A GRAND TORCHLIT RECEPTION had been planned for Clemens’s nighttime arrival in Johannesburg on May 17, but was canceled as a result of an outpouring of public grief, prompted by a prisoner’s suicide. Earlier that day, Fred Grey, a popular and prominent businessman and father of six, had been buried in Johannesburg after slitting his throat with a borrowed razor. His fellow prisoners in Pretoria Gaol sent an enormous wreath of flowers.
He had been one of the sixty-four members of the so-called Reform Committee — mine owners and managers, solicitors and barristers, company directors, physicians — all foreigners or “Uitlanders” as the Boers called them, who had been imprisoned by the Transvaal government and charged with plotting its overthrow.
The Transvaal (officially the South African Republic) and the Orange Free State were republics founded by the Boers, descendants of the Dutch and French who had emigrated to South Africa in the seventeenth century. After the British annexed their territory in the Cape, some trekked northward in search of fresh lands and renewed independence, and they did so again after the British annexed their territory in Natal.
The discovery of gold in 1886 transformed the Transvaal’s poor and largely pastoral economy. From almost all parts of the world, thousands flocked to the goldfields on which, in a few short years, the glittering city of Johannesburg arose, created by the genie of enormous wealth. Buildings to rival the greatest in Melbourne and San Francisco were rising, creating a shortage of bricklayers, stonemasons, and carpenters. Social life among the expatriate white community — the bankers, businessmen, mining engineers, physicians, lawyers, and their families — was elegant and brilliant. To those familiar with gold-boom towns, Johannesburg was a wonder of the world. But like other gold-rush towns, it was wild and dissipated, with ninety-seven brothels serving a population of 25,000 white men, according to a survey carried out in 1895. One observer described the town as “Monte Carlo superimposed on Sodom and Gomorrah.”
Great contrasts emerged between rich and poor. There might have been no young crossing-sweepers, as in London, but there were barefoot urchins hoping to earn a tip by holding the reins of your horse.
Although the Uitlanders soon made the Transvaal the richest of the four white South African states, and paid most of the state’s taxes, they had no vote and received few services. Further, the government imposed unnecessary costs upon the mining companies in addition to the bribes exacted by government officials. The political and economic constraints under which the Uitlanders labored were exacerbated by a culture clash: the newcomers viewed the conservative, old-fashioned, and provincial Boers as uncouth, uneducated, and benighted, while the Boers saw the cosmopolitan, modernizing foreigners as a money-grubbing, soulless rabble.
Clemens, who socialized mainly with Uitlanders, adopted their view of the Boers, although he was influenced as well by the work of Olive Schreiner, who was born in the Cape Colony of a German missionary father and an English mother. Her Story of an African Farm (1883), based on her experiences as a young governess on remote Cape farms, became an immense success in America and England and won her many admirers abroad, including Clemens.
Although he viewed the Boer as a “white savage,” Clemens understood the Boer point of view. The Afrikaner, Clemens wrote in Following the Equator, “has stood stock-still in South Africa for two centuries and a half, and would like to stand still till the end of time, for he has no sympathy with Uitlander notions of progress. He is hungry to be rich, for he is human; but his preference has been for riches in cattle, not in fine clothes and fine houses and gold and diamonds. The gold and the diamonds have brought the godless stranger within his gates, also contamination and broken repose, and he wishes that they had never been discovered.”
The Uitlanders sought, in the words of one of their leaders, “those simple, democratic rights which had been denied alike to their respectful petitions and to their constitutional protests.” Those simple rights, of course, belonged only to whites. Granting black Africans the vote occurred no more to the Uitlanders than it did to the Boers.
By the end of 1895 it was common knowledge that an Uitlander uprising was imminent. Guns and ammunition were being smuggled into Johannesburg in oil tanks and coal cars, and then hidden in disused mine shafts. Cecil Rhodes was centrally involved in the conspiracy. Self-made millionaire by the age of thirty, prime minister of the Cape Colony, and the richest and most powerful man in South Africa, he was an arch-imperialist, convinced that the English were supremely fitted to dominate the world. He viewed the Transvaal republic as a major barrier to his dream of a railroad from Cape Town to Cairo traveling entirely through British territory. Supporting Uitlander grievances to the point of revolt, he financed their weapons and, with the connivance of the British High Commissioner in Cape Town and the British Colonial Secretary in London, planned an armed intervention once the uprising began. He instructed his friend and right-hand man, Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, to wait with an armed, mounted force at Pitsani, a village in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, on the western Transvaal border. This mounted force was to come to the assistance of the Uitlanders once the insurrection began and the signal was given.
Jameson waited for the signal in vain. Some of the conspirators had begun to suspect that Rhodes was exploiting their grievances for his own purposes, namely to bring the Transvaal into a British-dominated South African federation, whereas most of the conspirators wanted to preserve the republic’s independence. Others were rightly worried that they had not yet accumulated enough arms and ammunition. Further, word had arrived that Jameson’s force was smaller than anticipated. Others pointed out that the invasion was planned for the end of the year, when large numbers of Afrikaner farmers, in town for Christmas, could be quickly mobilized against them. Besides, many Uitlanders hoped that the mere threat offeree might be enough to extract concessions from the government. They ordered Jameson not to move, but, impetuous and fatally overconfident, he disregarded them. He himself would incite the uprising that they had been too timid or disorganized to mount. On December 29, 1895, he dashed across the border with his men.
A few days later, after skirmishes in which seventeen of his men were killed and fifty-five wounded (among fewer than five hundred men), Boer commandos surrounded Jameson and his raiders, fourteen miles from Johannesburg, and forced them to surrender. Three weeks later they were handed over to British representatives at the Natal border and packed off to England for trial. Meanwhile the British High Commissioner, who had come up to Cape Town to effect a settlement between the Transvaal government and the Uitlanders, persuaded the Uitlanders to give up their weapons as a condition for entering into negotiations. Members of the Reform Committee, which had been acting to promote Uitlander rights, soon found themselves in a Pretoria jail. Collectively representing millions of pounds sterling, these gentlemen were confined to a prison whose conditions were appalling even for the poor.
About a week before Clemens landed in Durban, the Reform Committee members were tried and convicted. Four leaders were condemned to the gallows, among them John Hays Hammond, an American mining engineer who stood at the head of South Africa’s mining experts. Clemens had met him long ago, when Hammond was a senior at Yale. The remainder were sentenced to two years in jail, a fine of £2,000 each, and three years of banishment after their release. The next day the death sentences were commuted, but at the time Clemens arrived in Johannesburg, the terms to be served by the four leaders had not yet been announced.
A reporter joined Clemens and Smythe in the carriage that took them to the Grand National Hotel. On the way, Clemens spoke about their journey from Pietermaritzburg, about 280 miles to the southeast. He described the locusts he had seen clouding the sky. uAt one place there were great silver-plated acres of veld, all due to the locusts. When you looked at them against the sun, each black silhouette was distinct. When the sun shone on their gauzy wings they made the best imitation of a snow-storm I have ever seen … Yes you have had a fearful time here lately, what with wars, revolutions, rinderpest, locusts, drought — and me! I guess you can go no further with plagues. Now that I’ve come you must take a change for the better.”
Two travelers, he reported, invaded their compartment. “I tried to explain that the car was reserved for Royalties, but as they only saw two Princes, they refused to be impressed. First thing they asked was what my business was. I said writing books. They thought I said keeping books, so to encourage me they said: — ‘Well, there’s a countryman of yours here, one Hammond who’s done well, he might manage to get you a job.’ “
The next morning, another reporter found Clemens in “the best bedroom” of the Grand National Hotel, propped up against pillows at the foot of the bed. Dismissing the possibility of an Anglo-American war, Clemens said that England and America “were made to help and stand by each other,” adding that if England had decided to fight for the sake of the Armenians, America would have come to her aid. At that time the bankrupt, tottering government of the Ottoman Sultan, disturbed by rising Armenian nationalism, was carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing. During the time of Clemens’s tour, Turkish and Kurdish mobs, protected by soldiers, were butchering largely unarmed Armenians and plundering and destroying hundreds of their villages. Armenians in the scores of thousands were dying, from massacre or starvation, a forerunner of the massacres and expulsions of 1915, when Armenians in the hundreds of thousands died, and a precursor of the Holocaust, a generation later, when Hitler remembered that no one had helped the Armenians. “And these things are going on undisturbed,” commented The Times of London at the end of 1895, while the most powerful fleet of modern times lies idle in the Aegean, and the six Great Powers of Europe are looking on in hopeless imbecility.”
The reporter asked Clemens a standard question: What was his favorite among his own books? Clemens would vary his response to this query, naming different books at different times, perhaps to relieve the tedium. In this case he claimed not to be familiar with any of his books, and asked to be excused from answering. “He says he has only taken up one of his books to read, after writing them, and that was Huckleberry Finn. He read that once to a little girl in his family, and — he owns it shamefacedly — he laughed over it, whereupon his young critic sharply reproved him for laughing at what he had written himself. That experience, he says, was so discouraging that he never ran the risk of repeating it.” He said that his most popular books, judging by sales, were Roughing It, The Innocents Abroad, and The Prince and the Pauper.
The talk turned to some of the authors Clemens knew, which led him to speak of Howells. “Howells is one of the very best literary men America has produced; there is no bludgeoning with him. His is the rapier method. You English don’t like him because he once adversely criticised Dickens, and I believe even Thackeray! But we honour him as a man who delivers his verdicts after weighing the evidence most carefully; a man who despatches this aspirant or that not hurriedly or with passion, but slowly, deliberately, almost lovingly. Howells is a gentle, kindly, refined spirit; he is too good for this world. In my opinion there is never a trace of affectation or superiority in either the man or his books, though he is accused of both.”
One of the century’s most remarkable literary phenomena, Clemens said, was “the Bellamy ‘boom.’ “ Edward Bellamy, a journalist and editor, is best known for his novel Looking Backward, set in Boston in the year 2000, when Americans worked until the age of forty-five in a national industrial army. Honor and prestige were the motivations for work, not material want, since a socialistic system provided for all. The book, published in 1888, sold more than a million copies and led to the organization of Bellamy Clubs to discuss its social implications. Clemens, who knew Bellamy, assured the reporter that no one was more surprised by the book’s popularity than the author himself. The publishers didn’t expect much from it either, “for the first edition was about as scrofulous-looking and mangy a volume as I have set eyes on.”
In another interview, Clemens referred to the political situation that had arisen after Jameson’s raid as “an inexpressible tangle.” The first he had heard of the invasion, he said, was when he was in Albany, in Western Australia: “It was just the bare fact of the incursion having taken place. At Colombo we got nothing further that was definite beyond the fact of the defeat, and we were without any more news till we got to Bombay, although it was aggravating to reflect that particulars were passing under the sea along the wires we were passing over. From that day to this I have been getting more and more bewildered through missing weeks of news at a time. From Calcutta to Mauritius I was in a handsome state of suspense, until at last I heard that the leaders were all in gaol, and I could not for the life of me make out what it was for.”
That Monday night he gave the first of four At Howies on four consecutive nights. The audience was so large that “it filled every available part and several strictly unavailable nooks and crooks of the Standard Theatre.” Two or three semicircular rows of listeners sat behind him on the stage. When he first appeared, “he was so vociferously applauded that it was a full minute or two before he could proceed.” The “gods,” those seated in the upper balconies, whistled “Yankee Doodle,” and when at last he began to speak, “auditors wiped tears from their eyes, mopped their brows, and threw one fit after another. Nuances were wasted, broad strokes alone were in order. The clamor wore down poor Mark, whose voice sank after the intermission. A man shouted, ‘Speak up, old fellow!5 and the offender won his audience back by saying, 4I have caught a succession of colds lately, and they do cripple me; but I suffer from them more than you do.’ “ A reporter from The Star wrote that the story of the golden arm was “well-known among the South African Dutch.” He had heard the story from an old nurse when he was a boy, and she had heard it from her grandmother, who was born a slave. A reviewer for The Johannesburg Times wrote that “at all times the lecturer was eloquent; we, however, must not forget that the great American has come to us in person in the autumn of his life, and though we appreciate and applaud his eloquence and humour, we would fain have had the opportunity of listening to him when his talents sparkled with the freshness, crispness, and brilliance of middle age.”
Clemens lunched on Tuesday, May 19, at the Rand Club, where many of the Reform Committee members had been arrested. For lunch on Wednesday he may have gotten himself into trouble. He suspected, as he wrote Mrs. Clemens that day, that he had engaged himself with two different groups for one o’clock, a problem that never would have arisen, he said, if she had been with him.
After Clemens’s fourth At Home, on May 21, the Johannesburg correspondent of an out-of-town paper reported that Clemens had been received with tremendous enthusiasm. “The Standard Theatre was packed from ‘gods’ to stage, and not even standing room was available in any one of the four At Homes … Twain, who unconsciously carries on a crusade against pessimism, has done more for the salvation of the human family than ten score of priests.”
The unconscious crusader dined with Natalie Hammond, the pregnant wife of John Hays Hammond, on Friday evening, the day after his fourth At Home. A few days before, the government had announced that her husband and the other three Reform leaders, whose death sentences had been commuted, were sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. At the same time, eight prisoners were released immediately upon the payment of their fines, and the jail terms of the remainder were reduced to a maximum of one year. The Transvaal, under the auspices of its formidable president, Paul Kruger, was demonstrating what came to be called “magnanimity by inches.”
Clemens had met Mrs. Hammond on a crossing from Southampton to New York, but when he first saw her in Johannesburg he couldn’t remember her name. He was, he asserted, “a wretched hand at remembering people’s names,” confiding that “I even forget my own at times, and I often have to give a fictitious name to the police.” But his memory was jogged when he read her husband’s name in the papers. Mrs. Hammond sent her carriage for him early, before her other guests were expected, which gave her a chance to tell him of the stirring events that followed Jameson’s raid.
Among Mrs. Hammond’s guests that night were the American consul, Robert Chapin, and his wife. Mrs. Chapin had taken Clemens on carriage rides and had entertained him at lunch. The morning after Mrs. Hammond’s dinner party, Mrs. Chapin even packed his luggage, before she and her husband took him to the station. They accompanied him, Smythe, and Mrs. Hammond on the train to Pretoria, about forty miles northeast, where they hoped to visit the Reform prisoners and where Clemens would next perform.