Diamonds were found in 1867-8 along the Vaal and Orange rivers in a region where some 3,000 Griquas, 1,000 Korannas and 1,000 Afrikaners lived in uneasy proximity.1 Britain had acknowledged the Griqua claims to the territory by treaty in 1834 and 1846. Reversing her policy, she gave independence to the Transvaal voortrekkers in 1852 and to the Orange Free State in 1854, repudiated her alliances with coloured peoples north of the Orange, excepting Adam Kok, and in effect abandoned them to Afrikaner domination. Then came the discoveries. Diamonds, prophesied the Cape's colonial secretary, Richard Southey, were 'the rock on which the success of South Africa will be built'. Britain rediscovered a moral duty towards the Griquas. Wodehouse, the Cape governor, informed Kimberley, the British secretary of state, that ' as a matter of right the native tribes are fairly entitled to that tract of country in which, for the present, the diamonds appear to be chiefly found. 2 Kimberley agreed and added that his government would be much displeased if the republics were to extend their slave-dealing activities, oppress the natives, and cause disturbances of the peace by encroaching on Griqua territory. 3
Britain walked off with the prize, while Griquas, Korannas, Rolong and Afrikaner republics disputed the ownership of the diamond fields. Cornelius Waterboer, the Griqua leader, had trustingly appealed to Britain for protection. An arbitration court awarded the territory to his people, and Britain annexed it in 1871 under the title of Griqualand West. A payment of £90,000 was made to the Orange Free State as compensation for the loss of her title. To the Griqua went the consolation of having their name perpetuated in one of the richest portions of the earth's surface, which once they had called their own. South Africans of all races and a random selection of immigrants took their place. The influx raised the population of the territory by June 1871 to 37,000, of whom 215,000 were Africans and Coloured. 4 None of the administering authorities, whether Griqua, Afrikaner or British, was prepared for the rush. The diggers appointed committees to enforce order, and the Orange Free State asserted a nominal authority before the annexation, but there was a dearth of even rudimentary services.
Housing, hospitals, water supplies, sanitation, power and transport had to be improvised, usually by private agencies at rising prices. Diggers, some with families, lived in wagons, tents, huts or galvanized iron sheds. Africans, who usually walked barefooted to the fields, often arrived in an emaciated state: 'weary, grimy, hungry, shy, trailing along sometimes with bleeding feet, and hanging heads, and bodies staggering with faintness.' 5 Many came from far in the interior with the sole purpose of earning £6 for a gun, the only weapon with which they could hope to protect their land and cattle against invading colonists. No one accepted responsibility for the newcomers. Their destitution rendered them unfit for hard toil, but forced them to labour twelve hours a day and more. They slept on the bare earth without shelter or in a brushwood hut, and suffered greatly from the cold. They lived on mealie-meal, with an occasional chunk of refuse meat. Water, at 2s. 6d. a bucket, was beyond their means. Many acquired a taste for Cape brandy, retailed at 3d. a tot and 10s. 6d. a gallon. There were no laws to regulate wages and working conditions, impose safety measures against accident and disease, or enforce the payment of workmen's compensation.
Farmers trekked to the fields with oxwagon, family, and a retinue of servants who were paid £3 a year, or the price of a cow, to dig for diamonds, while the patriarch, smoking his pipe, sat at the sorting table. Recent immigrants, who accounted for one-quarter of the white population on the fields, soon adopted the South African way of life. They too hired Africans to pick, shovel, break, haul and sift ground, to cut and carry firewood, to cook and wash, and to accompany their masters to market with sack or wheelbarrow. Most whites felt disinclined for manual work during the summer, observed Sir Charles Payton, who spent six months on the diggings in 1871. 'It is quite sufficient for them to sit under an awning and sort, leaving the Kafirs to perform all the other stages of work.' 6 Middle-class English gentlemen, like Cecil Rhodes and his brother, ' delighted to find themselves in a veritable Tom Tiddler's ground, where they could not only pick up gold and silver, but have it done for them by niggers" '. 7
Conditions were ideal for making fat profits on a thin investment. Luck, foresight, tenacity, ruthlessness and a little capital were needed for success. Most diggers probably lacked these qualities and failed to pay their way. 8 But the successful ones could amass great wealth, by production or speculation, out of a valuable mineral extracted without expensive plant and by peasants who received no protection against gross exploitation. Diamonds to an estimated value of £1.5million were taken out of the ground by 1872. 9 The labourer's share was a weekly wage of 7s. 6d. or 10s. and rations worth 6s. 6d. consisting of twenty-five pounds of mealie-meal (but whole mealies came much cheaper), an issue of coarse meat (called 'kafir' meat in the trade), a handful of coarse tobacco, and a Saturday night's tot of crude wine, spirits or brandy. Africans could not fail to note the contrast between their poverty and the value of their labour. If they missed the point, dealers in stolen gems drove it home.
Illicit diamond mining grew into a major industry. Stolen stones passed from the labourer to a ' tout ', who sold them for a small part of their value to a registered claimholder or licensed dealer. Louis Cohen, a native of Liverpool who emigrated to the diggings in 1866, noted that many wealthy diggers laid the basis of their fortunes by buying stolen gems. They robbed the small man of his diamonds and claim, became big mine owners or dealers, and were then loudest in denouncing the profession that they had previously practised with such success. 10 African and Coloured labourers supplied the stolen diamonds. Few were convicted but all were suspected, not least by unsuccessful diggers. A mythology took shape. Coloured claimholders were said to be more successful than white ones because they received stones stolen by relatives and friends. 11 Africans, it was maintained, stole at least half the output. 12 'The partially civilized Kaffir rapidly develops into a thief.' 13 The 'raw Kaffir' fresh from the kraal, is best and most trustworthy. 'Above all things, mistrust a Kaffir who speaks English and wears trousers,' advised Payton, who had a prodigious capacity for consuming and regurgitating colonial prejudices. 14
Prospectors from Australia and California imported notions of a 'diggers' law'. A Diamond Diggers' Protection Society, formed in 1870, issued a set of regulations. They stipulated that 'no licence to dig should be granted to a Native', prohibited persons of colour from holding claims or diamonds in their own right, and prohibited the buying of diamonds from any servant unless he had his employer's written authority to sell. The rules were given 'the force of law' by the executive council of the Orange Free State while it claimed to administer the diggings; but lost all semblance of legal validity after Britain had annexed GriquaIand West. 15 Coloured and Africans could then assert the same right as any white man to take out a licence and dig on their own account. The whites protested vigorously, especially when diamond yields declined, or prices fell, or the cost of claims rose. There was always some distress among the diggers. They blamed it on the servants who stole and the dealers who bought the stones, but, above all, on African and Coloured licensed claimholders.
Rioters swept through the streets of New Rush, the site of Kimberley, in 1872; tried to lynch an Indian accused of buying diamonds; burnt the tents and canteens of suspected traffickers in stolen gems; chased and flogged African passers-by. Two of the three British commissioners appointed to administer the diggings submitted to the campaign of violence. They issued a proclamation on 23 July suspending all digging licences held by Africans and Coloured. No more licences were to be issued to persons of colour except by leave of a diggers' committee or of a board of seven bonafide white claimholders. 16 Barkly, the Cape governor and high commissioner of Griqualand West, ruled that such discrimination was contrary to reason and justice, and therefore ultra vires. 17 He disallowed the proclamation, but undertook to see how far he could meet the rioters' demands. The diggers then submitted draft rules which would bar Africans and Coloured from obtaining licences to search for, buy, sell, or otherwise trade in diamonds. The rules also provided for written labour contracts, the expulsion of unemployed Africans from the diggings, and the confiscation of diamonds held by servants. Barkly conceded the substance of the demands in a proclamation of 10 August 1872, described as a measure to prevent the stealing of diamonds.
Barkly kept up the appearance of equality before the law by applying the proclamation to all ' servants '. But it discriminated, and was meant to discriminate, against Africans and Coloured. In the first place, no person could become a registered claimholder unless a magistrate or justice of the peace had certified him to be of good character, fit and proper to be registered. White officials under pressure from aggressive racists could be relied upon to use their wide powers against Africans as a class. Only a few licensed Coloured diggers, operating on the outskirts of the fields, remained to give credence to the Cape's doctrine of liberalism. Secondly, the proclamation laid the basis of the 'pass' system that spread in time to the Rand mines and from there to labour districts and towns throughout South Africa. It centred on the registration of labour contracts. Servants had to produce a certificate of registration on demand, and have it endorsed on taking their discharge. To leave the diggings lawfully, a servant had to produce the endorsed certificate and take out a pass. Any person found wandering in a mining camp without a pass and unable to give a satisfactory account of himself ran the risk of summary arrest a £5 fine and three months' hard labour or twenty-five lashes.
The object was to detect and apprehend deserting workers, who were liable under the Masters and Servants Act to fines or imprisonment. A related aim was the recovery of stolen diamonds. A policeman or employer might without warrant search a servant's room, property and person within twenty-four hours of his leaving his place of work. Diamonds in his possession belonged to his master unless the contrary was proved.
Barkly's surrender to racism failed to appease the leaders of the malcontents. They were after bigger game than a handful of Coloured prospectors and debris-sorters. Aylward, Tucker, Ling and others like them wanted power - an unreasonable and dangerous amount of power, reported Southey, now the lieutenant-governor of Griqualand West. They would use it, he warned, to deprive Her Majesty's Coloured subjects of their rights and privileges. 18 He and his secretary John Currey resisted demands for a stringent vagrancy law and an outright ban on the employment of registered servants by Coloured and Africans for mining and the sorting of debris.
More tents were burned. Discontented diggers made common cause with plotters from the Orange Free State and speculators out to buy claims cheaply. They formed the Kimberley Defence League, organized armed vigilantes, and hoisted the black flag. Carnarvon, the secretary of state, sided with the diggers and ordered the dismissal of Southey and Currey in 1875 for having failed to establish good relations with the whites of Kimberley. 19
The Griquas rose in rebellion in 1878, and the Cape incorporated Griqualand West in 1880. The colony's Vagrancy Act of 1867, as amended by Act 23 of 1879, could then be applied on the diggings. It supplemented the pass laws by prescribing a maximum of six months' imprisonment with hard labour, spare diet and solitary confinement for any ' idle and disorderly person' - the phrase used to describe anyone who wandered abroad without lawful means of subsistence and failed to give a good and satisfactory account of himself.
Southey had fallen foul of the Colonial Office by rejecting racial discrimination and protecting migrant workers against gross neglect. In his dispatches he complained of diggers who turned sick labourers into the street instead of caring for them as the law required. At his instance the legislative council passed Ordinance 2 of 1874 to provide hospital accommodation, medical attention and sanitary services 'for the benefit of the native labourers ', though at their expense. Every master was to deduct one shilling a month from his servant's wage and pay it to the registrar of servants, for a hospital and the improvement of general sanitation. The diggers objected strenuously to the levy, which came out of the worker's pocket, although the annual African death rate in Kimberley reached the alarming figure of seventy-nine per thousand in 1879 in contrast to a rate of forty for whites. 20 The levy yielded £10,000 in 1882, and a hospital was built. Nearly twenty years later however sick Africans, usually suffering from scurvy, were often left 'to lie in the compounds day after day in their dirty blankets and their bodies in a filthy condition'. 21
Human beings were cheaper than diamonds, as white workers also discovered. Men died or suffered injury in accidents caused by inexperience, lack of training, inadequate safety measures and the failure to supervise machinery. Witnesses told the Diamond Mining Commission of 1881 that no proper inquest or inquiry was held after an accident. 22 The commission suggested that safety regulations be introduced, but Cecil Rhodes and some other members of the commission seemed more anxious to prevent diamond thefts than to prevent accidents. Much attention was given to whether white employees as well as Africans should be searched for stolen stones. For the small claimholders, whose pressure had led to the elimination of Coloured diggers, were by then being eliminated in turn. A world-wide slump in diamond prices in 1875 forced many diggers out of the fields. More left as the yellow ground became exhausted. At lower levels, when digging deep into the blue ground, men found open-cast mining impossible on small claims of thirty feet square. Rockfalls, water seepage, boundary disputes, high costs and technical difficulties associated with deep-level mining hastened the process of converting independent diggers into servants of big companies.
Successful diggers and dealers, foreign merchants and investors bought and accumulated claims, formed syndicates and merged into companies. The original 3,600 claims in the four big mines at Kimberley were reduced by 1885 to 98 properties, held by 42 companies and 56 private firms or individuals. The mergers continued until each mine was worked as a unit. Big capitalists bought or squeezed out small shareholders. Small companies formed large companies which eventually merged into one great corporation, the De Beers Consolidated Mine. It controlled all the Kimberley mines and ninety per cent of the world's output of diamonds before the end of the century. 23 Laws enacted to protect small diggers now operated for the company's benefit. Men who had clamoured for protection against illicit diamond buying found that the weapons they had helped to forge were being turned against themselves.
A special court was set up in 1880 to try cases of illicit diamond buying - 'the canker worm of the community', said the judge, Sir Jacobus de Wet. The Trade in Diamonds Consolidation Act of 1882 prescribed a maximum penalty of a thousand-pound fine or fifteen years' imprisonment or both for being in unlawful possession of uncut diamonds. Only a licensed dealer was allowed to buy the uncut stones. But heavy penalties did not stop the traffic. Attempts were therefore made to stop it at the source. Regulations of 1872 and 1880, that provided for the searching of persons when they entered or left mining ground, proved ineffective. A majority of the diggers and claimholders who replied to a questionnaire circulated by the commission of 1881 favoured the compulsory searching of African workers; some wanted whites also to be searched; and some suggested the lash, life imprisonment, banishment, or a stricter pass and vagrancy law to put down illicit diamond buying. Amended regulations of 1883 required all mine workers, other than managers, to wear uniforms and to strip naked in searching houses when they left work.
White workers complained of being degraded to the 'Kafir's' level, went on strike, demonstrated and rioted in 1883. Twenty-five Africans who had joined in the turmoil were sent to jail for disorderly conduct, and the company rescinded the order to strip. A new instruction, issued in 1884, required white employees to be searched while clothed in shirt, trousers and socks, and those who refused were threatened with instant dismissal. The men called a general strike, stopped the pumps on all mines and when the 'French' company resumed work, marched on the mine to put the hauling gear out of action. The company's guards, barricaded behind sandbags, called on them to halt, opened fire, killed four demonstrators outright and fatally wounded two more. The workers held a splendid funeral, gathered at mass meetings to protest, and went back to work after the owners had agreed to subject white employees to only irregular surprise searches. 24
Africans were searched every day at the end of their shift. Stripped naked, they jumped over bars and paraded with arms extended before guards, who scrutinized hair, nose, mouth, ears and rectum with meticulous care. It was much the same kind of search that Africans endured in Kimberley's central prison where, remarked Judge, the civil commissioner, 'many a raw native ignorant of the laws of the province experienced the first acquaintance with civilization.' 25 Rhodes and his fellow directors took the parallel a long way further when they hit on the idea of confining African miners in closed compounds for the four or six months of their contract period. This debasing form of working-class housing was firmly entrenched by 1888, the year of the great merger of all controlling companies with De Beers. The compound was an enclosure surrounded by a high corrugated iron fence and covered by wire-netting. The men lived, twenty to a room, in huts or iron cabins built against the fence. They went to work along a tunnel, bought food and clothing from the company's stores, and received free medical treatment but no wages during sickness, all within the compound. Men due for discharge were confined in detention rooms for several days, during which they wore only blankets and fingerless leather gloves padlocked to their wrists, swallowed purgatives, and were examined for stones concealed in cuts, wounds, swellings and orifices. 26
Kimberley's shopkeepers protested loudly that they were being deprived of trade by the company's policy of converting 'a labour contract into a period of imprisonment with hard labour and a truck system of wages'. 27 To appease them, De Beers undertook to stock its shops with goods bought only in the district; and Rhodes distributed the profits, amounting to £10,000 a year, between a sanatorium, mining school and amenities for the whites of Kimberley. 28 Africans, whose trade yielded the profit, were said to benefit in other ways from their enforced confinement. It shielded them, the company claimed, from the temptation to waste their money on strong drink and bad women or to risk unpaid imprisonment by stealing diamonds, deserting service, or breaking discipline. In truth, peasants who entered an alien world, dominated by persons of a different race, language and culture, often fell prey to traders in shoddy goods, illicit liquor sellers, pimps and prostitutes. Many lives were wasted by alcoholism, venereal disease tuberculosis and crime. But free workers who inhabited the slums and shanties of industrial towns acquired the insights, maturity and hardness of will needed for survival in a harsh environment. Neither class nor national consciousness developed among the inmates of Kimberley's compound-jails.
De Beers' monopolistic structure and political influence enabled it to rationalize mining techniques and enforce strict control of workers, output, markets and prices. Working costs dropped by half in the decade after amalgamation, to 10s. a carat, while the average price of diamonds rose from 20s. to 30s. a carat. Dividends increased from 5 per cent in 1889 to 25 per cent in 1893 and 40 per cent in 1896. 29 Rhodes, Beit, Barnato and Philipson-Stow, the four life governors, took 40 per cent of the profits in excess of £1,440,000 a year - a right which they eventually sold to the company for three million pounds' worth of shares. Through the harsh exploitation of Africans and not, as Professor Frankel suggests, by 'miraculous industry' 30 - the mine owners extracted more than £300 millions' worth of diamonds at low capital costs in seventy years. The accumulated profits helped to finance the early mining of gold on the Witwatersrand.
Rhodes seemed indifferent to the homosexual practices that the compounds of Kimberley and the Rand injected into African life. As prime minister of the Cape, he introduced the Glen Grey Act of 1894, which imposed a labour tax and introduced individual land holdings to make peasants migrate to the mines. He showed no desire to protect their families against disintegration and the moral rot caused by excessive labour migration. Unemployed white workers, displaced by his company mergers and rationalization, were given work on his Rand mines or recruited for the pioneer column that invaded Mashonaland in 1890. But there was a time when he required police protection against the threats of unemployed diggers and bankrupt traders in Kimberley.
De Beers dominated the town. Company detectives spied on men at work and in their private lives, reported on their political activities, and set traps for suspected dealers in stolen diamonds. When white workers banded together in 1891, they called themselves the Knights of Labour, taking the American secret society of that name as their model, and declared 'perpetual war and opposition to the encroachment of monopoly and organized capital'. 31 Some Knights had taken part in an abortive attempt to 'rush' the Premier mine, later called the Wesselton, which de Beers bought in 1891 for nearly half a million pounds. They accused Rhodes of a 'breach of trust and corruption' for taking options on the property in his capacity as managing director while at the same time, as prime minister, opposing a petition to have it proclaimed an open digging. 32
The Knights of Labour blamed De Beers, 'that great monopoly', and the 'wealthy, overestimated, disappointing politician' Rhodes for the depressed state of the working classes during the collapse of the first gold boom. 'Unity, Charity, Fidelity' were inscribed on the society's banner. The members were pledged to champion the labouring classes everywhere against monopoly capital and 'the insidious attack of cheap labour competition'. The society aimed, on the one hand, to secure direct representation of labour in parliament, and, on the other, to exclude Indian, Chinese or 'other cheap labour competition of any Inferior Race attempting to invade our shores'. Here, in brief, was the ideological platform of the future white labour movement. But the Knights themselves failed to establish a hold. The white employees of De Beers were engine drivers, banksmen,* onsetters**, or supervisors. Set in authority over the African, they earned four or five times as much, and lived in company houses in an attractive suburb with clubhouse, parks and recreation grounds. The Knights could not wean them from loyalty to the company; or, according to trade unionists, break the strangle hold of the company over their lives.
'The white miners of Kenilworth, the suburb of Kimberley,' wrote J. A. Hobson in 1900, 'are absolutely under the control of De Beers Company: drawing their wages from De Beers, living in houses owned by De Beers, trading with shops controlled by De Beers, they are the political and economic serfs of the company; if they object to any terms imposed upon them by the company, they must quit not only their employment but their homes, and must leave Kimberley to find a means of living outside the clutches of the diamond monopoly.' 33 The experiences of militant workers in Kimberley were to verify Hobson's analysis in years to come. Conditions in the company town made a lasting impression on white workers of the Witwatersrand. Kimberley became a symbol of the fate that would overtake them if they allowed mine owners to substitute ' indentured compound labour ' for a free working class. The Knights of Labour faded away. But its vision of a war on two fronts, against Monopoly Capital and Cheap Coloured Labour, guided the thinking of organized white labour for many decades to come.
There was no doubt about the preference of the owners for cheap and docile workers whose wages could be pegged for thirty years or more at an average rate of 3s. 5d. a day, while the average wage of white miners rose in a few years from 16s. 8d. to 22s. 6d. a shift. Africans paid 2s. a month in 'pass ' and hospital fees, received free quarters and medical care, and spent about 1s. 2d. a day on basic foodstuffs, mostly mealies, beans, bread and meat. 34 By stinting on food and other requirements, a diligent worker who escaped sickness and injury could save at most £20 in seven months, the time taken to complete six 'tickets' of thirty shifts each. But his diet was worse and his accommodation no better than that of the hard labour convicts who also worked on the mines. The death rate among underground workers was reduced to forty per thousand by 1914 as a result of improved sanitation and medical treatment. But the Tuberculosis Commission of that year reproached the management of De Beers' Premier mine near Pretoria for its 'extravagant waste of life and health'. And the rebuke applied more or less to all mines. 35
The diamond mines never lacked labour. They attracted men by paying piece rates and a small reward to finders of highpriced stones. Ex-miners in the eastern Cape and Basutoland sent their sons to the compounds where they would be shielded from Kimberley's vices. The ten-feet high fences cut them off also from influences that might have made them politically conscious. The labour movement ignored the men in the compounds. Both Coloured and African nationalists were committed to the mine owners' party and never criticized the compound system. It was 'as near perfection as it was possible to make it', declared Tengo Jabavu, editor of Imvo) when he visited Kimberley in 1906 to collect money to found the South African Native College of Fort Hare. Officials of De Beers guided him through the compounds and donated £2,500 to his college. 36 But he complained that Alfred Beit left nothing in his will for the education of the African who had 'delved for diamonds to make Mr Beit a Magnate'. 37 The criticism applied equally to Rhodes, J. B. Robinson, Barney Barnato and other millionaires who made their fortunes out of the land and labour of Coloured and African.
Financiers and mine managers were out to develop mines and not the miner. They adopted a laissez faire attitude, neglected his physical needs, made no attempt to teach him anything - the rudiments of mining, safety measures, the alphabet, or the elements of his new society - and used crude punishments to enforce required standards of discipline. Compound life consequently tended to perpetuate tribal superstitions and antagonisms. Kimberley's Coloured and African residents formed mutual benefit and improvement societies in the eighties, but the men in the compounds never combined. Tribalism had a divisive effect also on other large groups of peasant workers. Fifty-six Zulu and Fengu were killed on Old Year's Day 1883 in a 'faction fight' among railway construction workers at De Aar. The fighting, wrote Theal, doyen of South African historians, seemed to the men 'a not very objectionable mode of celebrating a holiday'. 38 His jocularity typified the colonial attitude to the new working class, as less of a threat than the Zulu impis (regiments) who cut down 800 British soldiers and as many African levies at Isandhlwana in 1879. Indeed, another generation passed before African workers developed an outlook and organization to cope with the effects of industrialism. Radical whites and educated Africans blazed the trail.
The first African writers, journalists, ministers, teachers, clerks and politicians were sons or grandsons of tribalists and products of mission schools, among whom the Rev. Tiyo Soga (1829-71) was an early and outstanding representative. His father, a councillor of Gaika, had eight wives and thirty-nine children, and was killed in the war of 1877-8 against Gcaleka and Ngqika clans. Tiyo studied at the Lovedale Missionary Institution and the Free Church seminary in Glasgow, graduated at the age of twenty-seven in theology at Glasgow university, and was admitted to the ministry of the United Presbyterian Church - the first African from the south to take a degree and become an ordained minister. He married Janet Burnside, a Scot, and returned with her in 1857 to South Africa, where he preached, raised a distinguished family, translated the Pilgrim's Progress into Xhosa, composed hymns and assisted in a revision of the Xhosa Bible. 39 Described in obituary notices as 'a perfect gentleman', a 'loyal subject of the Queen' and a 'noble missionary of the Cross', he died at the early age of forty-two on the eve of great changes that brought about many schisms in mission churches between white and African leaders.
The missionary was a bearer of British culture as well as a teacher of the gospel. In both capacities he actively opposed traditional institutions such as chieftainship, the ancestor cult, the practice of magic, polygyny and bridewealth, that kept tribesmen away from the church. 40 And he sided with the colonists in their armed struggle to integrate independent states in the colonial society under British rule. The loyalties of missionary trained Africans, on the other hand, were divided between their people and the church, to which they owed their religion, education and livelihood. By the seventies, however, educated Africans, who found employment in government, commercial, legal and printing establishments, could free themselves of dependence on the missionary and become religious or political leaders in their own right. This development received a big impetus from the aggressive policy of expansion that Britain adopted after the gold and diamond discoveries.
Reversing her policy of disengagement, Britain annexed Basutoland in 1868 and Griqualand West in 1871. Lord Carnarvon, the secretary of state for colonies in 1874-8, decided to link colonies and republics in a federation. He met with opposition and resorted to force. Britain annexed the South African Republic In 1877 and then, to appease the burghers, made war with the aid of Swazi warriors on the Pedi under Sekukuni. The war against Cetshwayo's Zulu kingdom followed in 1879. Natal and Transvaal colonists coveted the land, and Zulu power stood in the way of federation. The annexation of the Transkei began in the same year, after a long and bloody war. Basutoland was the next victim. Acting under the Peace Preservation Act of 1878, the Sprigg ministry at the Cape ordered Africans everywhere to hand in their rifles, legitimately bought and often used to assist the British against independent tribes. The Sotho refused and turned their rifles against the Cape police in 1880. The 'war of disarmament' spread to Griqualand East, while the Transvaal republicans rose in rebellion, defeated the British at Majuba, and regained independence in 1881. Attempts at confederation were abandoned, but only after arousing passions in Afrikaners and Africans that never died away.
Educated or unlettered, Christian or pagan, all Africans were subject in some degree to the 'disarmament' act, the 'cattle removal' act of 1870, the 'vagrancy' act of 1879, pass laws, prohibition of liquor, and other measures that discriminated against their race. There was great resentment and call for protest. But the hundred years of desperate struggle on the frontier had ended in defeat. The chiefs, councillors and district heads who led the people in wars of independence were dead, exiled, deposed or absorbed as minor officials in the colonial bureaucracy. The struggle for liberation would from then on be fought within the common society by men able to wield the colonist's own weapons of education, propaganda, political organisation and the vote. Leadership passed to the teachers, ministers and others like them in the eastern Cape who formed the Native Teachers' Association in 1875, the Native Education Association in 1880, the South African Aborigines' Association (Imbumba Yama Afrika) in 1882, and the Native Electoral Association in 1884. 41 Though largely confined to Xhosa-speaking people, they were non-tribal in composition and reflected the growth of an African consciousness.
John Tengo Jabavu (1859-1921), a prime mover in the formation of the Native Electoral Association, became the acknowledged leader of progressive Africans in the Cape for the next thirty years. A certificated teacher and lay preacher during his teens, he was appointed editor in 1881 of the Lovedale mission journal Isigidimi Sama Xosa (Xhosa Express) - the forerunner of the Christian Express and the present South African Outlook and matriculated in 1883, the second African to do so. His political career started in 1884, when he and the Association mobilized the ninety African voters in the constituency of Victoria East behind James Rose Innes, a liberal of the old school and future chief justice. Innes won the election against six other candidates with the aid of the African voters, who plumped for him, though he was an utter stranger, because 'he favoured a fair and sympathetic policy towards the Bantu people'. 42 Jabavu left the Isigidimi after the election to found, with financial backing from a brother of Rose Innes and other liberals, the first independent African newspaper, Imvo Zabantsundu (African Opinion).
Imvo made its first notable impact with a campaign against the Sprigg governments Parliamentary Registration Act of 1887, which disfranchised thousands of Africans in the eastern Cape. Rhodes, then in opposition and angling for the Afrikaner Bond's support, wanted to go the whole way. Africans, he argued, were a subject race and should have no vote at all, as in Natal. There could be no union of South Africa unless the Cape met its neighbours on the issue of African rights. Writing in Imvo's editorial columns, Jabavu claimed that the bill, in addition to being ' the severest blow ' yet aimed at his people, would 'establish the ascendancy of the Dutch in the colony for ever ' by disfranchising the English party's 'devoted allies'. While the Afrikaner press deplored 'the impudence of the Kafir', Sprigg told the House that Imvo was ' libellous and seditious '. Yet Jabavu had leaned over backwards to show that he was no radical. 'We not only preach loyalty,' he wrote, 'but we preach subordination to superiors.' The 'Kafir', he maintained, was no leveller or democrat; he believed in caste and the principle that 'some are born to rule and others to be ruled'. 43
A petition to the Queen, protest meetings, a conference and talk of a deputation to England followed the passing of the act. Many such appeals were to be made before Africans learned the futility of looking for salvation to Victoria or her successors. Rhodes drove the constitutional lesson home in 1892 by sponsoring the Franchise and Ballot Act which raised the franchise qualifications to the disadvantage of Africans, Coloured and poor whites. It was colour-class legislation and acceptable to all sides of the House including the liberals - Rose Innes, then attorney-general in Rhodes' cabinet, John X. Merriman and J. W. Sauer - who had taken the place of Porter and Solomon as champions of coloured rights. But they opposed Rhodes in 1893 when he moved the abolition of plural voting in the Cape division, where alone each elector had four votes, to forestall the candidature of H. N. Effendi, representative of the Moslem Association. Coloured voters were expected to plump for him; and parliament insisted on remaining exclusively white. W. P. Schreiner, a famous liberal in later years, who had replaced Innes as attorney-general, defended the measure. The return of a Coloured member, he argued, might precipitate constitutional changes prejudicial to Africans. Their interests, he thought, would be best secured if they were represented in parliament by white men nominated by government. 44
Ever willing to sacrifice African interests for an alliance with Afrikaners, Rhodes was as ready to sacrifice the alliance to build an empire. He plotted against Kruger's republic and organized the coup that ended in the fiasco of Jameson's Raid in 1896. It changed the course of politics, wrote Jabavu, by substituting ' the Dutch Question for the Native Question'. 45 Liberals who condemned the raid broke with Rhodes to join forces with the Afrikaner Bond in opposition to the pro-imperialist Progressive party formed in 1897. Schreiner, the Bond's parliamentary leader, took over the premiership in 1898 and included Merriman and Sauer in his ministry. Jabavu, who had stood with Sauer on the same platform for twenty years, supported the government and came under heavy fire from the English press.
Alfred Palmer, editor and publisher of the South African Review, wrote in September 1899, on the eve of Britain's war against the republics, that Jabavu 'has much to answer for'. He had helped the Bond into a position where it could manufacture 'whips for dusky backs', by turning African voters against the Englishman, who gave them the best wages and fairest treatment, compared with the 'dog's life' they led under 'Boer employment'. Rhodes, and not any Bond supervisor, was their proper leader. 46 In 1897 Rhodes promised 'equal rights for every white man south of the Zambesi'. Three years later, during the war fought, so the imperial government claimed, to enfranchise all British subjects and secure the full liberty of all in South Africa, Rhodes declared a policy of equal rights for every civilized man south of the Zambesi. 47 African and Coloured national movements were to take shape a few years later in the course of an unsuccessful struggle to hold Britain to her pledge.
*Overseers at brink of pit or shaft.
**Supervisors of cage at bottom of shaft; also called 'hangers-on'