” which would help “advance ... civilization in Africa
and the general interests of the Empire.”15
Shepstone returned to South Africa with his commission from Carnarvon to
annex the ZAR. He assembled a staff of twelve, which included a representative of
the Standard Bank, and together with twenty-five mounted police he eventually rode
into Pretoria.16 He immediately declared the purpose of his visit to President Burgers,
that he had come to promulgate Britain’s annexation of the ZAR. To begin with he
sought to persuade the president and various factions within the republic to agree to
annexation. Shepstone found virtually no support for his proposal but nor was there
an organised opposition. He parlayed for four months before he decided to act
without local backing and then had a proclamation read which announced that the
ZAR, which would henceforth be known as the Transvaal, was to be a British colony.
Shepstone had assured Carnarvon that the Afrikander state would readily submit to
British rule and to begin with it looked as if he might not be altogether wrong.
The ZAR was in disarray. Taxes were not being collected, the Pedi had
defeated the President’s forces, largely because his men had deserted him. And
because Shepstone put it about that the Zulu state was massing on the ZAR’s border
intent on invading the Afrikander Republic, and there was anxiety about the Pedi,
there was some relief that Britain would provide protection if such an attack took
place. Shepstone promised financial support for the bankrupt state and some looked
on waiting to see what he would dispense. Little was forthcoming but circumstances
changed as the British army took on the Pedi and then the Zulu and ultimately
defeated both African states. Ironically, this may have freed those who resented the
British take over of the ZAR and allowed them to grow bolder since they were no
longer threatened by African adversaries. Gradually, Burgers was abandoned by the
majority of his countrymen and a triumvirate, consisting of S.J.P. Kruger, E.J.P. Jorissen
and Piet Joubert, emerged to lead them. Under their aegis a series of mass meetings was
called. There were four of these, one in 1878, two in 1879 the last in 1880.
The ZAR’s return to independence and the Transvaal British
Yet the leadership was circumspect. Four years had passed since Shepstone’s arrival
in the Afrikander republic and although there had been much in the way of petitions
and deputations there was as yet no outright resistance to British annexation. The
triumvirate was reluctant to challenge the British head-on. The most important of the
Afrikander leaders was Kruger who saw the dangers of rallying supporters into an
immediate and direct confrontation with the British state. Rather, he and his fellows
sought to temper their supporters, seeking to persuade the Colonial Secretary that
there was no popular endorsement for British rule. Moreover, Gladstone and the

15. Cope, Carnarvon’s South African Confederation Policy, p 11.

16. De Kiewiet, The Imperial Factor, p 113.

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Liberal Party let it be known that they were opposed to the annexation. When the
Liberals defeated the Conservatives at the 1880 election Kruger and his followers
assumed that their independence would be restored. But Gladstone then claimed that
what had been done could not be undone but he offered Dutch Afrikanders self-
government within a British dominated federation. The triumvirate would not accept
Gladstone’s compromise and as they began to rally their supporters events overtook
them. Kruger could see that whilst there were those who wanted immediate action
there were equally some who were hesitant and against precipitous action. Kruger,
the adroit political leader was determined to keep the two wings of the population
united in the face of the old opponent. Then circumstance determined the course of
events.
In November 1880 Shepstone’s permissive administration was replaced by that
of the more financially disciplinarian Sir Owen Lanyon.17 He insisted that burghers
must pay taxes or have their property seized. The court sheriffs of Potchefstroom,
therefore, chose to seize the property of a defaulter. A wagon was expropriated to meet
a tax bill of £28-10s. In response an armed posse of Afrikanders, led by a burgher
named Piet Cronje, seized the wagon and returned it to its owner. Cronje had forced the
hand of the triumvirate. The meeting scheduled for Paardekraal on the 10th of
December 1880, took the decision to restore the Republic four years after it had been
annexed.18 The old executive council was restored as was the 1877 legislature, the
Volksraad; the flag of the ZAR – the Vierkleur – was hoisted above them.
Independence was proclaimed and the small British garrisons in the English-speaking
towns were all besieged. At the same time the main military force under Joubert was
sent to the Natal border to prevent the British army from relieving the towns. The story
of the disastrous campaign fought by the British army is well-known. The effect of the
annexation and its overthrow was to create a Dutch-Afrikander confidence and a
nationalism in the ZAR which had not been there before and this was to effect the
politics of South Africa up to and beyond the War of 1899-1902.19
But it was not only the Dutch-Afrikanders whose identity had changed
because of the annexation and the recession. The British-Afrikanders whose trading
and commercial activities brought them to the ZAR were to suffer the consequences
of Britain’s bungled annexation and the recession. British settlers had been equivocal
about the original annexation of the ZAR and not all of them had favoured it. Once
there was an armed conflict between the Imperial government and the Afrikander
republic they mostly rallied to British troops and garrisons in their region. In the
process they accepted assurances that once a British presence had been established it
would be permanently maintained. Yet Britain had withdrawn asserting the useless
promise that its suzerainty would safeguard their interests. But as Sarah Heckford
noted in her popular memoir, A Lady Trader in the Transvaal many of the ZAR’s
British-Afrikanders, were “destined henceforth to be subject to the men whom we, by
our promises, had tempted ... to turn from friendly neighbours into enemies.”20
The harassment of “friendly neighbours” meant that some British settlers felt it
necessary to flee the once more independent ZAR. But whether they stayed or

17. De Kiewiet, The Imperial Factor, pp 241-242.

18. De Kiewiet, The Imperial Factor, p 274.
19. Robinson & Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, p 72.
20. S. Heckford, A Lady Trader in the Transvaal (Sampson Low, London, 1882), p 398.

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withdrew, self-styled Transvaal Loyalists came to portray themselves as having been

abandoned to the mercies of a vengeful Boer state and society by a perfidious and
ungrateful Imperial government. Moreover, Gladstone’s talk of “magnanimity” in
“restoring a brave little (Dutch-Afrikander) nation to freedom” enraged these
Loyalists. Their secretary, C. K. White, mocked the “tender care” given to the
“Boers”. He contrasted it with the “very little care and very little sympathy” shown to
Loyalists who had “borne sorrow and suffering”, doing their duty against the enemy.
Many of them had been critical of the policy which had led to annexation but they had
buried their political differences when they saw “English troops attacked”. They
accepted the “call of the imperial authorities to fight and some, alas! to die, for the
maintenance of British supremacy”. They had trusted the “inviolate word of
England” but now they found they had “trusted in vain”. So enraged, it was said,
were the Loyalists of Pretoria that when the 1881 Convention was signed they interred
a Union Jack in a coffin which they duly buried.21 The story has the ring of the
apocryphal but whether it was authentic or not the old British settlers knew that their
property and their livelihood was not as secure as it had been.
In the next decade the Transvaal British, when they sought to advance their
political rights, did so by first announcing themselves as republicans, albeit “true”
republicans. This probably allowed them to distance themselves – and their wish for
reform – from the accusation that their call for political rights was merely a cloak for
once more inviting British intervention. Nor should this conceal from us the growing
belief among British settlers in the ZAR that they would be better off without having
to owe allegiance to an untrustworthy Imperial state which would always put its own
interest above theirs. British-republicanism emerged in the ZAR’s newly established
mining town of Barberton, the site of an 1886 gold discovery. From among
Barberton’s population of prospectors, traders and speculators were some who had
moved on from Kimberley. From their number a small group of political activists
emerged to found the Transvaal Republican Union. The organisation they created
modelled itself, they said, on the Cape’s Afrikaner Bond and the purpose of their
strategy was to place themselves beyond Dutch-Afrikander and Imperial power.
Their programme was signalled by a local newspaper, the Barberton Herald and their
methods of achieving their ends emerged in the rowdy demonstration which greeted
the visit to the town of Paul Kruger, President of the ZAR, in 1887. For Kruger these
were ominous events yet for those who felt the impact of the British annexation
Kruger was not necessarily the enemy.22
Kruger’s economic policy
If gold mining at Barberton hinted at new opportunities (and turbulences), discoveries
on the Witwatersrand offered a far greater set of possibilities. But none could have
anticipated the change in fortune which would come to those who shared the aspirations
of the Paul Kruger. We have noted that Kruger was the latest of the Presidents of the

21. D.M. Schreuder, Gladstone and Kruger Liberal Government and Colonial “Home
Rule”, 1880-1885 (Routledge & Paul, London, 1969), p 199.
22. These Barberton-British were not, in any event, the first British republicans of the
middle years of Victoria’s reign. It should be noted that the South African expression
of the British political movement had far more to do with colonial hostility to
Imperial rule than to a rejection of a hereditary monarchy. There would, however,
have been a rejection of the class hierarchy with which it was associated.

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ZAR who had taken upon himself to attempt the break from the economic and
diplomatic straight jacket which a succession of British pro-consuls had imposed upon
the Afrikander republic. After his election in 1883 Kruger announced what
contemporary parlance would call a development strategy. He proposed erecting local
monopolies to encourage the creation of manufactured goods and using the language of
the eighteenth century Dutch mercantile company, the VOC, he called these konsensies,
concessions. These concessions, he proposed would lead to “the development of the
resources of the country”.23 The country needed, he said, to reduce imports and increase
exports. Local raw materials such as wool, hides, fruits and grains should be processed
locally and could be sold more cheaply than expensively priced foreign manufactures.
Ambitiously, Kruger talked of factories “being erected to manufacture our own
gunpowder and ammunition, our sugar and strong drink.”
Kruger, like his predecessors had long hankered for an economic strategy for
the republic, and he was fortunate to find a fellow enthusiast for economic
development through manufacturing. Alois Hugo Nellmapius, a Hungarian-born but
Dutch trained civil engineer came to the Afrikander state in 1874 and his skills
allowed the building of the first substantial road from the eastern ZAR into
Mozambique. Kruger was much impressed by Nellmapius’ vision and energy and
together the two men embarked upon the ZAR’s first industrial project outside
Pretoria, on the latter’s Hatherley farm, which they called Het Eerste Fabrieken
(HEF). Although it was to be known primarily for the distillation of liquor HEF also
included a glass works and a cooperage and it began an elementary smelting works.
The partnership of Lewis and Marks replaced Nellmapius during the decade and their
firm was to provide Kruger with the engineering and entrepreneurial skills, and
sometimes the capital, for his ventures.24 However, even if the activities of HEF may
have been encouraging to Kruger, it was hardly likely to set the ZAR free of Britain’s
economic grip. The massive Witwatersrand gold discovery of 1887 increased the
long term prospects of the ZAR’s capacity to become an economic actor and it made
two major attempts to turn the new found wealth to its advantage in a spectacular if
not highly successful way. The Kruger government’s economic policy was best
known for its dynamite monopoly and the railway franchise it gave the German-Dutch
Company to build a rail link between Delagoa Bay and Pretoria. There were many
other monopolies or sought after monopolies and there were hundreds of concessions
which became mere speculative licences.
If these monopolies had the immediate impact which Kruger intended for
them, explaining his political economy would be a simple matter. But they did not.
The holders of the dynamite concession did not go about manufacturing their product
in the ZAR but for over a decade they imported its ingredients from Europe and sold
it at grossly exorbitant prices to the increasing irritation of the mining industry
because, they claimed, these excessive returns threatened the profits of their mining
ventures. Kruger was resolute in his defence of the dynamite concession in spite of
criticisms from significant parts of his “own” Afrikander population who saw it as
holding up economic growth and the result of corrupt practices.

23. C.T. Gordon, The Growth of Boer Opposition to Kruger 1890-1895 (Oxford
University Press, Cape Town, 1970), p 36.
24. I.R. Smith, The Origins of the South African War 1899-1902 (Longman, London &
New York, 1996), p 53.

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Similarly, his railway policy was extremely unpopular, not only to the mining
industry, but to various sections of the burgher population. Such was the hostility to
these aspects of his policy that he came close to losing the 1893 election to
Piet Joubert. These policies were seen as the result of corruption which, on occasion,
they were. They were also seen to result in gross inefficiency and they provoked
difficulties for him at every point on the political compass. The British government,
the Chamber of Mines and the self-styled progressive Afrikanders all attacked him for
his concessions policy. Yet he stubbornly persisted with them. Why? Did the
owners of the concessions buy his support? The dynamite concessionaires
undoubtedly bought influence but there is no evidence of Kruger’s corruption
although some in his entourage, such as his son-in-law, may have been. But the
policies persisted for reasons that extend beyond the simple need for patronage.

If there were Dutch-Afrikander critics of Kruger then those who stood out side
of those circles could hardly contain themselves. The mining industry and the
Colonial Office, for overlapping reasons, saw Kruger as denying good government,
encouraging corrupt practices and holding up economic growth. Kruger and the
political philosophy which was said to emanate from him, Krugerism, extolled an
anti-modernist social and economic order. Whether we report the political
observations of Lionel Phillips or the historical claims of Percy Fitzpatrick, the
propaganda of The Times newspaper, the sociological observations of the Fabian
Society or of George Bernard Shaw, or even the sympathetic assertions of Olive
Schreiner, we get the same picture of the kommandant of a medieval oligarchy.25
Kruger was hemmed in by the “hurrying tide of civilization”, leaving him and his
following “rooted in the ‘seventeenth century’”. All this led Lionel Phillips to give
currency to the myth that “Kruger seems to think that too many people and too much
capital is coming in here and that this must be checked!!” If Kruger’s perception
prevailed it would mean “our interests might be affected frightfully by oppressive
legislation or political complications”. Above all, Lionel Phillips contended, Kruger
was “untractable and oblivious to all argument”.26

II

The concept of modernisation and the modernising state are deeply embedded in the
ideology, politics and class structures of particular societies. Yet as we have seen,
Kruger and his circle had long sought to break out of Britain’s economic and political
grip in an attempt to lay the foundations of a modern society. And modern historians
J.S. Marais, H.J. and R.E. Simons and Charles van Onselen have all attested to the
modernising achievements of the ZAR’s notables.27 Undoubtedly, Kruger emerged

25. L. Phillips, All That Glittered selected correspondence of Lionel Phillips, 1890-1924
(Oxford University Press, Cape Town & New York, 1977), pp 83-85; L. Phillips, Some
Reminiscences (Hutchinson, London, 1924), pp 68, 136-139; P. Fitzpatrick, The
Transvaal from within a private record of public affairs (Heinemann, London, 1900).
26. Number 49, Phillips – Beit, LA 670, Johannesburg, 16 June 1894, page 78.
27. J.S. Marais, The Fall of Kruger’s Republic (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1961),
pp 23-27; H.J. and R.E. Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850-1950
(International Defence & Aid Fund, London, 1983), p 59; C. van Onselen, Studies in
the Social Economic History of the Witwatersrand New Babylon, (Ravan,
Johannesburg, 1982), pp 12-17.

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with a diametrically different vision of the modern to that held by imperial pro-
consuls, their political masters in London, and their sometime allies, the Randlords.
Kruger and his associates sought both to enhance the economic standing of their own
Dutch-Afrikander notables and to extend welfare of its increasingly landless poor. By
his 1898 inauguration speech Kruger to his legislature, the Volksraad, sought to widen
his appeal to those in the ZAR who were buffeted by economic depression, the result
of capitalist cycles and the speculative chicanery of mine owners, stock jobbers and
banks calling in mortgages. He also held out a hand to the white miners. The latter,
he claimed, had been deceived about the cost of living on the Witwatersrand, faced
poverty created by the limits of existing wages and were forced to work in dangerous
and unpleasant conditions. And those miners lived with the fear that the Randlords
would create a Kimberley-like monopoly which would reduce wages and undermine
their political and social conditions by creating again a company town. For their part,
the mine owners denied that this was one of their objectives, but this belief always
coloured the relationship between Randlords and mineworkers.

The Randlords and rebellion

What the Randlords wanted was to reduce the wages of the white mineworkers to
ensure the profitability of their mines. The wages of the European and colonial
mineworkers was, however, only a part of a much larger problem faced by the mine-
owners. As the mining economy of the Witwatersrand grew more complex the
owners found themselves confronted by a set of administrative, economic and social
problems over which they only had limited control. On the diamond fields, the
owners had direct charge over the relevant institutions, or their relationship with the
officers of the state meant that solutions were quickly found with relatively minimal
costs. The magnates became political actors and achieved a very nearly complete
control of the state in Griqualand West. Ensuring the same degree of control over the
ZAR was far more difficult. Cecil Rhodes played an increasingly important political
role in the 1880s, ensuring the annexation of Tswana and then Ndebele and Shona
polities.28 Rhodes became so involved in colonial politics that he became Prime
Minister of the Cape Colony in 1890. By 1894 to 1895, in the ZAR the major
Randlords, Rhodes included, came to believe that the policies of the Afrikaner state
threatened to reduce profitability significantly. This was not only because of its effect
on white wages, but because its administrative and social policies added significantly
to mining costs. Rhodes, and his Randlord colleagues, encouraged in 1894 by the
High Commissioner, Lord Loch (who was, however, acting beyond his brief), began
creating an insurrectionary coterie set on transforming the ZAR’s state.

Although they had the tacit support of the imperial government, which
intended to step in once their rebellion was successful, tactical considerations made
these capitalist rebels distance themselves from the suggestion that their insurrection
was intended to achieve British colonial rule. Partly this was to neutralise the anti-
imperialists emerging among Kruger’s adversaries, that is the so-called “progressive”
Afrikaners, American mining engineers and others. Partly because to have revealed
pro-imperialist sympathies would have alienated sections of the white working class.
Confusion about the insurrection’s aims may have contributed to its overall failure
early in 1896. At the same time the Colonial Office became increasingly anxious of a

28. Robinson & Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, pp 221-250.

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“cosmopolitanism”, or a British republicanism, threatening imperial power. Both,

moreover, were seen to threaten British interests to an even greater extent than the
Kruger state was thought to be doing.

Thereafter, the Imperial authorities determined to reassert direct British

supremacy in South Africa and at the same time there were avowals of loyalty from
the British settlers of the eastern Cape and from the Cape Dutch. The new High
Commissioner, Alfred Milner, appointed in 1897, was determined to force a definition
of allegiance upon these Cape loyalists which was bound to disconcert them. Milner’s
timing was not without interest. In part it was nothing more than a signal to British
South Africans that he was about to strengthen resistance to any challenge to Imperial
supremacy in southern Africa. By rejecting Cape Dutch declarations of loyalty as
little more than deceit, he was announcing that the imperial power had acquired a new
determination and could now be depended upon in any conflict with Afrikaner power.
Nevertheless, denying the validity of Afrikaner loyalty ran the risk of alienating the
colonial Dutch while leaving British interests no better off than they had been to begin
with. All the while, counterbalancing this attempt to summon a British nationalism –
jingoism was the contemporary term – was the republicanism of the ZAR as well as
that voiced by the alienated British among the miners of the Witwatersrand. Both
republicanisms were seen as defying British political supremacy but they were also
challenges to the economic power of mining capitalists.
To recapitulate, for the most part, British administrators in South Africa
always saw economic independence as closely connected to political independence
and wherever they could they attempted to hinder the emergence of economic
autonomy. However, British trader-merchants, whose own movements paralleled
Afrikaner migrations into the interior, had sufficient commercial and financial
strength to overwhelm would-be competitors without needing to calling upon direct
assistance from the imperial state. Under these circumstances newly evolving and
sometimes competing ethnic alliances were brought together in nineteenth century
South Africa. While some of these alliances challenged British rule, loyalists were
just as likely to emerge as were anti-imperialists, and, by the 1880s, loyalists could
very well be Afrikaners, whilst anti-imperialists were sometimes ethnically British.
And as these various movements of loyalists and anti-imperialists were emerging,
corresponding mining capitalists and white workers were also arriving on the South
African stage. Such movements materialised first in the newly uncovered diamond
fields of the 1870s and then in the gold fields of the 1880s and 1890s – and with these
movements, came new class antagonisms and newly intensified nationalist
perceptions.

The origins of the South African War: old and new explanations

Out of these several complex processes, have come conflicting portrayals of the
origins of the South African War. There is the account, provided by J.C. Smuts and
others, of the hundred-year long assault by Britain on an essential Afrikaner essence,
famously depicted as A Century of Wrong.29 Then, by contrast, there is the imperial
representation of a Britain defending its empire against a republican Afrikaner polity

29. F.W. Reitz, n Eeu van Onreg (Nasionale Pers, Kaapstad, 1939), was probably written by
J.C. Smuts and J. de V. Roos. Smith, Origins of the South African War, p 427.

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bent upon opposing Albion’s institutions of liberty and progress. Out of these
representations came alternative depictions of the route to war. In the first explication
of the war’s origins, we see ruthless economic processes and imperial acquisitiveness
at work, which are ultimately frustrated by the rise of an Afrikaner spirit of resistance.
In the second, the war’s origins are understood almost entirely in political and
ideological terms and its context is given no significance whatever – so much so that,
in this historiography, “context” has become an improper term.
This second view, advanced most impressively by the liberal South African
J.S. Marais, as well as by later imperial historians, Andrew Porter, Ian Smith and
Arthur Mawby, has recently been revived and it is very influential in British academic
circles.30 The question which Marais and others have set out to answer ultimately
revolves around establishing liability, within British circles, for the outbreak of war.
There is therefore a concern with discovering which particular politicians or high
administrators were most responsible for decisions which ultimately can be said to
have led to the war. This historiography is dismissive of an earlier body of work
which held that gold lay at the heart of the crisis that resulted in war.31 But this
historiography is not entirely ruled by the evidence. Insisting that mining capitalists
played no part in forcing the crisis, the role of the magnates in financing and
disseminating opposition to Kruger, as well as in making reforms politically
impossible, is minimised or even overlooked. Yet in 1898 and 1899 the major mining
magnates, recipients of a stream of intelligence reports which sought to establish that
the ZAR was incapable of being reformed, sent these on to the Colonial Office.
The view which emphasised the centrality of gold, is found among a diverse
group of authors, foremost among whom is the contemporary observer
John A. Hobson, writing in 1900. Then came the eminent liberal South African
historian, C.W. de Kiewiet, writing in the nineteen thirties, followed by the modern-
day Marxist, the equally distinguished historian Eric Hobsbawm.32 Latter-day
proponents of the belief that gold is at the heart of the conflict, mostly consider this
proposition to be so self-evident and obvious, that they have sometimes not bothered
to provide adequate supporting evidence for their argument. In dismissing these
judgments, Ian Smith and Arthur Mawby have therefore been concerned to claim that
they alone support their contentions by rigorous reliance on archival records.33
These two writers, and others, are correct to require that the documentary
record be given conscientious and meticulous attention. Their work relies on minutes,
memoranda and the letters of British cabinet ministers and imperial officials, and to

30. Marais, The Fall of Kruger’s Republic; A. Porter, The Origins of the South African
War Joseph Chamberlain and the Diplomacy of Imperialism, 1895-1899
(Manchester University Press, London, 1980); Smith, Origins of the South African
War, pp 393-428; A.A. Mawby, Gold Mining and Politics, Johannesburg, 1900-
1907 the Origins of the Old South Africa? (Edwin Mellen, Lewiston NY, 2000).
31. In this regard, Mawby is particularly critical of Marks and Trapido: “Lord Milner
and the South African State”, in M. Twaddle (ed), Imperialism, the State and the
Third World (British Academic Press, London, 1992).
32. De Kiewiet, The Imperial Factor; E. Hobsbawm, Age of Empire (Weidenfeld &
Nicholson, London, 1987), p 66.
33. Smith, Origins of the South African War, p 408; Mawby, Gold Mining and Politics,
pp 3-8.

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some degree on similar material from capitalist mine owners, among others, and our
understanding of the war’s origins are all the richer for these sources. But, because
these historians have denied themselves recourse to the context in which their
dignitaries operate – and they are mostly dignitaries – their weakness lies in the way
these pronouncements are taken at face value.34 There is little attempt to understand
what it was that shaped and influenced the dignitaries and in the end, we the readers,
are left to believe that the mine owners, and ultimately the British state wanted
nothing more than “good government”. We are given no insight into the social and
ideological meaning of that phenomenon. It is enough to believe that Britain would
stand up to a corrupt and inefficient economic and administrative order. The
government of the ZAR was said to be riddled with corruption and inefficiency – a
state of affairs that came to be known, as Krugerism in reference to the president of
that republic. But in this interpretation, Krugerism is allowed to be no more than a
shibboleth for a dishonest and wasteful patronage system, built upon a semi-feudal
edifice as its contemporary opponents, such as Percy Fitzpatrick, were asserting.35
But was Krugerism little more than corruption and inefficiency? And, if so, is it
entirely plausible that imperial civil servants and mining magnates would have
disclaimed diplomatic and political solutions to the problems facing them? Neither
group was, after all, above buying political and administrative favours. Nor, we must
assume, could corruption and inefficiency be sufficient to challenge imperial and
mining interests. Moreover, and paradoxically, mining companies were not always
enthusiastic about administrative changes/improvements the Kruger government was
showing itself willing to make. As Van Onselen has demonstrated, in 1897 and 1898
Kruger had brought reform-minded office holders into his government, but these were
not always enthusiastically received by either British administrators or by mining
capitalists.36 The suspicion must exist, therefore, that Krugerism was something more
substantial than that depiction provided by its adversaries. If we examine the claims
of those who believed themselves to be in an empire imperilled by Krugerism
alongside the claims of those perceiving themselves as the victims of “a century’s
wrong”, do we arrive at conclusions which are more than the sum of two sets of
assertions? Moreover, if there was a threat to Empire in South Africa, was it only
Afrikaners who made that threat? We know that it did not come from those Cape
Afrikaners who were loyalists, asserting that they spoke the “Queen’s Dutch”. Nor
can we confidently say that all British Afrikanders were loyal to the empire. So what
impact did these sometimes blurred loyalties have on either Krugerism or
imperialism?
And what of that mineral at the heart of the matter, gold? Its production, its
exchange and ultimately, its economic function set it aside from other minerals and
gave it unique importance. Whilst the costs of mining gold on the Witwatersrand
were it was claimed, abnormally high, producers could not raise the price of their
commodity. For this reason profits were, dependent on mine-owners cutting
expenditure to an exceptional extent. Mine managers needed – since they could not
restrict the price of machinery and other stores – to control the price of foodstuffs,
transport, and above all, labour. Within the cost structure in which they were working
they needed to reduce the price they were paying for African labour. Another way to

34. For example: Smith, Origins of the South African War, pp 408-409.
35. Fitzpatrick, The Transvaal from within, pp 75, 115, 213-228.
36. Van Onselen, New Babylon, pp 12-17.

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cut labour costs would have been to reduce the wage bill for the far more expensive
European and white settler workers. Although they were far fewer in number than
their African counterparts, they were able to command much higher wages because
initially they were more skilled and had a greater capacity to defend their interests.
But for as long as the mining capitalists needed the white workers as political allies
against the Kruger republic, they were going to find it difficult to challenge white
workers’ pay or jobs. This dilemma brought them up against Kruger’s patronage
networks, since Kruger needed to ensure welfare for an increasing number of
Afrikaners who were being reduced to landlessness and poverty – some of whom
were, potentially, part of the white urban working class. In this way, the long term
implications of Krugerism were easily as important to its adversaries as corruption
and inefficiency.
The final question to be asked revolves around gold, its role as the major
medium of exchange and the effect, if any, that this had on the making of British
government attitudes and policy towards the ZAR. Gold, as we know, was central to
the world’s trading system, then dominated by the financial and mercantile
institutions of the City of London. As world trade grew in the second half of the
nineteenth century, so the amount of gold required to underpin it increased
enormously. The discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand, which became the world’s
largest producer in little more than a decade, was a tremendous fillip to international
trade. This was particularly so since, at much the same time, production in other
major gold fields was declining. We must, therefore, ask, why it was that neither the
Bank of England nor the City expressed public or private disquiet that a diplomatic
crisis, or worse, a war, was brewing between Britain and the world’s leading gold
producer, the ZAR. Successive Chancellors of the Exchequer had made it clear that
they recognised the importance of gold to the Bank of England. The Treasury may
not, in the years before the South African War, have formulated an economic doctrine
to allow it to theorise about the role of gold in the British economy, but its practice
left it in no doubt that gold was absolutely central to the financial system. As the
Liberal Chancellor, Sir William Harcourt, observed in 1894 when being exasperated
by a supporter of bimetallism:

I desire London to remain what it is, the Metropolis of the Commerce of the
World to which all nations resort to settle their business. This I believe and I think
all those who have practical knowledge of the money market (with the striking
exception of yourself) believe to be owing to the soundness of our monetary
system, London being the only place where you can always get gold. It is for
that reason that all the exchange business of the world is done in London.37

Mining capitalism generated two parallel industrial working classes, one

originally unskilled and drawn from the indigenous population, the other migrant and
largely drawn from Britain and its settler Empire. Initially both populations were
involved in a mass search for diamonds. In the process some “diggers”, mostly
holding some financial resources, began to accumulate claims. From their number
emerged an entrepreneurial class, whilst the majority of diggers became labourers. In
this descent into the proletariat, the immigrant white diggers, in an attempt to stave off
the prospect, used the state’s power to help themselves exclude African diggers from
the role of independent claim holders. Yet both African and European diggers were

37. Harcourt – Henry Hucks Gibbs, pp 72-73.

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reduced to proletarians, although white workers – some with mining skills, political
rights and a knowledge of syndicalism – clung precariously, and with less and less
success, to higher wages and greater social privileges. African workers were reduced to
ever lower wages and were held for the duration of their contracts in prison-like
compounds. Meanwhile capitalists and their European financiers, aided by the colonial
legal system, were consolidating their holdings of diamond bearing ground until they
were able to create an enormously rich cartel. As for the remaining number of white
workers on the diamond fields, many of them saw their predicament as the result of
capitalism and British colonialism. Although the majority of them were British, or
British colonials, this experience left them with a greater sympathy for republicanism.
As noted earlier, a similar republicanism had emerged among British settlers
in the Afrikaner state annexed by Britain in the late 1870s. This annexation had been
part of a scheme to create a South African federation and initially these settlers were
reluctant to see a process of British appropriation succeed. Once the annexation had
become a fait accompli, however, British settlers were won over to accept their
obligation to the Imperial state. But, when Britain changed its policy, abandoning the
annexation and thereby leaving its own subjects compromised and at the mercy of a
hostile Afrikaner society which by now regarded them with suspicion, “old-British
settlers” became mistrustful of all Britain’s intentions. While some of them aligned
themselves to reform movements in the ZAR, they invariably asserted that they
sought merely to reform the Republic’s existing institutions and vigorously opposed
proposals to bring the state under imperial control.

Mining capital and the Jameson Raid

The discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 led the British government to
regret its earlier decision to withdraw from direct control of the ZAR and it was soon
to assert a doctrine of suzerainty as fact. Witwatersrand gold mines were giving
Britain an increasingly important economic stake in the Republic, but alarmingly, the
wealth that these mines were generating was evidently strengthening the ZAR’s
capacity to negotiate with, and distance itself from, the Imperial power. Yet British
perceptions of this Afrikaner threat took a most paradoxical form. It became widely
believed in Colonial Office circles that Britain’s hold on the territory was threatened,
not so much by “Dutch Afrikanders”, as the Boers were called, but by “British
Afrikanders” and their cosmopolitan allies. At first glance, the most tangible example
of this cosmopolitanism was perceptible in the National Union, an organisation
committed to achieving political and economic reforms in the ZAR but which wished
to maintain the republican system of government. It was largely supported by the
middle classes, if only because trade unionists saw the organisation as an agent of the
capitalists. “Cosmopolitan” was a euphemism for non-British capitalist mine-owners,
but despite the British government’s suspicion of them, these capitalists looked to
London for much of their financial support and for most of their political backing.
The mine-owners varied in the size and scale of their operations. By far the
largest of them were now held in the Wernher, Beit & Eckstein (WB&E) group.
Wernher and Beit had made their fortunes on the diamond fields. By the end of the
1890s they held two-fifths of the mining property on the Witwatersrand and produced
half the country’s gold. Two other mining houses, Rand Mines, with Cecil Rhodes as
its managing director, and the property held by George Farrar, were responsible for

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half again of the gold sold abroad. By 1894 the mines of these groups were not only
about to become the major sources of deep level gold, but the same companies were
to remain as the major outcrop miners – a point which can dispose of the argument
that it was the distinction between deep level and outcrop mining which generated a
major structural division within the goldmining companies.
WB&E, Rand Mines and Farar were loud in their complaints about the ZAR,
whose tariffs and monopolies were, they claimed, making profitable mining very
difficult. Witwatersrand gold mines, we know, had specific problems created by the
combination of a very low internationally set price of gold, along with the quantity of
gold in the Witwatersrand seams, which again, was low, for all that it was consistent.
In addition, the depths from which the gold ore had to be excavated, was becoming
ever deeper. The ZAR state was said to be unsympathetic to the industry’s difficulties
on account of its being ill-informed and unrealistic about the amount of revenue
which it could expect to extract from the industry. Patronage and armaments were
what drove the ZAR’s fiscal policy and from this the mine-owners could see no
escape. However, once it appeared that a new and major uncertainty about costs
might emerge, when leading republican politicians proposed that the state take over an
essential patent to a vital metallurgical process which would have added significantly
to mine owner’s expenditure – some mining houses had their anxieties about the Boer
state greatly increased. All these factors exacerbated the economic malaise which the
Witwatersrand was suffering. Coinciding with this, and intensifying it, was a
restlessness among the immigrant or Uitlander population in the ZAR, a restlessness
detected by the visiting British High Commissioner in South Africa and one which his
attention seemed likely to aggravate. With Lionel Phillips, Chairman of the recently
formed Chamber of Mines, the High Commissioner raised the question of how long a
Johannesburg rising, fuelled by this unrest, could hold out. That is, until a British
military force could come to intervene on its behalf.

Phillips, who was a director of the WB&E group and head of their Intelligence
Department, had already begun to contemplate the possibility of such a Johannesburg
uprising as a way of achieving reforms for the mining industry, even before his
meeting with the British High Commissioner. And, while discussing the possibility
with some of his fellow Johannesburg capitalists and senior managers, Phillips was
urged to involve Cecil Rhodes in the conspiracy. Although Rhodes largely left
management of Rand Mines to others, he was very much a key actor in southern
Africa. As Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, Chairman of the De Beers diamond
cartel and Chairman of the British South Africa Company, Rhodes had access to arms
and ammunition, troops, the Colonial Office and other influential circles in London.
Rhodes’ motives – like those of Phillips and Alfred Beit, the senior figure in WB&E –
were to ensure the profitability and safety of his investments in the ZAR. Rhodes, as
he was reported by Percy Fitzpatrick, a leading publicist and one of the conspirators,
wanted to “obtain an amelioration of the conditions such as he was entitled to claim as
representing an enormous amount of capital invested in the Transvaal”. Both Beit and
Rhodes, Fitzpatrick went on to observe,
... may be regarded as the chiefs to whom the ultimate decision as to whether it
was necessary, from the capitalistic point of view, to resort to extreme
measures was ... left. Each of these gentlemen controls in person and through
his business associates many millions of money invested in the Transvaal;

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each of them was, of course, a heavy sufferer under the existing conditions
affecting the mining industry, and each as a businessman must have been
desirous of reform in the administration.38

Rhodes might have been essential to the logistics of a coup d’état but he was
ultimately incapable of understanding the coup’s political needs. The conspiratorial
plan, as it evolved, was for an uprising to take place in Johannesburg and for troops to
come to the assistance of the would-be rebels.

These troops would be stationed on territory ceded to the British South Africa
Company by the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain. Chamberlain, whose
political life had begun in the Liberal Party with him as an advocate of social welfare,
had broken with that Party over imperialism. Now in the Conservative government,
he saw empire as an important buttress to Britain’s domestic policy. Almost his first
action as Colonial Secretary, his clandestine support for the capitalists’ conspiracy
was to lead to considerable embarrassment for his new Party. Additionally, he was to
impose a policy upon the conspirators which had the unintended consequence of
ensuring that their plot came to nothing. Rhodes, in acquiring resources from the
Colonial Secretary, had doomed it by acceding to Chamberlain’s demand that the
Johannesburg conspiracy be undertaken to raise the Union Jack over the ZAR.

In Johannesburg, the plot disintegrated, probably because the majority of

Johannesburg conspirators were hostile to the possibility of an imperial take-over and
were committed to the idea of a reformed republican system of government. Thus, for
example, a week before the rising was to take place, Fitzpatrick had told a public
meeting that he would not, in any way, undermine republican government. He and
the other reformers knew that they must include “Progressive” Afrikaners and
American mine managers in their number if they were to succeed. Yet although the
Johannesburg conspirators called for the coup and the Raid to be postponed – and
Rhodes supposedly agreed to this – the Raid, nonetheless, went ahead. Rhodes’
associate and lieutenant, Starr Leander Jameson, probably with the former’s support,
cut the telegraph wires, so preventing the receipt of countermanding orders. Jameson
and his troop were surrounded and detained by an Afrikaner militia and eventually
handed over to the British government. They were then tried for breach of their
military oath forbidding them to wage war against a friendly government and they
received nominal sentences.

The collapse of the conspiracy greatly strengthened the ZAR, diplomatically,

militarily and psychologically. It was able to take advantage of its opponent’s
embarrassment, welcoming the support it received from continental European powers,
and it embarked upon a programme of rearmament. Simultaneously, however, the
British government began reformulating policy in the light of this strengthening
challenge to its pre-eminence in the region. That reformulation had begun within
days of the collapse of the Raid. But it was not Chamberlain – part hero and part
embarrassment to the British Government – who led the way here. Rather, it was
Arthur Balfour, Leader of the House of Commons and nephew of the Prime Minister,
who announced that the “Transvaal is independent as regards internal, but not

38. Fitzpatrick, The Transvaal from within, p 97.

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external, relations”.39 Moreover, to give body to this formulation,

William Waldegrave Palmer, otherwise Lord Selborne, Chamberlain’s Under
Secretary, and the Prime Ministers Lord Salisbury’s son-in-law, drew up a
memorandum in which he laid out the likely prospective changes in the ZAR and the
dangers which these would contribute to British objectives.
The Selborne memorandum

Salisbury was wary of Chamberlain who had compromised the government over the
Raid and it was convenient for him to use Selborne to keep him informed of his
Colonial Secretary’s activities. For his part, Chamberlain often left Selborne “to
make the Colonial Office’s case privately to the Prime Minister,” if only because the
domestic arrangements of the latter two men meant that they lived under the same
country house roof for much of the year. This allowed Selborne, the go-between, to
become the effective policy maker on South African matters, although we must
assume that his doing so was sanctioned by Salisbury. Selborne took advantage – or
was allowed to take advantage – of being left to deal with South African issues and
officials on a daily basis. And as we shall see there were moments when he was to
reprimand his supposed overlord.40

Possibly the most important policy formulation which followed from this
collective view of the threat to British supremacy in South Africa, came soon after the
Jameson Raid when Lord Selborne, drew up the well-known, if much less understood
memorandum. As Ian Phimister has explained, Selborne’s Memorandum in effect
asserted that “Dutch” power in South Africa was only a secondary obstacle to British
imperial hegemony.41 The primary obstacle was likely to be the “cosmopolitan”
threat. Selborne’s memoranda, addressed to the Prime Minister, and to the Colonial
Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, argued:

The worst thing that could happen to us and to South Africa, would be for the
English whether in the Transvaal or in the Queen’s dominions to come
definitely to the conclusion that the Imperial government had no sympathy for
their aspirations and to decide that the Imperial connexion was a barrier to
their legitimate hopes.42

This, Selborne thought, would be worse than the emergence of a South Africa-
wide Afrikaner unity, for, he wrote, “the next worse thing for us would be to unite all
the Dutch in South Africa in determined hostility to British rule and the British
flag”.43 Selborne was convinced that the Transvaal was “the richest spot on earth” and
that its British inhabitants would inevitably come to be dominant within it. Above all,
what worried Selborne was the prospect of a sizable immigration of mostly British

39. A. Porter, “Lord Salisbury, Mr. Chamberlain And South Africa, 1895-1899”, p 5.
40. Robinson & Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, p 432.
41. I. Phimister, “Empire, Imperialism and the Partition of Africa”, in S. Akita (ed),
Gentlemanly Capitalism, Imperialism and Global History (Palgrave Macmillan,
Basingstoke, 2002), pp 75-76.
42. G.D. Boyce (ed), The Crisis of British Power the imperial and naval papers of the
second Earl of Selborne, 1895-1910 (Historians’ Press, London, 1990), pp vii, 438 –
hereafter: Selborne Papers, draft memorandum by Lord Selborne, January [1896].
43. Selborne Papers, draft memorandum by Lord Selborne, January [1896].

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settlers, who would make their way to the ZAR, and, in consequence, change the
political configuration of that state.
Just think what would be the result of 10 or of 20 years of an immigration
maintained at one fifth or even one tenth of [the present] rate! Therefore,
according to all the experience of history, this country so powerful in its future
wealth and population must be a British Republic if it is not a British Colony;
and I cannot myself see room for doubt but that a British Republic of such
great wealth and of so large a population situated at the geographical centre of
political South Africa would assuredly attract to itself all British Colonies in
South Africa.44

This would mean that the British population of the Transvaal would
necessarily settle the destiny of southern Africa and create a federal South Africa. But
there were two distinct routes to such a federation. Either it could become a United
States of Southern Africa flying a republican flag, or it could follow the Canadian
model owing economic and political allegiances to Britain as the Dominion of
Southern Africa. However, he also made it clear that the route British settlers in the
Transvaal would take would not be entirely in their own hands. The extent to which
the imperial government intervened, and the effectiveness of its policy, would
determine whether South Africa was to have a New Canada or a New United States.45
Without Rhodes’ involvement, the real risk of an insurrection in Johannesburg
was that it might lead to the creation a new United States, in the process of forcing
through reforms in the gold mining districts of the ZAR while retaining its republican
form. The leading Johannesburg conspirators, all of them major figures in the mining
industry, agreed that they should not transform the existing state into a British Colony
and that it should remain an independent Republic. All conspirators believed that
Afrikaners would not resist determined opposition.
In the months immediately after the Raid, Chamberlain, acting on his own
initiative, appeared to be trying to reverse the results of the failed coup. At first he
toyed with the idea of acquiring a municipal government for Johannesburg. This was
to be preferred to independence because it would leave the Uitlanders still dependent
on the British government. He also tried to cajole Kruger into coming to London
where he hoped to brow beat the President into making certain concessions. Then, in
November 1896, he attempted to persuade the Cabinet that a show of force against the
ZAR would be desirable but the Cabinet, with other international problems to deal
with, refused to send reinforcements to South Africa.46 Early in 1897, an undeterred
Chamberlain sent an indiscrete, supposedly hypothetical, question to Lionel Phillips,
asking him about the possibility and the likely effect of shutting down the
Johannesburg mines. “It has been represented to me” he wrote to Lionel Phillips,
... that the mining magnates of Johannesburg could, if they chose, bring
matters to a satisfactory issue by closing the mines, and that in this case the
Transvaal Government would be obliged to make concessions in order to
secure their revenues.47

44. Selborne Papers, Selborne – Marquis of Salisbury, 30 March 1896.

45. Robinson & Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, pp 410-461.
46. E. Drus, “Select Documents from the Chamberlain Papers Concerning Anglo-
Transvaal Relations, 1896-1899”, BIHR, 27, 1954, p 164.
47. Drus, “Select Documents”, p 165 (Chamberlain – L. Phillips, 1 January 1897).

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There were a number of international complications which made it difficult for

Britain to act against the ZAR at that particular moment. On several occasions British
officials in South Africa were to restrain themselves, or their over-enthusiastic local
imperialists, when Britain’s other commitments made it impossible to support an
agitation within the ZAR.48 In an apparent attempt to be helpful to the Colonial
Office, but one which must be seen as another form of lobbying, WB&E shared
information and intelligence with both the British agent in Pretoria, Connyngham
Greene, and with Whitehall.
A year after the Raid, some of the gold producers began again to protest
against state measures which were seen as inhibiting the growth of the mining
industry. To meet these complaints, the ZAR established the Industrial Commission.
The government was persuaded that such a Commission would show that the
industry’s complaints were unfounded. All but one of the Commissioners initially
appointed by the Government lacked the technical expertise to undertake the inquiry
and they therefore accepted the help offered by the mining houses. Five experts,
drawn from the Chamber as well as from the Association, were asked to join the panel
and they soon became its leading members.
Their report’s non-negotiable demands included the cancellation and
expropriation of the state’s dynamite monopoly, an end to its control over railway
tariffs, control of the movement of African labour, prohibition of alcohol sales to
Africans, and the eradication of the illegal gold trade. The administration and the
enforcement of these demands was to be in the hands of a local board. It was to have
a police force independent of the ZAR state and placed under mining house control.
These demands not only questioned the sovereignty of the state, but threatened key
groups within it with the loss of a major part of their patronage. In short, it was
beyond the capacity of the existing ZAR Government to implement the
recommendations of the report. When the Government duly declined to implement
the Commission’s recommendations, it aroused hostility from Alliance entrepreneurs.
German and French firms protested to the ZAR government over its failure to effect
the recommendations.

Fitzpatrick, Milner and the road to war

WB&E’s Percy Fitzpatrick also sought to influence Alfred Milner, the High
Commissioner, knowing full well that there was no constitutional way of achieving
his demands. Milner, in endorsing these demands, announced, “There is only one
possible settlement - war! It has got to come”. They must resolve
... the status of the Courts, the native policy, the franchise, redistribution of
seats, language, customs, Railways, Court of Appeal, etc., settled once and
forever, so that we may have peace to follow our business and an end to all the
South African turmoil and unrest.49

48. Transvaal Archive Depot, Pretoria: BA 18, 175, BA – HC, 24 March 1898; Bodleian
Milner papers: MS Milner dep 17, Milner – B. Synge, Morija, Basutoland, 20 April
1898; C. Headlam, The Milner Papers (Cassell, Toronto, Melbourne & Sydney,
1933), pp 227-229.
49. NELM: JPF – Beit, 4 March 1898.

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By this point Milner was all set to take on the ZAR. When he first arrived in
South Africa he did not allow himself to be hurried into revealing his strategy. He
waited, instead, for the ZAR to hold its presidential election before deciding on his
course. Once that election showed Kruger was not to be challenged, let alone
defeated, by the Progressives, he embarked on his own course to determine the future
of South Africa. Whether or not he was convinced by Selborne’s breakdown of the
forces at work in South Africa, he now determined to bring about a new set of
parameters around which he expected subjects of the crown would regroup.
But no sooner had Milner committed himself to a policy which must result in a
direct confrontation with the ZAR – and he had let Chamberlain know that this was so
– then he was reminded by the Colonial Secretary that Britain’s immediate foreign
policy left no room for such a conflict. He would have to bide his time. “If it had not
been for all our troubles elsewhere, I should not have striven ... for a peaceful issue”,
Milner wrote. He went on:

The Boer Government is too great a curse to all South Africa to be allowed to
exist, if we were not too busy to afford the considerable war which alone can
pull it down.50

If Milner was having to restrain himself because the British Government was
elsewhere engaged, Fitzpatrick and the Randlords had similarly to avoid a crucial part
of the long term policy of the mining industry when they were addressing the
Industrial Commission. The issue was that of white wages. As Fitzpatrick confided
to Wernher, when the former was being examined by the Commission, “white wages
was the most difficult question to handle in evidence”. They could find a way to
reduce the wages of white workers, “but it should not be the subject of public
discussion or of concerted action”. To have allowed white wages to be discussed
openly would have been calamitous. “Few things would be more disastrous to us or
more acceptable to the Government, than a split between the white labourers and
employers at the present juncture”.51 John Hobson noted the importance to the
mining industry of the white workers’ wages bill. The saving, he noted, “to be
effected out of white wages is greater than out of black, for the aggregate of the wages
paid to white miners has hitherto been larger than that paid to black, though the
numbers of the latter are eight times as large”. Hobson could see the mine-owners’
predicament. If the alliance of white workers and capitalist was achieved and
maintained, then the costs of production must remain high. If white wages could be
cut then that alliance would collapse:

White wages have not been reduced in the past, because the Outlanders
desired to work together for political salvation, and any attack upon the white
labourers pay would have caused a split in the ranks. However, when new
conditions prevail, white wages must come down.52

50. MS Milner dep 17, Milner – B. Synge, Morija, Basutoland, 20 April 1898.
51. NELM: JPF – J. Wernher, 1 May 1897.
52. J.A. Hobson, The War in South Africa. Its Causes and Effects (Nisbet, London, 1900),
p 240.

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By the start of 1899 there was a new mood in the air. Britain had, for the time
being, settled its differences with Germany, France and the United States and was free
to act in South Africa if it chose to do so. Both the government of the ZAR and its
protagonists in South Africa reassessed their positions. Leading figures in the Kruger
government set out to offer the Randlords a set of financial and commercial
compromises in return for a political settlement. The ZAR would provide the mining
houses with tax concessions and allow them to control the bewaarplaatsen. This was
land originally granted to the mining companies for storage and surface work only but
which now lay above the gold reefs as they plunged to the great depths where
mining’s future lay. WB&E, more than any other mining group, based its future well
being on the assumption that it would ultimately be able to acquire these
bewaarplaatsen. Until that moment the state threatened to give these to its clients but
now it was prepared to offer these to the Randlords in return for a settlement which
would have them disavow the South African League (SAL), end the anti-Boer tone of
The Star and accept the continuation of the dynamite monopoly. It also offered to grant
the Uitlanders the right to vote after five years’ residence in the ZAR. They were to
urge Britain to concede the republic’s right to treat Coloured and Indians as it saw fit.

If implemented this would have gone a considerable way towards meeting the
economic demands of the mining houses. At any rate this set of proposals, which
came to be known as the Great Deal could have been seen as the basis for
negotiations. Fitzpatrick was wary of the offer, partly because the ZAR would not and
could not deliver what they were offering. But more than this, if the ZAR did produce
the settlement they were offering the mining houses would not achieve the kind of
domination which they wanted. Fitzpatrick informed his London Directors of the
ZAR’s offer and expressed his continuing distrust. Wernher and Beit agreed with him
and they organised the support of the major mining houses London.

The Republic now offered the Randlords a new compromise. In addition to the
bewaarplaatsen, it would resolve the franchise question. In return, the mining industry
was to provide the ZAR with a loan, suppress the press, disavow the SAL and Uitlander
opposition, and oppose the British government’s criticism of the ZAR’s treatment of
Indians. In effect, these proposals were an attempt to divide the capitalists, the SAL and
the Uitlanders from each other and from British influence. Once again, Fitzpatrick
accepted the tactical necessity of examining the ZAR’s offer, while ensuring that the
mine-owners were persuaded to look beyond their immediate interests.

The WB&E directors believed that, while the outcome of economic

negotiations should be to the mine-owners’ advantage, these should not be bought at
the price of alienating the SAL and the Uitlanders. This was a circle which could
never be squared. The franchise on offer from the ZAR government would still have
left considerable numbers of Uitlanders without the vote, and, worse, without
citizenship for the qualifying period. The London representatives of three major
mining houses, Consolidated Gold Fields, WB&E, and Goerz and Co, welcomed the
concessions being offered on the bewaarplaatsen, but were unwilling to detach this
from the franchise settlement.

Eckstein, Wernher and Beit were however alarmed by the prevarications they
had encountered in separate visits to the Colonial Office in March 1899. When

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Wernher spoke to Chamberlain and Selborne on 8 and 9 March, he was surprised that
they recommended a municipality for Johannesburg. When Wernher raised the
question of the franchise for the Uitlanders, Selborne evaded the query, cautioning
that it “was going at once to the point of most resistance”.53 Once again the major
capitalists were concerned at the prevarication of the leading actors in the Colonial
Office. Eckstein told the British Vice Agent in Johannesburg that, unless Britain
acted decisively against the ZAR, he would not risk all by rejecting the latter’s terms;
he would “go to Pretoria and make peace with the [Z]SAR”.54
By the spring and summer of 1899, relations between Britain and the
South African Republic had begun to deteriorate dangerously, but the City conveyed
no particular anxiety. On the contrary the war, when it came, was extremely popular
amongst members of the British financial community. And whilst that popularity
stemmed, in part, from the end of uncertainty, and, in part, from the jingoism which
late Victorian nationalism had spawned, it also stemmed from the assumed interests of
these financial communities. To begin with it was widely believed that the intense
pressure put upon the government of the ZAR was likely to succeed without Britain’s
need of recourse to war. Equally, when war came, there was considerable confidence
– although not amongst those few who were closest to the conflict – that Britain
would very soon force the Afrikaner republic into submission. Had the Bank of
England and the City of London thought that its interests were being endangered by
the political and diplomatic policy of the government, these influential spheres of
interest would have let their anxieties be known. Whatever doubts remained were any-
way swept aside by the final rush to war. Determined to get its blow in first, the ZAR,
together with the OVS, issued an ultimatum in October 1899 demanding the recall of
British troops on their way to South Africa, and the withdrawal of existing forces from
republican borders. Having provoked the ultimatum, Britain “naturally ignored it”55
and within days the first Boer columns were streaming into Natal and the Cape.
Conclusions
This chapter has attempted to advance an interpretation of the causes of the
South African War which integrates context with agency. By emphasising the
struggle’s long and short term contexts, it has tried to give meaning to the
responsibility for war so assiduously sought by generations of liberal historians. But
in doing so, this chapter has stressed the pivotal role of the Selborne Memorandum, as
well as the key part played by Percy Fitzpatrick in overcoming the inertia and caution
characteristic of much mining house behaviour. It was Fitzpatrick who helped set the
stage on which Milner acted. Overall, the conclusions suggested here have attempted
to avoid the polarised positions taken up in so many accounts of the causes of the war.
Rather than having to choose between a political and strategic set of explanations on
the one hand, or the economic determinism of gold and gold mining’s imperatives on
the other, this chapter has argued for the convergence of both, particularly in the
decisive period between 1895 and 1899.

53. CO 417/259, Minute by Selborne & Chamberlain, 8 & 9 March 1899; Marais, The
Fall of Kruger’s Republic, pp 251-252.
54. MS Milner dep 208, P81, pp 408-409, Her Majesty's Agent Pretoria – High
Commissioner, summary of letter from Vice Consul, Johannesburg, 19 April 1899.
55. D. Judd and K. Surridge, The Boer War (John Murray, London, 2002), p 50.

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