The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (43 page)

Rhodes’s first coup, achieved with the cooperation of Gladstone’s ministry, was the annexation of Bechuanaland in 1884–5. During the past five or so years, parties of Boer settlers had been penetrating this region, where they established the miniature republics of Goschen and Stellaland. Simultaneously, German colonists were moving inland from the embryo settlement of Angra Pequeña, and there were fears in Cape Town and London that they would eventually link up with the Boers. The result would be the blocking of the ‘Missionaries Road’, which ran northwards towards what was then known as Zambesia (roughly modern Zimbabwe and Zambia), a region widely believed to be rich in minerals. There was also, and this caused the greatest anxiety to the British government, the possibility of the emergence of a German-Transvaal axis. In April 1884, when Paul Kruger, the Transvaal’s president, had visited Berlin he had spoken publicly of his people’s affinity with Germany. ‘Just as a child seeks support from his parents so shall the young Transvaal state seek, and hopefully find, protection from its strong and mighty motherland, Germany, and its glorious dynasty.
16

This was enough to arouse the British government, already uneasy about the appearance of German settlements in South-West Africa (Namibia), and under pressure from an alliance of Rhodes and the missionary lobby, which feared for the future of the Tswana of Bechuanaland under Boer rule. In December 1884 a small, well-armed force was ordered into the area to evict the Boers and declare a protectorate over Bechuanaland, which it did without resistance.

Rhodes was the ultimate beneficiary from the acquisition of Bechuanaland, a colony of little economic value, which was costing Britain £100,000 a year in subsidies during the 1890s. Bechuanaland was the springboard for Rhodes’s incursion into Zambesia, an undertaking that would be accomplished by his British South Africa Company, which was officially chartered in 1889. This company, like its contemporaries the Royal Niger Company, the British Imperial East Africa Company and the North Borneo Company, represented a revival of seventeenth-century, private enterprise colonisation and trading. The government gained overlordship of new territories on the cheap since their day-to-day administration and policing were in the hands of the company’s staff. The British South Africa Company’s mandate was for farming and mining in Mashonaland, where mineral and settlement rights had been granted by the Ndebele king, Lobengula, in return for a company pension, 1,000 now obsolescent Martini-Henry rifles and a gunboat for the Zambesi River, which was never delivered.

At the end of 1890, the first column of settlers, less than 400 in number but heavily armed with machine-guns and artillery, entered Lobengula’s kingdom. The events of the next ten years paralleled those which had been played out in North America during the previous two centuries. Lobengula gradually realised that by making concessions to the company he had weakened his own authority, which he attempted to reassert in the autumn of 1893 by ordering his impis to raid Shona villages close to British settlements. He played straight into the hands of the company’s chief magistrate, an extremely foxy and belligerent former physician, Dr Leander Starr Jameson. Jameson had long believed that two sources of power could not co-exist in the region, and that the company’s future would never be assured until the formidable Ndebele war machine was dismantled. The raids were therefore just what Jameson wanted and gave him the excuse for a war against Lobengula.

The first Matabele War of 1893–4 was a one-sided affair, for Ndebele generals, like their Zulu counterparts, stuck to traditional frontal attacks. These were suicidal against the company’s Maxim machine-guns, the latest and most deadly of their kind, which fired six hundred rounds of .45 ammunition a minute. The Maxims terrified the Ndebele, who saw them as some awesome kind of magic; a native baby, born at this time and alive in the 1970s, explained his unusual name, Zigga-Zigga, as being based on the sound made by the machine-guns, and therefore believed by his parents as having some supernatural power.
17
Ndebele resistance did not end with the overthrow of Lobengula’s state, for there was a further uprising in the spring of 1896, in which settlers and their families were attacked and murdered.

The killing of the colonists generated bitter racial passions in Britain and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), as the company’s territories were now generally known. ‘Permanent peace there cannot be in countries like Mashona and Matabeleland until the blacks are either exterminated or driven back into the centre of Africa,’ proclaimed the
Saturday Review.
18
Its forthrightness echoed the views of settlers, like the big-game hunter Sir Frederick Selous, who thought that armchair imperialists were mistaken if they expected gratitude from natives who had been freed from oppressive rulers and the powers of the witch-doctors. Only condign chastisement repeatedly applied would teach the Ndebele ‘the uselessness of rebelling against the white man’.
19
Delivering these lessons in quietism was a horrifying business. Rifleman John Rose, one of the 1,200 British soldiers hurried to Rhodesia from the Cape, described the storming of a kraal during mopping-up operations in August 1896:

… all over the place it was nothing but dead or dying niggers. We burnt all the huts and a lot of niggers that could not come out were burnt to death, you could hear them screaming, but it served them right. We took about 5 women prisoners, but let them go again; one woman was holding a baby and some one shot the baby through the leg and through the woman’s side, but it was nothing [and] our doctor bandaged the wounds up.
20

Details of this nature shocked Liberals and Radicals at home, and there were some sharp exchanges in the Commons between Chamberlain and the company’s critics. Henry Labouchere questioned him on Rhodes’s stated intention of ‘thoroughly thrashing the natives and giving them an everlasting lesson’, executions without trial and village-burning. The last, Chamberlain insisted, was ‘according to the usages of South African warfare’, which must have puzzled those who believed that the advance of Anglo-Saxon civilisation in Africa would bring an end to such practices.
21
Parliamentary protests did little to change the nature or the course of the war, which dragged on into 1897, when the last guerrilla groups were finally hunted down.

A secondary, equally bloody campaign of pacification was being fought to the north-west of Rhodesia on the eastern shores of Lake Nyasa. British penetration of this region had followed Livingstone, whose early missions had been superseded by the Scottish Presbyterian African Lakes Company. It received government patronage in its armed struggle against Arab slave-traders, who operated from Zanzibar and supplied slaves to the tribal potentates of Arabia and the Persian Gulf. A British protectorate was declared over the area in 1891 to forestall acquisition by the Portuguese, who were, with good reason, suspected of not pulling their weight in the international effort to suppress Arab slaving. There followed four years of small-scale wars, subsidised by Rhodes, and fought by Sikh troops, commanded by Sir Harry Johnston, and a flotilla of tiny gunboats. Arab slavers and those tribal chiefs who had refused to accept Britain’s paramountcy were successively defeated; the latter were characterised by Johnston as slavers, which made it easier for him to justify his rigorous measures to the Foreign Office.
22

Those who took part in the small wars waged across southern Africa during the 1890s believed they were the pathfinders of the vast new British dominion with its own iron racial order. ‘Africa south of the Zambezi must be settled by the white and whitish races,’ claimed Johnston in 1893, ‘and that Africa which is well within the tropics must be ruled by whites, developed by Indians, and worked by blacks.’
23
William Brown, an American naturalist-turned-colonist who had been captivated by Rhodes’s dreams and helped to make them reality, believed the process of conquest and settlement was inexorable since it was an expression of ‘the spirit of the age’. This, he insisted, ‘decrees that South and Central Africa shall become a great English-speaking country’, perhaps another United States, which in time would fulfil ‘the destiny for which Providence seems to have chosen the Anglo-Saxon race’.
24

By 1914 the process seemed well underway. Southern Rhodesia had a white population of 34,000, who had their own elected legislative council which lorded it over the 732,000 blacks, half of whom lived in reservations. Many of the whites were Boers, who brought with them the racial prejudices of South Africa. In 1903 a law was made which punished a black man found guilty of raping a white woman with death; a protection not available to black women.
25
In Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), where white settlement was sparse, British law obtained under a separate and, by and large, a more humane form of government which owed its form to British rather than South African influence. In 1924 it was taken over by the Colonial Office.

The period that saw the establishment of British supremacy in Rhodesia and Nyasaland was one during which it was under assault in South Africa. The British government continued to regard South Africa as its exclusive sphere of influence, and clung to the hope that its constituent parts would eventually merge in a federation which would, of course, be within the empire. Rhodes was of the same opinion and, on becoming prime minister of the Cape in 1891, he endeavoured by charm and cheque book to convince its Boer population to accept the permanence and value of the British connection. There was, however, an alternative future for South Africa as part of a predominantly Boer federation in which the Transvaal would be paramount.

Such an arrangement was wormwood to Britain. Neither Rosebery’s Liberal ministry (1893–5) nor its Conservative successor under Salisbury could allow a strategically vital region to slip from Britain’s grasp into Germany’s. It was argued that a United States of South Africa under the Transvaal would be too weak to resist German encroachments, and might easily become a German satellite. Much to Britain’s irritation, the Transvaal had now become a pawn in the game of international imperial power politics, which was being played by Germany in order to extract concessions elsewhere. German political interest and investment strengthened the Transvaal’s sense of independence and, seen from both London and Cape Town, were evidence of the urgent need for measures to reassert British prestige and authority.

Developments during 1894 and 1895 heightened tension. The completion of the Delagoa Railway gave the Transvaal free access to the sea (German warships attended the opening celebrations at Lourenço Marques) and was followed by a brief trade war in which hindrances were officially placed in the way of British businessmen in the Transvaal. This petulant display of independence helped concentrate the mind of the British government on how to bring the Transvaal to heel. Rhodes’s answer was a
coup de main
delivered by mounted forces of the Rhodesian and Bechuanaland
gendarmerie,
who would descend on Johannesburg in support of an uprising there. The rebels were drawn from the largely British Uitlander (outsider) community of miners, engineers and entrepreneurs, who outnumbered the Boers and, for this reason, had been denied political rights.

What became known as the Jameson Raid was botched from the start. Rhodes’s private army began assembling at Pitsani on the frontier with Transvaal in November 1895 amid conflicting rumours that it would attack either the Transvaal or a local native chief. There was no security here, nor in Johannesburg, which meant that the Transvaal authorities had warning of what was in hand.
26
Spurred on by abundant supplies of whisky and promises of high wages, the troopers launched their attack at the very end of December, were intercepted, and forced to surrender early in January 1896. President Kruger had the ringleaders sent back to Britain for trial, and Rhodes, his political integrity compromised, withdrew from public life.

Just how much Chamberlain, the new Colonial Secretary, knew of Rhodes’s plans is not known for certain, although there can be no doubt that he would have warmly applauded the coup had it succeeded. Inside South Africa, the raid raised the political temperature and was widely seen as the first round in a contest between Britain and the Transvaal. Lewis Michael, manager of the Standard Chartered Bank in Cape Town, believed that the issue could now only be resolved by war. ‘The ambition of the Transvaal to become the rising power in the land is beyond doubt,’ he wrote in April 1896, ‘and I don’t think we shall all quiet down again until the question is settled one way or another. The whole school is looking at the “two big boys” who aspire to be “cock of the school”, and I fear there is only one way of settling the dispute; viz. the old school way.’
27

Chamberlain agreed, but he knew that if war came it would have to have the wholehearted support of the British electorate. He had been a populist politician, and was therefore more aware than his aristocratic colleagues of the need to proceed with the backing of public opinion, particularly in the provinces. What was needed to prepare the ground for a war against the Transvaal was a moral cause which would win wide support. One was available: Kruger’s steadfast refusal to allow the vote to the Uitlanders was presented as an affront to those democratic principles which were now the basis of Britain’s government, Chamberlain’s efforts to swing British opinion behind a strong line with the Transvaal were helped by an ill-judged telegram of congratulations and a pledge of support sent to Kruger by the Kaiser after the Jameson Raid. From 1896 until the outbreak of the Boer War in October 1899, Chamberlain was able to pose both as a champion of democratic rights and the defender of Britain’s historic influence in southern Africa against Germany, which was already being publicly identified as an international rival. But it was the Uitlanders who always held centre stage; in May 1899, when the drift to war seemed unstoppable, Lord Selbourne, the Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, summed up Britain’s moral case: