Germany's Vanishing Colonies

by Gordon Le Sueur

The German hope of obtaining sway over Bechuanaland through the Boers was frustrated by vigorous action on the part of the Cape statesmen. Their protests, and especially the individual efforts of Rhodes, stirred the Home Government into saving for the Empire the territory which the freebooters from the Transvaal had seized upon in the name of their Republic.

Rhodes personally, on behalf of the Cape Government, conducted negotiations with the Boers, but it was not until 1885 that a successful issue was arrived at after a show of force by the Home Government in the expedition of Sir Charles Warren.

The danger of the Cape Colony being cut off from the north through Bechuanaland was obviated, but a large field for German enterprise still lay open.

Their attempts to acquire a footing in Matabeleland were frustrated, and the delegates who set out from the Transvaal in search of a concession from Lo Bengula were unsuccessful in their mission to secure for Germany sway over the countries that now comprise Rhodesia.

For decades British private enterprise had been busy on the coast of Great Namaqualand and Damaraland; in fact in 1863 a British firm (De Pass, Spence & Co.) had purchased from the native chiefs a large tract round about Angra Pequena, and worked the huge deposits of guano on the Ichaboe group of islands, some of which are less than a mile off the mainland.

Disputes were constant up to 1884 between British and German traders; continuous appeals were made for British annexation of the territory from the Orange River to the Portuguese border, but the Government could not be induced to do anything more towards acceding to Sir Bartle Frere's urgent representations than to declare Walfisch Bay, with some fifteen miles around it, to be British territory.

In 1882 a German, Herr Luderitz, the representative in South Africa of the Hamburg and Bremen merchants who pulled the strings of the Government through the German Colonisation Society, established a trading station at Angra Pequena and commenced, in accordance with the preconceived plan of "conquest," to extend the operations of his business inland by founding trade stations at suitable centres.

The British traders soon began to make representations to the Cape Government owing to Luderitz exercising rights of proprietorship over a large portion of territory which he claimed to own by purchase, and to his levying import duty charges upon goods landed by other traders.

Another cause of complaint was that Luderitz was importing large quantities of arms and ammunition and supplying them to the natives by way of barter.