The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (44 page)

We take our stand on … the duty and right of every civilised government to protect its subjects resident in foreign countries when they are oppressed and our own especial interest in everything South African as the Paramount power there.
28

Ironically, both British and Boers imagined themselves specially chosen races whose right to govern rested on the dispensation of Providence. Boer preachers and newspapers constantly reiterated claims that the British were an ungodly people, while British propagandists dismissed the Boers as a backward, semi-barbaric race. Viscount Milner, High Commissioner in South Africa since February 1897 and a fervent apostle of Britain’s imperial destiny, perceptively summed up the Transvaal’s government as a ‘mediaeval race oligarchy’, which existed solely to perpetuate Boer dominance. Bernard Shaw, playwright and Fabian Socialist, concurred and added pointedly that ‘small communities of frontiersmen’ were totally unfitted to control the assets of South Africa, especially its minerals.
29
During the war British soldiers were struck by Boer naïveté (which included the acceptance of elaborately printed biscuit-box labels as five-pound notes), callousness towards the blacks (‘Johnny Boer, he used to shoot niggers like you’d shoot a dog’) and coarseness.

War broke out in October 1899 after the breakdown of negotiations between Kruger and Milner over the Uitlanders’ franchise. The only strategy open to the Boers was the seizure of railway lines in the Cape and Natal and the occupation of Durban and Cape Town, which would frustrate the landing and dispersal of British reinforcements. Successful at first, the Boer offensive soon ran out of momentum, and by the end of the year the Boer armies were bogged down besieging Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking. British attempts to relieve the former two were beaten back at the battles of Stormberg, Magersfontein and Colenso during the second week of December.

The loss of ground and the three defeats stunned the British public, which had grown used to its army winning spectacular victories over poorly-armed natives. In South Africa it faced opponents who were mobile, adept in bushcraft and armed with modern rifles and artillery. It was fortunate that during the winter of 1899–1900 the Boer high command threw away these advantages and chose static warfare, giving their opponents a breathing space in which to collect armies and develop a strategy. This was the responsibility of a new commander, Field Marshal Lord Roberts and his chief-of-staff, General Lord Kitchener.

It was Roberts who masterminded the downfall of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State by adapting Boer principles of mobility. Using massed cavalry, he swiftly outflanked his enemies, occupying Kimberley and trapping Piet Cronjé’s army at Paardeberg, where it surrendered on 28 February 1900, Majuba Day. A cavalcade followed in which Roberts’s forces successively took Pretoria and Johannesburg. Further east, in Natal, General Sir Redvers Buller, a courageous but intellectually limited soldier, relieved Ladysmith, and then advanced to the Transvaal frontier.

By midsummer 1900 many fighting men believed the war was over, won by superior manpower and matériel. It was not; a younger generation of Boer commanders came to the fore with a new, war-winning strategy of attrition. Kommandos, disencumbered from their wagon trains, would maintain a continual pressure on the British by lightning raids on camps and lines of communication. Ceaseless guerrilla warfare would make South Africa ungovernable and force the war-weary British to restore the Boer republics’ indepedence.

During the next two years the nature of the war changed radically. Kitchener, who replaced Roberts as commander-in-chief, devised a counter-strategy, which was also based on attrition, but designed to make life unbearable for those who continued to resist. Disaffected areas were criss-crossed with barbed wire and blockhouses; carefully coordinated mounted columns rode to and fro in search of kommandos; and Boer farms and livestock, which provided sustenance for the partisans, were destroyed. Boer women and children and their black servants were coralled into internment camps.

In the early days of the war, British public opinion had rallied to the government with an upsurge of patriotic clamour. Domestic jingoism did not reach the front line, where the ‘soldiers’ songs of the death and glory quality’ which pleased music-hall audiences were actively discouraged around campfires.
30
The tedium of garrison duties, long hours in the saddle, thin and irregular rations, extremes of heat and cold, and disease quickly disenchanted even the most zealous patriot. In a book kept in Cape Town, the ardent young men who volunteered as Imperial Yeomanrymen during the winter of 1899–1900 were asked to fill in their reasons for their arrival in and departure from South Africa. One, who must have spoken for thousands, wrote ‘Patriotic Fever’ and ‘Enteric Fever’.
31

Kitchener’s campaign inspired no patriotic fever in Britain, rather unease about what the war’s critics described as ‘methods of barbarism’. The phrase rang true as Britain heard reports of epidemics sweeping through the internment camps, killing women and children. Contrary to Boer legend, these were not a consequence of deliberate British policy, but the result of contemporary medical and sanitary ignorance. The same distempers which decimated the inmates of the camps also laid low over 16,000 British soldiers, nearly three times as many as died from enemy action. Nonetheless, there was mounting concern at home among humanitarians, left-wing Liberals and Socialists who refused to believe that the ends justified the means.

They did, at least for Kitchener, and in the spring of 1902, when both sides were approaching exhaustion, peace negotiations began. The Treaty of Vereeniging, signed at the end of May, gave the British what they had always wanted, political supremacy. The Boers got £3 million, which they needed to rebuild and restock their farms, and the promise that self-government would eventually be restored to the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The Boer
volk
was also assured that Britain would not make an issue of legal rights for blacks when it came to framing a constitutional settlement for the region.

Britain’s largest imperial war had cost £200 million and had witnessed the mobilisation of 295,000 soldiers, which was evidence of the lengths the government was prepared to go to to uphold paramountcy in South Africa. In a sense, Britain had been defending the imperial
status quo,
which from 1895 onwards appeared imperilled by the Transvaal’s bid for independence and German meddling. To have ignored both would have been to admit weakness, which would have been unthinkable at a time when Britain was under pressure from France, Germany and Russia, who were challenging her position elsewhere in Africa and the Far East. The war was, in international terms, a demonstration of Britain’s imperial will and determination to retain global power, whatever the cost.

Practitioners of the conspiracy school of history, mostly on the left, believed that the war had been secretly engineered by a handful of capitalists, some Jewish, to advance their interests on the Rand. This theory was superficially attractive, but failed to show exactly how the plotters had benefited, something which did not prevent it from becoming widely accepted by those already convinced that capitalism was wicked. In one sense, however, the war assisted business interests by perpetuating the system which relegated the black population to the role of a passive labour force. When the British army rode into Pretoria and Johannesburg, black workers burned their passes, the hated symbol of Boer oppression. They had acted prematurely, as the documents would be needed under the new order. Hundreds of thousands of blacks had been employed by the British during the war, often for wages higher than those commonly on offer. Smaller numbers had been used as armed scouts by column commanders, much to the fury of the Boers who naturally insisted that the war, like the future of South Africa, was the white man’s affair.

7

That Heroic Soul: The Struggle for the Nile

In 1882 Egypt appeared on the way to becoming a thriving, modern state. Its improvement owed much to the ambition and energy of Khedive Muhammad Ali and his successors who, for the past sixty years, had run the country as a private estate. They had encouraged investment in irrigation, railways, ship-building, cotton plantations, schools and universities. Two-fifths of Egypt’s cultivated land was given over to the growing of cotton, most of which was exported to Britain, Egypt’s major trading partner. The remaking of Egypt had been paid for by British and French capital, and by 1880 its total debt topped £100 million, a huge amount for a country whose annual exports averaged £13 million.

In spite of Khedive Ismail’s sale of his 44 per cent holding in the Suez Canal to Britain for £4 million in 1875, Egypt was sliding into insolvency. Various expedients were adopted by the great powers to keep her afloat: in 1876 an international commission was imposed on the government with a mandate to enforce financial stringency, and three years later the new Khedive Tawfiq was persuaded to accept Anglo-French control of his treasury, customs, post offices, telegraphs, railways, ports and even museums. What added up to the gradual erosion of Egyptian sovereignty and the commandeering of its government by foreigners was bound to provoke a nationalist backlash. It first manifested itself in February 1881 with a protest by unpaid army officers, led by Urabi Pasha who, the following September, carried out a
coup d’état
and made himself Minister for War with full control of the army. Urabi was a nationalist who united the fellah class of smallholders, from which he came, with the educated effendi class of landowners and officials. The fellahin were being squeezed off their lands by capitalist agriculture, much of it practised by foreigners who had purchased land in Egypt, and the effendiya were alarmed by the irruption of foreigners into government posts. There were also fears, natural enough, that Egypt would be directly taken over; during the spring and early summer of 1881 the French were putting the finishing touches to their annexation of Tunis.

The appearance of a popular national movement inside Egypt, and with it a government which might not dance to a tune played by foreign functionaries and composed by British and French bankers, took the British and French governments by surprise. In October 1881 they applied the usual antidote prescribed whenever symptoms of restlessness appeared in areas of unofficial empire, and sent a pair of ironclads to Alexandria. Annoyingly, these did nothing to change the minds of the Egyptians.

The British government was in a quandary. Gladstone and his cabinet were operating under considerable constraints since, two years before, their party had campaigned against the amoral adventurism of the Tories and in favour of a pacific foreign policy based on international cooperation. For this to work in the case of Egypt, Britain and France would have to proceed in tandem and with the backing of the rest of Europe. Attempts to produce a joint Anglo-French policy aimed at restoring the
status quo
were, however, overtaken by events in Egypt.

On 11 June 1882 a row over a fare between an Egyptian donkey boy and a Maltese led to a riot in Alexandria in which nearly fifty foreigners were murdered and their property plundered. What was interpreted as the first step towards anarchy in Egypt shook the money markets in London and Paris, where panicky French investors were beginning to offload Egyptian stock. Unease among the business community was reflected in the
Economist,
which predicted on 17 June that ‘very great losses must be incurred and great disturbances to business must arise’ if no effort was made to contain the disorders in Egypt. In parliament there was an angry mood and demands for action. ‘Our side in the Commons is very jingo about Egypt,’ wrote Sir Charles Dilke, a member of the cabinet. ‘They badly want to kill somebody. They don’t know who.’
1
If there was killing to be done, Gladstone hoped that the French would lend a hand, but on 1 July the French assembly voted decisively against armed intervention.

Britain was now alone and facing further defiance from Urabi. After his troops had restored order in Alexandria, he ordered the strengthening of the port’s defences with modern Krupp cannon. By now, a substantial British squadron was lying in the roads, and on 3 July its commander, Admiral Sir Beauchamp Seymour, demanded the dismounting of the new batteries. Urabi refused, and eight days later the cabinet approved the bombardment of the gun emplacements. On 13 July landing parties of sailors and marines entered Alexandria, where law and order had collapsed after the departure of Urabi’s soldiers.

Defending the attack on the fortifications, Gladstone claimed that Egypt was ‘in a state of military violence, without any law whatsoever’.
2
This being so, his government was prepared to send an expeditionary force which would restore order and install a new administration. During August two armies, one 24,000-strong from Britain and the other 7,000-strong from India, converged on Egypt under the command of Wolseley. Warships occupied the canal unopposed and the British landed at Ismailia on 18 August. Four weeks later, Urabi’s fortified camp at Tel-el-Kebir (al-Tall al-Kabir) was stormed and overrun, opening the way for a triumphal march on Cairo. Urabi was taken prisoner, court-martialled and banished to Ceylon.