The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (42 page)

The business of grinding down the Xhosa was fraught with difficulties since they were ingenious guerrillas, fighting in rough country which they knew intimately. Explaining this to his superiors in London, a British commander in the 1846 campaign characterised the Xhosa warrior as ‘a greasy savage, whose full dress consists of a feather in his head and a sheaf for his organ of generation, who runs about as quick as a horse’.
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Getting to grips with such an opponent was hard and frustrating work. Nevertheless, bush-fighting came as a relief from tedious garrison duties. ‘I can scarcely keep myself from jumping out of joy at the idea of really being a soldier,’ Lieutenant Fleming of the 45th Regiment told his family as he prepared for action in July 1846. Six months later he was suffering from dysentery, loss of appetite and a hacking cough and was keeping himself alive with doses of quinine and port.
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When the war ended, he had had his fill of excitement and returned to England to take holy orders.

As in so many imperial frontier wars, there were natives who were willing to place their local knowledge and skills at their conquerors’ disposal. Khoikhoi were widely employed as scouts and skirmishers, although large numbers deserted during the 1850–53 operations against the Ngquika Xhosa. Gradually, and by a scorched earth policy which starved out their opponents, the British soldiers, known as ‘amarwexu’ (small-pox Satans), got the upper hand, but the spirit of resistance remained strong. In 1855 the Xhosa were heartened by rumours that Britain had been beaten in the Crimea, and that Russian troops would shortly appear and drive all the British from the Cape.
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Soldiers did in fact arrive from the Crimea, but they were former German mercenaries who had been employed to make up the wartime shortfall of British recruits. The War Office, sick of costly frontier campaigns in the Cape, had resurrected a precedent which had been used by the Romans to keep order on chaotic frontiers. The mercenaries, like ex-legionaries, were given farms in return for defending fortified villages in districts recently seized from the Xhosa.
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Seen from the perspective of London, the Cape and its tiny offshoot, Natal, were Cinderella colonies, continually disturbed by internal and external ructions. Both were unrewarding as markets for British manufactures; in 1855 South Africa imported British goods worth £922,000, which put it on the same level as Peru and well behind the Argentine and Chile. The political development of the two colonies followed the same course as that of the Canadian provinces and Australian states: under Colonial Office guidance, elected parliaments were established in the Cape in 1854 and Natal two years later. Pressure from British and local liberals devised a franchise which included richer black and mixed-race voters. This was done in the hope that a non-white middle class would eventually emerge and join with the white to form a stable, responsible electorate like that in contemporary Britain.

The late 1860s witnessed an economic revolution in the Cape whose repercussions soon affected every part of southern Africa. The discovery of diamonds in Griqualand, which was swiftly annexed as a crown colony in 1871, attracted investment and immigrants on an unprecedented scale. British imports into the Cape soared from £2 million in 1871 to £7.7 million twenty years later, when the total of the Cape’s exports stood at £9.5 million, a third of which came from diamonds. Between 1871 and 1875, the Cape government inaugurated an ambitious programme of railway construction that, by 1890, gave the colony a network which extended for over 2,000 miles.

Digging for diamonds and laying railway tracks were both labour-intensive activities requiring a vast, unskilled workforce, which could only be found among the black population. If industrialisation was to proceed, the blacks of southern Africa had to be completely pacified and brought under white control. The need for a final assertion of white supremacy was becoming urgent by the mid-1870s as black migrant workers, particularly Pedi from the Transvaal, and Basotho, were using the wages they earned on the diamond fields to buy guns. Obsolete muskets and modern breechloaders, some imported through Natal, were becoming widely available, and for some years the Zulu kings had been building up an arsenal of firearms.
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A passive black population was also necessary in order to implement the Colonial Secretary Lord Carnarvon’s plan for a South African federation, comprising the Cape, Natal and the two Boer republics. This appeared an ideal solution to regional problems since it would create a stable unit which, thanks to the Cape’s mineral revenues, would be self-supporting. Cautiously welcomed in the two British colonies, the scheme found little favour with the Boers, who saw it as a stratagem by which Britain could dominate the entire region.

Progress towards a federation was halted in 1876–8 by a sequence of native rebellions and wars, which were, as it turned out, the last major effort by South Africa’s blacks to stem the advance of white power. There was unrest among the Griquas in the northern Cape, the Pedi and Basotho in the Transvaal, and the Ngquika and Gcaleka Xhosas in the eastern Cape. Local British and troops, bluejackets and marines were able to handle the unrest in the Cape, employing the latest military technology, including the new Martini-Henry breech-loading rifle and Gatling machine-guns. The Boer campaign against Sekhukhuni’s Pedi soon ran out of steam and into trouble when a kommando (unit of mounted volunteer riflemen) was beaten. This reverse exposed the fragility of the Transvaal, and gave Carnarvon a welcome pretext to order its annexation in January 1877. The Boers were grateful for British intervention which, for the time being, guaranteed their safety.

The coup against the Transvaal was delivered by Sir Theophilus Shepstone, a singleminded colonial bureaucrat with a flair for native languages and a taste for intrigue. While the Boers may have seen him as a saviour, Shepstone saw the occupation of their republic as the prelude to its incorporation into the proposed South African federation. An enthusiast for the federation, Shepstone had convinced himself that measures for its creation could not proceed until the Zulu state had been emasculated. The overthrow of the Zulu kingdom was also the objective of Sir Bartle Frere, the new governor of the Cape, whose Indian experience had taught him that it was dangerous to tolerate the existence of any independent and well-organised native state on an imperial frontier.

During 1878, Frere and Shepstone conspired to engineer a war with the Zulu King Cetshwayo, ignoring the fact that he showed no hostility towards his southern neighbour, Natal. The two proconsuls doctored their reports to the Colonial Office to make Cetshwayo appear a warlike tyrant, and exaggerated the size of his army, which they falsely alleged was a standing force, rather than a body of men who were only mobilised in an emergency. Behind their cynical machinations was the hope that once Cetshwayo’s kingdom had been dismantled, his subjects would become a subservient labour force at the disposal of Natal’s white farmers and the mining companies.
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Having manoeuvred Cetshwayo into a corner, Frere and Shepstone got the war they wanted in January 1879. It started badly thanks to ill-luck and the slipshod generalship of the commander-in-chief, Lord Chelmsford. At the end of the month, a 1,200-strong column of British troops and native auxiliaries was all but wiped out at Isandlwana. Immediately after, and in defiance of Cetshwayo’s orders, an impi of between three and four thousand warriors crossed into Natal and attacked the mission station at Rorke’s Drift, which was defended by 139 men from the 24th Regiment, many of them invalids. In the epic battle which lasted for over twenty-four hours the attackers were repelled with losses of over 500 dead. The Zulus were exhausted and had not eaten for two days, and British fire-power more than compensated for the imbalance in numbers. One survivor, Colour-Sergeant, later Colonel Bourne, remembered how a few Zulus had managed to reach the improvised defences. Those who did, ‘to show their fearlessness and their contempt for red coats and small numbers … tried to leap the parapet, and at times seized our bayonets, only to be shot down.’
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Nonetheless the defenders showed extraordinary steadiness and eleven were awarded the Victoria Cross.

The trouble for the Zulus was that their indunas (generals) were fatally addicted to the traditional headlong charge of assegai-armed warriors. It had succeeded, just, at Isandlwana, but at a cost of 5,000 casualties. Nevertheless, similar tactics were repeated throughout the war, although Cetshwayo urged his commanders to adopt a guerrilla strategy and attack the extended and vulnerable British lines of communication.
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The British government was also disappointed by its servants’ performance and sacked Shepstone, Frere and Chelmsford, who was replaced by the abler and more methodical Sir Garnet Wolseley. He arrived in Zululand too late for the final destruction of the Zulu army at the battle of Ulundi in July. By this time everyone involved knew what to expect; the British deployed in a Napoleonic-style square, the better to concentrate their fire-power, and the Zulus, who had been progressively disheartened, launched their usual charge, but, observers noticed, without much conviction. The overthrow of the Zulu kingdom had required a tremendous effort, which indicated the importance the government attached to the achievement of paramountcy in southern Africa. 17,000 reinforcements had been rushed to Natal and the two invasions of Zululand had required 27,000 oxen, 5,500 mules and 30,000 native porters and labourers.
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The final bill was £4.9 million.
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With Zululand prostrate, Wolseley turned his attention to Sekhukhuni, whose Pedi were defeated by a mixed force of Highlanders and Swazis. The Basotho, who copied the Boers and fought as rifle-armed mounted infantry, proved a harder nut to crack. The result was that Basutoland became a British protectorate governed through local native chiefs. Experiments of a similar kind in Zululand failed and it was finally absorbed by Natal. The campaigns of 1877–9 had achieved their purpose: large-scale black resistance had been extinguished and white supremacy, which would last for just over a hundred years, was confirmed.

The pacification of South Africa’s black population by the British army marked the start of a new power struggle between the British and the Boers. Once it became clear that Britain’s occupation of the Transvaal was not a stopgap measure, but a preparation for its amalgamation into a South African federation, the Boers rebelled. The Transvaal’s war of independence of 1880–81 ended with the defeat of a small British force, which had been trapped on the summit of Majuba Hill in northern Natal. Rapid, long-range rifle fire had done for the British infantrymen, but the Boers celebrated their victory as the judgement of God in favour of His elect and against a race commonly considered impious. The newly-elected Liberal ministry saw the battle as the outcome of an amoral policy, which Gladstone had campaigned against during the general election. Plans for a federation, which the Boers had so forcefully rejected, were dropped and the Transvaal’s independence was restored. And yet, during negotiations at Pretoria in 1881 and London three years later, the government clung to pretensions of sovereignty over the Boer republics, and with it the right to interfere in the shaping of their domestic and foreign policies.

What at the time was no more than an academic legal point assumed enormous significance during the next twenty years. It was a period which witnessed tentative Boer expansion northwards and eastwards, and, after the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886, the transformation of the Transvaal’s economy. Once in production, the Rand mines provided a quarter of the world’s supply of gold and ensured that the centre of economic power in southern Africa shifted away from the Cape to the Transvaal. By 1896 the Transvaal government was the richest in Africa with annual revenues of over £8 million from minerals. British credit underwrote this economic revolution: in 1899 British investment in the Transvaal totalled £350 million, and two-thirds of the Rand’s mines were owned by British stockholders.

The questions which hung over southern Africa during the last two decades of the nineteenth century were, how would the Transvaal’s new wealth be used, and what effect would it have on Britain’s position in the area. This last was very much the concern of Cecil Rhodes, who, while still in his early thirties, had made himself a multi-millionaire by an accumulation of diamond-mining concessions. A shrewd manipulator, he had by 1891 secured a monopoly over the Kimberley diamond fields for his Rhodes De Beers Consolidated Company and had extensive investments on the Rand.

Rhodes became the most famous, many would have said notorious imperialist of his age. He was amoral, instinctively acquisitive (sleeping in the open during the 1884 Bechuanaland campaign, he had contrived to get for himself a blanket he was sharing with a British officer) and a brilliant businessman. His fortune was the servant of his dreams. These were inspired by contemporary Social-Darwinism and the new imperialism, which convinced him that it was the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon races to civilise the world. Nothing could withstand the force of this destiny, certainly not the rights of those who stood in its way. In a revealing episode, he listened to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s complaint that Germany had entered the race for empire too late and that there was nothing worthwhile left for her anywhere. ‘Yes, your Majesty there is,’ Rhodes responded. ‘There is Asia Minor and Mesopotamia.’ That these belonged to Turkey did not trouble Rhodes. The compass of Rhodes’s temerity and ambitions startled contemporaries. Viscount Milner observed, ‘Men are ruled by foibles and Rhodes’s foible is
size.
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Like other mavericks, such as Clive, Brooke and, later, T.E. Lawrence, who came to empire-building by chance, Rhodes’s imagination and talents were not apparent in his earlier life. He also shared the former trio’s good luck by being the right man in the right place at the right time and, of course, had the singular advantage of a private fortune with which to fulfil his dreams. He also had, at every turn, the assistance of successive British governments which, while many of their members did not share Rhodes’s breadth of vision, saw him as an extremely useful instrument for the preservation and extension of Britain’s influence in southern Africa at a time when it was in jeopardy.