The raising of the British flag at St. Lucia Bay, on the Indian Ocean, in 1884, and a treaty with the Tonga tribes, binding them to make no treaties with any other power than the English, completed the hold of the British crown on the eastern coast line up to the southern border of the Portuguese possessions.
The Africanders, denied expansion on the north, sought compensation in the acquisition of [[184]]Swaziland, to the east of the Transvaal republic—a small but fertile region and possessing considerable mineral wealth. It was inhabited by some 70,000 Kaffirs, near of kin but hostile to the Zulus. After long negotiations, in which the South African Republic, Cetawayo of the Zulus, and the British authorities took part, the Africanders secured a concession of right to build a railway through the marshy region lying between Swaziland and the sea to the coast at Kosi Bay; this concession was granted in 1890 and laid in abeyance awaiting the acquisition of Swaziland itself, through which the railway must run. In 1894 the whole territory of Swaziland was placed under the control of the South African Republic, subject to a formal guaranty of protection to the natives.
It is difficult to determine whether it was Africander dullness or British sharpness, or both, that omitted from the Swaziland convention of 1894 the concession to the South African Republic, granted in 1890, of a right to construct a railway to the sea through the marshy district of Tongaland lying next the coast line. But it was omitted from that instrument, and it was held that, as the later convention superseded and voided the earlier one, the provision for access [[185]]to the sea had lapsed. Whereupon the British government promptly secured the consent of the three Tonga chiefs concerned, and proclaimed a protectorate over the whole strip of land lying between Swaziland and the ocean, up to the southern portion of the Portuguese territory. Thus by a stroke of statecraft the access of the Africanders to the sea by railway communication entirely under their own control was effectually stopped.
Within nine years the British control established in Bechuanaland in 1885 was extended over the whole unappropriated country as far north as the Zambesi. By a new treaty made with Lo Bengula in 1888 the sphere of British influence was further expanded to embrace not only Matabeleland, but Mashonaland also—a partially explored territory to the eastward, over which Lo Bengula claimed some authority.
The next step in working out the policy of the British in South Africa was the granting of a royal charter to a corporation known as the British South African Company, formed to develop this eastern and undefined region of Lo Bengula’s territory. Mr. Cecil Rhodes was conspicuous as the leader in this movement. The purpose of the company was twofold: To develop [[186]]the gold fields supposed to exist there, and to forestall the Transvaal Africanders in taking possession of the country. The charter not only invested the company with the rights of a trading corporation, but also with administrative powers as representative of the British crown. In 1890 the pioneer emigrants under this management began to arrive in the chartered territory and commenced to found settlements and build forts along the eastern plateau.
With the conflicts which arose between the British South African Company and the Portuguese—complicated by alliances with the natives, with the wars which arose therefrom, and with the final adjustments and treaties that followed—we have nothing to do in these pages. The one fact that is of interest to us in closing this chapter of conflict in statecraft is that at last the British succeeded in isolating the Africanders from the sea, and in throwing around them a perfect cordon of British territories and pre-emptions. By chartering the British South African Company to the north of the Transvaal the last link in the chain that inclosed the two Africander republics was completed. For there had been left no possibility of advance toward the sea eastward on the part of the Transvaal Republic—in the Arbitration [[187]]Treaty of 1872 Great Britain had obtained pre-emption rights over the Portuguese colonial possessions. [[188]]
CHAPTER XIII.
CAUSES OF THE AFRICANDERS’ SECOND WAR OF INDEPENDENCE.
In one sense the causes of the Second War of Independence, like those of the first, were as remote as the British seizure of Cape Colony in 1795, and as the years between 1814 and 1836, which saw the accumulation of grievances that led to the “Great Trek.” Seeds of dislike to the English were then sown in the Africander mind which have never ceased to propagate themselves—an ominous heredity—from father to son through all the intervening generations.