Lord Milner's Work in South Africa Part 1

Lord Milner's Work in South Africa.

by W. Basil Worsfold.

PREFACE

In sending this book to press I have only two remarks to make by way of preface.

The first is wholly personal. It has been my good fortune to reside twice for a considerable period in South Africa--first in the neighbourhood of Capetown (1883-5), and afterwards in Johannesburg (1904-5). During these periods of residence, and also during the long interval between them, I have been brought into personal contact with many of the princ.i.p.al actors in the events which are related in this book. While, therefore, no pains have been spared to secure accuracy by a careful study of official papers and other reliable publications, my information is not derived by any means exclusively from these sources.

My second remark is the expression of a hope that the contents of this book may be regarded not merely as a chapter of history, but also as a body of facts essential to the full understanding of the circ.u.mstances and conditions of South Africa, as it is to-day. Since the restoration of peace--an event not yet five years old--a great change has been wrought in the political and economic framework of this province of the empire. None the less, with a few conspicuous exceptions, almost all of the princ.i.p.al actors in these pages are still there; and, presumably, they are very much the same men now as they were before, and during, the war. And in this connection it remains to notice an aspect of the South African struggle which transcends all others in fruitfulness and importance. It was a struggle to keep South Africa not a dependency of Great Britain, but a part of the empire. The over-sea Britains, understanding it in this sense, took their share in it. They made their voices heard in the settlement. The service which they thus collectively performed was great. It would have been infinitely greater if they had been directly represented in an administration nominally common to them and the mother country. No political system can be endowed with effective unity--with that organic unity which is the only effective unity--unless it is possessed of a single vehicle of thought and action. To create this vehicle--an administrative body in which all parts of the empire would be duly represented--is difficult to-day. The forces of disunion, which are at work both at home and beyond the seas, may make it impossible to-morrow.

W. B. W.

RIDGE, NEAR CAPEL, SURREY, _October 19th, 1906_

LORD MILNER

CHAPTER I

DOWNING STREET AND THE MAN ON THE SPOT

The failure of British administration in South Africa during the nineteenth century forms a blemish upon the record of the Victorian era that is at first sight difficult to understand. If success could be won in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, in India and in Egypt, why failure in South Africa? For failure it was. A century of wars, missionary effort, British expansion, industrial development, of lofty administrative ideals and great men sacrificed, had left the two European races with political ambitions so antagonistic, and social differences so bitter, that nothing less than the combined military resources of the colonies and the mother-country sufficed to compel the Dutch to recognise the British principle of "equal rights for all white men south of the Zambesi." Among the many contributory causes of failure that can be distinguished, the two most prominent are the nationality difficulty and the native question. But these are problems of administration that have been solved elsewhere: the former in Canada and the latter in India. Or, to turn to agencies of a different order, is the cause of failure to be found in a grudging nature--the existence of physical conditions that made it difficult for the white man, or for the white and coloured man together, to wring a livelihood from the soil? The answer is that the like material disadvantages have been conquered in Australia, India, and in Egypt, by Anglo-Saxon energy. We might apply the Socratic method throughout, traversing the entire range of our distinguishable causes; but in every case the inquiry would reveal success in some other portion of the Anglo-Saxon domain to darken failure in South Africa.

Nevertheless, in so far as any single influence can be a.s.signed to render intelligible a result brought about by many agencies, various in themselves and operating from time to time in varying degrees, the explanation is to be found in a little incident that happened in the second year of the Dutch East India Company's settlement at the Cape of Good Hope. The facts are preserved for us by the diary which Commander Van Riebeck was ordered to keep for the information of his employers. Under the date October 19th, 1653, we read that David Janssen, a herdsman, was found lying dead of a.s.segai wounds, inflicted by the Beechranger Hottentots, while the cattle placed under his charge were seen disappearing round the curve of the Lion's Head. The theft had been successfully accomplished through the perfidy of a certain "Harry," a Hottentot chief, who was living on terms of friendship with the Dutch--a circ.u.mstance which was sufficiently apparent from the fact that the raid was timed to take place at an hour on Sunday morning when the whole of the little community, with the exception of two sentinels and a second herdsman, were a.s.sembled to hear a sermon from the "Sick-Comforter," Wylant. It was the first conflict between the Dutch and the natives; for Van Riebeck had been bidden, for various excellent reasons, to keep on good terms with the Hottentots, and to treat them kindly. But the murder of a white man was a serious matter. Kindness scarcely seemed to meet the case; and so Van Riebeck applied to the Directors, the famous Chamber of Seventeen, for definite instructions as to the course which he must pursue.

[Sidenote: Van Riebeck's difficulty.]

He was told that only the actual murderer of David Janssen (if apprehended) was to be put to death; that cattle equal in amount to the cattle stolen were to be recovered, but only from the actual robbers; and that "Harry," if necessary, should be sent to prison at Batavia. But he was not otherwise to molest or injure the offending Hottentots. Excellent advice, and such as we should expect from the countrymen of Grotius in their most prosperous era. But unfortunately it was quite impossible for Van Riebeck, with his handful of soldiers and sailors, planted at the extremity of the great barbaric continent of Africa, to think of putting it into effect. He replied that he had no means of identifying the individual wrong-doers, and that the inst.i.tution of private property was unknown among the Hottentots. The only method by which the individual could be punished was by punishing the tribe, and he therefore proposed to capture the tribe and their cattle. But this was a course of action which was repugnant to the Directors' sense of justice. It aroused, besides, a vision of reinforcements ordered from Batavia, and of disburs.e.m.e.nts quite disproportionate to the practical utility of the Cape station as an item in the system of the Company. In vain Van Riebeck urged that a large body of slaves and ten or twelve hundred head of cattle would be a great addition to the resources of the settlement. The Chamber of Seventeen refused to sanction the proposals of the commander, and, as its own were impracticable, nothing was done. The Beechranger tribe escaped with impunity, and the Hottentots, as a whole, were emboldened to make fresh attacks upon the European settlers.

[Sidenote: The Afrikander stock.]

This simple narrative is a lantern that sheds a ray of light upon an obscure subject. Two points are noticeable in the att.i.tude of the home authority. First, there is its inability to grasp the local conditions; and second, the underlying a.s.sumption that a moral judgment based upon the conditions of the home country, if valid, must be equally valid in South Africa. By the time that the home authority had become Downing Street instead of the peripatetic Chamber of Seventeen, the field of mischievous action over which these misconceptions operated had become enlarged. The natives were there, as before; but, in addition to the natives, there had grown up a population of European descent, some thirty thousand in number, whose manner of life and standards of thought and conduct were scarcely more intelligible to the British, or indeed to the European mind, than those of the yellow-skinned Hottentot or the brown-skinned Kafir. A century and a half of the Dutch East India Company's government--a government "in all things political purely despotic, in all things commercial purely monopolist"--had produced a people unlike any other European community on the face of the earth. Of the small original stock from which the South African Dutch are descended, one-quarter were Huguenot refugees from France, an appreciable section were German, and the inst.i.tution of slavery had added to this admixture the inevitable strain of non-Aryan blood. But this racial change was by no means all that separated the European population in the Cape Colony from the Dutch of Holland. A more potent agency had been at work. The corner-stone of the policy of the Dutch East India Company was the determination to debar the settlers from all intercourse--social, intellectual, commercial, and political--with their kinsmen in Europe.

One fact will suffice to show how perfectly this object was attained.

Incredible as it may seem, it is the case that at the end of the eighteenth century no printing-press was to be found in the Cape Colony, nor had this community of twenty thousand Europeans the means of knowing the nature of the laws and regulations of the Government by which it was ruled. So long and complete an isolation from European civilisation produced a result which is as remarkable in itself as it is significant to the student of South African history. This phenomenon was the existence, in the nineteenth century, of a community of European blood whose moral and intellectual standards were those of the seventeenth.

[Sidenote: The nationality difficulty.]

Our dip into the early history of South Africa is not purposeless. It does not, of course, explain the failure of British administration; but it brings us into touch with circ.u.mstances that were bound to make the task of governing the Cape Colony--a task finally undertaken by England in 1806--one of peculiar difficulty. The native population was strange, but the European population was even more strange and abnormal. If we had been left to deal with the native population alone we should have experienced no serious difficulty in rendering them harmless neighbours, and have been able to choose our own time for entering upon the responsibilities involved in the administration of their territories. But, coming second on the field, we were bound to modify our native policy to suit the conditions of a preexisting relationship between the white and black races that was not of our creation, and one, moreover, that was in many respects repugnant to British ideas of justice. Nor was this all. The old European population, which should have been, naturally, our ally and fellow-worker in the task of native administration, gradually changed from its original position of a subject nationality to that of a political rival; and, as such, openly bid against us for the mastership of the native African tribes.

Now when two statesmen are pitted against each other, of whom one is a man whose methods of attack are limited by nineteenth-century ideas, while the morality of the other, being that of the seventeenth century, permits him greater freedom of action, it is obvious that the first will be at a disadvantage. And this would be the case more than ever if the nineteenth-century statesman was under the impression that his political antagonist was a man whose code of morals was identical with his own. When once he had learnt that the moral standard of the other was lower than, or different from, his own, he would of course make allowance for the circ.u.mstance, and he would then be able to contest the position with him upon equal terms. But until he had grasped this fact he would be at a disadvantage.

Generally speaking, the representatives of the British Government, both Governors and High Commissioners, soon learnt that neither the natives nor the Dutch population could be dealt with on the same footing as a Western European. But the British Government cannot be said to have thoroughly learnt the same lesson until, in almost the last week of the nineteenth century, the three successive defeats of Stormberg, Magersfontein, and Colenso aroused it to a knowledge of the fact that we had been within an ace of losing South Africa. Many, indeed, would question whether even now the lesson had been thoroughly learnt. But, however this may be, it is certain that throughout the nineteenth century the Home Government wished to treat both the natives and the Dutch in South Africa on a basis of British ideas; and that by so doing it constantly found itself in conflict with its own local representatives, who knew that the only hope of success lay in dealing with both alike on a basis of South African ideas.

As the result of this chronic inability of British statesmen to understand South Africa, it follows that the most instructive manner of regarding our administration of that country during the nineteenth century is to get a clear conception of the successive divergences of opinion between the home and the local authorities.

At the very outset of British administration--during the temporary occupation of the Cape from 1795 to 1808--we find a theoretically perfect policy laid down for the guidance of the early English Governors in their treatment of the Boers, or Dutch frontier farmers.

It is just as admirable, in its way, as were the instructions for the treatment of the Hottentots furnished by the Directors of the Dutch East India Company to Van Riebeck. In a despatch of July, 1800, the third Duke of Portland, who was then acting as Secretary for the Colonies, writes:

[Sidenote: Non-interference.]

"Considering the tract of country over which these border inhabitants are dispersed, the rude and uncultivated state in which they live, and the wild notions of independence which prevail among them, I am afraid any attempts to introduce civilisation and a strict administration of justice will be slow in their progress, and likely, if not proceeded upon with caution and management, rather to create a spirit of resistance, or to occasion them to emigrate still further from the seat of government, than answer the beneficent views with which they might be undertaken. In fact, it seems to me the proper system of policy to observe to them is to interfere as little as possible in their domestic concerns and interior economy; to consider them rather as distant communities dependent upon the Government than as subjects necessarily amenable to the laws and regulations established within the precincts of Government. Mutual advantages arising from barter and commerce, and a strict adherence to good faith and justice in all arrangements with them, joined to efficient protection and occasional acts of kindness on the part of the Government, seem likely to be the best means of securing their attachment."

Who would have thought that this statement of policy, admirable as it is at first sight, contained in itself the germ of a political heresy of the first magnitude? Yet so it was. The principle of non-interference, here for the first time enunciated and subsequently followed with fatal effect, could not be applied by a nineteenth-century administration to the case of a seventeenth-century community without its virtually renouncing the functions of government. Obviously this was not the intention of the home authority. There remained the difficulty of knowing when to apply, and when not to apply, the principle; and directly a specific case arose there was the possibility that, while the local authority, with a full knowledge of the local conditions, might think interference necessary, the home authority, without such knowledge, might take an opposite view.

[Sidenote: Slaghter's Nek.]

A very few years sufficed to show that the most ordinary exercise of the functions of government might be regarded as an "interference with the domestic concerns and interior economy" of the European subjects of the British Crown in South Africa. At the time of the permanent occupation of the Cape (1806) the population of the colony consisted of three cla.s.ses: 26,720 persons of European descent, 17,657 Hottentots, and 29,256 returned as slaves. One of the first measures of the British Governor, Lord Caledon, was the enactment of a series of regulations intended to confer civil rights on the Hottentots, while at the same time preventing them from using their freedom at the expense of the European population. From the British, or even European point of view, this was a piece of elementary justice to which no man could possibly take exception. As applied to the conditions of the Franco-Dutch population in the Cape Colony it was, in fact, a serious interference with their "domestic concerns and internal economy." And as such it produced the extraordinary protest known to history as the "Rebellion" of Slaghter's Nek. There was no question as to the facts. Booy, the Hottentot, had completed his term of service with Frederick Bezuidenhout, the Boer, and was therefore ent.i.tled, under the Cape law, to leave his master's farm, and to remove his property. All this Bezuidenhout admitted; but when it came to a question of yielding obedience to the magistrate's order, the Boer said "No." In the words of Pringle, "He boldly declared that he considered this interference between him (a free burgher) and _his_ Hottentot to be a presumptuous innovation upon his rights, and an intolerable usurpation of tyrannical authority."

And the danger of allowing the Boers to pursue their seventeenth-century dealings with the natives became rapidly greater when the European Colonists, Dutch and English, were brought, by their natural eastward expansion, into direct contact with the ma.s.ses of military Bantu south and east of the Drakenberg chain of mountains--the actual dark-skinned "natives" of South Africa as it is known to the people of Great Britain. The Boer frontiersman, with his aggressive habits and ingrained contempt for a dark-skin, disintegrated the Bantu ma.s.s before we were ready to undertake the work of reconstruction. And therefore the local British authority soon learnt that non-interference in the case of the Boer generally meant the necessity of a much more serious interference at a subsequent date with both Boer and Kafir. And so non-interference, in the admirable spirit of the Duke of Portland's despatch, came to bear one meaning in Downing Street and quite another in Capetown.

[Sidenote: D'Urban's policy.]

The earliest of the three crucial "divergences of opinion," to which collectively the history of our South African administration owes its sombre hue, was that which led to the reversal of Sir Benjamin D'Urban's frontier policy by Charles Grant (afterwards Lord Glenelg) at the end of the year 1835. The circ.u.mstances were these. On Christmas Day, 1834, the Kafirs (without any declaration of war, needless to say) invaded the Cape Colony, murdering the settlers in the isolated farms, burning their homesteads, and driving off their cattle. After a six months' campaign, in which the Dutch and British settlers fought by the side of the regular troops, a treaty was made with the Kafir chiefs which, in the opinion of D'Urban and his local advisers, would render the eastern frontier of the Colony secure from further inroads. The Kafirs were to retire to the line of the Kei River, thus surrendering part of their territory to the European settlers who had suffered most severely from the invasion; while a belt of loyal Kafirs, supported by a chain of forts, was to be interposed between the defeated tribes and the colonial farmsteads. In addition to these measures, D'Urban proposed to compensate the settlers for the enormous losses[1] which they had incurred; since, as a contemporary and not unfriendly writer[2] puts it, the British Government had exposed them for fourteen years to Kafir depredations, rather than acknowledge the existence of a state of affairs that must plainly have compelled it to make active exertions for their protection.

[Footnote 1: The official returns showed that 456 farm-houses had been wholly, and 350 partially, destroyed; and that 60 waggons, 5,715 horses, 111,930 head of horned cattle, and 161,930 sheep had been carried off by the Kafirs. And this apart from the remuneration claimed by the settlers for services in the field, and commandeered cattle and supplies.]

[Footnote 2: Cloete. See note, p. 16.]

The view of the home authority was very different. In the opinion of His Majesty's ministers at Downing Street the Kafir invasion was the result of a long series of unjustifiable encroachments on the part of the European settlers. D'Urban was instructed, therefore, to reinstate the Kafirs in the districts from which they had retired under the treaty of September, 1835, and to cancel all grants of land beyond the Fish River--the original eastern boundary of the Colony--which the Colonial Government had made to its European subjects from 1817 onwards; while, as for compensation, any indemnity was altogether out of the question, since the colonists had only themselves to thank for the enmity of the natives--if, indeed, they had not deliberately provoked the war with a view to the acquisition of fresh territory.

The divergence between these two opinions is sufficiently well marked.

To trace the precise agencies through which two diametrically opposed views were evolved on this occasion from the same groundwork of facts would be too lengthy a business; but, by way of comment, we may recall two statements, each significant and authentic. Cloete, writing while the events in question were still fresh in his mind, says of Lord Glenelg's despatch: "A communication more cruel, unjust, and insulting to the feelings not only of Sir Benjamin D'Urban ... but of the inhabitants ... could hardly have been penned by a declared enemy of the country and its Governor." And Sir George Napier, by whom D'Urban was superseded, stated in evidence given before the House of Commons: "My own experience, and what I saw with my own eyes, have confirmed me that I was wrong and Sir Benjamin D'Urban was perfectly right; that if he meant to keep Kafirland under British rule, the only way of doing so was by having a line of forts, and maintaining troops in them."

[Sidenote: The Great Trek.]

This settlement of a South African question upon a basis of British, or rather non-South African, ideas was followed by events as notorious as they were disastrous. It must be remembered that in 1819-20 the first and only effort to introduce a considerable British population into South Africa had been successfully carried out when the "Albany"

settlers, to the number of some five thousand, were established in this and other districts upon the eastern border of the Cape Colony.

The colonial farmers who suffered from the Kafir invasion of 1834-5 were not exclusively Boers. Among them there were many members of the new British population, and the divergence of opinion between D'Urban and Lord Glenelg was all the more significant, since in this case the British settlers were in agreement with the Boers. It was no longer merely a divergence of views as between the local and the home authority, but as between the British in Britain and the British in South Africa. It must also be remembered that, in the same year as the Kafir invasion, a social revolution--the emanc.i.p.ation of slaves--had been accomplished in the Cape Colony by an Act of the British Parliament, in comparison with which the nationalisation of the railways or of the mines in England would seem a comparatively trifling disturbance of the system of private property to the Englishman of to-day. The reversal of D'Urban's arrangements for the safety of the eastern frontier was not only bad in itself, but it came at a bad time. Whether the secession of the Emigrant Farmers would in any case have taken place as the result of the emanc.i.p.ation of slaves is a matter which cannot now be decided. But, however this may be, the fact remains that two men so well qualified to give an opinion on the subject as Judge Cloete and Sir John Robinson, the first Prime Minister of Natal, unhesitatingly ascribe the determining influence which drove the Boers to seek a home beyond the jurisdiction of the British Government to the sense of injustice created by the measures dictated by Lord Glenelg, and by the whole spirit of his despatch.[3]

And this judgment is supported by the fact that the wealthier Dutch of the Western Province were much more seriously affected by the emanc.i.p.ation of slaves than the "Boers" of the eastern districts of the Colony; yet it was these latter, of course, who provided the bulk of the emigrants who crossed the Orange River in the years of the Great Trek (1835-8) We shall not therefore be drawing an extravagantly improbable conclusion, if we decide that the movement which divided European South Africa was due to a well-ascertained divergence of opinion between the home and local authorities--both British.

[Footnote 3: For the benefit of those who may desire to read the pa.s.sages in which these opinions are expressed, I append the references. Cloete's opinion is to be found in his "Five Lectures on the Emigration of the Dutch Farmers," delivered before the Natal Society and published at Capetown in 1856. A reprint of this work was published by Mr. Murray in 1899. Sir John Robinson's opinion, which endorses the views of Mrs.

Anna Elizabeth Steenekamp as expressed in _The Cape Monthly Magazine_ for September, 1876, is to be found at pp. 46, 47 of his "A Lifetime in South Africa" (Smith, Elder, 1900).]

[Sidenote: The birth of the republic.]

[Sidenote: Sir George Grey.]

The results of this secession of something like one-fourth of the Franco-Dutch population are common knowledge. Out of the scattered settlements founded by the Emigrant Farmers beyond the borders of the Colony were created, in 1852 (Sand River Convention) and 1854 (Bloemfontein Convention), the two Boer Republics, which half a century later withstood for two years and eight months the whole available military force of the British Empire. The first effect of the secession was to erect the republican Dutch into a rival power which bid against the British Government for the territory and allegiance of the natives.

Secession, therefore, made the inevitable task of establishing the supremacy of the white man in South Africa infinitely more costly both in blood and treasure. The British nation accepted the task, which fell to it as paramount power, with the greatest reluctance. The endless and apparently aimless Kafir wars exhausted the patience of the country, and the destruction of an entire British regiment by Ketshwayo's[4] _impis_ created a feeling of deep resentment against the great High Commissioner, whose policy was held--unreasonably enough--responsible for the military disaster of Isandlhwana. Two opportunities of recovering the lost solidarity of the Europeans were presented before the republican Dutch had set themselves definitely to work for the supremacy of South Africa through reunion with their colonial kinsfolk.

That both were lost was due at bottom to the disgust of the British people at the excessive cost and burden of establishing a civilised administration over the native population in South Africa. But in both cases the immediate agency of disaster was the refusal of the Home Government to listen to the advice of its local representative. Sir George Grey would have regained the lost solidarity of the Europeans by taking advantage of the natural recoil manifested among the Free State Dutch from independence and responsibility towards the more settled and prosperous life a.s.sured by British rule. His proposal was to unite the Cape Colony, Natal, and the Free State in a federal legislature, consisting of representatives chosen by popular vote in the several states. In urging this measure he took occasion to combat the pessimistic views of South African affairs which were prevalent in England. The country was not commercially useless, but of "great and increasing value." Its people did not desire Kafir wars, but were well aware of the much greater advantages which they derived from the peaceful pursuits of industry. The colonists were themselves willing to contribute to the defence of that part of the Queen's dominions in which they lived. And, finally, the condition of the natives was not hopeless, for the missionaries were producing most beneficial effects upon the tribes of the interior. But the most powerful argument which Grey used was his ruthless exposure of the futility of the Conventions. By allowing the Boer emigrants to grow into independent communities the British Government believed that not only had they relieved themselves of responsibility for the republican Dutch, but that they had secured, in addition, the unfaltering allegiance of the larger Dutch population which remained behind in the Cape Colony. Grey a.s.sured the Home Government that in both respects it was the victim of a delusion bred of its complete ignorance of South African conditions. The Boer Republics would give trouble. Apart from the bad draftsmanship of the conventions--a fertile source of disagreement--these small states would be centres of intrigue and "internal commotions," while at the same time their revenues would be too small to provide efficiently for their protection against the warlike tribes. The policy of _divide et impera_--or, as Grey called it, the "dismemberment" policy--would fail, since the political barrier which had been erected was wholly artificial.