[Note.—Sir R. Wingate's account is quoted from two sources—one, Mohammed Nur el Barudi, who was cook to Hicks Pasha, and was one of the wounded prisoners after the battle; and the other, Hassan Habashi, a former Government official at El Obeid, who had fallen into the Mahdi's hands on the capture of that place. Hence the story is complete on both sides.]
[TRANSVAAL CONVENTION (1884).]
Source.—Parliamentary Papers, "Transvaal," C 3,947 of 1884, p. 47.
A Convention between Her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and the South African Republic.
Whereas the Government of the Transvaal State, through its delegates, consisting of Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger, President of the said State, Stephanus Jacobus Du Toit, Superintendent of Education, and Nicholas Jacobus Smit, a member of the Volksraad, have represented that the Convention signed at Pretoria on the 13th day of August, 1881, and ratified by the Volksraad of the said State on the 25th October, 1881, contains certain provisions which are inconvenient, and imposes burdens and obligations from which the said State is desirous to be relieved, and that the south-western boundaries fixed by the said Convention should be amended, with a view to promote the peace and good order of the said State and of the countries adjacent thereto; and whereas Her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland has been pleased to take the said representations into consideration.
Now, therefore, Her Majesty has been pleased to direct, and it is hereby declared, that the following articles of a new Convention, signed on behalf of Her Majesty by Her Majesty's High Commissioner in South Africa, the Right Honourable Sir Hercules George Herbert Robinson, Knight Grand Cross of the most distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George, Governor of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, and on behalf of the Transvaal State (which shall hereinafter be called the South African Republic) by the above-named delegates, Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger, Stephanus Jacobus Du Toit, and Nicholas Jacobus Smit, shall, when ratified by the Volksraad of the South African Republic, be substituted for the articles embodied in the Convention of 3rd August, 1881; which latter, pending such ratification, shall continue in full force and effect.
[Note.—The word "Preamble" is not prefixed to the opening passage of this Convention. When the suzerainty question arose in 1898 the British argument was that the 1884 Convention only altered the articles of the 1881 Convention, and left the Preamble in force; the Boer argument was that the 1884 Convention had a preamble, and therefore the earlier one must have been superseded.]