The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (30 page)

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Authors: III H. W. Crocker

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More problematic was the white tribe of South Africa, the Boers. They had fought with the British against the Zulu, but they still yearned to be free from the British yoke, if yoke it was. There were only 3,000 British troops in the entire Transvaal, an area of roughly 110,000 square miles. It wasn't a matter of oppression so much as it was a matter of the incompatibility of two exceedingly different peoples—the imperial British, who believed they held Heaven's command, and the dour, leathery, Old Testament-thumping, stiff-necked Afrikaners whose entire imagination was suffused with the idea of the frontier, the independent farmer, and of being answerable to no one but God.
Zulu Dawn
“What a wonderful people! They beat our generals, they convert our bishops, and they write ‘finis' to a French dynasty.”
 
Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli on the disaster of Isandhlwana, the pro-Zulu agitation of the liberal Anglican Bishop John William Colenso, and the death in battle of the only son and heir of Napoleon III, a commissioned lieutenant in the British army, quoted in Andre Maurois,
Disraeli: A Picture of the Victorian Age
(The Modern Library, 1955), p. 339
In 1880, led by Paul Kruger—the craggy, heavy-set former vice president of the South African Republic—they rebelled; their first action being a massacre of Connaught Rangers who thought they were marching through a peaceful Transvaal. No more: the Boer was in the saddle and a gun was in his hand, and in a matter of three months he had retaken the Transvaal for himself. The British had been bewildered and besieged, and the Gladstone government, with no stomach for a fight, agreed to a self-governing Transvaal still under the Crown and nominal British supervision, including authority over the blacks whom the British deemed in need of protection.
The Boer War
The patchwork peace lasted nearly two decades. When it was undone it was with far greater violence than anything that had happened before. It wasn't a campaign against a tribe; it was a full-scale war between two European armies. The war was sparked by the Boers' refusal to give voting rights to the British in the Transvaal (unless they were residents for increasing periods of time, reaching fourteen years in 1890) and other challenges to Britain's claim to be the paramount power in South Africa. It was the old issue revisited: the British believed in their divine right to rule, and the Boers wanted no part of it, preferring their own Boerish republic (which happened to be well-seeded with gold and diamonds that attracted
uitlanders
). Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain and South African High Commissioner Alfred Milner pressed the case for war, and precipitated it by getting the government to renounce recognition of the Transvaal as an independent state. Paul Kruger responded by demanding that the British drop all claims on the Transvaal and setting a deadline for the British to agree. They did not, and on 11 October 1899, the Boers invaded Natal and the Cape Colony.
The commander in chief of the Cape Colony was General William Blunt, who had thought war against the Boers was unnecessary and imprudent—and as he had no orders to prepare for war, he had not. He was relieved of command, and the British troops were led by General Sir Redvers Buller. Buller appeared to have all the necessary bona fides—he had fought in China and Canada, and battled the Ashantis in West Africa, the Zulus in South Africa, and the Dervishes in the Sudan. But against the Boers he came a cropper. The British were besieged at Ladysmith, Kimberly, and Mafeking. In combat against the Boers, British commanders proved far too fond of frontal assaults. Boer tactics, on the contrary, counted on entrenching and blasting the gallant British infantry with powerful Mauser rifles. If the British ever got too close, the Boers simply mounted their ponies and galloped away. The result was a series of bloody British defeats and mounting British frustration, cheered on by much of the rest of the world, which sympathized with the Boers' defiance and their twisting of the lion's tail.
Imperial Colossus
Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902) was a self-made multi-millionaire who lent his name to a country (Rhodesia), the Rhodes scholarship (perhaps the most famous in the world), and created the mighty De Beers mining company. Like so many empire-builders, he was the son of a clergyman. A sickly child—he was asthmatic—he was sent to South Africa in the hope that the climate would help him. It did well enough that he became a diamond miner and purchaser of mines—interrupting his burgeoning business dealings only to attend Oxford. He followed his business success with political ambitions, becoming governor of the Cape Colony, from which position he had to resign after attempting to overthrow the government of the Transvaal in 1895 in a misadventure known as the Jameson Raid. His goal was to paint East Africa British imperial red from Cape to Cairo. Leftists who make him out to be an imperialist monster need to come to grips with the fact that he was a political liberal (he even favored Irish nationalism as long as it was maintained under the big tent of empire); as a member of the Progressive Party he stood by the slogan of “equal rights to every civilized man south of the Zambesi” (however much he was prone to think of blacks in terms of a laboring class that needed paternal direction); was an early conservationist; and if not in favor of world government, favored an imperial federation and an imperial parliament that would bring together the English-speaking peoples in a united cause. And of course that's the problem—the left does not believe in “Anglo-Saxon” values and civilization and its mission to the world, as Rhodes did: God, he believed, “is manifestly fashioning the English-speaking race as the chosen instrument by which He will bring in a state of society based upon Justice, Liberty, and Peace.” God, he said, would want him “to paint as much of the map of Africa British red as possible, and to do what I can elsewhere to promote the unity and extend the influence of the English-speaking race.”
a
He is buried in the African hills he loved, in the country that was Rhodesia.
The British needed a new commander to rescue the day and found one in Field Marshal Lord Roberts, known as “Little Bobs,” a five-foot-three bantam who had fought successfully in India, Abyssinia, and Afghanistan. Bobs turned the whole war around, relieving the besieged cities. The relief of Mafeking after 217 days (on 17 May 1900) was celebrated in England with more huzzahs and banners and streamers and parades and massed cheering than the wildest Hogmanay—though it was a town of only a little more than 8,000 people, 7,000 of them blacks. The defense had been led by Colonel Robert Baden-Powell—the Boy Scouts' founder who seemed to be an overgrown boy himself—he had kept up spirits with amateur theatricals (he liked that sort of thing).
Elsewhere, in swift strokes, Bobs captured the Boer towns, and on 5 June 1900 seized the Boer capital of Pretoria. Kruger scuttled off into exile, and by October it seemed peace was at hand. Bobs returned to England and left his second-in-command Lord Kitchener to do the mopping up, which proved to be an arduous and ugly business, involving the holding of Boer families in concentration camps, the burning of their farms, and the hunting down of Boer guerrillas. The final treaty ending the war—the Treaty of Vereeniging—was not reached until 31 May 1902.
South Africa was officially unified in 1910 as a British dominion (putting it on the same level of status and self-government as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). The former Afrikaner republics retained a good deal of autonomy, proved resistant to British efforts to Anglicize them, and were politically powerful, though the Boers, as farmers, tended to be much poorer than the British who dominated industry. Largely black African areas—Basutoland, Bechuanaland, and Swaziland—were British protectorates. Rhodesia—then comprising Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Southern
Rhodesia (Zimbabwe)—was governed by Cecil Rhodes's British South African Company until 1923, when Northern Rhodesia became a protectorate and Southern Rhodesia became a largely self-governing colony.
South Africa fought at Britain's side in both world wars—though there was pro-German sentiment among a large number of Afrikaners. Jan Smuts—who had fought against the British in the Boer War—not only became a British field marshal and close confidant of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in World War II, but was a leader in the creation of both the League of Nations and the United Nations. He was also a Zionist, and a supporter of South Africa's large Jewish minority. Twice prime minister of South Africa (latterly from 1939 to 1948), he lost the 1948 election largely because of his support for dismantling some of the segregationist laws that had been built up over the decades—a sign that Smuts was becoming too British for his own good, as the British, though complicit in racially discriminatory legislation, were generally more liberal on racial issues than the Afrikaners.
After the 1948 election, the victorious National Party began building the system known as apartheid, with its complexity of racial classifications and laws, which made South Africa an irritant to the British Commonwealth, from which it exiled itself in 1961, becoming a republic. From then until the collapse of the apartheid regime in 1994 and the introduction of one-man, one-vote elections, South Africa was an international pariah. It was also, however, an embarrassment to the rest of Africa in a different way. While other African nations were failing, South Africa was a regional superpower, an economic colossus (in African terms at least), and, despite its harsh racial laws, a recipient of large numbers of African illegal immigrants who preferred the racial discrimination of South Africa to the oppression, corruption, violence, and economic regression of independent sub-Saharan Africa. If nothing else, the British had provided a political and
economic model—and the colonists to make it work—that gave South Africa an enormous leg up over the rest of the continent.
The Wind of Change
On 3 February 1960, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan delivered a speech in Cape Town that reverberated the length of British Africa; it became known as “The Wind of Change” speech, from these lines: “The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.” The speech was largely a call for South Africa “to create a society which respects the rights of individuals, a society in which men are given the opportunity to grow to their full stature—and that must in our view include the opportunity to have an increasing share in political power and responsibility, a society in which individual merit and individual merit alone is the criterion for a man's advancement. . . .”
9
While the speech was greeted positively in South Africa at the time, it was immediately seen elsewhere as striking a blow for decolonization and majority rule—including in British East Africa. Macmillan's premiership coincided with the end of the Mau-Mau insurgency in Kenya, which had been a combination of Kikuyu tribal civil war, anti-colonial struggle, and—as it was seen in much of the Western press—an outbreak of savage barbarism against British settlers. With the Mau-Mau defeated, it appeared Kenya's colonial future might be at an end.
Britain's interest in East Africa was nominal at first. The Royal Navy might sail its coasts looking for slavers, missionaries and explorers might investigate it, but it was not until 1886 that Uganda and Kenya became Britain's responsibility, and even then the British government's chief interest was combating the slave trade, limiting German expansion in the area,
and defending Egypt by controlling the source of the Nile. The Imperial British East Africa Company was established in 1888. In Uganda it had to navigate politics riven by Catholic, Protestant, and Arab-Muslim factions. In Kenya, things were simpler, but nevertheless the Company was dissolved, free trade imposed, and in 1895 the British government created the British East Africa Protectorate.
Jomo Kenyatta on the Mau-Mau
“We are determined to have independence in peace, and we shall not allow hooligans to rule Kenya. We must have no hatred towards one another. Mau-Mau was a disease which had been eradicated, and must never be remembered again.”
 
Jomo Kenyatta 1962, quoted in Robert B. Edgerton,
Mau Mau: An African Crucible
(The Free Press, 1989), p. 216; Kenyatta was the “founding father” and first president (1964–78) of independent Kenya
One of its first orders of business was building a railway from Mombasa into the interior, all the way to Uganda, a project that had to fight through tsetse country, lion attacks, and a sometimes arid landscape parched of water. Indian workers, who were considered far more reliable and skilled than the Africans, were imported to work on the railway construction. White settlers arrived too; for them, Kenya was an ideal land for enormous tea, coffee, and other plantations. The white farmers worked extraordinarily hard—the soil was good, but they were developing a country from scratch and had to defeat exotic tropical pests.

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