CHAPTER ELEVEN
RURAL STRUGGLES AND THE POLITICS OF A COLONIAL COMMAND: THE SOUTHERN MOUNTED RIFLES OF THE TRANSVAAL VOLUNTEERS, 19051912
Ian van der Waag
Based on offi cial and private records, both in South Africa and the United Kingdom, this essay analyzes the apparent motives behind the creation of the Transvaal Volunteers and explores the phenomenon of ‘volunteerism’ in the Standerton District of the Transvaal Colony dur- ing the post-Anglo-Boer-War period. Despite the great transformations played out in South Africa during this time, historians have largely neglected the study of these volunteer regiments. Th is neglect is caused at least partly by the nature of the sources; there are many, small clusters of offi cial archives that have been used to present an organizational history of the Transvaal Volunteers, but lend little to our knowledge of what it was like to serve with the volunteer regiments during this diffi cult time. Moreover, on imperial peripheries, personal records are infrequent. Yet, rare fi nds, which highlight the struggles of individual volunteers to survive and at times actually serve amid a wash of change, can reveal how the private life of the settler and the public service of the Volunteer inexorably intersected. Th is study uses one regiment (the Eastern Rifl es, reconstituted in 1907 as the Southern Mounted Rifl es) and its commander, whose unique correspondence complements the offi cial record, as vehicles through which to range the structure of local Transvaal society and to explore in particular the changing nature of relations between the British settlers and the increasingly-militant Afrikaners of the newly-conquered platteland.
Post-war Transvaal and the Creation of the Transvaal Volunteers
Th e Transvaal Volunteers were established in 1902 just aft er the Anglo- Boer War ended and southern Africa entered a new era of undoubted British supremacy, to which Lord Milner, the British proconsul in Southern Africa, had aspired and for which the war had been fought. 252 ian van der waag
Yet Pax Britannica did not necessarily bring a more settled South Africa, then still a geographic concept embracing an assortment of British colonies, former Boer republics, and a number of recently-conquered African kingdoms and chiefdoms. Several strategic problems vexed the British administration. Th e worst but least likely contingency—never constant and seldom real—was a war between Britain and an imperial power, especially one opposing Britain in Africa. If the enemy were Germany or Portugal, the war would probably include an overland invasion from South West Africa or Mozambique, the fi ring of an Afrikaner rebellion, and in the case of Germany, a limited naval cam- paign in the Southern Oceans. A war with France or Belgium would involve the same problems, less the landward invasion but with the possible addition of an African uprising. Imperial authorities and the colonial administrations in the four British colonies in South Africa drew up plans to counter the eventu- alities. Milner had realized from the start that the war would fi rst have to be won militarily and then, aft er a peace, politically. Th e ravages of a total war had to be repaired: in places whole towns had to be rebuilt and more than 250,000 refugees had to be repatriated and resettled; a diffi cult task considering that Boers were returning from the camps to the Transvaal in late 1902 at a rate of some 3,500 per week.1 Th e Milner administration introduced progressive agriculture and restocked the country with horses, cattle, and sheep. Some farmers received grants, others compensation. Land was purchased for new settlers, who, Milner hoped, would form ‘a useful element’ in the agricultural population. Government departments were recreated; some that had existed before 1899 received an overhaul, and others were built from scratch. Th e Boer defense structures, chiefl y the commandos of the two former republics, disappeared altogether. Milner was resolute that “the old condition of things should not be reproduced in which the English-Afrikaans language divide coincided almost completely with a division of interests, the whole country population being virtually Boer, while the bulk of the industrial and commercial population was British.”2 As he explained to his military secretary, Hanbury Williams, late in 1900:
1 Milner to Chamberlain, 22 September 1902, Th e National Archives, London [hereaft er TNA]: CO 291/42, No. 43292. 2 Milner to Chamberlain, 30 December 1901, British Parliamentary Papers [hereaf- ter BPP]: Cd.1163-1902, Further Correspondence relating to Aff airs in South Africa, No. 20.