An African Adventure Part 1

An African Adventure.

by Isaac F. Marcosson.

FOREWORD

From earliest boyhood when I read the works of Henry M. Stanley and books about Cecil Rhodes, Africa has called to me. It was not until I met General s.m.u.ts during the Great War, however, that I had a definite reason for going there.

After these late years of blood and battle America and Europe seemed tame. Besides, the economic war after the war developed into a struggle as bitter as the actual physical conflict. Discord and discontent became the portion of the civilized world. I wanted to get as far as possible from all this social unrest and financial dislocation.

So much interest was evinced in the magazine articles which first set forth the record of my journey that I was prompted to expand them into this book. It may enable the reader to discover a section of the one-time Dark Continent without the hardships which I experienced.

I. F. M.

NEW YORK, _April, 1921_

AN AFRICAN ADVENTURE

CHAPTER I--s.m.u.tS

I

Turn the searchlight on the political and economic chaos that has followed the Great War and you find a surprising lack of real leadership. Out of the mists that enshroud the world welter only three commanding personalities emerge. In England Lloyd George survives amid the storm of party clash and Irish discord. Down in Greece Venizelos, despite defeat, remains an impressive figure of high ideals and uncompromising patriotism. Off in South Africa s.m.u.ts gives fresh evidence of his vision and authority.

Although he was Britain's princ.i.p.al prop during the years of agony and disaster, Lloyd George is, in the last a.n.a.lysis, merely an eloquent and spectacular politician with the genius of opportunism. One reason why he holds his post is that there is no one to take his place,--another commentary on the paucity of greatness. There is no visible heir to Venizelos. Besides, Greece is a small country without international touch and interest. s.m.u.ts, youngest of the trio, looms up as the most brilliant statesman of his day and his career has just entered upon a new phase.

He is the dominating actor in a drama that not only affects the destiny of the whole British Empire, but has significance for every civilized nation. The quality of striking contrast has always been his. The one-time Boer General, who fought Roberts and Kitchener twenty years ago, is battling with equal tenacity for the integrity of the Imperial Union born of that war. Not in all history perhaps, is revealed a more picturesque situation than obtains in South Africa today. You have the whole Nationalist movement crystallized into a single compelling episode. In a word, it is contemporary Ireland duplicated without violence and extremism.

I met General s.m.u.ts often during the Great War. He stood out as the most intellectually alert, and in some respects the most distinguished figure among the array of nation-guiders with whom I talked, and I interviewed them all. I saw him as he sat in the British War Cabinet when the German hosts were sweeping across the Western Front, and when the German submarines were making a shambles of the high seas. I heard him speak with persuasive force on public occasions and he was like a beacon in the gloom. He had come to England in 1917 as the representative of General Botha, the Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, to attend the Imperial Conference and to remain a comparatively short time.

So great was the need of him that he did not go home until after the Peace had been signed. He signed the Treaty under protest because he believed it was uneconomic and it has developed into the irritant that he prophesied it would be.

In those war days when we foregathered, s.m.u.ts often talked of "the world that would be." The real Father of the League of Nations idea, he believed that out of the immense travail would develop a larger fraternity, economically sound and without sentimentality. It was a great and yet a practical dream.

More than once he asked me to come to South Africa. I needed little urging. From my boyhood the land of Cecil Rhodes has always held a lure for me. s.m.u.ts invested it with fresh interest. So I went.

The s.m.u.ts that I found at close range on his native heath, wearing the mantle of the departed Botha, carrying on a Government with a minority, and with the shadow of an internecine war brooding on the horizon, was the same serene, clear-thinking strategist who had raised his voice in the Allied Councils. Then the enemy was the German and the task was to destroy the menace of militarism. Now it was his own unreconstructed Boer--blood of his blood,--and behind that Boer the larger problem of a rent and dissatisfied universe, waging peace as bitterly as it waged war. s.m.u.ts the dreamer was again s.m.u.ts the fighter, with the fight of his life on his hands.

Thus it came about that I found myself in Capetown. Everybody goes out to South Africa from England on those Union Castle boats so familiar to all readers of English novels. Like the P. & O. vessels that Kipling wrote about in his Indian stories, they are among the favorite first aids to the makers of fiction. Hosts of heroes in books--and some in real life--sail each year to their romantic fate aboard them.

It was the first day of the South African winter when I arrived, but back in America spring was in full bloom. I looked out on the same view that had thrilled the Portuguese adventurers of the fifteenth century when they swept for the first time into Table Bay. Behind the harbor rose Table Mountain and stretching from it downward to the sea was a land with verdure clad and aglare with the African sun that was to scorch my paths for months to come.

Capetown nestles at the foot of a vast flat-topped ma.s.s of granite unique among the natural elevations of the world. She is another melting pot. Here mingle Kaffir and Boer, Basuto and Britisher, East Indian and Zulu. The hardy rancher and fortune-hunter from the North Country rub shoulders with the globe-trotter. In the bustling streets modern taxicabs vie for s.p.a.ce with antiquated hansoms bearing names like "Never Say Die," "Home Sweet Home," or "Honeysuckle." All the horse-drawn public vehicles have names.

You get a familiar feel of America in this South African country and especially in the Cape Colony, which is a place of fruits, flowers and sunshine resembling California. There is the sense of newness in the atmosphere, and something of the abandon that you encounter among the people of Australia and certain parts of Canada. It comes from life spent in the open and the spirit of pioneering that within a comparatively short time has wrested a huge domain from the savage.

What strikes the observer at once is the sharp conflict of race, first, between black and white, and then, between Briton and Boer. South of the Zambesi River,--and this includes Rhodesia and the Union of South Africa,--the native outnumbers the white more than six to one and he is increasing at a much greater rate than the European. Hence you have an inevitable conflict. Race lies at the root of the South African trouble and the racial reconciliation that Rhodes and Botha set their hopes upon remains an elusive quant.i.ty.

I got a hint of what s.m.u.ts was up against the moment I arrived. I had cabled him of my coming and he sent an orderly to the steamer with a note of welcome and inviting me to lunch with him at the House of Parliament the next day. In the letter, among other things he said: "You will find this a really interesting country, full of curious problems."

How curious they were I was soon to find out.

I called for him at his modest book-lined office in a street behind the Parliament Buildings and we walked together to the House. Heretofore I had only seen him in the uniform of a Lieutenant General in the British Army. Now he wore a loose-fitting lounge suit and a slouch hat was jammed down on his head. In the change from khaki to mufti--and few men can stand up under this transition without losing some of the character of their personal appearance,--he remained a striking figure. There is something wistful in his face--an indescribable look that projects itself not only through you but beyond. It is not exactly preoccupation but a highly developed concentration. This look seemed to be enhanced by the ordeal through which he was then pa.s.sing. In his springy walk was a suggestion of pugnacity. His whole manner was that of a man in action and who exults in it. Roosevelt had the same characteristic but he displayed it with much more animation and strenuosity.

We sat down in the crowded dining room of the House of Parliament where the Prime Minister had invited a group of Cabinet Ministers and leading business men of Capetown. Around us seethed a noisy swirl which reflected the turmoil of the South African political situation.

Parliament had just convened after an historic election in which the Nationalists, the bitter antagonists of Botha and s.m.u.ts, had elected a majority of representatives for the first time. s.m.u.ts was hanging on to the Premiership by his teeth. A sharp division of vote, likely at any moment, would have overthrown the Government. It meant a regime hostile to Britain that carried with it secession and the remote possibility of civil war.

In that restaurant, as throughout the whole Union, s.m.u.ts was at that moment literally the observed of all observers. Far off in London the powers-that-be were praying that this blonde and bearded Boer could successfully man the imperial breach. Yet he sat there smiling and unafraid and the company that he had a.s.sembled discussed a variety of subjects that ranged from the fall in exchange to the possibilities of the wheat crop in America.

The luncheon was the first of various meetings with s.m.u.ts. Some were amid the tumult of debate or in the shadow of the legislative halls, others out in the country at _Groote Schuur_, the Prime Minister's residence, where we walked amid the gardens that Cecil Rhodes loved, or sat in the rooms where the Colossus "thought in terms of continents." It was a liberal education.

Before we can go into what s.m.u.ts said during these interviews it is important to know briefly the whole approach to the crowded hour that made the fullest test of his resource and statesmanship. Clearly to understand it you must first know something about the Boer and his long stubborn struggle for independence which ended, for a time at least, in the battle and blood of the Boer War.

Capetown, the melting pot, is merely a miniature of the larger boiling cauldron of race which is the Union of South Africa. In America we also have an astonishing mixture of bloods but with the exception of the Bolshevists and other radical uplifters, our population is loyally dedicated to the American flag and the inst.i.tutions it represents. With us Latin, Slav, Celt, and Saxon have blended the strain that proved its mettle as "Americans All" under the Stars and Stripes in France. We have given succor and sanctuary to the oppressed of many lands and these foreign elements, in the main, have not only been grateful but have proved to be distinct a.s.sets in our national expansion. We are a merged people.

With South Africa the situation is somewhat different. The roots of civilization there were planted by the Dutch in the days of the Dutch East India Company when Holland was a world power. The Dutchman is a tenacious and stubborn person. Although the Huguenots emigrated to the Cape in considerable force in the seventeenth century and intermarried with the transplanted Hollanders, the Dutch strain, and with it the Dutch characteristics predominated. They have shaped South African history ever since. This is why the Boer is still referred to in popular parlance as "a Dutchman."

The Dutch have always been a proud and liberty-loving people, as the Duke of Alva and the Spaniard learned to their cost. This inherited desire for freedom has flamed in the hearts of the Boers. In the early African day they preferred to journey on to the wild and unknown places rather than sacrifice their independence. What is known as "The Great Trek" of the thirties, which opened up the Transvaal and subsequently the Orange Free State and Natal, was due entirely to unrest among the Cape Boers. There is something of the epic in the narrative of those doughty, psalm-singing trekkers who, like the Mormons in the American West, went forth in their canvas-covered wagons with a rifle in one hand and the Bible in the other. They fought the savage, endured untold hardships, and met fate with a grim smile on their lips. It took Britain nearly three costly years to subdue their descendants, an untrained army of farmers.

A revelation of the Boer character, therefore, is an index to the South African tangle. His enemies call the Boer "a combination of cunning and childishness." As a matter of fact the Boer is distinct among individualists. "Oom Paul" Kruger was a type. A fairly familiar story will concretely ill.u.s.trate what lies within and behind the race. On one occasion his thumb was nearly severed in an accident. With his pocket-knife he cut off the finger, bound up the wound with a rag, and went about his business.

The old Boer--and the type survives--was a Puritan who loved his five-thousand-acre farm where he could neither see nor hear his neighbors, who read the Good Word three times a day, drank prodigious quant.i.ties of coffee, spoke "_taal_" the Dutch dialect, and reared a huge family. Botha, for example, was one of thirteen children, and his father lamented to his dying day that he had not done his full duty by his country!

Isolation was the Boer fetich. This instinct for aloofness,--princ.i.p.ally racial,--animates the sincere wing of the Nationalist Party today. Men like Botha and s.m.u.ts and their followers adapted themselves to a.s.similation but there remained the "bitter-end" element that rebelled in arms against the const.i.tuted authority in 1914 and had to be put down with merciless hand. This element now seeks to achieve through more peaceful ends what it sought to do by force the moment Britain became involved in the Great War. The reason for the revolt of 1914, in a paragraph, was Britain's far-flung call to arms. The unreconstructed Boers refused to fight for the Power that humbled them in 1902. They seized the moment to make a try for what they called "emanc.i.p.ation."

To go back for a moment, when the British conquered the Cape and thousands of Englishmen streamed out to Africa to make their fortunes, the Boer at once bristled with resentment. His isolation was menaced. He regarded the Briton as an "_Uitlander_"--an outsider--and treated him as an undesirable alien. In the Transvaal and the Orange Free State he was denied the rights that are accorded to law-abiding citizens in other countries. Hence the Jameson Raid, which was an ill-starred protest against the narrow, copper-riveted Boer rule, and later the final and sanguinary show-down in the Boer War, which ended the dream of Boer independence.

In 1910 was established the Union of South Africa, comprising the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, Natal and the Cape Colony which obtained responsible government and which is to all intents and purposes a dominion as free as Australia or Canada. England sends out a Governor-General, usually a high-placed and t.i.tled person but he is a be-medalled figure-head,--an ornamental feature of the landscape. His princ.i.p.al labours are to open fairs, attend funerals, preside at harmless gatherings, and bestow decorations upon worthy persons. First Botha, and later s.m.u.ts, have been the real rulers of the country.

The Union Const.i.tution decreed that bi-lingualism must prevail. As a result every public notice, doc.u.ment, and time-table is printed in both English and Dutch. The tie of language is a strong one and this eternal and unuttered presence of the "_taal_" has been an a.s.set for the Nationalists to exploit. It is a link with the days of independence.

Following the Boer War came a sharp cleavage among the Boers. That great farm-bred soldier and statesman, Louis Botha, accepted the verdict and became the leader of what might be called a reconciled reconstruction.

Firm in the belief that the future of South Africa was greater than the smaller and selfish issue of racial pride and prejudice, he rallied his open-minded and far-seeing countrymen around him. Out of this group developed the South African Party which remains the party of the Dutch loyal to British rule. To quote the program of principles, "Its political object is the development of a South African spirit of national unity and self-reliance through the attainment of the lasting union of the various sections of the people."

Botha was made Premier of the Transvaal as soon as the Colony was granted self-government and with the accomplishment of Union was named Prime Minister of the Federation. The first man that he called to the standard of the new order to become his Colonial Minister, or more technically, Minister of the Interior, was s.m.u.ts, who had left his law office in Johannesburg to fight the English in 1900 and who displayed the same consummate strategy in the field that he has since shown in Cabinet meeting and Legislative forum. With peace he returned to law but not for long. Now began his political career--he has held public office continuously ever since--that is a vital part of the modern history of South Africa.

In the years immediately following Union the genius of Botha had full play. He wrought a miracle of evolution. Under his influence the land which still bore the scars of war was turned to plenty. He was a farmer and he bent his energy and leadership to the rebuilding of the shattered commonwealths. Their hope lay in the soil. His right arm was s.m.u.ts, who became successively Minister of Finance and Minister of Public Defense.

The belief that reconciliation had dawned was rudely disturbed when the Great War crashed into civilization. The extreme Nationalists rebelled and it was Botha, aided by s.m.u.ts, who crushed them. Beyers, the ringleader, was drowned while trying to escape across the Vaal River, DeWet was defeated in the field, De la Rey was accidentally shot, and Maritz became a fugitive. Botha then conquered the Germans in German South-West Africa and s.m.u.ts subsequently took over the command of the Allied Forces in German East Africa. When Botha died in 1919 s.m.u.ts not only a.s.sumed the Premiership of the Union but he also inherited the bitter enmity that General J. B. M. Hertzog bore towards his lamented Chief.

Now we come to the crux of the whole business, past and present. Who is Hertzog and what does he stand for?

If you look at your history of the Boer War you will see that one of the first Dutch Generals to take the field and one of the last to leave it was Hertzog, an Orange Free State lawyer who had won distinction on the Bench. He helped to frame the Union Const.i.tution and on the day he signed it, declared that it was a distinct epoch in his life. A Boer of the Boers, he seemed to catch for the moment, the contagion that radiated from Botha and spelled a Greater South Africa.

Botha made him Minister of Justice and all was well. But deep down in his heart Hertzog remained unrepentant. When the question of South Africa's contribution to the Imperial Navy came up in 1912 he fought it tooth and nail. In fiery utterances attacking the Government he denounced Botha as a jingoist and an imperialist. Just about this time he made the famous speech in which he stated his ideal of South Africa.