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CHAPTER VI RHODES IN PARLIAMENT I IT may be seen that, when Rhodes entered the Cape Parlia ment, the air was charged with resentments, suspicions, hostilities. The Dutch of the Free State could not forget the annexation of Griqualand West, their loss of the Diamond Fields. The Dutch of the Transvaal could not forget the Shepstone annexation. The Dutch of the Cape felt for their northern brothers. In the middle of 1880 a new scheme for confederation had been before the Cape Parliament, and to Cape Town had come Paul Kruger, inflamed by the betrayal of the Gladstone Government, to speak against it. The Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr who, for years, had preached South African union, now opposed it until the annexation was annulled. But then, mollified, he linked his Farmers’ Defence Associa-tion to a society run by a Dutch Reformed minister called du Toit, whose principles were ’ A United South Africa under its own Flag ‘-but not under England, and together the two societies formed a body which called itself the Afrikander Bond, which felt itself to be, defensively and protectively, Dutch, and which, as Hofmeyr’s rancour faded, ceased to be hostile to England, and became (exit the Rev. du Toit) Hofmeyr’s instrument for his own particular brand of Union. The influence of the Bond spread to the Free State and the Transvaal. Hofmeyr’s word became its law. The Bonds- men voted as Hofmeyr instructed them to vote. Ministries were formed subject to Hofmeyr’s approval. For thirty years, although he only once, for a short period, took office, he was the autocrat of his party. He was called, for his subterranean methods, the Mole. But he was a sickly man, and, slightly varying the Duke of Plaza Toro’s method, he led his regiment from below because he found it less exciting. He was one 46 of the ablest of South African statesmen, and is remembered in South Africa as Onze Jan-Our Jan. It did not take Rhodes long to decide that Hofmeyr was his man. Hofmeyr, for his part, saw in Rhodes what he could see in no other Englishman. They found, very soon, that they could work together. II The English of the Cape, generally speaking, were not so amiably inclined towards the Bond as was Rhodes. For, if the Dutch colonists had feelings about the Transvaal, so had they ;if the Dutch could not forget the Shepstone Annexation, neither could they forget the humiliation of Majuba. Then there was a depression in the country such as had not been known since the finding of diamonds, and, naturally, that made people hate and blame one another. Then there was the perennial Native Question concerning which there had been enmities between English and Dutch from the beginning of the century. Nobody really knew what to do about the Native Question, and here was a fresh manifestation of it : should, or should not, the Basutoland natives be disarmed ? The Basutos themselves did more than talk. They fought. Already this disarmament policy had cost the Cape a war, the lives of men, millions of money, and a certain reputation for fair dealing. Rhodes had seen in Kimberley what guns meant to the natives. It was the reason they came to Kimberley, walking hundreds of miles on their pale, hard soles ; sweating, far from their kraals and women, on the floors of great ditches : that they might earn the money to buy the white man’s magic. They would work half a year and more for a gun. The guns were their investment, their claim to modernity, their title to power among those who knew only the old-fashioned assegai. They had found it beyond justice to be asked to give them I up, they had fought rather than give them up, they had and given them up. 4 Rhodes’ speech concerning the disarmament of the Basutoaj was his first in Parliament. He had three reasons, besides:, the feelings of the Basutos, for speaking against this The first two he mentioned, the third he did not.policy.:a it was no time to throw away millions.He said; He asked who were:’ they, in South Africa, to play about with native policies: ’ Are we a great and independent South Africa 7 No, we are only the population of a third-class English city spread over a great country.’ He did not point out that if the natives. were not allowed to carry arms they would lose their chief inducement for coming to work on the Diamond Fields, and that would be a great nuisance for Kimberley. On the other hand, he did, on behalf of the Diamond Fields, say that if Kimberley were not given a railway he would smash the Ministry. The railway was refused, and the Ministry fell. He then went himself to Basutoland to investigate the claims of loyal Basutos. It was in Basutoland he met General Gordon, who had come out as military adviser, and they became friends. England took over Basutoland, a rocky little country full of natives, for it was land the Cape needed, said Rhodes, and not natives. What with Disarmament and rail- i ways, it was something like a political triumph for Rhodes. He was, for a few weeks before its end, Treasurer-General ( in the Ministry that followed. III But as if South Africa had not already enough racial troubles : Boer bgainst Briton, Black against White, racial troubles must needs now begin to come in from outside. For suddenly the European nations had discovered what Rhodes had discovered at the age of nineteen, on his long trek from Kimberley to Pilgrim’s Rest : that the only great untaken lands left in the 49 world were in Africa ; and they were all snatching at Africa, rousing agitation and the spirit of rivalry in South African bosoms. The Belgians, led by the explorer Stanley, were in the Congo. The French, led by the explorer de Brazza, were in the Congo. Italy was colonizing. Portugal was colonizing. Germany was colonizing. It was more than Kruger, now President of the South African Republic, could bear. His republic was young, feeble, poor, harassed by debts and natives ; its wealth of gold was barely, as yet, realized ; it was already too big for its scattered people. But what country is ever big enough ? Kruger’s Boers wanted to have so much land that they need do nothing but let the cattle browse on it. It was their dream not to have to see the next man’s smoke. Kruger could hardly stand by while everybody else was taking Africa from the natives, and do nothing himself. Kruger was in it too. There were, as Kruger tells the story, two native chiefs of Bechuanaland who were at war with one another. Each had an ally. Each sought also white assistance. One offered land to English settlers in return for their help, the other offered land to Boer settlers in return for their help. A Royal Com- mission following Majuba had laid it down that the Boers were not to interfere with the natives. So Kruger, he says virtuously, forbade his Boers to join the natives. The Boers were tempted, however, he says, by the land, renounced their burgher rights under the Republic and, consequently, his authority, and did join. The chiefs supported by the Boers won. The Boer mer-cenaries claimed their reward. They got the land. They were joined by other Boers,and founded the Republics of Stellaland and Goshen, which immediately began to quarrel with one another and their native allies.4 That, according to Kruger, is how the Boers happened to be in Bechuanaland. Others tell a different story. They remember that already, in 1870, Kruger had offered to ally himself with the chief 50 Montsioa, and the chief Montsioa had declined, saying : ‘ N one ever inspanned an ass with an ox in one yoke ’ ; ho four years later, Montsioa begged the British to help against the marauding Boers ; and how, in the end, the B had so much power over the natives, that England was co pelled to warn them off. Whichever story is right (and, as far as they go, they both probably right), Rhodes had not been long in Parliamment when, not only were the nations of Europe, and notably many, snatching at Africa, the Boers also were entrenching themselves in Bechuanaland. Rhodes knew something of Bechuanaland. The District of Griqualand West which held his Kimberley was geographically a part of it. Even now there were heart burnings over piece of the chief Mankoroane’s ground that had been wro assigned to Griqualand West. Bechuanas came to work the Kimberley mines. Trade went out from Kimberley i Bechuanaland. Rhodes saw Bechuanaland and its meanm where it lay on the map of Africa. He loved maps. to-day, there rests on a small massive table in them of his bedroom an enormous atlas, His house is full of maps. He arranged to have himself sent up to Bechuanaland on commission that was to inquire into Mankoroane’s rights. But he did more than investigate Mankoroane’s rights. He investigated the possibilities of annexing the country ; the possibilities that Kruger, about to go on a mission to England, the long, impassioned message. without costing you a sixpence.’‘ You can take the country He made touch with van Niekerk, the Boer Administrator 51 of Stellaland, and, when he returned to Cape Town, it was with a petition from the white inhabitants of Stellaland for the protection of the Cape. He had also spoken smoothly to Mankoroane and asked him to cede to the Cape, for Heaven knows what consideration, his disputed land. Now he demanded the backing of the House. ‘ You are dealing,’ he urged, ‘ with a question upon the proper treatment of which depends the whole future of the Colony. I look upon this Bechuanaland territory as the Suez Canal of the trade of this country, the key of its road to the interior. . . . Some honourable members may say that this is immorality. . . . " The lands," they may say, " belong to the chief Mankoroane. How improper I How immoral ! We must not do it ! " Now I have not these scruples. I believe that the natives are bound gradually to come under the control of the Europeans. I feel that it is the duty of this Colony when, as it were, her younger and more fiery sons go out and take land, to follow in their steps with civilized government. Is not this also the principle of the British Government ? . . . ‘ If we do not settle this ourselves we shall see it taken up in the House of Commons, on one side or the other, not from any real interest in the question, but simply because of its consequence to those occupying the Ministerial benches. We want to get rid of the Imperial factor in this question and to deal with it ourselves, jointly with the Transvaal. . . . What did we build railways for I To secure the trade of the interior. . . . I solemnly warn this House that if it departs from the control of the interior we shall fall from the position of the paramount state in South Africa, which is our right in every scheme of federal union in the future, to that of a minor state.’ IV It is said, even by the admirers of Rhodes, that he was not a good speaker. They admit he was effective because his matter was good, and he could now and then flash a phrase. But he began and ended awkwardly. He was rambling and 52 repetitive. He had a voice that broke startlingly into a high falsetto. We are, on the other hand, assured that his speeches, which are here quoted, were not edited. But, unless his manner was quite inescapably bad, there can be no explanation of why those speeches seemed so indifferent when they were delivered and read so well now, except that fashions in oratory have changed in the last fifty years. For Rhodes’ speeches are not only bold, wise, direct and epigrammatic in the reading, they give an impression of almost contemptuous sincerity. Here is a man, one feels, who, in his successful twenties, had already discovered what Samuel Butler felt bound to tell himself after a lifetime of the pain that comes from the consciousness of neglected merit : ‘ The world will, in the end, follow only those who have despised as well as served it.’ When Rhodes made this, his first speech on Northern 5.D expansion, he was thirty. But he was already in what Conrad, ‘1 thinking of a man’s forties, used to call ‘ the force of his life.’ 3 In experience, achievement, habit, thought-and body too- 0 he was a middle-aged manlv :; He had always, since his arrival in South Africa, been ahead { of his years. At an age when his contemporaries were still I; schoolboys, he was managing a farm, he was ‘ averaging about ; a hundred pounds a week ’ as a digger. When they were undergraduates he was an undergraduate too, but he was also a many-sided commercial adventurer. He knew his mind, /’ and had a plan of life at the age of twenty. When he entered ’ Parliament his income was said to be twenty thousand a year. He had come to Parliament with a definite purpose which was nothing less than to make Africa British. (‘ I went down to the Cape Parliament, thinking in my practical way, " I will go and take the North." ‘) He was then twenty-seven. And he was something of a cold brute, was he not ?, in his speeches, a trampling realist : ’ Are we a great and independent 53 South Africa ? No, we are only the population of a third-rate English city spread over a great country.’ (I881.) ‘ Some honourable members may say that this is immorality. . . . Now I have not these scruples.’ (1883.) Yet, in the year between these two offerings to Parliament, he makes a 111 leaving all he possesses to one inexperienced young friend ’‘: because his conditions ‘ can only be carried out by a trust- worthy person, and I consider you one,’ and this young frrend is to see that the money is used for the ‘ foundation of so great a power as to hereafter render wars impossible and to promote the best interests of humanity.’ Nothing less. Can two such conflicting attitudes both be honest 1 Was Rhodes presenting a false front to humanity or a false inside to himself 3 Did Rhodes make his wills as children write their secret diaries :for the joy of impressing with his virtues a world to which he now chose to show himself sneeringly indifferent ? Was he a realist or an idealist ? . . . Was King David a realist or an idealist .? Was the Shakespeare of the Sonnets a realist or an idealist ? Which human being is wholly the one or wholly the other-a straight flush : all the cards one colour, one kind, one sequence-that is outside a house for the insane ? . . . And he had not only, so soon, lived far into life, he looked a man past youth. At thirty he looked forty ; at forty, fifty ; at his death, even more than sixty. The portraits of his thirties show him a man, sensual-mouthed, double-chinned ; heavy in stance, heavy in seat ; big, thick, square, his very hands big and thick and square. But they show him, too, with the head, hair, brow, eyes, mien of a man beyond his fellows. Take up a picture with Rhodes in it-inevitably in the front, in the middle, of a group of men significant in their day-and he demands the eye, something different, something, for both good and evil, unique. ‘ The reason why this or that man is fortunate,’ says Emerson, ‘ is not to be told. It lies in the man. . . . See him, and you will know as easily why he succeeds, as, if you see Napoleon, you would comprehend his history of Rhodesdoes overtly lie in his body, and, as it is clear now, it was clear in his own time. He commanded attention, ‘ Who is the young man . . .’ writes a 5.5 of railways and pursuant trade. There is the promise of Union _-consummation-increase. . . . It is an overture, a Wagnerian overture. The conductor lifts his baton :we have a prophecy of all the themes in the drama to the world to get it. make up Rhodes’ plan in life. There are, first, those expressions : The Suez Canal to the interior, the Imperial factor. professional politicians.There is the impatience of those scruples. ’There is the haughty : ‘ I have not natives :There is the question of the rights of the control of them by this or the other power ; the conviction that they must give way before the white people. There is the theme of colonization : the going forth of the young and fiery sons. There is the understanding that co-operation with the Dutch is essential.
John And the rest so to speak is history------ |
