The family in Amsterdam must have been astounded. What was all this about gold in the Transvaal? At the beginning of August 1886, Louise Leyds wrote that she and Willem were thinking about ‘going to the Barberton goldfields, where there is a lot of excitement at the moment’. In late September she again mentioned Barberton, 350 kilometres east of Pretoria, not far from the Mozambique border. She described it as ‘the centre of the goldfields’, which had been ‘transformed from a small town into a city in the space of just a few months’. Four months later it transpired that the journey had taken them somewhere completely different. ‘We went on a wonderful excursion to the goldfields,’ she said in a letter dated Friday 4 February 1887. ‘We went in our own horsedriven coach’ and ‘arrived on the Witwatersrand around eleven o’clock’. Witwatersrand? Wasn’t that an escarpment south of Pretoria, no more than 50 kilometres away? Where exactly was this gold?25
It wasn’t only outsiders who were puzzled. The experts, too, had a lot to think about when it came to the Transvaal’s mineral resources. Everyone had known for decades that there were gold deposits in the ground—the samples found in many parts of the area looked promising. The only question was how to extract it profitably.
Some saw mountains of gold in every shimmering riverbed, but time and again the geological facts shattered their illusions. That is, until 1883, when a commercially viable artery was discovered in De Kaap, a valley in the eastern Transvaal. More deposits were found in 1884, followed a year later by the spectacular discovery of the Sheba Reef. All in all, it was enough to trigger a massive gold rush and inevitably a boom town—Barberton—to go with it. What had happened after the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley in 1871 was now being repeated here. In no time at all, a bustling city rose from the ground, built on the hopes and dreams of thousands of fortune-seekers. Barberton had it all: offices, shops, bars, hotels, clubs, music halls, brothels and of course a stock exchange, where speculators traded frantically from dawn to dusk, hoping for even more fabulous discoveries.
Kimberley and London traded with the same fervour. On the London Stock Exchange the price of shares in the Barberton gold mines went through the roof, increasing a hundredfold. Mining companies with nothing but a glossy prospectus to offer had no trouble raising share capital. It was pure speculation, a calculated risk and nothing to do with production. As we know, this can go terribly wrong, and indeed it did. It was soon clear that investors had been living in cloud cuckoo land and the Barberton bubble burst with a vengeance. Only five out of thousands of claims ultimately developed into viable mines. The rest vanished into thin air, along with the fortunes that had been invested in them. Transvaal gold had turned out to be an extremely risky investment.
That was one of the reasons why technical and financial experts became more cautious when new deposits were discovered on the Witwatersrand in the course of 1886. The other reason was related to the unusual nature of the gold on the Rand, as the escarpment was generally called. It didn’t occur in clumps or as threads of ore in quartz crystals, but was buried in a subterranean channel, mostly in low concentrations. This disadvantage was, however, more than compensated for by the sheer magnitude of the goldfield. It covered a vast stretch of land, 200 kilometres long, scores of kilometres wide and in parts four kilometres deep.
The full extent was obviously unknown at the time, and even where the reef emerged at the surface it wasn’t always recognised for what it was. The famous American mining engineer Gardner Williams made a blunder he was never allowed to forget. After a ten-day reconnaissance of all the gold-bearing sites known at the time, Gardner announced, ‘If I rode over these reefs in America I would not get off my horse to look at them. In my opinion they are not worth Hell room.’ And there he was, standing on the largest reserve of gold in the world.26
Besides the sceptics, there were others, including engineers and investors, who were prepared to stake their lives on the Rand’s potential. Here, as in Barberton, the diamond magnates of Kimberley stepped into the limelight. J.B. Robinson, originally from the Cape Colony, was a notoriously tough businessman. Though up to his neck in debt, he arrived on the Rand in July 1886 with enough capital to buy up huge parcels of land, laying the foundations for an untold fortune. His financier, Alfred Beit, born in Hamburg and educated in Amsterdam, had emerged in Kimberley as the wealthiest and most astute diamond merchant of them all. He and his two German colleagues, Julius Wernher and Hermann Eckstein, had started out in the employ of Jules Porgès & Cie, an international dealer based in Paris. Its founder, too, born as Yehuda Porgès in Vienna and raised in Prague, had abandoned the city of lights a decade earlier in favour of the city of diamonds. And now he had set his sights on the fledgling city of gold.
The company wouldn’t have been complete without Cecil Rhodes and his partner Charles Rudd. Rhodes was known in Kimberley as a man who bought everything from everyone or, rather, the man who bought everything and everyone. Diamonds, pumping equipment, horses, competitors, it was all the same to him. The one principle he did uphold was that of consolidation—providing he was at the helm. He had achieved success by wheeling and dealing. With financial support from the Rothschilds, he was determined to put the jewel in the crown of his career: a total monopoly of diamonds for the business he had founded, the De Beers Mining Company, named after the brothers from whom he had bought the land. He had already brought in Beit, and in 1888 the last serious rival followed. This was the clownish but shrewd Barney Barnato, born in London as Barnet Isaacs, who haggled but in the end was seduced by Rhodes’s offer of membership of the Kimberley Club, a seat in the parliament of the Cape Colony and 7000 shares in the newly established De Beers Consolidated Mines, ‘the richest, the greatest, and the most powerful company the world has ever seen’. Barnato used the millions he made from that deal to invest in the Rand.27
This, then, was the select and already fabulously wealthy consortium that laid the foundations for organised gold mining on the Witwatersrand. They started off cautiously, given the recent fiasco in Barberton, but with enough conviction to unleash another gold rush and see the rise of another boom town—on the highveld, 1800 metres above sea level, and this time for good. In October 1886, a patch of land known as the Randjeslaagte was reserved to accommodate the huge influx of fortune-hunters. It was called Johannesburg. No one remembers why.28
Three months later, when Willem and Louise Leyds came to see the mining camp, it was ‘a bustling village, already so large that you couldn’t get from one end to the other on foot. Of course, everything is still quite primitive. One sees e.g. a house of thatch and clay being built in a single day. There are signboards saying Standard Bank or Transvaal Hotel etc.’ There was also a wooden building, ‘the mine commissioner’s office, which houses the post office as well’. Three months later, in April 1887, it had been transformed. ‘It’s amazing how quickly places like Johannesburg are being built,’ Louise wrote to her family. ‘Six months ago it was still a barren piece of land.’ They had seen only ‘tents and clay huts’ and ‘now it’s a sprawling town with lots of buildings and new ones going up all the time’.29
And that was only the beginning. Right from the start there was no shortage of capital or labour on the Rand, but mining had to be industrialised and this demanded careful planning. Dynamite was needed to blast the rock, wood to support shafts and coal to fire the steam engines that drove the drills and stamping mills. The pulverised ore was washed over mercury-coated copper sheets, causing the fine particles of gold to form an amalgam with the mercury. The particles were then separated by heating and what remained was pure gold. The technical process wasn’t particularly complicated but the logistics of getting the raw materials and equipment to the site were time-consuming. Once the operation was up and running, in the course of 1888, Johannesburg began to boom.
There was just one last hurdle. It turned out that the gold ore found beneath a depth of 60 or 70 metres was mixed with pyrite, the ‘fool’s gold’ that every miner dreaded. Mercury was of no use at all. As a result, the growth of the gold-mining industry and the influx of immigrants stagnated after 1890. But no time was lost in seeking a solution and it came in the form of potassium cyanide, which produced the necessary chemical reaction. The technique was developed in Glasgow, and tested and applied soon afterwards by Wernher, Beit & Co., the successor of Jules Porgès & Cie. And in fact it was far more effective than the old method. Potassium cyanide extracted the gold residue that mercury left behind. In 1892, confidence was restored and the streets were again teeming with newcomers. Nothing stood in the way of Johannesburg’s expansion, not in South Africa, nor anywhere in the world. By 1896, a decade after it was founded, Johannesburg had a population of 100,000. More than 40,000 were African immigrants from all corners of the southern African subcontinent. They performed the physical, unskilled labour, above and below ground. There were also 5000 coloureds and over 50,000 whites, who took the semi-skilled jobs, providing technical, administrative or financial services. Only 6000 of them were born in the Transvaal. Twothirds were English-speaking, from the Cape Colony and Great Britain; the remainder were a hotchpotch from all parts of the globe: Russian Jews, Germans, Hollanders. The vast majority of them were single young men. Bars, gambling halls and brothels did a roaring trade. Johannesburg had evolved into a hybrid between Monte Carlo and Sodom and Gomorrah.30
The town was like Kimberley, which was in a sense the ‘mother city’. Yet there were marked differences between the two, attributable to different mining techniques and the respective market values of gold and diamonds. In Kimberley’s early days, mining was random and indiscriminate, with countless operators holding claims to parcels of ground of various sizes. Diamonds came out of the ground as a more or less finished product. Those who performed the labour could easily pocket the stones and sell them for their own profit. As the market value of diamonds is determined by demand and supply, the mine operators soon realised they could only keep the selling price at a reasonable level through some form of regulation, mainly by limiting production and supervising their workforce more closely. That was why people like Rhodes wanted to consolidate right from the start. They were helped along by the technological and organisational demands of deep mining. They helped themselves too by imposing increasingly rigorous and ultimately drastic controls. Black miners were subjected to a strip search at the end of the working day. Nose, mouth, armpits, navel, anus, every orifice and every part of the body where diamonds could be concealed was scrutinised. Wounds, potentially self-inflicted, received special attention. A week before their contracts expired, miners were confined to a ‘detention house’, where their hands were shackled and their faeces inspected. If their bowel movements were irregular, they were given laxatives. The object of course was to retrieve any stones they may have ingested. Something like a production line had even been devised to expedite the procedure. Sewage from the latrines passed through several layers of gauze, ranging from coarse to fine, to sort the excreted gems.31
It wasn’t high-tech, but it was symptomatic of the mine bosses’ obsessive efficiency. It took 17 years to transform the chaos of Kimberley’s early days into a slick monopoly. From 1888, De Beers dominated the world trade in diamonds.
Johannesburg’s development was influenced by a different set of factors. From the start, gold mining on the Rand was dependent on raw materials and machinery, in other words, capital and organisation. If for this reason only, land and mining concessions weren’t awarded piecemeal as they were in Kimberley—and labourers couldn’t make off with the end product. It was the diamond magnates from Kimberley who took the lead in forming what were ultimately ten or so mining syndicates, thus achieving fame and fortune as gold barons into the bargain. Johannesburg’s iconic Corner House, with Hermann Eckstein in the saddle, epitomised the power of the Randlords. But the concentration of power never culminated in a monopoly, mainly because of the way gold derives its value. Like diamonds, it is used for jewellery and has various industrial applications, but its principal economic function is to serve as security for the global monetary system. Consigned to the vaults of national banks, gold isn’t subject to the simple market mechanism of demand and supply, which means that monopolies cannot manipulate its price. The only guaranteed way for the mining industry to increase profits is to reduce costs.
Of course, there was another fundamental difference between the two cities, namely their geographical location. The British had drawn Kimberley within the borders of the Cape Colony. Johannesburg was in the heart of the Boer republic of the Transvaal, between Potchefstroom, the former capital, and Pretoria, its successor. The contrast between the two couldn’t have been greater. A nineteenth-century industrial variant of a new Babylon emerged out of nothing in the middle of the grassy pastures of the highveld, an outpost of international big business, where Mammon had taken the place of the Protestant God. Paul Kruger called Johannesburg the city of the devil.32
Even so, the laws of the Transvaal had to be enforced in Johannesburg, like anywhere else. This meant considerably more work for Willem Leyds. He was an attorney not only at the Supreme Court in Pretoria, but also at what were known as circuit courts. As a result of mass immigration to the goldfields, magistrates were spending more of their time in the De Kaap Valley and more still on the Rand. Added to that, a completely new police apparatus had to be formed in Barberton and Johannesburg, including mounted police forces and an intelligence agency.33
The nature of the magistrates’ work was changing as well, from routine misdemeanours like cattle theft to more complex offences. Leyds had a taste of what was to come in the course of 1886, in the case of the State vs Alois Nellmapius. This was a controversial matter, mainly because it involved conflicts of interest up to the highest level. It put Leyds’s professional competence as well as his integrity to the test.
Nellmapius was a Hungarian businessman who had been active in the Transvaal since 1873. He had outstanding connections in the highest circles and was a close friend of Kruger’s. This brought several lucrative contracts his way, including one for the manufacture of gunpowder. But as director of the gunpowder factory he had run into trouble. His superiors in London accused him of using company funds for his personal benefit and laid charges against him in Pretoria. Leyds believed there were sufficient grounds to prosecute Nellmapius—with the consent of the judiciary but to the chagrin of the political authorities.
The dispute escalated. The Executive Council, including President Kruger, was opposed to the case being brought to court. State Secretary Willem Bok, himself a member of the gunpowder factory’s supervisory board, urged that ‘Mr Nellmapius’s friends must be kept on our side’. Many gave in to the pressure, but Leyds held his ground because, as he said, ‘it was simply my duty’. He won the case, which was heard in late September 1886, and Nellmapius ended up behind bars.
But not for long. He was released a few days later on the authority of the Executive Council. The judicial authorities and the business world were outraged. ‘What assurance would one have in future if a judgment can simply be overturned?’ Chief Justice Kotzé immediately had Nellmapius rearrested. The knives were drawn. The Executive Council protested and wanted to discipline Kotzé. Although Kotzé was no friend of Leyds, in Leyds’s opinion he was in the right. He appealed for lenience on Kotzé’s behalf but failed to persuade Kruger. Until one night at a quarter to four, when there was a knock on the Leydses’ door. Their astonishment resounded in the letter Louise wrote home the following morning. ‘It really was the President.’ Kruger had evidently come round to Leyds’s way of thinking. ‘They sat talking in the living room until half past five. W. wrote another letter.’ But Louise had other things to worry about. ‘In the meantime I lay in bed fretting about my carpet and chairs, because, you know, it’s not only wise words that come out of Oom Paul’s mouth, but a spray of saliva too. I was pleasantly surprised that the chairs were spared.’
The politicians won in the end. But thanks to Leyds, Kotzé was able to back down without losing face. Nellmapius was pardoned. The incident tarnished the Transvaal’s reputation for upholding the rule of law, but the state attorney came out with flying colours. Leyds had shouldered his responsibility and acquitted himself with integrity. He no longer needed to wear a beard to win respect. He expressed his pride to his father-in-law. ‘N’s conviction was a huge triumph for me and, between you and me, it has enhanced my prestige.’34
The Nellmapius affair played an important role in Leyds’s decision about his own future. In early April 1886, he and Louise had opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate the completion of the first half of his contract period. They were missing Holland, more than ever perhaps after the loss of their first son at the age of only five months. By the end of the year, however, there was no longer any question of them returning to the Netherlands. The Nellmapius affair could well have become a breaking point. Leyds might have thrown in the towel out of contempt for the Boer leaders’ nepotism. But he didn’t. Nor was his relationship with wheelerdealer Kruger irreparably harmed. At 27, Leyds was still a youngster by Transvaal standards, but he had proved his mettle in a politically sensitive post. He had taken an independent stand, diametrically opposed to the president’s, and been vindicated by Kruger’s meek apology in the middle of the night. Leyds must have found this sufficiently gratifying both professionally and personally, to turn a blind eye to the Boers’ all too obvious shortcomings.35
It would be no exaggeration to say that by the end of 1886, Leyds had been won over to the Boer cause. This emerges firstly from his reaction to two royal distinctions conferred on him in November, one by the Portuguese government, the other by Great Britain. He accepted the knighthood from Portugal without reservation. From then on, he was entitled to wear the decorations of a Knight of the Royal Order of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception of Vila Viçosa. But he declined a knighthood as Commander of the Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George, a distinction of equivalent rank, just as Kruger had turned down the Great Cross in the same Order. Unlike the president of the Orange Free State, Johannes Brand, they refused to compromise themselves for the sake of a British medal. Considering all they would have to endure in their dealings with the United Kingdom in the future, the titles ‘Sir Paul’ and ‘Sir William’ would have left a bitter taste in the mouth.36
Even more compelling evidence of Leyds’s enhanced prestige and his solidarity with the Boer cause came in December 1886. The setting was Paardekraal, just west of the fledgling Johannesburg. This was where the signal had been given for an armed uprising against the British in December 1880. A four-day festival held there a year later to commemorate the event had attracted huge crowds. The 12,000 Boers who attended enjoyed a programme of entertainments as well as a pious homily. Kruger delivered a stirring speech about God’s mysterious ways: the victory at Blood River in 1838, the expulsion of the Ndebele from the Transvaal after independence in 1852, the return to freedom earlier that year. All of this, according to Kruger, bore witness to the Lord’s abiding benevolence. The Boers, he believed, were a chosen people. The gathering had all the hallmarks of an invented tradition, culminating in the celebration of Dingane’s Day on 16 December.37
Five years later, in December 1886, thousands of Boers and their families converged on Paardekraal once more for another incongruous mix of market, entertainment and worship. Willem and Louise Leyds were there as well. Louise was amazed at the number of oxwagons—11,000 and more—the ‘city of tents’, as sprawling as Pretoria, the stone monument and the stage in the centre. This time, too, there was ‘much fun and festivity’. Most of all, Louise enjoyed the fireworks, the shooting gallery and the band. Her only complaint was ‘the complete absence of certain indispensable facilities, which was particularly inconvenient because so many people were present’. Willem was preoccupied with weightier matters. He had the honour of addressing the gathering, which he did with genuine empathy. As if born and bred on the highveld, he spoke of the many tribulations ‘our people’ have endured. ‘For that we give thanks to the Almighty.’ All their ‘adversaries among people, among animals and in nature’ had given the Boers the opportunity to prove their worth. Moreover, the experience had been edifying. ‘All of this was an instrument in God’s hands. It was uplifting.’ The Boer leaders in particular, he believed, had been chastened by their perpetual ‘struggle for freedom and justice . . . Beset by peril and firmly committed to the rights of this nation and this Republic, with God’s help they have learned the lessons of experience.’38
The bridge had been crossed. Willem Leyds had taken sides, at a remarkable time and in a remarkable place. The symbolism was obvious. Paardekraal and Johannesburg, December 1886. Two tented camps, less than 25 kilometres apart. Two cities bustling with life and energy, yet the difference couldn’t have been greater. Paardekraal epitomised the old Transvaal, where they honoured tradition, erected cairns to commemorate a cherished past, praised the Lord for the afflictions He had sent to try them, amused themselves with Bengal fireworks and departed by oxwagon a few days later, each to his own and to his own remote farmstead. See you in five years’ time! And hopefully nothing will have changed.
In Johannesburg, a new Transvaal was shooting up at a furious pace. Here, everyone’s gaze was fixed on the future. They were just waiting for the dynamite, coal and steam machines to arrive. The mountains of gold they had been dreaming of were finally there, and the whole world was jostling to share in the bounty. It just kept on growing. Canvas, reed and clay were replaced with wood, iron and stone. Liquor flowed in abundance, women were available for money. And this in the very same state. It couldn’t last. The two worlds were bound to collide.
The first more or less official clash between old and new occurred two months later, in February 1887. President Kruger was visiting Johannesburg to see for himself and form his own impression of the newcomers to his territory. He wasn’t pleased. He was given a warm reception, that wasn’t the problem, but he was also presented with a long list of demands: a daily postal service, a local council, a special court for concession disputes, lower taxes and representation in the Volksraad. The president snapped back. This was all too fast. There was only one law in the Transvaal and everyone had to obey it, he warned. That applied to Johannesburg too. Change takes time. One has to consider things carefully.39
At least he knew he could count on the support of his state attorney for some time to come. It was clear that Leyds had found his place at the president’s side. And the other way round: everyone was satisfied with his work. In July 1887, the Volksraad had approved the Executive Council’s proposal to extend Leyds’s contract, which was due to expire on 6 October. Or, more accurately, renew it, because the contract Leyds had originally drawn up with Moltzer’s help entitled him to an extra lump-sum payment of £1000. Now that the contract had expired and he was entering into new terms of service, the bonus was promptly paid out. ‘It’s not a fortune,’ he observed realistically, and indeed it paled into insignificance beside the riches a Cecil Rhodes or an Alfred Beit had amassed by the same tender age. But still, it was ‘a tidy sum and I’m more than pleased with it’.40