Cecil Rhodes and the Election That Caused the Boer War

In 1898 – some 12 years before it was subsumed into the Union of South Africa – the Cape Colony held what would be the most factious and divisive election in its history. What was more, it was an election that saw the mining magnate and self-professed racist Cecil John Rhodes prostrate himself before an entirely black audience, espousing a brand of imperialist politics that would lead, within a year, to the Second Boer War. How this occurred is a highly complex colonial story.

As the 19th century neared its end relations in the Cape Colony between the Afrikaans-speaking Boers and the English-speaking colonists were approaching their nadir. Tensions – generally surrounding Boer autonomy – had simmered ever since Britain took control of the Cape from the Dutch in 1806. After Britain abolished slavery in 1834 many Boers left the colony in frustration at what they saw as a challenge to a long-established racial order. Moving into the interior of southern Africa, they founded the two Boer republics: the Zuid Afrikaansche Republic (ZAR, or Transvaal) and the Orange Free State. Many others remained in the Cape, living alongside the growing influx of British settlers.

In 1853, after years of protests and agitations, the Cape was given representative government that included a non-racial franchise. Any man who owned property worth more than £25, irrespective of race, could vote. The Boers’ sense of exclusion was exacerbated by the fact that only English was spoken in the Cape’s parliament – almost a carbon copy of the British system – and its courts. The colony was granted further independence in 1872 when it achieved Responsible Government under its first prime minister, John Molteno. Molteno’s government stipulated that any attempt by Britain to confederate the Cape with the Boer republics would never be accepted, unless they could guarantee the franchise rights of black citizens.

Then, in 1877, the British annexed Transvaal, triggering the First Boer War. The invasion was resisted by the Boers under their president, Paul Kruger, who defeated the British at the Battle of Majuba in 1881. In the subsequent peace settlement, Transvaal was granted independence (although Britain retained the right to control its foreign policy). In the same year that the war ended Cecil Rhodes – one of the most controversial figures in the Cape’s history – was elected to its parliament, some ten years after he had first entered the diamond trade at Kimberley as an 18-year-old recently arrived from Hertfordshire. In 1890 he would become the colony’s prime minister.

A broken bond

By 1898, however, things were not going well for Rhodes. He was now a disgraced former prime minister, having ruled (representing no party – all Cape MPs were independent) until 1896 in a tenure broadly defined by two things: racist legislation and an unlikely alliance with the Afrikaner Bond, with whom he had governed in an uneasy coalition.

It was uneasy because, having begun as a farmers’ union, the Bond had grown into an Afrikaner nationalist vehicle with strong connections to the Boer republics. A conservative movement, it sought to preserve Afrikaner identity while also working against the empowerment of the Cape’s black citizens. Its leader, ‘Onze Jan’ Hofmeyr (‘Our Jan’), was brought up near Cape Town speaking English. His Afrikaans and Dutch were said to have been littered with English words, although he wrote High Dutch with perfect fluency and strongly identified as an Afrikaner. Eschewing the spotlight, he was described by a fellow politician as ‘the Mole’: ‘An industrious little animal … You never see him at work, but every now and then a little mound of earth, thrown up here or there, will testify to his activities.’

Though its hardline stance had softened somewhat under Hofmeyr’s leadership (he was even said to have toasted Queen Victoria in 1887), the Bond’s goal was the unification of South Africa under its own flag – and never a British one. Their alliance with Rhodes, therefore, was not obvious. But in 1890 leading members of the Bond had been convinced by Rhodes that, as prime minister, he would work towards a union in the interests of South Africa rather than Britain – that his politics were ‘Cape-centric’ rather than imperial. To a degree, this was true: Rhodes was primarily an expansionist (‘I would annex the planets if I could’) and it was mining interests in the Transvaal that were of primary importance to him. And, whatever Rhodes and the Bond’s differences on union might have been, they shared reactionary politics. Rhodes was a vociferous opponent of the black vote. In 1887 he made his position clear: ‘The native’, he stated in parliament, ‘is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise.’ As he later said: ‘I look upon the Afrikaner Bond as a party I can work cordially with. Your ideas are the same as mine.’

The Rhodes-Bond coalition was, as the writer and campaigner Olive Schreiner declared, a corrupt marriage between reactionaries and capitalists. In 1890 Rhodes attempted to reintroduce the whipping of labourers with the ‘Strop Bill’, but even Hofmeyr baulked at the prospect and voted against it. Rhodes and the Bond then pushed through the Franchise and Ballot Act (1892), which increased the voting qualification from £25 to £75 and created a ‘civilisation’ or ‘education test’: all voters had to be able to write their names, a clear attempt to curtail the growing number of black voters. Shortly after the passing of the Franchise Act, a corruption scandal broke involving Rhodes’ friend and cabinet minister James Sivewright, the so-called Logan Affair. For various liberal MPs who until this point had propped up Rhodes’ government (including voting through the Franchise Act), Sivewright’s awarding a lucrative contract to a friend in a blatant display of cronyism was a step too far. When Rhodes refused to fire Sivewright, three liberals broke with his government, effectively sinking it. Among them was James Rose Innes, who now became head of a group in parliament known as the Progressives.

In 1895 Olive Schreiner’s husband, Samuel Cronwright-Schreiner, delivered a barnstorming speech written by his wife at Kimberley Town Hall excoriating Rhodes and his racist politics. He warned his audience that Rhodes had eyes on the gold-rich Transvaal. In response, the Bond sent a young lawyer, Jan Smuts (a future Boer general and prime minister), to defend Rhodes’ honour and deny that he had secret ambitions to overthrow Kruger.

But Rhodes’ agreement with the Bond was always on shaky ground. The issue that finally destabilised their coalition was that of the Uitlanders, a group of English-speaking mine workers who had moved to Transvaal after the discovery of gold in 1886, and who had extremely limited franchise rights under Kruger (who was not on good terms with Hofmeyr and, unlike the Bond, had no desire for a united South Africa). The political rights of the Uitlanders would become the imperial vehicle that Rhodes, eyeing Transvaal, was looking for. On 26 December 1895 Hofmeyr stated in an interview with the Cape Times that he recognised that the Uitlanders did have ‘legitimate aspirations’. Three days later, on 29 December, Rhodes’ colonial comrade Leander Starr Jameson crossed the Transvaal border with troopers from Rhodes’ Rhodesian British South African Company (BSAC), intending to overthrow Kruger’s government with the help of the Uitlanders. The Jameson Raid ended in ignominious failure, largely because the Uitlanders failed to support it.

Rhodes’ involvement in the escapade was obvious, and he was forced to resign as prime minister. His alliance with the Afrikaners was finished. When the Cape parliamentary inquiry into the Raid took place, the Bond-aligned newspaper Onze Courant stated somewhat prophetically: ‘Rhodes the Afrikaner has become an impossibility – thus now begins the career of Rhodes the jingo.’

Rhodes recast

In 1896, with BSAC troopers imprisoned with Jameson and absent from Rhodesia (a territory run by the BSAC under a British charter), the Ndebele rose up in rebellion. Rhodes, who was in Rhodesia at the time (partly to avoid the political fallout of the failed raid in the Cape), took part in a brutal attempt at repression. When this failed, he sued for peace, going out in person to meet with the Ndebele leaders in the Matopo Hills. Evidence of Rhodes’ crimes was gathered by Olive Schreiner and her husband, including a photograph of the lynching of three Ndebele soldiers which she had printed on the opening pages of her novella, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland.

In the Cape, the Jameson Raid had consequences beyond Rhodes’ resignation. By 1897 two distinct political parties had emerged for the first time: the Afrikaner Bond (now a party) and the largely English-speaking Progressive Party. Many liberals were deeply concerned by the divisions now emerging between the English and Boers in the Cape. Out of this an alliance was formed between some of the liberals and the Bond, the South African Party, led by Olive Schreiner’s brother, W.P. Schreiner. W.P. Schreiner agreed with many in the Bond that Rhodes was the single greatest threat to peace in southern Africa.

By late 1897 the government of Rhodes’ successor as prime minister, Gordon Sprigg, was hanging by a thread. After Rhodes stepped down, Sprigg had been supported by the Bond; he was now relying on Rhodes, who was still a member of parliament. But Rhodes had no clear place in Cape politics. He was neither a Progressive, with his anti-black and pro-tariff politics, nor would the majority of the Bond have anything to do with him. The only way back appeared to be a pro-imperialist and pro-Uitlander stance, which Rhodes took. By 1897 he was recorded regularly declaring that he stood for ‘equal rights for every white man south of the Zambezi’. South of the Zambezi, of course, were the Boer republics and the Uitlanders.

Among those convinced by Rhodes was the editor of the Cape Times, Edmund Garrett, who decided that Rhodes could be recast as a Progressive. In a series of articles, Garrett tried to convince the English-speaking public that Rhodes was the man to lead the Progressive Party. Garrett’s highly emotional argument hinged on the Uitlanders. He acknowledged that Rhodes was neither a ‘democrat’ nor a ‘free trader’, but these traits, by now, were of secondary importance to the fate of the Uitlanders. In March 1898 Garrett published an interview with Rhodes filled with extraordinary hubris. ‘Don’t talk as if it was I who want your Cape politics’, Rhodes said: ‘You want me. You can’t do without me.’ Three days later, at a mass meeting in Cape Town, he agreed to take over leadership of the Progressive Party. As an election drew closer, anti-Kruger sentiment ran high in the colony among the English. As John X. Merriman, later prime minister of the Cape, observed, Rhodes’ followers intended on making ‘him a sort of dictator, in which case – woe to the Transvaal and woe to the Natives’.

The black vote

After Sprigg lost a vote of no confidence in May 1898, an election was called. It would be the first in the Cape’s history to be contested by political parties rather than independents. Given the growth in the number of black voters, election agents would prove crucial. Essentially paid canvassers, election agents were generally convinced supporters of the candidate they worked for. Most liberal politicians who ran in a seat that had a substantial amount of black voters had at least one black agent. In 1898 Rhodes’ direct opponent Henry Burton employed a Mr Pukwane for £11. When Rhodes’ white agent offered him £60 to change sides Pukwane refused and told Burton about the bribe, stating that he was happy with his £11.

John Tengo Jabavu was also an election agent and, by 1898, he was perhaps the most famous black figure in the Cape. Jabavu attempted to encourage James Rose Innes – still an independent – to join the alliance with the liberals and the Bond, writing: ‘For myself I should rather see you coming in as Prime Minister of the Moderate men … From my standpoint, which is solely that of Native Policy, such a ministry would be ideal.’ Rose Innes replied that he simply could not ‘throw myself into the Bond Party’ without ‘committing political suicide’.

In response, Jabavu explained why he and his paper, Imvo Zabantsundu (Black Opinion), supported the Bond-liberal alliance. He admitted that he was encouraged into this position by Merriman, who believed that the Afrikaner farmer ‘is more to be depended on for the ends all of us have in common’. This change in allegiance was a considerable moment in Jabavu’s life. He was an Mfengu, who had traditionally allied themselves with the British.

Jabavu was by no means the only black intellectual in the Cape. Walter Rubusana and Nathaniel Mhala were both mission-educated men, but they were members of the Xhosa Rharhabe who were not on friendly terms with the Mfengu. There were also A.K. Soga and Robert Grendon, the latter of whom was a half-Irish, half-Herero poet, teacher and journalist who, as secretary of the Coloured People’s Association, had written to the British prime minister William Gladstone in 1892 to protest the Franchise and Ballot Act.

By 1898 Rubusana, Mhala and Soga were part of the South African Native Congress (SANC) which opposed Jabavu. The SANC was legitimately worried that Jabavu was encouraging black voters to support their traditional Afrikaner enemies. Isaac Wauchope, an Mfengu reverend, lamented at the time of the election that ‘the two [Mfengu and Xhosa] races are of the same colour and speak the same language’ – and yet had split politically.

Robert Grendon, who was neither Xhosa nor Mfengu, also feared that support for the Bond would ultimately mean support for Kruger – a man he deemed to be the great oppressor of black political rights in southern Africa. In 1900 Grendon wrote an epic poem, Paul Kruger’s Dream, which opened: ‘Great Britannia – thou – that givest/Equity to ev’ry man.’ There was a strong sentiment among the SANC that Britain had given them political rights that the Bond and Kruger would never have considered.

Electioneering

By early 1898 it was clear that the election would be extremely close. The Bond and Rhodes had once supported each other; now they would have to fill that gap with a new constituency. The black vote would decide important seats. Hofmeyr got out of the blocks first, stating in a speech in March that, unlike Rhodes, he had not voted for the ‘Strop Bill’: ‘I never tried to deprive a single Native of the vote which he had already acquired’ and ‘never joined the insensate cry of equal rights for all white men South of the Zambezi.’

As Rose Innes noted, Rhodes had made a mistake with his election motto ‘equal rights for white men’. When asked by Robert Grendon to explain it, Rhodes clarified: ‘My Motto is – Equal Rights for every civilised man south of the Zambezi. What is a civilised man? A man, whether white or black, who has sufficient education to write his name, has some property, or works. In fact, is not a loafer.’ For Grendon and many like him, this was enough. Its implication was that if the Boer republics fell under British dominion the Cape’s colour-blind franchise would be offered to ‘civilised’ black citizens.

When it came, the election was fought, as the historian Eric Walker put it, ‘with a ferocity and expenditure of money unexampled in the sober annals of the Cape Colony’. Rhodes went out to buy the election and control the media. He already covertly owned the Argus newspaper as well as having the editor of the Cape Times in his pocket. The Diamond Fields Advertiser in Kimberley, which had a strongly anti-Rhodes editor, was acquired and the editor removed.

Then, in one of the most controversial events in South African history, Rhodes gave a substantial amount of money to the SANC to produce its own newspaper, Izwi Labantu (The Voice of the People). Unsurprisingly Izwi came out punching for Rhodes’ Progressive Party. Grendon also started a newspaper, the Coloured South African; it too supported Rhodes. With almost all of the Cape’s newspapers under his thumb Rhodes brought in Owen Lewis, an election agent from the UK who was ‘well versed in electioneering wiles and stratagems’. Rhodes also made payments amounting to £21,000 to the MP and former editor of the Argus Thomas Fuller, ‘to purchase favour and unexpected advantage’. As Rose Innes wrote in the 1930s, the people who got money from Rhodes were those loyal ‘to the Führer’.

The most hotly contested seat of the election was Rhodes’ own Barkly West constituency, near Kimberley. Standing against him was Henry Burton, who had made a name for himself as a lawyer defending black clients. Burton’s response to Rhodes’ spending was a pamphlet aimed at black voters including the photograph of the lynched Ndebele soldiers with the caption: ‘How the Natives are Ruled Under Cecil Rhodes’ Company.’

The pamphlet led to an unprecedented move by Rhodes. Shortly before the election at a meeting near Kimberley, as his own Diamond Fields Advertiser reported: ‘Mr Rhodes Meets Natives’ – something he had said he would never do. The paper reported that Rhodes ‘knocked the bottom out of the Bond myths by explaining that the persons hanged were not hanged as natives but as murderers’. He was then reported to have ‘scored off Mr Tengo Jabavu’ by characterising his alliance with the Bond as ‘funny animals to put into a cage together’. He went on: ‘I hope they won’t end by tearing each other to pieces, because Tengo Jabavu, President Kruger [and the Bond] are all caged together; someone will get bitten.’

The speech, by all accounts, went down well with the black electorate: Rhodes won his seat convincingly. The SANC and their Rhodes-funded paper, Izwi, seemed to have had a decided effect on the black vote; J.C. Molteno, who was a liberal/Bond ‘friend of the native’, lost his seat in Tembuland to the Rhodes-supporting Progressive A.J. Fuller.

The road to war

Rhodes had thrown everything at the election, even ‘lowering’ himself to talk to the black electorate. The Progressive Party convincingly won the popular vote by around 42,000 votes to the Bond’s 32,000. However, when all seats were tallied, the Progressive Party came up one short – 39 to the Bond’s 40. Rhodes appealed to Governor Alfred Milner to hold off calling parliament until he could manufacture a majority by hook or by crook. Despite Milner’s close ties to Rhodes, he refused. Rhodes then attempted to entice three members of the Bond to cross the floor, offering one £3,000 to do so, unsuccessfully. W.P. Schreiner became the Cape’s new prime minister on 13 October.

But the election, combined with the factional war of words in Jabavu’s Imvo and the SANC’s Izwi, had sown the seeds of war – Schreiner’s tiny majority was always unlikely to hold things back. The new Cape government’s attempts to curtail Rhodes’ imperial desires – shared by Milner – were not enough. The Uitlanders and their supposed plight were used time and again to pressure Kruger. Even the head of the British army in South Africa, William Butler, admitted that there was little reality to the rhetoric around the Uitlanders. The MP John X. Merriman warned Milner that the result of his pressure on Kruger could only be war and what he referred to as ‘another Ireland’. Sure enough, on 11 October 1899 the Boer republics launched a pre-emptive attack on the Cape Colony.

Of the black men who participated in the 1898 election, many ended up engaged in the ensuing Second Boer War. Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, who would go on to help found the African National Congress (ANC), was trapped in the siege of Mafeking and worked as a court interpreter for the army. His diary reveals a passionate support for the British. Both Grendon and Soga joined the British army. Jabavu’s paper, Imvo, was closed for its supposed pro-Boer stance.

Despite the warnings, the British had been caught off-guard by the attack. Rhodes rushed to Kimberley after the Boers laid siege to the city, although once there he simply got in the army’s way. Two months into the war, in what became known as ‘Black Week’, the British suffered three near-catastrophic defeats. However, after the arrival of General Frederick Roberts on 10 January 1900 and a huge surge of troops from across the Empire, the war changed course. In just over four months Roberts captured Kruger’s capital, Pretoria. Kruger fled to Switzerland but many Boers continued a guerrilla war. Lord Kitchener, who took over from Roberts, then began a scorched earth policy, burning Boer farms. Around 150,000 men, women and children deemed to have supported the Boers were placed in concentration camps. It is estimated that more than 50,000 people, mainly children, died of measles, typhoid and dysentery. After two years of guerrilla war, in 1902 the Boers agreed to a peace settlement. In 1910 the four colonies were united by the British into the Union of South Africa. The non-racial franchise was retained in the Cape but was not extended to Transvaal or the Orange Free State.

Rhodes died in March 1902, just months before the war’s end. As Grendon wrote, he could only reap ‘fruition of his noble task/Within the grave! Britannia rules supreme.’ The reality was far less glorious. As the British prime minister Arthur Balfour acknowledged, the war had badly damaged Britain’s global prestige. After it ended, Plaatje, Grendon, Soga and Rubusana all joined Jabavu in becoming critics of British rule in South Africa, which had done nothing to further black political rights in the former Boer republics.

Catastrophe

The 1898 election had heightened the tensions between English and Afrikaners in South Africa, a rift that is still tangible today. It also forged distrust between white liberals and black voters, who began to realise that they had been betrayed by both Rhodes’ Progressive Party and the Bond. In 1910 Rubusana, feeling that he could no longer trust white political parties, ran as an independent for the Cape Provincial Council and won. Two years later, with Sol Plaatje, he became one of the driving forces behind the formation of the ANC. The party would become a broad church of all races and tribes under Nelson Mandela, dominating post-apartheid South African politics. More recently, it has succumbed to factionalism and no longer holds a majority in parliament.

But perhaps the 1898 election’s biggest legacy was the victory of Rhodes and his politics. The liberals ultimately failed to convince both the Cape’s English-speaking electorate and politicians in Britain that Rhodes’ jingoistic, corrupt and divisive politics would lead to catastrophe. The Second Boer War, and the horrific practices it established, was just that.

Matthew Blackman writes on South African history. His latest book is Legends: Twelve People Who Made South Africa a Better Place (Penguin, 2024).