Impressions of South Africa

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

Finally, the British government removed the two native dangers which the Boers had feared. In 1879 Sir Bartle Frere's war with Cetewayo destroyed the Zulu power, the dread of which might have induced the Boers to resign themselves to British supremacy, and an expedition under Sir Garnet Wolseley reduced Sikukuni's strongholds and established peace in the north-east. It was probably necessary to deal with Sikukuni, though the British government seems to have forgotten its former doubts as to the right of the Boers to the territory of that chief; but in extinguishing the Zulu kingdom the High Commissioner overlooked the fact that he was also extinguishing the strongest motive which the republicans had for remaining British subjects. The British government were doubly unfortunate. It was the annexation of the Transvaal in 1877 that had alarmed Cetewayo and helped to precipitate the war of 1879. It was now the overthrow of Cetewayo, their formidable enemy, that helped to precipitate a revolt of the Boers.

At this time, however, everybody in British South Africa, and nearly everybody in England, supposed the annexation to be irrevocable. Leading members of the parliamentary Opposition had condemned it. But when that Opposition, victorious in the general election of 1880, took office in April of that year, the officials in South Africa, whose guidance they sought, made light of Boer discontent, and declared that it would be impossible now to undo what had been done in 1877. Thus misled, the new Cabinet refused to reverse the annexation, saying by the mouth of the Under Secretary for the Colonies, "Fieri non debuit, factum valet." This decision of the British government, which came as a surprise upon the recalcitrant republicans in the Transvaal, precipitated an outbreak. In December, 1880, a mass-meeting of the Boers was held at a place called Paardekraal (now Krugersdorp). It was resolved to rise in arms; and a triumvirate was elected, consisting of Messrs. M.W. Pretorius, Kruger and Joubert, which proclaimed the re-establishment of the South African Republic, and hoisted the national flag on Dingaan's day, December 16.[28] The Boers, nearly every man of whom was accustomed to fighting, now rose en masse and attacked the small detachments of British troops scattered through the country, some of which were cut off, while the rest were obliged to retire to posts which they fortified. The Governor of Natal, General Sir George Colley, raised what troops he could in that Colony, and marched northward; but before he could reach the Transvaal border a strong force of Boers, commanded by Commandant-General Joubert, crossed it and took up a position at Laing's Nek, a steep ridge close to the watershed between the upper waters of the Klip River, a tributary of the Vaal, and those of the Buffalo River, which joins the Tugela and flows into the Indian Ocean. Here the British general, on January 28, 1881, attacked the Boers, but was repulsed with heavy loss, for the ridge behind which they were posted protected them from his artillery, while their accurate rifle fire cut down his column as it mounted the slope. A second engagement, eleven days later, on the Ingogo heights, caused severe loss to the British troops. Finally, on the night of February 26, General Colley, with a small detachment, seized by night Majuba Hill, a mountain which rises about 1500 feet above Laing's Nek, and completely commands that pass.[29] Unfortunately he omitted to direct the main force, which he had left behind at his camp, four miles south of the Nek, to advance against the Boers and occupy their attention; so the latter, finding no movement made against them in front, and receiving no artillery fire from Majuba Hill above them, checked the first impulse to retire, which the sight of British troops on the hilltop had produced, and sent out a volunteer party to scale the hill. Protected by the steep declivities from the fire of the soldiers above them, they made their way up, shooting down those whom they saw against the sky-line, and finally routed the British force, killing General Colley, with ninety-one others, and taking fifty-nine prisoners. By this time fresh troops were beginning to arrive in Natal, and before long the British general who had succeeded to the command had at his disposal a force which the Boers could not possibly have resisted. The home government, however, had ordered an armistice to be concluded (March 5), and on March 23 terms were agreed to by which the "Transvaal State" (as it was called) was again recognized as a quasi-independent political community, to enjoy complete self-government under the suzerainty of the British crown. These terms were developed in a more formal convention, signed at Pretoria in August, 1881, which recognized the Transvaal as autonomous, subject, however, to the suzerainty of the Queen, to British control in matters of foreign policy, to the obligation to allow British troops to pass through the Republic in time of war, and to guarantees for the protection of the natives.[30] The position in which the Transvaal thus found itself placed was a peculiar one, and something between that of a self-governing Colony and an absolutely independent State. The nearest legal parallel is to be found in the position of some of the great feudatories of the British crown in India, but the actual circumstances were of course too unlike those of India to make the parallel instructive.

Few public acts of our time have been the subjects of more prolonged and acrimonious controversy than this reversal in 1881 of the annexation of 1877. The British government were at the time accused, both by the English element in the South African Colonies, and by their political opponents at home, of an ignominious surrender. They had, so it was urged, given way to rebellion. They had allowed three defeats to remain unavenged. They had weakly yielded to force what they had repeatedly and solemnly refused to peaceful petitions. They had disregarded the pledges given both to Englishmen and to natives in the Transvaal. They had done all this for a race of men who had been uniformly harsh and unjust to the Kafirs, who had brought their own Republic to bankruptcy and chaos by misgovernment, who were and would remain foes of the British empire, who were incapable of appreciating magnanimity, and would construe forbearance as cowardice. They had destroyed the prestige of British power in Africa among whites and blacks, and thereby sowed for themselves and their successors a crop of future difficulties.

To these arguments it was replied that the annexation had been made, and the earlier refusals to reverse it pronounced, under a complete misapprehension as to the facts. The representatives of the Colonial Office in South Africa had reported, partly through insufficient knowledge, partly because their views were influenced by their feelings, that there was no such passion for independence among the Boers as events had shown to exist.[31] Once the true facts were known, did it not become not merely unjust to deprive the Transvaal people of the freedom they prized so highly, but also impolitic to retain by force those who would have been disaffected and troublesome subjects? A free nation which professes to be everywhere the friend of freedom is bound—so it was argued—to recognize the principles it maintains even when they work against itself; and if these considerations went to show that the retrocession of the Transvaal was a proper course, was it either wise or humane to prolong the war and crush the Boer resistance at the cost of much slaughter, merely in order to avenge defeats and vindicate a military superiority which the immensely greater forces of Britain made self-evident? A great country is strong enough to be magnanimous, and shows her greatness better by justice and lenity than by a sanguinary revenge. These moral arguments, which affect different minds differently, were reinforced by a strong ground of policy. The Boers of the Orange Free State had sympathised warmly with their kinsfolk in the Transvaal, and were with difficulty kept from crossing the border to join them. The President of the Free State, a sagacious man, anxious to secure peace, had made himself prominent as a mediator, but it was not certain that his citizens might not, even against his advice, join in the fighting. Among the Africander Dutch of Cape Colony and Natal the feeling for the Transvaal Boers was hardly less strong, and the accentuation of Dutch sentiment, caused by the events of 1880 and 1881, has ever since been a main factor in the politics of Cape Colony. The British government were advised from the Cape that the invasion of the Transvaal might probably light up a civil war through the two Colonies. The power of Great Britain would of course have prevailed, even against the whole Dutch-speaking population of South Africa; but it would have prevailed only after much bloodshed, and at the cost of an intense embitterment of feeling, which would have destroyed the prospects of the peace and welfare of the two Colonies for many years to come. The loss of the Transvaal seemed a slight evil in comparison.

Whether such a race conflict would in fact have broken out all over South Africa is a question on which opinion is still divided, and about which men may dispute for ever. The British government, however, deemed the risk of it a real one, and by that view their action was mainly governed. After careful inquiries from those best qualified to judge, I am inclined to think that they were right. It must, however, be admitted that the event belied some of their hopes. They had expected that the Transvaal people would appreciate the generosity of the retrocession, as well as the humanity which was willing to forgo vengeance for the tarnished lustre of British arms. The Boers, however, saw neither generosity nor humanity in their conduct, but only fear. Jubilant over their victories, and (like the Kafirs in the South Coast wars) not realizing the overwhelming force which could have been brought against them, they fancied themselves entitled to add some measure of contempt to the dislike they already cherished to the English, and they have ever since shown themselves unpleasant neighbours. The English in South Africa, on their part, have continued to resent the concession of independence to the Transvaal, and especially the method in which it was conceded. Those who had recently settled in the Republic, relying on the declarations repeatedly made that it would for ever remain British, complained that no proper compensation was made to them, and that they had much to suffer from the Boers. Those who live in the two Colonies hold that the disgrace (as they term it) of Majuba Hill ought to have been wiped out by a march to Pretoria, and that the Boers should have been made to recognize that Britain is, and will remain, the paramount power in fact as well as in name. They feel aggrieved to this day that the terms of peace were settled at Laing's Nek, within the territory of Natal, while it was still held by the Boers. Even in Cape Colony, where the feeling is perhaps less strong than it is in Natal, the average Englishman has neither forgotten nor forgiven the events of 1881.

I have dwelt fully upon these events because they are, next to the Great Trek of 1836, the most important in the internal history of South Africa, and those which have most materially affected the present political situation. The few years that followed may be more briefly dismissed. The Transvaal State emerged from its war of independence penniless and unorganized, but with a redoubled sense of Divine favour and a reinvigorated consciousness of national life. The old constitution was set to work; the Volksraad again met; Mr. Stephen John Paul Kruger, who had been the leading figure in the triumvirate, was chosen by the people to be President, and has subsequently been thrice re-elected to that office. Undismayed by the scantiness of his State resources, he formed bold and far-reaching plans of advance on the three sides which lay open to him. To the north a trek was projected, and some years later was nearly carried out, for the occupation of Mashonaland. To the south bands of Boer adventurers entered Zululand, the first of them as trekkers, the rest as auxiliaries to one of the native chiefs, who were at war with one another. These adventurers established a sort of republic in the northern districts, and would probably have seized the whole had not the British government at last interfered and confined them to a territory of nearly three thousand square miles, which was recognized in 1886 under the name of the New Republic, and which in 1888 merged itself in the Transvaal. To the west, other bands of Boer raiders entered Bechuanaland, seized land or obtained grants of land by the usual devices, required the chiefs to acknowledge their supremacy, and proceeded to establish two petty republics, one called Stellaland, round the village of Vryburg, north of Kimberley, and the other, farther north, called Goshen. These violent proceedings, which were not only injurious to the natives, but were obviously part of a plan to add Bechuanaland to the Transvaal territories, and close against the English the path to those northern regions in which Britain was already interested, roused the British Government. In the end of 1884 an expedition led by Sir Charles Warren entered Bechuanaland. The freebooters of the two Republics retired before it, and the districts they had occupied were erected into a Crown Colony under the name of British Bechuanaland. In 1895 this territory was annexed to Cape Colony. In order to prevent the Boers from playing the same game in the country still farther north, where their aggressions had so far back as 1876 led Khama, chief of the Bamangwato, to ask for British protection, a British protectorate was proclaimed (March, 1885) over the whole country as far as the borders of Matabililand; and a few years later, in 1888, a treaty was concluded with Lo Bengula, the Matabili king, whereby he undertook not to cede territory to, or make a treaty with, any foreign power without the consent of the British High Commissioner. The west was thus secured against the further advance of the Boers, while on the eastern shore the hoisting of the British flag at St. Lucia Bay in 1884 (a spot already ceded by Panda in 1843), followed by the conclusion (in 1887) of a treaty with the Tonga chiefs, by which they undertook not to make any treaty with any other power, announced the resolution of the British crown to hold the coast line up to the Portuguese territories.

This policy of preventing the extension of Boer dominion over the natives was, however, accompanied by a willingness to oblige the Transvaal people in other ways. Though they had not observed the conditions of the Convention of 1881, the Boers had continued to importune the British government for an ampler measure of independence. In 1884 they succeeded in inducing Lord Derby, then Colonial Secretary, to agree to a new Convention, which thereafter defined the relations between the British crown and the South African Republic, a title now at last formally conceded. By this instrument (called the Convention of London),[32] whose articles were substituted for the articles of the Convention of 1881, the control of foreign policy stipulated for in the Pretoria Convention of 1881 was cut down to a provision that the Republic should "conclude no treaty with any State or nation other than the Orange Free State, nor with any native tribe to the eastward or westward of the Republic," without the approval of the Queen. The declarations of the two previous Conventions (of 1852 and 1881) against slavery were renewed, and there was a "most favoured nation" clause with provisions for the good treatment of strangers entering the Republic. Nothing was said as to the "suzerainty of her Majesty" mentioned in the Convention of 1881. The Boers have contended that this omission is equivalent to a renunciation, but to this it has been (among other things) replied that as that suzerainty was recognized not in the "articles" of the instrument of 1881, but in its introductory paragraph, it has not been renounced, and still subsists.[33]

A few years later, the amity which this Convention was meant to secure was endangered by the plan formed by a body of Boer farmers and adventurers to carry out an idea previously formed by Mr. Kruger, and trek northward into the country beyond the Limpopo River, a country where the natives were feeble and disunited, raided on one side by the Matabili and on the other by Gungunhana. This trek would have brought the emigrants into collision with the English settlers who had shortly before entered Mashonaland. President Kruger, however, being pressed by the imperial government, undertook to check the movement, and so far succeeded that the waggons which crossed the Limpopo were but few and were easily turned back. Prevented from expanding to the north, the Boers were all the more eager to acquire Swaziland, a small but rich territory which lies to the east of their Republic, and is inhabited by a warlike Kafir race, numbering about 70,000, near of kin to the Zulus, but for many years hostile to them. Both the Boers and Cetewayo had formerly claimed supremacy over this region. The British government had never admitted the Boer claim, but when the head chief of the Swazis had, by a series of improvident concessions, granted away to adventurers, most of them Boers, nearly all the best land and minerals the country contained, it was found extremely difficult to continue the system of joint administration by the High Commissioner and the Transvaal government which had been provisionally established, and all the more difficult because by the concession to the New Republic (which had by this time become incorporated with the Transvaal) of the part of Zululand which adjoined Swaziland, direct communication between Natal and Swaziland had become difficult, especially in the malarious season. Accordingly, after long negotiations, an arrangement was concluded, in 1894, which placed the Swazi nation and territory under the control of the South African Republic, subject to full guarantees for the protection of the natives. A previous Convention (of 1890) had given the South African Republic certain rights of making a railway to the coast at Kosi Bay through the low and malarious region which lies between Swaziland and the sea, and the earlier negotiations had proceeded on the assumption that these rights were to be adjusted and renewed in the same instrument which was destined to settle the Swaziland question. The Boer government, however, ultimately declined to include such an adjustment in the new Convention, and as this new Convention superseded and extinguished the former one of 1890, those provisions for access to the sea necessarily lapsed. The British government promptly availed itself of the freedom its rivals had thus tendered to it, and with the consent of the three chiefs (of Tonga race) who rule in the region referred to, proclaimed a protectorate over the strip of land which lies between Swaziland and the sea, as far north as the frontiers of Portuguese territory. Thus the door has been finally closed on the schemes which the Boers have so often sought to carry out for the acquisition of a railway communication with the coast entirely under their own control. It was an object unfavourable to the interests of the paramount power, for it would not only have disturbed the commercial relations of the interior with the British coast ports, but would also have favoured the wish of the Boer government to establish political ties with other European powers. The accomplishment of that design was no doubt subjected by the London Convention of 1884 to the veto of Britain. But in diplomacy facts as well as treaties have their force, and a Power which has a seaport, and can fly a flag on the ocean, is in a very different position from one cut off by intervening territories from those whose support it is supposed to seek. Thus the establishment of the protectorate over these petty Tonga chiefs may be justly deemed one of the most important events in recent South African history.

Down to 1884 Great Britain and Portugal had been the only European powers established in South Africa. For some time before that year there had been German mission stations in parts of the region which lies between the Orange River and the West African possessions of Portugal, and in 1883 a Bremen merchant named Lüderitz established a trading factory at the bay of Angra Pequeña, which lies on the Atlantic coast about one hundred and fifty miles north of the mouth of that river, and obtained from a neighbouring chief a cession of a piece of territory there, which the German government a few months later recognized as a German Colony. Five years earlier, in 1878, Walfish Bay, which lies farther north, and is the best haven (or rather roadstead) on the coast, had been annexed to Cape Colony; but though it was generally understood both in the Colony and in England, that the whole of the west coast up to the Portuguese boundary was in some vague way subject to British influence, nothing had been done to claim any distinct right, much less to perfect that right by occupation. The Colony had always declined or omitted to vote money for the purpose, and the home government had not cared to spend any. When the colonists knew that Germany was really establishing herself as their neighbour on the north, they were much annoyed; but it was now too late to resist, and in 1884, after a long correspondence, not creditable to the foresight or promptitude of the late Lord Derby, who was then Colonial Secretary, the protectorate of Germany was formally recognized, while in 1890 the boundaries of the German and British "spheres of influence" farther north were defined by a formal agreement—the same agreement which settled the respective "spheres of influence" of the two powers in Eastern Africa, between the Zambesi and the upper Nile. Although the people of Cape Colony continue to express their regret at having a great European power conterminous with them on the north, there has been really little or no practical contact between the Germans and the colonists, for while the northern part of the Colony, lying along the lower course of the Orange River, is so arid as to be very thinly peopled, the southern part of the German territory, called Great Namaqualand, is a wilderness inhabited only by wandering Hottentots (though parts of it are good pasture land), while, to the east, Namaqualand is separated from the habitable parts of British Bechuanaland by the great Kalahari Desert.

The new impulse for colonial expansion which had prompted the Germans to occupy Damaraland and the Cameroons on the western, and the Zanzibar coasts on the eastern, side of Africa was now telling on other European powers, and made them all join in the scramble for Africa, a continent which a few years before had been deemed worthless. Italy and France entered the field in the north-east, France in the north-west; and Britain, which had in earlier days moved with such slow and wavering steps in the far south, was roused by the competition to a swifter advance. Within nine years from the assumption of the protectorate over British Bechuanaland, which the action of the Boers had brought about in 1885, the whole unappropriated country up to the Zambesi came under British control.