Onselen The Cowboy Capitalist

John Hays Hammond, the American West and the Jameson Raid
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-86842-739-0
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 576 Seiten

The Jameson Raid of 1895-1896 was a pivotal moment in the history of South Africa, linking events from the Anglo-Boer War to the declaration of the Union of South Africa in 1910 and the advent of apartheid in 1948. For over a century, the failed revolution has been interpreted through the lens of British imperialism, with responsibility laid at the feet of Cecil John Rhodes. But rigorous historical analysis points in a different direction - to a plot that drew not only on British jingoes and disgruntled Afrikaner fifth-column elements, but also on the culture of the American West, a culture that embraced wild adventurism, filibustering and the writ of the vigilance committees. In The Cowboy Capitalist, Charles van Onselen challenges a historiography of over 120 years, locating the raid in American rather than British history and forcing us to rethink the histories of at least three countries. He identifies Californian mining engineer John Hays Hammond, a confidant of both Cecil Rhodes and Leander Starr Jameson, as the principal architect of the attempted coup in Paul Kruger's Boer republic. In so doing, he uncovers the hidden history of the American West on the South African Highveld, situating Hammond's career against the backdrop of the global expansion of the United States during the Gilded Age. This radical reinterpretation challenges the commonly held belief that the Jameson Raid was quintessentially British and, in doing so, drives splinters into our understanding of South African history at the turn of the 19th century and well beyond.

Charles van Onselen is the author of several award-winning books, including The Fox and the Flies, Masked Raiders and The Seed is Mine, which was voted one of the hundred best books to come out of Africa in the 20th century and which won the Alan Paton Award in 1997. He has been elected to Visiting Fellowships at Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford and Yale universities and has been Research Professor in the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship (CAS) at the University of Pretoria for the past two decades.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Onselen, Charles Van

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE

North Atlantic Revolutions and South African Realities

Plotting Urban Insurrection in an Agrarian Economy

September 1894

By the mid-19th century, economic growth was starting to deliver unprecedented benefits to the urban middle classes on either side of the North Atlantic. By contrast, the semi-arid interior of southern Africa was still an agricultural backwater, barely able to sustain farmer-hunters of European descent, let alone nurture a tiny white middle class element in a few isolated towns north of the Orange River.

It was the discovery of diamonds around Kimberley, in the late 1860s, and gold, near Johannesburg, on the Witwatersrand, in the late 1880s that changed everything. The two events set hitherto distant northern and southern cousins, with markedly different cultural, educational, industrial and political legacies, on a collision course that proved to be as brief as it was traumatic. The primary misalignment, the unusual perceptions that it gave rise to, and the way in which these led to the disastrous Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), arose from fateful discussions that took place between three men around campfires during a six-week safari to assess the value of gold mining properties spread through the bush of Matabeleland, between mid-August and late September 1894. Those deliberations changed the course of southern Africa’s history for a hundred years and more. They also helped apply the finishing touches to an already aggrieved ethnic edge of a small, white, Afrikaner-Dutch ruling class that, in the post-bellum period, continued to perceive its members as serial victims of northern imperialist ambitions and therefore entitled to take control of their destiny, free of interference, in the construction of a racist state.

 

John Hays Hammond Photo: Library of Congress

 

Cecil Rhodes

 

Leander Starr Jameson

 

The three travellers in Matabeleland were an American, an Englishman and a Scot – proudly and self-consciously ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and born within 18 months of one another, in San Francisco, in Bishop’s Stortford and Edinburgh, in the mid-1850s. Their fathers, although of vastly different means, were professionals – a soldier-turned-surveyor and land-speculator, a vicar in the Anglican Church, and a lawyer. All had been raised at a time when revolutionary wars on both sides of the Atlantic were still within living memory, and when capitalism and imperialism were rapidly enveloping the world through rail and telegraphic networks. Their sons, perhaps predictably, were graduates of three great universities – Yale, Oxford and University College, London – the one a mining engineer, the second an arts graduate, the third a medical doctor.

Richly endowed in terms of class, education and financial well-being, the friendships of the Anglo-Saxons – who enjoyed the services of a ‘Coloured’ butler-valet during their extended travels through the bush – were further underwritten by membership of prestigious clubs, by Freemasonry and by a penchant for capitalist-political conspiracies, oath-taking and secret societies. And, as befitted men in a frontier-gobbling age, in which the success of the nation-state was calibrated by the formal extension of the empire by force, or through the informal conquest that came via aggressive economic expansion, all three were deeply admiring of heroes who demonstrated a propensity for action rather than talk, displayed great courage or ‘pluck’, and who behaved in ways that were identifiable as being simultaneously gentlemanly and masculine.

All three men, circling 40 years of age, were already spectacularly successful by the standards prevailing in an increasingly pervasive Anglophone world. The American, in awe of the Englishman, was the highest paid mining engineer in the world and never shy of mentioning the fact to anyone who inquired. The Englishman, a millionaire, owned the largest diamond mining company in the world and had ambitions to expand his holdings on the Witwatersrand with the help of the engineer. In a world where money and political power were lifelong partners he was also the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. The Scot, much taken with the American and so close to the Englishman that one modern analyst has suggested that they might have been lovers, had given up practising medicine a few years earlier so as to provide practical assistance to the latter’s dream of imperial expansion through the African continent. Only months earlier, the diminutive Scot had become an instant hero of the frontier when he had orchestrated the military defeat of Ndebele tribesmen whose erstwhile domain the party were then traversing. The Englishman, who had acquired the rights to a Chartered Company bearing the royal seal, even before the indigenous people had suffered their first defeat, had made the Scot the administrator of a territory larger than the Low Countries. It was a touring party not much given to suppressing personal or political ambition. In short, the travellers saw themselves as part of an emerging transatlantic elite destined to take ‘civilisation’ and enlightened rule to the lesser ‘races’ of the world, including the benighted Boers of southern Africa, whom nature had blessed with the richest goldfields on the planet.1

These latter-day musketeers, John Hays Hammond, Cecil Rhodes and Leander Starr Jameson, took it as self-evident that the future of the entire region would eventually be determined by the administration and government of the goldfields, which, rather perversely, were locked into the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR), or South African Republic, overseen by the formidable President SJP ‘Paul’ Kruger with the help of a poorly educated Afrikaans-Dutch-speaking agrarian elite ill-suited to presiding over an emerging industrial economy.

The three were also ad idem that Kruger’s rural notables could not, and probably should not, be allowed to prevail over a modernising urban dispensation which, if it was not already doing so, might unleash new and challenging class-based forces that, if ignored or neglected, might give rise to a new republic, one dominated by an insurgent white working class, which in turn might be poorly disposed to the rest of Anglophone southern Africa and perhaps to British imperial interests throughout the wider region.

The question was thus not so much as to whether or not there would be a revolution in the South African Republic – there almost certainly would be one – but when it would occur and who might best seize control of it so as to steer a new, second-generation republic into a loosely federated economic structure that would inevitably come to dominate the political future of the subcontinent. It was a daring, transatlantic political thought transposed to an African context and one capable of producing an outcome of global significance. The timing and nature of the change coming to the South African Republic could certainly be argued back and forth, but what was clearly not worth debating at length was who might be best suited to steering the process.

When the three friends stared into the campfire smoke of Matabeleland, it was Hammond, who had only recently fled the United States and who was still indirectly involved in a bitter, unresolved industrial war between mining capitalists and mineworkers in the Coeur d’Alene region of Idaho, who most readily perceived the spectre of revolution in Johannesburg. And, because he outlived his co-conspirators and the revolution failed, Hammond later denied that he had stoked the fears of his companions. In truth, he probably had thought Idaho and talked Witwatersrand.2

Rhodes, a Prime Minister and the man with the most to lose should the predicted revolution go wrong, was not easily convinced by Hammond’s tales, since he had recently experienced other setbacks in the quest to realise his geopolitical dreams for the region. In 1891, he and Jameson had made an unsuccessful attempt to wrest the port of Beira from the Portuguese so as to provide his Chartered Company with an East Coast outlet. More recently, he had failed to persuade the Portuguese to sell him Delagoa Bay (today Maputo) so as to acquire a port and seal off the landlocked ZAR.3 For all that, Rhodes and Jameson were sufficiently intrigued by Hammond’s prognostications to agree to visit the republic and take soundings as to the likelihood of there being a revolution from below.

Exploratory visits to the South African Republic by Rhodes and Jameson, in late 1894 and again in early 1895, appeared to confirm Hammond’s view about a nascent upheaval. There can be little doubt that the seed of the original idea of a full-scale revolution, one stoked and appropriated by a capitalist vanguard composed of mine owners – a notion that bore a few striking similarities to the industrial war being waged in the Coeur d’Alene – was the brainchild of Hammond. Likewise, it was Hammond, rather than Rhodes or Jameson, who, in 1895, borrowed freely...