The New Penguin History of the World (151 page)

The crumbling of the Spanish empire so soon after the defection of the thirteen colonies led many people to expect that the other settler colonies of the British Empire would soon throw off the rule of London, too. In a way, this happened, but hardly as had been anticipated. At the end of the nineteenth century, the British magazine
Punch
printed a patriotic cartoon in which the British Lion looked approvingly at rows of little lion-cubs, armed and uniformed, who represented the colonies overseas. They were appropriately dressed as soldiers, for the volunteer contingents sent from other parts of the empire to fight for the British in the war they were then
engaged upon in South Africa were of major importance. A century earlier, no one could have foreseen that a single colonial soldier would be available to the mother country. The year 1783 had burnt deep into the consciousness of British statesmen. Colonies, they thought they had learnt, were tricky things, costing money, conferring few benefits, engaging the metropolitan country in fruitless strife with other powers and native peoples and in the end usually turning around to bite the hand that fed them. The distrust of colonial entanglements which such views engendered helped to swing British imperial interest towards the possibilities of Asian trade at the end of the eighteenth century. It seemed that in the Far East there would be no complications caused by European settlers and in Eastern seas no need for expensive forces which could not easily be met by the Royal Navy.

Broadly speaking, this was to be the prevailing attitude in British official circles during the whole nineteenth century. It led them to tackle the complicated affairs of each colony in ways which sought, above all else, economy and the avoidance of trouble. In the huge spaces of Canada and Australia this led, stormily, to the eventual uniting of the individual colonies in federal structures with responsibility for their own government. In 1867 the Dominion of Canada came into existence, and in 1901 there followed the Commonwealth of Australia. In each case, union had been preceded by the granting of responsible government to the original colonies and in each case there had been special difficulties. In Canada the outstanding one was the existence of a French Canadian community in the province of Quebec, in Australia the clashes of interest between settlers and convicts – of whom the last consignment was delivered in 1867. Each, too, was a huge, thinly populated country, which could only gradually be pulled together to generate a sense of nationality. In each case the process was slow: it was not until 1885 that the last spike was driven on the transcontinental line of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and transcontinental railways in Australia were delayed for a long time by the adoption of different gauges in different states. In the end, nationalism was assisted by the growth of awareness of potential external threats – United States economic strength and Asian immigration – and, of course, by bickering with the British.

New Zealand also achieved responsible government, but one less decentralized, as befitted a much smaller country. Europeans had arrived there from the 1790s onwards and they found a native people, the Maori, with an advanced and complex culture, whom the visitors set about corrupting. Missionaries followed, and did their best to keep out settlers and traders. But they arrived just the same. When it seemed that a French
entrepreneur was likely to establish a French interest, the British government at last reluctantly gave way to the pressure brought upon it by missionaries and some of the settlers and proclaimed British sovereignty in 1840. In 1856 the colony was given responsible government and only wars with the Maoris delayed the withdrawal of British soldiers until 1870. Soon afterwards, the old provinces lost their remaining legislative powers. In the later years of the century, New Zealand governments showed remarkable independence and vigour in the pursuit of advanced social welfare policies and achieved full self-government in 1907.

That was the year after a Colonial Conference in London had decided that the name ‘Dominion’ should in future be used for all the self-governing dependencies, which meant, in effect, the colonies of white settlement. One more remained to be given this status before 1914, the Union of South Africa, which came into existence in 1910. This was the end of a long and unhappy chapter – the unhappiest in the history of the British Empire and one which closed only to open another in the history of Africa which within a few decades looked even more bleak.

No British colonists had settled in South Africa until after 1814, when Great Britain for strategic reasons retained the former Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope. This was called ‘Cape Colony’ and soon there arrived some thousands of British settlers who, though outnumbered by the Dutch, had the backing of the British government in introducing British assumptions and law. This opened a period of whittling away of the privileges of the Boers, as the Dutch farmers were called. In particular, they were excited and irked by any limitation of their freedom to deal with the native African as they wished. Their especial indignation was aroused when, as a result of the general abolition of slavery in British territory, some 35,000 of their blacks were freed with, it was said, inadequate compensation. Convinced that the British would not abandon a policy favourable to the native African – and, given the pressures upon British governments, this was a reasonable view – a great exodus of Boers took place in 1835. This ‘Great Trek’ north across the Orange River was of radical importance in forming the Afrikaner consciousness. It was the beginning of a long period during which Anglo-Saxon and Boer struggled to live sometimes apart, sometimes together, but always uncomfortably, their decisions as they did so dragging in their train others about the fate of the black African.

A Boer republic in Natal was soon made a British colony, in order to protect the Africans from exploitation, and prevent the establishment of a Dutch port which might some day be used by a hostile power to threaten British communications with the Far East. Another exodus of Boers followed, this time north of the Vaal River. This was the first extension of
British territory in South Africa but set a pattern which was to be repeated. Besides humanitarianism, the British government and the British colonists on the spot were stirred by the need to establish good relations with African peoples who would otherwise (as the Zulus had already shown against the Boers) present a continuing security problem (not unlike that posed by Indians in the American colonies in the previous century). By mid-century, there existed two Boer republics in the north (the Orange Free State and the Transvaal), while Cape Colony and Natal were under the British flag, with elected assemblies for which the few black men who met the required economic tests could vote. There were also native states under British protection. In one of these, Basutoland, this actually placed Boers under black jurisdiction, an especially galling subjection for them.

Happy relations were unlikely in these circumstances and, in any case, British governments were often in disagreement with the colonists at the Cape, who, after 1872, had responsible government of their own. New facts arose, too. The discovery of diamonds led to the British annexation of another piece of territory, which, since it lay north of the Orange, angered the Boers. British support for the Basutos, whom the Boers had defeated, was a further irritant. Finally, the governor of Cape Colony committed an act of folly by annexing the Transvaal republic. After a successful Boer rising and a nasty defeat of a British force, the British government had the sense not to persist and restored independence to the republic in 1881, but from this moment Boer distrust of British policy in South Africa was probably insurmountable.

Within twenty years this led to war, largely because of two further unanticipated changes. One was a small-scale industrial revolution in the Transvaal republic, where gold was found in 1886. The result was a huge influx of miners and speculators, the involvement of outside financial interests in the affairs of South Africa, and the possibility that the Afrikaner state might have the financial resources to escape from the British suzerainty it unwillingly accepted. The index of what had happened was Johannesburg, which grew in a few years to become the only city of 100,000 in Africa south of the Zambezi. The second change was that other parts of Africa were being swallowed in the 1880s and 1890s by other European powers and the British government was reacting by stiffening in its determination that nothing must shake the British presence at the Cape, deemed essential to the control of sea routes to the East and increasingly dependent on traffic to and from the Transvaal for its revenues. The general effect was to make British governments view with concern any possibility of the Transvaal obtaining independent access to the Indian Ocean. This concern made them vulnerable to the pressure of an oddly assorted crew of idealistic
imperialists, Cape politicians, English demagogues and shady financiers who provoked a confrontation with the Boers in 1899 which ended in an ultimatum from the Transvaal’s president, Paul Kruger, and the outbreak of the Boer War. Kruger had a deep dislike of the British; as a boy he had gone north on the Great Trek.

The well-known traditions of the British army of Victorian times were amply sustained in the last war of the reign, both in the level of ineptness and incompetence shown by some higher commanders and administrative services and in the gallantry shown by regimental officers and their men in the face of a brave and well-armed enemy whom their training did not prepare them to defeat. But of the outcome there could be no doubt; as the queen herself remarked, with better strategic judgement than some of her subjects, the possibilities of defeat did not exist. South Africa was a theatre isolated by British sea-power; no other European nation could help the Boers and it was only a matter of time before greatly superior numbers and resources were brought to bear upon them. This cost a great deal – over a quarter of a million soldiers were sent to South Africa – and aroused much bitterness in British domestic politics; further, it did not present a very favourable picture to the outside world. The Boers were regarded as an oppressed nationality; so they were, but the nineteenth-century liberal obsession with nationality in this case as in others blinded observers to some of the shadows it cast. Fortunately, British statesmanship recovered itself sufficiently to make a generous treaty to end the war in 1902 when the Boers had been beaten in the field.

This was the end of the Boer republics. But concession rapidly followed; by 1906 the Transvaal had a responsible government of its own, which in spite of the large non-Boer population brought there by mining, the Boers controlled after an electoral victory the following year. Almost at once they began to legislate against Asian immigrants, mainly Indian. (One young Indian lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi, now entered politics as the champion of his community.) When, in 1909, a draft constitution for a South African Union was agreed, it was on terms of equality for the Dutch and English languages and, all-important, it provided for government by an elected assembly to be formed according to the electoral regulations decided in each province. In the Boer provinces the franchise was confined to white men.

At the time, there was much to be said for the settlement. When people then spoke of a ‘racial problem’ in South Africa they meant the problem of relations between the British and Boers, whose conciliation seemed the most urgent need. The defects of the settlement would take some time to appear. When they did it would be not only because the historical sense
of the Afrikaner proved to be tougher than people had hoped, but also because the transformation of South African society which had begun with the industrialization of the Rand could not be halted and would give irresistible momentum to the issue of the black Africans.

In this respect, South Africa’s future had been just as decisively influenced as had those of all the other British white dominions by being caught up in the trends of the whole world economy. Canada, like the United States, had become, with the building of the railroads on her plains, one of the great granaries of Europe. Australia and New Zealand first exploited their huge pastures to produce the wool for which European factories were increasingly in the market; then, with the invention of refrigeration, they used them for meat and, in the case of New Zealand, dairy produce. In this way these new nations found staples able to sustain economies much greater than those permitted by the tobacco and indigo of the seventeenth-century plantations. The case of South Africa was to be different in that she was to reveal herself only gradually (as much later would Australia) as a producer of minerals. The beginning of this was the diamond industry, but the great step forward was the Rand gold discovery of the 1880s. The exploitation of this sucked in capital and expertise to make possible the eventual exploitation of other minerals. The return which South Africa provided was not merely in the profits of European companies and shareholders, but also an augmentation of the world’s gold supply, which stimulated European commerce much as had done the California discoveries of 1849.

The growth of humanitarian and missionary sentiment in England and the well-founded Colonial Office tradition of distrust of settler demands made it harder to forget the native populations of the white dominions than it had been for Americans to sweep aside the Plains Indians. Yet in several of the British colonies, modernity made its impact not upon ancient civilizations like those of India or South America but on primitive societies, some of which were at a very low stage of achievement indeed, Neolithic if not Palaeolithic, and correspondingly vulnerable. The Canadian Indians and Eskimos were relatively few and presented no such important obstacle to the exploitation of the west and north-west as had done the Plains Indians’ struggle to keep their hunting-grounds. The story in Australia was far bloodier. The hunting and gathering society of the aborigine was disrupted by settlement, tribes were antagonized and provoked into violence by the uncomprehending brutality of the white Australians, and new diseases cut fast into their numbers. The early decades of each Australian colony are stained by the blood of massacred aborigines; their later years are notorious for the neglect, bullying and exploitation of the survivors.
There is perhaps no other population inside former British territory which underwent a fate so like that of the North American Indian. In New Zealand, the arrival of the first white men brought guns to the Maori, who employed them first on one another, with disruptive effects upon their societies. Later came wars with the government, whose essential origin lay in the settlers’ displacement of the Maori from their lands. At their conclusion, the government took steps to safeguard these tribal lands from further expropriation, but the introduction of English notions of individual ownership led to the disintegration of the tribal holdings and the virtual loss of their lands by the end of the century. The Maoris, too, declined in numbers, but not so violently or irreversibly as did the Australian aborigines. There are now many more Maoris than in 1900 and their numbers grow faster than those of New Zealanders of European stock.