South Africa, vol. II.

by Anthony Trollope

When Mr. Burgers was elected President of the Transvaal Republic he was, or shortly before had been, a clergyman of the Dutch Reformed Church in the Cape Colony, who had differed on matters of creed with the Church to which he belonged, and had consequently cast off his orders. He was known as an eloquent enthusiastic man, and was warmly welcomed in the Transvaal,—where, if ever, a silent, patient, unobtrusive officer was wanted for the work which had to be done in consolidating the Republic. The country at the time was very poor. The Treasury was empty,—a paper currency had been set afloat in 1865, and was of course greatly depreciated. Taxes were with difficulty collected, and the quarrels with the natives were incessant. Mr. Burgers succeeded in raising a loan, and borrowed £60,000, which the bank who lent the money will now receive from the pockets of tax-payers in England. A considerable portion of this sum has, I believe, already been repaid out of money voted by the House of Commons. He established a national flag,—which was we may suppose a cheap triumph. He had a gold coinage struck, with a portraiture of himself,—two or three hundred gold pieces worth 20s. each—which I will not hurt his feelings by calling sovereigns. This could not have cost much as the coinage was so limited. They were too all made out of Transvaal gold. He set on foot a most high flown scheme of education,—of which the details will be given elsewhere and which might not have been amiss had it not been utterly impracticable. He attempted to have the public lands surveyed, while he did not in the least know what the public lands were and had no idea of their limits. There was to be a new code of laws, before as yet he had judges or courts. And then he resolved that a railway should at once be made from Pretoria through the gold fields of the Transvaal down to Delagoa Bay where the Portuguese have their settlement. For the sake of raising a loan for this purpose he went in person to Holland,—just when one would have thought his presence in his own country to be indispensable, and did succeed in saddling the Republic with a debt of £100,000 for railway properties,—which debt must now, also, be paid by the British tax-payers. To all this he added,—so runs the rumour among those who were his friends in the Republic—many proud but too loudly spoken aspirations as to the future general destiny of the South African Republic. His mind seems to have been filled with the idea of competing with Washington for public admiration.

In all this there was much for which only the statesman and not the man must be blamed. The aspirations in themselves were noble and showed that Mr. Burgers had so far studied his subject as to know what things were good for a nation. But he had none of that method which should have taught him what things to put first in bestowing the blessings of government upon a people. We remember how Goldsmith ridicules the idea of sending venison to a man who is still without the necessaries of life.

“It’s like sending them ruffles when wanting a shirt.”

It was certainly a shirt, and other of the simplest of garments, which the people of the Transvaal then wanted;—the ordinary calico shirt of taxation and the knee-breeches of security for property;—while Mr. Burgers was bestowing ruffles upon them in the shape of a national flag and a national gold coinage with his own portrait. Education is certainly one of the first wants of a people, but education will not be assisted at all by a law declaring that all schoolmasters shall have ample incomes, unless there be funds from which such incomes may be paid. What is so excellent as a good code of laws;—unless indeed it be some means of enforcing them, without which the best code in the world must be ineffective? A code of laws is to be had with comparatively little difficulty,—almost as easily as the flag. There are so many that an aspiring President need only choose. But that regular system of obedience to the laws which has to found itself on a well-collected Revenue, and which is the very essence of government, should come first, and in such a country as that which Mr. Burgers was called upon to govern, the establishment of this system should have been the care of the Governor before he had thought of a new code. Mr. Burgers rushed at once to the fruition of all the good things which a country can possess without stopping to see whether they were there, to be enjoyed. Such was his temperament. Nothing more plainly declares the excessive wealth of France and of England than the plenty of their gold coinage;—therefore certainly let us have some gold pieces in the Transvaal. How proud are the citizens of the United States of their Stars and Stripes! Therefore let us have a flag. How grand is the education of Prussia! Therefore let us have schools every where!

I myself think that the measure most essential for the development of the resources of the Transvaal is a railway to Delagoa Bay. I cannot therefore quarrel with Mr. Burgers for holding the same opinion. But it was characteristic of the enthusiasm of the man that he, leaving his country in uttermost confusion, should himself rush off to Europe for a loan,—characteristic of his energy that he should be able to raise, if not a large sum of money, railway plant representing a large sum—and characteristic of his imprudence that all this should have been done without any good result whatever. A railway to a country is a great luxury, the most comfortable perhaps that it can enjoy; but Mr. Burgers does not seem to have understood that a nation like a man, should be able to provide for itself the necessaries of life before it looks for luxuries.

As in this I am accusing Mr. Burgers, so also am I defending him from many of the charges which have been brought against him. His fault hitherto has been an ambition to make his country great before it had been made secure; but in what he so did there is no trace of any undue desire for personal aggrandizement. As a nation rises in the world, so will its rulers rise. That a President of a young Republic should be aware of this and feel that as honour and wealth come to his people so will they come to him, is fair enough. It is but human. I believe that Mr. Burgers thought more of his country than of himself. That he was sanguine, unsteady, and utterly deficient in patience and prudence was the fault of those who elected him rather than of himself.

All these follies, if they were follies, could have been nothing to us but for our close proximity to the borders of the Transvaal. While the gold was being coined and the flag was being stitched, there were never-ending troubles with the Natives. The question of the right to territory in a country which was inhabited by native races when it was invaded by Europeans is one so complex that nothing but superior force has as yet been able to decide it. The white races have gradually obtained possession of whatever land they have wanted because they have been the braver and the stronger people. Philanthropy must put up with the fact, and justice must reconcile herself to it as best she may. I venture to express an opinion that to the minds of all just men, who have turned this matter in their thoughts with painful anxiety, there has come a solution,—which has by no means satisfied them, but which has been the only solution possible,—that God Almighty has intended that it should be as it is. The increasing populations of the civilized world have been compelled to find for themselves new homes; and that they should make these homes in the lands occupied by people whose power of enjoying them has been very limited, seems to have been arranged——by Destiny. That is the excuse which we make for ourselves; and if we do not find verbal authority for it in Deuteronomy as do the Boers, we think that we collect a general authority from the manifested intention of the Creator.

But in the midst of all this the attempts to deal justly with the original occupants of the soil have of late years been incessant. If we buy the land then it will be ours of right. Or if we surrender and secure to the Native as much as the Native wants, then are we not a benefactor rather than a robber? If we succour the weak against the strong then shall we not justify our position? If in fact we do them more good than harm may we not have quiet consciences? So we have dealt with them intending to be just, but our dealings have always ended in coercion, annexation, dominion and masterdom.

In these dealings who has been able to fix a price or to decide where has been the right to sell? A few cattle have been given for a large territory or even a few beads; and then it has turned out that the recipient of the cattle or beads has had no title to dispose of the land. But the purchaser if he be strong-handed will stick to his purchase. And then come complications as to property which no judge can unravel. Shall the law of the Native prevail or European, laws? and if the former who shall interpret it,—a Native or a European? Some years ago a Zulu king conquered a native tribe which lived on lands which are now claimed as part of the Transvaal and then sold them for a herd of cattle to the Dutch Republic. Time went by and the conquered people were still allowed to live on the land, but the Dutch still claimed it as a part of their empire. Then there arose a warrior among the tribe which had been conquered; and the number of the tribe had increased with peace; and the warrior said that he was then on his own territory and not there by sufferance. And now that he was brave and strong he declared that all the land that had once belonged to his tribe should be his. And so there came war. The warrior was Secocoeni, the son of Sequani who had been conquered by Dingaan the King of the Zulus, and the war came up in the time of Mr. Burgers and has been the cause of our annexation of the Republic. It should have been the first duty of Mr. Burgers to have settled this affair with Secocoeni. His title to the land in question was not very good, but he should have held it or yielded it. If not all he might have yielded some. Or he might have shown himself able to conquer the Native, as Dutchmen and Englishmen have done before,—and have consoled himself with such justification as that I have mentioned. But with his coins and his flags and his railway he seems to have lost that power of inducing his Dutchmen to fight which the Dutch leaders before his time have always possessed. There was fighting and the Dutch had certain native allies, who assisted them well. The use of such allies has become quite customary in South Africa. At the very moment in which I am writing we are employing the Fingos against Kreli and the Galekas in Kafraria. But Mr. Burgers with his allies could not conquer Secocoeni although he was again and again rebuked by our Secretary of State at home for the barbarity with which he carried on the war. It is thus that Lord Carnarvon wrote to our Governor at the Cape on the 25th January 1877. “I have to instruct you once more to express to him”—President Burgers,—“the deep regret and indignation with which H.M. Government view the proceedings of the armed force which is acting in the name and under the authority of the Transvaal Government, and that he is rapidly making impossible the continuance either of those sentiments of respect and confidence towards him, or of those friendly relations with him as the Chief of a neighbouring Government, which it was the earnest hope of H.M. Government to preserve.” This was a nice message for a President to receive, not when he had quelled the Natives by the “armed force which is acting in the name and under the authority of the Transvaal Government,”—and which was undoubtedly the Transvaal army fighting for the just or unjust claims of the country,—but when that armed force had run away after an ineffective effort to drive the enemy from his stronghold!

Whether Mr. Burgers ever received that message I do not know. It was not written till a day or two after the arrival of Sir Theophilus Shepstone at Pretoria,—to which place he had then gone up as British Commissioner, and could hardly have been handed to the President much before the final overthrow of his authority. Under these circumstances we may hope that he was spared the annoyance of reading it. But other annoyances, some from the same source, must surely have been enough to crush any man, even one so sanguine as Mr. Burgers. During all the latter period of his office he was subjected to a continued hail-storm of reproaches as to slavery from British authorities and British newspapers. These reached him generally from the Cape Colony, and Mr. Burgers, who had come from the Cape, must have known his own old Colony well enough himself to have been sure that if not refuted they would certainly lead to disaster. I do not believe that Mr. Burgers had any leaning towards slavery. He was by no means a Boer among Boers, but has come rather of a younger class of men and from a newer school. But he could only exist in the Transvaal by means of the Boers, and in his existing condition could not exert himself for the fulfilment of the clause of the treaty which forbad slavery.