Leyds’s baptism by fire in the world of diplomacy put his stamina to the test. In January 1885 Kruger decided that the situation on the south-west border of the Transvaal needed his personal attention. He wanted his state attorney to accompany him to the disputed territory to attend to the finer points of law; high-ranking British officials were also involved. It was hard work in spartan conditions, with ‘always meat’ that smelt foul and ‘never vegetables, bread that’s mostly rock hard’ and ‘always something they pass off as coffee’. This was diplomacy out in the bush.
Kruger was in his element. The highveld, the wide open spaces on either side of the Vaal: this was his natural habitat. He had shot his first lion here, at the age of 14, led his first military commando at 17 and lost his left thumb when his rifle exploded. In peacetime he had built farms and churches, grazed cattle, sheep and horses, hunted elephant and rhinoceros. In their many clashes with black adversaries he had always led the way into battle. Once the personification of strength, at 60 he still cut a powerful figure, with scars as badges of honour.
For Leyds, just six months in office, the whole experience was new. Though he had been born in the East Indies and was no stranger to the outdoors, playing on a veranda under the watchful eye of his babu was something entirely different. A city-dweller, he was a nobody (in spite of the beard he grew from time to time) in the presence of this man of the earth. Physically, he had never been a weakling. At school he had excelled not only academically but also at gymnastics. At university he had studied music but learned fencing and marksmanship as well. And here on the highveld he furnished proof of his sound constitution. It wasn’t easy ‘but I shouldn’t think a little draught will do me too much harm’, he wrote to Louise.19
Kruger and Leyds were to meet their British adversaries at the end of January in the far south-west of the Transvaal. The place can best be described as a tongue of land surrounded by three political entities, the Boer Republic of the Orange Free State to the east, the British Cape Colony to the south and Bechuanaland to the west. Bechuanaland was at the centre of the dispute. It was not yet a state in the European sense. As long as anyone could remember, it had been inhabited by Khoikhoi and Bantu speakers dispersed among several rival empires. Some years earlier a few small groups of trekboers had left the Transvaal to settle there, by their own account at the request of two of the warring chiefs, Moswete in the north and Mosweu in the south. In return, the white colonists claimed autonomy over the land they lived on, which in 1882 and 1883 they declared the republics of Goshen and Stellaland respectively.
The new mini-states were a thorn in the side of the British. London regarded any expansion of Transvaal territory to the west as a threat to its own strategic position. It would enable the Boers to block the only open trade route to the north and continue unimpeded to push through to the west, perhaps all the way to the Atlantic coast. Decisive action was called for. The London Convention, signed in 1884, provided an opportunity to establish the south-west border of the Transvaal. Three months later the British reached an agreement with two other black chiefs in the region, Montshioa and Mankuroane, whereby the entire southern part of Bechuanaland, down to the Molopo River, became a British Protectorate. As from May 1884 that territory was officially called British Bechuanaland.
That seemed to spell the end of Goshen and Stellaland. But Stephanus du Toit had other ideas. Assigned to Goshen as special commissioner, he announced in September of that year that the Transvaal would give ‘its protection’ to both Moswete and Montshioa. In other words, the tiny Boer Republic of Goshen was suddenly annexed to its big brother. At a ceremony to mark the transition, Du Toit had the Transvaal flag hoisted in the capital, Rooi-Grond, ‘without having received instructions to that effect,’ Leyds noted with disapproval. More than that, when word reached Pretoria, Du Toit was given immediate orders ‘not to do so, and if he already had, to lower the flag’.
But the damage had been done. The British protested to the Transvaal government in the strongest terms. This was after all a double violation of the London Convention: unilateral territorial expansion and entering into an agreement with African chiefs without the consent of the British. It was all the more serious, because in the meantime Germany had formally entered the southern African arena in August 1884 with its protectorate over Angra Pequena and its surroundings. A willingness to compromise apparently wasn’t one of the qualities required of the British negotiators who were sent to meet Kruger and Leyds in January 1885.
The team was led by Lieutenant-General Charles ‘Jerusalem’ Warren. The nickname had nothing to do with Warren’s piety but alluded to his involvement in important excavations in Palestine—Warren was a professional archaeologist as well. Apart from that, he was as arrogant and stubborn as only a British senior officer can be. Fifteen years later he flaunted these qualities again in the Battle of Spion Kop, one of the most devastating British defeats in the Boer War. It didn’t come to an armed conflict in Bechuanaland but that wasn’t due to Sir Charles. He was itching to teach the ‘Republics of Robbers’ a lesson one way or another. For that contingency he had brought with him 4000 troops and a ‘Native corps’. Non-whites bearing arms, according to Leyds, ‘caused many to shake their heads’, that is, many Boers.
They were already shaking their heads over John Mackenzie, the second member of the British delegation. To the Boers he was the personification of slander, the missionary possessed by the devil, who for years had accused them of racism, murder, homicide and exploitation. To supporters of the London Missionary Society, he was a hero who performed a sacred mission among the Africans and used political means to promote their rights at the same time. Earlier, he had made life difficult for the Transvaal delegation in London by turning public opinion against them. Back in South Africa, he was appointed to serve as the first deputy commissioner in the new Protectorate of British Bechuanaland. That didn’t last long. He turned out to be less competent as an administrator than a preacher, but Warren insisted that he attend the talks with the Boers.
The third member of the delegation was someone Warren would rather have done without, but he had no choice. Cecil Rhodes, aged 31, had made a fortune and a name for himself in Kimberley and Cape Town. He was destined for even greater wealth and fame, and would eventually achieve the ultimate honour of giving his name to the new state of Rhodesia, since renamed Zimbabwe. In January 1885, Rhodes was a member of parliament in the Cape Colony and Mackenzie’s successor as deputy commissioner. Warren thought him far too reasonable. Leyds saw him as someone he could do business with. ‘Rhodes has honoured our agreement to the letter, unlike Warren.’ After the meeting Kruger was sure he would be seeing more of ‘this young man’ in the future.
And he was right. In the end the Boers would curse the ground Rhodes walked on, but that was only later. In the tents in Veertienstroom and Blignautspont where they met the three British negotiators, Warren was the hardest nut to crack. They didn’t succeed. His troops were a valuable trump and he knew he could count on the support of the high commissioner, Sir Hercules Robinson, in Cape Town and the secretary for the colonies, Lord Derby, in London. Warren wouldn’t budge an inch. There were lesser issues they managed to trade off, such as accusations of cattle theft, from both sides, by the pro-British Mankuroane and the Boers’ ally Mosweu. But as far as the border was concerned, they made no progress at all. Neither Kruger’s razor-sharp arguments nor all of Leyds’s shrewdness could change that. ‘Just what a statesman wants,’ he wrote to Louise, ‘especially when he’s defending a weak case.’ And that’s what it was. There was simply no way to save Goshen and Stellaland, not on legal grounds and not by force.
The outcome was that the British upgraded the southern part of Bechuanaland from a protectorate to a Crown colony, governed from Cape Town. The territory above the Molopo River became a new British protectorate. The British had secured their corridor to the north and preempted the Transvaal’s expansion to the west.
Leyds returned to Pretoria in poor health. The tainted meat had got to him.20
What happened in Bechuanaland in 1884 and 1885 was nothing new under the southern African sun. Since the 1820s the region had seen a proliferation of new states, accompanied by the inevitable clashes between expanding white and black empires. The stakes were control of land, human labour, cattle, trade and strategic positions. Land for pasturage and agriculture, or mining. Labour to do the hard work, or conquer new territory. Cattle for subsistence and as symbols of wealth. Trade to make money, buy arms and win prestige. Strategic positions to protect whatever one already possessed and to acquire what one still wanted. Power, fame, wealth, status: these were the personal aspirations. And they were combined with a spirit of enterprise, a desire for freedom, religious zeal and patriotism. What had begun as a patchwork of informal settlements developed in the course of the nineteenth century into large competing territories with firmly demarcated frontiers.
The process can best be understood by looking at two points on the map, one in the south-west and the other in the east. In demographic terms it was about an expanding white population core in the Cape Colony and a dynamic black power centre in what is now KwaZulu-Natal.
The south-west coastal area around Cape Town was the point from which white colonists fanned out to other parts of the country. In the early nineteenth century, this territory was inhabited by two rival groups. The Dutch-speaking community claimed the right of first arrival. They had been there since Jan van Riebeeck established a refreshment station in 1652. Although they had subsequently produced offspring with German and French immigrants and non-white slaves, they had maintained their allegiance to their predominantly Dutch roots and the faith of their seventeenth-century forefathers. The second group were white colonists of British descent. They had come in the wake of the British troops who had taken the Cape Colony from the Netherlands, first from 1795 to 1802 and then permanently in 1806. The English-speaking newcomers had become increasingly dominant, partly by implementing a targeted immigration policy. They upheld the values and principles of the Enlightenment and considered themselves the heirs of a superior culture—to the indignation of the descendants of the Dutch.
These two groups of white colonists in the Cape were also in competition with a number of indigenous communities. They can be divided into three main categories based on origin and language. The oldest inhabitants were the Bushmen, or San, who lived in small groups as hunters and gatherers. Over the years they were driven deeper into mountainous terrain or semidesert regions such as the Karoo. The second group were the Khoikhoi, a nomadic people who, with their cattle, sheep and goats, roamed vast tracts of land, covering most of the western half of present-day South Africa. The white colonists called them Hottentots, imitating the sound of their language to Dutch ears. The last group differed from the first two in lifestyle and skin colour. The Bantu were cattle and crop famers and darker in appearance than the San or Khoikhoi. They fell into three subcategories, according to their territorial dispersal. The Damara and the Ovambo lived in the north-west, the Tswana and Sotho on the highveld in the interior, while the largest groups, the Xhosa, the Swazi and the Zulu, occupied the eastern strip from north to south.
In reality the distinctions between the various groups were less clear-cut than this description suggests. Besides being rivals, the different groups also had other forms of contact. The Griqua, for example, originated from intermarriages and sexual relations between European colonists and Khoikhoi. They were recognised as a distinct subgroup by the early nineteenth century. It must be said, however, that intimate relations between whites and members of other groups were rarely consensual. Violence in general was rife. In the eastern part of the Cape Colony, first the Dutch and later the British colonists clashed with the Xhosa so many times that the ‘border wars’ were assigned numbers. By 1818 they had reached the fifth.
But all of this was still in the area south of the Orange River, or Gariep in the language of the Khoikhoi. The Orange is the longest river in South Africa and runs from the Drakensberg to the Atlantic Ocean, covering a distance of more than 1800 kilometres. The most militant black resistance to white expansionism emerged in the area east of the Drakensberg in the 1820s.
Shaka, the king of that territory, ruthlessly laid the foundations of the legendary Zulu kingdom in Natal. His regiments, or impis, sowed death and destruction along the entire coast of the Indian Ocean. His rivals scattered in all directions and wherever they had taken refuge proceeded to build their own empires, in turn generating new flows of migration. Mzilikazi headed west, crossed the Drakensberg and continued to the basin of the Vaal River on the highveld, where he established the Ndebele kingdom. Moshoeshoe settled in an impenetrable fortress in the high mountains of Basutoland, now Lesotho. In 1828 Shaka was assassinated by his brother Dingane, but the fearsome military prowess of the Zulu kingdom remained a force to be reckoned with.21
The white colonists of predominantly Dutch descent who trekked north from the Cape Colony in the 1830s experienced all this at first hand. The term Afrikaner was already in use, but when they established a permanent settlement the Dutch colonists were called Boers. Collectively this group of pioneers was known as Trekkers or, among themselves, Voortrekkers. They migrated in a bid to regain their independence, escape the yoke of the British, stake out pastures wherever their oxwagons might take them and keep their coloured servants subordinate, just as they had always done in the past. That was their idea of independence. They left in waves, ultimately about 15,000 people in all, men, women and children, on a Great Trek that branched out in several directions. Some crossed the Orange River, some continued further and crossed the Vaal, while others headed east, crossed the Drakensberg and ended up in Natal.
That last group ran into Dingane in February 1838. The encounter was horrific. Their invitation to Dingane’s quarters ended in a bloodbath, with hundreds of casualties among the Trekker families and their Khoikhoi servants. In December the Boers got their revenge. At the Ncome River their rifles and laager (a circular configuration of wagons joined together) proved a deadly combination. Out of 10,000 Zulu warriors armed with assegais, 3000 lost their lives. Only four of the Boers were wounded, among them their leader, Andries Pretorius. They renamed the Ncome ‘Blood River’ and declared 16 December Dingane’s Day. The Zulu king fled north and was removed from the throne. The Boers established the Republic of Natalia, with Pietermaritzburg as its capital.
In the Transvaal the confrontation between the white newcomers and the established black rulers ended in much the same way. Here it was Mzilikazi who sent his impis to attack the Trekkers, one of whom was the 12-year-old Paul Kruger. And again the assegai proved no match for the rifle and laager. Moreover, the Boers received support from their allies, the Griqua and the Tswana. When they attacked Mzilikazi’s flank, he and his Ndebele followers fled north, beyond the Limpopo River.
The success of the Great Trek stirred the British to action as well. They were concerned about the young Boer republic in Natal. The change in the status quo in the region was a risk to the security of the British trading post of Port Natal on the Indian Ocean, known today as Durban. The situation caused consternation in the Cape Colony and even more so in England. If there was one aspect of the South African power game that the government in London considered important, it was the safety of sea routes to Asia, particularly to British India. Halfway ports such as Cape Town and Port Natal played a vital part in that strategic plan. That was why they dispatched the Royal Navy frigate, the Southampton, with sufficient reinforcements on board to conquer Natal. The territory was annexed in 1843 and became a British colony.
British rule again—that was a bitter pill for most of the Boers in Natal. Led by Andries Pretorius, they moved on, or rather back west, and crossed the Drakensberg again, finally to settle on the highveld between the Orange River and the Vaal. But even there they remained in the grip of the British. Once again the British argued that the Trekkers were a threat to the prevailing balance of power. The government in Cape Town was anxious to avoid unrest along its colonial frontiers, so in 1848 the Boers’ new domain was annexed as well. It was called the Orange River Sovereignty.
The annexation didn’t have the desired effect. The British administration reluctantly became embroiled in local conflicts between the Boers and the Sotho under Moshoeshoe; the region was still troubled and it was costing a lot of money. The British didn’t have the military resources to deal with the problem, as they were soon tied up in yet another border war—the eighth—with the Xhosa (1850–53). Retreat was the only way out. They left the highveld to the Voortrekkers. To Pretorius the Sand River Convention of 1852 felt like a personal atonement. Great Britain recognised the autonomy of the area north of the Vaal, which became the South African Republic, unofficially known as the Transvaal. In 1854 the Bloemfontein Convention established the same rights for the territory between the Orange and the Vaal. The Orange River Sovereignty became the Orange Free State.22
The British resigned themselves to the situation until the 1870s and left the South African Republic and the Orange Free State in peace. There were still fewer than 30,000 Boers living there, in relative isolation. Their only connection to the civilised world was the trail of their wagon wheels to the south. The Boer republics were nominally independent, but in terms of political state-building and economic growth they lagged far behind the Cape Colony. If necessary, the British thought, they could always take them over.
When diamonds were discovered they proved to be right. The whole power game changed dramatically. So far, expansion had been driven by the quest for grazing or agricultural land, or strategic security. As of 1867, there was a new and supremely powerful incentive: the craving for minerals. Diamonds had been discovered around the confluence of the Vaal and the Orange, first near Hopetown and subsequently in other places in the area. In 1870 and 1871, they were found in dazzling profusion on and around Colesberg Kopje, where miners discovered four volcanic pipes of molten lava containing diamonds, near the surface. A month later, thousands of delirious prospectors were digging on hundreds of parcels of land. Their chaotic, rapidly expanding encampment was called New Rush. The name was appropriate. In 1873, with a population of 13,000 whites and 30,000 blacks, New Rush was South Africa’s second largest city, after Cape Town. Colesberg Kopje disappeared from the face of the earth. It was excavated hundreds of metres deep and transformed into an immense crater. This was the Big Hole that Willem and Louise Leyds had looked forward to seeing on their journey to Pretoria.
The diamond-mining industry had a tremendous impact. A dynamic city emerged out of nothing in the midst of a rural community, all because of a single activity: large-scale and increasingly industrialised mining. The diamond fields boosted the Cape’s economy and attracted tens of thousands of migrant labourers, which again altered the balance of political power.
The diamonds were discovered in the vicinity of disputed territorial borders. There were claims pending from the Transvaal, the Orange Free State and Griqualand West, a territory that had been allocated to the Griqua people in the 1830s. In the chaos and anarchy resulting from the sudden influx of thousands of fortune-hunters, Nicolaas Waterboer, ‘captain’ of the Griqua, turned to the British for help. Not in vain. In October 1871 the governor of the Cape Colony, Sir Henry Barkly, without waiting for approval from London, declared Griqualand West a British Crown colony. At the same time, he officially established its border with the Orange Free State, carefully drawing it ever so slightly east of the diamond fields. The two Boer republics protested, but were unable to support their claims. In July 1873, New Rush was renamed Kimberley after the incumbent British secretary of state for the colonies. The point was made.23
Barkly’s successor, Lord Carnarvon, continued to make every effort to annex the territory, now with support from London. The new Disraeli government had explicitly imperialist ambitions. Lord Carnarvon’s ideal for South Africa was a confederation, such as he had created in Canada. The Boers could object as much as they liked. They had also grumbled about the diamond fields being incorporated into the Cape Colony, only to resign themselves to the situation subsequently. There was also Burgers, the president of the Transvaal since 1872, who was hatching a plan which the British weren’t happy with. He wanted to end the South African Republic’s isolation, in the first place by building a railway to the sea at Delagoa Bay in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. On a journey through Europe he had managed to secure diplomatic and financial support for that purpose. The idea conflicted with Lord Carnarvon’s dream of a united South Africa. He needed a pretext to annex the Transvaal, and now one presented itself.
In 1876, a Boer attack against Sekhukhune, king of the Pedi in the eastern Transvaal, had ended badly. Burgers was held responsible, as he was for the financial bankruptcy his projects had led to. The Boers were divided and incapacitated as a result. Lord Carnarvon saw his chance. Twenty-five mounted police officers from Natal under the command of Theophilus Shepstone were all it took to put an end to 25 years of independence. The Transvaal was annexed on 12 April 1877.
This easy victory put the British in a winning mood. The new high commissioner, Sir Bartle Frere, who had just arrived in Cape Town, was a hard-core imperialist like Lord Carnarvon but far less patient. He saw the remaining independent black kingdoms as the main obstacle in the way of his plans for federation and decided to take them on, one by one. British troops defeated the Xhosa in the ninth—and last—border war. Next, they quelled a series of ‘uprisings’ in various parts of the region, including Griqualand East and West. At this point Bartle Frere felt it was time for a final showdown with the Zulu, whose kingdom he considered the biggest threat to British supremacy in South Africa.
Since the 1830s, the Zulu kingdom had diminished in size, but its military prowess was still fearsome. The implicit declaration of war that Bartle Frere sent King Cetshwayo in December 1878 took considerable courage. Stupidity, many said, when the first battle ended in disaster. On 22 January 1879, a contingent of British troops was overwhelmed by 20,000 Zulu warriors at Isandhlwana. More than 1000 men were lost on both sides. It was the most crushing defeat in Britain’s entire colonial history.
Such a humiliation could not go unavenged. The British raised reinforcements as quickly as possible and appointed a new commander. General Sir Garnet Wolseley had gained a reputation in India, Russia, China, Canada and West Africa. He was a living legend, ‘our only general’, according to the British press. But the Zulu War was over even before he arrived. His predecessor, Lord Chelmsford, was determined to settle the score for Isandhlwana himself and he succeeded in doing so at the very last minute. On 4 July 1879 he led a decisive attack on the royal capital at Ulundi. It was now up to Wolseley to decide on the future of the Zulu empire. Wolseley was ruthless. Cetshwayo was taken prisoner and his empire divided into a patchwork of 13 territories. The mighty Zulu kingdom ceased to exist.
In the same year Wolseley made a clean sweep in the eastern Transvaal. With a superior force of regular and other troops, including some 8000 Swazi, he defeated the Pedi and captured their king, Sekhukhune, putting an end to all organised armed resistance from the African population. The British were lord and master of the whole of South Africa. They could proceed to create a confederation.
But that was not to be, firstly because of a change of guard in the British camp. In April 1880, Prime Minister Disraeli was succeeded by William Gladstone, who opposed colonial expansion. Lord Carnarvon disappeared from the London scene, Bartle Frere was recalled from Cape Town and Wolseley’s presence was needed at another flashpoint, this time in Egypt.
The disappearance of these diehard imperialists opened up new avenues for the Boers, although this wasn’t evident at first. They were divided and overwhelmed by Shepstone’s coup in April 1877, but they had never resigned themselves to the annexation. Twice, their representatives, among them Paul Kruger, had pleaded their cause in London, but to no avail. Gladstone was expected to be more sympathetic. In June 1880, when Gladstone made it known that he wasn’t prepared to change course, the Boers lost hope of a peaceful solution. Thanks to Chelmsford and Wolseley, they had been delivered from the Zulu and the Pedi, their most formidable black adversaries. Now there were only the British themselves to deal with. Under the command of Kruger, Piet Joubert and Marthinus Pretorius, the Boers prepared for war. At a huge gathering in Paardekraal this triumvirate restored the republic. On 20 December 1880, it became clear that they were in earnest.
The first real contest between the Boer and the British forces took place near Bronkhorstspruit, 50 kilometres east of Pretoria. It was a memorable occasion. The two rival white communities in South Africa had been waging wars for decades, but so far their encounters had always been against black opponents, rifles against assegais. Among themselves, it had never gone beyond posturing. Never before had they challenged each other in battle. Now for the first time, it was white against white, rifle against rifle.
The British had the most difficulty with this situation. Their officers couldn’t bring themselves to see the Boers as a real adversary. Buffoons, they thought, in those corduroy trousers and floppy hats. It brought out the worst of their legendary arrogance, and they ended up making elementary tactical errors. It had happened to Colonel Philip Anstruther at Bronkhorstspruit and to Major-General Sir George Pomeroy Colley, three times over at Laing’s Nek, Ingogo and finally Majuba Hill on 27 February 1881. That last, decisive battle took the lives of 92 Britons, including Colley, and left 134 wounded. The Boers suffered one fatality and five wounded.
Their losses were smaller than at Isandhlwana, but the humiliation was no less bitter. Queen Victoria and the Conservative Opposition demanded revenge. Now, however, it was clear that it did matter—very much—who was in government. Gladstone was anxious to prevent the conflict from spreading to the rest of southern Africa and decided to cut his losses. As a result, the campaign was limited to four battles, waged in a little over two months. The Boers gained a conclusive victory at what later came to be known as the First Boer or Anglo-Boer War.24
Restoring peace was far more difficult. It took the Boers another three years, and Kruger a third visit to London, to rid themselves of formal British suzerainty. In return, under the London Convention, they would agree to fixed borders. On that point Gladstone was adamant, as Kruger and Leyds discovered in Bechuanaland in January 1885. The South African Republic had regained its independence internally, but it would be unable to expand any further, so it seemed.