The spoils of South Africa

THE story of how the discovery of diamonds and then of gold transformed the agrarian backwater of South Africa has been told many times before, but never with more vividness, clarity and verve than in the engrossing “Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa” by Martin Meredith.

Filled with colorful characters and fascinating events, this book has an energy and authority that will engage readers who want to find out about this corner of history. Even those who are more conversant, like this reviewer who has been reading about this subject for 50 years, will find a freshness in this illuminating historiographical enterprise.

When Britain occupied the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa during the Napoleonic Wars at the turn of the 19th century, there was a small settler population of mixed Dutch and French Huguenot descent there since the 17th century. These Afrikaners -- the Dutch word for African -- continued to speak Dutch and run their fruit and wine farms with slaves of mixed African, Asian and European extraction.

But when slavery became illegal in the British Empire in 1834, many, but not all, Afrikaners moved to the interior of South Africa beyond the reach of British rule. By the early 1850s, they had founded two isolated nations, the South African Republic (also known as the Transvaal) and the Orange Free State. These were oligarchies run along democratic lines for the white populations: blacks and those of mixed race had no political rights, unlike in the British-ruled parts of South Africa where there was a colorblind suffrage based on property and education and small but significant numbers of nonwhite voters. Under pressure from Britain, though, there was no actual slavery in the two Boer (the Dutch name for farmer) republics.

Britain was happy to maintain this status quo as long as there was nothing it wanted in the Boer territories. But as Meredith pithily puts it:

“Then, in 1871, prospectors exploring a remote area of sun-scorched scrubland in Griqualand, just outside the Cape [Colony]’s borders, discovered the world’s richest deposits of diamonds. Britain promptly snatched the territory from the Orange Free State. Fifteen years later, an itinerant English digger . . . stumbled across the rocky outcrop of a gold-bearing reef on a ridge named by Transvaal farmers as the Witwatersrand [Reef of White Waters]. Beneath the reef lay the richest deposits of gold ever discovered. The gold strike transformed the Transvaal from an impoverished rural republic into a glittering prize.

“What followed was a titanic struggle fought by the British to gain supremacy throughout Southern Africa and by the Boers to preserve the independence of their republics. It culminated in the costliest, bloodiest and most humiliating war that Britain had waged in nearly a century. Britain provoked the war expecting it to be over within a few months, but it turned into a grueling campaign lasting two and a half years; required half a million imperial troops to finish it; and left the two Boer republics devastated.”

The world’s dominant superpower goes to war over strategic deposits and gets more than it bargained for: The parallels to a similar adventure a century later are too obvious. But Meredith has a good story in itself to tell. Along the way, there are memorable portraits of the actors in this drama. The megalomaniac empire builder, business tycoon and prime minister of the Cape Colony, Cecil Rhodes, leaps forth in all his contradictory glory and infamy. As does Boer leader Paul Kruger, a wily politician who worshiped the literal truth of the Bible and believed to the end of his days that the world was flat. The obsessions of both men came to naught. Afrikaners do not rule South Africa, the countries that bore Rhodes’ name, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, are now Zambia and Zimbabwe, and his dream of unbroken British territory from the Cape of Good Hope to Cairo is a risible fantasy. Yet the name of each man lives on: Rhodes in the prestigious Oxford scholarships he endowed and Kruger in the coin bearing his name and his image: the Krugerrand, made of the very substance, gold, that blew apart his world.

One virtue of Meredith’s book is the way he reminds us that the global stage was a different place at the time. There was immense sympathy for the Boers -- considered plucky by America, continental Europe, even by some in Britain -- swamped by imperial might. Meredith accords them their due. But he never falls victim to tunnel vision and points us toward other casualties. For all the arrogance and greed of the British Empire, it had accorded the blacks living under its rule in South Africa some measure of political participation. Yet after the long, exhausting Boer War, its determination to extend those rights to the newly conquered territories was trumped by guilt toward those it had just defeated and with whom it was determined to politically reconcile. Boer general Jan Smuts was allowed to change the clause in the peace treaty reading “The Franchise will not be given to Natives until after the Introduction of Self-Government” to “The question of granting the Franchise to Natives will not be decided until after the introduction of self-government.”

Meredith writes, “It meant that the white electorates of the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony would be left to decide themselves whether to enfranchise the black population. Given that the republics had never allowed blacks to vote, it was a foregone conclusion, as both sides acknowledged, that blacks would be excluded.” As even the British proconsul Lord Milner, hardly known for his liberalism, commented ironically: “You have only to sacrifice [blacks] absolutely and the game is easy.”

A stunning account of the 19th century Boer-British clash, “Diamonds, Gold, and War” also explains from where the tragedy of 20th century South African apartheid sprang.

Martin Rubin is a critic and the author of “Sarah Gertrude Millin: A South African Life.”