Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (67 page)

Step by step towards
fin
de
siècle
the British Empire approached the fulfilment of this dream. From the south British suzerainty advanced from South Africa across the Limpopo to the Zambezi. From the north, as General Kitchener embarked at last upon the reconquest of the Sudan, conveniently financed by the Egyptians,
the Empire marched towards the headwaters of the Nile. The Cape-Cairo railway had readied Wadi Halfa in the north, Rhodesia in the south, and the first of the feeder lines was already being built between Uganda and the coast. Only a narrow strip of German territory in Tanganyika interrupted the all-British corridor from Egypt to South Africa. On the African flanks Nigeria, the Gold Coast, the Gambia, Sierra Leone, Somaliland, Uganda, Kenya and Zanzibar were all safely under the flag, importing their guns, cloths and iron goods from Manchester and Birmingham, sending to Britain their cloves, cocoa, ivory, coconuts and coffee. It was not yet a very profitable estate, but it had great promise, and to the imperial seers it seemed almost a new empire, the India of the coming century.
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Yet like an infuriating particle of grit in the gears of this great machine, the infinitesimal republic of the Transvaal still resisted the British Empire. Now that it possessed within its frontiers the world’s principal source of gold, its independence seemed more than ever an impertinence to history. Never did a destiny seem more manifest, than the Transvaal’s eventual inclusion within the British pattern for Africa. It is true that to the east the republic was bordered by Portuguese Mozambique, and that a railway line now linked Johannesburg with the Portuguese port of Delagoa Bay, enabling the Boers to send their exports abroad without crossing British territory at all. But with the Empire north, south and west of them, with British capital financing their industries, and British expertise extracting their gold, with Queen Victoria still hazily suzerain to their State, the extinction of the republic appeared inevitable in the end. This was the last decade of the nineteenth century: no time for anachronisms.

Even in the 1890s the British were not prepared to indulge in naked aggression against white people, and once more they approached the Transvaal problem deviously. A kind of half-tacit conspiracy was fostered. It was well-known that the Reform Movement
in Johannesburg was fitfully considering an armed rising. Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary in London, now authorized Sir Hercules Robinson, British High Commissioner in the Cape,
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to intervene in Johannesburg if such a rising occurred—not of course to seize the country, but merely to restore order as representative of the suzerain Power. At the same time Rhodes, Premier of the Cape, and Jameson his chief assistant, went a stage further, and conspired with the Reformers to support their revolution: the moment the word came, they would send in a force to overthrow Kruger and establish a new Government, either independently British, or as a colony of the Empire. How far all the conspirators knew each other’s minds has never been made clear. Perhaps they did not want to know. It was an unwritten, unspecified arrangement. Nothing was spelt out. Much was left, in the true spirit of the African Scramble, to a wink and a crooked nod.

In 1895 the British in South Africa, hoping to circumvent the Boer railway to Delagoa Bay, removed the customs controls on their frontier with the Transvaal, so that trade could come their way again. Kruger immediately responded by closing the drifts or fords by which the roads out of Pretoria and Johannesburg crossed into British territory. This was a slap in the imperial face, and it was an obvious signal for the rebellion of the Uitlanders. The conspirators moved. Jameson and his force went to Pitsani. A flow of coded messages streamed from Johannesburg to Cape Town, from Cape Town to Pitsani, from Cape Town to London. The South African air hummed with rumour. There were false alarms, second thoughts, cancellations, misunderstandings. The rising was planned for tomorrow, for the day after, it was cancelled, it was postponed. On December 30 Rhodes, learning from Johannesburg that the Reformers were once again postponing the rising, cabled Jameson to hold his hand. But it was too late. On December 29, 1895, at dawn, the little force at Pitsani had saddled its horses, struck its tents, ridden away from the kopjes and crossed the unmarked frontier into the Transvaal Republic

The Jameson Raid was the summation of the scramble for Africa, and a turning-point in the story of the British Empire. It was like a poor parody of the imperial process. It was underhand, it was mean, and it failed. It was the beginning of the end of that grand confidence which had sustained Victoria’s Empire through so many hazards, always to emerge victorious in the end. The Empire never quite recovered from the ignominy of Jameson’s Raid: it was as though a bubble had been pricked, or some great exotic blossom, grown glorious in the sunshine of a long summer, had reached its amplitude at last and begun to shed its petals.

Jameson’s men were mostly very young, and foolish. There was Sir John (‘Johnny’) Willoughby, and the Honourable Major Bobby White, and there was J. B. Stacey-Clitheroe. There were the 470 troopers of the British South Africa Company police, well-mounted, sensibly dressed in grey, with wide-brimmed ‘smasher’ hats and dark blue puttees. They had a 12-pounder gun and five Maxims, and they seemed to be well enough organized for a dash into the Rand. Stores and remounts had been surreptitiously arranged for them along the route. The telegraph wires would be cut. The Reformers had promised to send out a body of horse to meet them as they approached Johannesburg. Jameson’s own brother was one of the Doorfontein plotters; so was Rhodes’s brother Frank; it was a conspiracy of intimates.

Jameson had been ready to ride since the beginning of December, and he was already primed with a
casus
belli—
an undated letter from the Reform Committee, to be cabled to
The
Times
in London at the right moment, allegedly appealing for help against Boer oppression. Week after week, as the rising was repeatedly postponed, Jameson and his men fretted in the Pitsani heat, until on Boxing Day Jameson heard direct from his brother Sam in the city: ‘Absolutely necessary to postpone flotation…. We will endeavour to meet your wishes as regards December but you must not move until you have received instructions to’. Something seemed to crack inside the Doctor, when he read this. The Uitlanders would never rebel, he told himself,
unless he made them. Two messengers arrived from Johannesburg telling him on no account to move, but by December 28 his mind was made up. ‘Shall leave tonight for the Transvaal’, he cabled Cape Town, and summoning his young soldiers to parade, he read them the letter of appeal from the Reformers, and assured them (or so it was later sworn) that the Imperial authorities supported their adventure. They cheered, sang the National Anthem, and led by Dr Jameson on a black horse, crossed the frontier at Burman’s Drift at five in the morning.

Nothing went right. Not all the telegraph wires were cut, so that the Boers knew of the invasion almost at once. The remounts could not be caught. Two messengers overtook the raiders to order them back in the name of the British Government—‘Her Majesty’s Government’, said the second directive, ‘entirely disapprove your conduct in invading Transvaal with armed force. Your action has been repudiated. You are ordered to retire at once from the country and you will be held personally responsible for the consequences of your unauthorized and most improper proceeding’. Another message told Jameson that the rising in Johannesburg had fizzled out with an armistice between the Reformers and Kruger, so that the entire enterprise was aborted anyway.

Still the Raid continued, in a spirit one feels more of boyish bravado than of power-politics. The horsemen had to cross 190 miles of rough country to reach the outskirts of Johannesburg. At first it was splendid easy going, as the Raid itself perhaps seemed to its protagonists—fine open downland, almost treeless, with wooded ravines and cactus bushes: but when they reached the Rand itself the flavour of the country, as of the adventure, subtly changed. Now the landscape was corrugated with ridges and valleys, tracks twisted here and there, gulleys interrupted every downland gallop, and the points of the compass were never easy to grasp. The conviction of the enterprise faltered, like the pace. The guides lost their way. The troopers were tired and hungry. The horses were worn out. The first Boer horsemen appeared like shadows on the hillsides, following the raiders silently at a distance. When the first shots were fired, on the afternoon of New Year’s Day, 1896, the raiders were only some thirty miles from Johannesburg, but they hardly
had a hope. Skilfully the Boers forced them north-west around the perimeter of the city, skirmishing all the way, until at a place called Doornkop, almost within sight of the gold mines, they found themselves surrounded. They fought back bravely enough. Their Maxims were fired until they jammed, their 12-pounder was almost out of ammunition, when on the morning of January 2 they ran up the white flag and limply surrendered. The grand slam had foiled. The rising in Johannesburg had never happened. The British Government had publicly condemned the raid. Rhodes in Cape Town was shattered and disgraced: ‘poor old Jameson’, was all he could say, ‘twenty years we have been friends, and now he goes in and ruins me’.
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It did not at once break the spirit of the New Imperialism. Though Jameson was tried in England and imprisoned for treason, and though Rhodes was driven from office and never really recovered from the disaster, and though the Kaiser sent President Kruger a warm congratulatory telegram, still the British public on the whole did not disapprove of the venture. They thought it a dashing piece of buccaneering, and were sorry it failed. They admired rather than resented the British Government’s part in the conspiracy—for though Chamberlain was cleared of complicity by a Select Committee, few really believed it, and some thought the Queen herself privy to the plot. They considered that Kruger deserved to be overthrown, that the Uitlanders were unfairly oppressed, and that Jameson was in trouble only because he did not succeed. The amorality of the adventure did not shock them. A celebratory poem by the new Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, exactly reflected the general mood:

There spoke the spirit of the Scramble, the last rationale of the will to rule. The British people, in the last years of Victoria’s century, believed the Empire must be its own judge. When Kruger seemed likely to visit London shortly after the raid, even Lord Salisbury said he hoped he would be drowned in turtle soup. The young politician Winston Churchill thought similarly at the time, and considered Jameson’s adventure no more than a bold attempt to avenge Majuba. Later he came to change his opinion, and looking back upon the Raid through the tragedies that were presently to befall the British Empire, saw in that crude filibuster a different and darker meaning. ‘I date the beginning of these violent times’, he wrote then, ‘from the Jameson Raid.’