History of South Africa podcast

In 1882, the German mathematician Ferdinand von Lindemann proved that π was transcendental: it cannot be reduced to a tidy equation, never captured inside the comfortable boundaries expected by mathematicians. For centuries mathematicians tried to “square the circle” — creating a perfect square with the same area as a circle using only classical tools. In 1882, they finally got their answer: impossible. π’s transcendence meant the problem itself can never be solved.

π sits at the centre of order — wheels, planets, architecture, engineering — but does not obey the rules mathematicians thought would contain it. The more closely pi is examined, the more it slips beyond simple description. But pi also has beauty in it’s patterns.

π — roughly 3.14 etc etc — is the hidden constant inside every circle: divide the distance around any circle by the distance across it, and written out as a decimal, it goes on forever without ever stopping and without ever falling into a repeating pattern.

Southern Africa in the early 1880s had the appearance of something similar. The neat assumptions of empire borders that could be drawn, peoples classified, and territories administered into obedience — were beginning to collide with a far messier reality. The aftermath of the First Anglo-Boer War had humbled imperial confidence, African polities remained powerful actors, and the mineral revolution was creating forces no colonial administrator fully controlled. Like π, South Africa was proving resistant to simple formulas.

Emerging at this time was the Afrikaner Bond, led by Jan Hendrick Hofmeyr, his Boeren Beschermings Vereeniging, Farmers Protection Society, had merged with the Bond. Hofmeyr’s main aim was to merge the diverse Afrikaner cultural movements from behind the scenes, thus his nickname, The Mole.

Cape Prime Minister John Gordon Sprigg was sparring with political humanists, particularly Saul Solomon who owned the Cape Argus. As a liberal member of parliament, he was an articulate defender of African rights, called a friend of the natives and worse by some settlers. He was enticed to sell his paper to the editor at the time, what he didn’t know, was that Cecil John Rhodes was secretly backing the sale - no Rhodes owned the Argus.

It was in that moment that the Cape lost its important outsider voice, and Rhodes gained a news outlet. The main story the paper was covering after the first Anglo-Boer war was the instability in Basotholand. The Argus and other liberals had taken up the Basotho cause against the land-hungry settlers of the Orange Free State.

Shoring up his personal wealth and power, Rhodes was simultaneously using his growing influence in the Cape to protect its northern territories. This was a natural progression, north of Kimberley lay the Vaal River, and the Molopo River. Between the two lay not only the Boers of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, but the Tswana people. South of the Molopo there were the Thlaping, the Rolong, north of the Molopo the Ngwato chiefdom, ruled by Khama as well as the Kwena under chief Sechele, the Ngwaketse ruled by Gaseitsiwe and soon, his son, Bathoen.

The Tswana were tussling with colonial expansion, and navigating the difficult politics of the frontier, keeping the Boer settlers at arm’s length. Along the edge of these chief’s territory there lay the Great North Road, on the eastern side of the Tswana lands. Transvaal President Paul Kruger was behind efforts to cut off the Road to the North, something the British authorities suspected but couldn’t prove.

For Cecil Rhodes and British ambitions, these two micro-republics were a geopolitical nightmare. If the Transvaal annexed Stellaland and Goshen which was Paul Kruger's ultimate goal, the Boers would completely block Cape Colony access to the interior of Africa.

Rhodes had taken to calling the Great north Road the Suez Canal of South Africa.

When Cetshwayo kaMpande was captured after the Anglo-Zulu War, he was ferried to Cape Town and on to Robben Island. His countenance was one of dignity but that is difficult to maintain in the face of terrible sea-sickness.

The Zulu king had made it be known that he was afraid of the sea, and his nervousness compounded the queasiness.

He was also terribly sea-sick on the five day voyage from Port Durnford, modern day Richards’ Bay, and Simons Town. He and his five wives who’d joined him in captivity were ensconced in a hut that had been erected for him on the poop deck, from where he watched the activities on the shore for almost a week before he disembarked. As he observed all the ships, the developments on the coast, it became apparent that his attempt at fighting the powerful British empire had always been doomed.

When he eventually stepped onto Cape turf, his appointed custodian Captain J Ruscombe Poole of the Royal Navy escorted the Zulu King from Simon’s Town. Like Nelson Mandela’s minders much later, Captain Ruscombe-Poole was a sympathetic jailer, so too the king’s interpreter, Henry Longcast.

Henry was an Irish orphan who’d been brought up at the KwaMagwaza Mission station and had known Cetshwayo since he was a child.

An odd relationship developed between these two men, Longcast was a straighforward honourable man, and became Cetshwayo’s advisor - never betraying the Zulu King’s trust. Joining Cetshwayo in exile was Mkhosana kaZangqana, formely one of Mpande’s counsillors. Three other attendants were at hand, including the royal hairdresser, four young women of royal standing, and a female servant.

They were first to spend time in the Flagstaff Bastion of the 17th Century Castle in Cape Town, where they were alloted a suite of apartments and a parapet for daily walks. Throngs of what they called daytrippers in Victorian times, we would describe them as tourists, gathered to catch a glimpse of the Zulu King on the heights of the Castle.

Back in Zululand, Sir Garnet Wolseley had been fashioning together a new Zulu system.

Believe it or not, it resembled the system resembled what the British were trying to impose on Afrghanistan. There Lord Lytton was trying to secure the North West Frontier of India, what is now Pakistan, by breaking Afghanistan into a number of impotent principalities. There local princes who were sympathetic to British control would be handed the levers of power.

Wolseley wanted to secure the safety of Natal and the Transvaal by fragmenting the Zulu kingdom.

Sir Theophilus Shepstone was the go-to once more, along with ex-Cape Native Affairs Secretary Charles Brownlee and Natal commissioner, Sir Henry Bulwer. Shepstone’s main aim was to destroy the power of the Zulu royal family, and believed it was fragile anyway.

This was a miscalculation on numerous fronts. Cetshwayo may have been in exile, but the concept of political power in Zululand was well and truly in the hands of the extended Royal Family. Thirteen chiefs should be nominated, said Shepstone, each independent of the other but utterly dependent on the British.

Much much further north, in Afghanistan, Lord Lytton the British Viceroy of India, envisaged Kandahar province as the bulwark against the rebellious tribes of Afghanistan and the wild mountains of north western India. The British defeated Sher Ali Khan in the war between 1878 and 1880. Lytton’s vision involved separating key regions and strengthening frontier zones that could be more easily influenced from India. In this thinking, Kandahar mattered enormously. It sat astride the routes connecting southern Afghanistan to the approaches toward the Indian subcontinent, linking trade and military corridors running west toward Persia and north toward central Afghanistan.

By now, Cetshwayo kaMpande was technically free to return from exile once these arrangements had been made, but he first requesting a meeting with Queen Victoria.

Die Dorsland — the Thirstland — is part of the Kalahari that has an interesting history when it comes to pastoralists. The San didn’t call it the Thirstland, for them it wasn’t a barrier but part of a network of seasonal resource nodes. They would navigate the dry spans using sip-wells, inserting long, hollow reeds deep into the damp sand, use grass filters, and literally suck water up to store in hollowed-out ostrich eggshells buried along transit routes for future journeys. Around 2,000 to 2,500 years ago, a massive economic shift occurred when groups in northern Botswana acquired livestock, sheep and later cattle, transitioning from hunter-gatherers to pastoralists—becoming the Khoekhoe.

Archaeological evidence indicates the Khoekhoe moved out of the northern Botswana/Zambezi region and split. One major migration route skirted the western edge of the Kalahari desert, moving down through modern-day Namibia and into the Northern and Western Cape with the Kalahari was the geographic pivot around which this entire pastoralist expansion rotated. Moving large herds of sheep and cattle through a Thirstland required moving between reliable pans and riverbeds like the Nossob, Auob, and Molopo rivers. They transformed the Kalahari from a hunter-gatherer landscape into a series of strategic grazing corridors.

The Dorsland Trekkers were going to reverse that course to some extent, using the north western Botswana region to reach Namibia, and eventually, Angola.

The Khoekhoe like the Voortrekkers, appreciated their freedom, moving in small extended family groups, their mobility part of their world-view. Instead of heading north west like the trekkers, they had headed south west for hundreds of years, arriving in Southern Africa about 2400 years ago.

That was about the time parts of south-central Africa experienced a shift in rainfall, forests and dense woodlands expanded or contracted, the tsetse belts moved. If you were an early pastoralist whose entire wealth, diet, and social structure depended on cattle and sheep, a shifting tsetse belt was an existential threat.

The arid margins of the Kalahari, the Namib, and the Karoo environments further south were too dry for the tsetse fly. The Karoo was a safe haven for livestock, the Namib too dessicated.

In high-rainfall, tropical areas, grass grows fast but loses its nutritional value in winter, it becomes sourveld. In more arid regions like the fringes of the Kalahari and the Karoo the grass grows slower but retains its high mineral and protein content year-round, even when dry - it is sweetveld. To a sheep or cow, the arid south was an open buffet of incredibly nutritious feed.

The Khoekhoe migration pushed into the Western Cape, where they hit a completely different climate zone, the winter rainfall region, so just as the summer rainfall area dried out, the Cape valleys were greening up. But where the trekkers moved northwards taking a decade and arrived Angola in 1880, the Khoekhoe migrations took hundreds of years. A gradual seeping south if you like.

After the Khoekhoe, and before the Boers, the people of the Ngami area near the Okavango Delta were known as the Khwebe - from the word Kwe which simply means “people”. They dwelled close to a geographical anomaly in Botswana - the Khwebe Hills — Botswana is one of the flattest countries on earth.

The Khwebe hills are a windy place and Khwebe mythology speaks of the Gas Bird which lives in a certain baobab near the upper Okavango River valley. If you listen closely, you can hear his hissing voice inside the tree. The mythology is linked to earlier San cosmology, where the word !Khwe means wind — and where the wind is a supernatural being.

Thousands of miners were streaming into the Transvaal by the third quarter of the 19th Century, a horde of avuncular independent-minded treasure hunters. In volume Two of the Cambridge History of South Africa, Stanley Trapido calls them the ragbag of humanity - Stanley who sadly is no longer with us, had the right to call miners whatever he wanted — having worked in Krugersdorp gold mines in order to pay for his History Degree at Wits University.

But I’m sure the so-called ragbags and their moms would have taken offence. It is true that anarchy of a legendary level prevailed in many of the diggings, as it had in Griqualand West, these mining pioneers however were far more complex than a mob.

The Diamond Fields of Kimberley were in the hands of large corporations by the early 1880s, men like JB Robinson, Cecil John Rhodes, Barney Barnato dominated Kimberley as the hole descended towards Hades’ — huge piles of capital was required to buy equipment to pump out the water, for the steam driven mine heads, to pay the labour. A degree of cooperation was needed which the disparate groups of international diggers lacked.

New economic organisations flourished, consolidation was taking place, financial collaboration secured sales usually to diamond buyers in the City of London. That needed connections, engineering skills at the pit, managerial and administrative nouse. The early diggers, hardened bearded men who’d scratched at surface rock, these Americans, Australians, Canadians, Russians, French, Germans, Swiss, Austrians, Norwegians, Swedes, Italians, Scots, these men and some women were imbued with the streaks of obsession of the age. They no longer fitted the economy of Kimberley, the big name financiers were in charge.

Most of these expats were fearful of black labour, some such as the Americans, brought a fierce view of slavery into the mining fields, they were the most vocal when it came to demands to restrict black people from owning mineland — and enforcing a curfew around Kimberley. Their sentiment rubbed off on those around them. These mine compounds for blacks were going to be replicated in Johannesburg.

The days of the small-scale scrabbler however, were gone.

So it was with glee that many heard tales of a trove of gold that had been discovered far to the north east, in the eastern Transvaal, in the early years of the 1870s. The very word Gold sent shivers of anticipation through the bags of rags and the adventurers who had the guts to tramp off, or ride off, into the sunrise.

Tom Maclachlan has been almost forgotten but it was he who set off the gold rush in South Africa. I had a Scots Aunt, and the more I read about Tom Maclachlan, the more like Aunt Betty McLennnon he sounded particularly when it came to energy, focus and pure guts.

Possessed of an almost maniacallly steadfast faith that gold lay in the eastern Transvaal hills, Maclachlan prodded the rocks there for years — spurred on by faith and the prospect of a Five hundred pound reward for finding gold. That was being offered by the Landdrost of Lydenburg, AF Jansen. Maclachlan and his two partners, George Parsons and Sydney Valentine toiled throughout 1872, prospecting the entire country north, east and south of Mauchsberg Mountain — named after geologist Karl MAuch who predicted gold lay in that them thar hill.

Their sweat and toil payed off in the first weeks of 1873, they discovered what appeared to be payable gold in a stream on the north side of Spitskop Hill — six hours ride east of Lydenburg. A two and a half ounce sample of gold was sent to Jansen along with a request for the five hundred pounds reward. Jansen was excited and galloped off to Spitskop Hill along with four labourers, to test the alluvial gravel.

After a few days, they sifted out four ounces of pure gold, Jansen was convinced of its value, and he wrote a letter to the Volksraad Executive Council in Pretoria to report his findings. The Transvaal Volksraad broke it’s promise.

The hill of Doves — in isiZulu amaJuba means the place of many doves or pigeons. It became a place of violence and blood, and yet the catastrophic defeat of the British at Majuba was indeed to lead to peace.

The doves would fly again albeit fleetingly.

As you heard last episode, British commander General George Colley had been one of the casualties of the battle — Sir Evelyn Wood was now in charge of the empire’s army in the Transvaal. Or to be more accurate, in Natal attempting to enter the Transvaal.

Colley was buried at Mount Prospect — the British base below Laings Nek in sight of Majuba — letters of condolence were sent to his wife Lady Colley by the Town councils of Pietermaritzburg and Durban .. and also by the Transvaal Boer Leaders.

Colley had asked that his body should be allowed to remain where he fell on the battlefield, and so it was. His wife would have to travel to the Transvaal border to see where he lay.

A state of war existed, the Boers continued to besiege all British garrisons in the Transvaal in early 1881. More about that in a moment.

The Summer rains were falling, drenching the landscape like the blood of Majuba, and both sides sought peace. Boer emissaries had met with the Swazi king, but he was loathe to join the attack on the empires forces.

On the 2nd March 1881 Evelyn Wood relayed a letter to the Boer leadership, the triumpherate as they were known from his base at Newcastle. “to President Brand, Bloemfontein, P Joubert (he means Commandant Piet Joubert, Boer commander in the Transvaal) requests me to send you the following telegram…”

The British commander as postman — relaying one Boer message to another. Brand’s message back was reconciliatory in tone.

“…We are willing to accept every offer made by your Honour …” and by your honour Joubert meant Wood … “that peace may be, as far as it is not in direct opposition to our liberty…”

That was the minimum demand — the Boers demanded their liberty. ON the 5th, Wood and his staff met Piet Joubert and Boer leaders half way between Mount Prospect and Laing’s Nek in a hastily erected tent. The British hardliners were horrified - how could Wood, an English General who had now built up a force of 10 000 soldiers in Natal concede to an interview with the leaders of the enemy for the sake of gaining time to negotiate peace?

Some said it was too absurd to be credited, others in the English camp were astonished.

But he was also a general who represented an army that had been beaten four times in an open fight — Bronkhorspruit, Laings Nek, Schoonspruit, Majuba. Why continue the war? It was time to resolve things. While the English nationalists bayed for Boer blood, were calling for this upstart Transvaal Republic to be crushed as a warning to other rebels across the empire, cooler heads prevailed.

Joining Wood were Major Frazer, Captain Maude and Mr Cropper the translator. On the Boer side, Piet Joubert, DC Uys, CJ Joubert and CHJ Fouchees, with AJ Foster interpreting. A tight group. The fewer involved the better.

Wood opened with meeting with an explanation — he was there to call for an armistice so that Kruger and the Volksraad could reply to General Colley’s communication of the 21st February re: peace.

The entire meeting was to last an astonishing 90 minutes. Joubert presented the Transvaal position most concisely, Complete amnesty for all leaders, freedom of the Transvaal from British government although they’d accept suzerainty, no interference in Transvaal’s internal affairs — they meant on matters pertaining to race and land.

It was the word suzerainty that was the problem child here. To the British government, particularly officials in London, suzerainty implied that the restored Boer republic in the Transvaal would enjoy internal self-government but would remain subordinate to the British Crown in matters such as foreign relations as well as overall imperial authority.

The Boer negotiators understood the term far more loosely.