UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES THE TEMPLE PRIMERS "^/r^n.L-^^c A ^^, HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA By W. BASIL WORSFOLD 1 9 O & 29 &50 BEDFOIiD-STKEST* iJOTCPON :!«,<''*'' ^-.. * \(.i (S ^^17 iQERlsa ^ yf// rig/its resernfed JIT- ^ PREFATORY NOTE H^ g"^/ S As the subject of South African history is one of especial 2 interest at the present moment, and the material which lies^ at the disposal of the historian is both voluminous and intricate, - a word or two on the sources of information upon which I 1 have particularly relied may not be out of place. 2 In my other books on South Africa, and in the Short History which is here presented to the reader, I have gone for my facts to State papers and other official and semi- official publications, Dutch, Colonial, and Imperial ; and to the writings of authors who wrote from personal know- ledge of the events and subjects of which they treat, such as Pringle, Cloete, Mrs Harriet Ward, and Mr John I Mackenzie. 5 In the interpretation of these facts I have been guided by _^(fl) my own personal observation during two years* residence ^n the Cape Colony, and [b) my knowledge of the British Colonies in general, acquired in part by this and a further residence of three years in New Zealand and Australia, and in part by conversation with many Colonial friends whose homes are in Canada, Australasia, and South Africa. More- over, since in South Africa the numerical superiority of the dark-skinned population has influenced, and, indeed, con- 3ditioned, the political and industrial development of the ^European colonists, I have derived some incidental advan- ctage from the independent study of the organisation of "coloured races under European control, which I have been able to pursue in Java and in Egypt. W B W 3811359 CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE The Scene ...-.»••• i CHAPTER 11 The Legacy of the Dutch East India Compant . , 15 CHAPTER III English Ideas and their Effects ... 30 CHAPTER IV Englishmen and more English Ideas ..... 54 CHAPTER V Schism in European South Africa ..... 70 CHAPTER VI Two Views of South Africa ..... 87 CHAPTER VII The Need for Unity . ... 103 CHAPTER VIII Compromise • * .• . ..... 125 viii CONTENTS ■ CHAPTER IX I PAGE 'l Industrial Devfxopment under the stimulus of Gold |I Discovery 142 '^ \ CHAPTER X The Outlanders ......,, 159 CHAPTER XI After the Raid ... ... 182 HISTORICAL SUMMARY INDEX .... 191 »95 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Pass in the Drakenberc. between Natal and the Free State . . ..... Frontispiece PAGE In the Karoo , ....... 6 The Veldt 12 An Ostrich Farm 88 Kimberley Mine (Under old System or Surface Mining) . 100 Summit of Majuba Hill . 118 Early Morning in the Market Square, Johannesburg . 160 The Dutch Church and the Raadzaal (Parliament House), Pretoria 166 President Kruger , . . ^ . , . 168 MAPS Cape Colony in 1795 . . ... .22 The Eastern Border of the Cape Colony . . , 50 To Illustrate the Great Emigration of the Boers . . 72 South Africa in 1899 • » . . ^ • . 154 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA CHAPTER I. The Scene, Twenty years ago Englishmen began to talk of the Unity of the Empire. One or two experiments were made. Under the inspiration of Lord Beaconsfield, India helped England in a European crisis. Canadian boatmen took part in the Nile expedition under Lord Wolseley. These experiments were perfectly successful ; but still the great majority of thinking Englishmen shook their heads when a closer union between the Colonies and the Mother Country was suggested. They thougiit of the great disaster of a hundred years ago, and how New England and Virginia had set up on their account as the United States of America. To ask the great self-governing communities of Australia and Canada to submit to the tram- mels of closer union seemed to endanger the good relations already existing, and to court an ignominious rebuff, or worse, to drive them into a premature separation. In short, it was to forget the great principle laid down by Fox in 1791, when our disastrous interference with the freedom of New England had taught us to deal more wisely with Canada : The only method of retaining distant Colonies 'with advantage Is to enable them to govern themselves. But the world had not stood still for a century. Since Fox*s words were spoken great industrial forces had been at work which had already changed the relationship of the English in England to the English beyond the seas. Rail- ways, steamships, the telegraph and the post, had brought New Zealand closer to London than the Shetland Isles had 2 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA been when the Act of Union made Scotland and England one country in 1707. After Waterloo came the impulse to emigrate. Then commenced that process of reclaiming the desert, of clearing the forest and the bush, of filling up the waste spaces of the earth, of controlling and organising the native races, which has gone on throughout the century. <« We were dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled town ; We yearned beyond the sky-line where the strange roads go down. Came the whisper, came the Vision, came the Power with the Need, Till the Soul that is not man's soul was lent us to lead. As the deer breaks — as the steer breaks— from the herd where they graze, In the faith of little children we went on our ways." Nonv the impulse to federate had come ; to unite all that was best in the old England and the new in a great Anglo- Saxon commonwealth. "Those that have stayed at thy knees, Mother, go call them in — We that were bred overseas wait and would speak with our kin. Gifts have we only to-day — Love without promise or fee — Hear, for thy children speak, from the uttermost parts of the sea ! " The federal idea grew, but it grew more rapidly in the Colonies than in England. In this respect the Colonists had the advantage of Englishmen. They had been long familiar with the idea. When a number of states are united in a federal system, strength is obtained at the least possible sacrifice of liberty ; for the essence of the system is to separate general from local concerns, and to hand over these general concerns to the federal authority, while matters of local interest only are retained by the separate state legis- latures. Under this system the colonies of British North America had been already united, while the Australian Colonies were endeavouring to secure a like unity. More- over, the lost Colonies, the United States of America, had given a great example of the peculiar advantages which such a system aflx)rded, when it was applied to communities THE SCENE 3 separated by long distances and differing from each other in political development. But why all this talk of the federal idea ? What has this to do with South Africa ? Because union under some form or other of federation is the natural goal towards which the Anglo-Saxon com- munities of the British Empire are tending, and a necessary preliminary to the attainment of this goal is the union of the British Colonies which are to be found respectively in Canada, Australia, and South Africa, into three federal groups. If we measure South Africa by this test of unity, we can see at once how far it has fallen behind the other two groups in that course of orderly development which has marked their progress during the nineteenth century ; and the question at once presents itself: why is the con- dition of South Africa to-day so different from that of Canada or Australia ? To explain this difference we must know the circum- stances under which European Colonisation was commenced at the Cape of Good Hope, and examine the origin and history of the relations between England and both the European Colonists and the native races since the begin- ning of the century. As we review these relations we are compelled to ask, whether this unity, which is now being achieved at the cost of millions of money and thousands of brave men's lives, could have been won at any lesser sacrifice. Whether the final struggle might, or might not, have been avoided is a matter upon which each one must make up his mind for himself. But before we do so, we must learn the facts of South African history. This is the evidence upon which our judgment must be given ; and, unfortunately, whatever may be the final verdict of history, there is no question as to the conditions which have made the task of governing South Africa one of supreme difficulty; perhaps the most difficult in which the Anglo-Saxon race has yet been engaged. The barrenness of the country combined with extra- 4 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA ordinary mineral wealth, the fact that the great majority of the early colonists were of alien blood, and the presence of a rival claimant to the soil in the person of the warlike and prolific Bantu — each and all of them have had some- thing to do with it. But subject races, infinitely more numerous and powerful, have been controlled and organ- ised in India ; why not in South Africa ? A foreign colonial population has been won to allegiance in Canada. Again, why not in South Africa ? Why not, indeed ? If either the native question or the nationality difficulty had existed solely in South Africa, it would have been settled long ago as successfully as the one has been settled in India, and the other in Canada. But in South Africa we found them side by side, and they have acted and reacted most disastrously upon each other, until in our endeavour to settle the first we allowed the second to get into such a hopeless tangle, that nothing short of the sword could cut the knot. Let us take each of these elements of difficulty separately, and consider them a little more in detail. First, the physical configuration of the country, and its characteristics of soil and climate. If we look at a map of South Africa — that is to say, of Africa from the Zambesi to Capetown — we find that the mountains lie to the east at a varying distance from the Indian Ocean. Southwards, that is on the eastern borders of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, great mountain masses form a continuous range, the Drakenberg, which attains its greatest height in the mountainous country of Northern Natal and Basutoland. Further south again a succession of lesser ranges stretch parallel to the south coast of the Cape Colony, in the direc- tion of Capetown, where they sweep round to the north- wards. Taking the long range of the Drakenberg as a dividing line, we find the country slopes gradually west- wards over the high plateaus of the Transvaal and the Free State, to the desert levels of Bechuanaland and the northern THE SCENE 5 districts of the Cape Colony; while on the other side it falls rapidly, often in a series of terraces, to the east coast. West of the dividing range South Africa is in general barren and waterless ; east of the range the country is well watered and fertile, and the mountain slopes to the southward are clothed with forest trees. The reason for this difference is to be found in the fact that the rain-bringing winds blow from the south-east, and that the clouds which they bring are caught by the mountain ranges, and the moisture is thus prevented from reaching the interior. Not only is the rain- fall west of the great ranges both deficient and irregular, but the rivers of South Africa as a whole are practically useless both for the purposes of navigation and of irrigation. The rivers wiiich flow west, the great Orange river and its tributaries, are frequently broken by long intervals of barren channels, while those that flow eastwards are broken by the terrace-like formation of the land over which they pour their waters rapidly in a tumultuous flood in the season of rains. Just to give precision to these statements, the average rainfall in the west of the Cape Colony is 9 inches, in the middle 17, while in the east it rises to 27 inches. In the British Isles it has been calculated that the rainfall varies from 22 inches at Greenwich, to 38 in the Orkney Isles, and in France it varies from 24 inches at Paris, to 52 inches in the country on the borders of the Pyrenees. A comparison between these figures enables us to tell at a glance how much drier South Africa is than England or France. The greater part of South Africa is, therefore, by nature a barren and waterless country. And to this original disad- vantage we must add the fact that, when the Europeans arrived, the military tribes were found in possession of the most fertile regions, from which they had driven their weaker kinsmen westwards to the barren uplands and the deserts. And it is in these fertile eastern districts that the great masses of the dark-skinned population remain to-day. Again, to take another test. The wealth of the new tA THE SCENE 7 Anglo-Saxon countries consists in their raw materials and minerals. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, all alike contribute to the food supply of Great Britain. South Africa contributes practically nothing in the shape of food stuffs, while the amount of wool which it sends is only about one-tenth as much as the wool export of Australia. And yet wool is the staple industry of the Cape Colony, Natal, and the Free State. The second element of difficulty is the presence of the dark-skinned Bantu. Of the natives of North America the historian tells us that "the total Indian population within the territory of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains, -did not at any time subsequent to the discovery of America exceed, if indeed it even reached, three hundred thousand individuals." And we know that, since the coming of the white man, the red-skinned Indians have dwindled to insignificance both in the United States and in Canada, while in Australasia, if we except the Maoris, the natives offered little or no resistance to the advance of the European. But of the dark-skinned natives of South Africa the historian has a very different account to give. Mr Theal writes: "That the Bantu population in South Africa, from the Limpopo to the sea, has trebled itself by natural increase alone within fifty years, is asserting what must be far below the real rate of growth." From the first Kafir war in 181 1 to the revolt of the Matabele in Rhodesia in 1896, there have been native wars in South Africa, and it is only by dint of hard and almost continuous fighting, that the supremacy of the European has been established. And this supremacy, established by this costly aud laborious process, has brought with it the heavy responsibility of providing for the physical and moral wants of a native population, which already numbers between three and four millions, and which is rapidly increasing, since the estab- lishment of European control has removed the checks of war and famine. Both the burden of this necessary task of establishing 8 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA European control, and the weight of the present responsi- bility for the education and civilization of the native races, would have been infinitely lighter, if the Europeans had pursued a common policy with a common aim in view. But small as the European population has always been in comparison with the native — it numbers to-day considerably under a million — the power of the Europeans was early in the century weakened by separation and subsequently by actual conflict. The Dutch had one method of dealing with the native tribes, and the British another. Con- sequently these tribes have been more than once provoked to rebellion by the spectacle of disunion ; and disturbances which might have been avoided by administrative means have developed into rebellions which had to be punished by military operations alike disastrous to the victors and the vanquished. The third and most serious of these elements of difficulty is the fact, that at the commencement of British rule the great majority of the European colonists were Dutch and not British. After the first introduction of a consider- able British population in 1820, the Dutch out-numbered the British in the proportion of six or seven to one. The balance has been gradually redressed in favour of the British, but at the present time the Dutch still remain a majority. The original differences of nationality were accentuated by circumstances. The Dutch, or more cor- rectly Franco-Dutch, settlers had been cut off from inter- course with Europe by the illiberal administration of the Dutch East India Company during the eighteenth century, and they had become ignorant and unprogressive. The British settlers came fresh from a great industrial country, and brought with them the ideas and aspirations of the nine- teenth century — the century of industrial and political freedom. Nothing could be more incongruous than the association of these old-world people with the British Colonists in the double task of civilizing the native races and developing the industrial resources of South Africa. The Dutch clung THE SCENE 9 resolutely to their eighteenth century ideas and their primi- tive pastoral life. The British traded in the ports, made harbours and railways, established great mining centres at Kimberley, Johannesburg, and Buluwayo, applying, in the meantime, the humanitarian ideas of the nineteenth century to the government of the natives. In Canada, there was the same conflict of ideas between the French and British settlers; but in Canada, when the nationality difficulty became acute, political unity was adopted. In South Africa, separation was the remedy applied. When rebellions had broken out, both in Upper and Lower Canada in 1837, Lord Durham, in his famous ** Report," thus analysed the situation. In all the four colonies of British North America, he found "a collision between the executive and the representative bodies," whereas "the stability of Britain since 1688 had depended on the responsibility of the government to the majority of the legislature." But in Lower Canada, where the great majority of the inhabitants were French Canadians, he declared that "the real struggle was not one of principles but of race." Great Britain, he added, was responsible for this, because, in order to preserve Canada from the United States, it "had cultivated Lower Canadian nation- ality." And he pointed out the danger of allowing the ! French Canadians, whom he found "an utterly uneducated I and singularly inert population," to remain "an old and I stationary society in a new and progressive world." 1 As the result of Lord Durham's Report, the British i population of Upper Canada was united with the pre- ! dominantly French population of Lower Canada in a system of responsible government. In South Africa the opposite course was taken. In I 1854^ the British Government, in order to lessen the 1 I say 1 854 — the date of the Bloemfontein Convention — because the Sand River Convention of 1852 was due to the military exigencies of the moment. The Bloemfontein Convention v/as part of a deliberate policy — the non-intervention policy — then initiated. lo THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA strain of the South African administration, deliberately cut itself off from the dissatisfied Dutch farmers, known as the Boers, who had left the Cape Colony, and so allowed the Afrikander nationality and system to become strength- ened and established by a separate political existence. The evil results of this step were soon revealed by the political complications which arose out of the industrial development which followed the discovery of diamonds at Kimberley ; and ever since this period (1870) the chief aim of the Imperial Government has been to recover the solidarity of European South Africa which was thus lost. But this remedy of separation, of leaving the Boers to live their own life, would probably not have been applied except for the smallness of the British population then in South Africa. As it was, the small numbers of the British colonists and the backwardness of the Dutch majority made the introduction of any effective system of self-government practically im- possible, and the only alternative to the recognition of the independence of the Boers was a military occupation of the remote territories in which the emigrant Dutch had estab- lished their settlements. At the same time it must be remembered that the British Government were hampered in the solution of the nationality difficulty by the native question. The long series of Kafir wars, necessary to preserve the British settlers on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony, had used up both the men and the money which might otherwise have been devoted to the main- tenance of European solidarity. In its weariness of the Kafir wars the nation saw nothing in the industrial prospects of South Africa to justify so costly and so un- acceptable a remedy as a military occupation of the terri- tories beyond the Orange and the Vaal rivers. From this period onwards the two conflicting principles of the Boer and British systems began actively to work in South Africa ; and the European colonists became more and more attached to the one or other as the years passed by. And so in the closing years of the century the nationality difficulty THE SCENE ii has resolved itself into the plain issue, whether the Boer or Englishman is to be master — an issue which can be decided only by the arbitrament of war. And now let us sum up the effects of these three elements of difficulty and conflict by sketching the condition of South Africa as it was in the year 1899, when the final struggle for supremacy between the Boers and the English arose. In the first place, the conflict between the Europeans and the natives has been practically decided. From the Zambesi to Capetown the Bantu tribes have been subjugated, and have either been enclosed within the limits of one or other of the European Governments, or they have been organised in their own territories under European magistrates. By these means the native question in its original form has been solved, since the natives are no longer likely to break out into dangerous rebellions, and so menace the safety of the European settlers. On the other hand, the native question has acquired a fresh significance since the time when, now some twenty years ago, large masses of the Bantu population were brought under European control. The natives have been prevented from exterminating each other and from making war upon the Europeans. In other words, the native has been preserved in South Africa, and it now remains for the European to devise some means by which he may be taught to take a share in the work of industrial development, and to merit the acquisition of political rights. In the second place, the colonists of the two nationalities have become sharply divided alike in their political organisa- tion and in their industrial pursuits. Looked at from the political point of view the Europeans in South Africa present two groups : the Cape Colony, Natal and Rhodesia under British rule, and the South African Republic or Transvaal, and the Free State. These latter, the two Boer Republics, were possessed of full internal independence ; but their freedom of action in matters which concerned South Africa as a whole was THE SCENE 13 limited by the right of interference claimed and exercised by the Imperial Government as paramount power in South Africa. In the Cape Colony and Natal the colonists, irrespective of nationality, enjoyed the same rights of self-government as the other great colonies of the Empire ; but Rhodesia, owing to the smallness of its European population, was as yet in an intermediate stage. In the Boer Republics, on the other hand, political rights were made dependent upon military service ; and in the Transvaal the conditions under which the franchise could be obtained were so irksome, and required so long a period of residence, that the great majority of the British population were excluded from any share in the government of the Republic. More- over, whereas the coloured population and the natives were admitted within due limitations to political rights in the British colonies, they were rigorously excluded from political, and even in part from civil rights in the two Republics. From the social and industrial standpoint an almost equally marked line of division was to be observed. The great mass of the Boer and Afrikander popula- tion remained essentially a pastoral and unprogressive race. They inhabited the smaller inland towns and villages of the country districts, or lived in isolated homesteads scattered over the Karoo or the high veldt. Here they cultivated their farms in the primitive methods of their forefathers, and raised the cattle and sheep which they sold in the larger towns. But the British colonists, although a certain number of them had engaged in ostrich farming and sheep raising, were concentrated for the most part in the large towns on the coast, or had been drawn to the great industrial centres established in the mining districts. Neither of the two political groups were, however, exclu- sively British or Dutch. In the Cape Colony the majority of the European population were Afrikanders, more or less closely aUied by blood and sentiment to the Boers of the 14 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA Republics ; while in the Transvaal the unenfranchised British settlers were probably twice as numerous as the Boers themselves. I have dwelt upon these characteristic difficulties thus fully at the outset, because the task of welding South Africa into one political and social system still lies before the British people. And it has seemed to me that to place this question of unity thus prominently before the reader will give him a keener interest in following the events of the past. A knowledge of these events should make us at once more hopeful and more resolute. More hopeful, because when we read the history of the events out of which the present situa- tion arose, we feel that our lack of success heretofore is miti- gated, if it be not altogether excused, by the unprecedented difficulties which have accompanied the effort. More resolute, because we cannot fail to see that the one hope of a peaceful and orderly development for South Africa in the future depends upon the establishment of England as the sole and undisputed authority in South Africa. CHAPTER II. The J^egacy of the Dutch JB^ast India Company, The Cape of Good Hope was discovered by accident in the year I486 by the Portuguese navigator, Bartholomew Diaz. 1 say by accident, because the work which Diaz and the other Portuguese navigators of the fifteenth century were engaged upon, was to find an ocean pathway to the East, and so estabHsh direct maritime and trading communication between Europe and the wealthy and civilised countries of Asia — the East Indies, China and Japan. It was the same object which led Columbus ten years later to discover America — only, in his case, the belief that the world was round, led him to take a more direct route, and endeavour to reach the East by sailing westwards. The daring plan of the Genoese sailor would have been crowned with the success which it deserved but for the presence of that unknown obstacle — the continent of America. As it was, it remained for Vasco da Gama, following in the track of Diaz, to reach the distant coast of India in 1498, and thus to break through the monopoly of the carrying trade between Europe and the East, which the Moors and Turks had maintained for so many centuries, at the expense of Christendom. As the result of these discoveries, Portugal enjoyed the profits of the Indian trade for nearly a century ; and the United Kingdoms of Spain and Portugal together reaped the harvest of the gold and silver mines of Mexico and Peru, of the plantations of Brazil, and of the rich islands of the Spanish Main. But at the end of this century — the six- teenth century — the other nations of Western Europe, Holland, England, and France, had begun to compete for these dazzling commercial prizes, and in the opening years i6 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA of the seventeenth century, Portugal had been ousted from her Indian trade by the Dutch, and the eastern trade came to be organised in the hands of two great trading corporations, the Dutch East India Company, and the EngHsh East India Company. Portugal was the first European power of the modern era to acquire possessions in Africa. These possessions on the east and west coasts she still retains, and they form almost the sole remains of the colonial empire which she founded by a single brilliant effort between the years 141 5 and 1580. There is one episode in the establishment of Portugal in Africa which must be mentioned, because it has a direct bearing upon the history of South Africa. On the east coast the Portuguese in general confined themselves to the occupation of the trading centres previously held by the Moors ; and their one effort to acquire a hold on the interior — if we except the establishment of military posts upon the lower reaches of the Zambesi — was directed towards the acquisition of the gold mines of Mashonaland.i This effort was so far successful that in 1630 a treaty was made between the Kafir chief who was master of this region and the Portuguese sovereign, under which the control of the mines was conceded to the Portu- guese authorities. The Kafir chief was grandiloquently styled the Monomotapa, or Lord of the Mines, and the district over which his uncertain rule extended, was known to the Portu- guese and Dutch of the seventeenth century as the Imperium Monomotapae or Monomotapa. It was in virtue of this treaty, to which the Monomotapa had affixed his mark by way of signature, that the Portuguese secured Delagoa Bay in the arbitration between Portugal and Great Britain in 1875. The headquarters of the Dutch East India Company were established then as now at Batavia, in the fertile and populous Island of Java. Java, or more correctly, the kingdom of 1 These mines are known now to have been worked by Phoenician or Sabean colonists ; and the gold-bearing district between the Zambesi and the Limpopo has been identified by some writers with the Ophir of King Solomon. LEGACY OF DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANY 17 Bantam, was also the objective of the English Company, but the English settlements were gradually withdrawn from the islands of the Malay Archipelago to the mainland of Hindo- stan ; and here, in the " India*' of to-day, the factories and trading stations were slowly established in the seventeenth century, by means of which British influence became supreme at the end of the eighteenth, and our Indian Empire was created in the nineteenth. In the year 1652 — the middle of the seventeenth century — the Dutch East India Company occupied Table Bay by a small expedition, placed under the command of John Antony van Riebeck, a surgeon in their service. The Directors of the Company desired to form a naval station, where their outward and homeward bound fleets could obtain supplies, and where, if necessary, sick or disabled men could be left in hospital. Five years after, nine persons in the Company's employment were established on plots of ground behind Table Mountain and ordered to till the soil. These nine discharged soldiers and sailors, planted in the Liesbeck Valley, were the first "free burghers" and the original colonists of South Africa. The establishment or plantation — to use the Seventeenth Century term — of these nine "free burghers " is significant in more ways than one. In the first place, the terms upon which they were established is characteristic of the point of view from which the Directors of the Company regarded the Cape Colony during the whole period of their administra- tion (1652- 1 795). And in the next, the occupation of the Liesbeck Valley led to the first conflict between the natives and the colonists. These natives whom van Riebeck and his settlers en- countered were not the dark-skinned Bantu, who were far away to the eastwards on the other side of the continent, but yellow-skinned Hottentots and Bushmen. They were both feeble races, who could never have hoped to offer a serious resistance to the advance of the white men. But at the present time the white man was represented by the i8 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA little settlement on Table Bay, which numbered only 137 persons in all. The Hottentots wandered in tribes or clans over the mainland from one fertile spot to another, seeking pasturage for the herds of cattle which constituted their sole wealth. One of these clans was in the habit of pasturing its cattle on the very spot in the Cape Peninsula, where the nine settlers had marked out their plots of ground. The Hottentots found the pastures on the banks of the Liesbeck broken up by tillage, and the way to the stream barred by the fences of the colonists. Then, in the simple words of a Hottentot prisoner, which van Riebeck has recorded, they "resolved (as it was their land) to dis- hearten us by taking away the cattle, with which they could see that we broke up and destroyed the best land ; and if that would not produce the effect, by burning our houses and corn until we were all forced to go away.'* At first sight justice seems to be entirely on the side of the native. But the value which was attached to the possession of his country by the Hottentot was something altogether different from the value which the European philanthropist, arguing from his own sentiment of patriotism, imagines him to have placed upon it. When the injury of the Hottentot was measured by a practical test, it was found to exclude any senti- ment of patriotism. Indeed, the native is generally ready like Esau, though without Esau's excuse, to sell his heritage for a mess of pottage. It was to the interest of the Company that the settlers should live on good terms with the Hotten- tots, because they depended on them for supplies of cattle. Van Riebeck was therefore ordered " to treat the Hotten- tots kindly," and not drive them away by harsh usage. The difficulty about the possession of the soil was subsequently overcome by the simple device of purchasing the territorial rights from the chiefs of the tribes who claimed them, and in this way peaceable possession was at length obtained of the Cape Peninsula and the adjacent mainland. Afterwards, when the settlers had increased in numbers, and began to spread further inland, no native claimant appealed to dis- LEGACY OF DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANY 19 pute the soil, until the outposts of the Bantu masses were approached a century later. The terms upon which the settlers obtained their plots of land were these : The Company provided the land, the seeds, tools, and farming-stock, and subsequently exempted Ithe settlers from taxation for a limited period. The settlers on their side undertook to bring all their produce to the Company's stores, and to sell it at such prices as the Company deemed right. So much of their produce as was not required they were allowed to sell to any foreign ships that chanced to put into Table Bay ; but only after the Company's officers had themselves disposed of all the surplus produce that they had in hand. Again, in buying cattle from the Hottentots, the settlers were forbidden to pay more or less than the amounts paid by the Company, so that there should be no interference with its monopoly. The Colony was founded, therefore, on the principles of the counting-house. The Cape Settlement, like the trading stations in the East Indies, and the sugar plantations in Brazil, was intended to yield a profit to the shareholders in Holland. As for the colonists, they were regarded merely in the light of servants placed there to do the Company's work, and entitled merely to so much profit as was allowed them by the terms of their engagement. It is obvious that under such conditions of settlement the colonists could advance no claims to the possession of the soil they tilled, still less to any share in the government of the Colony. And the Directors of the Company re- fused to entertain any such claims during the period of their administration. Twenty years later, in 1679, the population of the Cape Settlement was returned at 300 men and 90 women. By this time the fact was established that Europeans could thrive on the Cape Peninsula, and shortly afterwards some 50 emigrants were sent out by the Company from Holland. In the course of the next five years the first town on the mainland — Stellenbosch — was founded at a point 30 miles 20 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA due east of Capetown : and then — between the years 1688 and 1690 — the Colony received a notable addition to its population in the form of 200 Huguenot refugees. These French Protestants, who had been driven from France by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, con- stituted about one-fourth of the original stock from which the so-called " Dutch " of South Africa have descended. The Directors gave rigorous instructions to Van der Stell, the governor, to mingle them with the Dutch settlers, and to prevent them from forming separate communities and so maintaining their separate nationality. These in- structions were carried out to the letter ; and by the middle of the eighteenth century the French language had been forgotten, and these French settlers had been absolutely incorporated into the Dutch majority. The foundations of the Colony had now been laid ; and during the next century — the eighteenth — the descendants of these settlers gradually spread eastwards into the interior. The process of expansion commenced with the passage of the Drakenstein range at Tulbagh Kloof (pass) in 1700. From this point the settlers spread down the Breede River Valley to the south coast ; and thence eastwards until they came into contact with the Bantu race in 17 40. It be- came necessary now to fix an eastern frontier for the Colony, and the line of the Gamtoos River (a little to the west of the present town of Port Elizabeth) was adopted for the purpose in 1745. Twenty-five years later the Government refused to issue any more "loan leases," or licences to settlers to occupy land. The object of this measure was to maintain the trade monopoly, by putting a stop to " the illicit traffic in the bartering of cattle " with the Hottentots and the " so-called Kafirs," 1 which was being carried on by settlers so far removed from the seat of government. Nevertheless the eastward expansion continued, and in 1 The word Kafir (unbeliever) was applied to the natives of Africa by the Mohammedan traders. It was adopted by the Portuguese, and transmitted by them to the Dutch. ir LEGACY OF DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANY 21 1778 the Governor, van Plettenberg, in the course of a tour of inspection, met the chiefs of the Amakosa in con- ference at the farm of one of the eastern settlers, Prinsloo by name. It was then arranged that the line of the Great Fish River, (about fifty miles eastwards of Port Elizabeth), should be the boundary between the colonists and the Bantu, and at the same time a Landdrost, or resident magistrate, was established at Graaf-Reinet, in the north-east corner of the Colony. The arrangement was no sooner made than it was broken by the Kafirs. The invasion was, however, speedily repelled by the settlers ; and the line of the eastern frontier, as thus constituted, was maintained up to the time when the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope was occupied by Great Britain, and for fifty years after that event. Towards the end of the eighteenth century the adminis- tration of the Dutch East India Company became corrupt and inefficient ; and the government of Holland, with a view of preserving the possessions, which had been acquired through the agency of this great trading corporation, ap- pointed Commissioners-General to enquire into the state of its affairs and reform abuses. The Commissioners selected by the Stadtholder, afterwards William I. of Holland, in 1 791, arrived at the Cape in 1793. They left the Colony in the following year for Batavia, deputing their powers of administrative reform to Sluysken, an invalided official of the Indian Government, who had arrived at the Cape on his way home from the East. It was this official. Commissary Sluysken, who surrendered the Colony in 1795 to the British expedition under Admiral Elphinstone and General Craig. The Commissioners had been too eager to proceed to the more valuable possessions of the Company in the East to effect any reforms at the Cape. Their efforts are summed up in the lively words of a contemporary writer : *' The most important of their proceedings consisted in their proclamation amid firing of cannon and tolling of bells, that they represented the Prince of Orange, and the rest any office-clerk might have done." ^ 1 Christian L, Neathling ; as translated by Judge Watermeyer LEGACY OF DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANY t^ We have now reached a point at which we can pause to take stock of the work accomplished by the Dutch East India Company at the Cape of Good Hope. At the end of the century when their administration ceased, and the Cape was occupied by a British force, there were some 20,oco European settlers scattered over the south- western extremity of the great continent of Africa. Cape- town had grown into a considerable place ; there were small towns, with landdrosts, at Stellenbosch, at Swellendam, and at Graaf-Reinet, but the bulk of the settlers were to be found in the isolated farmsteads scattered over the barren plains which lay between the Cape and the Great Fish River — the eastern boundary which separated the Dutch Colony from the teeming masses of dark-skinned Bantu that crowded the fertile regions between the Drakenberg moun- tains and the Indian Ocean, and threatened even at this early period to dispute the possession of South Africa with the European. What was the condition of these settlers? They formed probably the most backward European community then existing in the old or new worlds. The fact is most clearly revealed by the narrative of the strained relations which existed between them and the govern- ment at Cape Town, during the twenty years which preceded the English occupation. In 1779 the Free Burghers presented a petition to the Directors of the Company, in which they set out their grievances. From this petition it appears that the Cape settlers had not only been denied the most elementary political and commercial rights, but that their social con- dition was one of strange degradation. In it they bring general complaints of tyranny and corruption against the magistrates and chief officials of the Company, and protest against the practice of arbitrary and capricious deportation of offending burghers to the Indian factories. In particular they ask that the Fiscal, the chief law officer of the Colony, should be restrained " from arbitrarily committing burghers to 14 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA prison and from compounding crimes for fines to go to his private purse." The significance of these charges is, however, considerably lessened by the fact that the petitioners desire fuller opportunities for practising themselves the same tyranny which they deprecate in others. For we find them asking in the succeeding clause, ** that the Burghers shall be deemed at liberty to cause their slaves to be whipped by the execu- tioner at the town prison, at their discretion ; without being, however, entitled to act with too much severity ; and that for this privilege no more than one florin should be charged by the officers at the jail." The fact which the next petition discloses is more start- ling. It is " that authentic copies of the particular placaats and ordinances governing the Cape should be furnished for the behoof of the colony ; or, which they preferred, that a print- ing press should be established, and a printer be appointed, so as to enable all members of the community to obtain copies of the laws in force, that they might not longer be subject to the arbitrary exactions of fiscals and landdrosts in the exten- sion and limitation of fines and penalties.'' At this time, therefore, when the eighteenth century was drawing to a close — at a time when a whole literature had been born in the colonies planted by England on the Atlantic seaboard — no printing press had as yet been set up at the Cape. As a matter of fact, we have other evidence of the extraordinary condition of illiterateness to which the majority of the settlers had been reduced. With the exception of the more prosperous among the inhabitants of the Cape Peninsula and Stellenbosch, the settlers possessed no books but the Bibles and hymn books which they had brought out with them from Europe a century ago. This poverty, or entire absence, of literature, had some remarkable and far-reaching effects. Being deprived of communication with Europe through the medium of litera- ture, they remained unmoved by all the momentous changes of thought and manners which distinguished the eighteenth century ; they were ignorant of the scientific and industrial VI LEGACY OF DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANY 25 advances which the civilised world had achieved, and they had been excluded from the bare knowledge of the most conspicuous events and the most pregnant political changes. But that was not all. The absence of books had deprived them of any standard of correct speech, and after a century of isolation, the language of the Boers, or farmers, had degenerated into a. patois, with a vocabulary of a few hundred clipped and mutilated forms. The substitution of this patois, forming as it does a language entirely distinct from the Dutch of Holland, cut off the Boer from any future intercourse with the civilised world through the medium of literature, and to this day prevents their descendants from readily assimilating modern ideas. Of this dialect, the Afrikander Taal, as it exists to-day, Olive Schreiner writes : — " The Dutch of Holland is as highly developed a language, and as voluminous and capable of expressing the finest scintilla- tions of thought, as any in Europe. The vocabulary of the Taal has shrunk to a few hundred words, which have been shorn of almost all their inflections, and have been otherwise clipped. The plurals, which in Dutch are formed in various and com- plex ways, the Taal forms by an almost universal addition of an 'e'; and the verbs, which in Dutch are as fully and expressively conjugated as in English or German, in the Taal drop all persons but the third person singular. Thus the verb ' to be,' instead of being conjugated as in the Dutch of Holland and in analogy with all civilised European languages, thus runs : — ' Ik is, je is, hij is, ons is, yuUe is, hulle is ' — which would answer in English to — I is, thou is, he is, us is, you is, they is ! And not only so, but of the commonest pronouns many are corrupted out of all resem- blance to their originals. Of nouns and other words ot Dutch extraction, most are so clipped as to be scarcely recognisable. A few words are from Malay and other native sources ; but so sparse is the vocabulary, and so broken are its forms, that it is impossible in the Taal to express a subtle emotion or abstract conception, or a wide 20 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA generalisation ; and a man seeking to render a scientific, philosophic, or poetical work in the Taal, would find his task impossible." Trade, and commercial facilities in the form of land and sea communication, have always formed the chief test by which the early progress of a colonial community can be gauged. The condition of the Cape colonists in this respect is suffi- ciently indicated by the eighteenth article of the petition : " We further humbly solicit that your Honours will be graciously pleased to allow to the Cape colonists that two ships may be laden annually for the account of the Cape citizens with such wares as shall be purchased by their appointed agents — the burgher representatives binding them- selves to send back the said ships, laden for their account with Cape produce ; that the same shall be consigned to the Honourable Company, to be sold by public auction in pay- ment of the imported goods ; the undersigned desiring to know, in case of this prayer being granted, what would be the amount of duty which the Company would see fit to impose on this concession of limited export and import. " The Cape Burghers further implore to be allowed to have some vessels to carry the produce of the colony, after the re- quirements of the Company shall have been supplied, to India, and to receive in return wood, rice, and other articles of commerce ; and also they pray for a concession of a trade in slaves with Madagascar and Zanzibar, that foreigners may not enjoy the exclusive profit of this lucrative traffic." In plain words, in order to maintain their trading monopoly, the Company had absolutely excluded the colonists from all business relations with the outside world. But significant as is this list of grievances, the most damag- ing evidence against the Company's administration is afforded by the character of the arguments by which it was sought to justify this illiberal system. The petition itself was referred by the Directors to their legal representative in the Cape Government, the fiscal, for his report upon it ; and here in this report we have a statement of the point of view from LEGACY OF DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANY 27 which the Directors approached even the most legitimate of the petitions advanced by the settlers — the prayer for limited political rights, and for a limited permission to trade outside the Colony. On the subject of political rights this official remarks : " It would be indeed a serious error if a comparison were attempted to be instituted between the inhabitants of a colony situated as this is, and the privileged free citizens of our great towns in the United Provinces. It would be mere de- ception to argue any equality of rights between them. Were it necessary it would be easy to exhibit the origin of the burghers of our Republic and their privileges, in striking con- trast with the origin of the inhabitants of this colony and their claims. But it would be a mere waste of words to dwell on the remarkable distinction to be drawn between burghers whose ancestors nobly fought for and conquered their free- dom from tyranny, and from whose fortitude in the cause of liberty the very power of our Republic has sprung ; and such as are named burghers here, who have been permitted as a matter of grace to have a residence in a land of which pos- session has been taken by the Sovereign Power, there to gain a livelihood as tillers of the earth, tailors and shoemakers. Here comparison is impossible." The claim for commercial privileges he regards as even more preposterous. ** The burghers, whose number is at present far too great, and whom, on this account, it will soon be found very difficult to restrain and govern with a due regard to the preservation of the interests of the State and the Honourable Company, desire to be allowed a right of trading beyond the Colony in ships freighted by them, to Europe, to the African coast, to India, to barter the produce of other lands for that of this country. Now it is clear, and requires no lengthy argument, that for the purposes of enabling a subordinate colony to flourish as a colony, it is not always expedient to apply those means which, considered in the abstract, might be conducive to its prosperity. The object of paramount importance in i8 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA legislation for colonies should be the welfare of the parent State, of which such colony is but a subordinate part, and to which it owes its existence. "No great penetration is needed to see plainly the impossi- bility of granting such a petition. The dangerous conse- quences which would result to the State in general, and, in particular, to the Honourable Company, from the concession to a colony situated midway between Europe and the Indies, of free commerce, are manifest. It would soon be no longer a subordinate colony but an independent State.^" This is a frank statement indeed of the old colonial system — a system which was not abandoned in theory, although it had been abandoned in practice, by England herself, until the principle of Free Trade had been formulated by Adam Smith. The settlers sent more than one deputation to Holland to plead their cause with the Directors. But the Company re- mained obdurate, and its continued refusals, and the subsequent failure of the Commissioners to effect any practical reforms at the Cape, at length drove the settlers into open rebellion. In 1795 the burghers of Graaf-Reinet rose in arms and expelled the Landdrost, Maynier. In the district of Swell- endam the revolt took a more definite form. Not only was the Landdrost expelled, but the burghers convoked a National Assembly, of which Hermanus Steyn was elected president, and declared themselves a Free Republic. This was the state of affairs when the British fleet cast anchor in False Bay. Commissioner Sluysken, in whom the government was vested on behalf of the Dutch East India Company, appealed to {he burghers of Swellendam to assist him in the defence of the Colony, promising at the same time to grant an amnesty and free pardon to the insurgents^ and a prompt consideration of their grievances. But the burghers, so far from rallying to the aid of the Government, saw only in the presence of the enemy a favourable opportunity for ^ I am indebted for these extracts from the petition and the report of the Fiscal to translations of these documents made by the late Judge Watermeyer. LEGACY OF DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANY 29 achieving their independence. To Sluysken's appeal they replied, that they were surprised " that the Honourable Com- missioners did not respect the resolution of the National Con- vention, and still addressed official communications to the Landdrost, whom they had deposed." At the same time they demanded in set terms a recognition of their inde- pendence as the price of their assistance. Such, then, were the circumstances of the Colony, and such the relation of the colonists to the Government, when the rule of the Dutch East India Company came to an end. In the European settlers tyranny had begotten rebellion, and isolation ignorance. The Central Africans and Malays in- troduced by the Company had, together with the Hottentots, formed a slave population considerably more numerous than the Europeans ; and the institution of slavery completed the moral and social degradation of a strangely illiterate and un- progressive community. This community was the legacy which the Dutch East India Company left behind them to the British Government. CHAPTER IIT. :^nglish Ideas and their Effects. The Cape Colony, then, was a Dutch Colony, which came into the possession of England first by conquest, and after- wards by cession. In the fact of its foreign origin it re- sembles Canada, once New France. But in Canada, after the Declaration of Independence had separated the Atlantic Colonies from the mother country, many thousands of United Empire loyalists, as they were called, came across the border, and after filling up New Brunswick and Newfoundland won a new province — Upper Canada — from the primeval forest, in which the British element was predominant. Australia and New Zealand, on the other hand, have been colonised almost exclusively by the Anglo-Saxon race. This fact — the fact of the foreign origin of the original colonists — stands out above all others in the history of South Africa under British rule. In the face of the marvellous expansion of the British race in the nineteenth century we have become accustomed to think of a British Colony as being necessarily a country which is British not merely in name but also in race and in sentiment, and so we have sometimes forgotten or overlooked the wide interval which this fact alone places between South Africa and our other Colonies. Scarcely less important is the further fact, that in South Africa there always has been a native population many times as numerous as the colonists, and this dark- skinned population has remained side by side with the white men, constituting a force for good or evil with which the Government has had constantly to reckon. Both of these facts made the task of the British Government a very difficult one from the first, and for neither of these at least can we be 30 ENGLISH IDEAS AND THEIR EFFECTS 31 held responsible, although we may have subsequently added to the difficulties so created, by administrative errors. But before I speak of the difficulties of the British ad- ministration, it will be well to narrate more precisely how the Cape Colony passed into the possession of Great Britain. In 1793 the Republican Government of France declared war upon England and her allies, and in 1794-5 a French army overran Holland. It was the commencement of the final contest in the long struggle between France and England for maritime and commercial supremacy, which had already lasted for more than a hundred years. In the course of this struggle England had already wrested Canada and India from France. The only injury which France had inflicted upon England was the assistance which she gave to the United States in the War of Independence. Now the forces of France were to be directed in the final contest by the genius of Napoleon. The alliance, or rather conquest, of the Batavian Republic placed the over-sea possessions of Holland at the disposal of the French ; it also exposed them to the victorious fleets of Great Britain, into whose hands they fell one by one. The Cape, although it was a poor and thinly peopled settle- ment in itself, had a strategic importance quite out of pro- portion to its industrial value. It was the half-way house of what was then the only water-way to British India and the Far East ; and a hostile power which held the Cape could conveniently attack the British transports and merchant- men, as they passed backwards and forwards between England and her great dependency. In 1795, therefore, a British Expedition was sent out to occupy the Cape, and so prevent the French from establishing themselves in so im- portant a position. This occupation, which was carried out by Admiral Elphinstone (Lord Keith), was effected in the name of William of Orange, the Stadtholder, who had fled to England after the overthrow of his government and the establishment of the Batavian Republic in Holland. Commissary Sluysken was in a difficult position. On the 3Z THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA one hand there was the mandate from the Stadtholder which the British Admiral had brought : — " We have deemed it necessary by these presents to command you to admit into the Castle, as also elsewhere in the Colony under your Government, the troops that shall be sent thither by His Majesty the King of Great Britain, and also to admit the ships of war, frigates, or armed vessels, which shall be sent to you on the part of His Majesty into False Bay, or wherever they can safely anchor ; and you are to consider them as troops and ships of a Power in friendship and alliance with their High Mightinesses the States-General, and who come to protect the Colony against an invasion of the French. " Consigning you to the protection of Providence, we are " William, Prince of Orange." On the other hand were the instructions which he had received from the Directors of the Company ordering him to hold the Cape, if possible against the French and British alike. But Admiral Elphinstone had eight ships and 4000 men, whilst Sluysken had only 500 Germans in the Com- pany's pay, and some artillery. The burghers who might have supplied him with an effective force were in open revolt. Under these circumstances he made a decent show of resistance, and then submitting to the inevitable, surren- dered Capetown on September i6th, 1795. The first act of the British Government was to abolish the vexatious restrictions upon external and internal com- merce, by means of which the Company's monopoly had been maintained, and to declare that the colonists were henceforth free to sell their produce to whomsoever they chose, and to come and go as they wished by land or sea. The temporary British occupation lasted for seven years. In 1802 the short-lived peace of Amiens was concluded between France and England on a basis of mutual restitution of conquests ; and in pursuance of the terms of this treaty the Cape Colony was evacuated by England in 1803. In the meantime the Dutch East India Company had been ENGLISH IDEAS AND THEIR EFFECTS 33 abolished, and the administration of its possessions vested in an Indian Council directly controlled by the Government of Holland. A member of the newly-created India Council, Jacob De Mist, was appointed to take over the Colony from the English, and to establish a reformed system of adminis- tration. The government of the Colony was then entrusted to General Janssens, by whom it was wisely administered during the next three years. But the peace of Amiens had lasted barely a year. Napoleon had threatened to invade England, and in 1 805 Nelson had destroyed the combined fleets of France and Spain at Trafalgar. Once more the occu- pation of the Cape had become a necessary move in the great game of war. In 1805 a fleet, carrying some 7000 men, was despatched from England, and on January 19th, 1806, the Colony was surrendered to General Sir David Baird. This time possession was taken in the name of the King of England, and since that day the English flag has not been removed from the Castle at Capetown. British rule in South Africa dates therefore from the year 1806. When the allies had entered Paris in triumph in 1 8 14, the Cape Colony was formally ceded to Great Britain by Holland, in the course of the readjustment of territories which followed the downfall of Napoleon and the First Empire. Among the conquests taken from Holland in the war, England retained Ceylon, a part of Dutch Guiana and the Cape ; but she restored the populous and fertile island of Java and its dependencies, which to-day constitute the Indian possessions of Holland, and paid a sum of ;^6,ooo,ooo as compensation. During the early period of British rule — that is to say, from 1 806 to the Great Emigration of the Boers, which took place in the years 1836-38 — the problems of South African administration were rapidly developed. Both the " native question " and. the " nationality difficulty '' appeared, and appeared, too, in an acute form. In 1806 the popula- tion of the Colony numbered 73,663 persons. Of this total, 26,720 were of European descent, 17,657 were Hottentots, 34 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA and 29,256 were returned as slaves. The industrial con- dition of the settlers was so backward that the annual value of their exports was under ;^6o,ooo, while that of their imports did not greatly exceed ^^ 100, 000. The yellow- skinned inhabitants of the Cape, the Bushmen and Hotten- tots, who had offered some slight resistance to the early settlers, had retired to the deserts, or dwindled down to numbers that made them as insignificant as the slaves. But beyond the eastern boundary of the Colony were the virile and prolific Bantu, whom a century of war have made familiar to us under the names of Kafir, Zulu, Basuto, and Matabele, and of whom we speak to-day as the "natives" of South Africa. The Bantu, instead of dwindling, has increased and multiplied ; instead of retiring before the settlers as they spread eastwards, he advanced and watched the approach of the colonists with jealous apprehension. Later on, emboldened by the comparative impunity with which he found he could satisfy his robber instincts, he conceived the hope of driving the white man into the sea. Three times in the course of this short period it was necessary to drive back by force of arms the wave of cruel and untamed humanity, that broke over the frontier and overwhelmed the scattered settlers with death and rapine. It was no light task to protect so small a community — some 30,000 or 40,000 Europeans in all — against a savage neighbour whose numbers were reckoned in hundreds of thousands, and whose people made the art and practice of war the sole occupation of their lives. Yet the task of the English Government would have been comparatively easy, if they had been satisfied with merely securing the frontier. But the English Government and the English nation were not satisfied with this. They held it to be their duty as an Imperial people, not to shoot the natives down like dogs, or crush them in slavery, but to pre- serve and civilise these wild and untamed children of nature. But before this process of civilisation could be ENGLISH IDEAS AND THEIR EFFECTS 35 commenced, it was necessary to establish the authority of the Europeans. In this work of first establishing European control, and then introducing European ideas among the native tribes of South Africa, the inherent difficulties of the task were enormously increased by the character of the Franco-Dutch settlers, who at this time formed the sole European population of the Colony, if we except the English officials and merchants at Capetown. To put the difficulty quite plainly, the English Govern- ment began at once to apply English ideas — nineteenth- century ideas — to the administration of the colony ; and these ideas were totally at variance with the sentiments and practices of a scattered rural community, which, owing to its long isolation from the rest of the civilised world, remained frankly in the stage of the seventeenth century. One of these ideas was the desire to convert the natives to Christianity, and to civilise them by the agency of the missionaries. Another was to recognise the coloured man as the brother of the white man, and to make them both equal before the law. A third was the abolition of slavery — a subject upon which the British world had been deeply moved by the philanthropic agitation which led to the abolition of the slave trade at the end of the eighteenth cen- tury, and which was destined to produce the abolition of the institution of slavery itself at no distant date. In all these matters English opinion was considerably in advance of the rest of the civilised world, and it was a curious instance of the irony of human events that this colony, with its isolated seventeenth-century community, should be given to the Eng- lish nation as the chief field in which the new humanitarian sentiment could be put into practice. There was another idea, which is happily by no means confined to Englishmen to-day, but which was certainly more strongly developed in England at the commencement of the nineteenth century than in any other free people — the respect for the law, as law, apart from the abstract justice of 36 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA the law*s requirements. This respect for the law as the mandate and organ of society, was something quite new to the Boers, who had lived for so many years in their isolated homesteads, exercising a patriarchal authority over the mem- bers of their famiHes, and the slaves or Hottentot servants who ministered to their primitive requirements. Their isola- tion from any civilised public opinion, and their association with inferior races, had united to make each Boer '* a law unto himself." Moreover, under the selfish rule of the Dutch East India Company, the interests of the settlers as a class had been so long dissociated from the interests of the administration, that these settlers of the interior had come to identify government with oppression, and saw in any develop- ment of administrative machinery only an assault upon their personal freedom or industrial interests. Unfortunately the first administrative changes were directed towards the im- provement of the condition of the Hottentots ; and this object could not be achieved without curtailing the absolute freedom which the Boers claimed in the treatment of the people of this race. The early British governors were men of high character and ability. The conditions of their office, that is to say, the facts that the Cape was a possession of great strategic importance, and that the population was of alien race, made it necessary that they should be invested with wide powers, and that their authority should rest mainly on a military basis ; but this authority, whether excessive or not, was at least honestly employed in the one purpose of improving the condition of the inhabitants of the country, both European and coloured, and of placing the relations of the colonists with the Bantu tribes on their eastern border, on as good a footing as was possible. The inhabitants of the Colony, as we have already seen consisted of three distinct classes, the Dutch settlers, the Hottentots, and the slaves. The settlers in the neighbour- hood of Capetown, and in the western and more civilised districts of the Colony, were far in advance of the scattered ;! ENGLISH IDEAS AND THEIR EFFECTS 37 farmers of the interior and eastern districts, who came to be known as the Boers.^ Captain Robert Percival, who visited the Cape Colony in 1796 on his way home from India, gives us the follow- ing description of the Boers as they were at this early period : — " The men are clumsy, stout-made, morose, illiterate, and truly ignorant ; few have indeed any idea whatever of education. Though several were originally of French extraction, particularly the vine-planters, these settlers have been so mixed and intermarried, that little or nothing remains among them of the manner or character of that nation. . . . The schoolmaster ... is kept chiefly for the purpose of keeping their trifling accounts, writing their letters respecting their transactions at Capetown, and singing psalms of a Sunday ; for they afi^ect to be strenuously religious, and are very ostentatious of their devotion : it is a practice with them to be continually chanting hymns and psalms, and before meals they uni- formly use a long prayer or grace. Their children are bred up little better than their slaves, the greatest pan of their education is to learn to shoot, crack whips, drive waggons, and perhaps barely to read and write a little. *' The avarice of these Boers is also so great as often to disappoint their own objects ; they do not even allow the calves a sufficient quantity of milk to rear them healthy and strong, so eager are they to make butter and turn it into ready money." The general policy sketched for the guidance of the early governors in dealing with the Boers, is stated in a despatch of July 1800, which was written by the third Duke of Portland, who was then acting as Secretary of State for the Colonies. He writes : — "Considering the tract of country over which these border inhabitants are dispersed, the rude and uncultivated state in which they live, and the wild notions of independ- 1 The word Boer means " farmer," and it is used to designate these Dutch settlers of the interior by the contemporary English travellers. \ %j.^' '*> r^^ I 38 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA ence which prevail among them, I am afraid any attempts to introduce civilisation and a strict administration of justice will be slow in their progress, and likely, if not proceeded upon with caution and management, rather to create a spirit of resistance, or to occasion them to emigrate still further from the seat of government, than answer the beneficent views with which they might be undertaken. In fact, it seems to me the proper system of policy to observe to them is to interfere as little as possible in their domestic concerns and interior economy ; to consider them rather as distant communities dependent upon the govern- ment than as subjects necessarily amenable to the laws and regulations established within the precincts of govern- ment. Mutual advantages arising from barter and commerce, and a strict adherence to good faith and justice in all relations with them, joined to efficient protection and occa- sional acts of kindness on the part of the Government, seem likely to be the best means of securing their attachment." The difficulty was to apply this principle of non-inter- ference without renouncing the functions of government altogether ; since in the case of so backward a community as the Boers, non-interference was tantamount to becoming a party to injustice so flagrant that no civilised government could permit it within its borders. It meant also — which was not recognised at first — that the British Government would be insensibly and prematurely drawn into a struggle with the Bantu, since the alternate attacks and intrigues of the Boers hastened the disintegration of the Kafir tribes on the eastern border. Accordingly successive governors, with every intention of leaving the Boers alone, found that it became more and more impossible to follow this policy of non-interference ; for every step forward, which the British administration took, brought it into more hopeless conflict with Boer ideas. Lord Caledon, the first English governor after 1806, improved the postal communication of the Colony, and initiated a circuit system by means of which the settlers ENGLISH IDEAS AND THEIR EFFECTS 39 throughout the Colony could avail themselves of the services of the judges of the High Court. But his most important measure was the enactment of a series of regula- tions which were intended to improve the condition of the Hottentots. The purpose of these regulations was to secure for them the elementary rights of a free people, and at the same time to prevent them from so using their freedom as to become a source of danger to the Europeans. Under the Dutch laws the Hottentots had been left nominally in the position of an independent race ; that is to say, they remained under the control of their own chiefs, and were not held amenable to the laws of the Colony. In practice, how- ever, their position has become more subservient than that of the negro slaves. <'A Dutch farmer," writes Percival, " claims all children born of a Hottentot woman by another father than one of her own tribe, as slaves ; even those arising from their own connection with a Hottentot woman ; and also all the children which spring from the connection of a Hottentot man with a slave woman of any denomina- tion. But the Dutch masters went still farther ; for the children of Hottentots living with them as hired servants, although both father and mother belonged to that race, were yet retained as slaves till they arrived at the age of twenty- iive years ; and although the laws in favour of the Hottentots obliged the Dutch to register such children at the Cape, and to give them their freedom at this age, yet the period of their liberty was in reality little nearer than before, unless they deserted into the wild and uncultivated parts of the interior, far beyond the reach of their masters. Many arts were employed to retain them beyond the age of twenty-five years ; it was usual to keep them in ignorance of the age of their birth, and thus make them continue to work till their strength began to fail them. When old . . . they were discharged ... to misery. . . . Those unhappy natives who engage by the year in the service of a Dutch farmer, when they wish to depart, often find their children detained from them. . . ." 40 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA The condition of the Hottentots, the sole representatives of the original inhabitants of this part of Africa, was such therefore as might legitimately claim the attention of the governor of the Colony. Under Lord Caledon's enact- ment they were removed in 1809 from the authority of their chiefs, and placed under the control of the Colonial Government. They were made subject, however, to a code of special regulations similar to that which is now in force in Natal for the government of the native population within that colony. In order to prevent vagrancy, and to secure the safety of the Europeans, the Hottentots were forbidden to leave the locations set apart for them without permission from a magistrate or a European employer. On the other hand, the personal freedom and the property of the Hotten- tots were secured by the right they now enjoyed of seeking the protection of the colonial courts of justice ; and in particular, the practice of retaining the children of Hottentot servants as " apprentices " was declared to be illegal. This last provision was so much at variance with the sentiment of the settlers, that it was subsequently rescinded (1812) by Sir John Cradock, the succeeding governor; and it was not until 1828 that the Hottentots, in common with the rest of the free coloured population of the Colony, were made equal with the Europeans before the law. Nevertheless, although the interests and prejudices of the Boers were amply considered, and the amount of protection given to the Hottentots was reduced to the lowest limits consistent with public morality, yet when the Govern- ment came to put these reasonable provisions into force, they found that the Boers preferred the risk of open defiance to the smallest departure from their self-constituted claim of dealing with the Hottentots as their absolute chattels. Itwasthisstrange and inconceivable issue that led to the first open and deliberate resistance to the authority of the British Government. Before relating the circumstances of the rebellion of Slaghter's Nek, however, it is necessary to refer to the presence of the missionaries in South Africa. ENGLISH IDEAS AND THEIR EFFECTS 41 Missionary agency represented the nineteenth century in its most pronounced form ; and it is only natural that the conflict between English and Boer ideas in South Africa should have assumed its most bitter phase in the persistent hostility with which the Boers and the missionaries have regarded each other. It must also be added that while missionary effort in South Africa has produced a large balance of good, it has more than once been the means of evil. The very earnestness of the British nation, and the intense interest which they took in the work of civilising the native races, made the missionaries not merely a social, but also a political power in South Africa ; and the missionary factor, when employed as the instrument of political views, seriously increased the difiiculties of the colonial administration. It introduced in its most violent form that very interference with the domestic concerns and interior economy of the Boers, which the wise policy of the English Government sought to reduce to the narrowest limits. And at times it has by virtue of its political power, been able to interfere with disastrous results, in cases where the interests of the Europeans and the natives were in conflict, in the execution of measures, which the Colonial Government deemed, and deemed rightly, to be necessary and indispensable to the well-being of the Europeans in South Africa. In 1802 Dr van der Kemp, who had been sent out by the London Missionary Society four years previously, to work among the Kafirs, established a Hottentot Mission in the neighbourhood of Algoa Bay. This mission was afterwards removed to Bethel's Dorp on the banks of the Zwartkops River. The institution of circuit courts by Lord Caledon was followed by a very grave action on the part of Dr van der Kemp, and his assistant the Reverend J. Read. Cloete's account of the affair is this. From seventy to eighty cases of murders, aggravated assaults, and the like, alleged to have been committed upon Hottentots, based upon accounts published in the reports of the mission- 4 2 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA aries, and circulated among the supporters of the society in England, were brought forward against the Boers in the calendar of the very first circuit which went through the Colony. These charges, in which the members of almost every respectable family on the frontier were concerned, were not finally disposed of until the third session of the circuit court, in which Cloete himself sat as registrar. Of the result he writes : " It is but just to add, that of the long list of atrocious crimes thus enquired into, with the utmost care and impartiality, not one single instance of murder was proved against the accused, although in a few cases, acts of personal assault, and transgression of some Colonial law were brought home to them (the offenders) and punished accordingly." As an example of the absurdity of some of the charges, he gives the case of a widow woman, who was accused of a wilful murder by scalding to death, when, as a matter of fact, she had applied a hot bath to the frost-bitten feet of a Hottentot servant. Moreover, under the then Colonial law, the public prosecutor was entitled to double costs, and the defendants in a Government prosecution, whatever the event, were liable to pay the costs. In these trials one hundred families were involved, and a thousand witnesses were summoned and examined ; the expenses therefore which fell upon the innocent and guilty parties alike were very heavy. It is difficult in the face of this precise and definite evidence of the actual registrar of the court to avoid the conclusion that the missionaries had been singularly indis- creet on this occasion in their zeal for the oppressed Hottentots. And unfortunately, the bad effect of their action was not confined to the creation of a feeling of hostility against themselves ; but from this time onwards the Boers came to distrust the administration of justice in general, and to regard the newly established circuit courts as instruments designed for their humiliation and annoyance. ENGLISH IDEAS AND THEIR EFFECTS 43 This unfortunate action of the missionaries explains, although, of course, it does not justify, the extraordinary event which led to the rebellion of Slaghter's Nek. It is almost impossible to overrate the importance of a clear statement of the facts of this rebellion. On the one hand, such a statement shows upon how slender a basis the accusation of bad faith, persistently brought against the British authorities by the Boers throughout the century, rests, and on the other, it reveals a state of demoralisation among the Boers which cannot otherwise be brought home to the modern mind. Cloete characterises the rebellion as " the most insane attempt ever made by a set of men to wage war against their sovereign," originating entirely in the unruly passions of a few persons, who "could not suffer themselves to be brought under the authority of the law.'' But he adds, that he knows from conversation with the descendants of the executed rebels, that the remembrance of this rebellion left in their minds "a far more indelible impression than even the losses of the Kafir wars, or even the abolition of slavery." I give the facts as they are stated by Thomas Pringle, who was living in the actual scene of the rebellion, only a few years after the event. His authorities, he tells us, are ( i ) the report, printed in Dutch, of the Special Commission appointed to try the criminals, and (2) the accounts which he him- self received from the magistrates of the district, and from some of his Boer neighbours who had themselves taken part in the conspiracy. The significance of Pringle's narrative, abounding as it does in details which throw light not only upon the moral perversity of the Boers, but also on the honourable forbearance displayed by the British officers concerned in the affair, must justify the length of my quotations. " Some time in i 8 1 4, a Hottentot, named Booy, appeared at the magistrate's office at Cradock, and complained of the oppressive conduct of Frederick Bezuidenhout, a Dutch- African colonist, who resided at the place now called 44 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA Cameron's Cleugh, on Bavian's River. Booy, it appeared, had been for several years in the service of this Boer ; but when the term of his contract had expired, Bezuidenhout peremptorily refused to permit him either to depart, or to remove what little property he had on the place. Captain Stockenstrom, who at that time filled the office of deputy- landdrost of the sub-district of Cradock, gave the complainant a letter to Opperman, the field-cornet of Bavian's River, desiring that officer to enquire into tlie case ; and in the event of the Hottentot's statement proving correct, to take care that his property was delivered to him, and that he was allowed to remove unmolested. The field-cornet having gone to Bezuidenhout's place with Booy, found the Hot- tentot's statement to be perfectly correct. The Boer at once admitted the facts ; but instead of yielding obedience to the magistrate's order, he boldly declared that he considered this interference between him (a free burgher) and his Hottentot, to be a presumptuous innovation upon his rights, and an intolerable usurpation of tyrannical authority. He told the field-cornet that he set at defiance both himself and the magistrate who had sent him on this officious errand ; and to give further emphasis to his words, he fell violently upon poor Booy, gave him a severe beating, and then bade him go and tell the civil authorities that he would treat them in the same manner if they should dare to come upon his grounds to claim the property of a Hottentot. . . . *' Upon receiving the field-cornet's report of Bezuiden- hout's outrageous conduct, the magistrate instituted legal proceedings against him before the local court. But the Boer treated the regular summonses that were delivered to him with the same audacious contempt with which he had repelled the monitory intervention of the field-cornet, even threatening with personal violence the judicial messengers. The case was thus brought regularly before the Judges of Circuit, at GraafF-Reinet, in 1815, when the defendant, maintaining the same contumacy, and refusing to appear, he was sentenced to imprisonment for contempt of court. ENGLISH IDEAS AND THEIR EFFECTS 45 " It now became necessary to act with vigour, or else to expose the laws and courts of justice to the utter con- tempt of the colonists. The under-sheriff was therefore despatched by Captain Stockenstrom, who had recently been appointed chief magistrate (landdrost) of the district, to take Bezuidenhout into custody ; and as this audacious burgher had sworn never to surrender himself, the officer of justice was accompanied by a military escort to protect him in the execution of his duty. As soon as Bezuidenhout saw this party approaching his house, he, with a coolness and determination worthy of a better cause, betook himself to a cave in a huge rock overhanging the river, into which he had previously conveyed a large quantity of powder and ball, together with a supply of provisions, to stand a siege, and, compelling two young men, who lived with him, to accompany him, with their arms, he commenced a brisk fire upon the under-sheriff and the mihtary. The place was then sur- rounded ; and, as the desperate Boer would listen to no parley, but continued to shoot resolutely at every man who came within reach of his long-barrelled elephant gun (^roer), a fire of musketry was opened against the garrison of the cavern, the besiegers ensconcing themselves as well as they could behind the large stones and ledges of rock that lay around. At length, in Bezuidenhout's eagerness to get a good aim at one of the assailants, his person became so much exposed that a ball fired by one of the Hottentot soldiers from the opposite side of the river, took effect, and killed him on the spot.'* The death of Bezuidenhout threw the Boers of the sur- rounding districts into a condition of wild excitement. What galled them to the quick was that soldiers of the despised race, the Hottentot regiment, should have been the instru- ment used in the vindication of the law. They gathered in large numbers to the funeral, and denounced the laws for the protection of the Hottentots in particular, and the English Government in general, in wild harangues, which culminated in an oath of vengeance, sworn by the younger and more violent patriots, over the corpse of the dead burgher. 46 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA Subsequently a meeting of the disaffected Boers was held on the Tarka River, under the leadership of Henry Prinslo, at which the grievances of the burghers were formulated, and " a conspiracy was then entered into to bring about a general insurrection, and to call in the aid of the Kafirs to assist them in expelling the English from the eastern parts of the colony." In order to effect this purpose, it was agreed to despatch a letter to a Boer named Krugel, who lived at Rhinosterberg, desiring him to rouse the burghers on the northern border. This letter was written by Bothma, a man previously convicted of forgery ; it was signed by Prinslo, and entrusted to two brothers named Muller, who were also present at the meeting. The Mullers, however, mstead of taking the letter to Krugel, gave it to the Field- Commandant, van Wyk, who at once communicated with the ofHcer in charge of van Aard's post, by whom Prinslo was promptly arrested. The next step of the conspirators was one of criminal recklessness. In spite of the arrest of their leader they sent a deputation to the Kafir chief Galka, " with instructions to propose an alliance between him and the insurgents, for the purpose of expelling the English from the eastern districts." Gaika's reward was to be the Zuur- veldt and other districts west of the Fish River, from which the Kafirs had been expelled by the English Government in the war of 1 8 1 1- 1 2. But the Kafir chief was astute enough to see through the designs of the Boers. He had no desire, he said, to "place himself like a silly deer between a lion on the one side and a wolf on the other." The arrest of Prinslo, the failure of the plan to raise the northern border, Gaika's refusal to co-operate, and the activity and loyalty of the Landdrost, Stockenstrom, who called out the burghers of the disaffected districts and warned them of the criminal folly of the proposed revolt, reduced the numbers of the burghers who actually took up arms to some sixty persons. " This band rode down on van- Aard's, the nearest mili- tary post, and demanded the release of their captured leader. ENGLISH IDEAS AND THEIR EFFECTS 47 Prinslo, but as Captain Andrews did not think fit to comply, they retired without venturing upon an assault, and took pos- session of a pass which commands the valley of the Great Fish River, at the eastern termination of the Boschberg Range, immediately below the influx of Bavian's River. Here they were met a few days afterwards by a detachment of British troops, hastily collected by Colonel Cuyler from the frontier garrisons, accompanied by a body of their own countrymen, the burgher militia, under their local officers. As Colonel Cuyler's force advanced up the hill called Slaghter's Nek, on the brow of which the insurgents were posted, the latter were seen shaking hands together as a mutual pledge to fight to the last ; and there were doubt- less men among them, and especially some of the near rela- tives of the deceased Bezuidenhout, of a character sufficiently resolute and desperate to dare any extremity. But while they were levelling their long guns to take deadly aim at the leaders of the advancing troops, and voices were heard loudly calling out in Dutch to the loyalist burghers to separate them- selves from the military, in order to prevent bloodshed be- tween brethren. Captain (afterwards Colonel) Fraser, ordering his men to halt, advanced alone to hold a parley with the rebels. A gun was levelled, and a finger was on the trigger to seal the fate of this brave and generous officer, but the weapon was struck down by William Prinslo — my future acquaintance, Groot Willem. Fraser called to their leaders, and others whom he knew personally, and who loved and respected him. They gathered round him. He addressed them with energy on the folly of their attempting to resist the overwhelming force which, from more than one quarter, was advancing towards them ; and on the insanity of shutting themselves out from all hope of mercy by the fruitless shedding of blood. They were touched and convinced by his address. They wavered in their resolution, and, after a brief consulta- tion, all agreed to surrender — with the exception of five of the more desperate delinquents, who, seeing that * the game was up,' mounted their horses and iied up Bavian's River." 48 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA The five men who thus escaped were Hans Bezuldenhout, the brother of Frederick, and CorneUus Faber, his brother- in - law, Theumis de Klerk, and Stephanus and Abraham Bothma. Four were overtaken by Captain Andrews, with a force of Hottentot dragoons, as they were making their way with their waggons towards the frontier. Faber and the two Bothmas were taken alive, but Bezuidenhout, aided by his wife and little son, fought to the death. The whole of the in- surgents were brought up for trial before a Special Commission of the High Court at Uitenhage. Five, Prinslo, the two Bothmas, Klerk and Faber, were sentenced to death, Krugel was transported for life. The others were punished by fine, forfeiture, imprisonment, or banishment, in accordance with the character of the criminal acts of which they were con- victed. The sentence of death was executed on March 9th, 18 16, at van-Aard's Post, or Slaghter's Nek, in the presence of the remaining prisoners. An accidental occurrence, the fall of the beam of the gallows, which prolonged the execu- tion, added to the horror of the spectacle. It is worth noticing what, according to Pringle, were the results of this necessary severity. He and other Scotch emigrants, forming part of the Albany settlers of 1820, were placed on a location surrounded by the burgher population most deeply concerned in the insurrection. But he adds, " they had received a lesson not likely to be soon for- gotten ; and we found them very submissive subjects to the Government, and inoffensive neighbours, so far as we were concerned." The missionaries suffered for their indiscretion. After the disastrous results of Dr van der Kemp's charges, the Colonial Government practically closed the Colony for a time against fresh missionary efforts as being dangerous to public order. Robert Moffat, who was sent out in 18 16 to work amongst the Bechuana tribes, northward of the Cape Colony, was at first detained at Capetown. Eventually he made his way to Kuruman, where he was subsequently joined by David Livingstone, who afterwards became his son-in-law. ENGLISH IDEAS AND THEIR EFFECTS 49 Here, amongst the industrial Bantu, excellent work was done by Moffat, Livingstone, and Mr John Mackenzie. But the position of the missions within the Colony became so unsatisfactory that the London Missionary Society de- termined to send out Dr Phillip as superintendent, with a view of putting them on a sounder basis. Dr Phillip appears to have been a well-meaning but indiscreet man, whose ability made his indiscretion all the more disastrous. He was constantly in conflict with the Colonial Government from his first arrival in Capetown, and we shall have occasion more than once to note the influence of the mission- ary factor as a political force in South Africa. In the meantime, as though the difficulties of internal administration were not sufficient to occupy the energies of the Government, movements were taking place amongst the Bantu masses which continually threatened the security of the eastern border. As we have already seen, the eastern border of the Cape Colony, when it was transferred to the English Government, was the line of the Great Fish River. Owing, however, to the expansion of the Bantu population between the Drakenberg and the Indian Ocean, and to the predatory habits of the border tribes, the Kafirs had gradually established themselves in the districts immediately to the west of the Fish River within the colonial boundary. The object of the first Kafir war (1811-12) was to clear the colony of these dangerous and unlawful intruders ; and when this object had been effected by a combined force of burghers and British troops under Colonel Graham, a series of military posts were established. It was the policy of Sir John Cradock to keep this area between the Sunday and Fish rivers as a neutral zone, and in pursuance of this policy he allowed only a small number of burghers to settle in the immediate neighbourhood of the chief of these stations, which came to be called Grahamstown, in order that the garrisons might be provided with supplies. It is necessary to notice the circumstances of this first war because it was the starting-point of along series of Kafir wars. i^ If. w ENGLISH IDEAS AND THEIR EFFECTS 5« These wars came to be regarded at a subsequent period by a lajge section of the people of England as wars of aggression waged in the interests of the colonists. This view, which is entirely erroneous, would never have been entertained at all if only the early history of the relations between the Kafir tribes and the Colonial Government had been remembered. Both in India and in South Africa the English have estab- lished their authority over the barbarous or semi-civilised tribes upon their borders. This has been done, not because these governments wished to acquire fresh territory, but for the simple reason that the safety of their own subjects could not otherwise be secured. Two civilised powers can live side by side as good neighbours without injuring each other, or encroaching upon each other's rights, but when a civilised power has a savage or semi-civilised people for its neighbour, it is compelled to pursue one of two courses. It must either be prepared to deal with the savage power continually as an enemy, by always maintaining a military force on its frontier strong enough to repel an invasion ; or it must make up its mind to be the friend of its savage neighbour by teaching it how to become a civilised and well governed state. The English Government began in South Africa by the first plan ; but it gradually found that this plan became more and more difficult to pursue, and then, taught by experience, it began to adopt the second, and eventually ended by undertaking the heavy responsibility of entirely governing the native popula- tion on its colonial borders. To represent the wars by which British authority was ultimately established over the Bantu tribes as wars of aggression is to give an absolutely false idea of the facts of the case. In reality, the English people were extremely reluctant to undertake the task of governing these turbulent neighbours, and they only did so when they had been convinced by bitter experience, that no other plan could be found by which the colonists and the Kafirs could live in peace. To govern the natives became therefore the plain duty of England in South Africa as a colonial power, and the English people reluctantly assumed a responsibility from 52 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA which they could not escape without at the same time re- nouncing their position as an Imperial people. The second Kafir war arose out of a premature application of the second plan. Lord Charles Somerset, who had suc- ceeded Sir John Cradock as governor in 1814, determined to establish friendly relations with the savage neighbour of the Colony. For this purpose he held a conference with the Kafir chiefs in 18 17, at which it was agreed that Gaika should be recognised as paramount chief of the border tribes. In return for this recognition of his authority, Gaika was to maintain peace upon the border, and to prevent the Kafirs from making incursions into the Colony. The sequel showed the inherent difficulty of all such dealings with a savage power. Tribal wars broke out ; Gaika's authority was defied by a lesser chief, T'slambie, and Gaika, being worsted in battle, appealed for assistance to his new ally. The Colonial Govern- ment gave him this assistance, and thereupon T'slambie, sup- ported by the main strength of the Amakosa clans, turned upon the British Government, and invaded the Colony. When the Kafirs had been beaten back, and Gaika's author- ity restored, a new disposition of the frontier was made. The chiefs undertook to withdraw their people to the line of the Chumie and Keiskamma rivers, and to leave the belt of country thus vacated between these rivers and the colonial boundary as a neutral zone. This arrangement was based mainly on military considerations. It had been found that the bush on the east bank of the Fish River afforded a convenient cover from which the Kafir marauders could sally forth into the colonial territory, and so escape the vigilance of the military posts. Its object, therefore, was not to gain fresh territory, but to make the colonial boundary already recognised, secure. At the same time two mission- aries were sent to Gaika in order that the chief's influence might be strengthened, and his people might hear something of the white man's ways, and come" to look upon him as a friend instead of an enemy. Lord Charles Somerset's presence upon the eastern border ENGLISH IDEAS AND THEIR EFFECTS 53 led to an event second only in importance to the arrival of van Riebeck and his company in 1652. This event — the first establishment of a British population in South Africa — will be more suitably narrated in the succeeding chapter ; but before this account of the period in which the Cape Colony was merely a British possession is closed, a word of mention must be given to one or two administrative reforms. In addition to the reforms already mentioned as due to Lord Caledon, the " loan leases " of the Dutch Government were converted by Sir John Cradock in 18 12 into perpetual quit-rent tenures, and the Dutch farmers acquired a virtual free- hold of farms varying from 6000 to 20,000 acres in extent. By this measure the more enlightened farmers were encouraged to adopt better methods for the cultivation of their farms. At the same time schools were established in the remote country districts, in order that the children of the scattered farmers might not any longer grow up in ignorance. Lord Charles Somerset made a further contribution to the develop- ment of the natural resources of the Colony. Merinos were imported from Europe, and Government farms were established for the breeding of fine-wooled sheep in both the western and eastern provinces. In this way the introduction of fine wool producing sheep, which had been already commenced by Reitz and van Breda in the district of Swellendam, was stimulated, and the foundation of the wool industry, which remains to-day the staple industry of agricultural South Africa, was laid. CHAPTER IV. Englishmen and more English Ideas, The twenty years which followed the battle of Waterloo was a period in which a great movement of emigration from the British isles took place. After the close of the long Napoleonic wars a large number of men, who had been engaged in the business of war, were free once more to return to the pursuits of peace. Under the then existing industrial conditions it seemed impossible to find employment for them all, and many thousands of men with their families left the old country to find new homes in Canada, Australia, and South Africa. In a single year, 1831, it was computed that 18,000 emigrants left Ireland for Canada, and in four years, when the movement was at its height, no less than 160,000 persons left the British isles for the same country. It was during these years that the colonies, which form to- day the great Canadian dominion, received the influx which made their population predominantly British. In the early part of this period the first British settlers were established in South Africa. Lord Charles Somerset, in the course of his visit to the eastern frontier during the second Kafir war, was struck by the appearance of the country westward of the Great Fish River, which he declared to be unrivalled for its " beauty and fertility " ; and he suggested to the Home Government that they should establish a colony of British emigrants in this district. This suggestion was approved. Some 50c o per- sons were selected from the 90,000 applicants who offered themselves, and in the year 1819-20- the emigrants were conveyed across the seas to Algoa Bay. The majority of them were subsequently established in the district 54 ENGLISHMEN AND MORE ENGLISH IDEAS 55 between the Bushman and Fish rivers, which has since been known as Albany. Grahamstown and Port Eliza- beth were developed by these settlers, and they and their descendants formed the basis of the predominantly British population which now inhabits the eastern provinces. They had a hard time at first. Their crops failed ; floods swept away houses and stock, and devastated the fields which had been laboriously brought into cultivation. But they were saved from actual starvation by the supplies of food pro- vided by the Cape Government, and their fellow-country- men in England and in India generously assisted them in their distress. When the first period of constant struggle with the forces of nature was passed, and they had begun to adapt themselves to the conditions of colonial life, and in some cases to find fresh avenues of industry in trade and commerce, they were subjected to new dangers and dis- asters ; for the heaviest shock of the inevitable collision between the European and the Bantu was borne by them in the long series of Kafir wars. Among the emigrants was a party of Scotsmen, of whom Thomas Pringle, after- wards the Secretary of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery, was the recognised leader. His Narrat'vve of a Residence in South Africa is a valuable record of this early period in the history of South Africa. This narrative, and his South African poems, are full of vivid pictures of colonial life and scenery. I take one, because it presents not merely the motives and aspirations of this particular party of emigrants, but the spirit in which the British emigrants in general went forth at this time to fill up the waste places of the earth. The natural and legitimate idea of the individual emigrant to improve his material position is uppermost, but the thought of duty is not entirely ex- cluded, nor the consciousness that emigration is a function of the Anglo-Saxon race, and as such may become a means of extending civilisation throughout the world. "July 2nd was our first Sunday on our own grounds. . . . The whole party were accordingly settled after breakfast, 56 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA under a venerable acacia-tree, on the margin of the little stream which murmured around our camp. . » It was, indeed, an affecting sight to look round on our little band of Scottish emigrants, thus congregated for the first time to worship God in the same glen allotted for their future home and heritage of their offspring. There sat old , with his silvery locks, the patriarch of the party, with his Bible on his knee, — a picture of the high-principled, grave Scot- tish husbandman, his respectable family seated round him. There was the widow , with her meek, kind, and quiet look — (the look of one who had seen better days, but who in adversity had found pious resignation), with her three stalwart sons and her young maiden daughter placed beside her on the grass. There, too, were others, delicate females, — one of them very nearly related to myself — of whom I need not more particularly speak. There was , the younger brother of a Scottish laird, rich in blood, but poor in fortune, who, with an estimable pride, had preferred a farm in South Africa to dependence on aristocratic connec- tions at home. Looking round on these collected groups, on this day of solemn assemblage, such reflections as the following irresistibly crowded on my mind : * Have I led forth from their native homes, to this remote corner of the globe, all these my friends and relatives for good or for evil ? — to perish miserably in the wilderness, or to become the honoured founders of a prosperous settlement, destined to extend the benefits of civihsation and the blessed light of the Gospel through this dark nook of benighted Africa ? The issue of our enterprise is known only to Him who ordereth all things well : " Man proposes, but God disposes." But though the result of our scheme is in the womb of futurity, and although it seems probable that greater perils and priva- tions await us than we had once calculated upon, there yet appears no reason to repent of the course we have taken, or to augur unfavourably of the ultimate issue. Thus far Providence has prospered and protected us. We left not our native land from wanton restlessness or mere love of change, ENGLISHMEN AND MORE ENGLISH IDEAS 57 or without very sufficient and reasonable motives. Let us, therefore, go on calmly and courageously, duly invoking the blessing of God on all our proceedings ; and thus, be the result what it may, we shall feel ourselves in the path of active duty/ With these, and similar reflections, we encouraged ourselves, and proceeded to the religious services of the day. . . . While we were singing our last psalm in the afternoon, an antelope (oribi), which appeared to have wandered down the valley without observing us, stood for a little while on the opposite side of the rivulet, gazing at us in innocent amazement, as if yet unacquainted with man, the great destroyer. On this day of peace it was, of course, permitted to depart unmolested." In 1 8 19 the European population of the Colony was returned at 42,000, of whom all except the officials, the merchants of Capetown, and the missionaries, were of Franco-Dutch descent. The Albany settlement first brought an appreciable British element, and this element, which was in 1820 only one-eighth, has since gradually increased. Never- theless, the British settlers remained greatly inferior in numbers throughout the middle of the century, and to this day they are a minority of the European inhabitants of South Africa. Not only at the Cape, but in Canada and Australia, the British emigrants of this period were a cause of political disturbance. They had come from a country where the Government was so firmly established that complete free- dom could be permitted to all its subjects. But in the Colonies there were elements of danger — in New South Wales and Tasmania the convicts, in Canada the French settlers, and here in the Cape Colony, the Dutch — which made it inadvisable or impossible for the Colonial Govern- ments to allow the same measure of freedom to their subjects. The opinions of the new British settlers were by the nature of things democratic, and they keenly resented the unaccustomed limitations thus put upon their freedom of speech and action. In all the colonies there was a conflict between the new 58 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA arrivals and the Colonial authorities ; and in Canada this con- flict became so acute that the democratic party in Upper Canada, despairing of constitutional remedies against the power of the governing Minority, made common cause with the French Canadians of Lower Canada in the rebellion of 1837. In all these cases the reality of the grievance was ultimately recognised, and constitutional reforms which em- bodied appropriate remedies, were applied by the Home Government. The Government of Lord Charles Somerset was especially arbitrary. His principles were those of the Whig oligarchy which dominated the political life of England up to the Re- form Bill of 1832; but this system, which he called "the decent order of things," was intolerable when applied to a small community of less than 50,000 persons. Hitherto the few English residents at the Cape had been so closely associated with the Government that no material for a conflict existed. The arrival of the Albany settlers, however, created a new situation. In 1822 Pringle was summoned from his emigrant's cabin at Glen Lynden to take charge of the newly established library at Cape Town. He was subse- quently joined by his friend, John Fairbairn, who left Newcastle-on-Tyne at his invitation, and the two friends established a school for the sons of the chief inhabitants, and made a beginning of periodic literature in the South African Journal. Subsequently they undertook jointly to edit the first newspaper published at the Cape, the South African Commercial Advert iser^ established in January 1824, by the printer, George Greig. Lord Charles Somerset prac- tically suppressed both of these publications by enforcing a rigorous press censorship ; and further prevented the foundation of a Literary and Scientific Society by prosecuting the pro- moters for holding " illegal meetings," under a proclamation of Sir George Yonge, which was intended to apply to revolu- tionary assemblies. At the same time a pamphlet containing an altogether unjustifiable attack on the moral character of Dr Phillip, with whom Pringle had been associated in the forma- ENGLISHMEN AND MORE ENGLISH IDEAS 59 tion of the society, was issued from the Government press. The power of the Governor was so great, and his vindictive- ness was so persistent, that Pringle was driven from the Colony. He left in February 1825, and on his return to England took up the cause of slave emancipation. As secretary of the Abolition Society he was largely instrumental in carrying the Abolition Act through the British Parliament ; and in this work his name has ever since been honourably associated with those of Wilberforce, Buxton, Clarkson, Zachary Macaulay and Brougham. In the meantime the abuses of Lord Charles Somerset's administration had been brought to the notice of the Home Government, and a Commission of Inquiry had been ap- pointed to examine into the complaints which had been made, and to report generally upon the administration of the Colony, on the condition of the Hottentots, and upon the circum- stances of the Albany settlers. The Commissioners, Mr Bigge (who had recently been employed on a similar in- quiry in New South Wales), and Major Colbrooke, arrived in July 1823. They were, therefore, present in the Colony when Pringle was engaged in his conflict with the Governor ; but although they received his protests with due attention, they were prevented by the terms of their commissions from taking any action, or even expressing any opinion, in the Colony. Their sole business was to collect information for the guidance of the Home Government. The question, therefore, remained in abeyance until they presented their report. This was done in 1826; and in the meantime Lord Charles had avoided the necessity of defending his acts by a voluntary retirement from his office. In spite of the tyrannical excesses of his later years. Lord Charles Somerset had done good service to the Colony. He pro- moted the establishment of the wool industry, and defended the frontier with energy and address; and he not only caused the introduction of the first body of British emigrants into South Africa, but he extended to these emigrants the support and assistance without which they would have been unable to 6o THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA overcome the many difficulties by which they were con- fronted. In pursuance of the recommendations of the Commissioners a number of administrative changes were introduced into the Colony. These measures tended to effect the conversion of the Cape from a Dutch into an English colony. Now that there was an EngHsh population, it was felt that English ideas might be introduced in earnest. An attempt had been made to check the arbitrary authority of the Governor by the creation of an Executive Council in 1825. In 1828 the administration of justice was improved by the establishment of a Supreme Court at Capetown, and by provision for a more constant attendance of the High Court judges on circuit in the various divisions of the Colony. Under the Dutch system local government had been placed in the hands of courts composed of the chief residents of a district {^Heemraden) presided over by the Landdrost, an official who discharged the duties both of magistrate and civil commissioner. These often conflicting functions were now entrusted to two separate officials ; the judicial to the Resident Magistrate, and the administrative to the Civil Commissioner. The separation of these duties was a distinct gain, but it involved the loss of the Heemraden, which as representative local bodies had served to keep the adminis- tration in touch with the opinions of the Dutch settlers. Schools were established to promote instruction in the English language, and in 1827 this language was ordered to be used exclusively in official communications. The latter measure was a mistake, which has since been redeemed. As the great majority of the inhabitants of the Colony could only speak the Afrikander Taal, it constituted a practical injustice, and needlessly embittered the Boers against the British Government. At the same time the salaries of all the officials from the governor downwards were reduced, and the cost of administration was thus considerably lessened, while its efficiency was increased. The duties of the Commissioners had included an examination of the condition of the Hot- ENGLISHMEN AND MORE ENGLISH IDEAS 61 tentots. The evidence which they gave on this subject was powerfully supported by a book published by Dr Phillip in April 1828. By means of this book, Researches in South Africa^ a strong feeling of sympathy for this unfortunate race was created in England, and in response to this feeling General Bourke was instructed by the Home Government to issue the famous Ordinance 50, under which the free coloured population of the Colony were removed from the operation of the special laws hitherto applicable to them, and placed under the same laws as the Europeans. This well- intentioned interference caused great resentment in the Colony. It was one of those cases in which the Colonial authorities were infinitely more capable of forming a correct opinion than the English people or the Home Government. The principle that the coloured man should be recognised as the equal of the white man before the law was not disputed ; but what the English people did not know, and the colonists did know, was that before this principle could be usefully applied the coloured man must possess that rudimentary knowledge of the laws of civilised life, without which his freedom is as harmful to himself as it is dangerous to his European neigh- bours. Coercion is hateful : but what coercion is more stringent than the coercion of nature? To remove the native from this coercion by the presence of the European, and at the same time to refuse to allow the European to substitute another sort of coercion, is to throw the native back into a chaos of primitive impulses. This measure was quickly followed by the emancipation of the slaves. Here again the principle was admirable ; it was the application of the principle without any knowledge of local conditions, and any respect for local knowledge, that put the British Government and the British people, for the time, hopelessly In the wrong. In the first place a number of regulations were introduced to improve the condition of the slaves. These regulations were excellent In theory, but it was found to be impossible to apply them to the sparsely populated districts, and in view 6z THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA of the plain fact, as revealed by the almost universal protests of the slave owners, the Cape Government limited their application to Capetown and Grahamstown. The action of the Government at this period was felt to be so vexatious that the news of the passing of the Abolition Act in 1833 brought a sense of relief to the Dutch settlers. The more enlightened among them had not been opposed to the principle of emancipation, and a scheme by which the pro- cess of emancipating the slaves within the Colony would have been gradually accomplished, had in fact been already initiated. When they heard, therefore, that emancipation was to be accompanied by compensation, they were willing to acquiesce in what they at first believed to be an equitable arrangement. In this belief they were doomed to disap- pointment. Out of the ;£20,ooo,ooo voted by the British Parliament only ^lyZ^j^ooo was apportioned to the Cape Colony. As the value of the slaves had been officially returned at ;,^ 3,000,000, the community — for the actual employers of slave labour were not by any means the only persons who had money invested in slaves — was involved in an immediate loss of nearly ^^2, 000,000. Apart from this direct loss, the industries of the Colony, which at this time were confined to farming and stock raising, were seriously dislocated. Nor was this all. Under the terms of the Act claims for compensation had to be presented in London. This involved the employment of agents, for whose services payment, of course, had to be made ; and the more ignorant farmers were in many cases deprived in part of the sums to which they were entitled, through the dishonesty of the persons whom they employed. The account furnished by the late Judge Cloete enables us to form some idea of the disastrous effects which this measure, noble and benevolent though it was in intention, produced upon so small and backward a community as the 50,000 or 60,000 Europeans of the Cape Colony. As I refer to this authority on more than one occasion, it will be useful for me to state the circumstances which make the ENGLISHMEN AND MORE ENGLISH IDEAS 63 evidence provided in his Five Lectures on the Emigration of the Dutch Farmers^ etc. especially valuable. In the first place Cloete, like Pringle, is a contemporary writer, and writes from personal knowledge of the events which he describes. We meet with him first as registrar to the Court in the "black circuit" of 181 2; we find his name among those of the promoters of Pringle's Literary Society at Cape- town, and afterwards we shall find him appointed by the British Government to establish its authority over the emigrant farmers in Natal. In the second place, although he was a loyal servant of the Government, and a man of culture and intelligence, he was, as an Afrikander, well qualified to understand and express the sentiments of the Dutch population. Now Cloete, speaking of the pecuniary loss in which the Colony was involved by the emancipation of the slaves, writes : " I cannot give a more striking instance of the loss so sus- tained by the proprietors of valuable slaves, than by stating in my own case that for a slave for whom I had frequently re- fused ;;^500, and might have commanded ;^6co, I found according to the highest average for that class of slaves a sum of ;j^6o nominally awarded me, but by the mode of payment ultimately received even that pittance reduced to £a1 or ;^48." And of the outlook presented on the ist of December 1838,^ he says, "masters saw . . . the whole of their farming pursuits and plans destroyed : no bribe, nor entreaty, I believe, did avail in one single instance to induce any one of these now free persons to stay over that day. . . .'* In some places remunerative wages were offered, " but in the eastern country districts, this was impossible, and the agri- culturists there found themselves totally deprived of every vestige of labour to improve or cultivate their farms, or even to superintend or herd their flocks." 1 The Abolition Act received the Royal Assent on August 28th, 1833. The Act provided that the slaves should remain as apprentices with their masters for seven years, but this probationary period was subsequently reduced to five years, which ran in the case of the Cape Colony from December ist, 1833, to December ist, 1838. 64 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA When the Dutch settlers were smarting under the Aboli- tion Act, the Colony was visited by the grave disaster of a Kafir invasion, and this crisis was of all others chosen for the most ill-judged and hurtful of all the interferences with the local government into which the Home Government was driven by philanthropic sentiment in England. Early in the year 1834, Sir Lowry Cole, who had been governor since 1828, was succeeded by Sir Benjamin Durban. The new governor was charged with an important programme. He was to carry out the emancipation of slaves under the provisions of the Abolition Act ; he was to introduce such retrenchments in the number of officials and their emoluments, as would make the revenue of the Colony suffice to meet the cost of civil administration, and to establish a Legislative Council in which colonial opinion was to be represented by non-official members. Lastly, he was to provide for the better protection of the eastern farmers, Dutch and English, from the depredations of the Kafirs by placing British agents with the border chiefs. Like many another governor of the Cape, Sir Benjamin Durban found that the execution of a policy sketched out in Downing Street had to be postponed to the performance of the more primitive and necessary task of protecting the lives and property of the colonists entrusted to his charge. Like many another governor, too, he found that he was held responsible for military operations entirely beyond his control, that the measures which he, out of a full knowledge of local conditions, knew to be necessary, were reversed, and that he himself was discredited and recalled. Like many another governor of the Cape, he too had the melancholy satisfaction of seeing the measures which he had advised ultimately carried out at an increased cost both of men and money. For the details of this strange story of Imperial indiscretion we must go to the pages of Cloete, where the feelings of the colonists are vividly portrayed, and the- momentous results set forth in bold relief. Of the actual origin of the war it is sufficient to say that a ENGLISHMEN AND MORE ENGLISH IDEAS 65 Kafir chief, Macomo, who had been guilty of a raid upon one of his native neighbours, was removed to the east of the Chumie river. In resentment of this and other measures necessary to preserve the peace of the frontier, the Kafir chiefs, under the countenance of Hintza, the paramount chief of the Amakosas, united in a war of revenge. The attitude of the chiefs, though not of course their precise intentions, had been known for some time to the Colonial authorities ; but Sir Benjamin Durban found that there were two con- flicting opinions held at Capetown. On the one side there was the party of which Dr Phillip was the head, which repre- sented the intentions of the chiefs as pacific, and ridiculed the alarm of the colonists. '* The murders by Kafirs," wrote the editor of the Commercial Adi)erti%er shortly before the arrival of the governor, " of which the Colonial Government prate so fluently, are to be found only on the lips of lying men or in the imagination of the timid Cockneys and pinmakers who shrink from the bold eyes of a natural man. . . . The clamour was raised for the purpose of concealing a system and series of frauds practised by some of the whole English inhabitants against and upon this people." This party was small in numbers, and its views were contrary to the opinion of the local officials, but it was strong in the support of the philan- thropic sentiment of the English people, who at this time were keenly interested in the condition of the native races throughout the Empire. Under these circumstances Sir Benjamin Durban author- ised Dr Phillip to confer with the principal Kafir chiefs, and to obtain from them assurances that the peace of the border would not be violated. The report which Dr Phillip pre- sented contained such assurances, and the Colonial Govern- ment were lulled into inaction. In the meantime a less biassed observer, the Chief Justice Sir John Wylde, had formed a contrary opinion. After the Grahamstown assizes, to which Cloete accompanied him, they had met with a re- ception from the chief Macomo, in which the chief's be- haviour contrasted strangely with the pacific assurances be 66 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA had conveyed through Dr Phillip. The sequel must be given in the words of Cloete's dramatic narration. " On our return to Capetown, at a numerous convivial meeting, to which Sir Benjamin had invited myself and my family on New Year's Eve, I could not help dilating some- what at length on the hostile disposition of the tribes, to which His Excellency appeared to listen with particular interest, but nothing else indicated the slightest disturbance in society, except (what only was remembered afterwards by some of us) that Sir Benjamin had occasionally absented himself for a few minutes from the party. Good humour and hilarity prevailed until we had hailed in the New Year, when every one gradually retired to their homes; but on the next morning, on returning to town, I found the astounding intelligence universally spread abroad that the evening before His Excellency had received the account that the Kafirs, to the number of 12,000 or 15,000 men, had invaded the whole frontier from every quarter on Christmas Day, burning and destroying every farmhouse, murdering the inhabitants, and carrying away all their cattle and property." The news was so startling that Cioete refused to believe it until the intelligence had been confirmed by the lips of the governor himself. <*He in his wonted gentle and yet firm manner, not only confirmed the report, but jocularly observed that he had received the sad intelligence while we were assembled there, but that he had done immediately all that could be done, and had not wished to disturb the harmony of the party by divulging such intelligence. " T'hat night already every order had been given to dis- patch every disposable soldier, to call out all the burgher forces, and to send off Colonel Smith, the Quarter-Master- General of the forces (and now our worthy Governor-in- Chief), who had started in the middle of the night, and in five days reached Grahamstown, where he found everything in an indescribable state of panic and confusion." Both the Colonial and the Home Governments had been so completely misled by the representations of the missionary ENGLISHMEN AND MORE ENGLISH IDEAS 67 party, that there was no sufficient military force in the Colony. The whole line of the frontier was guarded by 750 men of all arms; and in addition to these, the governor had only iioo or 1200 men at his disposal. All the able-bodied men, Dutch and English, in the frontier districts were called out to serve in arms ; and these burgher forces acting in conjunction with the British soldiers after more than six months of arduous warfare at length cleared the country of the Bantu invader. When this had been done. Sir Benjamin Durban made a treaty in September, 1835, ^^^^ ^^^^ Kafir chiefs on such terms, as he believed would alone guarantee the Colony from similar disasters in the future. Under this treaty the Bantu were to retire to the line of the Kei River. The country between the Fish River and the Keiskamma was to be occupied by those settlers who had suffered most severely in the war, holding their land on condition of personal tenure, and thus forming a belt of European population. Beyond these European settlers — that is between the Keiskamma and the Kei Rivers — a number of loyal Kafirs were to be established with an efficient military force to protect them. Besides creating this barrier against Kafir inroads in the future, Sir Benjamin Durban proposed to compensate the eastern farmers for their losses in the war. The returns which were made by the officials showed that on the immediate frontier, 456 farmhouses had been burnt and entirely destroyed, while 350 had been pillaged and partially destroyed; 60 waggons, 5,715 horses, 111,930 horned cattle, and 161,930 sheep, had been carried off by the Kafirs and absolutely lost to the settlers. Altogether the settlers were poorer by ;^300,ooo in hard cash, to say nothing of the value of their services in the field, and of the cattle and supplies which had been "commandeered" for the use of the troops. The colonists thought with justice that they were entitled to compensation from a government, which, according to Cloete, had exposed them to losses from 68 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA Kafir inroads for fourteen years rather than acknowledge the existence of a danger with which they were not pre- pared to deal. Sir Benjamin Durban's proposals were duly forwarded for the approval of the Home Government. The reply came in the form of a despatch written by Mr Charles Grant (afterwards Lord Glenelg) on December 26, 1835. In this despatch the whole poHcy and operations of the war were unreservedly condemned. The Kafirs, Mr Grant maintained, had through a long series of years found ample justification for war, and had endeavoured justly, though impotently, to avenge a series of encroachments on the part of the colonists. In short, it was made abundantly plain that the sympathies of His Majesty's Government were entirely on the side of the Kafirs, and that the colonists — the men whose homes had been ruined, and whose cattle had been carried off — were suspected of having provoked the war for their own purposes. In pursuance of this opinion, the Colonial authorities were not only ordered to reinstate the Kafirs in the districts from which they had retired under the treaty of September 1835, but to cancel all grants of land made by the Cape Government beyond the Fish River since 1817; and at the same time the Home Government announced their determination of refusing all applications for an indemnity on the part of the settlers. " A communication more cruel, unjust, and insulting to the feelings both of Sir Benjamin Durban and of the colonists," writes Cloete, ** could hardly have been penned by a declared enemy of the country and its governor." And he adds, that to expect an entire population thus insulted and in- jured to continue loyally affected towards the British Govern- ment, was " to expect that of thorns men should gather figs, or that of a bramble bush they should gather grapes." There is no possible doubt as to the wisdom of Sir Benjamin Durban's policy. " My own experience and what I saw with my own eyes," said Sir George Napier by whom he was superseded, "have confirmed me that I was ENGLISHMEN AND MORE ENGLISH IDEAS 69 wrong and Sir Benjamin Durban was perfectly right ; that if he meant to keep Kafir-land under British rule, the only- way of doing so was by having a line of forts, and main- taining troops in them.'' This evidence was given in examination before the House of Commons, How was it that so unjust a despatch was written, so grave an error was committed ? At this time the tide of philanthropic feeling in England was at its highest point. In the Colony the Kafir was known only as a robber, a destroyer, and a murderer. In England he was regarded as a child of nature, whose primitive impulses ensured the richer harvest in the mission field. Both views were wrong ; but of the two, the philanthropist's was infinitely the more harmful, because the very loftiness of his motives made him the more persistent in his error, and the more intolerant towards those who differed from him. And this intolerance, this ignorance, found expression in Lord Glenelg's despatch. The struggles, the dangers, the difficulties, the very con- ditions of the daily life of these British settlers upon whom the flood of savage violence burst in its greatest fury, were forgotten. The Englishman of that generation knew little, and cared less, for the English beyond the seas ; the men who were stationed on the frontiers of the Empire, who were doing out-post duty in the army of Anglo-Saxon civilisation. I have dwelt, perhaps at disproportionate length, upon these early periods of British rule, because it is here that the plot is laid of the future drama of South Africa. Here we have the situation developed, the separate forces revealed — the conflict between the European and the Bantu, the conflict between Afrikander and English ideas, and the perpetually recurring and disastrous divergence of opinion — to use the dry official phrase — between Her Majesty's Government in Downing Street, and Her Majesty's repre- sentative at Capetown, which has made South Africa the ** grave of reputations." CHAPTER V. Scbism in J^uropean South Africa, In the year 1835 the movement known as the "Great Trek" began, and in that, and subsequent years, some 10,000 Boers left the Cape Colony. In the course of their wanderings they established settlements in the districts northward of the Orange River, since called the Orange Free State, the Transvaal and Natal. They encountered no resistance in the country immediately northward of the Orange River, with which they were already familiar from temporary expeditions in pursuit of pasturage ; but in Natal and on either bank of the Vaal they fought with desperate courage — the courage of the seventeenth-century Puritan — against the tribes of military Bantu, subjugating the treacherous and bloodthirsty Dingaan, king of the Zulus, and driving Moselekatze, the Matabele chief, and his Zulu followers northward beyond the Limpopo, where they fell upon the peaceable Mashona and Makalaka, and established themselves in the region since known as Matabeleland. By virtue of these successive victories the Boers laid claim to the territory of Natal, to the territory between the Orange and the Vaal rivers, and to the unknown interior northward of the Vaal ; but their actual occupation was confined to those districts east and west of the Drakenberg, which had been practically depopulated by the wars of extermination waged by Tshaka, the Zulu king, between the years 18 12 and 1828. The nature of these wars, and the character of the military Bantu in a state of nature, will be sufficiently apparent from the record which the . historian gives of this Tshaka, the father of Dingaan, and the grandsire of Ketsh- wayo. " He turned thousands of square miles into literally 1 1 ij SCHISM IN EUROPEAN SOUTH AFRICA 71 a howling wilderness, shed rivers of blood, annihilated whole communities, converting the members of others into cannibals, and causing misery and suffering, the full extent of which can never be known." In the eyes of the British Government, however, the Boers remained merely "emigrant farmers, being subjects of Her Majesty, who had made unlawful incur- sions into the territories of the natives " ; and it was not until twenty years later that their scattered farms and primitive settlements emerged from this ambiguous condition into the definite status of Republics, recognised as independent under the Conventions of 1852 and 1854. Before I relate what is essential in the tale of the varying relationship of the Boers to the British Government, the general principle, on which the British Government pro- posed to deal with the awkward situation which thus arose, must be stated. It was this. They desired to limit their interference to such measures as were necessary, on the one hand to secure the natives from being deprived un- justly of their territories, and on the other to prevent the Boers from becoming the subjects of any rival European power. With the first object in view the British Govern- ment concluded treaties with Adam Kok, the Griqua chief; with Moshesh, the Basuto chief; and with Faku, the Pondo chief; and to prevent the latter contingency they resumed the military occupation of Natal in 1 842, and established a British administration in this maritime territory in the follow- ing year. The causes which led them to depart from this attitude from time to time were the disturbances created by the conflicts between the Boers and the native chiefs, and the gradual realisation of the fact that such arrangements were insufficient to prevent the occurrence of similar and more widespread disorders. Ultimately the inherent difficulty of the task, joined to the burden and cost of maintaining the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony against the warlike Amakosa clans, led the British Government to endow the Boers with a separate political existence — a solution by means of which England gained a temporary respite from her GREAT EMIGRATION OFTHE BOERS (1S55-I845) SCHISM IN EUROPEAN SOUTH AFRICA 73 responsibilities as paramount power in South Africa, only to find them infinitely heavier, when circumstances at length compelled her to resume them. The early movements of the emigrant Boers must be stated with some precision, because of the light which these events throw upon subsequent chapters of South African history. The first expedition of the emigrant Boers reached the north-east of the Transvaal, and perished miserably with the exception of a few survivors, who made their way to Delagoa Bay, and thence by sea to Durban. In this latter place, then known as Port Natal, a handful of Englishmen had estabhshed themselves, having settled there originally in 1824, under a concession from Tshaka. In 1836 a com- pany of 200 emigrant Boers crossed the Orange River under the leadership of Hendrik Potgieter, and advanced to Thaba N'chu, where one branch of the Barolong tribe was estab- lished under the chief Maroko, with a missionary named Archbell. From this point the emigrants made their way northwards, and formed encampments on the south bank of the Vaal. As the Lieutenant-Governor Stockenstrom, who had been placed in charge of the eastern districts of the Cape Colony by Lord Glenelg, had declared that " he was not aware of any law which prevents any of His Majesty's sub- jects from leaving his dominions," the movement became general. Parties of Boers from Graaf-Reinet, Uitenhage, and Albany followed Potgieter across the Orange River under the direction of Gert Maritz, Jacobus Uys, and other leaders of the voertrekkers.^ In the meantime the emigrants' encampment on the south bank of the Vaal had been attacked by the Matabele Zulus under Moselekatze. The Boers were preserved from destruction by the protection afforded by their great travelling waggons. The process of " laagering the waggons " has become so significant in South African his- tory, that it is worth while to quote Cloete's account of the manoeuvre. " These laagers, or camps," he writes, " were formed by their waggons being brought up into a square, the 1 Pioneers. 74 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA poles and waggon * gear ' of one waggon being firmly secured under the * perch ' of the next waggon ; and when time ad- mitted branches of the thorny mimosas were also wattled in under each waggon, so that no entrance could be effected into the enclosure without forcibly tearing up all these im- pediments/' But although the Matabele were checked by the fire of the emigrants behind the laager on Vecht Kop, they succeeded in capturing 6000 head of cattle and 40,000 sheep, and thus deprived the Boers alike of their means of subsistence and of locomotion. From this desperate position the emigrants were rescued by the assistance of Maroko and Mr Archbell, with whom they managed to communicate ; and when fresh oxen had thus been obtained, they retired southwards in safety to Thaba N'chw. Subsequently a force of 200 Boers, drawn from the combined companies of Potgieter and Maritz, crossed the Vaal, and made a successful attack upon one of Moselekatze's chief kraals, recovering some of the captured waggons and 7000 head of cattle. On the strength of this victory a permanent settle- ment was efl^ected by the emigrant Boers on the north bank of the Vet River, to which the name of Winberg (the town of victory) was given. At the same time the stream of emigrants continued to flow across the Orange River from the Cape Colony. Among them was Pieter Retief, a man of Huguenot extraction, who had served as commandant of one of the frontier districts, but had thrown up his position through a disagreement with the Government on the question of native policy. Upon the arrival of Retief a general assemblage of the emigrant farmers was held at Winberg, and on June 6th, 1837, a rough government was formed, the principles of which were expressed in the Nine Articles of the Constitution of Winberg, and at the head of this government Retief himself was placed with the title of Commandant-General. Retief came to the conclusion that th? more fertile country across the Drakenberg Range would afford better prospects for the emigrants, and later on in the same year he obtained SCHISM IN EUROPEAN SOUTH AFRICA 75 permission from Dingaan, the Zulu king, for the emigrants to settle within his territory. In these negotiations Retief was assisted by the Reverend F. Owen, the missionary whom Dingaan had received at his town of Umkongloof. Having obtained this promise, Retief led a considerable body of the emigrants across the Drakenberg mountains into the north of Natal, where encampments were formed on the banks of Blaawkrantz River. In the meantime, that is to say, while Retief had been engaged in these negotiations, a second commando, consisting of two bodies of emigrants under Potgieter and Pieter Uys, crossed the Vaal River and inflicted such severe punishment upon the Matabele that Moselekatze subsequently retired northwards beyond the Limpopo. In all of these engagements with the Matabele the Boers were assisted by the Barolong tribe, and after " the old lion of the north," as Moselekatze was entitled, had thus been defeated, the branch of that tribe of which Taoane, the father of Mont- sioa, was chief, returned to the lands south of the Molopo River in Bechuanaland, from which they had been expelled by the Zulu adventurer. The fact, however, that the Boers had thus been materially aided by the Barolong tribe did not prevent them, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, from claiming to exercise sovereign rights over the descendants of this people in Bechuanaland. Early in January 1838, Retief and a party of emigrants from Natal crossed the Buffalo River and visited Dingaan's capital for the purpose of obtaining the king's signature to a formal deed of cession, which had been drawn up by Mr Owen. The ceremony was completed on February 4th, and on the following morning the whole party were treacherously murdered by the Zulu king. Without a moment's delay ten regiments of his trained and disciplined soldiers were ordered to advance upon the encampments on the Blaawkrantz River and destroy the emigrants. In a single week 600 men, women, and children were surrounded and barbarously done to death by the Zulus, and the only survivors were a few parties of emigrants who were warned of the savage onslaught 76 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA in time to laager their waggons. After this barbarous massacre a company of Boers under Uys, together with some British settlers from Durban, crossed the Tugela with a force of natives, where they were defeated with heavy loss by Dingaan. The Zulus then overran Natal and drove the British settlers at Durban to take refuge on a man-of-war, the Comet, which was fortunately lying at anchor in the Bay. A second expedition of 400 Boers under Uys and Potgieter, which advanced against Dingaan in April of the same year, were entrapped by the Zulu king and barely escaped destruction. In August Dingaan made a second attack upon the encampments of the emigrants, in which the Zulus were defeated. Later on in the year the emigrants were rescued from their precarious position by the arrival of 460 fighting men from the Orange River under Andries Pretorius. They were now strong enough to assume the offensive, and under the cautious tactics of Pretorius they succeeded in inflicting a crushing defeat upon a force of 10,000 Zulus on December T6th — a day henceforward celebrated in the Boer annals as *' Dingaan's Day." Dingaan himself had fled northwards after setting fire to his capital, and here, amid the smoking remains of the king's kraal, Pretorius recovered RetiePs scull and the actual deed of cession by which Dingaan had signified his assent to the settlement of the Boers within his territory. On returning to the Natal coast, Pretorius found Durban occupied by a small British force under Major Charters, who had been sent by Sir George Napier " to put an end to the unwarranted occupation of the territories belong- ing to the natives by certain emigrants from the Cape Colony, being subjects of Her Majesty." The object of this measure, which was thus stated in Sir George Napier's proclamation of November 1 4, 1 838, was, however, considered to be sufficiently effected by holding the port ; and the emigrant Boers were per- mitted to lay out the town of Pietermaritzburg without inter- ference in the following year, 1839, After a further attack upon the Boers, Dingaan quarrelled with his brother Panda, and the latter crossed the Tugela with his following and entered SCHISM IN EUROPEAN SOUTH AFRICA 77 into an alliance with Pretorius. In January 1840 a force of 4C0 mounted men under Pretorius, advancing with 4000 Zulus led by Panda, met and defeated Dingaan's forces in a decisive battle, from which the Zulu king fled northwards to Delagoa Bay, where he was murdered by his own people. Upon his return to Natal, Pretorius issued a proclamation declaring Panda king of the Zulus in succession to Dingaan, and claiming Natal by right of conquest. In this pro- clamation, which was dated February 14th, 1840, Pretorius styled himself " Chief Commandant of all the burghers of the Right Worshipful Volksraad of the South African Society of Port Natal, and Commander-in-Chief of the Army "... and at the same time a letter was despatched to Sir George Napier in which a formal acknowledgment of the inde- pendence of the emigrant Boers, as thus organised, was demanded. This Sir George Napier declined to give, and wrote for instructions from the Home Government as to the attitude which he should assume. In the meantime the detachment of the 72nd regiment, by which the Port was garrisoned, had been withdrawn, as the regiment had been ordered home ; and the British residents at Durban were placed in the ignominious position of being compelled to submit to the authority of the Boer Volksraad. On January 14th, 1 84 1, a formal proposal for an alliance between the Republic of Natal and the Queen was forwarded to Sir George Napier. An event, however, which had occurred at the end of the previous year (184c) made the Governor alive to the necessity of British intervention. This event was the raid made by Pretorius upon the chief N'Capai, who was located some 200 miles away on the borders of the Cape Colony. According to Cloete's account he attacked one of the chief's kraals at daybreak, "killed several men, captured about 3000 head of cattle and 250 sheep, etc., and carried off into captivity about seventeen little boys and girls, who were picked up after their parents had either been killed or driven away from the scene of slaughter." And, he adds, that the Boers by these proceedings had " sadly laid them- 78 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA selves open to the most severe animadversions from the whole civilised world." After this raid Sir George Napier sent a British force to the Umgazi River in Pondoland to prevent further aggressions upon the native territories to the south of Natal. By a letter, dated September 3rd, 1841, he communicated to the Volksraad the reply which he had received from the Home Government to their proposals for a commercial treaty. He wrote, ** That Her Majesty could not acknowledge the independence of her own subjects, but that the trade of the emigrant farmers would be placed on the same footing as that of any other British settlement, upon their receiving a military force to exclude the interference with, or the possession of, the country by any other European power." To this the Volksraad replied, on October 11, by a declaration of independence ; and Sir George Napier rejoined by announcing his intention "of resuming the military occupation of Natal." On February 21st, 1842, the Volksraad protested ; and in the following month, upon the arrival of a Dutch vessel, the Bra%iliay they concluded a formal treaty with a Mr Smellekamp, by means of which they accepted the protection of Holland, and adopted the Dutch ensign as the flag of their Republic. When informa- tion of these proceedings had reached Capetown, Sir George Napier ordered a force, under Captain Smith, to advance from Pondoland and occupy Durban. This small British force, consisting of about 200 men, was besieged by the Boers under Pretorius, until reinforcements were brought up by sea, and the Boer forces were dispersed. Shortly afterwards the Volksraad submitted, and a general amnesty was granted to the insurgents. Finally, on May ist, 1843, Cloete himself arrived in Natal as commissioner, to establish a British administration under instructions from the Home Government. The nature of these instructions is significant, as showing that the British Government desired to avoid the errors committed in forcing British ideas upon the Boers in the Cape Colony. The Commissioner was directed to call the SCHISM IN EUROPEAN SOUTH AFRICA 79 inhabitants together, and to enquire what form of govern- ment they would desire to live under. ** I think it probable," Lord Stanley ^ wrote, ** looking to the nature of the population, that they will desire those institutions to be founded on the Dutch, rather than on the English model, and, however little some of those institutions may be suited to a more advanced state of civilisation, it is the desire of Her Majesty's Government that in this respect the contentment of the emigrants, rather than the abstract merits of the institutions, should guide our decision/' This free- dom of selection was to be only limited by certain humani- tarian principles upon which the British Government insisted as necessary for the common good of South Africa. No distinction or disqualification founded on colour, origin, lan- guage, or creed was to be recognised ; no aggression upon the natives beyond the borders of Natal was to be sanc- tioned ; and slavery in any shape or form was to be declared absolutely unlawful. As a basis of settlement, these pro- posals differ in no essential from the most approved policy for the settlement of South Africa to-day. It was the inherent difficulties of the situation, as it developed from year to year, which prevented the British Government from giving effect to a policy which was at once both liberal and just. Whether the failure is to be assigned to a want of resolution on the part of England, or to an extraordinary and unreason- ing opposition on the part of the Boers, depends upon the interpretation we place upon the subsequent facts of South African history, considered not merely in themselves, but in their relationship to the contemporary history of the British Empire. Until 1845 Natal was placed under a military adminis- tration, and at the end of this period of transition it was annexed to the Cape Colony by the Governor, Sir Peregrine Maitland. In effecting a settlement, the British authorities proposed to retain within the borders the large number of Zulu refugees who had crossed the Tugela to avail them- 1 Afterwards (14th) Earl of Derby. 8o THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA selves of the security of European control, and to assign ample districts for the exclusive use of this native popula- tion. In the following years, 1846-7, the majority of the Boers, in resentment of this and other measures which cur- tailed their claim to the whole territory of Natal as won by right of conquest from Dingaan, withdrew under Pretorius to the country northward of the Vaal. In 1848 Natal was made a separate government, and placed under the adminis- tration of a Lieutenant-Governor, who was at the same time created paramount chief of the native tribes, and authorised in virtue of this position to administer the native customary law in concurrence with the ordinances issued by himself and his Executive Council. Between the years 1848-50 the foundation of the predominantly British population was laid by the arrival of some 4000 settlers — a settlement known from its chief promoter as the " Byrne " immigration. In 1856, when the European population was returned at 8,500, a re- presentative constitution was conferred upon the Colony ; and, owing to the slow growth ^ of the European element. Natal retained this status of a crown colony until the year 1893, when responsible government was at length established. The Boer exodus from Natal strengthened the settlements already formed to the west of the Drakenberg range, at Potchefstroom and Lydenburg, and complicated the rela- tions of the British Government with the emigrants between the Vaal and the Orange Rivers. The districts north and south of the Vaal, of which Potchefstroom and Winberg were the respective centres, had at first been united by an Adjunct Raad, and in 1844 this Adjunct Raad issued a declaration of independence. For the present, however, the British Government contented themselves with securing the territory of the natives by maintaining the Griquas under Adam Kok and the Basutos under Moshesh, in the districts which had been apportioned to them, by treaties previously executed with these chiefs. Under this arrangement some of the Boers found themselves subjected to native authority, 1 The European population of Natal in 1899 was only 60,000 SCHISM IN EUROPEAN SOUTH AFRICA 8i and this anomalous condition of affairs speedily produced disr turbances, which compelled the active interference of the British authorities. Sir Peregrine Maitland, who succeeded Sir George Napier as Governor of the Cape Colony in 1844, visited the scene of the disturbances, and, having vindicated the authority of Great Britain by the defeat of the Boers who had taken up arms to resist the government of the Griqua chief, arranged a compromise. The emigrant farmers who were living within the territory of both Adam Kok, the Griqua chief, and Moshesh, the Basuto chief, were assigned distinct districts, and placed under a European official. In pursuance of this arrangement, the Boers between the Modder and the Riet Rivers were adminis- tered by Major Warden, the British Resident in Griqua- land West, who established a small British garrison at Bloemfontein, while the Boers within the Basuto State were assigned exclusive use of the western portion of the State in the bend of the Caledon and Orange Rivers. But the Boer settlements northward of the Modder River were not interfered with. In order to understand the circumstances which led to the recognition of the independence of the Boers, we must go back to the history of the Cape Colony. In 1835, under Lord Glenelg's despatch, the eastern frontier was put back to the line of the Great Fish River. For the next ten years the Colonial Government maintained peace outside the border by entering into alliances with the Kafir chiefs. Under this system the border settlers were exposed to the continued de- predations of the Kafirs ; but the peace, such as it was, was maintained until the year 1846, when Sandilli succeeded to Gaika's position, and openly defied the British authorities. By this time the Kafirs had acquired the use of European weapons, and had developed into foes by no means despic- able. In the war which followed, the British troops were involved in more than one of those small defeats which are inseparable from the economic employment of professional soldiers in a difficult country and against a barbarous and 82 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA cunning enemy. During the course of this war Sir Peregrine Maitland was recalled, and in 1846 Sir Henry Pottinger was appointed Governor of the Cape Colony, with the additional powers, for the first time now con- ferred, of High Commissioner for the affairs beyond the borders of the Cape Colony. The Kosa clans were not reduced to submission until the close of 1848. In the meantime the British Government had decided that a more vigorous policy was necessary, and at the end of 1847 Sir Harry Smith was sent out in succession to Sir Henry Pottinger to put this policy into effect. Sir Harry Smith extended the boundaries of the Cape Colony to the Orange River on the north, and the line of the Keiskamma and Chumie Rivers on the east. The frontier district to the east, between the Keiskamma and the Kei Rivers, was annexed, and the Kosa clans within this territory, styled British Kaffraria, were placed under the control of a British Resident ; and thus after an interval of ten years the measures which Sir Benjamin Durban had recommended for the security of the frontier were at length carried out. At the same time the whole of the country enclosed by the Orange and the Vaal Rivers and the line of the Drakenberg range, was proclaimed a British possession under the name of the Orange River Sovereignty. By Sir Harry Smith's settlement, the whole of the European population in the Sovereignty were placed under the direct control of a central Administration at Bloemfontein, of which Major Warden was the head, while the Griquas and Basutos were left under the rule of their respective chiefs within the territories assigned to them. The Boers between the Modder and Riet Rivers gladly acquiesced in the estab- lishment of British authority, but the northern Boers from both sides of the Vaal assembled in arms under Pretorius, and drove Major Warden and his small garrison from Bloemfontein. Sir Harry Smith at once crossed the Orange River with a British force from the Cape Colony, and defeated the insurgents on August 29th, 1848, at Boom- SCHISM IN EUROPEAN SOUTH AFRICA 83 platz. After this defeat, Pretorius and the more resolute of the insurgents retired to the north of the Vaal, and the British Administration, re-established on a firmer basis, not only won the acquiescence of the remaining Boers, but attracted fresh emigrants from the Cape Colony. At the end of the year 1850 the Kosas again revolted, and for two years the border settlers and the British troops were engaged in a desperate struggle to re-establish European control over the seething mass of Bantu population eastward of the colonial border. The losses which were incurred by England, both in men and money, in this war produced a natural feeling of weariness, and Englishmen began to ask whether the possession of South Africa was worth the sacrifices which it involved.^ This moment of embarrass- ment was the opportunity seized by Pretorius to demand the recognition of the independence of the Boers beyond the Vaal, and the removal of the sentence of outlawry which had been pronounced against him by the British Government. When Sir Harry Smith was engaged with all the available British forces in reducing the Kafirs upon the eastern frontier of the Colony, Major Warden was informed by Pretorius that he would incite the Boers within the Sovereignty to revolt, unless his demands were satisfied. In order to save the Sovereignty, Sir Harry Smith yielded, and the independence of the Boers beyond the Vaal was formally recognised under the terms of the Sand River Convention, which was signed by the Com- missioners on January 17th, 1852, and afterwards confirmed by the Secretary of State in England and the Volksraad of the South African Republic. Sir Harry Smith was suc- ceeded by Sir George Cathcart early in 1852, and it was 1 It was in this war that the transport Birkenhead was wrecked off Danger Point on February 26th, 1852. In order to allow the women and children to be placed in the boats, the soldiers stood to their arms on the deck of the sinking ship, until the order was at last given them to leap overboard. In this one disaster England lost some 400 soldiers. F 84 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA under the direction of this latter governor that the Kafir war was finally concluded. In the meantime the Government of the Sovereignty had been involved in a dispute with Moshesh, the Basuto chief, and the small force at Major Warden's disposal had been defeated at Viervoet. So soon, there- fore, as the eastern frontier had been pacified, Sir George Cathcart crossed the Orange River and encamped with a force of between 2000 and 3000 British troops on the north bank of the Caledon. From this point he sent an ultimatum to Moshesh demanding the payment of io,coo head of cattle and 1000 horses, as compensation for the depredations which the Basuto tribe had committed upon the European settlers in the Sovereignty. When Moshesh failed to comply with this demand, he crossed the Caledon and advanced into the chief's country. After an engage- ment, in which the British losses were considerable, although 4000 head of cattle were captured, Moshesh offered a quali- fied submission, which Sir George Cathcart's experience of the difficulty of conducting military operations in the Basuto country, induced him readily to accept. After this experience of the difficulties of the situation, Sir George Cathcart reported to the Home Government that it was useless to think of holding the Sovereignty, unless a permanent garrison of 2000 British troops was maintained at Bloemfontein. This responsibility the English Govern- ment refused to incur, and in pursuance of their decision to abandon the Sovereignty Sir George Clerk was sent out as Special Commissioner to transfer the government to the Boers. In spite of the opposition of a considerable section of the European inhabitants, the Republican Government, henceforward known as that of the Orange Free State, was established by the Convention of Bloemfontein on February 23rd, 1854. The recognition of the independence of the emigrant Boers under the terms of the Conventions of Sand River and Bloem- fontein was the most important feature of a new policy — the policy of non-intervention — which the British Government SCHISM IN EUROPEAN SOUTH AFRICA 85 had determined to adopt in South Africa. In pursuance of this policy the turbulent Boers beyond the Vaal were " got rid of," the Sovereignty was " abandoned," the treaties with the native chiefs outside the borders of the Cape Colony, Natal, and British KafFraria were "declared to be at an end," and the direct administrative responsibilities of England in South Africa were confined to the two British colonies, and to the small portion of the densely populated native territory between the eastern border of the Cape and the southern border of Natal in which the Bantu had been practically brought under European control. As for the Boers and the natives outside these limits, they were to shift for themselves. By this process the European solidarity of South Africa was lost, and Eng- land temporarily withdrew from the task of guiding the development of European colonisation northward of the Orange River, and of controlling the disintegration and re- organisation of the native tribes in the face of the disturbing factor of the Boer expansion. From a South African point of view the non-intervention policy led to the gravest error committed by England in the century of her administration, for the grant of self-government to the Boer emigrants meant the establishment of an archaic military system, which was absolutely opposed alike to the industrial principles of Anglo-Saxon colonisation, and to the humanitarian sentiment upon which the native policy of the British Government was based. From an Imperial point of view it must be considered as a mistaken application of the wise colonial policy of Lord Grey, under which it was determined to give as large a measure of self-government as possible to the rapidly developing Pacific colonies, and to extend this principle to the British colonics in South Africa. The separation, therefore, of the turbulent republican section of the Franco-Dutch population from their compatriots under British rule was justified on the ground, that it would materi- ally contribute to the introduction of free institutions in the Cape Colony. This reason for abandoning the Boers has proved to be as mistaken as the belief that South Africa, as 86 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA a whole, would never become sufficiently valuable from an industrial point of view to compensate the British nation for the burden and cost of its administration : but it must not be forgotten that the opinion existed in the mind of the British Government, and that effect was given to it by the establish- ment of a representative parliament in the Cape Colony in 1853. The fault of the Colonial Office — constituted in 1854, by the appointment of a principal Secretary of State solely for the affairs of the Colonial Department — lay in the fact that it refused to believe the overwhelming evidence of the error which had been committed, when this evidence was laid before it by Sir George Cathcart's successor, Sir George Grey, and to adopt the remedy which was then proposed. The nature of this protest, and the remedy proposed by Grey, must be considered in a separate chapter. CHAPTER VI. Two Views of South Africa, After the recognition of the Boer Republics under the Con- ventions of Sand River and Bloemfontein, the stream of South African history flows onwards in two distinct channels. On the one hand we have the two British colonies and British KafFraria developing under British authority ; on the other, the two Republics where the old Dutch system of a military oligarchy is maintained. In spite of the Kafir wars, and the disturbances created by the emigration of the Boers, the inhabitants of the Cape Colony, both Dutch and English, had made steady progress in the arts of peace ; and this progress was continued until a remarkable and unexpected stimulus was given to the indus- trial development of South Africa by the discovery of the diamond mines of Kimberley in 1870. The cultivation of the vine, introduced by the Huguenot settlers in the seven- teenth century, was practised by the Franco-Dutch settlers in the Cape Peninsula, and in the fertile valleys of the adjacent mainland. The wool industry, founded early in the nineteenth century, was developed in the western province, and especially by the English settlers of the eastern province in the rich grazing districts between the Stormberg moun- tains and the Indian Ocean. In 1844 a system of roads had been constructed throughout the Colony, of which Sir Harry Smith said that they " would do honour to a great nation instead of a mere dependency of the Crown " ; and fifteen years later the railway was introduced both into the Cape Colony and Natal. In 1852 the first-fruits of the hidden mineral wealth of the country were gleaned in the establishment of the copper industry of Ookiep. At the 87 TWO VIEWS OF SOUTH AFRICA S9 same time the colonists were learning to utilise the special opportunities afforded by the climatic conditions of the Cape Colony. In 1856 the fine-haired Angora goat was success- fully introduced from Asia Minor, and the Mohair industry was established ; and in 1 869 the discovery of an artificial incubator by Mr Arthur Douglas of Albany made the breeding of ostriches one of the most lucrative of the Cape industries. One incident must not be omitted from this brief outline of the internal afl^airs of the Colony during the period which preceded the discovery of diamonds. In 1849 ^^^ Home Government determined to use the Cape as a convict station, and the Neptune arrived in Simon's Bay with its unwelcome freight of prisoners. A brief but energetic agitation ensued in which Mr John Fairbairn, Pringle's comrade in the struggle for the freedom of the colonial press, appeared once more as President of the Anti-Convict Association to defend colonial interests; and in February 1850 the obnoxious Order in Council was revoked. The success of this legiti- mate and strenuous manifestation of the will of the colonists contributed to the grant of representative institutions in 1853 ; and in the succeeding year Sir George Grey, who was quali- fied by his experience as governor of South Australia and afterwards of New Zealand, was appointed to administer the Colony under the new constitution. When Sir George Grey had been five years in South Africa he reviewed the situation, which had been created by the introduction of the non-intervention policy, and the process which he termed aptly enough the *' dismemberment " of South Africa. He pointed out that the Conventions had left the boundaries of both the Boer Republics undetermined, and that this defect had "sown the seeds of many future disagreements." Not only so, but " Great Britain was be- lieved (rightly or wrongly as may be) to be placed, by the Conventions she has made, in this anomalous position ; that she could conclude no treaty, form no alliance with any native tribes, whilst the independent republics could conclude such treaties and alliances with them as they thought proper ; 90 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA and that she was bound to prevent the native nations from obtaining supplies of arms and ammunition for the protection of life or property, whilst she was bound to permit the inhabitants of the independent republics always to obtain such supplies of arms and ammunition as they might require, with- out reference to the objects for which they might be used." The articles, to which reference is here made, appear as under in the Sand River Convention. Article I. The Assistant-Commissioners guarantee in the fullest manner on the part of the British Government to the Emigrant Farmers beyond the Vaal River the right to manage their own affairs, and to govern themselves according to their own laws, without any interference on the part of the British Government, and that no encroachment shall be made by the said Government on the territory beyond, to the north of the Vaal River ; with the further assurance that the warmest wish of the British Government is to promote peace, free-trade, and friendly intercourse with the Emigrant Farmers now inhabiting, or who hereafter may inhabit that country, it being understood that this system of non-inter- ference is binding upon both parties. Article III. Her Majesty's Assistant-Commissioners hereby dis- claim all alliances whatever, and with whomsoever of the coloured nations to the north of the Vaal River. These articles are practically the same, mutatis mutandis in both Conventions. In Article II. provision is made for a subsequent delimitation of boundaries in case of dispute ; but the sequel will show how amply Sir George Grey's criticism has been justified by events. Article VI. which permits the emigrant Boers to obtain arms and ammunition in the British colonies and possessions, is limited by the proviso : ** it being mutually understood that all trade in ammunition with the native tribes is prohibited both by the British Government and the Emigrant Farmers on both sides of the Vaal River." The only right of interference with the internal affairs of the Boer communities, which England retained under the terms of the Conventions, was that which was based upon the articles in both the Sand River and Bloemfontein Conven- tions which made slavery illegal. TWO VIEWS OF SOUTH AFRICA 91 Article IV. It is agreed that no slavery is or shall be permitted or practised in the country to the north of the Vaal River by the Emigrant Farmers. It is a principle of jurisprudence that every law must have a sanction. No one can doubt either that it was the inten- tion of the English Government to reserve to itself the right of enforcing this provision, or that England would have failed to exercise that right if occasion had arisen. Nor was there in such a case any question of an international sanction ; since the English Government had definitely declared in its earlier dealings with the emigrant Boers, that it would not permit any other power to assume the control which it might itself renounce. Sir George Grey had realised the value of the country northward of the Cape Colony, and the futility of the attempt to settle the nationality difficulty by permitting the secession of the emigrant Boers. The countries north of the Orange River, he wrote, "are very fertile and productive. . . . The population of the colony of the Cape ^ of Good Hope is continually spreading into these countries. In a few years, therefore, they must, in products, resources, and number of inhabitants, far surpass the united colonies of the Cape and Natal." He foresaw that the independent Boer states would become a centre and rallying point of Afrikander sentiment and nationality ; that in fact the Imperial Government were " cultivating " the Afrikander nationality by conferring upon the Boers a separate political existence. He foresaw also that in the event of further conflicts between the British Government and the Afrikanders, the Afrikanders in th Cape Colony would be attracted to the sentiment of the Boers, instead of the Boers being attracted to the sentiment of the Afrikanders under British rule. "Although these European countries," he wrote, " are treated as separate 1 It must be remembered that the boundaries of the Cape Colony of to-day have been enlarged since Sir George Grey's time, and now include Griqualand "West and Bechuanaland, in addition to successive annexations on the east. 92 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA nations, their inhabitants bear the same family names as the inhabitants of this colony, and maintain with them ties of the closest intimacy and relationship. They speak generally the same language, not English, bat Dutch. They are, for the most part, of the same religion, belonging to the Dutch Reformed Church. They have the same laws, the Roman Dutch. They have the same sympathies, the same prejudices, the same habits, and frequently the same feelings regarding the native races. . . . " I think that there can be no doubt that, in any great public, or popular, or national question or movement, the mere fact of calling these people different nations would not make them so, nor would the fact of a mere fordable stream running between them sever their sympathies or prevent them from acting in unison. . . . Many questions might arise in which, if the Government on the south side of the Orange River took a different view from that on the north side of the river, it might be very doubtful which of the two Governments the great mass of the people would obey." Sir George Grey pointed out also the disastrous effect of the "dismemberment " upon European South Africa itself — apart from the contingency of any direct conflict between the British and the Boers. These small states, he said, must become " centres of intrigues and internal commotions " ; and their revenues would be so small, that they could not " efficiently provide for their protection." On the other hand, the natives would combine for their mutual assistance, because in the first place they believed themselves to have been abandoned by England to the mercies cf the Boers, and in the second, they saw that the Europeans were weakened by separation. The nature and effects of this " separation " he clearly defined. England had the two British colonies and British Kaffraria, but no '* mutual relations," no " common council " united these possessions. Still less could the inde- pendent Boer Republics beyond the border be expected to agree to any general policy for the treatment of the natives under European control, or any plan of mutual defence TWO VIEWS OF SOUTH AFRICA 93 against the natives outside of the several colonies and states. Moreover England had suffered from the inevitable effect which follows the abandonment of territory in the face of a barbarous people — she had lost prestige. The natives hoped by pressing forward to gain still larger tracts of land ; and in particular, he pointed to the danger created by the reorganisa- tion of the military system of the Zulus, which had already commenced upon the recognition of Panda as an independent chief. In drawing the attention of the Colonial Office to these elements of danger in the condition of South Africa by this despatch of November 19th, 1858, Sir George Grey pro- posed a remedy. It was practically the same remedy as was applied in Canada under Lord Durham's Report in 1839. The Cape Colony, Natal, and the Free State were to be united in a federal legislature, the members of which were to be chosen by popular vote in the several states. In urging the adoption of this proposal. Grey combated the views of South Africa which had led to the dismemberment. There was the feeling, prevalent at this time, that the colonies were a source not of strength but of weakness ; and above all, there was the fact that England was chafing under the financial burden of the Empire. A few months previous to the date of this despatch Sir E. B. Lytton, the Secretary for the Colonies, had written to Grey ; " nevertheless a political observer of your distinction will be compelled to recognise as fact, the increased and increasing dislike of Parliament to the maintenance of large military establish- ments in our Colonies at Imperial cost." To this argument for maintaining the present unsatisfactory state of affairs, Grey replied that : — (i) Her Majesty's possessions in South Africa are of great and increasing value. (2) The people do not desire Kafir wars. They are fully aware of the much greater advantages which they derive from the peaceful pursuits of Industry. (3) The colonists are willing to contribute largely to the 94 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA defence of the portion of Her Majesty's dominions which they inhabit. (4) The condition of the natives is not hopeless. The missionaries have produced and are producing most beneficial effects upon the tribes of the interior. So certain was Grey of the wisdom of the policy which he advocated, that he took steps to secure the adhesion of the Free State, where many of the inhabitants, wearied of the difficult conflict in which they were involved with the Basutos, would gladly have welcomed the restoration of British authority. For this action he was charged with " direct disobedience " by the Colonial Office. He was recalled by a despatch of June 4th, 1859, and reinstated by a subsequent despatch of August 4th in the same year ; reinstated on one condition, " that you feel yourself sufficiently free and uncompromised, both with your Legislature and with the inhabitants of the Orange River Free State, to be able personally to carry into effect the policy of Her Majesty's Government, which is entirely opposed to those measures, tending to the resumption of sovereignty over that state, of which you have publicly expressed your approval in your speech to the Cape Parliament, and in your answers to the address from the state in question." It is difficult to understand how the Colonial Office failed to benefit by the singularly clear and definite analysis of the conditions of South Africa — both European and native — which was put before it by the masterly despatch of Sir George Grey, dated November 19th, 1853 ; and, indeed, a study of the almost innumerable South Africa blue-books leads to the conclusion, that in so far as any one cause can be assigned for the subsequent disasters, both military and administrative, of the British Government In this province of the Empire, it is to be found in the unwillingness of " the man in Downing Street " to listen to " the man at Capetown." But although Grey was not allowed to undo the great mistake of 1854, he was able to do good work for the Colony and for England during his term of office (1854- TWO VIEWS OF SOUTH AFRICA 95 1862). The Representative institutions established in 1853 comprised a Legislative Council and a House of Assembly, the members of which were in both cases elected by all British subjects, irrespective of nationality or colour, pos- sessed of certain minimum qualifications of property or income. The executive power was still vested in the Governor and the chief officials ; and this Executive was responsible for its actions to the Home Government, and not to the Cape Parliament. The executive officials could take part in the debates of both Houses, without, however, having the right of voting. On the other hand, financial measures could only be introduced by a member of the Executive. With this important exception, legislative power was henceforth exercised by the colonists themselves, through their representatives in the Colonial Parliament. In addition to giving these institutions a fair start. Sir George Grey signalised his administration by the introduction of a more humane and effective native policy. Up to this time British Kaffraria had been controlled by a British officer, whose duty it was to exercise authority through the chiefs. Sir George Grey purchased the right of inflicting fines and punishments from the chiefs by monthly stipends, and placed the administration of justice in the hands of European magis- trates. At the same time social measures were introduced with a view of raising the natives in the scale of civilisa- tion. The witch-doctors, who were the special instruments of the chiefs' cupidity,^ were discredited by the introduction of a knowledge of medicine through the establishment of hospitals; schools were introduced, and the natives were encouraged to substitute individual tenure of land for the common ownership of the tribal organisation. The native policy of the Colonial Government dates from this period. Its objects are well expressed by Mr Noble's words : 2 1 They '< smelt out" a rich proprietor of cattle and wives, and the chief thereupon condemned the unfortunate wretch on a charge of witchcraft, and appropriated his possessions. * History of South Africa, 96 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA "The aim of the policy of the Colonial Government since 1855 has been to establish and maintain peace, to diffuse civilisation and Christianity, and to establish society on the basis of individual property and personal industry. The agencies employed are the magistrate, the missionary, the schoolmaster, and the trader." The fact that peace was maintained upon the eastern border of the Cape Colony for fifteen years after Sir George Grey's administration was due in part to the introduction of this policy, but it must be attributed in the main to an extraordinary movement among the Kosa clans which en- tirely changed the character of British Kaffraria. In 1856, Kreli, the chief of the Amakosas, laid a crafty plot to drive the Bantu race once more in arms over the white man's border. Nongase, a Kafir girl, was reported to have held communication with the spirit world, and to have re- ceived a message, which bade her declare that on the morning of February 18th, 1857, a hurricane would sweep the earth, the ancestors of her people would arise with countless herds of cattle from their graves, and the Kosas, thus aided by the spirits of the dead, would sweep the Fingoes and the white men into the sea. But in order to avail themselves of this supernatural aid, the living must show their faith by de- stroying their cattle and ceasing to sow their fields with corn, Kreli sent messengers to the chiefs, both in British Kaifraria and beyond, ordering them to obey the spirits, his intention being to hurl the Amakosa clans in a desperate and frenzied assault against the Colony. Sir George Grey had taken all possible precautions to defend the frontier, and had at the same time collected stores of provisions for the starving natives. When the appointed day arrived, there was no hurricane, and no spirits with herds of cattle rose from their graves, but, through some strange oversight, Kreli failed to urge the frenzied tribes forward in a concerted advance against the Colony, and the thousands who crossed the border appeared not as invaders but as famine-stricken sup- pliants. In British Kaffraria and beyond the Kei River, TWO VIEWS OF SOUTH AFRICA 97 it was estimated that at least 25,000 Kafirs died of starva- tion. The thousands of refugees who entered the Colony at this time formed the basis of the present Bantu popula- tion westward of the Fish River ; on the other hand, the population of British Kaffraria was reduced from 105,000 to 38,000, and European settlers were introduced to occupy the tracts of land thus left desolate. These settlers con- sisted of ( I ) farmers from the Cape Colony, holding land on terms of military service ; (2) about 4000 men of the Anglo- German Legion, which had served in the Crimean War ; and (3) a body of about 2000 agricultural emigrants from North Germany. In this way British KafFraria was colon- ised, and King William's Town, and its port. East London, at the mouth of the Buffalo River, developed into consider- able towns. As the European element increased, union with the Cape Colony became natural and desirable; and in 1865, British KafFraria became part of the Colony, forming the two electoral divisions of King William's Town and East London. In making these arrangements for the control of the natives, and for the settlement of British KafFraria, Grey v/as persistently checked and thwarted by the refusal of the Home Government to support him with adequate funds. On September 8th, 1858, he wrote: "I would now only urge upon Her Majesty's Government that they should not distress me more than is absolutely necessary regarding the few thousand pounds, which may be necessary for the government and control of the people of the country which lies beyond the colony of the Cape of Good Hope. Stripping the country as I am of troops, some great disaster will take place if necessary funds are at the same time cut ofF from me. I am sure if the enormous reductions I have effected in military expendi- ture are considered, the most rigid economists will feel that the money paid by Great Britain for the control of this country has been advantageously laid out." Stripping the country of troops. The reference is to that daring assumption of personal responsibility by which, in Lord Malmesbury's 98 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA words, Sir George Grey *' probably saved India." Upon the arrival of the news of the outbreak of the mutiny in India, he ordered some transports returning with troops from China to sail for India, while at the same time he despatched reinforcements from the Cape Colony against the remonstrances of the General in command. To the statement that he had failed to carry out the policy of the Colonial Office, he replied : " With regard to any necessity which might exist for my removal on the ground of not holding the same views upon essential points of policy as Her Majesty's Government hold, I can only make the general remark that, during the five years which have elapsed since I was appointed to my present office, there have been at least seven Secretaries of State for the Colonial Department, each of whom held different views upon some important points of policy connected with this country.'* To the charge that he had overstepped the duties of a British Governor, he replied by this splendid plea for con- fidence in " the man on the spot " : " Can a man who, on a distant and exposed frontier, surrounded by difficulties, with invasions of Her Majesty's territories threatening on several points, assumes a responsibility which he, guided by many circumstances which he can neither record nor remember, as they came hurrying on one after the other, be fairly judged of in respect to the amount of responsibility he assumes by those who, in the quiet of distant offices in London, know nothing of the anxieties or nature of the difficulties he had to encounter ? " It is necessary to indicate briefly the course of events in the Free State : since these events, in so far as they led to the interference of the Imperial Government, have a signifi- cant bearing upon the question of the relationship of England to the Boer Republics after the Conventions. The principle which guided the Imperial Government in their subsequent interferences with the independence of the Republics was this. England, as paramount power in South Africa, held TWO VIEWS OF SOUTH AFRICA 99 herself responsible for the pe.-.ce ot South Afric.i as .^ whole. and in virtue of this responsibility she churned the cop,con;i- tant right of insisting that the Boer Republics should bo so governed as not to disturb or endanger the general peace. This right was something apart from, and independent oi\ the Conventions. It was a de facto right, which was convened into a de jure right by continuous exercise, and bv the ac- quiescence of the Republican Governments ; ^ nor was it ever seriously disputed, until the South African Republic formally claimed the status of a " sovereign international state" in 1899. After self-government had been restored to the emigrant Boers of the Free State by the Convention of Blocmfontein, the Volksraad, on April loth, 1854, adopted a republican constitution roughly modelled on that of the United States of America. That is to say, the executive power was vested in a President and Executive Council, and the legis- lative power in the single representative body termed the Volksraad. The new government was at once involved in the territorial difficulties, arising out of the neglect to de- termine the boundaries under the Convention, of which Sir George Grey wrote. Adam Kok and the Griquas refused to submit to the Republic, on the ground that the treaty between their chief and the British Government had not been cancelled by the Convention. Ultimately this dispute was settled by the action of Sir George Grey, who, in 1 860, removed this people to the territory which they now occupy, east of the Drakenberg (then on the north-cast of the Colonial border), called Griqualand East. The dispute with the Basutos was more serious. Moshcsh not only refused to submit to the Republic, but he permitted a series of aggressions by his people upon the Free State border. In 1861 Sir George Grey arbitrated on the Basuto ques- tion at the request of the Free State, and in 1864 Sir Philip Wodehouse performed the same office, at the request of the newly elected President, Mr (afterwards Sir John) ^ See p. 131. TWO VIEWS OF SOUTH AFRICA loi Brand. In both cases the award was in favour of the Free State ; but in 1865, and again in 1866, Basuto depredations compelled the burghers to take up arms. The Basuto war exhausted the resources of the diminutive state, and its pro- stration was marked by the proclamation of martial law and the issue of a paper currency. When, however, the burghers had at last got the upper hand, they proposed in self-defence to impose terms upon the Basutos, which were so harsh as to amount virtually to the confiscation of all their most fertile territory. This settlement would have produced the dis- persion of the tribe, and thereby seriously endangered the peace of South Africa. In order, therefore, to prevent this movement of dispersion, Sir Philip Wodehouse listened to the appeal of Moshesh, and proclaimed the Basutos British subjects. The Free State protested against this action as being a breach of the Convention, but the British Govern- ment refused to admit that their duty as paramount power was limited by that document, in a case where the common interests of South Africa were concerned. In the follow- ing year terms of peace between the Free State and the Basutos, and a definite boundary between the two com- batants, were embodied in the Convention of Aliwal North, which was concluded on March 12, 1869, between President Brand and Sir Philip Wodehouse, as High Commissioner for South Africa. As already mentioned, Grey was reinstated at the end of 1859, and the remaining years of his administration were not disturbed by any untoward circumstances. He was succeeded in 1862 by Sir Philip Wodehouse as Governor and High Commissioner, and five years later a discovery was made which proved the prelude to an event destined to suddenly quicken the whole life of South Africa. In 1867 a trader named O'Reilly found a river pebble in a farmhouse in the Hopetown district of the Cape Colony, which proved to be a diamond, and was eventually bought by Sir Philip Wode- house himself for ;f 500. The subsequent discovery of similar pebbles brought 10,000 men to the banks of the 102 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA Vaal, to search in what were known as the " wet diggings " for diamonds. In 1870 diamonds were discovered in the barren country, twenty miles south of the river diggings, and in the next year Kimberley and its diamond industry were founded. In a few years — almost months — an enter- prising industrial community had sprung up in this remote and unpromising region between the fork of the Vaal and the Modder Rivers. The interest of England in South Africa was once more awakened. Men and money flowed out to the Cape Colony, causing the Colonial revenue to double itself within five years. Railways were constructed on the strength of this increasing revenue, and the industrial development of South Africa commenced in earnest. In the meantime the Colony had attained to the dignity of full self-government. In 1869 Sir Philip Wodehouse had been succeeded by Sir Henry Barkly, and the new Governor was authorised to introduce responsible government into the Colony. In 1872 the new constitution was proclaimed, and the first Colonial Ministry, of which Sir John Molteno was Premier, took ofdce. Thus the industrial and constitutional development of the Colony proceeded side by side. CHAPTER VII. The Need for Unity. In the ten years which followed the discovery of diamonds the fruits of neglect came rapidly to maturity. The evil results of the dismemberment of South Africa, which Sir George Grey had foreseen, were now definitely realised. The Bantu tribes had become populous and restless ; and the Zulus, the flower of the race, had been organised by Ketshwayo into a formidable military power. The disunion of the European communities, and the mingled weakness and aggressiveness of the Republican governments, afforded a tempting opportunity to the Bantu to unite and shake off the white man's yoke. At the time, therefore, when the industrial development of South Africa first received a decisive im- pulse, the Europeans were found to have been divided into two separate and antagonistic systems ; the British colonies organised on industrial lines, and the Republics, where com- munities of farmers still remained in the backward condition in which military service was the price of citizenship, and a narrow subsistence, won from the land by primitive methods of agriculture, constituted their sole ambition. In short, two strong forces barred the path of progress — the forces of bar- barism and ignorance. Was it too late to undo the work of the past ? Could a remedy be found ? Lord Carnarvon, who became Secretary for the Colonies in 1B74, proposed a remedy — the only possible remedy short of military conquest, federation. He proposed to re-unite the colonies and republics in a federal system which, while it would establish a central authority wielding the united strength of the Europeans in matters of common concern, would at the same time interfere as little as possible with the 103 104 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA manners and habits of the Boers. Under such a system It would be possible to avert the antagonism of interests between the republican Dutch and the British colonists, and to initiate a common native policy by which European control could be peaceably and effectively established over the dark-skinned tribes. The need of attaining both these objects was demonstrated only too plainly by the logic of events. The boundaries of the Republics had never yet been definitely settled ; and when British authority was established over the Diamond Fields in 1871, and the territory of Griqualand West was constituted, the Imperial Government was brought into conflict with both of the Republics. The Transvaal pro- tested that the extension of British authority northward of the Vaal River was a violation of Article I. of the Sand River Convention, under which the Imperial Government had promised to make no encroachment " on the territory beyond, to the north of the Vaal River." The Free State Government declared that the Diamond Fields belonged to them as being included within the boundaries of the Sover- eignty proclaimed by Sir Harry Smith in 1848. The dispute with the Transvaal was referred to the arbitration of Mr Keate, the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal ; but the question of the south-western border of this Republic was not finally settled until the year 1884. The claim of the Free State was subsequently admitted by the Colonial Office, and a sum of ^^90,000 was paid by the Imperial Govern- ment, and accepted by the Free State Government, in com- pensation for the loss of territory. Neither of these incidents tended to promote a good understanding between the Imperial Government and the Boers, and it was very desirable to avoid the future repetition of such disagreements. Another incident, which arose immediately out of the establishment of the diamond industry, was no less significant of the need which existed for a central European authority in South Africa. In the rough work of the diamond mines native labour was employed j and the Bantu, whose services THE NEED FOR UNITY 105 were thus utilised, came from all parts of South Africa. Among them were some members of the Hlubi tribe, which was located on the western border of the colony of Natal. Under the regulations of the Griqualand West Government the natives were allowed to purchase fire-arms, and the Hlubis availed themselves of this permission to acquire the much coveted weapons. The circumstances of Natal, where there was a very small European community living in the midst of a native population ten or twelve times as numerous, made it necessary that the possession of fire-arms by the natives should be strictly controlled. The Hlubis on their return to Natal refused to register their guns, and before the regulations of the Natal Government could be enforced, a conflict occurred between them and the police. This incident revealed the danger created by the absence of a common system of control among the European Govern- ments ; and at the same time the attitude of the Bantu tribes beyond the limits of these governments was becoming increasingly threatening. In view of these facts Mr J. A. Froude was sent out by Lord Carnarvon to preach the doctrine of federation, and a South Africa Act was introduced into the Imperial Parliament. The object of Mr Froude's mission, which was to promote the creation of the federal union by means of local initiative, was frustrated through an unfortunate disagreement with the Cape Ministry. In the meantime the condition of the Transvaal had become so unsatisfactory, as to make the federal union more than ever necessary. In 1871 the Keate Award was accepted by President Pretorius, and repudiated by the Volksraad. Pretorius was therefore compelled to resign, and in the following year, after an unsuccessful attempt to unite the two Republics under President Brand of the Free State, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, Thomas Frangois Burgers, was appointed. President Burgers was at once too humane and too progressive to command the confidence of the Boers, and in 1876, when Sekukuni, the tchief of the Bapedi, had defeated the joint force of Burghers io6 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA and Swazis which he had levied, his government practically broke down. The Kafirs in the north-east were victorious and defiant, the Treasury was empty, the President's authority was insufficient to maintain order or to collect taxes, and Ketshwayo, the Zulu king, having picked a quarrel with the Boers on the question of their eastern boundary, had declared his intention of "eating them up." The traders in the towns, and the miners who had already begun to find gold in the Lydenburg district, in view of the general insecurity, desired the protection of the British Government. It was known that Sekukuni was Ketshwayo's " dog," and it was beHeved that the destruction of the Boers by Ketshwayo would be the prelude to a general rising of the Bantu tribes throughout South Africa. Under these circumstances Lord Carnarvon authorised Sir Theophilus Shepstone to watch events at Pretoria, and under certain circumstances to proclaim British authority over the Transvaal. Presi- dent Burgers thereupon submitted certain proposals for " strengthening the Republic " to the Raad, intimating that the alternative to the acceptance of these measures would be the declaration of British authority. The Raad broke up without accepting the President's proposals, and Shepstone, believing that the emergency contemplated by his commis- sion had arisen, and acting in conjunction with the party favourable to British rule, proclaimed the annexation of the territories of the South African Republic on April iith, 1877. TJ^^ President and Executive contented themselves with formally protesting against the Act, and the annexation was peaceably effected. In the meantime Lord Carnarvon had passed a second South Africa Bill through the Imperial Parliament, and had appointed Sir Bartle Frere as Governor and High Commis- sioner. Frere, who had been selected for the arduous duty of reuniting the Colonies and Republics in a federal system under the terms of the South Africa Act, because of the conspicuous administrative ability which he had displayed in India, arrived at the Cape on March 31st, 1877. The news THE NEED FOR UNITY 107 of the annexation of the Transvaal did not reach him officially, owing to the difficulties of communication, until April 30th ; as, however, the annexation has been more than once repre- sented as Frere's act, it is necessary to give a precise state- ment of his relationship to it, and of his opinion on the wisdom of the proceeding. Such a statement was pubHshed over his own signature in the Nineteenth Century for February 1881. It is this : — " In judging of the annexation of the Transvaal, I would wish it to be borne in mind that it was an act which in no way originated with me, over which I had no control, and with which I was only subsequently incidentally connected. The annexation took place on the nth of April, several days before my arrival at the Cape on the 31st of March could be known to Sir Theophilus Shepstone, as the telegraph line did not then exist, and letters took over three weeks from Capetown to Pretoria. . . . " It was a great question then, as now, whether the annexation was justifiable.'' But, British authority being once established, Frere be- lieved that, on the one hand, retirement would be most disastrous, and that on the other, the duties which justified the act must be performed both promptly and completely by the paramount power. These duties were the protection of the Transvaal from the insurgent natives, and the creation of a constitution which would both insure administrative efficiency and permit the Boers to retain a reasonable amount of self- government. At the same time the establishment of British authority in the Transvaal materially assisted the process of federation. Before any steps could be taken to give effect to the pro- visions of the South Africa Act, the energies of the new Governor were absorbed by an immediate danger, which threatened the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony. The densely populated regions between the Cape Colony and Natal had been left under the non-intervention policy prac- tically free from European control. Four months after Frere G io8 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA had arrived at the Cape, first the Gcalekas under Kreli, and then the Gaikas under Sandilli, defied the Colonial Govern- ment and attacked the frontier. Frere himself supervised the military operations, and by means of his strenuous efforts this, the last of the Kafir wars, was unaccompanied by the disastrous loss of the lives and property of the eastern colonists, which had marked previous conflicts with the border tribes. Nevertheless the Kafirs were not subdued until May in the following year, 1878. In the interval the attitude of Ketshwayo had become more threatening, and it became evident that the Zulu king, emboldened by the apparent inability of the new British Government of the Transvaal to subdue Sekukuni, and by the difficulties which the Colonial Government had experienced in their conflict with the Kafirs of the south, thought himself strong enough to throw off the mask and strike a decisive blow, which would be the signal for a general uprising of the Bantu race throughout South Africa. On December lOth, 1877, Sir Henry Bulwer, the Governor of Natal, had informed Frere that isolated conflicts between the Boers and Zulus on the border were in progress, although a " general collision " had been prevented. The Zulu king was more bitterly hostile, it appeared, to the present Transvaal Government than ever, and it was desirable therefore that the dispute should be settled as quickly as possible. For this purpose he suggested that a *' third party " should be appointed to arbitrate, and Sir Bartle Frere, having decided to himself undertake the examination of the conflicting claims of the Boer farmers and the Zulu king, arrived in Natal for this purpose in September 1878. Frere decided in favour of the Zulu claim, but he accom- panied his award with certain demands, which he deemed necessary for the security of the Europeans alike in the Transvaal and in Natal. He required the Zulu king — (i) to disband his army; (2) to receive a British resident; (3) to surrender certain persons who had committed an ofl^ence on British territory; and (4) to give guarantees for the better THE NEED FOR UNITY 109 government of his people in the future. When Ketshwayo returned no reply to these demands, Frere ordered Lord Chelmsford, who was in command of the British forces assembled in Natal in view of the threatening attitude of the Zulu king, to advance into Zululand. But before I give the bare outline of the Zulu war — which is the only account pos- sible within the limits of ';his work — there are three points upon which it is essential that the reader should be informed. These points are : — ( 1 ) The character of Ketshwayo and the nature of his military system. (2) The condition of the Transvaal. ( 3 ) The circumstances of Natal. I. Ketshwayo aimed at re-establishing the supremacy of Tshaka, and he had put himself into communication with the Bantu chiefs throughout South Africa. Frere's knowledge of the Indian natives enabled him to discern traces of an ominous communication passing from tribe to tribe. Wher- ever there had been disturbance and resistance to authority of government, he wrote,^ between the Limpopo and the westernmost limits of Kafir population, there we have found unmistakable evidence of " a common purpose and a general understanding'' among the black races to shake off the domination of the Europeans. And of this movement Ketshwayo is the ** head centre," and the Zulus the '* main strength." Of Ketshwayo himself he said, " It is no ex- aggeration to say that his history from the first has been written in characters of blood. I do not refer merely to the long chronicle of his butcheries — from the slaughter of his brothers and their followers, early in his career, down to the more recent indiscriminate and wholesale destruction of all the unmarried women who attempted to evade his orders, given in a fit of caprice, that they should accept as husbands the elderly unmarried soldiers of his army, the massacre being subsequently extended to all the relatives who took away for burial the exposed corpses of the slaughtered women — but I 1 Despatch of December loth, 1878. no THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA would take his character from his own account of himself." This account was contained in a reply which Ketshwayo had sent to the Governor of Natal two years ago, when a remonstrance had been addressed to him on the murder ot these girls, and he was reminded of the promises of good government which he had made to Sir Theophilus Shepstone on his coronation. It ran : " Did I ever tell Shepstone ? Did he tell the white people I made such an arrangement ? Because, if he did, he has deceived them. I do kill, but do not consider yet I have done anything in the way of killing. Why do the white people start at nothing ? I have not yet begun. I have yet to kill ; it is the custom of our nation, and I shall not depart from it. Why does the Governor of Natal speak to me about my laws ? Do I go to Natal and dictate to him about his laws ? I shall not agree to any laws or rules from Natal, and by so doing throw the great kraal which I govern into the water. My people will not listen unless they are killed ; and, while wishing to be friends with the English, I do not agree to give over my people to laws sent by them. Have I not asked the English Government to allow me to wash my spears, since the death of my father Umpandi, and they have kept playing with me all this time and treating me like a child ? Go back and tell the English that I shall now act on my own account, and if they wish me to agree to their laws I shall leave and become a wanderer ; but before I go it will be seen, as I shall not go without hav- ing acted. Go back and tell the white men this, and let them hear it well. The Governor of Natal and I are equal. He is Governor of Natal, and I am Governor here." The nature of the military system created by Ketshwayo will appear sufficiently from the following description, which is contained in the same desj)atch. '* Whether his young men were trained into celibate gladiators as parts of a most efficient military machine, or allowed to become peaceable cattle herds ; whether his young women were to be allowed to marry the young men, or to be assegaied by hundreds for disobeying the King's order to marry effete veterans, might THE NEED FOR UNITY m possibly be Zulu questions of domestic economy, with which the British Government were not concerned to meddle ; but they were parts of the great recruiting system of a military organisation which enabled the King to form out of his comparatively small population an army, at the very lowest estimate, of 25,000 perfectly trained and perfectly obedient soldiers, able to march three times as fast as we could, to dispense with commissariat of every kind, and transport of every kind, and to fall upon Natal or any part of the neighbouring colony, in such numbers and with such deter- mination, that nothing but a fortified post could resist them, making no prisoners and sparing neither age nor sex." 2. After the annexation, the Boers had sent a deputation, consisting of Mr Paul Kriiger and Mr Jorissen, to the Colonial Office, in 1877, to ask that the independent govern- ment might be restored. This request was refused by Lord Carnarvon, and there were already signs of an armed insur- rection among the burghers of the country districts. Sir Owen Lanyon (who had succeeded Shepstone as adminis- trator), although he had been most successful in Griqualand West, had failed to secure the confidence of the Boers. The position at the end of 1878 was, therefore, eminently un- satisfactory. The Boers, Sir Bartle Frere wrote,^ had not yet learnt to identify their interests with ours. The post- ponement of operations against Sekukuni, although quite unavoidable, was most unfortunate, since it was attributed both in the Transvaal and in Zululand to a want of power on the part of the Imperial Government. To defer the settlement of the Zulu question would therefore have a disastrous effect upon the position of affairs in the Transvaal. The danger of a Zulu attack upon the Transvaal Boers, and of a general rising of the natives against the Europeans, was one main ground for annexation ; and the danger was real enough to procure the acquiescence of a very large proportion of intel- ligent people, who saw that we were justified in protecting them to prevent ourselves from being attacked. ** This is a 1 Despatch, December 11, 1878 112 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA sound argument," said Frere, " if we do really protect the Transvaal, but it will cease to secure acquiescence," unless we show them, that we have both the power and the will to vindicate the supremacy which we have claimed. 3. Not only was the European population of Natal very small, consisting of some 20,000 white men in the midst of 300,000 Bantu, but the majority of the Natal natives were themselves Zulus, who had crossed the border to seek the security of British rule. In the event, therefore, of an invasion of the colony by Ketshwayo's imp'iSy the vast majority of the natives would be compelled to join their victorious comrades : otherwise they could not hope to escape the penalty of wholesale destruction, which would be ruth- lessly inflicted upon them as renegades and deserters. In short, the European colony of Natal was in deadly peril, and from this peril it could be alone saved by such immediate and offensive military operations as would compel the Zulu's to fight on their own territory, and fight, too, on the defensive, so that they would be robbed of the advantage of their singular mobility. These were the facts which Frere had in his mind when he ordered Lord Chelmsford to advance into Zululand. The Tugela was crossed early in January 1879. Of the three columns which then advanced into Zululand, with orders to concentrate by different routes upon Ketshwayo*s head- quarters at Ulundi, two — respectively commanded by Colonel (now Sir Evelyn) Wood, and Colonel Pearson — beat back the Zulus whom they encountered and established themselves in fortified posts, where they remained until the country was finally subjugated six months later. The main column, however, which Lord Chelmsford led in person, was subjected to one of those strange and unexpected reverses, which are endowed by attendant circumstances with effects altogether disproportionate to their intrinsic importance. On January 22nd, Lord Chelmsford moved out of camp at Isandlhwana, leaving behind him some 600 British and 700 native troops. A Zulu impif 1 5,000 strong, evaded Lord Chelmsford's THE NEED FOR UNITY 113 scouts, fell upon his camp, and destroyed the entire force with the exception of some forty mounted men, who fought their way through the black swarm, before the horns of the impi had closed completely round the camp. The immediate advance of the vanguard of the victorious impi into Natal was checked by the heroic defence of the passage of the Tugela, offered by a handful of the 24th regiment, who had been left under Lieutenants Bromhead and Chard at Rorke's Drift. Lord Chelmsford, thus deprived of his supplies, was compelled to fall back upon the Bridsh base in Natal ; and his second advance was delayed by the rising of the Tugela until the month of June. Ultimately he engaged the Zulus at Ulundi on July 4th, and inflicted a crushing defeat upon the army by which Ketshwayo had covered his capital. But the disaster of Isandlhwana had produced other and more far-reaching effects than this delay in the breaking-up of Ketshwayo's man-slaying machine. The almost total destruction of the 24th regiment had caused a profound sensation in England, and in the popular mind Frere was regarded as responsible for the disaster. The Government — Lord Beaconsfield's Government — bowed before an agita- tion which, however unreasonable in itself, placed a majority of votes for the moment at the disposal of the Opposition in the House of Commons, and avoided defeat by the sacrifice of Sir Bartle Frere. Lord Wolseley was appointed to com- mand the British forces in the place of Lord Chelmsford ; and Frere himself was censured, and the control of South- East Africa was taken from his hands and placed in those of the new Commander-in-Chief, who was further appointed High Commissioner for the aflPalrs of the Transvaal and Natal. Lord Wolseley assumed command of the British forces in Zululand a few days after the battle of Ulundi ; and on August 27th he was able to report that, with the exception of the north-west corner, the whole of Zululand was safe for Europeans. On November 28th Sekukuni's stronghold was stormed by Colonel Baker-RusseJl, and the work of subjugating the Bantu was completed. 114 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA The grounds upon which Frere was censured were ( i ) his " disobedience," in not waiting for pacific instructions before he presented a virtual ultimatum to Ketshwayo, and ordered Lord Chelmsford to enforce its terms; and (2) his rashness, in ordering Lord Chelmsford to break up the Zulu military system with the forces then in Natal. Frere's reply- to both these charges is to be found in a memorandum covered by a despatch of January 13th, 1880. It is sig- nificant that this memorandum was drawn up to serve as a reply to Mr Gladstone's speech at Glasgow on December 5th, 1879 ; ^^^ ^^ must be remembered that Lord Carnarvon had resigned the Colonial Secretaryship in the previous year (1878), and had been succeeded by Sir Michael Hicks- Beach. In answer to the first charge Frere replied, that the delay required to communicate ^ with the Home Government would have allowed Ketshwayo to assume the offensive, and 80 placed Natal at the mercy of the Zulus. *' In the judgment of all military authorities, both before the war and since, it was absolutely impossible for Lord Chelmsford's force, acting on the defensive within the Natal boundary, to prevent a Zulu impi from entering Natal and repeating the same indiscriminate slaughter of all ages and sexes which they boast of having effected in Natal, at Blaaw- Krantz and Weenen, in Dingaan's other massacres of forty years ago, and in the inroads into the Transvaal territory made by Umbellini, with Ketshwayo's connivance, within the last two years." 2 To the charge of rashness he replied : " An unexpected disaster, caused in Lord Chelmsford's absence by disregard of his orders, entailed a delay of five months and serious 1 Cable communication between South Africa and England was not established till after the disaster of Isandlhwana. 2 The significance of this statement has been amply demonstrated by the difficulties in which the British troops were involved by being compelled to defend Natal against the Boers in the present war. But the Zulus, it must be remembered, were even more mobile than the Boers. THE NEED FOR UNITY 115 discouragement to us, and added enormously to the military prestige of the enemy. " Nevertheless, as soon as he was enabled to resume the offensive, Lord Chelmsford, moving on the same line as that he first adopted, in eight marches from the scene of the former disaster, with a column of about 6000 Europeans, completely defeated the Zulu army and annihilated their military system. " Will any one, with this unquestionable fact before him, say I was rash in what I asked Lord Chelmsford to attempt in January with about 6000 English soldiers, commanded by officers like Wood and Redvers Buller, Pearson and Glyn ? " In this year — the year of the Zulu war, 1879 — South African affairs were actively discussed in England for the first time ; and the evils of our system of party politics have nowhere been more apparent, than in the sinister influence which this system has henceforth exercised upon England's South African administration. In this year the Boers sent a second deputation to the Colonial Office to ask for the restoration of their independence, and although they received no more encouragement from Sir Michael Hicks-Beach than they had from Lord Carnarvon, their cause was espoused by some members of the Liberal party. In the autumn, Mr Gladstone, in the course of his Midlothian campaign, sought to fix upon Frere the responsibility both for the annexation of the Transvaal, with its sequel the Zulu war, and for the late Afghan war ; and in return for the sympathy, which the liberal chief had then openly expressed with the cause of Transvaal independence, a letter was addressed to him by the Afrikanders in the Cape Colony, praying him to use his great influence on behalf of their kinsmen. Nothing could have been more disastrous than this interference. On the one hand, the position of Frere, the Queen's representative in South Africa, was fatally weakened, and on the other, the Boers, who assumed that a declaration made in opposition would necessarily be put into effect when the party, whose leader had made it, was returned to power, were encouraged ii6 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA to continue their agitation against the Queen's authority in the Transvaal. In April of the following year, 1880, Mr Gladstone came into power, and a third delegation was despatched to England by the Boers. But the views of Mr Gladstone in opposition were not the same as the views of Mr Gladstone the Prime Minister of England. Mr Kriiger and his fellow delegates were now informed by Mr Gladstone, that he could not advise Her Majesty to withdraw her authority from the Transvaal. At the same time the delegates received informal promises of support from Mr Courtney and other members of the Liberal party, and they would appear to have been told in so many words, that the recall of Sir Bartle Frere would remove the chief obstacle to the success of their efforts : and they, therefore, returned to the Cape with the deliberate intention of effecting this object. All this time, discredited by his official superiors, deprived alike of their support, and of the support of the English public, by the charges which had been published broadcast, but which he had never been allowed to answer, Frere went on with the difficult task of uniting the Colonies and States in a Federal Union. In April 1880 matters had so far advanced that Mr (now Sir) Gordon Sprigg's ministry had formulated proposals for holding the Conference of Delegates from the several states, which was the initial proceeding in the creation of the Union. These proposals were bemg submitted to the Cape Parliament, when Mr Kriiger and his fellow-delegates returned from their unsuccessful appeal to Mr Gladstone. Acting in concert with the Afrikander leaders in the Colony, they obtained pledges from the Afri- kander members to oppose the Conference proposals, on the ground that the question of Transvaal independence must be settled before the question of federation could be discussed. On June 29th, the Colonial Ministry withdrew their proposals in order to avoid the defeat which was now certain. On August 1st, that is to say, so soon as the despatches announc- ing the abandonment of the Federation measures had been THE NEED FOR UNITY 117 received, Sir Bartle Frere was recalled by a telegraphic despatch. It was the old story. "There has been so much divergence between your views and those of Her Majesty's present Government ..." Lord Kimberley telegraphed. In the meantime, the Delegates had written a letter 1 to Mr Courtney on June 26th, and pubhshed it in the Afrikander newspapers, in which they expressed their satisfaction at the successful result obtained by the common efforts of themselves and the section of the Liberal party of which Mr Courtney was the head. *' The fall of Sir Bartle Frere will in this respect be useful ... the annexation of the Transvaal is the chief cause of the defeat of Sir Bartle Frere. . . . We have done our duty and used all legitimate influence to cause the Conference proposals to fall^ There was a complete understanding between Messrs Kriiger and Joubert and Mr Courtney. They had been told to do their part and they had done it. We can neither blame the Boer leaders, nor grudge them their success, but what are we to think of these Englishmen who worked hand in glove with men who, six months later, were in arms against the Queen \ Surely their position, as strange as it was unenviable, affords damning evidence of the evils of government by party. After the recall of Frere, events marched with startling rapidity to the crisis of Majuba. Since June 1879, ^^e Transvaal had been administered by Sir Owen Lanyon under first Lord Wolseley, and then Sir George Colley, as High Commissioners for South-East Africa. On March 2nd, 1880, Lord Wolseley wrote in reply to the censures of the Home Government, that the energetic measures, which he had taken in the previous few months (when he was himself directing the administration) were necessary to remove the impression that the English Government was unable to defend its authority. " It appeared to me," he then said, "to be quite clear that the longer this false idea of the timid collapse of British sovereignty was suffered to germin- ate, the more dangerous would become the audacity of the 1 The text of this letter will be found in C — 2655. THE NEED FOR UNITY 119 leaders and instigators of the agitation, and the more con- firmed and intractable would be the feelings of the people." The Transvaal continued in this state of veiled rebellion during the following months in which, as already related, the delegates made their unsuccessful appeal to Mr Gladstone, and subsequently secured the recall of Sir Bartle Frere by the co-operation of the Afrikanders in the Cape Colony with the party in England who had condemned the annexation. In November, however, parties of Boers began to assemble in arms, and in certain districts the farmers formally refused to pay taxes to the British administration. A triumvirate, consisting of Paul Kriiger, Joubert and Pretorius, was then appointed, and on December 1 6th (Dingaan's Day) the Transvaal flag was raised on the desolate uplands of the Witwatersrandt. And thus before Frere's successor, Sir Hercules Robinson, had arrived at the Cape, the same Boer leaders, who had successfully co-operated with members of the British Parliament to procure the recall, were in open revolt against the Queen. Although Sir Owen Lanyon was prepared for a rebellion, he had not expected to find the plans of the Boers so com- pletely matured. The English garrisons in the Transvaal were quickly surrounded, and small bodies of troops were shot down or made prisoners. Sir George Colley promptly advanced from Natal to the relief of the Transvaal Govern- ment, but he found Laing's Nek occupied by the insurgents, and was himself killed on the 27th February 1881, at Majuba Hill. Then followed the successful advance of Sir Evelyn Wood with 10,000 men from Natal, the hurried despatch of Lord Roberts to Cape Town with an army to follow, the cessation of hostilities on March 22nd, and then the head of every Englishman in South Africa was bowed to the ground by the strange news — news that at first seemed in- credible — that the English Government had resolved to give up the Transvaal ; resolved to abandon the loyal subjects of the Queen, Dutch, Native, and English, who had heard the Queen's representative declare that so long as the streams 120 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA flowed seawards, and the sun ran its course in the heavens, the Queen's authority would there remain established : resolved to yield to force of arms the boon which two successive governments had thrice refused to the prayers of peaceful delegates ; resolved in the face of a resistance altogether more powerful and widespread than they had ever anticipated, to postpone until a more convenient season, the settlement of the question, whether the Boer or the Englishman was to be master in South Africa. This is a passage in the history of our country that no Englishman can read without a sense of shame. And why ? The shame of Majuba does not lie in the defeat of the British arms. If the circumstances of these early engage- ments with the Boers are studied, it will be found that the British soldiers who fell, faced death with the stubborn courage of the race, and that the only effect of their fall was to make their comrades eager to avenge them. Nor does it lie in the mere fact of the retrocession itself. What was a question of political expediency was represented at the time as a question of philanthropy, and the mass or the English people believed it to be such. The war was not to be prosecuted, they were told, that the national conscience might be saved from the stain of " blood-guilti- ness." England was to be magnanimous, and to extend the principle of self-government, which she had applied to her own colonial sons, to this alien and liberty-loving race of farmers. These motives undoubtedly existed in the mind of England and secured the acquiescence of the nation in the action of the government. But to pretend that Mr Gladstone's Cabinet was influenced by these motives is to forget the all important fact, that ten months before, when these same motives were in equal operation, they had been powerless to produce the same result. We know the real reason now. Lord Kimberley, himself Colonial Secretary at the time, has repudiated in his speech at Newcastle^ the suggestion that the decision 1 In November 1899. THE NEED FOR UNITY 121 was due to any considerations of "sentiment." Whatever the public may have thought, the Cabinet had solid facts before them, which permitted of no illusion. They had been informed by President Brand that he could no longer hold back the Free State burghers from joining the in- surgents in the Transvaal, and the Afrikanders in the Cape Colony had openly expressed their sympathy with the Boers. The Government were confronted with a conflict in which the whole of the Dutch population in South Africa would have been arrayed against them, and on this evidence they made terms with General Joubert. Were they right or wrong ? It is not necessary for us to decide. The shame of Majuba lies deeper than any such question of policy. The defeat, and the ignominious settlement to which it led, were the natural and inevitable consequence of the abandonment by the Government and the nation of its faithful servant. Sir Bartle Frere. It is because Majuba enables us at once to measure our ingrati- tude and our blindness, that the word must ever be charged with feelings of shame and regret. The circumstances under which the Despatch of Censure of March 19th, 1879, reached Frere are significant. In disregard alike of official etiquette and political decency, the House of Commons was informed that Frere had been censured, before the despatch had come into his hands. Consequently the first news of his official con- demnation reached him through the Press. When the news thus met his eye, he was returning from a dangerous and arduous mission undertaken on his own initiative in the interests of his country. He had ridden 350 miles through disturbed territory in Zululand and Natal, and dispensing with his slight military escort, had gone, attended only by his staff, into a camp of 2000 insurgent Boers. There he had listened patiently to their grievances, and having undertaken to promote the redress of such of them as he deemed well-founded, won from them a promise to disperse peaceably to their homes. This 122 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA promise he redeemed. After consultation with President Brand of the Free State he sketched the lines of a con- stitution for the Transvaal, which he believed would be acceptable to the Boers and consistent with the establish- ment of that federal South Africa which fofmed the special object of British policy. In this, as in other matters, his efforts were paralysed by the distrust of the Home Govern- ment. The grasp which Frere had of South African affairs, and in particular of the condition of the Transvaal, is apparent in all his despatches ; but the following passage which occurs in a private letter of this year (1879) describes in terms of marvellous prescience the actual position of to-day : — " Any reliance on mere force in the Transvaal must react dangerously down here in the old colony, and convert the Dutch country party, now as loyal and prosperous a section of the population as any under the Crown, into dangerous allies of the small anti-English Republican party, who are for separation, thus paralysing the efforts of the loyal English party now in power, who aim at making the country a self- defending, integral portion of the British Empire. Further, any attempt to give back or restore the Boer Republic in the Transvaal must lead to anarchy and failure, and probably, at no distant period, to a vicious imitation of some South American Republics, in which the more uneducated and misguided Boers, dominated and led by better educated foreign adventurers — Germans, Hollanders, Irish Home Rulers, and other European Republicans and Socialists — will become a pest to the whole of South Africa, and a most dangerous fulcrum to any European Power bent on contesting our naval supremacy, or injuring us in our colonies." And again : — " There is no escaping from the responsibility which has been already incurred, ever since the English flag was planted on the Castle here. All our real difficulties have arisen, and still arise, from attempting to evade or shift this responsibility. THE NEED FOR UNITY 123 ... If you abdicate the sovereign position, the abdication has always to be heavily paid for in both blood and treasure. . . . Your object is not conquest, but simply supremacy up to Delagoa Bay. This will have to be asserted some day, and the assertion will not become easier by delay. The trial of strength will be forced on you, and neither justice nor humanity will be served by postponing the trial if we start with a good cause." In this dark story of the abandonment of Sir Bartle Frere there is one significant fact. The Prime Minister, Lord Beaconsfield, was himself opposed to the decision of the re- maining members of the Cabinet which took effect in the vote of censure. But the Government as a whole was unable to withstand the force of public opinion, and having put their hands to the plough they looked back. And yet nothing could have been more unjust than this angry condemnation of Frere, conceived in the bitterness of an unexpected and temporary reverse. The destruction of the 24th regiment at Isandlhwana, the untimely death of the Prince Imperial, the simultaneous outbreak of the Afghan war, 1878-9 — all these things were against him. The opponents of the Government fixed upon Frere the responsibility for these events in clamorous invectives, and the Government, at a time when Russia was thundering at the gates of India, and the constituencies were growing restive, strove to appease alike their opponents and their supporters by first censuring, and then partially superseding, the man whose only fault lay in the fact that the duties which had been laid upon him were at once too skilfully and too faithfully executed. In India his services had been amply recognised. Twice he had received the thanks of Parliament for the splendid courage and address with which he had kept Sind loyal, when the rest of India was seething in the Mutiny. In Africa he lost everything, as he said, except his integrity. Influences more powerful and varied were never brought to bear upon a man than those which Frere withstood without sacrificing one iota of the principles which he had 124 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA adopted at the outset of his career, which by constant practice he had made part of himself. The malignity of fortune, the coldness and distrust of his official superiors, misrepresentations and calumnies which he was powerless to refute — all of these united to crush him. Nevertheless Frere emerged, as he said, "whole" from the collision; and his "failure" has created a tradition of loyal regard for the interests of the Colonial subjects of the Queen, more useful to the Empire than any " success " achieved through a facile submission to the exigencies of party polidcs. His integrity remained. He allowed no spot to tarnish his shield of knightly honour ; he abated not one jot of his high ideal of duty ; he swerved not an inch from those principles of statesmanship which he believed to make for the greatness of England. He had confidence enough in his countrymen to believe that his reputation would be restored. And he was right ; for the principles which he maintained at the cost of his reputation — and perhaps at the cost of what he valued less, his life — are the principles by which the Empire has grown in the past, and by which alone it can be maintained in the future. CHAPTER VIII. Compromise, The white man is not alone in South Africa, as he is in Australia and for the most part in North America. He shares the country with the native. The terms of the partnership have not yet been definitely arranged, but when once the supremacy of the European had been established by the Zulu war, definite progress towards an equitable settle- ment began to be made ; and to-day the basis of the partner- ship may be said to have been laid down in the happy phrase, that whereas in Australia and America the white man is both brain and muscle, in South Africa the white man is the brain and the black man the muscle. The original inhabitants of the Cape Colony were, as we know, the yellow-skinned Hottentots and the Bushmen ; but the 3,500,000 dark-skinned Bantu between the Zambesi and Capetown have long since constituted for us the " natives " of South Africa. The tribes which make up this Bantu population are conveniently distinguished as " military '* and " industrial." Among the former are the various Kafir tribes between the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony and the southern borders of Natal, together with the Zulus, the Matabele, and the native population under Transvaal rule ; among the latter are the Basutos, the Bechuana tribes and the Mashonas. The general distribution of these two divisions of the Bantu family in South Africa is significant. The military tribes being the more powerful, are to be found in possession of the most fertile and well-watered country ; and the densest masses of the Bantu race lie between the Draken- berg mountains and the Indian Ocean, and in the mountainous 126 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA country to the north of the range. With the exception of the Basutos, who clung to their mountain fastnesses in the very centre of the system, the industrial Bantu have been scattered over the high central plateaux, or driven westwards into the deserts. The two branches differ in their mode of fighting, their tribal organisation, their dwellings, and their pursuits. They are both armed with the assegai,^ but while the industrial' Bantu use it as a javelin, the military Bantu use it as a " stabbing spear " in close combat. The chief of the military tribe exercises almost despotic power, but in the industrial tribes the chief's authority is limited by a council of lesser chiefs, and questions of great importance are decided by the pitsho, or assemblage of all freemen of the tribe. The " town " of the military tribe is a fort, in which the chiePs hut and the cattle are protected by concentric circles of huts, but the " town " of an industrial chief is an open collection of dwellings. Again, while the military Bantu in a natural state devote themselves primarily to the art and practice of war, growing as little corn, and herding as few cattle, as suffice for their immediate necessities, the industrial tribes cultivate plots of garden ground around their dwellings, and possess some knowledge of the arts of working in metals and weaving cloth. The British Government had from the first endeavoured to mete out justice between the often conflicting claims of the natives and the Europeans, but its efforts had been limited by the smallness of the military forces at its disposal, and hampered by the illiberal sentiments of the Afrikander population. Still, in acknowledging the independence of the emigrant Boers it had secured a minimum of justice for the native tribes thus placed under their rule. In 1881 the position was this. There was a large native population living under the respective governments of the Cape Colony and Natal ; there were about 500,000 natives in the Transvaal, ^ The word assegai comes from the Latin hasta^ through the Portuguese, by w^hom it was first applied to the spear of the South African natives. COMPROMISE 127 and some 70,000 natives in the Free State, under the Boers ; the Zulus were " protected " by the Governor of Natal, and the Basutos were administered by the Colonial Government of the Cape. In addition to this, British residents had been placed with some of the Bechuana chiefs. This arrangement left a large balance of native population between the Cape Colony and Natal, and again both eastwards and westwards of the Transvaal, over which no European control had been established. The position of the natives, over whom European authority had thus been established, varied con- siderably. In the British colonies they were admitted to civil and political privileges, with such limitations only as were necessary both in their own interests and in those of the European community of which they formed part. In the Republics they had the minimum secured by the Conventions ; that is to say they had partial civil rights, but no political rights. And in both the Colonies and Republics special regula- tions were in force, which were necessary to secure order among the natives and to prevent them from endangering the safety of the Europeans. After the retrocession of the Transvaal the British Govern- ment again endeavoured for a time to limit their responsi- bilities, but in 1884 they practically assumed the duty of controlling all the native races outside the limits of the Colonies and Republics. In other words, the Imperial Government assumed what was the most pressing of the duties which would have been performed by the Federal Authority, which they had unsuccessfully endeavoured to establish under the South Africa Act of 1877. The change was due in the main to the growth of a healthier public opinion in England, but the actual steps which led to this important departure were these : In 1878 Bechuanaland was temporarily occupied by the Griqualand West police ; and on the withdrawal of the police British agents had been left with the chiefs Mankoroane and Mathlabane. After the Convention of Pretoria (1881) the British Government determined to withdraw these agents, on 1*8 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA the ground that it was no longer necessary to maintain represen- tatives outside the colonial frontier, since the western boundary of the Transvaal had been finally defined under the Conven- tion. It will be remembered that the Boers claimed the whole of the country which had been overrun by Moselekatze by virtue of the defeat which Hendrik Potgieter inflicted upon the Matabele chief in 1838 ; and in this claim they included the sovereignty of the Barolong tribe. The Barolongs, however, denied the claim, so far as they were concerned, on the ground that they had fought against Moselekatze in alliance with the Boers ; and both Taoane, the father of Monsioa, and Monsioa himself repudiated their authority, threatening to appeal to the British Government, when they were called upon to "pay taxes" by the Boer officials.^ After the British residents were withdrawn Bechuanaland soon became in the disturbed condition in which it remained for the next three years. Some of the chiefs acknowledged the sovereignty of the Transvaal ; others refused, and claimed the protection of the British Government. Parties of Boers crossed the border, and establishing themselves with the chiefs who acknowledged the Transvaal authority, proceeded to attack the loyal chiefs, who were in turn defended by parties of Englishmen. In this way it came about that in 1884 Monsioa was at war with Moshette, and Mankoroane with Massouw. On the eastern border the Boers pursued the same tactics, and here their expansion was permitted by the Imperial Government, although it was accomplished in defiance of the Conventions, until it threatened to give them access to the coast. In the course of the process, however, they acquired the western half of Zululand, and a virtual control of Swaziland under the terms of the Swazi Convention of ^ In 1869 Pretorius issued a proclamation in which he laid claim to South-Central Africa as far northwards as Lake N'gami. Against this proclamation the British Government at once protested, and it was withdrawn. COMPROMISE 129 December loth, 1894. But on the western border the Boer expansion was checked at once. Bechuanaland pos- sessed political importance as containing the trade route from the Cape Colony to the interior of Africa, and, as the scene of the missionary labours of Moffat and Livingstone, it was a country which Great Britain was reluctant to re- nounce. The necessity for putting an end to this highly unsatisfactory state of affairs in Bechuanaland was the immediate cause, which led the Imperial Government to accept the task of regulating the disintegration of the native tribes under the process of European expansion. The new departure was taken in conjunction with a change in the status of the Transvaal, which was effected by the substitution of a new Convention, the Convention of London, for the original Convention signed at Pretoria. The Convention of Pretoria, under which the independent government of the Transvaal was restored in 1881, con- tained clauses definitely asserting the suzerainty of the Queen. The British Government reserved to itself the right of moving troops through the country, and a British Resident was appointed to safeguard the interests of the natives. In addition to this, articles were introduced by which it was intended to secure equal rights, both civil and political, for future British immigrants. In July 1883 the Transvaal Government obtained permission to send a deputation to England, which consisted of Messrs Kriiger, Dutoit, and Smit, to propose certain modifica- tions which they desired. The negotiations, which lasted from November 1883 to the end of February 1884, were conducted by the deputation on behalf of the Transvaal, with Lord Derby (15th Earl), the then Colonial Secretary, who was himself advised by Sir Hercules Robinson, the Governor of the Cape, and Mr John Mackenzie, the missionary. The result of these negotiations was the Convention of London, which was signed on February 27th, 1884. As compared with the original Convention the new Convention exhibited certain material changes. The old 130 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA Convention was uni-lateral, that is to say, its terms pro- ceeded solely from the suzerain authority, the Queen. The new Convention was bi-Iateral, constituting an agree- ment between two contracting parties. The name, " South African Republic," was used to designate the Boer State. The conduct and control of diplomatic relations was ex- pressly conceded to the government of the Republic ; all mention of the Queen's suzerainty was omitted, and the rights of the Queen in this respect were embodied in Article IV., which made the Queen's approval necessary for the final validity of any treaties concluded by the Republic with foreign powers other than the Free State. The British Resident was withdrawn, and in his place a British Agent, with diplomatic functions only, was ap- pointed ; and the right to move troops through the country was given up. On the other hand, the Articles contain- ing guarantees for the equal treatment of future British inhabitants, and for the maintenance of the rights of the existing British subjects of the Republic and of those of the natives, were retained in full. In return for these generous concessions the western border of the Republic was once more "finally delimited," and the delegates agreed to the establishment of a British Protectorate over Bechuanaland, with Mr Mackenzie as Commissioner. It is easy to be wise after the event, and to recognise the fatal inexpediency of these concessions, as shown by the future history of what we must henceforward call the South African Republic ; but we must remember that at the time when these concessions were made the direct object of the Colonial Office was to rescue the Bechuana natives from Boer government, and to secure the trade route to the interior. As regards the question of the suzerainty. Lord Derby's view was that the sub- stance of the rights conferred upon the Queen by this vague expression was retained by the precise terms of Article IV., while the de facto control which the British Government had always claimed to exercise over the Boer COMPROMISE 131 Republics, on the ground that England was the " paramount power '* in South Africa, remained precisely as before. To understand Lord Derby's position it is necessary to know — ( I ) What the delegates did originally ask ; and (2) The nature of the de facto control embodied in the term " Paramount power." What the delegates really wanted is shown by Article I. of the draft treaty, which they submitted on November 26th, 1883, for the approval of the Colonial Office. " It is agreed [that Her Majesty's Government] guarantees by this treaty the full independence of the South African Republic." To this communication Lord Derby replied three days later : *' The Draft Treaty which you have submitted is neither in form nor in substance such as Her Majesty's Government could adopt." With this request and reply before us, it is impossible to understand how the South African Republic could advance the con- tention, that the Republic had been put in the position of a *' sovereign international state " by the Convention of London. The nature of the control, exercised by England in South Africa as Paramount power, can be best exhibited by the following statements, which do not admit of contradiction : ( 1 ) The British Government had never permitted any foreign power to interfere in the affairs of the European communities or native tribes within the region roughly indicated by the term South Africa. (2) The British Government had on more than one occasion claimed the duty, and exercised the right of requiring that both 1 the Boer Republics, and the native tribes, should be governed in a manner consistent with the safety and well-being of the Europeans in South Africa as a whole. (3) The Governments of both the Free State and the Transvaal had always conducted their official correspondence not with the Foreign Office, but with the Colonial Office, through the medium of the High Commissioner at Capetown. 1 See p. loi for interference with the Free State. 13* THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA Lord Derby was therefore justified in thinking that, al- though he had sacrificed the expressions which had wounded the susceptibilities of the Boers, he had retained the substance of the Suzerainty. That was the view held in London. What was the view taken in Pretoria ? It is shown in the report which the deputation presented to the Volksraad before they asked that body to ratify the new Convention. In this document Mr Kriiger and his colleagues expressed their regret that the Convention had not placed the Republic in the position in which it had stood under the Sand River Convention. Lord Derby had declined to discuss the modi- fication of the Pretoria Convention, until the question of the western boundary had been settled. They had offered to " neutralise " goods going through the Transvaal on their way to ,the interior, and to allow them to pass duty free, but all to no effect. They attributed the defeat of their efforts in this respect to two classes : " the negrophilists, who thought that they were obliged to oppose the case of the Republic in the interests of their proteges, and the mercantile community who thought that in their own interests they had to watch that an imaginary trade route to the west of the Republic, going from the Diamond Fields to the interior, did not fall within the boundaries of the Republic by the settle- ment of the western border question." But they concluded by pointing *' with all modesty " to the following respects, five in number, in which the new Convention was an im- provement on the old ; — ( 1 ) The Convention is drawn up in Dutch as well as in English. (2) It is bi-lateral, the Transvaal having become a free contracting party. (3) The Suzerainty is abolished. (4) The debt due to England is reduced by ^^i 3 1,000. (5) The new western border adds a strip of land 130 miles long by 20 broad, containing the greater portion of the lands of the Bechuana chiefs who desired to live under their government, to the territory of the Republic. COMPROMISE 133 At Capetown the weakness of the position was at once recognised. It was felt that Lord Derby had shown " a want of candour in respect of the Suzerainty," and that the " weak affectation of having reserved by tacit consent a con- dition which the other party to the negotiation, as he well knew, regarded as withdrawn, in not being expressed," was a fatal mistake, and would lead to conflict in the future. " There will be no rest to the Transvaal spirit until the Con- vention of Sand River is restored in its simplicity," wrote the Cape Times on August 20th, 1884. In pursuance of the more definite native policy, upon which the Imperial Government had decided, a new com- mission was issued to Sir Hercules Robinson on February 29th, 1884 — two days after the Convention had been signed — - by virtue of which he, as High Commissioner, was authorised to assume control over all the native tribes outside the Hmiti of the European States. He was further authorised to appoint commissioners to exercise these powers on his behalf, and to define the districts over which these officers should have control. In March Colonel Marshall Clark took over Basutoland from the Colonial Government,^ and in May Mr John Mackenzie arrived in Bechuanaland to establish the Queen's authority in the Protectorate. In the meantime parties of Transvaal Boers had established themselves in two infant Republics, to which they gave the names of Land Goshen and Stellaland. These Boer settlers refused to submit to Mr Mackenzie's government, or to acknowledge the Queen's authority ; and on July 30th Mr Mackenzie was withdrawn by Sir Hercules Robinson. It was alleged, in justification of this measure, that Mr Mackenzie's former position as a missionary made him unacceptable to the Boer inhabitants of the Protectorate. Subsequent events, however, point to the conclusion, that if Mr Mackenzie had received the small measure of support which he had undoubtedly a right to expect, he would have successfully overcome the 1 The difficulty of administering this people had proved too great for the Colonial Government. 134 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA disaffection which he encountered. As it was, he was super- seded by Mr Cecil Rhodes, who certainly possessed the sym- pathy of the Afrikander party then in power in the Cape Colony. But Mr Rhodes, who was accompanied by Captain Graham Bower, the Imperial Secretary, was treated by the freebooters of Rooi Grond with a contemptuous indifference, that marked the lowest point to which the prestige of England has ever sunk in South Africa. The Transvaal delegates had promised on behalf of their Government to co-operate with the Imperial officers in the establishment of the Queen's authority in Bechuanaland. This promise they failed to keep, and the country rapidly drifted into a state of anarchy. In the meantime President Kriiger attempted by a bold stroke to recover the territory which he had been unable to win from Lord Derby. On September i6th he issued a proclamation, by which he declared his intention in the "interests of humanity" of taking the contending chiefs, Moshette and Monsioa, under the pro- tection of the South African Republic. This proclamation, he prudently added, was made subject to Article IV. of the London Convention ; and on October 3rd the Transvaal flag was hoisted at Rooi Grond. President Kriiger*s action produced a revulsion of opinion in the Cape Colony. It was not only a scandalous example of bad faith, since the ink of the Convention which it violated was barely dry ; but it showed the Afrikanders that the South African Republic had absolutely no regard for the interests of the Cape Colony. The English, supported by the most enlightened and in- fluential of the Dutch inhabitants, raised a cry for the imme- diate interference of the Imperial Government. But the Imperial Government were in a cautious mood ; and Mr Evelyn Ashley, the Under Secretary for the Colonies, stated in the House of Commons that they must be assured of the moral support of the Cape colonists before they undertook to intervene by force of arms. In order to provide the neces- sary assurance, a great public meeting was held at Cape Town on September 24th, 1884, at which resolutions were passed, COMPROMISE 13s declaring " That the intervention of Her Majesty's Govern- ment in Bechuanaland for the maintenance of the trade route to the interior, and the preservation of native tribes to whom promises of Imperial Protection had been given, was an act dictated by the urgent claims of humanity no less than by the necessities of a wise and far-seeing policy." And "That any failure on the part of Her Majesty's Government to maintain its just rights under the Convention of London . . . and to fulfil its obligations towards the native tribes in the Protectorate of Bechuanaland, would be fatal to British Supremacy in South Africa." It is worth while to notice that the native question was the turning-point, so far as the Imperial Government was immediately concerned. Again and again we find that the interference of the British Government on behalf of the rights of the natives in South Africa has saved the situation ; and it is this continuous and disinterested interference on behalf of the native population, which gave England an un- assailable moral right to interfere on behalf of her own sons, when the time came to require that the government of the South African Republic should grant them the rights of citizens. After this manifestation of opinion in the Cape Colony, the Imperial Government called upon President Kriiger to withdraw his proclamation, and proceeded to equip and de- spatch a force, which was placed under the command of Sir Charles Warren, to establish the Queen's authority in the Protectorate. In the meantime, that is to say, during the two months which elapsed before the arrival of Sir Charles Warren at Cape Town on December 4th, a curious effort was made by the Colonial Government to prevent the appearance of the Imperial Government in an active role on the South African stage. The situation thus created in 1884 merits analysis, because it anticipated in many respects the situation created in 1899. The Government — Mr (now Sir Thomas) Upington's Government — was maintained in power by the support of the Afrikander party. The Afrikanders in the 136 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA Colony had awakened to consciousness of their strength by the significant success of their co-operation with the Boer leaders in 1880, when they virtually defeated the Federation proposals of the Imperial Government and caused the recall of Sir Bartle Frere. Moreover, during the last year (1883) they had given effect to the political influence which they possessed under the Cape Constitution by virtue of their numerical preponderance, in an electoral victory achieved through an organisation known as the " Afrikander Bond,'* which was founded at "rebel Burghersdorp " in 188 1. In internal affairs the Bond party represented the agricultural and pastoral interests of the Colony ; and this party, although they were strongly in sympathy with the Boers in their demand for independence, had been startled and repelled by the evident intention of President Kriigcr to aggrandise the Transvaal at the expense of the commercial interests of the Cape Colony. But when it became known that the Imperial Government was prepared to intervene actively and, if necessary, by force of arms, to secure the Protectorate, their sympathy with their Boer kinsmen overcame the sense of annoyance caused by President Krliger's disregard of the interests of the Colony. Moreover, the policy of the Imperial Government had been so vacillating, and its later interferences had produced such disastrous results, that the opinion was gaining ground even among some of the English colonists that the less they depended upon England the better, and the " elimination of the Imperial factor,'* as the phrase went, was openly advo- cated by men like Mr Cecil Rhodes, who were not otherwise unpatriotic in their sentiments. In this way pressure was brought to bear upon Mr Upington, and the Colonial Government made an attempt at the eleventh hour to prevent the interposition of the Imperial Government. In November the Premier and Mr (now Sir) Gordon Sprigg went up to Bechuanaland, and made an arrangement with the Boers who had defied the Queen's Commissioner. The terms they offered were, briefly, COMPROMISE 137 that Bechuanaland should be administered by the Cape Government, and that the Boer adventurers were to retain the lands which they had taken from the Bechuana chiefs. The proposed agreement was submitted by telegraph to the Colonial Office, together with Sir Hercules Robinson's comments upon it. In the High Commissioner's opinion they were " equivalent to recognition as a de facto govern- ment of freebooters who had made war on the British Protectorate, and to acknowledgment of the bona Jide char- acter of the claims of the brigands to land in Monsioa's country." In view of these emphatic expressions it is not surprising that the Imperial Government refused to consent to the arrangement. One of the main grounds upon which the Colonial Ministry had urged the acceptance of their mediation was the belief that the appearance of Imperial troops in South Africa would cause feelings to be aroused *' which might lead to a calami- tous race war and unsettle society in every relation." They earnestly desired to "avert bloodshed and avoid the creation of race bitterness and national jealousies." Undoubtedly such feelings did exist in the Colony at this time. To take an example, a controversy was seriously maintained between the two moderate Afrikander journals, the Sud Afr'icaan and the Volksblad, on the question whether the Imperial Government had, or had not, the right to send troops through the Colony, without the consent of the Colonial Ministry. In commenting upon this question a correspondent wrote in the Patrioty the extreme organ of the Afrikanders : " I believe the Volksblad is correct in maintaining that England has that right. But if England has the right to send Rootbaaljes ^ to kill my brethren in the Transvaal, then I have also the right to try and prevent the same. My brother is nearer than England. England can send troops, but whether they will all arrive safely in Stellaland — that stands to be seen." This extract, which is only a specimen of many like expressions of opinion which appeared in the 1 I.e. British soldiers. 138 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA Afrikander press at this crisis, shows the evil effects of a mis- understood generosity. Most of these expressions were mere idle boasting, but the feeling of contempt which underlay them was real enough — sufficiently real to make the life of an English- man in the up-country districts of the colony far from pleasant. In view of this attitude of the Afrikander party, the actual operations and the after effects of Sir Charles Warren's expedition acquire a considerable significance. From a military point of view the expedition was entirely successful, and Sir Charles Warren's instructions — " to remove the filibusters from Bechuanaland, to pacificate the country, to reinstate the natives in their land, and to take such measures as were necessary to prevent such depredations, and, finally, to hold the country until its further destination was known " — were carried out without bloodshed. "There was every intention," Sir Charles Warren tells us,^ "to fight on the part of the filibusters, and on the part of those who sympathised with them, but when they found that we were prepared at all points, they did not know how to commence. They received no provocation, and they simply retired before us and disappeared." Not only so, but on his return from Bechuanaland Sir Charles Warren was received everywhere with the warmest enthusiasm. This feeling was not confined to the English centres in the Cape Colony, but it was shared by the inhabitants of the Free State, by whom, and by President Brand, a "most gratifying" reception was accorded him. "There was," he says, "one general senti- ment throughout the Colony for having given peace with honour, having averted civil war, and having restored to Englishmen the prestige and position which they had enjoyed in former days." When the Queen's Authority had thus been established over the Protectorate, and incidentally British prestige had been partially restored in South Africa, it was possible for the Imperial Government to proceed with the native policy which had been sketched out. 1 In an account which he read to the Royal Colonial Institute on November loth, 1885. COMPROMISE 139 In 1883, when the process known as the partition of Africa had begun, Germany established a Protectorate over the west coast region between the Orange River and the Portuguese territory. By a memorandum of September 1884, the western boundary between the Bechuanaland Protectorate and this German territory was fixed at the 20° east longitude ; northward the Protectorate was declared by the High Commissioner's proclamation of March 23rd, 1885, ^° extend to the 22° of south latitude. The southern portion of the Protectorate, stretching from the Molopo River to the Cape Colony, was administered as a Crown colony by the Imperial Government, until in 1895 ^^ '^^^ annexed to the Cape Colony. At the same time, that is to say, shortly after the proclamation of March 1885, the whole of the country northwards as far as the Zambesi was declared to be within the British sphere of influence. It has been already mentioned that the Imperial Government relieved the Cape Colony of their responsibility for Basutoland, and in return the Colonial Government undertook to administer the native territories between the eastern boundary of the colony and Natal. The last of these, Pondoland, was brought under the Colonial Government in 1895. In 1887 Eastern Zulu- land was annexed by the Imperial Government, and in 1891, by agreement with the Portuguese Government, a British Protectorate was declared over the southern part of Tonga- land, and in this way Imperial control was established over the east coast up to the Portuguese boundary. In the meantime the South African Republic annexed Western Zululand in 1888, and was allowed by the Convention of 1894 to obtain control of Swaziland. The successive steps by which British authority was carried up to, and northwards of, the Zambesi, and the colony of Rhodesia was founded, will be more fully related in the succeeding chapter. The facts, however, here mentioned will be sufficient to indicate the manner in which European control was extended over the remaining natives on the borders of the Colonies and Republics in South Africa. I40 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA The establishment of the Bechuanaland Protectorate was part of a wider recognition of the responsibilities which be- longed to England as Paramount power in South Africa. For the first time the main lines of British policy were definitely laid down. They are nowhere better or more clearly expressed than in the words which Sir Hercules Robinson used before his departure for the Cape in 1884:— " To bring about between the variously governed Euro- pean Communities something approaching to uniformity of system and action upon matters of common concern ; to allay and eventually extinguish race animosities between the two European sections ; to provide for the protection and gradual elevation in the scale of civilisation of the natives, while arranging for that expansion of the white race which is inevitable, and which, if properly regulated, will prove of great advantage to all concerned. These are the problems which have to be solved ; and the last, which embraces the whole question of frontier policy, is the one which has con- stituted for so long a time the main difficulty in the adminis- tration of the South African possessions." Here was at last a definite policy, and a fair prospect of success. Since 1885 these objects have been pursued, not indeed without error or miscalculation, but earnestly and in good faith, by the Imperial Government. Yet the central objects of this policy — to create a common authority for South Africa and to allay race animosities — have not been achieved. The failure is due to the ambition of the Dutch Afrikanders to obtain supremacy in South Africa, an ambition which first took definite form — the form of a United South Africa under its own flag — in the dark years which succeeded the retrocession of the Transvaal, when the Bond taught the Afrikander majority to control the Parliament of the Colony. This idea need never have disturbed the sleep of English statesmen, if it had not been for an unforeseen circumstance, the establishment of the gold industry on the Randt. The sequel will show how this circumstance placed a powerful COMPROMISE 141 weapon in the hands of the most ambitious, and at the same time the least enlightened, of the Republics, and how this weapon — a revenue large beyond the dreams of the most sanguine of the Republican leaders — thus placed at the dis- posal of the Pretoria Executive, was unscrupulously employed to undermine the authority of England, and at length to equip the whole Dutch population with arms for the in- evitable conflict, which was to decide whether the Boer or the Englishman was master in South Africa. CHAPTER IX, Industrial Development under the stimulus of Gold Discovery. Up to 1870 the industries of South Africa were pastoral and agricultural. With the exception of a small output of copper from the Ookiep mines in the north-west corner of the Cape Colony, the South African exports of this period werejiifiQij ostrich feathersj mohair and the skins of sheep a nd goats. On the littoral belt of Natal the English settlers had begun to' raise tropical produce, and sugar planting had been introduced as far back as 1850; and the Cape vineyards provided a scanty export of inferior wines. To-day, as everyone knows. South Africa is the greatest gold-producing country in the world ; and in addition to the gold of the Transvaal and Rhodesia, and the diamonds of the Cape Colony and the Free State, two useful minerals, coal and iron, are known to exist in abundance, and the former of these — coal — is being raised in increasing quantities in the north- east of the Cape Colony, in the north of Natal, and side by side with the gold reefs on the Randt. The establishment of these mining industries is the almost exclusive work of the English in South Africa. Not only do the Boers and the Dutch Afrikanders of the Cape Colony remain a pastoral people to this day, but the Republican Boers have resented the changed conditions of life by which this industrial de- velopment has been accompanied, and opposed the material agencies by which it has been accomplished. After diamonds, gold. And yet as a matter of fact gold had been searched for, and found, many years before the 142 INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT 143 barren kopjes of Kimberley^ were ransacked for their treasures. The earliest discovery of gold was made in the Transvaal two years after the independence of the emigrant Boers beyond the Vaal had been recognised by the Sand River Convention. But the Volksraad forbade prospecting in fear lest the introduction of a mining population should bring with it the return of British authority. The Boer country being closed, the gold prospectors of this early period turned their attention to the interior northward of the Limpopo, and eventually a German explorer, Karl Mauch, discovered the Tati goldfields in 1865. Shortly after this event the re- strictions on gold prospecting within the South African Republic were removed, and in 1872 rewards were offered by the Volksraad for the discovery of payable goldfields, while at the same time the right to minerals and precious stones was declared to be vested in the state. This new departure, marked by the Gold Law of 1872, must be con- nected with the downfall of Pretorius in 187 1, and the advent of a more enlightened regime under the new president — President Burgers — who had been summoned from his pastorate of the Dutch Reformed Church at Capetown to purge the Republic of the administrative abuses which threatened its existence. The failure of Burgers' reforms and the subsequent collapse of the Republican Government have been already mentioned among the circumstances which led to the annexation of the Transvaal in 1877. Four years before this event gold was discovered thirty-three miles east of Lydenberg, and ten years later (1884) the De Kaap fields were added to those of Lydenburg. Both of these early goldfields were in the mountainous country on the eastern border of the Republic. But these discoveries, 1 The Kimberley " mines " are the pipes and craters of four extinct volcanoes. The " blue ground " in which the diamonds are found is the volcanic mud by which these pipes and craters were filled. The blue ground was first dug out by surface mining ; afterwards (and to- day) it is raised by underground mining, i.e. by shafts and tunnels similar to those of the coal mines in England. 144 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA although the deposits which they had revealed were by no means inconsiderable, were destined to be overshadowed by an altogether more momentous revelation of the mineral wealth of South Africa. Northward of the Vaal there stretched a range of desolate uplands, which ran for three hundred miles east and west and formed the *' high veldt " of the Transvaal. Scientific explorers had been attracted more than once to this region, and after the annexation, the first administrator. Sir Theophilus Shepstone, had employed an Australian expert to test the promises of mineral wealth which it revealed ; but the gold deposits of the famous con- glomerate beds on the Witwatersrandt — the White-water slope — had hitherto concealed their existence from the pro- spector's hammer. But now at last, by two years' patient toil on the part of two brothers, Mr H. W. and Mr F. P. J. Struben, the banket reefs which carry the greatest and most permanent gold deposits as yet known to the world, were tapped; and on September 20th, 1886, the Randt was declared a public gold-field. The great gold-field was quickly developed by the assistance of Kimberley capital, and within five years Johannesburg had become one of the industrial centres of the world, and a great mining com- munity — predominantly British — had been established in the heart of the Boer Republics. When the value and permanence of the gold deposits in the Transvaal had been demonstrated by the foundation of Johannesburg and the rapid growth of the Randt output, the wide regions beyond the Limpopo, which had in 1885 been declared within the sphere of British influence, acquired a new importance. For it was here, in the gold-bearing districts between the Zambesi and the Limpopo, that the Phoenician miners a thousand years before the birth of Christ had won a golden harvest for the ancient world. The central district in these regions, the Mashonaland plateau, which divided the watershed of the Zambesi on the north from the watershed of the Sabi and Limpopo on the south, was known from the accounts of travellers and hunters INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT 145 to be healthy and well-watered. Its high elevation, a factor of great importance in Central Africa, made its climate comparatively temperate; and in 1883 Mr Selous had described it as a country where " European children would grow up with rosy cheeks, and apples would not be flavour- less." The inhabitants of this region were the Mashonas, a race of industrial Bantu, who lived in open villages and had made some progress in the arts of smelting iron and weaving cotton. The southern portion of the country, however, was occupied by the Matabele Zulus, who had been driven north- wards by the emigrant Boers in 1837. The conquest of the Mashonas was effected by Moselekatze, the father of Loben- gula. The account of this event which Mr Selous gives ^ is so characteristic of the methods of the miHtary Bantu, that I give it at length. "About 184O," he writes, "the Matabele Zulus, under their warlike chief, Umziligazi, settled in the country which they now inhabit, and very soon bands of these ferocious and bloodthirsty savages over- ran the peaceful vales of the Mashona country in every direction. The poor Mashonas, unskilled in war, and living, moreover, in small communities scattered all over the country, without any central government, fell an easy prey before the fierce invaders, and very soon every stream in their country ran red with their blood, whilst vultures and hyaenas feasted undisturbed amidst the ruins of their devastated homes. Their cattle, sheep, and goats were driven off by their conquerors, and their children, when old enough to walk, and not above ten or twelve years of age, were taken for slaves ; the little children too young to walk were, of course, killed together with their mothers. In a very few years there were no more Mashonas left in the open country, the remnant that had escaped massacre having fled into the mountainous districts to the south and east of their former dwellings, where they still live. Thus, in a short time, an immense extent of fertile country that had, perhaps, for ages past supported a large and thriving community, was again ^ Travel and Adventure in Africa. 146 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA given back to nature ; and so it remains to the present day — an utterly uninhabited country, roamed over at will by herds of elands and other antelopes." In 1887 *^^ Boers contemplated — and, indeed, en- deavoured to effect — a settlement in the country north- ward of the Bechuanaland Protectorate, but within the British sphere. In October of the same year, Lobengula, the Matabele king, was visited by a party of Englishmen, Mr Rudd, Mr Thompson and Mr Maguire, who obtained from him the exclusive right of searching for, and working the minerals within his territory. In the following year a treaty of "peace and amity" was concluded between Loben- gula and Great Britain, under which the Matabele chief bound himself " not to enter into correspondence with any foreign power without the knowledge and consent" of the High Commissioner ; and by this means an attempt on the part of the Boer Government to obtain control of Matabele- land was frustrated. In the meanwhile the project of a northward expansion had attracted the attention of Mr Cecil Rhodes, whose financial genius had been demonstrated by the amalgamation of the Kimberley mines ; and an association was formed to purchase the Rudd concession, and give effect to the rights which it conveyed. This association became the British South Africa Company, which obtained its charter on October 29th, 1889. - The field of the operations of the Chartered Company ex- tends from the Molopo River to the borders of the Congo International State, covering an area of 750,000 square miles which contains, in M. Lionel Decle's words, " the pick of Central Africa on both sides of the Zambesi." The steps by which this new province was added to the British Empire, followed in rapid sequence under the direction of a master- mind. In applying for a Royal Charter the founders of the Company declared their objects to be these : — 1. To extend northwards the railway and telegraph systems in the direction of the Zambesi. 2. To encourage emigration and colonisation. INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT 147 3. To promote trade and commerce. 4. To develop and work mineral and other concessions under the management of one powerful organisation, thereby obviating conflicts and complications between the various interests that had been acquired within those regions, and securing to the native chiefs and their subjects the rights reserved to them under the several concessions. Immediately after the Charter had been granted, Mr Rhodes, who had been appointed managing director in South Africa, made arrangements for the construction of the first section of the Bechuanaland railway, which was to carry the line northwards from Kimberley to Vryburg ; at the same time a force of 500 police was organised and equipped under the wise control and supervision of Lord Loch, who had succeeded Sir Hercules Robinson as Governor and High Commissioner in this year. On June 28th, 1890, a pioneer force, consisting of 200 Europeans and 150 natives, together with the Company's police, left their camp on the Macloutsie River to take possession of the country. They were guided by the famous hunter, Mr F. C. Selous, and on September 12th they reached a point 400 miles to the north, which was named Fort Salisbury, and became the capital of the setdement. On their way to Fort Salisbury they had constructed a road 400 miles long, spanning the streams with corduroy bridges, fording the rivers, and cutting a path through the forest; and a line of forts, with inter- mediate posts, had been established and duly garrisoned by the police. All this was done with the full consent of Lobengula, and the occupation of Mashonaland was thus effected "without the loss of a single life, and without the necessity of firing a shot." Within a few weeks the pioneers had dispersed, and were at work prospecting for gold, or taking up the grants of land which the Company had assigned to them, and the administration of the little community, which had thus penetrated far into Central Africa, was entrusted by the Company to Mr A. R. Colquhoun. 148 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA The execution of these necessary measures was rendered the more easy by the fact that Mr Rhodes had become Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in 1890. He owed his majority in the Cape Parliament to the support of Mr J. H. Hofmeyr and the Afrikander Bond. The alliance between Mr Rhodes and Mr Hofmeyr had grown out of the resent- ment aroused in the Cape Colony by the selfish policy pur- sued by the Transvaal in Bechuanaland, and at this time the most enlightened colonists of both nationalities were united in the desire of preserving the northern territories from Boer aggression. This union of the Dutch and English colonists lasted, as we shall see, until South Africa was convulsed by the Jameson Raid at the beginning of 1 896, and it was based upon the perception that the ambition of the Pretoria Executive was detrimental to the commercial interests of South Africa as a whole. A few weeks after the occupation of Mashonaland had been accomplished, the Company's police found themselves in conflict with the Portuguese authorities in Manicaland. Portugal, although she had been in possession of certain ports on the south-east littoral of Africa from the beginning of the sixteenth century, had never succeeded in establishing an effective control over the hinterland. But now, when the partition of Africa had begun in earnest, she advanced definite territorial claims, which barred the Mashonaland settlers from access to the coast. A prompt settlement was necessary in view of the dangerous excitement which the event had caused in Portugal. On November nth, 1890, a temporary settlement was effected, and six months later the western boundary of the Portuguese territory was fixed under the Anglo-Portuguese Convention of June i ith, 1891. By this agreement the western boundary of Portuguese East Africa, from its contact with the German territory on the north to the border of the South African Republic on the south, was delimited ; and although the Company's settlers in Mashonaland were denied access to the coast at Beira, the Portuguese Government bound themselves to con- INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT 149 struct, or allow the construction of, a railway from this point to the interior, and guaranteed that the duties levied upon goods in transit through their territory should not exceed a maximum of three per cent. The prospects of the settlers were, however, seriously affected by their temporary exclusion from communication with the coast at Beira, which com- pelled them to draw their supplies from Capetown. In Mr Rhodes' words, the " fifteen hundred settlers went to work to find their reefs, but they were removed 1700 miles from the coast, and their food cost them ;£'Jo a ton." In addition to the fact that food was at famine prices, the un- usually heavy rains of the first season, 1890-91, produced an outbreak of fever, which led to the retirement of Mi Colquhoun. The new administrator was Dr Leander Jameson. When Dr Jameson was appointed a new danger threatened the settlement. The Boers had determined to dispute the pos- session of Mashonaland with the Chartered Company, and a **trek," 4000 strong, had been organised in the Transvaal. In order to meet this danger, the Company's police force was raised to 750, and instructions were given by Lord Loch that the Bechuanaland border police should, in con- junction with the Company's force, hold the Limpopo drifts, and if necessary resist the advance of the Boer emigrants by force of arms. When the Boer leader was informed by Dr Jameson that it was the Queen's High Commissioner who had given orders that the police were to open fire upon his company if they crossed the river, he bade the emigrants turn their waggons homewards ; and thus, through Lord Loch's firmness, this attempt on the part of the Boers to obtain a footing in the new settlement was completely frustrated.^ After the danger of Transvaal interference had been suc- cessfully averted, Dr Jameson was able to effect a reduction in the cost of administration. At this time the occupation of 1 The Chartered Company, of course, are willing to admit Boer settlers, provided that they acknowledge the authority of the Govei-nment ISO THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA Mashonaland was costing the Company ^^2 50,000 a year, since the infant settlement could yield little or no revenue to meet the expenses of government. The police were dis- banded, with the exception of 40, and the future defence of the settlers was secured by an economic system of volunteers, and by making every able-bodied settler liable to military service in case of necessity. For the next two years the development of the country proceeded without in- terruption. The work of extending the railway northwards from the Cape Colony had been commenced immediately on the grant of the Charter; and on December 3rd, 1890, the first section from Kimberley to Vryburg was open for traffic. At the same time arrangements were made for the construc- tion of a railway from Beira on the east coast to Fort Salis- bury, and the first seventy-five miles of this east coast railway, covering the Tsetse fly belt,i was completed on October 19th, 1893. '^^^ telegraph wires had already reached as far north as Mafeking. They were carried to Fort Victoria by De- cember 1 89 1, and two months later the Company's capital, Fort Salisbury, was placed in telegraphic communication with Mafeking and the world beyond. To effect this object 8 1 9 miles of wires were laid down. In 1893 the development of Mashonaland was again interrupted by the first Matabele war. The attempt of the European settlers to live on equal terms with their barbarous neighbours failed, as all such attempts are bound to fail, owing to the plain fact that the uncivilised native cannot distinguish peace from weakness. Lobengula himself, who was in receipt of a monthly stipend of ;^ 1 00, wished to remain on good terms with the Com- pany ; but the presence of the white men interfered with the tyrannical rule of the Matabele over the Mashonas, and the young warriors, deceived by the peaceful attitude of the settlers, clamoured for war. And then, as Mr Rhodes himself put it, " we either had to have that war, or leave the country. 1 The presence of this insect, which does not attack men, but is fatal to horses and cattle, made communication practically impos- sible through this district until the advent of the railway. INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT 151 I do not blame the Matabele," he said. " Their system was a military system; they once a year raided the surrounding people, and such a system was impossible for our develop- ment." On July 1 8th, 1893, a Matabele impi invaded the Company's settlement at Fort Victoria. They were in pur- suit of some Mashona refugees, whom Dr Jameson refused to give up. They were told to retire from the township, and upon their refusal the mounted police, under the late Captain Lendy, were ordered to eject them. The Matabele fired upon the police, and the police, then returning their fire, drove them out of the township, inflicting a loss of about thirty killed upon them. Communications were then sent to Lobengula, both from the Administrator and afterwards from Lord Loch, the High Commissioner. But the Matabele king assumed a defiant attitude, and refused to treat with the Company unless the Mashona refugees were first of all handed over to him. Under these circumstances Dr Jameson was authorised by the High Commissioner "to take all steps he considered necessary to provide for the lives and property of the settlers under his administration." The scattered settlers were quickly concentrated at Fort Salisbury and Victoria, and two columns were equipped, numbering in all 1227 men, of whom 672 were Europeans. These columns met at Indaima's Mount on October i6th, and advanced from that point upon the king's chief kraal at Buluwayo. In the mean- time Lord Loch ordered the Imperial police in the Bechuana- land Protectorate to advance upon the same point from the south, in conjunction with a native force supplied by the Bechuana chief Khama. This force, which was commanded by Major Gould-Adams, met and defeated a Matabele impi which Lobengula had despatched to oppose its progress. The Company's force, which was commanded by Major P. W. Forbes, was accompanied by the administrator, Dr Jameson, and the Company's senior military officer, Sir John Wil- loughby. This force, after it had encountered and defeated two Matabele armies, respectively 5000 and 7000 in number, captured the king's kraal at Buluwayo on November 4th. IS* THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA Lobengula himself had fled northwards, and it was in pursuit of the Matabele king that Major Allan Wilson, Captain Borrow, and thirty-three others met their death on the banks of the Shangani River, after the heroic defence which has ennobled the annals of the infant Colony of Rhodesia. With the exception of this disaster, the Matabele war was a brilliant military performance of which the chiet merit belongs to Dr Jameson. In respect of expenditure both of men and money, the Company's operations afford a startling contrast to the records of the native wars waged by the Imperial Government. According to the returns published in the Company's reports, the total casualties ol the Mashonaland force, on whom the brunt of the fighting fell, were 87 killed and 45 wounded. Out of these the Europeans lost 49 killed — of whom 35 were Wilson's party — and 12 wounded. The Southern force lost only 4 killed and 10 wounded out of 445 Europeans engaged. The total expenditure incurred on account of the war was entered at ^113,488, 2s. iid. After the death of Lobengula and the destruction of the Matabele military system, Southern Mashonaland was quickly opened up. Buluwayo itself became the scene of one of those rapid transformations characteristic of the gold era in South Africa. Within two years a town of 2000 inhabitants, with biick-built houses, newspapers, and a chamber of com- merce had sprung up less than a mile away from the king's kraal. It became the centre of the gold industry in Matabele- land, and the capital of Rhodesia ; and on November 4th, 1897, the fourth anniversary of its capture by the Chartered Company's forces, the first train steamed over 1250 miles of rails from Capetown into Buluwayo. In the meantime the barren uplands beyond the Vaal had witnessed vaster and more momentous changes. In 1886 the huts of the prospectors and their workpeople were the sole objects to break the monotony of the African veldt upon the eastern ridge of the Witwatersrandt, which here attains an altitude of little less than 6000 feet above sea level. In INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT 153 1896 the census of the Sanitary Board showed a total population of 102,078 persons living within a three mile radius of the Market-Square of Johannesburg. Of these, 50,907 were Europeans, whose presence was revealed in the broad streets and bustling crowds of the town, and the chimneys, pit-head gears, engine houses, batteries and surface works, that spread for thirty miles along the crest of the ridge outside. The same powerful agency — gold discovery — which had peopled the Australian colonies and the Western States of North America in the middle of the century, was now at work in South Africa. The development of South-Central Africa by the Char- tered Company, and the foundation of Johannesburg, were alike due to the search for gold ; and it remains to trace the effect upon South Africa as a whole of these joint manifesta- tions of a single economic force. Just as Kimberley gave the Cape Colony its railway system, so South Africa as a whole owes the trunk lines which connect state with state to the gold mines. These lines, with the exception of the northern extension of the Cape railways, which is destined ultimately to traverse the entire continent from South to North, con- verge upon Johannesburg. The first, which crosses the Free State and unites the Randt with the ports of the Cape Colony, was opened in July 1892. The second, the Pretoria-Delagoa Bay line, was completed in the autumn of 1894; and in the following year the Randt rail- way was carried eastwards to meet the Natal railways at Charlestown, and Johannesburg was linked to Durban. Thus direct railway communication was established between the industrial centre of South Africa and the ports of Delagoa Bay, Durban, East London, Port EHzabeth and Capetown ; and these successive constructions, together with some lesser and subsidiary lines, represent a thousand miles of railway added within eight years under the stimulus of the gold industry on the Randt. In the same period the Chartered Company had promoted the construction of 930 miles within their territories ; and this sum is to-day being SOUTH AFRICA in1S99 (Showing Railways) INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT 155 increased by the 750 miles of the projected extension of the main trunk line of Africa from Buluwayo to Tanganyika.^ The general progress of South Africa since the com- mencement of the gold era is sufficiently indicated by the rapid expansion of its external trade. In 1886 the exports and imports which passed through the South African ports were valued at i^j millions sterling; in 1898 they had risen to between 40 and 50 millions sterling. In other words, the sea-borne trade of the colonies and republics had been trebled within twelve years. There is one aspect of this industrial development which requires a brief consideration, since it touches one of the characteristic difficulties of South African administration. The construction of these public works and the establishment of the mining industries have claimed the active co-operation of the native races which form the natural labour supply of South Africa. The successive steps by which European control has been established over the Bantu peoples have been related as they occurred from time to time. As the general result of these measures we have to-day a simple system of territorial government established over the native tribes in the territories reserved for them, while the native population within the colonies and republics are admitted in varying degrees to the civil and political privileges which are enjoyed by the members of civilised communities. The advantages which the Bantu people have reaped from the establishment of this European control are, broadly put, security of life and property from the destructive effects of constantly recurring wars and feuds, and an increased supply of the simple necessaries of life through the introduc- tion of improved methods for the cultivation of their lands. At the same time in the British colonies, and especially in the Cape Colony, a systematic effiDrt has been made to develop their mental faculties by elementary schools, and technical instruction ; and throughout South Africa as a 1 The first section of 250 miles from Buluwayo to the Zambesi is already under construction. .56 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA whole the native races have benefited by contact with civilisation through missionary effort, and through the ad- ministration of justice by European magistrates. It is only reasonable that the European community through whom these benefits have been conferred upon the Bantu race, should expect this race in return to make some contribution to the material prosperity of South Africa. The only contribution which the Bantu can make is to provide an ample supply of cheap labour ; but strange as it may seem, it is nevertheless the fact that the very comfort and improved conditions of the life they lead in their own territories under European super- vision has made the Bantu reluctant to submit to the restraints of continuous employment. Moreover, the same causes which have made native life more comfortable have produced a rapid increase in the Bantu population. Hitherto a sufficient Bupply for the rough work alike of the mining and pastoral industries of South Africa has been provided by the over- whelming reserves of Bantu vitality. But if the increase of the Bantu population is to be accompanied by a growing reluctance to submit to the effort necessary to equip them with the qualities by the possession of which they can alone be admitted to a partnership with the Europeans, the problem of native administration will enter upon a new and more difficult phase. In plain words, if the natives refuse to make any return for the boon of civilisation, the European communities cannot be expected to undertake the many re- sponsibilities involved in native administration and education, which are necessary to qualify the Bantu for a partnership with the European. A solution of the problem has been provided by Mr Cecil Rhodes in the Glen Grey ^ Act, which is being tried as an experiment in some of the native districts of the Cape Colony. In this measure the fact that the Bantu people have been de- prived of the chief occupation of their lives by the suppression of tribal wars is frankly recognised, and an alternative occupa- 1 So called from the name of the native district in which it was first introduced. INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT 157 tion is provided in two ways. In the first place a simple system of local government is provided, by means of which the natives can occupy themselves with such matters as the construction of roads and bridges, the plantation of trees, and the provision of schools ; and, in the second, a tax of 10s. per head is imposed upon the idle young men. As the pro- ceeds of this labour tax are appropriated to the provision of industrial and training schools, " the neglect of labour will provide a focus for instruction in labour.'' This tax, it must be explained, is by no means oppressive. The sum in ques- tion (los.) can be earned by a native in four days or a week under a European employer, and exemption Is granted to any native who has been in European employment for three years consecutive or otherwise, while he gains exemption for twelve months after he has worked for three months in any given year. Although the Act has only been applied for the present in the Cape Colony, it is intended to provide a system which can be suitably employed among the Bantu population from Lake Tanganyika to Capetown. The measure was introduced into the Cape Parliament in July 1 894, when Mr Rhodes was Prime Minister of the Cape Colony ; and in speaking in support of the proposal he made the interesting statement that in his double capacity of Secre- tary for Native Affairs in the Cape Colony and Managing Director of the British South Africa Company he was responsible for some 2,000,000 natives. Of these 1,000,000 were under the control of the Colonial Government, while the Company had half a million natives on either side of the Zambesi within its territories. Mr Rhodes also added as evidence of the urgency of the question that there were in the Transkei alone 600,000 Bantu, and that in twenty years that population would be doubled at the present rate of increase. It is obvious that if the territories now assigned to the natives are to support so vast an increase of population in the near future, it will be necessary for their inhabitants to apply themselves more diligently and more effectively to the 158 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA work of cultivation. And therefore it is as necessary in the interests of the natives themselves, as it is in the interests of their European partners in South Africa, that they should be taught the habit and faculty of labour. Nor could any better training school be provided than that which is afforded by the development of the industries of South Africa, which has resulted from the discovery of gold. In this respect the words, which an old colonist has spoken with reference to the effects of the mining industry at Kimberley, hold good now as then. '' The best Aborigines Protection Society that ever existed in the world is the Society of Diggers in the Diamond Fields of South Africa. They have taught the natives to work for wages, taught them habits of industry, cleanliness, and to some extent honesty." CHAPTER X. The Outlanders, We have seen the wider industrial effects of the establishment of the gold industry in the Transvaal, as manifested in the creation of an inter-state railway system, and the expansion of European colonisation northward to the Zambesi. We have now to trace its immediate economic and political effects upon the South African Republic, and more especially the movement of revolt among the British immigrants in the Boer State, which has led to the assertion of British supremacy throughout South Africa by force of arms. First, the economic effects of the gold industry. The output of gold won from the Randt in 1887, the first year after the commencement of mining, was 34,867 oz. of the value of ^^ 12 5,000. In 1898 it had risen by succes- sive yearly increments to 4,295,602 oz. of the value of £15,250,000. If we add to this Randt output the product of the lesser fields, we get a total of ;^i 7,500,000 as the value of the current output of gold in the Transvaal. These figures sufficiently indicate the rapidity with which the mineral resources of the Boer State were developed, and in this con- nection it must be remembered that the coal deposits con- tiguous to the gold reefs on the Randt were worked as an auxiliary industry. This development, which was accom- plished by a large expenditure of capital and a rapid increase of the industrial population, had the effect of raising the value of the mere soil. During the ten years subsequent to the commencement of gold mining on the Randt the value of the agricultural land in the Transvaal — that is land not occupied as town or mining sites — increased from p^933)200 to 159 THE OUTLANDERS i6i ;^ 1 0,000,000. In the course of the process about one- third of the land originally held by the Boers passed into the possession of British purchasers, and this British holding, although one-third in area, is two-thirds in value of the agricultural land of the Republic available for European occupation. More significant still was the introduction of an industrial and non-Boer population. The chief seat of this alien or Outlander population was Johannesburg, which quickly became the commercial centre of South Africa. According to the returns of an official census, taken under the authority of the Sanitary Board between July i 5th and October 21st, 1896, Johannesburg had at this date a total population of 102,078 persons living within a three miles' radius of the Market- S quare ; and of this total 50,907 were Europeans, 42,533 natives, 4,807 Asiatics, 972 Malays, and the remainder were of mixed and other races. But the European population of the entire district of the Randt was estimated shortly before the outbreak of the war as 120,850. At the same time the revenue had enormously increased, and the financial position of the Republic was changed from penury to opulence. The returns for a few typical years will serve to show how entirely the Boer community have owed their prosperity to the presence of British residents in the past, as well as the immediate indebtedness of the State to the capital and enterprise of the Outlanders of to-day. In the year of the annexation, 1876-77, the Transvaal revenue amounted to ^Gi^^jGi. The establishment of British authority, then effected, was followed by a considerable influx of British capital and population, and in 1880, owing to this cause and the improved administration of the finances by the British Government, the revenue had risen to ^174,068. In 1885, that is four years after the retro- cession, it stood at ;£ 1 7 7,8 76. In the following year it was more than doubled through the introduction of capital consequent upon the development of the eastern gold fields, and reached ;£38o,433. From this time onwards the Randt industry began to operate, and the revenue of the South i«2 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA African Republic leapt up from this total in 1886 to ^4,886,499 in 1897. In round numbers, then, the gold industry raised the revenue of the Transvaal in twelve years from ;^400,ooo to ^,^5,000,000. The enormous revenue, which was thus placed at the disposal of the Pretoria Executive, was not only raised by methods which were both uneconomic and inequitable — since they hampered the development of the industry upon which the prosperity of the state depended — but it was applied in such a manner that the Boers derived almost the entire benefit of its expenditure. In plain words, the revenue yielded by the industry which the Outlanders had created was used to enrich the Boer minority in the Re- public, and afterwards to promote the cause of the Afrikander nationality throughout South Africa. The method by which those objects were achieved will appear from an examination of the amounts respectively contributed by the three elements — Natives, Boers, and Outlanders — of the population of the Republic, and of the manner in which the total sum thus contributed was apportioned. Taking the year, 1897, ^^ find! that of the ^4,886,499 thus collected, 3 per cent, was contributed by the natives, 7*4 per cent, by the Boers, and 89*4 per cent, by the Outlanders. Now the natural and proper object of taxation is, of course, to provide for the expenses of government ; that is to say, for the cost of the civil service, the administration of justice, the police, and for the defence of the country against foreign powers. In the case of the South African Republic there was little or no need for any expenditure on this last head, since the protection of the Republic, in common with that of the other European communities in South Africa, was guaranteed by England. The only legitimate objects, therefore, upon 1 I am indebted for these figures, and also for the land values and revenue receipts given above, to a paper contributed by the late W. Y. Campbell, late Vice-President of the Chamber of Mines, Johannesburg, to British Africa, being Volume II, of the British Empire Series, I^ondon, 1899. THE OUTLANDERS 163 which this revenue could be expended were those which are comprised under the head of that general expenditure in which all members of the State would alike benefit. To this general expenditure, thus understood, the Pretoria Executive apportioned ;£i, 183,273; while on the other hand they devoted ;£"2,5 15,491 to special expenditure from which the Boers only derived any benefit, and left ;,^ 1, 2 5 7, 745 unaccounted for. In short, the Boers so administered the finances of the Republic that they em- ployed three and three-quarter millions out of the five millions at their disposal for the purpose of promoting the interests of their own nationality. Second, the political effects of the establishment of the gold industry must be stated. The rapid increase of revenue, although primarily an economic effect, must be included among the political effects of the gold industry, since the surplus revenue thus created was used more and more for political purposes, and came ultimately to be applied with a definite political aim to the providing of arms and ammunition for the burgher forces of the Republic and their allies throughout South Africa. To this effect must be added the fundamental change produced by the increase of British population. Broadly put, the Outlander inmigration completely reversed the composition of the European population of the South African Republic. In 1881 there were probably some 40,000 Boers and 5000 British in the Transvaal. Before the war broke out it is estimated that out of the 288,750 Europeans returned by the State Almanacht the Boer population numbered 78,076, the British 168,000, and that of other Europeans 42,674. In other words, omitting the Europeans of other nationalities, a Boer majority of seven to one had been converted in eigh- teen years into a British majority of two to one. As the question of the nationality of the Outlanders is one of con- siderable interest, I will give two tables which throw light upon the matter. The first is taken from the census of the Sanitary Board of Johannesburg to which reference has been K i64 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA made already. According to the returns of this census the origin of the 50,909 European inhabitants of Johannesburg was as follows : — Place of Birth. United Kingdom . Cape Colony Transvaal . 16,265 15,162 . 6,205 Russia (Polish Jews) Germany Holland . 3.335 2,262 819 France 402 To these must be added smaller contributions from Sweden and Norway, Italy, Switzerland, and other coun- tries ; and it must be remembered that the British subjects from the Cape Colony would include Dutch Afrikanders. The second table is supplied by the late Mr W. Y. Campbell, and gives the ratio of foreign letters, which, as he points out, is a fair indication of the composition of a new immigrant population. It refers to a period slightly later than the Johannesburg census. ro n Britain 77-55 per cent J) Germany . . 6-39 J) Russia (Jews) . 5'47 J) France , 2-72 »> Holland . • 2-56 „ 99-97 We may conclude, therefore, that the great majority of the Outlanders were British subjects ; and before we notice the most startling political effect of the gold industry — the revolt of the Outlanders against the Boer Government — we must first learn the condition of political subservience to which this population had been reduced. These British Outlanders, forming an actual majority of THE OUTLANDERS 165 the European population of the Republic, and constituting, as we have seen, the immediate source of its material pros- perity, had not been admitted to the franchise, and had therefore been excluded from any share in the administration of the State. What did this mean ? In a progressive and well-governed state it might have meant very little ; but in the Boer Republic it meant that a great industrial population was placed in subjection to the will of a rural community, which was alike ignorant and hostile. The will of this rural community was expressed by a bare majority of the twenty-four members of the Volks- raad, a legislative body which was not only childishly in- capable but flagrantly corrupt. The Volksraad became the tool of President Kriiger and the Executive, and these Boer leaders in turn allowed their policy to be swayed by the counsels of the Hollander officials, whose special object was to prevent the fusion of races out of which a peaceable adjustment of the conflicting interests of the old and new settlers could have arisen. The purpose of Dr Leyds, the most able and least scrupulous of these Hollanders, was frankly to maintain the South African Republic as a Boer state, and by elevating this state to the headship of the Afrikander nationality, to create an independent power sufficiently strong to challenge the supremacy of England in South Africa. In pursuit of these aims the prayer of the Outlanders for admission to the franchise was refused, and the use of the Dutch language was rigorously enforced. The children of these British residents were growing up in ignorance, because the Government compelled the State schools to recognise no medium of instruction except Dutch. According to the Johannesburg census, there were in 1896, 13,391 European children under fifteen years of age in the town, and of these 6992 were unable to read or write, and were not undergoing instruction of any kind. The Dutch language was used exclusively in the public notices addressed THE OUTLANDERS 167 to the population of this English-speaking town ; the legal records of commercial transactions were declared to be invalid unless they were written in Dutch, and English- men were compelled to plead and give evidence in Dutch, in the law courts. Nor was this all. The very industries which the Outlanders had created, and to which the State owed its prosperity, were fettered by fiscal exactions and Government monopolies as uneconomic as they were un- just, enforced by officials who were at once incapable and corrupt. Now we have defined the position, and it is time to ask, how did it arise ? We must go back to 1881. Under the Convention of Pretoria it was intended by the Imperial Government to secure equal civil and political rights for all present and future British residents in the Transvaal, and equal privileges for the trade which any British possession might carry on with this country. The second of these objects was secured by Article XXV. of this Convention, reproduced as Article XIII. in the London Convention. "... No other and higher duties shall be imposed on the importation into the South African Republic of any article coming from any part of Her Majesty's dominions, than are or may be imposed on the like article coming from any other place or country." . . . The intention of the Imperial Government in respect ot the first and more important object, was expressed in Article XXVI., reproduced as Article XIV. of the London Con- vention. " All persons, other than natives, conforming themselves to the laws of the South African Republic (a) will have full liberty, with their families, to enter, travel, or reside in any part of the South African Republic ; (^) they will be entitled to hire or possess houses, manufactories, warehouses, shops, and premises ; (c) they may carry on their commerce either in person or by any agents whom they may think fit to employ; (J) they will not be subject, in respect of their PRESIDENT KR.UGER. THE OUTLANDERS 169 persons or property, or in respect of their commerce or industry, to any taxes, whether general or local, other than those which are or may be imposed upon citizens of the said Republic." Whether the alterations of the franchise laws by which, as we shall see, the British residents were practically excluded from the right of voting for members of the Raad, were or were not contraventions of this Article, we need not now stop to enquire ; since the Convention has itself been destroyed by the subsequent action of the Government of the Republic. But what it is essential for us to know, is that President Kriiger himself was perfectly aware of the intentions of the Imperial Government in this matter, and promised definitely that the object in question should be carried out. This is shown by the following extract from the proceedings of the Royal Commission, by which the independent Government of the Transvaal was restored in 1881. " Sir H. Robinson. — Before annexation, had British sub- jects complete freedom of trade throughout ? Were they on the same footing as citizens of the Transvaal ? Mr K. — They were on the same footing as the burghers. There was not the slightest difference in accordance with the Sand River Convention. Rob. — I presume you will not object to that continuing ? Mr K. — No, there will be equal protection for everybody. Sir Evelyn Wood. — And equal privileges ? Mr K. — We make no difference as far as burgher rights are concerned. There may, perhaps, be some slight differ- ence in the case of a young person who has just come into the country." The expression " young person " was subsequently amended by Dr Jorissen, who acted as Mr Kriiger's secretary, as indicating "young" not in age, but in residence in the country. This promise was violated in 1882, when it was enacted by the Volksraad that the necessary qualifications for burgher rights were [a) five years' residence ; [b) registration on the field-cornet's list for a like period ; and [c) the payment of a 170 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA sum of ;^2 5. The stipulation for registration on the field- cornet's list meant, of course, submission to the commando law with its routine of military duties. After the tide of immigration consequent upon the dis- covery of the Randt goldfields had set in, the attitude which the Pretoria Executive adopted, was that which is embodied in President Kriiger's words : *' When the floods rise, we build the banks higher." In 1890 a specious concession was made to the claims of the Outlanders. A second chamber was then created, in which matters of special concern to the industrial population were to be discussed, but this second Raad had no control over taxation, and its resolutions were subject to an absolute veto of the first Raad. Moreover, the period of residence necessary to qualify the Outlander to vote for either the first or second Raads, was at the same time raised to ten years, in addition to two years of naturalization — twelve years in all. Finally, in 1893, a law was passed under which, in Mr Chamberlain's words,i the Outlander " can now never hope to attain these rights in full^ and their partial enjoyment is only conceded after a term of probation so prolonged as to amount, for most men, to a practical denial of the claim. If he omits to obtain any kind of naturalization for himself, his children, though born on the soil, remain aliens like himself." There were two parties aggrieved by the refusal of the Boer Government to admit the Outlanders to political rights — the Outlanders themselves and the Imperial Government. It is necessary to enquire what steps were taken respectively by these two parties to obtain redress. After the creation of the second Raad and the extension of the period of residence necessary to obtain the franchise in 1890, the Outlanders commenced to agitate for political rights in earnest. In 1892, President Kriiger gave a pledge in writing to a deputation from the Randt, that he would intro- duce a measure to extend the franchise to *' trustworthy persons." This pledge was characteristically redeemed by 1 Dispatch of February 4th, 1896. THE OUTLANDERS 171 the restrictive law of 1893, which made it impossible for an Outlander to qualify by residence until he was forty years of age, and even then left him debarred from the right of voting for the election of the President and Commandant-General of the Republic. In 1894 a petition signed by 13,000 Out- landers was presented to the Raad, and rejected with " con- temptuous laughter and jeers." In 1895 a petition supported by 38,000 signatures was received with still less courtesy. In the debate which ensued, a member of the Raad, Otto by name, used these words : — " Come on if you want to fight. I say come on and have it out — the sooner the better. I am prepared to fight you, and I think every burgher of the South African Republic is with me. I say to-day that the people who signed the Memorials are rebels." The Outlanders were, therefore, justified in the conclusion at which they arrived in this year, that it was hopeless to think of obtaining any concessions by constitutional means. In order to understand the attitude of the Imperial Govern- ment we must look back a little, and review the general situation in South Africa. At this period the car of South African progress was driven by a very impetuous charioteer — Mr Cecil Rhodes. As we have already seen, Mr Rhodes began to work in alliance with the leaders of the Afrikander Bond during the period of the Bechuanaland Settlement. After the British Protectorate had been established by Sir Charles Warren's Expedition, the Afrikander leaders made up their quarrel with President Krliger, and in 1887 the annual meeting of the Bond was held at Potchefstroom, the old capital of the Transvaal Boers. But as the Republic became more prosperous, points of difference arose. Cape products were excluded from the Republic by the heavy duties imposed by the Pretoria Executive ; and Hollanders were introduced into the Civil Service of the Republic to the exclusion of Afrikander candidates from the Cape Colony. When Mr Rhodes became Prime Minister of the Colonial Ministry in 1 890, he owed his position to the support of Mr i-jz THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA Hofmeyr and the Afrikander Bond. As the head of a Bond ministry, Mr Rhodes carried out Afrikander ideas : that is to say, the rural industries of the Colony were favoured in the Budget, and questions of native policy were dealt with from the Afrikander point of view. In 1892 the admission of natives to political rights in the Colony was restricted by an alteration in the franchise law. The property qualification was raised from jQ'2-'^ to ;^75, no person was henceforward entitled to be registered as a voter in respect of any native, tribal, or communal occupation of land, and an education test was introduced, which required every voter to be able to sign his name, and write his occupation and address. The effect of this measure was good ; because it tended to make the native feel, that if he wished to possess the franchise, he must first obtain the elementary qualifications of a good citizen. And in 1894 the Glen Grey Act was passed — a wise measure, intended equally to benefit the European and the Bantu. At the same time the Bond party supported Mr Rhodes in the northward expansion, which was being achieved through the agency of the British South Africa Company. Mr Rhodes' intention at this time was to cultivate good relations with the Republics through the Afrikanders of the Cape Colony ; and this was in the main identical with the policy of racial conciliation advocated by Sir Hercules Robinson (Lord Rosmead), who was Governor and High Commissioner from 1880 to 1889, and then, after the term of office held by Sir Henry Loch (Lord Loch), from 1895 to the appointment of Sir Alfred Milner in 1897. A scheme of fiscal union was promoted as a first step towards that political union of the Colonies and States under a Federal System, which then, as now, formed the natural goal of South African statesmanship. In 1889 the Free State joined the Cape Colony in the South African Customs Union, and a Railway Convention was concluded, under which the Colonial Government undertook to construct a railway through the Free State to the Transvaal border THE OUTLANDERS 173 towards Johannesburg, and to work this and other Free State railways until the Republican Government was pre- pared to take them over.^ At this time there was reason to believe that both the Transvaal and Natal would join the Customs Union, and this belief in part accounts for the compliant attitude shown by the Imperial Government in its transactions with the Government of the former in respect of the Boer expansion eastwards. In 1887 ^^^ Boers were allowed to incorporate the western half of Zululand ; and in 1890 the Boer claims to Swaziland, originating in con- cessions obtained from the Swazi king Umbandine, were recognised by the first Swazi Convention, which provided for the establishment of a joint British and Boer government over the European colonists, and left the Swazis themselves under the control of their king. In the subsequent negotia- tions for the settlement of this question — it must be re- membered that the independence of the Swazis was definitely guaranteed by Article XII. of the London Convention — a powerful inducement was held out to President Kriiger to enter the Customs Union. Mr Rhodes was now Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, and he was pushing forward the plan of Fiscal Union with his customary energy. That the realization of this object was by no means impossible is shown by the words used by Dr Jameson in a speech which he made 2 on January 28th, 1895. '* You must remember," he said on this occasion, " that the very conception of Rhodesia was due to the Prime Minister of Cape Colony, who is also Managing Director of the Chartered Company ; that Rhodesia is being populated by both Englishmen and Cape Colonists ; that the Cape Colony is in entire sympathy with us ; that our direct trunk line and most important means of communication will come from the Cape Colony ; and further, you must remember that qua commercial development, the Free State under its enlightened President, Mr Reitz, is in entire sympathy with 1 This was done eventually in 1897. 2 At the Imperial Institute. 174 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA the Cape CoJony and with us. Given a combination of the Cape Colony, Orange Free State, and Rhodesia deter- mined on a commercial federation, with Natal possibly lukewarm, and only the Transvaal inimical, and the Trans- vaal with a population of nearly 50,000 Englishmen and Cape Colonists equally desirous with us, as against a popula- tion of about I 5,000 Boers opposed — remembering all this, I do not think you will consider []a commercial federation or amalgamation of South Africa] an extravagant dream, but will rather consider it as a proposition of practical politics which must inevitably come about.'' Under the influence of this predominant idea the Imperial Government temporarily abandoned its traditional policy of excluding the Boer States from the sea, and agreed to allow the South African Republic to construct a railway to Kosi Bay, provided that the Republic entered the Customs Union within three years from the date of the proposal. It was the ambition of President Kriiger's life to obtain a seaport for his Republic ; but the fear lest the independent existence of his State would be practically sacrificed prevented him from fulfilling the necessary stipulation. Natal also refused to join the union. The reasons for this refusal were per- fectly clear. To enter the Customs Union involved the equalization of the Natal duties with those of the Cape Colony. But the immediate interests of the lesser Colony at this time required that the Natal tariff should be kept as low as possible, in order that Natal might compete success- fully with Delagoa Bay and the Cape ports for the carrying trade of the Randt district ; and with this object in view the Natal Railway was being carried rapidly northwards to the Transvaal frontier. On December 10th, 1894, the question of Swaziland was settled by a new Convention, under which the Govern- ment of that country was handed over to the South African Republic, but equal political rights for British immigrants were definitely secured. In the following year, as the Government of the Republic had refused to enter the Customs Union, THE OUTLANDERS 175 Tongaland was annexed by the Imperial Government, and the Transvaal was shut out from the sea coast. In this year also Pondoland, the last of the native territories between the Cape Colony and Natal, was taken over by the Colonial Government, and Southern Bechuanaland, hitherto ad- ministered as a Crown Colony, was incorporated into the Cape Colony. After the refusal of the South African Republic to join the Customs Union, Mr Cecil Rhodes and the Afrikander Bond Party became hostile to the Transvaal, and President Kriiger, on his part, resented the annexation of Tongaland by the Imperial Government, against which he protested as **an unfriendly act." The fact that the Pretoria- Delagoa Bay Line^ had been opened in the preceding year (1894), enabled him to attempt to injure the com- mercial interests of the Cape Colony by placing heavy charges upon the imports brought by the Cape railways to the Transvaal frontier. In order to escape these duties goods were carried across the Vaal Drifts (Fords) in waggons, and loaded on to the Transvaal railways within the Border. To prevent this evasion President Kriiger declared the Vaal Drifts closed to traffic. This action of the Pretoria Executive was held by the legal advisers of both the Imperial and Colonial Governments to be a breach of Article XIII. of the London Convention, under which, as we have seen, equal treatment was guaranteed to imports from British possessions. And in October 1895, ^'^^ Cape Government — of which Mr Rhodes was Prime Minister, and Mr Schreiner, Attorney-General — supported the Im- perial Government in the despatch of a virtual ultimatum in which the re-opening ot the drifts was demanded. The presentation of this ultimatum, to which President Kriiger at once yielded, shows how completely the interests of the 1 This railway was constructed and worked by the Netherlands South African Company, but the Transvaal Government hold one- third of the shares, and practically control its administration and finances 176 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA Afrikander party had been amalgamated under Mr Rhodes' leadership with those of the Imperial Government. It is only possible to understand the quiescence of the Imperial Government in the face of the grave injustice with which the Outlanders in the Transvaal were treated, by bearing in mind the situation which I have endeavoured to describe in the foregoing review. As a matter of fact, the position on the Randt did not become acute until the year 1894. In the month of June of this year, Lord Loch, the High Commissioner, visited Pretoria for the purpose of dis- cussing the new Swazi Convention, and with the direct object | of informing President Kriiger that the Imperial Government insisted upon British subjects being at once exempted from the operation of the commando laws. In this connection it is necessary to explain that although the Boers had denied the franchise to the Outlanders, they had attempted to '* com- mandeer " Englishmen to serve against Malaboch, a Kafir chief, who had at this time rebelled against the Republic. While Lord Loch was at Pretoria on this errand, he was invited by the British residents at Johannesburg to visit their town. President Kriiger, however, begged him not to take this course lest it should lead to a disturbance, and in deference to the President's wish Lord Loch declined the invitation, although he took the opportunity of informing President Kriiger that, in his opinion, the 40,000 British subjects in the Transvaal had *' some very real and substantial grievances." Moreover he received a deputation from Johannesburg, by whom he was informed that the British residents, in despair of achieving political rights by constitutional means, con- templated a resort to force. From this course Lord Loch at once dissuaded the deputation, pointing out the inadequacy of the military preparations which they were making, in view of the strength of the burgher forces which the Republic could command. The steps which Lord Loch took after | his return to Capetown are thus related in a speech made in the House of Lords.^ 1 On May ist, 1896. Lord Loch was defending himself from the THE OUTLANDERS 177 " In consideration of the excited state of the country, and the probability of an insurrection there, I felt it to be my duty, in the position which I then filled as Her Majesty's High Commissioner, to take steps if necessary to protect the lives and property of British subjects. The steps I adopted were in connection with an assembly, at certain points, of the British Imperial Bechuanaland Police. My intention was that if disturbances had risen in Johannesburg, disturbances resulting from the administration extended by the Republic towards the Uitlanders in that city, it would have been my duty to have informed President Kriiger that he would be held responsible for the property and lives of British subjects. I should have further considered it to be my duty to have informed President Kriiger, that if he had failed in providing the necessary protection of the lives and property of British subjects in Johannesburg, I should have felt myself at perfect liberty to have taken such steps as I might have felt expedient for giving that protection which he had failed to give." This visit of Lord Loch to Pretoria, and its sequel, has an important bearing upon the question of the moral re- sponsibility of the several parties concerned in the Jameson Raid, which happened just eighteen months afterwards. The quiescence of the Imperial Government up to this date may perhaps be justified by the course of contemporary events in South Africa ; but how are we to account for its strange inaction after this revelation of the dangerous condition of affairs at Johannesburg in June 1 894 ? At this time Lord Ripon was Colonial Secretary, and continued to hold that office until Lord Rosebery's Government was succeeded by the present Unionist Ministry in the autumn of 1895. According to Mr Chamberlain's famous despatch of February 4th, 1896, it was due to the following facts. In the first place *' the Oatlanders and their organs had always depre- cated the introduction into the dispute of what is called in statement made by the Pretoria correspondent of the Temps, in which he was charged with having planned an invasion of the Transvaal similar to the Jameson Raid. 178 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA South Africa the * Imperial factor ' ; and in the second, * the rumours ' of ' violent measures ' were continually falsified by the event." But this excuse seems strangely inadequate — unless, indeed, we are prepared to accept the new political doctrine that Ministers of State must follow, but not lead, the public will — in view of the actual situation. Whatever " the man in the street " may or may not have known at this time, the Colonial Office knew that the British Outlanders in the Transvaal had "very real and substantial grievances," that their petitions to the Volksraad had been rejected with con- temptuous insolence, that rifles and ammunition were being served out to the inhabitants of Johannesburg, that President Kriiger was waiting for the Outlander tortoise to put out its head — and the Colonial Office and the Imperial Govern- ment did nothing. One more fact is necessary to explain the position in South Africa before the Raid. In the autumn of 1895, when Mr Chamberlain had just succeeded Lord Ripon at the Colonial Office, an agreement was made between the Imperial Govern- ment and the Chartered Company under which certain changes were introduced in the administration of the Bechuanaland Protectorate. The Crown Colony of Bechuanaland was, as we have seen, united at this time to the Cape Colony ; the native chiefs, Khama and Sechele, in the Protectorate were kept under the immediate control of the Imperial Govern- ment, but the strip of territory, through which the northward railway was being constructed, was placed under the direct control of the Chartered Company. In pursuance of these arrangements the Bechuanaland Border Police were taken over by the Chartered Company, and the keeping of this eastern border of the Protectorate, which ran side by side with the South African Republic, passed into the hands of Mr Cecil Rhodes and Dr Jameson. On December 26th the Transvaal National Union issued its manifesto. In this document the constitutional and ad- ministrative reforms required by the Outlanders were tabulated in the following summary with which it closed. THE OUTLANDERS 179 <' We want: 1. The establishment of this Republic as a true Republic. 2. A grondwet or constitution which shall be framed by competent persons selected by representatives of the whole people and framed on lines laid down by them, a constitution which shall be safeguarded against hasty alteration. 3. An equitable franchise law and fair representation. 4. Equality of the Dutch and English language. 5. Responsibility to the Legislature of the heads of the great departments. 6. Removal of religious disabilities. 7. Independence of the Courts of Justice,^ with adequate and secured remuneration of the judges. 8. Liberal and comprehensive education. 9. An efficient Civil Service, with adequate provision for pay and pension. 10. Free Trade in South African products. This is what we want. There now remains the question which is to be put before you at the meeting of the 6th of January, viz. : How shall we get it ? To this question I shall expect from you an answer in plain terms according to your dehberatc judgment." On Sunday, December 29th, Dr Jameson "rode in " with 600 troopers from Mafeking. This movement was part of a preconcerted scheme in which Mr Rhodes had played a leading role ; but the precise action which constituted Dr Jameson's offence was taken on his sole authority, and in opposition to the wishes of the reformers at Johannesburg, and the instructions of Mr Rhodes at Capetown. The sequel — the surrender at Doornkop on January 2nd, 1896, the Kaiser's telegram of congratulation, the hasty visit of Lord Rosmead to Pretoria, the surrender of Johannesburg under the pledge of Imperial protection, the trial of the Reform leaders at Pretoria, and the conviction of Dr 1 The necessity for this was subsequently demonstrated by the arbitrary dismissal of Chief- Justice Kotze in February, 1898, by the Pretoria Executive. i8o THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA Jameson and his officers in London — is too fresh in our memories to need description.^ Certain other results of the Raid must, however, be noticed. Mr Rhodes at once resigned the Premiership of the Cape Colony ; and the alliance between him and Mr Hofmeyr came to an abrupt termination. The Colonial Office was startled into activity, and Mr Chamberlain in particular showed both energy and address in his management of the dangerous situation thus created. The military forces of the Chartered Company were immediately placed under the control of Imperial officers, and every possible assurance was given to President Kriiger that the Imperial Government would countenance no aggression upon its independence. At the same time Mr Chamberlain did not fail to impress upon Lord Rosmead the necessity of removing the " root cause " of the disorder. In his despatch of January 4th he bade Lord Rosmead remind the Government of the Republic that '< the danger from which they had just escaped was real, and one which, if the causes which led up to it were not removed, might recur, although in a different form.'' And a little later he urged him to use " plain language to President Kriiger," adding that the people of Johannesburg had surrendered "in the belief that reasonable concessions would be arranged by your intervention, and until these are granted, or are definitely promised to you by the President, the root cause of the recent troubles will remain." But the problem was not to be solved in this prompt manner. Only the man on the spot knew what the real difficulties of the situation were, and Lord Rosmead, who had barely succeeded in inducing President Kriiger to hand over Dr Jameson and his troopers to the Imperial authorities, ^ The reader is referred for an account of the actual circumstances under which Dr Jameson crossed the Transvaal border to the author's South Africa ; a Studi/ in Colonijl Administration and Development. In the chapter entitled, "The Revolt of the Uitlanders," an attempt is made to discriminate the degrees in which the respective parties were responsible for the disastrous results of this occurrence. THE OUTLANDERS i8i replied wearily, "the question of concession to Outlanders has never been discussed between us." On February 4th (1896) Mr Chamberlain wrote the masterly despatch, in which the case of the Outlanders was set forth with completeness and precision, and a remedy was suggested in the form of '* home rule " for the Randt. At the same time President Kriiger was invited to visit England, and personally confer with the Colonial Office on the settle- ment of the questions at issue between the Republic and the Imperial Government. There is reason to believe that President Kriiger himself was ready to adopt this method of solving the difficulty, but a sinister influence, represented by the person of Dr W. J. Leyds, State Secretary of the South African Republic, interposed to prevent the personal contact between the aged President and the Imperial authori- ties, which was offered by this proposal. And from the date of the refusal of this invitation a situation was developed which became more hopeless, and more dangerous for the peace of South Africa, with each succeeding month. CHAPTER XI. After the Raid. Before describing the elements of the dangerous situation created by the Jameson Raid in South Africa as a whole, it is necessary to revert to the affairs of the Chartered Company, since one of the most startling of the immediate effects of Dr Jameson's action was the insurrection of the natives in Rhodesia. Apart from the actual invasion of the Transvaal by its Administrator, the Company was deeply compromised by the action of Mr Rhodes, its managing director in South Africa. Both the Committee of the Cape Parliament and the South Africa Committee of the Imperial Parliament,^ which were respectively appointed to enquire into the origin of the Raid, found that Mr Rhodes was responsible for the arrangements which had been made to support the revolt of the Outlanders, although the actual incursion had been made in defiance of his mstructions. This verdict Mr Rhodes anticipated by resigning the premiership of the Cape Colony on January 6th, 1896, and six months afterwards he withdrew from the Board of Directors of the British South Africa Company.2 At the same time other changes were made without delay in the personnel and administration of the Company. The Capetown Secretary, Dr Rutherfoord Harris, was dismissed, Mr Beit and Mr Rochfort Maguire resigned their seats on the Board, together with Mr Rhodes, and Lord Grey was appointed to succeed Dr 1 The former reported to the Cape Assembly on July 17th, 1896 ; the latter was ordered on July 30th, 1896, and completed their inves- tigations in the middle of the following year, 1897. 2 Mr Rhodes was re-elected (together with Mr Rochfort Maguire) on April 21st, 1898. AFTER THE RAID 183 Jameson as administrator. The duties of the new Adminis- trator were, however, now purely civil, since, as we have already noticed, the military forces of the Company had been at once placed under Imperial officers. In view of this change. Sir Richard Martin was now appointed " Com- mandant-General of the local forces in the Bechuanaland Protectorate and in the territories south of the Zambesi under the direct administration of the British South Africa Company, and Deputy-Commissioner of the last mentioned territories." Before these new officials reached the scene of their labours the native population of Rhodesia had risen in revolt, and a general officer. Sir Frederick Carrington, was despatched on April 25th to take command, of the local and Imperial forces which had been hastily collected to put down the rebellion. The first overt act of rebellion was the murder of a native policeman on March 20th. Six days later Buluwayo went into laager, and the European settlers hastily withdrew from the country districts to the shelter of the town. On April 28th Lord Grey gallantly threw himself into his little capital, which was now sur- rounded by 10,000 Matabele. He brought with him a welcome supply of arms and ammunition for the slender garrison, which numbered less than 1000 men, and sent home the cheery message that Buluwayo was " as safe as London." And so it proved to be ; for the relieving column of troopers hastily collected at Mafeking, under Colonel Plumer, got through on May 1 5th with Sir Richard Martin, and on June 2nd General Carrington arrived to direct the mihtary operations by which in the course of the next three months the rebellion in Matabeleland was put down. It must be mentioned that Mr Rhodes was present in the colony which bore his name at this period of danger. After his resignation of the Cape Premiership he returned to England, where he had an interview with Mr Chamberlain ; and he then made his way through the Suez Canal to Beira, and thence to Fort Salisbury. Mr Rhodes was in this 1 84 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA latter place when the insurrection broke out in Matabeleland, and he at once organised a column for the relief of Buluwayo. In accompanying this column, which reached Buluwayo on May 30th, and in the dangerous negotiations which he afterwards conducted with the insurgent Matabele in the Motoppo Mountains, Mr Rhodes showed himself as in- different to his personal safety as he was fertile in resource. The insurrection of the Matabele was followed by a rising among the Mashonas in the northern districts of the Com- pany's territories, and the authority of the white man was not entirely restored until the beginning of the next year. After peace had been secured, an enquiry was made into the causes of the rebellion. In so far as the discontent of the natives was ascertained to be due to faults in the Company's administration, appropriate reforms have been since intro- duced ; but apart from any specific causes of irritation, such as the misbehaviour of the native police and the belief that the Company were confiscating their cattle, there can be no question but that the immediate cause of the outbreak was the fact that the territory had been stripped of the European police by Dr Jameson's invasion of the Transvaal. In the meantime — that is to say while the rebellion was still smouldering — the work of railway construction was rapidly pushed forward by Mr Rhodes. The dangerous isolation of Buluwayo and the industrial requirements of the mining settlers, had both alike shown the absolute necessity of establishing direct railway communication between Rhodesia and the Cape Colony. In 1896 the line was carried northwards for 180 miles from Mafeking, and Palachwe, Khama's capital, was reached early in the following year ; and finally, as we have already seen, the Capetown to Buluwayo line was opened for traffic by Sir Alfred Milner on November 4th, 1897. Since that date the iron road has been laid still further northwards, and the realisation of Mr Rhodes' great scheme of uniting Capetown with Cairo by a Trans-Continental Railway has been further promoted by the extension of the Egyptian AFTER THE RAID 185 railways southwards to Khartoum. At the same time the East Coast Railway was carried forward to Massikessi on the Portuguese boundary, and thence to Fort Salisbury ; and thus, when Buluwayo and Fort Salisbury have been united by the line now in progress, Rhodesia, as a whole, will be placed in communication with Beira, its east coast port. Railways and telegraphs are elements of such im- portance in the development of new countries, that it will not be irrelevant to add that Mr Rhodes' sister scheme of a Trans-Continental Telegraph is on the point of realisation. From Capetown the telegraph line has been carried north- wards through Rhodesia to British Nyassaland ; from Cairo it has been carried southwards through the Soudan to Uganda, while arrangements were made a year ago by Mr Rhodes with the German Imperial Government for the construction and working of the line through German East Africa, which now forms the sole intervening territory between these respective termini. But to return to the political situation in South Africa after the Raid. The elements of this situation, which lasted up to the Bloemfontein Conference of June 1899, were these: — I. The Afrikander party in the Cape Colony was estranged, and the work of racial reconciliation, which had preceded under the alliance of Mr Rhodes and Mr Hofmeyr, was undone. Their leaders were naturally and bitterly incensed at the thought that they had been used as a cat's paw to further Mr Rhodes' personal and political ambitions. II. The Free State was alarmed for its own independence, and was driven into the offensive and defensive alliance with the South African Republic, the terms of which were arranged at Bloemfontein on March 9th, 1897. III. The Pretoria Executive, possessing a powerful instrument in the surplus millions contributed by the gold industry to the annual revenue of the Republic, began ■2 1 systematically to organise their military resources, and to i86 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA provide arms and ammunition sufficient to equip the whole of the Afrikander population in South Africa. The Transvaal armaments had commenced before the Raid. In the manifesto of the Reformers, <* the policy of force " which the Executive had already adopted, was denounced. ;^2 50,000 was to be spent upon completing a fort at Pretoria; ^100,000 was assigned to the construction of the fort destined to overawe rebellious Johannesburg. Orders had been given to Krupp for big guns ; and German officers had been imported to drill the burghers. Moreover, on January 27th, 1895, President Kriiger had publicly announced, that " the time had come to knit ties of the closest friendship between Germany and the South African Republic." It has been calculated that a million and a quarter of pounds sterling had been expended in material of war, before Dr Jameson crossed the frontier on December 30th of this same year. But now the work of armament was pushed on by the Pretoria Executive with feverish activity. In considering the policy which was pursued by the Imperial Government, in the face of this grave situation, it is necessary to remember that the condition of the Out- landers was no longer obscure. The Raid, whatever else it may have done, had at least produced this good effect — it had made the ignominious position of the British populatian in the Transvaal known to the British race throughout the Anglo-Saxon world. In view of this knowledge it was impossible for the Colonial Office to draw back from the complete fulfilment of the pledge, which had been given to the people of Johannesburg, to obtain the redress of the "admitted grievances" of the Outlanders. On the other hand the Colonial Office, and indeed the nation, felt that they owed some amends to the Afrikander sentiment in the Cape Colony and in the Free State, which had been so cynically betrayed by Mr Rhodes. The Imperial Govern- ment, therefore, endeavoured to allay the irritation in the Cape Colony and the Free State, and to win back Afri- AFTER THE RAID 187 kander sentiment to the side of the Outlanders, and thus to secure the necessary reforms in the Transvaal by the double pressure of South African opinion and Imperial remonstrance. In a speech made early in 1896 Mr Chamberlain laid down the main lines of the South African policy which the Government intended to pursue in view of the refusal of President Kriiger to visit England. After declaring that ( 1 ) the paramount power of England was to be maintained at all hazards, and no foreign interference was to be permitted under any pretence; and (2) that the admitted grievances of the Outlanders were to be redressed, he stated the means by which this object was to be attained. This, the operative clause, in the Declaration of Policy was as follows : — " We have a confident hope that we shall be able in the course of no lengthened time to restore the situation as it was before the invasion of the Transvaal, to have at our backs the sympathy and support of the majority of the Dutch population in South Africa, and if we have that, the opinion — the united opinion — which that will constitute, will be an opinion which no power in Africa can resist." And in addressing the House of Commons on the same subject Mr Chamberlain pledged himself " to use every exertion, exhaust every means" to convert the majority of the Dutch population from hostility to sympathy. This policy, which was steadily pursued during the three suc- ceeding years, to its denouement in the Bloemfontein Con- ference, has failed. It failed through the action of causes too deep to be touched by such a remedy. The fatal effects of the errors of twenty years before had been realised. The precise position had arisen in the Transvaal which Sir Bartle Frere had foreseen and described. " Any attempt to give back or restore the Boer Republic in the Transvaal must lead to anarchy and failure, and ... to a vicious imita- tion of some South American Republics, in which the more uneducated and misguided Boers, dominated and led by better educated foreign adventurers — Germans, Hollanders, i88 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA Irish Home Rulers, and other European Republicans and Socialists — will become a pest to the whole of South Africa, and a most dangerous fulcrum to any European Power bent on contesting our naval supremacy, or injuring us in our Colonies." The Transvaal gold had done its work alike in Europe and in South Africa. At the end of 1898 the position was summed up in the terse phrase, which was spoken by loyal Englishmen with bated breath, We are losing South Africa. When the remonstrances, repeatedly addressed to the Pretoria Executive by the Imperial Government, had failed to secure the enfranchisement of the Outlanders, Sir Alfred Milner was summoned to confer with Mr Chamberlain in January 1899. After the whole South African situation had thus been considered with the aid of the High Commissioner's local knowledge and experience, Mr Chamberlain proposed that arrangements should be made for the personal discussion of the questions at issue by Pre- sident Kriiger and Sir Alfred Milner ; and this conference took place on May 3ist-June 5th at Bloemfontein. Here, at last. Downing Street and Capetown spoke with one voice. With the refusal of President Kriiger to carry out the minimum reforms required by the Imperial Government came " the new situation. " Then followed three months of fruitless diplomacy. The question of the redress of griev- ances was met by a demand for the formal recognition of the South African Republic as a sovereign international State. But the Imperial Government were not in a mood to barter, and the barren controversy was at last closed by the despatch of September 23rd, in which they announced their intention of formulating a settlement of the questions at issue without any further reference to the Pretoria Executive. A fortnight of intense anxiety was closed on October 9th, when the Transvaal ultimatum was handed to the British Agent at Pretoria ; and forty-eight hours afterwards the forces of the two Republics were mobilised for war. AFTER THE RAID 189 The question has been asked more than once, What is the object of the war ? The history of South Africa can alone supply the answer. The army of Great Britain and the Anglo-Saxon Empire is fighting to-day in South Africa to retrieve the mistake of 1854, and to recover the lost solidarity of the Europeans. The motives which led to that error are only too clear. There was the belief that South Africa was worthless — or at least not worth the blood and treasure expended in the Kafir wars. There was the desire to escape from the financial burden and the political responsibilities of Empire. Blind statesmen ! blind England ! In the Sovereignty lay a practically inexhaustible supply of diamonds, a supply so great that it is only by rigorously limiting the output that the market value of the diamond is maintained to-day. Across the Vaal, in the barren uplands that rose northwards, lay the conglomerate beds enclosing gold deposits now variously estimated at between ^^3 2 5,000,000 and ^^450,000,000 in value, and yielding a current output at the rate of ;^i 5,500,000 a year. Our statesmen could not foresee the existence of these mineral treasures ; but they might have known that an evasion of responsibility is as dangerous to a nation as it is to an individual. Sir George Grey warned them ; Sir Bartle Frere repeated the warning in words which have to-day a melancholy significance. " There is no escaping from the responsibility ivhich has been already incurredy ever since the English Jlag ivas planted on the Castle here. All our real difficulties have arisen^ and still arise, from attempting to evade or shift this responsibility. . . . If you abdicate the Sovereign position, the abdication has always to be heavily paid for in both blood and treasure.^' But no ; Downing Street must disregard all advice, must temporise and postpone, until at last an issue was raised so 190 THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA plain, so brutal in its frankness, that even ' the man in the street ' knew that the great name of England was at stake. The cost of recovering the lost unity of South Africa is great. Every despatch from the front adds to the tale ot the bright coin of brave men's lives paid down. The great- ness of the cost is the penalty we pay for fifty years of official ineptitude, for fifty years of national neglect. Even so, great as is the cost, grave as is the penalty, neither cost nor penalty is too great, if only the object of the war be attained, and the Unity of South Africa under the British flag be established without possibility of cavil or dispute. HISTORICAL SUMMARY [The names of British Governors of the Cape Colony — who, commencing with Sir Henry Pottinger, were also High Commissioners for South Africa — are printed in italics.^ A.D. i486 Discovery of the Cape by Bartholomew Diaz. 1652 Settlement of Dutch East India Company. 1688-90 Huguenot immigration. 1795 Temporary occupation of the Cape by England. 1803 Restoration to Holland. 1806 Permanent occupation by England. 1 807 Earl of Caledon, 1 8 1 2 Sir John Cradock. 1 8 1 4 Lord Charles Somerset. The Cape Colony formally ceded to England. 1820 Albany Settlement. 1826 General Bourke. 1828 Sir Lonvry Cole, 1833 Abolition Act. 1834 Sir Benjamin Durban, Slave Emancipation. Kafir Invasion. 1835 Lord Glenelg's despatch. Sir George Napier. 1835-38 Boer Emigration. 1837 Defeat of Moselekatze by Henry Potgieter. 1838 Defeat of Dingaan by Pretorius. 1843 British authority established in Natal. 1844 Sir Peregrine Maitland. 191 192 HISTORICAL SUMMARY A.D. 1846 Sir Henry Pottinger. 1846-8 Kafir war (War of the Axe). 1847 Sir Harry Smith. British KafTraria annexed. 1848 British sovereignty declared over country between Vaal and Orange rivers. 1849 Convict agitation. 1 85 1 -2 Kafir war. 1852 Sand River Convention. Sir George Cathcart. 1853 Basuto war. Representative Government in Cape Colony. 1854 Convention of Bloemfontein. Sir George Grey. 1857 Colonisation of British Kaffraria. I 862 Sir Philip Wodehouse. 1863 First railway in Cape Colony. 1865 British Kaffraria annexed to Colony. 1868 Convention of Aliwal North (Basutos protected). 1870 Discovery of diamonds at Kimberley. Sir Henry Barhly. 187 I Annexation of Griqualand West. 1872 Responsible government in Cape Colony. 1877 Annexation of Transvaal. Sir Barlle Frere. 1877-8 Kafir War. 1879 Zulu War. Lord Wolscley supersedes Frere as High Com- missioner for South-East Africa. 1880 Recall of Sir Bartle Frere. Boer revolt in Transvaal. t88i Sir Hercules Robinson (Lord Rosmead). Convention of Pretoria. 1884 Convention of London. 1884-? Bechuanaland Settlement. 1886 Randt declared a public goldfield. HISTORICAL SUMMARY 193 A.D. 1887 Zululand annexed. 1888 Treaty with Lobengula. 1889 Sir Henry Loch (Lord Loch). Free State enters Customs Union. British South Africa Company receives Charter. 1890 Mr Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of Cape Colony. Mashonaland occupied. 1891 Anglo-Portuguese Convention. 1893 Matabele War. Responsible government in Natal. 1894 British South Africa Company extended north of Zambesi. Lord Loch's visit to Pretoria. Swazi Convention. 1895 Annexation of Tongaland. Crown Colony of Bechuanaland annexed to Cape Colony. Pondoland annexed to Cape Colony. Drifts question. Sir Hercules Robinson (Lord Rosmead). Revolt of Outlanders. (December 29th) Jameson Raid. 1896 (January 2nd) Surrender at Doornkop. Native insurrection in Rhodesia. Sir Alfred Milner. (May 3ist-.Iune 5th) Bloemfontein Conference. (October 9th) Transvaal ultimatum. / INDEX Abolition (of Slavery), 59, 63. Afrikander, 10, 91, 115, 140; (Bond), 136, 148; (party), 135, 171, 185; (Journals), 117, 137. Albany Settlement, 48, 54, 57. Angora (goat), 89, Archbell (Missionary), 73. Ashley (Evelyn), 134. Australia, i, 7, 54, 57. B Baird (Generah), 33. Bantu, 4, 7, 34, 103, 125, 145, 156. Bapedi, 105. Barolong, 73, 75. Barkly (Sir Henry), 102. Basutos, 80, 99, loi, 126 ; (— Land), 84, 139. Batavia, 16. Bavian's (river), 44. Bechuana, 48 ; ( — Land), 127 ; (Protectorate), 133, 139, 178. Beaconsfield (Lord), i, 123. Beira, 148, 185. Beit, 182. Bethelsdorp, 41. Bezuidenhout, 43. Birkenhead, 83, note. Blaawkrantz (river), 75. Bloenifontein, 81, 82, i88. Blue ground, 143, note. Boer, 37, 70, 80, 83, 128, 149, 159 ; (great emigration), 70; (system), 10, 85, 103, 165. Bond. See Afrikander Bond. Boomplatz, 82. Brand (Sir John), 99, loi, 121. Breda, 53. British (colonists), 8, 10, 54, 57 ; (occupation), 23, 32, 33; (policy), 37, 51, 61, 64, 68, 71, 78; 84, 93> 127, 135, 171, 177; (as paramount power), 98, 140 ; (netive), 133. British South Africa Co., 146, 149, 153, 182. Buffalo River ; (Natal), 75. Buluwayo, 151, 152, 183. Bulwer (Sir Henry), 108. Burgers (President), 105, 143. Burghers, 17, 23. Burghersdorp, 136. Bushman (river), 55. Bushmen, 17, 34. Byrne, 80. Caledon (Lord), 38 ; (river), 84. Canada, i, 7, 9, 30, 54, 57. Carnarvon (Lord), 103. Cape of Good Hope, 15. Cape Colony (Dutch), 23; (British), 30. 33- Cape to Cairo (railway), 184 ; (tele- graph), 185. Carrington(Sir F.), 183. Cathcart (Sir George), 83. Cetywayo. See Ketshwayo. Chamberlain, 170, 178 ; (policy after Raid), 180, 187. Chartered Company. See B.S.A. Co. Chelmsford (Lord), 109, 112. Cloete, 41, 43, 62; (Commissioner in Natal), 78. Coal, 142. Cole (Sir Lowry), 64. Colley (Sir George), 119, X9S 196 INDEX Colquhoun, 147. Colonial Office, 86. Constitution (Cape Colony), 60, 64, 95, 102 ; (Natal), 80 ; Republics, 74. 80, 99, 165. Conventions, 98 ; (Sand River), 83, 90 ; (Bloemfontein), 84, 90 ; (Aliwal North), loi ; (Pretoria), 129, 167 ; (London), 129, 167 ; ( Anglo- Portuguese), 148; (Swazi), 173, 176. . . ^ ^ Convict (agitation), 89. Copper, 87. Courtney (Leonard), it6, 117. Cradock (Sir John), 40, 49, 53. Craig (General), 21. Customs Union, 172. Delagoa Bay, 16, 153. Derby (14th Earl of), 79 ; (15th Earl of), 129. Diamonds, 87, loi. Diaz (Bartholomew), 15. Dingaan, 75 ; Dingaan's Day, 76. Doornkop, 179- Douglas (Arthur), 89. Drakenberg, 4. Drakenstein, 20. Drifts (question), 175. Durban (Natal), 73, tj. Durban (Sir Benjamin), 64, Durham (Lord), 9. Dutch East India Company, 16, 21. Dutch (language), 20, 25, 60, 165; (population), 8, 20 ; (local government), 60. East London, 97. Education (Native). 95, 155 ; (Out- landers), 165. Elphinstone (Admiral), 21, 31. English East India Company, 16. English (language), 60; (ideas), 35- Fairbairn, 58, 89. Faku, 71. Federation, 103, 116; (Grey), 93; (Frere), 106 ; (Fiscal), 172 ; (Im- perial), 2. Fish (river), 21, 49, 67. Forbes (Major), 151. France (war with), 31. Franchise (Native), 127, 172 ; (Outlanders), 167. Frere (Sir Bartle), 106, 114, 121 ; (Zulu policy), 109 ; (Transvaal policy), 107, III, 122. Free State. See Orange F.S. Froude, 105. Gaika, 46, 52, 81. Gama (Vasco da), 15. \\ Gamtoos (river), 20. ' German (colonists), 97 ; (South West Africa), 139 ; (East Africa), 148, 185 ; (influence), 186. Gladstone (W. E.), 115; (and Frere), 114; (Transvaal), 115, 120. Glenelg (Lord), 68. Glen Grey Act, 156. Gold, 142 ; (effects of), 153, 159. Goshen (Land), 133. Graaf Reinet, 21. Graham (Colonel), 49. Grahamstown, 49, 55. Greig, 58. Grey (Sir George), 86, 89, 99 ; (and / India), 97 ; (Federation), 93 ; ' (Kafir policy), 95 ; (and Colonial Office), 94, 98. Grey (Lord), 85. Grey (Lord), Administrator of Rhodesia, 182. '■! Griquas (State), 71, 80. | Griqualand East, 99. v Griqualand West, 104. \ H Harris (Dr R.), 182. Heemraden, 60. INDEX '97 Hicks Beach (Sir Michael), 114. Hintza, 65. Hlubis, 105. Hofmeyr, 148, 172, 180. Hollanders, 165, 171, Hottentots, 17, 34, 39, 41, 43, 60. Huguenot (settlers), 20, 87. Imperial Government. See British Policy. Imperial factor, 136, 178. Isandlhwana, iia. J Jameson (Dr L.), 149, 152, 179. Jameson Raid, 177, 182, 185. Janssens, 33. Johannesburg, 144, 153, 161. Joubert, 117, 121. K Kaffraria (British), 82, 92, 95, 97. Kafirs, 20, 69, 81 ; (wars), 49, 52, 64, 67, 83, 84, 108. Keate (award), 104. Kei (river), 67. Kemp (Dr van der), 41. Keiskamma (river), 52, 67. Ketshwayo, 103, 106, 108. Khama, 178, Kimberley, 102. Kimberley (Lord), 117, 120. Kok (Adam), 71, 81. Kosa, 21, 52, 82, Kosi Bay, 174. Kotze, 179, note. Kreli, 96, 108. Kriiger, iii, 117, 119, 129, 134, • 169, 176. Laager, 721- Landdrost, 21, 60. Laing's Nek, 119. Lanyon (Sir Owen), iii. Leyds (Dr), 165, 181. Limpopo (river), 75, 144, 149, Livingstone, 48, 129. Lobeng^la, 146, 150. Loch (Lord), 147, 149, 176. Lydenburg, 80, 143. M Mackenzie (Reverend John), 49, 129, 133. Mafeking, 179, 183. Maguire (Rochfort), 146, 182. Maitland (Sir Peregrine), 79, 81. Malays, 29. Majuba Hill, 119. Maritz (Pieter), 73. Maroko, 73. Martin (Sir Richard), 183. Mashonas, 145 ; (land), 144, 147, 150, 184. Matabele (Zulus), 73, 150, 183 ; ( — land), 145 ; (war), 150. Milner (Sir Alfred), 172, i8^, 188. Missionaries, 40, 48, 52, 65, 94, Mist (de), 33. Modder (river), 81, 102. Moflfat (Robert), 48, 129. Mohair, 89. Molopo (river), 75, 139. Molteno, 102. Monomotapa, 16. Montsioa, 75, 128. Moselekatze, 73, 145. Moshesh, 71, 81, 84. N Napier (Sir George), 68, 76. Natal, 70, 78, 80, 142, 174. Natives (administration), 11, 40, 95, 125, 126, 155 ; (franchise), 13, 172. N'capai, yj. Nongase, 96. OOKIEP, 87. Ophir, 16, note. Orange Free State, 70, 84, loi, 172, 185. 198 INDEX Orange River, 5. Orange River Sovereignty, 82. Ostriches, 89. Outlanders, 159, 186. Panda, 76. Paramount Power, 131. Percival (Captain Robert), 37. Philip (Dr), 49, 61, 65. Phoenicians, 16, note, 144. Pietermaritzburg, 76. Plettenberg (van), 21. Plumer (Colonel), 183. Pondoland, 78, 139, 175. Population (European), 8, 33, 57, 80, 163; (Native), 7, 33, 112, 125, 157. Port Elizabeth, 55. Portland (Duke of), 37, Portuguese (East Africa), 16, 148. Potchefstroom, 80, Potgieter (Hendrik), 73. Pottinger (Sir Henry), 82. Pretoria — Delagoa Bay Line, 175. Pietorius (Andries), 76, 82. Pretorius (President), 105, 143. Pringle (Thomas), 43, 55. Railways, 87, 102, 147, 150 ; (Gold Industry), 153 ; (B.S.A. Co.), 153, 155, 184. Rainfall, 5. Randt, 144, 152, 159. Republics, 84, 89, 92, 98, 185. Retief (Peter), 74. Rhodes, 134, 146, 148, 156, 171, 178, 182; (Prime Minister), 171, 180 ; (and the Raid), 179, 182. Rhodesia, 152, 184. Reitz, 53 ; (President), 173. Riebeck (van), 17. Rivers, 5. Robinson (Sir Hercules). See Rosmead. Rorke's Drift, 113. Rosmead (Lord), 129, 140, 180. Rudd, 146. Salisbury (Fort), 147. Sandilli, 81, 108. Schools, 53, 60 ; (Native), 155 ; (Outlanders), 165. Schreiner (Olive), 25 ; (Philip), 175- Sekukuni, 105. Selous, 145, 147. Shepstone (Sir T, ), 106. Slaghter's Nek, 40, 43. Slaves, 29, 34, 90; Emancipation of, 61. Sluysken, 21, 32. Smith (Sir Harry), 66, 82. Somerset (Lord Charles), 52, 58. South Africa (physical), 4 ; (politi- cal, II. South African Republic. See Transvaal. Sprigg (Sir Gordon), 116, 136. Stall (van der), 20. Stellenbosch, 19. Steyn (Hermanus), 28. Stockenstrom, 44, 73. Struben, 144. Sugar, 142. Suzerainty, 130. Swazis (conventions), 173, 176. Swellendam, 23, 28. Taal (the), 25. Table Bay, 17. Telegraph (construction), 150, 185. Thaba N'chu, 73. Tongaland, 139, 175. Trade, 26, 32, 34, 142, 155. Treaty States, 71. Transvaal, 70, 142, 159, Tshaka, 70, 73. Tugela, 76. Tulbagh Kloof, 20. U Ultimatum (Transvaal), 188. Uitlander. See Outlanders. Ulundi, 113. %^ INDEX 199 United States of America, i, 9. Upington (Sir Thomas), 135. Uys (Jacobus), 75. ViERVOET, 84. Volksraad, tj, 99, 165 ; (Adjunct), 80. W War (object of), 189. Warden (Major), 8t. Warren (Sir Charles), 135. Watermeyer (Judge), 28, note, Wilson (Major Allan), 152. Winburg, 74, 80. Witwatersrandt. See Randt, Wodehouse (Sir Philip), 99, loi. Wolseley (Lord), i, 113, 117. Wood (Sir Evelyn), 112, 119. Wool, 7, 53, 87. Wylde (Sir John), 65. Zambesi River, 16, 139, 146. Zulu, 93, 108. Zululand, 139. PRINTED BY TURNBULL AND SPEARS, EDINBURGH ^^ DNIVERSlTY.of CALIFORNfA I AT Lt)S ANGELES LIBRARY DT 766 W89h lill£mi.S[^.rL'SRARy FACILITY B 000 021 121