How many bones must you bury before you can call yourself an African? Updated December 2009 A South African Diary: Contested Identity, My Family - Our Story Part D: 1886 - 1909 Compiled by: Dr. Anthony Turton [email protected] Caution in the use and interpretation of these data This document consists of events data presented in chronological order. It is designed to give the reader an insight into the complex drivers at work over time, by showing how many events were occurring simultaneously. It is also designed to guide future research by serious scholars, who would verify all data independently as a matter of sound scholarship and never accept this as being valid in its own right. Read together, they indicate a trend, whereas read in isolation, they become sterile facts devoid of much meaning. Given that they are “facts”, their origin is generally not cited, as a fact belongs to nobody. On occasion where an interpretation is made, then the commentator’s name is cited as appropriate. Where similar information is shown for different dates, it is because some confusion exists on the exact detail of that event, so the reader must use caution when interpreting it, because a “fact” is something over which no alternate interpretation can be given. These events data are considered by the author to be relevant, based on his professional experience as a trained researcher. Own judgement must be used at all times . All users are urged to verify these data independently. The individual selection of data also represents the author’s bias, so the dataset must not be regarded as being complete. The reader is strongly urged to do additional research before drawing conclusions, using this dataset merely as a guide of some known events. Images used in this document are from the public domain, unless otherwise noted, so copyright is not being claimed by the author. Andrew Charles Turton, my younger brother, is thanked for his work in sourcing the Turton genealogical data used in this text. © Anthony Richard Turton 2009 (except for public domain images individually acknowledged) ~ 1 ~ How many bones must you bury before you can call yourself an African? Updated December 2009 1886 1886 Gold is discovered in the Transvaal Republic . Britain covets this resource and plots the overthrowal of the ZAR Government to gain access to it. Paul Kruger tries to monopolize the gold industry, reserving posts for Boers and excluding Uitlander’s. Mills & Williams (2006:83) note that the discovery of gold is a key trigger for the subsequent Second Anglo-Boer War . (See also Turton et al., 2006). 1886 The British are apprehensive about possible German intervention in Pondoland, so they force the sale of Port St John’s. 1886 The coldest winter in living memory devastates the ranchers of the American West. Deep snow drifts kill hundreds of thousands of cattle, causing farmers to leave the land and seek their fortunes elsewhere. It was in this social climate that gold fever found its frenzied roots. 20/7/86 Turton Genealogy: Aletta Johanna Louisa Sophia De Bruyn, wife of Louis Hosea Jordaan (Maternal 3rd Great-Grandparent), dies aged 81. While the exact location of her death is unknown, her husband Louis Hosea Jordaan, died at Kroonstad, Orange Free State on 24/8/1874, suggesting that they participated in the Great Trek . 11/12/86 Turton Genealogy: Gysbert Van Rooyen (Maternal 3 rd Great-Grandparent), dies at Roodekrans, in the Waterberg District of Rustenburg, Transvaal Republic . Given that he was born in Grahamstown in 1828, and that he married Barbara Christina Jacoba Meintjies on 6/6/1847 in Craddock, who dies on 11/4/1909 in the Boschfontein District of Rustenburg, Transvaal Republic provides strong evidence that both he and his wife participated in the first movement of settlers during or after the Great Trek from the Cape to the Transvaal Republic . This evidence is supported even further when noting that their child, Susara Aletta Van Rooyen, was born on 15/8/1853 at Zuurplaat and died on 12/4/1892 in Dwarsvlei, District Pretoria. Additional evidence comes from his father, Gysbertus Van Rooyen, who was baptized in Grahamstown on 9/11/1798, was married on 3/4/1820 in Craddock and who died on 15/2/1884 in Bosfontein, District Rustenburg. It is also evident that Barbara Christina Jacoba Meintjies lived through the Second Anglo-Boer War and the British Scorched Earth Policy . 1887 1887 The Transvaal Republic negotiates a concession with Lobengula . This is immediately countered by Sir Hercules Robinson of Britain, who uses the access provided by Robert Moffat’s son John, to convince Lobengula not to give any of the Matabele-Ndebele land away to the Boers, without prior sanction by the British. At the time Ndebele land stretches from the Bechuanaland Protectorate border (the contemporary Botswana-Zimbabwe border) towards the Zambezi River in the north and Portuguese territory to the east. The Ndebele capital is Lobengula’s royal kraal Bulawayo, meaning “the place of slaughter”. The British call this Matabeleland , with the area to the north-east occupied by the Shona people known as Mashonaland . 1887 The Transvaal government grants a concession to Edouard Lippert, a German national with a long history in Kimberley, for the exclusive right to manufacture dynamite, gunpowder, explosives and ammunition for a period of sixteen years. In terms of this concession a local factory is to be erected within five years, and the importation of machinery and raw materials by Lippert is to be duty free. The importation of actual dynamite is not duty exempt however (Meredith, 2007:298). Lippert sells this concession to a French consortium with a Dutch national as the managing director of the Transvaal subsidiary called the Zuid Afrikaansche Maatschappij voor Ontplofbare Stoffen Beperkt (Meredith, 2007:298). 1887 Cecil John Rhodes forms the Consolidated Goldfields Company . 1887 Ralph Williams arrives in Pretoria as the British consul, describing the village as “homely to a degree”. He describes what he finds: “The Old Colonial Executive Office, the workroom of a © Anthony Richard Turton 2009 (except for public domain images individually acknowledged) ~ 2 ~ How many bones must you bury before you can call yourself an African? Updated December 2009 government strong enough to defy the power of England, was a dirty, tumble-down place, containing a rough deal table and eight or ten common chairs. … Whenever I had need to put any matters officially forward I was asked to attend the council [Raad]. At the head of the table sat the State Secretary [Dr Willem Leyds], with on one side of him the famous General Piet Joubert , the Commandant General, and on the other as the Vice-President, General Smit , our conqueror at Majuba Hill. The other members sat around the table. The President sat in an easy chair away from the table, smoking continually an old Dutch pipe, and opposite him was another easy chair in which I sat. There was no spittoon in the room, though there was sad necessity for it, and it was the invariable habit of Mr Kruger to put his leg under the table near the State Secretary’s chair and drag out the waste-paper basket to serve as a spittoon for himself (and for me had I needed it) during the interview. He used it copiously, and I was constrained to draw in my legs lest he should exceed its limits and trench within my domain” (Meredith, 2007:291-2). 16/5/87 Turton Genealogy: Josiah Turton (Paternal Great-Great Grandfather), dies in Dundee, Natal, having lived through the period of the Anglo-Zulu War . Josiah’s wife, Jane Elizabeth Raistrick, was born on 29 November 1814 and records show that she died on an unknown date and was buried in Vryheid, “near the coalfield and base of the Mountain Talana”. No further details are known. (See details of the Battle of Talana on 20/10/1899). 1888 1888 Cecil Rhodes writes his third will (see 1877 & 1882), with much the same theme as before. This version carries a covering letter to Lord Rothschild suggesting that the Jesuit order be used as a template for the secret society, but that the words “British Empire” should replace “Roman Catholic Religion” (Meredith, 2007:382). 1888 There are 44 separate gold mining companies now operating in the Transvaal gold fields (Meredith, 2007:392). 1888 A boom starts in Johannesburg, lasting until 1889. This attracts scores of prostitutes who arrive by train from the Cape Colony and Natal (Meredith, 2007:293). 1888 Joseph Chamberlain gives an insight into his mindset when he asks of the London Chamber of Commerce, if there, “is a man in his senses, who believes that the crowded population of these islands [Britain] could exist for a single day if it were cut adrift from the great dependencies which now look to us for protection and which are the natural market for our trade?” Chamberlain, later to join the cabinet of the Gladstone government, becomes possessed with the notion of developing imperial trade, to the point where he later regards the Transvaal , both as an anomaly and as a threat to British supremacy (see 1/8/1895) (Meredith, 2007:315). 7/88 Cecil Rhodes tells the Cape parliament: “I regard him [Paul Kruger] as one of the most remarkable men in South Africa, who has been singularly unfortunate. When I remember that Paul Kruger had not a sixpence in his Treasury when his object was to extend his country over the whole of the northern interior, when I see him sitting in Pretoria with Bechuanaland gone, and other lands around him gone from his grasp, and last of all, when he, with his whole idea of a pastoral Republic, finds that idea vanishing, and that he is likely to have to deal with a hundred thousand diggers, who must be entirely out of sympathy and touch with him, I pity the man” (Meredith, 2007:294).