The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (43 page)

This remains the most convincing account of the
ultimate
objective of British intervention in September 1899. But it does not do justice to the wider causes of the war, nor to the pressures that beat upon an uncertain cabinet. What made South Africa the sternest test of late-Victorian imperialism was the collision of three political forces of exceptional intensity. The first was the enormous geopolitical investment the British had made in the exclusion of any rival great power south and east of the Zambezi. It was not only a question of safeguarding the Cape. The ink was scarcely dry on the diplomatic map of Africa and the partition of China and the Middle East was on the cards. The surrender of British primacy in a region where their interests were so important and of such long standing would have implied an astonishing loss of confidence. Salisbury's sovereign cure for geopolitical uncertainty – the careful demarcation of spheres – would have been jettisoned, with unforeseeable consequences. It was inevitable, once the argument over Uitlander rights turned into a dispute about paramountcy, that Salisbury would insist on Kruger's submission. The ‘old’ British interest in the Cape had become part of a ‘new’ British stake in the peaceful partition of the world.

Salisbury's misfortune was that the three-masted barque (Salisbury was fond of maritime metaphors) of his partition diplomacy was struck amidships by a state-building project of unusual strength. Until the 1880s the Transvaal had been a ramshackle frontier settlement, an African Costaguana. After Britain's failed annexation, Kruger's personal rule imposed the rudiments of statehood. The discovery and exploitation of gold after 1886 was widely expected to rot the foundations of what Milner was to call a ‘mediaeval race oligarchy’. Immigrants would swamp the old burghers; civilised commerce would displace their predatory pastoralism; Cape liberalism would discredit their crude trekker republicanism. Like the Trojan horse, the Rand would conceal an invading army ready at the signal to capture the Boer citadel and open its gates to British influence. Instead, Kruger skilfully utilised the bonanza of gold to reinforce his Afrikaner state. The Afro-Asian world was littered with failures in the ‘race against time’ to modernise before conquest: Kruger meant to be a winner. He was helped by the distinctive political economy of the goldfields. The Rand swelled his revenues, but remained a geographical and social enclave. It was easily contained, as was shown by the Jameson Raid and its aftermath. It depended heavily upon the state for its (black) labour supply and for transport. Its white population – many of them transients
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– could be treated as restless aliens or guest-workers. Mining revenues and commercial prosperity served not (in the short term) to liberalise Kruger's state but to enlarge the patronage at his disposal and consolidate a loyal burgher elite. They also paid for the arsenal of heavy weapons to supplement the citizen commando. Under these conditions, to be a landlocked state in the South African interior was no longer the handicap it had originally seemed. Guarded by geography and the passive sympathy of the Cape Afrikaners, Kruger's South African republic had fashioned an exceptionally favourable geopolitical niche in a world of imperialisms.

It is at best uncertain whether Salisbury's government would have had the will, the means or the opportunity to throttle Kruger's quiet bid for independence but for the intervention of a third force. It was also doubtful whether the Imperial Factor alone was a match for the Transvaal whites, any more than it had been in 1880. But, since the 1880s, the political landscape of the sub-continent had been transformed and not just by gold. Rhodes had outflanked the Transvaal and checked its expansion. By astute publicity and prodigal largesse he harnessed the speculative frenzy of the 1890s to the idea of British expansion in Southern Africa. His disaster in 1896 was a check, but by that time his efforts to strangle Kruger had begun to mobilise new and unexpected support. Jameson's fiasco had roused an ethnic ‘British’ movement in the Cape which soon spread to the Rand. Its leaders there, with little prospect of imperial deliverance, looked to the Cape for support. Building a local constituency was uphill work. Many miners were short-term migrants with little interest in local politics. Many suspected the League to be a front organisation for the mine-owners, a suspicion Kruger tried to encourage. But, by the middle of 1899, the Edgar case and the new tactic of petitioning the Crown, had given the League far greater credibility as the voice of the Uitlander.
⁷⁴

The League's success among British settlers in South Africa was symptomatic of a wider late-Victorian phenomenon. ‘Britannic’ nationalism was fiercest where the claim of British communities to social and cultural predominance was challenged: by Metis, East Europeans, French Canadians, Catholic Irishmen, Chinese migrants or Transvaal Boers. It was fostered by the growing closeness of educational and sporting connections, the new swiftness of communication, the growth of the press, the convergence between the urban society of the overseas British and their counterparts at home. It was no coincidence that the Wanderers club in Johannesburg, with its fierce assertion of British sporting values, was closely identified with the League and the venue for its meetings when permitted.
⁷⁵
The League's appeal was to an injured sense of ethnic and cultural superiority. At a meeting in June 1899, wrote one Uitlander, the League's Transvaal secretary, Thomas Dodds, ‘was cheered as…I have never heard any man cheered before, particularly at his words “we appeal to Caesar”. He knows well the pride of race – of which thank God I still have a small portion left in me.’
⁷⁶
Dodds' message was as obvious as it was popular: the Uitlanders were Roman citizens whose emperor would come to chastise the barbarians. Fitzpatrick's account of Uitlander suffering
The Transvaal From Within
, circulated at the same time in Britain, embodied a similar appeal.
⁷⁷

The Transvaal government was bound to suspect that the League was not only the voice of British ‘race patriotism’ but the tool of Rhodes’ ambition. Despite his electoral defeat in 1898, Rhodes’ hand was seen everywhere. To the Transvaal League he was its ultimate leader.
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Rhodes’ formula of ‘equal rights for all white men’ inspired the League's campaign for the franchise and spearheaded its appeal in Britain.
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Rhodes kept in close touch with the campaign waged at home (and with his help) by the South Africa Association's campaign.
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To the Transvaal Boers, the ‘great amalgamator’ had become the great manipulator. ‘Rhodes presses the button and the figure works’ was how Fitzpatrick described their fear.
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As a result, the Transvaal leaders were anxious to forestall imperial intervention but also to break the alliance between the Uitlanders and Rhodes symbolised by the League. In his negotiations with Fitzpatrick, the Uitlander spokesman in March 1899, Smuts pressed him to repudiate the connection with the League in the Cape. Fitzpatrick's reply was uncompromising. The League, he told Smuts (or so he claimed in a speech), ‘represent[s] a very large section in South Africa which section has been very friendly to us’. To his Uitlander audience he added: ‘They [i.e. the Cape ‘English’] are my people and I (for one) shall not turn my back on them…They are our people and we will stick to them.’
⁸²

The conclusion seemed obvious. The Uitlander leadership would use the franchise to widen the scope for Imperial influence. The League would take its orders from Kimberley. Kruger's dilemma was acute. As we have seen, he needed to defuse the feverish mood Milner and Rhodes had created and head off an Imperial coup. But he had to avoid a concession that would expose him to the ‘salami tactics’ of which Chamberlain, Milner and Rhodes were suspected. Smuts and Kruger may both have believed that the inherent strength of their strategic niche would deter Imperial aggression as long as they avoided the outright provocation of British opinion. Smuts’ offer was designed to remove the excuse for Imperial intervention now and its warrant in future. The end of suzerainty would block future petitions to the Crown and erode the sense of common identity on which Milner and Rhodes had played so successfully. But this attempt to outflank the Britannic nationalism he distrusted roused the deepest fear of all in British leaders. A cabinet cynical of Uitlander grievances united round the threat to British supremacy that Smuts had let slip.

Imperial supremacy, Transvaal state-building and Britannic nationalism were a volatile mixture. What made them explosive was the extreme uncertainty created by the speed of South Africa's economic transformation. It was widely assumed that the pace of change would increase. The Transvaal would be richer and stronger. But it could also be swamped by a flood-tide of migrants. The Afrikaner state might dominate the region – or be drowned in the attempt. Yet it was only in the last months before the war that the issue seemed so stark. For all the efforts of Milner, the great impresario of imperial politics, there is little sign before July 1899 that British ministers were impressed by his apocalyptic vision of a united Afrikanerdom and a vanished supremacy. Chamberlain may have shared Milner's hopes for a new dominion of ‘British South Africa’. But he had no idea how to achieve it. Instead, it was the insurgent force of Britannic nationalism on the Rand and in the Cape which exposed the race for power and brought Kruger and Smuts at last to their desperate remedy.

A British South Africa?

The decision by Kruger and Steyn, the Orange Free State president, to launch a pre-emptive attack upon the British may have smacked of desperation, but it was not uncalculated. Smuts had made much of Britain's strategic weaknesses: her multiple commitments; the chance of interference by her imperial rivals; the restlessness of colonial populations everywhere.
⁸³
Military intervention in South Africa would come at a high price for a far-flung empire. Kruger's reputation had been made by his skilful adaptation of South Africa's peculiar geopolitics in 1880–1. For both men, it was tempting to believe that the same combination of geographical remoteness and the political sympathy of Cape Afrikanerdom would stop the Imperial coercion of the republics in its tracks. In fact, the Boer leaders intended to make London's task even harder. By moving first, they aimed to capture Durban (the nearest port from which the Transvaal could be invaded) and Kimberley, the great inland centre of the Cape. With these in their hands, the Boers would hold the strategic initiative. Faced with a long war to battle their way into the South African interior, Salisbury and Chamberlain would begin to see reason. The result would be not the surrender that Milner demanded but a new convention.

They were too optimistic. The invasion of Natal was indecisive and Kimberley withstood their siege. The humiliating defeats they inflicted on British troops in the dreadful ‘Black Week’ of December 1899 created alarm and anger in Britain not indifference or resignation. Twenty years earlier, the interior could be abandoned after Majuba. But, in 1899, the fate of Kimberley, Rhodesia and the Rand itself all turned on victory; so did Britain's reputation as a military power. The response was a steady build-up of military strength and a crushing advance that gradually overwhelmed the Boer armies. By the end of 1900, the Boer capitals had been occupied, the Rand brought under Imperial rule, and the republics annexed to the British Crown.

The Boers’ collapse in the face of British military power was a brilliant vindication of the hopes of Milner and Rhodes. But it was also a mirage. By early 1901, it was plain that the Boer commandos intended to fight a war much more to their taste than the sieges and set-pieces in which they had been worsted. In the new guerrilla conflict that stretched from the Transvaal to Cape Colony, mobility, veldcraft and local sympathy made them more than a match for the Imperial forces sent to hunt them down. Far from disintegrating with the departure of the ‘Kruger gang’ (Kruger had escaped to Europe), Afrikaner patriotism was strengthened by comradeship and the racial bitterness of a total war. As the guerrilla struggle intensified, the Boer War became a civil war.
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Ten thousand Cape Afrikaners, subjects of the Crown, turned rebel and joined the commandos. More than 50,000 ‘loyalists’ were mobilised against them.
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Several thousand ‘poor white’ Afrikaners in the republics changed sides to fight for the British as ‘National Scouts’.
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Black communities seized the moment to recover lost lands.
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Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of blacks and (mixed race) coloureds, serving as British auxiliaries, or suspected of British sympathies, were murdered by Boer commandos.
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The rural economy of the highveld was devastated by British farm-burning, while the terrible mortality (both white and black) of the civilian prison ‘concentration’ camps sowed a tradition of ethnic martyrdom among Afrikaners.

On the British side, as the ‘expedition’ that Milner had first imagined turned into a long war, public sympathy began to flag. Marching to Pretoria was one thing. A messy, inconclusive war of attrition, punctuated by defeats and compromised by ‘barbarism’ was quite another. The eagerness of British leaders for peace was sharpened by the sense of strategic vulnerability on which Smuts had counted. With their army and reserves tied down in South Africa, and a long oceanic supply line to guard, ministers could only hope that no emergency arose in the defence of India or of British interests in the ethnic cauldron of the Near East. The crisis in China over the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and the threat that a partition would follow was a brusque reminder that a long war in South Africa was a strategic luxury that London could ill afford. Kitchener, who had taken over as commander-in-chief in South Africa when Roberts went home, was willing to make peace with the Boers for little more than recognition of British sovereignty
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– a condition they rejected at the Middelburg negotiations of March 1901. It was only after a further year of war, with no hope of victory or of help from abroad, and amid the rising fear that their rural society might be permanently damaged, that the Boer leaders agreed at Vereeniging in May 1902 to give up the struggle.
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