Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

If this had been the rule during the present reign, I am perfectly certain that, whether by purchase, conquest, or colonisation, the whole of Africa from the Zambesi to the Cape would now be coloured red, and there would probably have been a red streak stretching from Cairo viâ Khartoum to the shores of Lake Tanganyka.

In one of his speeches, Cecil Rhodes aptly described South Africa as the Cinderella of the British Colonies, and this is perfectly true. There is hardly a single instance in which Downing Street has not tried to lose what every one now recognises as of almost priceless importance.

Thus, for instance, in 1872 Lord Kimberley might have bought Delagoa Bay, “the keyhole of Africa,” for the paltry amount of twelve or fifteen thousand pounds and he refused the bargain. It would be cheap now at ten millions. Unfortunately, as his biographer aptly puts it, there was no Cecil Rhodes then to find the money out of his own pocket. He was still sitting on a bucket and sorting diamonds in Kimberley.

Again, in 1875, the Cape Colonial Government strongly urged the annexation of Walfisch Bay and Damaraland on the south-west coast. The reply of Downing Street was: “Her Majesty can give no encouragement to schemes for the retention of British jurisdiction over Great Namaqualand and Damaraland.”

This, by the way, is a somewhat important point to those who wish to get a clear view of Cecil Rhodes’s work as an Empire-Maker in South Africa. Twenty-two years ago Ernst von Weber, who had been prospecting, as it were, for a German South African Empire, said: “What would not such a country full of such inexhaustible natural treasures become if in course of time it is filled with German emigrants! Besides all its own natural and subterraneous treasures, the Transvaal offers to the European Power which possesses it an easy access to the immensely rich tracts of country which lie between the Limpopo and the Central African lakes and the Congo.”

In 1884 Prince Bismarck said before a committee of the Reichstag: “No opposition is apprehended from the British Government, and the machinations of the Colonial authorities must be prevented.”

Now look at any modern map of South Africa. Damaraland is now German territory, the Transvaal has been given back to the corrupt and tyrannical government which has of late made itself a libel on the name of civilisation. A German railway runs from Pretoria to Delagoa Bay, the only road from the sea to the Transvaal which does not pass through British territory. There is a regular line of German steamers to Delagoa Bay, and through this channel have come in the German officers who have drilled the Transvaal army and built the forts which command Johannesburg and Pretoria, as well as the field-pieces and machine-guns, the thousands of rifles and the millions of cartridges, which have no other purpose than the oppression of British subjects and the slaughter of British soldiers as soon as the psychological moment arrives.

This much for the present has been lost, and unhappily no one has been hung for the losing of it. Some day it will have to be taken back, probably at a frightful loss of life and an enormous expenditure of money.

But there is one bright spot in the picture. Between the German territory of Damaraland and the western frontier of the Transvaal and the Free State there is a broad stretch of red. It was only painted red just in the nick of time, and it was Cecil Rhodes who painted it.

Another glance at the map will convince you in a moment what would have happened if he had not made Bechuanaland British. To the east there is the ignorantly hostile Transvaal. Behind that and stretching far away to the northward is the Portuguese territory of Mozambique. Farther north are the southern confines of the Soudan, and the enormous virgin lands of Central Africa. To the west is German West Africa. Hence, but for that red strip, there would be no way either by sea or land through British territory—that is to say, through no territory that would not be hostile—to the Central African Empire of the future, most of which is, thanks to Cecil Rhodes, already called Rhodesia.