Kimberley and the Siege of Rhodes
More than thirty years before the outbreak of the Second Boer War a
Dutch child in the Hopetown District of Cape Colony found, while playing
carelessly near the left bank of the Orange, a pretty pebble that was
destined to mould the History of South Africa.
He took the bagatelle home to his father's farm, where a neighbour, one
Van Niekirk, saw it and was struck by its brilliancy. It chanced that
the Irishman O'Reilly was passing that way and to him it was entrusted
to take to Colesberg for expert opinion upon its value. Here certain
Jews declared that it was but a white topaz not worth one shilling and
it was disdainfully cast out into the road, from which it was with
difficulty recovered by O'Reilly, whose belief in it though shaken was
not wholly abandoned. Through a mutual friend, Lorenzo Boyes, Acting
Civil Commissioner of the District, the pebble came to the notice of an
expert mineralogist named Atherstone at Grahamstown, but it was held so
lightly in esteem by the sender that it reached Atherstone as an
enclosure in an ordinary unregistered letter. Atherstone examined it,
and when it had not only spoilt all the jeweller's files in the town but
had also passed an examination by polarized light, pronounced that it
was a diamond worth £500. His certificate to its character, which had
been so ignorantly disparaged, was the origin of the Diamond industry of
South Africa. Another diamond was soon picked up near Hopetown which
without difficulty or misadventure rose to its own plane in mineralogy.
Its career was short and its destiny happy. It was purchased by the
first Earl of Dudley for the adornment of his second wife.
When it was noised abroad with the customary exaggeration that the
monopoly of Golconda and the Brazils was at an end and that diamonds
grew wild on the South African veld, a wide extent of country was
explored and the precious crystallized carbon was found in districts
separated by many hundreds of miles. In certain places, one of which
became known as the town of Kimberley, it was ascertained to recur in a
constant proportion of the contents of the "pipes" or volcanic tubes
which rose through the surface strata.
The pioneers of Kimberley took possession of the diamondiferous grounds
without ascertaining to whom they belonged, and when their value became
positive the question of ownership arose. The boundaries of the
districts administered by the Cape Colony, the Orange Free State, and
the Transvaal respectively were, as regards territory, supposed to be of
little account, vague, ill-defined, and unsurveyed; and the districts
themselves were occupied by native tribes of nomad habits. About the
middle of the XIXth century a Hottentot chief named Waterboer came up
out of the West and squatted in the districts lying between the Orange
and the Vaal. His rights, such as they were, were assumed or acquired by
the Cape Government, which soon became involved in controversy with the
Orange Free State as to their extent and nature. Finally the British
Empire secured a good title to the estate by the payment of £90,000. But
the Orange Free State not unnaturally, when the value of the Diamond
Fields increased day by day, soon began to think that it had parted with
a profitable possession for an inadequate return. The feeling rankled;
and the confident expectation of recovering Kimberley sold for a song
tempted Bloemfontein into the fatal alliance with Pretoria.
In 1871 a sickly youth named Cecil Rhodes came from England to South
Africa in search of health, which after a short sojourn in Natal he
found at Kimberley. The prospects of the place favourably impressed him,
and he soon laid in it the foundations of his fortune; but six years
later the future of Kimberley was still precarious and the discovery of
gold in a remote district of the Transvaal sucked thither the greater
proportion of the citizens, who, however, found that they had not
bettered themselves by the change and returned to the pipes: and soon
nearly a hundred companies, syndicates, and private adventurers were
groping for diamonds over an area of less than two hundred acres. The
waste of energy was manifest to Rhodes, who in 1888 completed, with the
help of the Rothschilds, the task upon which he had been engaged for
some years, the amalgamation of the conflicting and overlapping diamond
interests under the name of the De Beers Consolidated Mines. It was soon
found that the new industry was insufficiently protected by the existing
criminal law and a new felony was created by the Illicit Diamond Buying
Act.
It has been for several centuries the practice of Great Britain to
entrust to private companies the imperial responsibilities which she is
reluctant to assume and to let out to contractors, who can be repudiated
if they fail and expropriated if they succeed, the job of expanding an
Empire. Of this policy the most prominent instance is the East India
Company, a commercial venture which obtained from Queen Elizabeth a
charter empowering it to trade with the East and which, though connected
with Great Britain only by the slender thread of an ocean track of
12,000 miles, maintained itself for two centuries and a half with ever
increasing territory and authority until it became a great military
Empire. Other examples of lower degree are the Hudson's Bay Company and
the Borneo Company. The De Beers Company provided out of its abundance
large sums for exploration and settlement in South Africa and for the
furtherance of the Imperial idea, and it is said that Rhodes spent the
whole of one night in arguing with some of the materialistic magnates of
Kimberley, before he could induce them to consent to the employment of
the resources of the Company in the advancement of his schemes of
Empire. He found, however, that these could not be satisfactorily
promoted by a Company whose primary interests were commercial rather
than imperial; and in 1888 he obtained a charter for the British South
Africa Company, an offshoot of the De Beers Company, formed for the
purpose of extending the British Empire towards the Equator.
The question of the defences of Kimberley engaged the attention of the
De Beers Company some years before the outbreak of the war. Its
vulnerability to attack from the Orange Free State, the border of which
ran close to the town, was obvious; and in 1896 a depot of arms and
ammunition was formed. A military plan of the place was sent to the
Imperial authorities and a defence force was also organized. This,
however, had in 1899 ceased to exist owing chiefly to the action of Mr.
Schreiner, at that time the Premier of the Cape Colony, who in June
refused, with complacent optimism, to furnish it with arms, saying that,
"there is no reason for apprehending that Kimberley is in danger of
attack," and that "the fears of the citizens are groundless and their
anticipations without foundation." A battery of artillery was, however,
surreptitiously brought up from King Williamstown.
The policy of Schreiner during the months preceding the war is obscure.
While refusing help to Kimberley he was allowing munitions of war, which
were way billed as pianos and hardware, to pass through the Cape Colony
to the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. He does not appear to have
been actively disloyal to the Imperial Government and in his own way he
probably did his best to keep the peace. His mind was cast in a mould
which is not uncommon in the British Empire but which is rarely found
outside it. He was more anxious to stand well with its enemies, and like
the Unjust Steward to have a claim to a place in their houses, if they
were successful, than to work for its security. It was with great
difficulty that Sir A. Milner as late as September 18 obtained his
consent to the dispatch of a few regulars to Kimberley to form the
backbone of a defensive force. He seems to have retained almost to the
end, in spite of all indications to the contrary, the belief that the
war would be averted or at least that the Orange Free State would not
join in it. Yet in this he erred in good company. Mr. Balfour said that
if on September 28 he had been asked whether war with the Orange Free
State was a probable contingency he would have replied that war with
Switzerland was one equally probable; and Lord Lansdowne declined before
September 23 to discuss with Lord Roberts the question of operations in
the Free State. Buller, with surer insight, had foreseen the alliance as
far back as 1881.
The War Office, however, was to a certain extent on the alert and
distrusted the optimism of Schreiner and of a high military official who
had been for some years in South Africa. Officers were sent to Kimberley
to organize a scheme of defence, but having regard to the susceptibility
of the Capetown Government it was done secretly and confidentially and
Schreiner was outwitted. By October 7 the town, which was under the
command of Colonel Kekewich, was secure against a _coup de main_ though
not against a vigorous and sustained siege. Little more than an eighth
of the garrison was composed of regular troops; the artillery was out of
date; rifles and ammunition were deficient. On October 13 Rhodes threw
himself into Kimberley and became for better or worse a power in the
town. As soon as the siege began the relative value of the chief
products of the mines was inverted: water, the most generous gift of
nature and hitherto an embarrassment in the workings, became for the
time being more valuable than the diamonds.
On October 12 the curtain of the great drama was raised and the first
scene presented. It showed the capture of an armoured train on the
railway between Kimberley and Mafeking. Kimberley under any
circumstances was a prize worth winning. But Kimberley taken with Rhodes
as a prisoner of war, the man who had curbed and checked on every side
the expansion of the Republics, who had taken Matabeleland on the north
and Bechuanaland on the west into the fold of the British Empire, would
be more than a prize, would be a triumph. Rhodes metaphorically in
chains, and actually paraded as a captive in the streets of Bloemfontein
and Pretoria was an alluring prospect.
Great, however, as were the advantages to be gained by the early capture
of Kimberley, the object was not pursued with energy and determination.
When the siege began on November 6 the situation was in favour of the
attack. The Boers were in possession of the railway from Orange River
Station to Mafeking: Kimberley was ill-supplied with the munitions and
weapons of war and was defended by a force mainly composed of
irregulars; it was encumbered with a large native population; and the
civil and military authorities were not working in harmony.
The defence throughout was more active than the attack. Reconnaissances
and raids against the enemy's positions were made with effect; and the
bombardment which followed a rejected summons to surrender did little
harm. Communication with the outer world was not seriously impeded.
Cattle grazed almost with impunity inside the line of investment and
several thousands of the natives escaped.
But the difficulties of Kekewich, who had been in command since
September 20, were not confined to those created by the military
situation. He was thrown into close association with the man who was one
of the indirect causes of the war, and who had little confidence in
military men, or sympathy with their ideas and methods. Rhodes had come
into his own Kimberley and for the first time he was not master in it.
He found himself a sterilized dictator acting in an atmosphere too
tenuous to support his vitality but sufficient to preserve it from
extinction. He was subject to the authority of the military commandant,
a galling position for a distinguished statesman who had not a high
opinion of the professional capacity of the British officer. From the
age of eighteen he had been his own master except during the intervals
which he had spared from South Africa and spent at Oxford, when he was
temporarily subject to the lax discipline of a University. While his
contemporaries were amusing themselves at college, or performing routine
duties in the Army or the Civil Service, or preparing to enter a
profession, Rhodes was spending the critical years of his life in
outlining the future and scheming for a South African Empire to be
erected on the foundation of the Kimberley Mines.
It was inevitable from the nature of the case and from his intimate
concern in the fortunes of Kimberley that he could not see South African
affairs at large in their true perspective. The sparkle of his diamonds
made him curiously colour-blind and out of this defect in his mental
vision sprang the mischief. Kimberley, for the time being at least,
stood so closely in the foreground that other objects were thrown out of
focus. Nor did the disturbing influence of the glare and halation of
Kimberley only affect the vision of the diamond men within the town. It
closed the eyes of the besiegers without it to a great strategical
opportunity which soon passed away.
The figure of Rhodes in Kimberley was the magnet which attracted and
detained commandos which could have been more usefully employed
elsewhere, and his presence, so far as it had this effect, was of great
service to the perilously weak British force during the first few weeks
of the war. If the commandos squatting before Kimberley had instead been
sent to raid southwards towards the Karroo, and to inflame the Dutch
districts in the Cape Colony, they would have met with little
resistance, and advancing with daily increasing numbers would have had
little difficulty in planting themselves firmly in the heart of the
enemy's country. For the moment the war in the west was waged not
against Great Britain but against the Man of Kimberley.
The diamond men, with Rhodes at their head, forgetting that the object
of the war was the redress of the Outlanders' wrongs in the Transvaal,
began to bellow for relief even before the Boers had completed the
investment of the town. Telegrams couched in extravagant and almost
hysterical language and betraying the egotism and the want of
self-control of the senders were repeatedly despatched. One of these, in
which on October 19 the De Beers directors asked for information as to
the plans of the military authorities at Capetown, "so as to enable us
to take our own steps in case relief is refused," was thought not
unnaturally by Buller to hint at surrender; and although this was not
the intention of the senders it is probable that they did not regret the
interpretation that was put upon it.
Fortunately, however, Kekewich was a cool-headed man who did not suffer
himself to be hustled. While preserving amicable personal relations with
Rhodes, he was careful to let Capetown know that the situation in
Kimberley was by no means desperate and that it would be able to hold
out for several weeks.
The impetuous and childish letters and telegrams sent out by the diamond
men induced Buller, who said afterwards that "although I had every
confidence in Colonel Kekewich's military capacity I did not trust the
other powers within the city," to send Lord Methuen northwards on
November 10 with instructions to help Kimberley by removing unnecessary
non-combatants and natives, and "to let the people understand that you
have not come to undertake its defence, but to afford it better means of
maintaining its defence."
The news of Methuen's approach did not allay the excitement of the
townsmen. His movement was not an essential part of the general plan of
campaign but only a raid in force with the object of putting men and
supplies into Kimberley and enable it to hold on until pressure
elsewhere upon the Boers should raise the siege automatically.
The dignity and the self-respect of the diamond men was affronted. Like
the Syrian captain Naaman, when offered relief of his leprosy by the
prophet Elisha, they resented the simple process by which their own
relief was to be effected. They had looked to an Army Corps at least
marching on Kimberley with all the pomp of war and speedily enabling it
to resume its normal occupation of diamond grubbing; and now they found
that the town was not considered of much account in the scheme of the
military, who regarded it as a mere besieged place of little strategical
importance; which, after some assistance, was to be left dependent for
its safety upon its own exertions while the main army advanced through
the Free State.
On December 4 Kekewich was instructed to make arrangements for the
deportation of a large proportion of the white and coloured population,
Methuen hinting that Rhodes himself might be included. Although Rhodes
had a few weeks before complained of the difficulties caused by the
presence of non-combatants and had even endeavoured to send them away,
he now vehemently opposed their removal. His reasons for so doing are
not very clear, but they appear to be part of the systematic obstruction
which he offered to every proposition of the military authorities which
tended to restrict the output of diamonds. His objections were
transmitted to Buller, who speedily put the question in its proper light
by telegraphing to Kekewich that "what we have to do is to keep the
Union Jack flying over South Africa without favour to any particular set
of capitalists," and Methuen met his protest with the answer that
"Rhodes has no voice in the matter." After the defeat at Magersfontein
the plan of deportation had necessarily to be given up.
In his own proper sphere of a civilian working with civilians Rhodes was
usefully active and his services were great. He employed the persons
thrown out of work by the closing of the mines in labour for the general
benefit of the town, and did much to relieve the distress among the
poorer inhabitants.
The manufacture of a heavy gun, to which the name of Long Cecil was
given, in the De Beers engineering establishment, was soon countered by
the Boers, who brought into action a gun throwing a much heavier shell
which had been disabled by the Naval Battery at Ladysmith, repaired at
Pretoria, and was now mounted before Kimberley. The appearance of Long
Tom, supervening on a reduction on the daily rations, caused a panic
among the civilians. On February 9 Rhodes threatened to call a public
meeting to consider the situation unless he was informed of the plans
for the relief of the town: but Kekewich was authorized by Lord Roberts
not only to forbid the holding of the meeting, but even if necessary to
arrest Rhodes. A private meeting was then held at which a remonstrance
was drawn up for transmission to Lord Roberts through Kekewich; and for
the second time a communication from the Kimberley men was interpreted
as a threat to surrender. It was probably sent with that intent in order
to elicit information as to Lord Roberts' plans.
Kekewich meanwhile was finding his position almost intolerable, and his
representations convinced Lord Roberts of the necessity of raising the
siege of Rhodes without delay and at any cost. It was effected on
February 15 by French's brilliant cavalry movement; but at the cost of
the convoy of 170 wagons which were snapped up by De Wet at Waterval
Drift, and of an Army compelled to march and to fight for nearly four
weeks on reduced rations. But the harvesting of the crop of diamonds was
resumed, and as far as Kimberley was concerned the war was at an end.
Although the siege lasted for more than three months the casualties were
few, only 40 persons being killed and 123 wounded by acts of war. The
privations suffered by the inhabitants, especially during the last few
weeks, were no doubt great, but certainly not greater than the
privations which unhappily are endured by the unemployed in Great
Britain during a hard winter. The siege was conducted without much
vigour and determination, and the most important operation on the side
of the defence was a sortie on November 29 after the news had come in of
Methuen's approach.
The relief of Kimberley closed the public career of the most conspicuous
figure in the British Empire; and with great dignity and self-restraint,
which might well have been imitated by other persons whose conduct
during the war was impugned, Rhodes refrained from publishing a
Kimberley book.
If the Siege of Kimberley brought out the weak side of his character,
his egotism and impatience, his lack of power to adapt himself even
temporarily to unaccustomed conditions, it will be remembered that these
defects were inherent and that his marvellous success in life had
accentuated them. The acts of a public man are so variously regarded by
his opponents and his admirers, are seen by them in such different
lights, that there can rarely be any general agreement on the question
of the ratio between his merits and his failings; but the chief phases
of his life afford the raw material out of which each man for himself
can form an estimate of his character.
Like many men who have afterwards become famous in the secular world,
Cecil Rhodes was intended for the Church. His health suffered from the
rigours of the East Anglian climate and he was sent out to South Africa.
His brother's farm in Natal, to which he was consigned, he found
derelict on his arrival, but he was soon growing cotton on it, against
the advice of the local experts, but with eventual success. At the age
of 18 he was prospecting for diamonds at Kimberley, and forming the
opinion during a visit to the Transvaal that an insufficient proportion
of the South African Continent belonged to the British Empire. In 1872,
being then 19 years of age, he went to Oxford, but in a few months his
health broke down and another voyage to the Cape became necessary. In
1876 he returned to the University and remained there for two years when
South Africa recalled him. As soon as he could be spared he went back to
his college and, eight years after matriculation, completed his
undergraduate course. It was a high compliment to the value of a Pass
Degree at Oxford, where, however, he formed the opinion, which was not
publicly divulged until his will was opened twenty-one years later, that
Oxford Dons were "children in finance."
His election to the Cape Parliament in 1881 as Member for Kimberley
placed him in a favourable position to advance his schemes for the
northward extension of the British Empire. When the trespasses and
encroachments of the Transvaal Boers beyond the limits assigned to them
under the Convention of 1884 made it advisable to incorporate
Bechuanaland he was unable to persuade the Cape Government to undertake
that responsibility, but with the assistance of Sir Hercules Robinson
and the support of Mr. Chamberlain he induced the Imperial Government to
take action. President Kruger had connived at the establishment on
native territory under British protection of two little republics of
raiders, to which the names of Goshen and Stellaland were assigned; and
a costly expedition under Sir C. Warren was needed to bring him to his
senses. In 1885 Bechuanaland became an integral part of the British
Empire.
In 1888 he again opened the flood gates of Imperialism, and secured by
means of a treaty with Lobengula the reversion of the native territory
north of the Transvaal, at which two European nations were nibbling, and
which in his honour received the name of Rhodesia.
He became Premier of the Cape Colony in 1890 by the help of the Dutch
vote and from that time gradually sank from the zenith of his success.
His good fortune left him when he attained his ambition. The Jameson
Raid, for which he was not personally, though he confessed himself
morally, responsible, ended his political career. His last good service
to the Empire was given during the Matabele rising. He accompanied the
troops sent to suppress the rebellion; and when the operations seemed
likely to be indefinitely prolonged, he brought it to an end by going
fearlessly and almost unattended among the natives, whose confidence he
won by meeting them trustfully in council and listening to their
grievances.
His physical vitality, always inadequate, was seriously impaired by the
strain of the siege. He never fully recovered his strength and he died
on March 26, 1902, two months before the Second Boer war was brought to
a close by the Vereeniging Treaty.
He was a rich but honest man, and the great wealth which he amassed
never led him to attach undue importance to the possession of it. He
valued it not for his own advantage, but for its help in advancing his
political and imperial schemes. He employed it creditably and without
ostentation, and spent none of it in social display in London. By his
will he left the greater portion of it to the University of Oxford for
the establishment of an amiable if somewhat quixotic system of bringing
the various branches of the Anglo-Saxon race into association at a
centre of learning and athletics, where they were to be leavened by a
Teutonic admixture.
The vision of posthumous reputation allured him, and he delighted in the
hope that the name of his own Rhodesia, like the cities which still bear
the name of Alexander, would be on the lips of men of generations as far
distant from his own as his own was from the days of the Great
Macedonian.
He presented a pair of sculptured lions to President Kruger. Almost on
the eve of the war he asserted confidently that Kruger would not fight.
It is probable that this was not his belief, but that it was said in
order to provoke the President into rejecting the overtures of the
British Government, and to make inevitable the war which he foresaw was
the only way of settling the South African question.
Not a few incidents in his life are difficult to explain. The donation
of £10,000 to the funds of the Parnellite Party by an ardent English
Imperialist who had never expressed any particular enthusiasm for Home
Rule may have been a _douceur_ to prevent the Irish members from
attacking him in the British Parliament. He had not forgotten that
Parnell inaugurated the policy of obstruction carried to the length of
all-night sittings upon the occasion of the discussion of a Cape
Colonial question in the House of Commons. Possibly Rhodes was a Home
Ruler not in spite of his Imperialism but because of it. Home rule was
necessary to it. The function of the Imperial Parliament was the general
control of the affairs of the Empire, leaving local politics to be dealt
with by local legislatures.
The strong and dominant personality of Cecil Rhodes came to the front at
a time when the British Empire was beginning to show signs of lassitude
and appeared to be growing tired of itself. Patriotism was being slowly
transmuted into a limp and sickly cosmopolitan altruism. He checked this
decadence, at least for the time being, but passed away before he was
able to subdue it.