Africa During the Scramble: Avenging Majuba
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By Gary Oswald.
William Ewart Gladstone, four-time Prime Minister of the UK, was an imperialist. He oversaw the largest empire to ever exist and that empire expanded during his time in charge. In particular he made the choice to interfere in Egypt, overthrowing their government there and establishing British control over what was then the largest independent African country, something which kick-started the entire Scramble for Africa into another gear.
But he was still considerably less imperialistic than the majority of the British political and military elite during the late 19th century and was hated for that by them. His government generally pushed back against a lot of plans to expand the British Empire, which his rival Disraeli would have approved. In particular Gladstone was massively resented by the military for not avenging British defeats.
The two defeats which bothered them most were Khartoum (in 1885 as part of the first Anglo-Mahdist War) and Majuba Hill (in 1881 as part of the first Anglo-Boer War), both of which I have covered in previous articles in this series, both of which were humiliating losses to the British Army, and both of which Gladstone had no interest in correcting. He was sympathetic to both the Sudanese and the Boers in their quest for independence and felt neither battle should have been fought at all. After all, Gordon was under orders to retreat from Khartoum and Majuba Hill was fought only after a ceasefire had been arranged. Instead of escalating the wars, he ended both, allowing the Transvaal Republic and Mahdist Sudan to establish themselves as independent states.
This was deeply unpopular and the British Military and civil service were very keen on making sure that once Gladstone was gone, they would be back to re-establish British dominance in both Sudan and South Africa. The result of this in Sudan was the second Anglo-Mahdist War (covered here), where as in South Africa avenging Majuba was a touchstone in British-Boer relations right up until the second Anglo-Boer War started in 1899.
This desire for revenge was also tinged with racially motivated fear. The British were scared of the two Boer Republics – the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, both founded by white Afrikaner exiles from British South Africa – in a way they just weren't of Black Africans. There was never a serious risk of a Xhosa state supplanting the Cape Colony as the rightful rulers of South Africa in the eyes of Europeans, but a Boer State just might be able to do it. This fear of a United States of South Africa emerging in the Transvaal would motivate a lot of British actions.
And the discovery of diamonds (in 1867) and then gold (in 1886) in the interior deepened those fears. Suddenly, instead of a backwater, South Africa was thriving, and the economic centres of this new boom country were not British Cape Town or Durban but Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, and the other towns near the Kimberley diamond mines and Witwatersrand Gold Fields. As increasingly large amounts of English speaking workers (or uitlanders) took up work within the Boer Republics, the British felt that union between the British colonies and the Boer colonies was inevitable so that they could have joint policies on economics and the natives.
By the 1890s their big fear was that if this union didn't happen within the Empire it would happen without it. They felt that inevitable reform would open up the vote in the Republics to the uitlanders (the Transvaal Republic only gave the vote to white Afrikaner men but this was seen as unsustainable), this new entity would take over the area entirely with the impoverished British colonies joining the booming uitlander ones. To forestall this the UK needed to be the one to force the reform within their system. The 1895 Jameson Raid, in which a British force from Rhodesia invaded the Transvaal with the goal of leading the uitlanders to overthrow the Boer republic, emerged from both those fears and the explicit desire of those men to avenge Majuba. The raid failed when the uitlanders refused to revolt upon cue and Jameson’s men were defeated (something also discussed in a previous article) but this direct attack further poisoned British-Boer relations further.
From the British side this had given them a second defeat to brood over but from the Boer side it made it clear that they were not safe. Jan Smuts would describe the raid in 1906 as having been the real deceleration of the Second Boer War, and the Boers used those four years as such.
Paul Kruger, the flat earther Christian fundamentalist who ruled the Transvaal, would cement his grip on power thanks to this second victory over the British, whereas prior to that his party’s rule looked increasingly fragile; and the Orange Free State, spooked by the raid, would ally itself with the Transvaal, adding 15,000 soldiers to Kruger’s army. Kruger’s army itself would be vastly improved as a result of the Jameson Raid, with millions spent on buying better guns, artillery and fortresses. And it was reinforced by Afrikaners from the Cape Colony, who had felt betrayed by their PM, Cecil Rhodes, attacking their kin and so had defected – Jan Smuts himself was one of them. The Cape Colony White population (and so the voting population, after Rhodes had disenfranchised most of the non-white voters of the Cape) was majority Afrikaner and the UK feared that they were a possible fifth column for any war against the Transvaal.
The British would try and do damage control by denying a direct role in the Jameson Raid. Though Rhodes was implicated by Jameson, both claimed that the British Government had never approved their actions (in return for Rhodes’ company’s rule of Rhodesia not being revoked). Instead two members of the Colonial Office, Graham Bower and Edward Fairfield, were offered up as scapegoats, with the idea they had acted without informing their higher ups (Bower was paid off with a cushy retirement and Fairfield had died of a stroke). Nobody actually believed that Joseph Chamberlain, Colonial Secretary, hadn’t approved the raid; he had, though his PM, Lord Salisbury, genuinely had no idea about the plot. But Chamberlain lied well enough that the failure did not stick to him and he kept his position.
And the truth is the voting public of the UK in 1896 did not really see invading another country as a bad thing. Jameson was treated as a hero rather than a villain. The true villain, in the eyes of the British Public, was Kaiser Wilhelm, who publicly congratulated Kruger for maintaining his independence.
While the British Government were not overtly planning for the Second Boer War, their men in South Africa absolutely were. Having been warned that an act of aggression against the Transvaal would risk British security in the Cape Colony, Alfred Milner, High Commissioner for Southern Africa, took that to mean that Kruger must be seen to start the war. Milner and his men did not want peace, they wanted a chance to avenge their previous defeats, and their policies were designed to force the UK to go to war with the Transvaal without it being too obvious, to either the British Government or the Cape Colony population, that that is what they were doing.
Given that the Second Boer War lasted two and three-quarter years and was the costliest and bloodiest war that Britain fought between 1815 and 1914, it is perhaps worth thinking about how Milner got his war and how that could be avoided.
That war not happening is huge, both within Africa, where the hundred-year British project to conquer Southern Africa would go uncompleted, and within the rest of the world. For a start, the UK completely reformed their military as a result of the Second Boer War, which made a difference for how 1914 went: without it, the Germans might have done better in those first months of World War I. Likewise the British Election of 1900 would have been won by the Liberals if the Conservatives hadn’t been able to campaign as a wartime government, which changes the speed of domestic reform in the UK. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were first asked to send troops outside of their neighbourhood to fight for the Empire in this war, something which changed their own politics. Things like the term Kop and the Boy Scouts emerged from that war as well, as more British soldiers than ever before fought in Africa and came back with new experiences.
And, obviously, a lot of people died, including twenty-two thousand British soldiers, a figure very high for Britain’s imperial wars. I live within five minutes’ walk of a memorial for the dead volunteers from Gateshead which shows how much this loss spread across the country. But the loss within South Africa itself was much greater, where over fifty thousand people, black and white, lost their lives – and these causalities tended to be civilians, and often children, rather than soldiers.
In contrast, ninety threw people had died at Majuba Hill and twenty-two in the Jameson Raid. Those losses would be avenged fifty-fold.
The inciting incident that would eventually lead to the war was the shooting of Tom Edgar, a boiler maker from northern England, by the Transvaal Police. Edgar had struck another uitlander in a drunken fight and had attacked the officer who tried to apprehend him with his stick and thus was shot and killed. Concerns about police violence in the Transvaal, in particular the persistent racist abuse of non-white British workers, were already high and this shooting of a white man without a gun seemed to prove that uitlanders were not safe in this republic. And the uitlanders had genuine grievances, as they were unable to vote in the republic because Kruger had changed the residency in 1888 from five years to fourteen years, meaning people who had worked in his country for a decade still had no democratic voice. The killing of Edgar, and the ultimate acquittal of his shooter in the court case, led to fury and protests. And when the Transvaal Police arrested those protestors, the protests doubled.
And this fury was harnessed and funded by the British industrialists who owned mines within the Transvaal Republic, who felt they’d make far more money without having to pay taxes and custom duties to the Transvaal, which would not exist if it was a British colony selling to the UK, and if black labour was cheaper. The Boer Republics were incredibly racist states who did not pay their black workers well, but their black workers were syill paid whereas in a lot of British colonies, in particular in Rhodesia, the labour was forced and demanded instead of taxes. Economically the mine owners had reasons to think Milner could give them a better deal than Kruger. All they needed was for the British Army to remove Kruger for them.
In March 1899, Kruger tried to win over the mining barons by offering them a new deal. He’d recommend in parliament that the fourteen-year residency rule would be replaced once again by a five-year rule, though dated not from their arrival in the Republic but rather from when they applied for citizenship (meaning that the current uitlanders would still not get it until 1904). The barons would also be given preferential mining rights and tax breaks in return for backing Kruger’s leadership and distancing themselves from radicals who were raising issues about the police violence against Asian traders in the Republic. Much like Rhodes had sold out his non-white voters to appeal to the Afrikaner block in the Cape Colony, Kruger was offering the same. Anglo-Boer solidarity over the bodies of the non-white population.
The uitlanders, led by James Percy FitzPatrick, refused this offer unless the five years residency was retroactive and, in the meantime, reached out to Milner to work out how the two of them could goad Kruger and Salisbury into a war against each other. FitzPatrick probably would have taken a deal from Kruger if the latter had budged on the residency agreements but without that, his best bet was to hope for regime change and preferential treatment in British Transvaal. Milner asked for the British government to intervene democratically on behalf of the uitlanders, which they, after much debate, agreed to.
In June 1899, representatives of the British and the Transvaal met in the Orange Free State to try and hammer out an agreement over uitlander suffrage. What was actually at stake here, though it varied how much this was understood, was the UK’s role as the paramount power in Southern Africa. For the British government, though not Milner and FitzPatrick, what they wanted was the recognition that their opinions mattered more than anyone else’s; if they were concerned about the plight of the uitlanders, then the Transvaal Republic needed to do something to reduce those concerns. The Boers being independent didn’t change that, in British eyes, because Britain’s voice mattered more. But from the Boer point of view, they were never sure how much their concessions would actually matter, given that the British had tried to overthrow their republic just four years ago. Was this all just an excuse for a declaration of war?
For Milner, it was but for his bosses, they just wanted Kruger to climb down and admit that the UK was right. Milner was given permission to ratchet up the pressure on Kruger so that he would capitulate, something Milner was happy to do in the belief that Kruger never actually would. But Kruger did: in secret, though not in public, he offered a reform bill that vastly increased the uitlander representation if in return, the UK would pay some reparation for the Jameson Raid and recognise Transvaal rights over the Swazi Kingdom. Another man in Milner’s position could have agreed that and come away with full praise from his superiors for enforcing the British position that they could interfere in the Transvaal’s affairs. But Milner, with his desire for war, was never going to accept it. The conference broke down and both sides began to mobilise for war.
In July there was an even further backdown from Kruger, an open public offer for a retrospective seven-year franchise for white immigrants. As far as London was concerned, they’d got everything they wanted. As such they proposed a joint British-Transvaal inquiry to scrutiny and enforce the new rules. This, however, was a step too far for Kruger and he refused it. War seemed even more likely. In August Kruger made another go at it, agreeing the original five-year demand asked for by FitzPatrick in return for complete independence from further British demands, which the British found unacceptable because the precedent that they could make demands was what they were fighting for.
Fundamentally Kruger and Chamberlain could have made peace, their positions were not that far away from each other. It is easy to see a potential settlement that would have defused the crisis. But neither trusted each other, both worried they were negotiating against an opponent who would never accept anything but war, and both were worried about losing face in front of their own people’s increasing jingoism. And a lot of the people who could have acted as a bridge between them did not want peace at all.
You would need to change the British personnel in South Africa to avoid war, but I do think it is possible. In which case the Transvaal would gain a lot more non-Boer voters but remain a Boer majority state. The Transvaal would become like the Cape, a state in which a united British and Boer white population held whip hand over the non-whites in a racist white supremacist state and would have likely grown closer to the other South African states, though I think a union is unlikely. And as discussed above, the British Empire is very different without that war or even a later war, though I think with a Liberal win in 1900 and World War I in 1914, the Boers probably do keep their independence if they survive 1899.
In OTL, however, by September both the British and the Transvaal were convinced that a war was inevitable. The Orange Free State was not and vacillated throughout September, delaying the unified Boer Ultimatum until October, and costing the Boers four weeks during which thousands more British troops arrived in South Africa (though much less then requested by the Generals thanks to the Secretary of State for War not believing war was imminent).
On October 9th 1899, the two Boer states issued a joint ultimatum that Britain needed to withdraw all of the troops they were gathering in South Africa or they would find themselves at war. Milner had done it, the war had begun and he could swing it as being Kruger’s choice. The British turned down the ultimatum and on the 11th of October, Boer armies invaded British Natal and the Cape Colony.
Which bring us to our second POD. If the Orange Free State had agreed to war a month earlier, could the Boers have captured all of British South Africa prior to British reinforcements arriving by ship, meaning those reinforcements could not land and Britain would have to seek peace? They would, after all have had huge advantages in numbers and quality, as they would prove in their victories in the first months of the year, and certainly some people in the Boer Army thought it was possible that the war could be a quick victory.
I don't, I think that is close to impossible. The Boers would not be able to capture that much territory that quickly; they laid siege to Mafeking for seven months without capturing it, for a start. And it relied on the idea of an en mass switching of sides in the Cape Colony that just didn’t happen. And even if they miraculously did capture all of British South Africa, the Royal Navy could probably just capture back their ports and land troops there quite easily.
A quick war would never be won by the Boers, who had no ability to hit at their enenemies’ homelands, only by the British who did. And given the quality of the Boer armies, a quick victory for the British is also very unlikely even if a different leadership had sent more men there during the crisis. They needed tens of thousands of men in South Africa who they didn't yet have spare, as political concerns had kept their army relatively small compared to how large the empire was, and they hadn't really changed their tactics since the Napoleonic Wars.
If the war was to end quickly, it would have to be due to foreign intervention and the Boer’s representatives in Europe tried to argue for that intervention on their behalf. They certainly gained a lot of sympathy and foreign volunteers, but nobody was willing to risk a war with the world’s greatest empire over a small republic in Africa. In late 1899, France did make a private inquiry to Russia and Germany as to whether the three could act in uniform to force the British to back down or face a war with all three at once but were rebuffed by the Germans. That proposal never went beyond the earliest sounding out stage but would have completely changed European geopolitics in the 20th century had it actually happened.
Instead, with no foreign intervention on the table, the war was going to not be a quick one. And the actual events of the war will be covered in another article.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.
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