AFRICA HAD BEEN a reverie of Burnham’s since boyhood. He never forgot the evenings in a Minnesota cabin when he listened to a girl reading by candlelight from a tale of adventure set in South Africa. Throughout his youth he devoured books about the continent, especially by explorers such as David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley, which kept his dreams of Africa glowing.
“After my marriage in 1884,” he later wrote, “I believed that the beckoning spirits of Africa would fade away and no longer haunt me, but softly as the falling dew they kept returning . . . In the end I allowed myself to share with my wife the music they poured into my ears by night and often by day. Their magic won my wife completely, until in January, 1893, together we set out to make our dreams come true.”
Several springs fed these dreams. Burnham was captivated by H. Rider Haggard’s best-selling African adventure tales, particularly King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and Allan Quatermain (1887). Quatermain, the hero of these exotic romances, is an educated Englishman and a sharpshooting outdoorsman who detests cities and prefers the rough life of Africa—a man after Burnham’s own heart. (Quatermain was based on the British explorer and hunter Frederick Courteney Selous, whom Haggard met during his stint as a minor government official in South Africa from 1875 to 1882. Both Selous and Haggard would become Burnham’s friends.) Haggard’s tales also intensified Burnham’s gold fever. King Solomon’s Mines posed the intriguing notion that the biblical land of Ophir, whose gold and silver mines had enriched Solomon, could be rediscovered in the interior of southern Africa.
The connection to the lost mines of Solomon may have been fanciful, but the continent’s mineral wealth was proving very real. By the time Burnham sailed from America, men had made millions by digging holes in the wilds of southern Africa. In the 1870s diamonds began tumbling from the mines of Kimberley. In 1886 came a big gold strike, 300 miles north in the Transvaal’s Witwatersrand, soon world-famous as the Rand. Within a couple of years the boom camp there had turned into the roaring frontier town of Johannesburg.
Only a small group of men—it was always just a small group—had become rich from the Rand’s gold. An even smaller group of these so-called Randlords had simply added golden wealth to fortunes already made from the diamond mines in Kimberley.
One of these latter men was Cecil Rhodes, founder and principal owner of the De Beers diamond cartel and principal owner of Consolidated Gold Fields in the Rand. He was also the chief funder and guiding force of the British South Africa Company (BSAC). In 1889 the British government awarded the BSAC an immense concession and virtual self-governance above the Limpopo River in southern Africa. The BSAC was Rhodes’s primary tool for realizing his vast ambitions, what Burnham accurately called Rhodes’s “colossal dream of empire.”
Though one of the world’s wealthiest men, Rhodes rarely made ostentatious display of it and had little interest in tracking his worth. Only unimaginative men were satisfied by personal gain. For Rhodes, wealth was merely the prerequisite for things of true value: power, influence, freedom from restrictions. He didn’t crave these for small ends, but to shape countries, continents, perhaps the entire world, and to achieve immortal fame. He had the tremendous force made possible when fabulous wealth combines with monomania, utopian visions, and inexhaustible energy for turning dreams into reality.
In 1888, a year before the British government awarded the BSAC a concession, Rhodes made a deal with Lobengula, chief of the Ndebeles (at the time called Matabeles). The Ndebeles were the most powerful tribe between the Limpopo and the Zambezi. The agreement gave the BSAC the mineral rights to the eastern half of Lobengula’s kingdom, Mashonaland, named after the people who occupied it, the subservient Mashonas (now called Shonas). In return Lobengula would receive £100 a month, 1,000 new rifles, 100,000 rounds of ammunition, and either a steamboat on the Zambezi or another £500. Burnham admired Rhodes for achieving his goal without shedding blood and keeping his word to Lobengula—at least at first.
Rhodes expected the mineral wealth in Mashonaland to match the strikes in Kimberley and the Rand. This new infusion of money would fund the next phase of his ambitions. His long-range plans were to expand the BSAC’s reach on behalf of the Crown, first by taking over Mashonaland and Matabeleland, then by moving east to the Indian Ocean and north to Egypt, completing the dream of a corridor from “Cape to Cairo.” He also expected the friction between the Boers and the British in southern Africa to end in a war that would absorb the Boer republics into the British Empire. In the long term he envisioned a United States of Southern Africa. In fact, he had a plan to hurry that along. He had come to South Africa from England as a young man because of a heart condition, and he suspected that his life would be short, which gave him a sense of urgency.
In 1890, within months of getting the royal concession, the BSAC funded a “pioneer column” that left Kimberley for Mashonaland. There were 380 men: 180 prospectors and 200 armed men to protect them from wild animals and warriors who didn’t like Lobengula’s agreement. The pioneers named their first permanent encampment Fort Victoria (now Masvingo in Zimbabwe). By September they had established a second camp 200 miles farther north, Fort Salisbury (now Harare). Each miner got a license to peg one alluvial claim of 150 square feet and ten quartz claims of 150 feet by 400 feet (for digging and tunneling). If a miner decided to work a claim, he had to form a company and give the BSAC a 50 percent share. Rhodes hoped this arrangement would refill the BSAC’s coffers without adding to its expenses for the venture, which had already reached nearly £1 million.
In the first five months, 7,000 claims were pegged. Even Chief Lobengula, who was now trying to repudiate his deal with the BSAC, sent someone to stake gold claims for him. To persuade prospectors to endure the hardships and dangers of life in Mashonaland, the BSAC had assured them that the territory was littered and veined with gold.
But the pioneers found no alluvial gold waiting to be plucked. That left the arduous work of digging and tunneling, for uncertain reward. Instead of working their claims, many prospectors sold to syndicates. These had scant interest in hard investments such as labor costs and mining equipment, which had to be transported 800 miles from the nearest railhead at Kimberley. It was easier to float speculative stocks on the “Kaffir Circus,” the London market for South African gold shares. Gold fever was running high because of the money pouring from the Rand. Anyone paying attention knew that the BSAC was touting Mashonaland as the next Rand. Stock speculators, like prospectors, don’t need much encouragement to imagine a big payoff. The stocks ran up and crashed, ran up and crashed, driven by rumors and dreams.
Burnham had been avidly following all this from California. Rhodes’s new colony offered everything that enticed him: the chance to start over on a wild new frontier, the prospect of mineral wealth, and the opportunity to be part of a breathtaking plan to create a new country. That Mashonaland already had a ruler, landowners, and occupants were minor impediments, as they had been in the American West.
En route to Africa, riding the train across the upper American West, Burnham saw no bison but noticed “the remnants of the Cree tribe” hawking polished bison horns. The family stopped in Chicago to see the World’s Fair (directed by architect Daniel Burnham, no relation). They no doubt paid special attention to the exhibits of villages imported from Africa, complete with bona fide savages. Burnham probably visited one of his boyhood idols, Buffalo Bill, and took in his Wild West show, with its bison, trick shooters, cavalrymen, and whooping Indians in feathered headdresses. The showbiz West was a blockbuster in Chicago, taking in about a million dollars.
Burnham attended the fair before Frederick Jackson Turner arrived to deliver a paper that would influence historians for a century, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Burnham would have nodded at Turner’s premise that the American frontier had closed. The fair must have stimulated other thoughts about how quickly the future was burying the past: the spears in the African pavilion, the bows and arrows in the Wild West show, were a short walk from the building devoted to new weaponry made by the German armorer Fritz Krupp, including the biggest cannon ever made, a monster that fired a shell weighing 2,000 pounds.
Burnham never expected to return to the United States, so this farewell tour also included Washington, D.C. The place brought out his disgust with the Gilded Age traits that were propelling him away: political corruption, vested rights, squashed opportunities for anyone without money, dynastic wealth inherited rather than earned. In a vehement letter to his mother he wrote,
Great forces are gathered here strong enough to work wonders and miracles. But do they? Hardly, for so many are not in touch with the mass of people. Abas [down with] senators who buy their seats. Abas judges who are owned by R.R.s [railroads]. . . . But a better time is coming or a much worse time. Things are in change and the closing years of the 19th century will yet be a historical period. If the institutions of this civilization are not elastic enough, if the classes have served their purpose and will not bend, then we will make history in a sea of blood. Tis well. I can swim in that element for the animal in me is so strong that I am not troubled by that ghost of the many, fear. If the changes come in peace, that is well, for it answers to the secret desire of one’s better nature. Only cast the die. I am anxious for it, if by force, then pity dies and mercy, mercy flees to the wilds. The location of great cities will be known only by the presence of a slag made up of iron, glass and brick well fluxed with human blood. That great strength and bulwark of the 19th century civilization, vested rights and inheritance, will be a prime factor in its complete undoing. But after all has been accomplished, when the old order of things have passed away as a dream of the night, will we rebuild on a better and truer basis? Being an optimist, I think yes.
Both sides of his family had roots in England, but Burnham had been brought up to despise Britain as a place to escape, a colonial oppressor. He was surprised to be moved by his ancestral home, despite London’s dirty air and dreary weather. He felt his allegiances shifting. The idea of America’s greatness, he wrote home, “is getting dim to me.”
They took a train across Europe. Burnham loved Paris—“the only city I ever saw that I liked”—especially the Louvre and, for different reasons, the Bastille, “which showed to the world what an outraged people can do.” As for the Alps, “we could carve a Switzerland out of California and have scenery to spare.” Rome’s Colosseum led him to muse that all great countries and civilizations rose from spilled blood. Naples disgusted him. At last, in Port Said, Egypt, they boarded the ship that would carry them through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, and along the east coast of Africa. Five weeks, 6,000 miles. Then the real journey would begin.
The voyage introduced them to Africa and Africans. Two hundred Sudanese soldiers and their families inhabited the lower deck, and Africans thronged every port of call. The phosphorescent sea, the exotic vegetation, the striking variations among African peoples and their customs—all were strange and mysterious. Even the stars and the seasons were topsy-turvy, and the warm winds came from the north.
It all excited Burnham’s love of adventure and novelty. “He is so happy and contented,” wrote Blanche to her mother. “I am so glad that we came even if it never amounts to anything, for Fred’s life ambition will have been gratified.” Blanche herself was ambivalent. She already missed her close-knit family. In letters home, she urged them to come to Africa. Not long into the future, when Burnham’s absences became almost constant, the theme of loneliness would grow stronger in her letters home.
She responded to Africans with more wariness than fascination. Like her husband, she assumed they belonged to an inferior race, but her views about them were simpler and harsher, tinged by discomfort and fear. “It does not take any stretch of imagination,” she wrote to her family, “to believe that they are descendants of orangoutangs . . .”
The Burnhams’ racial views, including casual use in their letters of the word “nigger,” are reprehensible today. These views were typical of their era and were not uncommon among people admired by history. In the first chapter of The Winning of the West, for instance, entitled “The Spread of the English-Speaking Peoples,” Theodore Roosevelt laid out the case for the inevitable triumph of the Anglo-Saxon race, not only over blacks but also over European peoples such as the Spanish and Portuguese who had foolishly mixed their blood with conquered natives instead of retaining racial purity. He believed strongly in “a square deal” for every citizen, and did more to achieve that than any president before him, but he also believed that blacks were generations behind whites in intellectual abilities.
Similarly, in 1901, after stints as an enthusiastic imperial soldier and correspondent in India, Sudan, and South Africa, whose natives he believed were fittingly “subject races,” Winston Churchill noted, “The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.” He likened conquered peoples to children in need of Anglo-Saxon care and discipline, a common trope. Woodrow Wilson was a racist and segregationist, yet was also, like Roosevelt, one of the most progressive politicians of his era.
Another striking example is Mahatma Gandhi. Revered for his nonviolent protests against imperialism and inequality in India, he first spent twenty-one years practicing law in South Africa, where he arrived the same year as the Burnhams. In South Africa he worked not only to improve the lot of Muslim Indians but to keep black Africans segregated and subjugated. He objected that Indians were often treated like native blacks—forced, for instance, to enter the post office through the door reserved for inferior races. “Kaffirs [blacks] are as a rule uncivilized . . .” he wrote, sounding exactly like a white Afrikaner or a British imperialist. “They are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals.” He resented being equated with black people “whose sole ambition is to collect a number of cattle to buy a wife, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness.” He insisted that South Africa’s emigrant Indians, like white Afrikaners, believed heartily in racial purity.
Such examples don’t lessen the insidiousness of racism or excuse its handy rationale for imperial greed and oppression. The point is that the Burnhams, like others with similar views, didn’t consider themselves malicious racist oppressors, but actors on the progressive side of history. That they were unable to transcend the racial attitudes of their era doesn’t negate their struggles and achievements. They were blind to the contradictions and exclusions within their ideals, but when they mistook their prejudices for principles, they usually did so in the belief that they were advancing civilization, not merely themselves.
For instance, here is Burnham thirty years after he reached Africa, explaining why he so urgently wanted to go to there and attach his fate to that of Rhodes:
Rhodes had the courage of a lion. He hated bloodshed. He did not believe in lordship over subject races, but admitted that backward races should be guarded, conserved, developed. Scrupulous justice and unlimited mercy were shown in all his adjudications. He was never misled by slogans, nor did he believe that the Voice of the People is the Voice of God. He recognized too well the crimes that have been committed by popular vote, from the Crucifixion to the present day. He did believe that the civilization of the English-speaking world was to become the pivotal point around which all peaceful nations might safely rally. Under the administration of Rhodes, there were the fewest laws, the widest freedom, the least crime, and the truest justice I have ever seen in any part of the world.
Nearly every sentence of this can be attacked as untrue, uninformed, or self-serving. Yet that isn’t the whole truth about the passage. Burnham’s sincerity is clear. He isn’t trying to conceal or rationalize. His pride in Rhodes, and by extension in himself, is apparent, and not all of it is wrong-headed. Rhodes could be admirably courageous. He did prefer negotiation to bloodshed—yet sometimes called for lots of blood. He did believe that the natives should be protected and developed—by lording over them. He also believed in justice and mercy for the natives, far more so than did the Germans, French, Portuguese, or Belgians—but only after the natives had submitted, and not equally for black and white. He certainly believed in the superiority of the English-speaking peoples—and to assure their position as guardians of world peace, he was willing to wage war. He also believed in “the widest freedom”—but only for whites, and not if that freedom interfered with what he considered best for everyone. By the light of historical hindsight, the passage self-destructs with contradictions, yet Burnham, a thoughtful man, was recording what he earnestly believed. To reduce it all to racist imperialism robs him and other progressive nineteenth-century whites of their flawed complexity and erases any hope of understanding our links to them, through their strengths as well as their prejudices.
At the port of Tanga, north of Zanzibar, Burnham watched blacks manacled to each other by chains and neck irons unload a ship. He asked an officer if the men were slaves. Oh no, the chains were simply a precaution to keep the men from running off. “For an African or an Arab to do this would be slavery,” wrote Burnham to his uncle, “but for Germany or England it is not. For my part I fail to see the fine distinction. No doubt my mind is too much befogged by Yankee ideas yet.” His Yankee ideas would soon change, corrupted by the rationales of colonialism.
At the end of March 1893 the Burnhams debarked at Durban, a trim British town whose pretty parks and shops reminded them of Pasadena. Part of its charm, for Blanche, was that no natives except servants were allowed to live within the town limits. Burnham noted with approval that Durban remained affordable for newcomers because the town retained ownership of the land, foiling speculators, one of his peeves about the United States. Yet within a year he would be neck-deep in land speculation on the frontier.
He set about outfitting the family for the trek inland: northwest for 400 miles by wagon road to Johannesburg, then 800 mostly trackless miles north to Fort Salisbury in Mashonaland. The customary mode of long-distance transportation in southern Africa was a heavy wagon pulled by eighteen oxen. Because of the gold boom in Johannesburg, oxen and wagons were exorbitantly expensive. Equally problematic, Burnham didn’t know how to handle the thirty-foot whip necessary to drive the huge ox-teams.
He applied Yankee ingenuity. He didn’t understand oxen, but prospecting had taught him all about “desert canaries”—burros—which were underappreciated in southern Africa and hence underpriced. They weren’t as strong as oxen, but they could cover more ground per day and needed less forage. He bought four that had never been hitched to a wagon, for $15 each.
Next he searched Durban for an American buckboard. In a warehouse loft he found the disassembled running gears of a “spider,” a light American carriage made by Studebaker, a deal at $100. He hired a carpenter to make a slat wagon-bed and install a spring seat. He couldn’t find breast-strap harnesses to fit the burros, so he bought leather hide, some tools and rivets, and made his own. Blanche bought supplies and packed them, along with her new Singer Jones sewing machine; she didn’t intend to buy any dresses for five years. For their bed, she quilted a mattress filled with “coconut feathers” and sewed a cover for it from canvas. Meanwhile, Burnham had been breaking the burros to harness. Less than three weeks after arriving in Durban, they were ready to go.
Strangers snickered at their burros and light wagon. New acquaintances said they were crazy to head into the African veldt in that get-up. A woman urged Blanche not to go. “But she didn’t know my wife,” noted Burnham. To his uncle he wrote, “nothing can stop me till I reach the land of Ophir. . . . I will probably cast in my lot here. There is more room, a better chance, greater possibilities. . . . I am ready to tackle the frontiers again and help build a new empire . . .”