With so much money and power at his disposal, Rhodes’s pursuit of territory became relentless. ‘I would annex the planets if I could,’ he once told a London journalist. He acquired ‘exclusive mineral rights’ in Barotseland, north of the Zambezi (western Zambia) for a payment of £2,000. He obtained a treaty in Manicaland (eastern Zimbabwe), a hundred miles from the Indian Ocean coastline, conferring not only mineral rights but granting monopolies of public works, including railways; banking; coining money; and the manufacture of arms and ammunition – all for an annual subsidy of £100. He financed the occupation of the Lake Nyasa region (Malawi) to keep it out of Portuguese hands.
He became obsessed with the idea of gaining access to the coast of Mozambique, making repeated efforts to acquire Delagoa Bay from the Portuguese. On his first visit to Pretoria as the Cape’s prime minister in November 1890, he proposed acting in collusion with Kruger to get it.
RHODES: We must work together. I know that the Republic needs a seaport. You must have Delagoa Bay.
KRUGER: How can we work together that way? The port belongs to the Portuguese, and they will never give it up.
RHODES: We must simply take it.
KRUGER: I can’t take the property of other people . . . a curse rests upon ill-gotten goods.
His overall objective, as he explained to an Afrikaner audience in the Cape in 1891, was to establish a union of all southern African states, led by the Cape. ‘The Cape,’ he said, ‘should stretch from Cape Town to the Zambezi with one system of laws, one method of government and one people.’
In a long conversation he had with Queen Victoria in December 1894, he dwelt on the same theme. When she opened the conversation by asking him politely, ‘What are you engaged on at present, Mr Rhodes?’ he replied, ‘I am doing my best to enlarge Your Majesty’s dominions.’ Since they had last met, he said, he had added 12,000 square miles of territory. But there was more to be done. He expressed his belief that the Transvaal – ‘which we ought never to have given up’ – would ultimately return to the Empire, an idea the Queen found gratifying.
But Rhodes’s vaulting ambition was to lead to disaster and humiliation. When he realised that Zambesia was not going to deliver another gold bonanza, he turned his attention to Kruger’s Transvaal. Gold revenues had made the Transvaal the richest state in southern Africa, enabling Kruger to challenge British hegemony in the region and thwart Rhodes’s plan for a confederation of British-ruled states. A potent new factor had been added to the mêlée of disputes and grievances festering among the uitlander population and foreign mining companies: to counteract British pressure on the Transvaal, Kruger began to cultivate links with Germany, encouraging German investment and German immigration. At a banquet to mark Kaiser Wilhelm’s birthday in 1895, Kruger spoke of cementing ties with Germany. His growing friendship rattled not only Rhodes in the Cape but British politicians in London. In collusion with British ministers, Rhodes set out to remove Kruger.
Having recently captured Matabeleland with little difficulty, Rhodes assumed that the overthrow of Kruger’s regime would be similarly straightforward. He was convinced that the uitlander population on the Witwatersrand was ready and willing to rebel against Kruger. His plan was to assemble a group of Johannesburg conspirators, supply them with arms for an insurrection smuggled in from the Cape and to support their uprising with a column of armed volunteers from his private army, the British South Africa Police, sent to Johannesburg from a staging post on the Bechuanaland border, only 170 miles away. Rhodes gave command of this enterprise to his old friend Starr Jameson. An inveterate gambler, Jameson took on the task with schoolboy enthusiasm.
As part of the plan, Rhodes importuned Britain’s colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, a fervent imperialist, to grant the BSA Company ‘a strip of land’ along the Bechuanaland border which he could use as a military base to prepare for the invasion. Well aware of Rhodes’s intentions, Chamberlain approved the land grant.
Rhodes’s attempt at a coup soon degenerated into a fiasco. However disgruntled they were, the uitlander population showed no appetite for participating in an uprising. Even leading conspirators changed their minds and urged Rhodes to postpone the escapade. British officials in the Cape made similar pleas. Yet Rhodes still believed he could succeed. And Jameson was hell-bent on action. Ignoring all messages for him to hold back, he led the invasion force of 500 men across the border from Bechuanaland into the Transvaal on 30 December 1895, confident he could reach Johannesburg within three days. But he was soon surrounded by Kruger’s commandos and forced to surrender.
The Jameson Raid, as it became known, caused uproar. Faced with yet another example of British aggression, Afrikaners across southern Africa – in the Cape, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State – rallied behind Kruger. Rhodes was obliged to resign as prime minister of the Cape Colony. Cape Afrikaners never forgave him for his treachery. The working alliance between Afrikaners and English-speakers that had prevailed for decades in the Cape was irretrievably damaged. In the Transvaal, the depth of Afrikaner distrust of British intentions ran even deeper. Rhodes and Jameson were exposed as the main culprits behind the conspiracy. But Kruger believed Chamberlain to be equally culpable for the attempt to overthrow him.
There were other ramifications. By withdrawing units of the British South Africa Police from Rhodesia to participate in his invasion of the Transvaal, Rhodes had left the white settlers of Matabeleland and Mashonaland at considerable risk. The Ndebele, deprived of most of their cattle and much of their best land, subjected to forced labour and harsh treatment, were seething with discontent. Drought, locusts and rinderpest, a cattle disease, added to their grievances. Once it became known that Jameson’s force had been defeated in the Transvaal and locked up in a Pretoria prison, the Ndebele seized the opportunity to revolt. The Shona too, resentful over the loss of land, hut taxes and maltreatment, followed suit, turning on the whites with greater ferocity than any resistance they had previously shown against the Ndebele. Only with the assistance of British imperial forces did Rhodes manage to suppress the revolts and secure his private kingdom.
Although Rhodes had been thwarted in his bid to take over the Transvaal, Chamberlain pursued the same aim ruthlessly. He considered the rise of the Transvaal as a wealthy, independent state to represent a threat not only to Britain’s hold on southern Africa but to its standing as an imperial power. He feared that because of its economic strength, the Transvaaal would become the dominant power in southern Africa, drawing into its orbit other territories in the region – the Cape Colony, Natal and the Orange Free State – and leading them into an independent union outside the realms of the British empire. He was willing to risk a war with Kruger to avert this outcome and ensure that British supremacy reigned throughout southern Africa.
To bolster his strategy, Chamberlain in 1897 appointed Sir Alfred Milner, an imperial zealot, to the post of British high commissioner in Cape Town. Milner’s objective was what he called ‘winning the great game for mastery in South Africa’. He was soon convinced that only war would bring an end to the ‘Transvaal oligarchy’ and set out to engineer one. In a private letter to Chamberlain, he suggested he should ‘work up a crisis’. Aided and abetted by British officials in Cape Town and Pretoria, a ‘jingo’ movement among uitlanders in the Transvaal began to agitate for British intervention.
In Pretoria, Kruger reacted to signs of British belligerence by strengthening the Transvaal’s defences. He ordered a vast array of modern military equipment from Germany and France – field guns, siege guns, Maxim guns, howitzers and modern rifles. Fortresses were constructed in Johannesburg and Pretoria. Between 1896 and 1899, more than one-third of the Transvaal’s revenues were allocated to defence expenditure. Kruger also drew closer to the Orange Free State, signing a defence treaty that pledged mutual support ‘when the independence of one of the two States may be threatened or attacked’. In a series of public speeches, he also conceded that changes to citizenship laws were needed to accommodate ‘aliens’ and ‘strangers’.
But Milner ensured that uitlander agitation against Kruger was kept at fever pitch and organised press campaigns to support their cause. He persuaded Chamberlain to publish a ‘Blue Book’ setting out in detail the background to the uitlander crisis so that it could ‘get rubbed into the public mind’. In his own contribution to the Blue Book, he claimed that thousands of British subjects were ‘kept permanently in the position of helots’ – suggesting their plight was comparable to that of the slaves of ancient Greece. The case for intervention on their behalf, Milner insisted, was overwhelming. Britain’s reputation as an imperial power was at stake.
As talk of the possibility of war swirled around southern Africa, a group of prominent Afrikaners in the Cape intervened as intermediaries, proposing a face-to-face meeting between Kruger and Milner to avert confrontation. Though little was expected from it, the meeting took place in Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State, in June 1899. Milner focused on the single issue of the franchise, seeing it as the means to ‘break the mould’ of Transvaal politics and wrest the Transvaal from Boer control. He demanded ‘immediate and substantial’ representation for the uitlanders. After much prevarication, Kruger offered the uitlanders a sliding scale varying from two to seven years’ residence. But Milner raised a host of objections. He had no intention of negotiating over the matter and broke off the talks. The only settlement Milner had in mind was a victory for British supremacy. As Kruger kept repeating in his last encounter with Milner: ‘It is our country you want.’
The drumbeat for war grew ever louder. In England, Chamberlain made clear to the public that what was really at stake was not the issue of the franchise but ‘the power and authority of the British Empire’. He argued that Britain had the right to intervene in the Transvaal not just because of its obligation to protect British subjects but because of its position ‘as suzerain Power’ in southern Africa. When Kruger improved his offer over the franchise, Chamberlain rebuffed him. What was needed, said Chamberlain, was to establish ‘once and for all’ who was ‘the paramount power in South Africa’.
The war that Britain provoked was expected to last no longer than a few months. Milner confidently predicted the Boers would put up no more than ‘an apology’ of a fight. London newspapers envisaged a ‘tea-time’ war that would be finished by Christmas. But it turned into the costliest, bloodiest and most humiliating war that Britain had waged in nearly a century. From the outset, the British campaign suffered one military defeat after another. It took a British expeditionary army eight months to reach Johannesburg and Pretoria and another two years before the war was finally over. Having lost control of the towns, the Boer armies of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State resorted to guerrilla warfare, sabotaging railway lines, ambushing supply columns, destroying bridges, severing telegraph wires and raiding depots, running rings around British forces with hit-and-run tactics.
Ill-prepared for this kind of war, British military commanders resorted to scorched-earth tactics, destroying thousands of farmsteads, razing villages to the ground and slaughtering livestock on such a scale that by the end of the war the Boers of the Orange Free State had lost half their herds, those in the Transvaal three-quarters. Reporting back to London in a dispatch in 1901, Milner described the Orange Free State as ‘virtually a desert’. To make sure that captured burghers would not fight again, the British deported thousands to prison camps overseas. Women and children were rounded up and placed in what the British called concentration camps, where conditions were so appalling that some 26,000 died there from disease and malnutrition, most of them under the age of sixteen. In London, an opposition politician, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, accused Britain in its conduct of the war of employing ‘methods of barbarism’. All this became part of a Boer heritage passed in anger from one generation to the next. The war formally ended on 31 May 1902 when Boer generals agreed to a peace treaty that consigned the Transvaal and the Orange Free State to become colonies of the British empire. But many Boers mourned the loss of their republics.
In the words of Rudyard Kipling, Britain’s poet of empire, the war taught the British ‘no end of a lesson’. It had required the deployment of 450,000 imperial troops and cost the British exchequer £217 million, far beyond the original estimate of £10 million. The British military lost 22,000 dead – two-thirds of them from disease and illness. Only five years later, the British government concluded that self-government might be a better option for its two Boer colonies. By 1907, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State were again self-governing under the control of defeated Boer generals who had signed the terms of surrender. Britain next decided to amalgamate its four colonies into a Union of South Africa in the hope that the Boers and the British might find a way of resolving their differences and merge into a single South African nation.
The black population fared badly out of this arrangement. After a hundred years of wars and clashes against the British and the Boers, all the African chiefdoms lying within South Africa had succumbed to white rule. Most of their land had been lost through conquest and settlement. During the Anglo-Boer war, some 116,000 Africans were caught up in the sweeps carried out by British military commanders to ‘scour’ rural districts of all means of support for Boer guerrillas and sent to their own concentration camps where some 14,000 died, most of them children. In the aftermath of the war, African leaders had confidently expected that British rule would lead to improved political rights for the black population. But Britain’s priority was to facilitate reconciliation between the Boers and the British which meant ignoring African demands. Africans were excluded from negotiations leading to the founding of the Union of South Africa and denied political rights under its proposed constitution. An African delegation went to London to make representations, protesting at what they regarded as Britain’s betrayal of their interests, but to no avail.
The Union of South Africa was launched in 1910 with much good will. But fear and resentment of British domination ran deep in the two Boer colonies. The war had destroyed much that could not be reconstructed and reduced most of the Boer population there to an impoverished rural people. A growing number drifted to the towns, hoping to find work. But the towns were the citadels of British commerce and culture where Boers from the platteland, possessing no skills or education, found themselves scorned and despised for their poverty, their country ways and their language. Out of the maelstrom of degradation came a virulent form of Afrikaner nationalism that eventually took hold of South Africa.