Gold and Guns

The First Boer War of 1880–81 was, by the standards of imperial Britain, a minor embarrassment. The Transvaal Boers had revolted against a British annexation imposed in 1877, won a decisive battle at Majuba Hill — where General Colley was killed and his force routed by men who looked, to Victorian eyes, more like farmers than soldiers — and forced Gladstone's government to restore Transvaal independence in the Convention of Pretoria. Britain had been humiliated, but the humiliation was manageable. The Transvaal was poor, remote, and strategically marginal. Gladstone cut his losses.

Then, in 1886, the Witwatersrand gold reef was discovered. It was the largest gold deposit in the world — so large and so rich that it would eventually produce more gold than any other source in history. Within five years, Johannesburg had grown from nothing to a city of 100,000. The Transvaal, which had been bankrupt at annexation and poor at independence, was suddenly one of the wealthiest territories on earth. British capital poured in; British, Australian, and American miners — the Uitlanders (foreigners) — came in their thousands. By 1895 the Uitlanders may have outnumbered the Boers in the Transvaal itself.

Paul Kruger, the Transvaal president, faced an existential dilemma. The gold revenue was transforming his republic, funding modern Krupp artillery and German Mauser rifles and the administrative infrastructure of a serious state. But the Uitlanders represented a potential fifth column: if they were granted political rights — as they demanded, and as British imperialists demanded on their behalf — they would vote the Boer republic out of existence within a generation. Kruger refused them the vote, taxed them heavily, and watched with grim satisfaction as British frustration mounted.

Cecil Rhodes, the Cape Colony Prime Minister and diamond magnate who dreamed of a British Africa from the Cape to Cairo, organized a solution that was as reckless as it was stupid. In December 1895, a small armed force under Dr. Leander Starr Jameson rode into the Transvaal from Bechuanaland, intending to trigger an Uitlander uprising that would topple Kruger's government and hand the territory to Britain. The Jameson Raid was a fiasco: the Uitlander uprising failed to materialize, Jameson's force was surrounded and surrendered within days, and the Kaiser sent Kruger a congratulatory telegram that enraged British public opinion while demonstrating the international sympathy Boer resistance commanded. Rhodes was finished as Cape Prime Minister. But the damage was done: Kruger now knew that war was coming and began arming seriously. Britain knew it too.