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The Times History of the War in South Africa, 1899-1902

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The Times History of the War in South Africa, 1899-1902 ( 107 ) CHAPTER V THE UITLANDEE GRIEVANCES Feom the earliest days of the immigration of the Boers into the country beyond the Vaal a foreign element had been associated with them. English hunters of big game and traders were among the first inhabitants of the Transvaal, and in some cases even preceded the " Voortrekkers." Their children, as a rule, became completely absorbed in the Boer population, but the survival of English names in otherwise purely Boer families is an indication of the presence of an original English element in the country. The Hollander, too, as has been noted in an earlier chapter, was no new feature of President Kruger's devising, but as old as MjTiheer British and Ohrig, of Amsterdam, and Mynheer Smellekamp, the ambi- elements in tious supercargo of the BrazUia. During the seventies the the Trans- rapidly owing dis- foreign element increased to the gold jj^q ^^gt coveries, and even before the annexation the larger villages were almost as much English as Dutch. A large district between Ermelo and the Swazi border became known as "New Scotland," and its chief village was styled "Eob- bumia" in honour of the poet Bums.* During the annexation the British element increased enormously. It is probable that at the time of Mr. Gladstone's surrender there was an actual majority of the white inhabitants of the Trans- vaal in favour of the maintenance of British rule. But as these were only loyal subjects who could be deserted without trouble or expense their wishes were not taken into consider- ation. The majority of those who were thus betrayed left the Transvaal when the Eepubhc was restored. Of those * When the war of independence brought the anti-English reactionary party to power, Bobbumia was rechristened New Amsterdam. 108 THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA who remained, some in the fierceness of their indignation threw themselves into the arms of the Boers and have since distinguished themselves as among the very bitterest enemies of England. Others, unable to believe that the abandonment of the Transvaal could be the last word of British policy, went on waiting patiently in the spirit of the motto " resurgam" inscribed on the cofl&n of the flag they had buried in Pretoria. For the first few years after the retrocession there was practically no immigration, but the opening of new goldfields at Barberton in 1885 and the discovery in 1886 of the Discovery banket reef of the Witwatersrand—the richest goldfield the Wit- of the world has ever known brought an unprecedented rush of watersrand — Reef, 1886. population into the Transvaal. From every part of the world, but above all from Great Britain and the British colonies, the foreigners, or " Uitlanders," streamed to the new city on the Band, called Johannesburg after Johannes Eissik, the Surveyor- General of the Transvaal. Already in 1892 President Kruger gave as a reason for not granting any extension of the franchise to the Uitlanders the fact that they outnumbered the burghers. An estimate made in 1896 gave 25,000 as the number of fully enfranchised burghers, and 50,000 as the approximate number of adult male Uitlanders then resident m the Transvaal. There are no accurate figures, but it seems to have been generally accepted by Dutch and Uitlander authorities alike that the adult male white population of the State was in a proportion of about one-third Dutch and two-thirds Uitlander. The total figures, including women and children, would be somewhat more in favour of the Dutch, as many of the Uitlanders were unmarried or unaccompanied by their wives and children. Permanent These immigrants were not mere diggers and adventurers. character The peculiar character of the reef does not of the Witwatersrand Uitlander lend itself to individual digging for nuggets, but only to settlement. industrial development on a large scale. The Uitlanders soon showed every indication of becoming a permanent industrial population. The most complicated and expensive machinery was set up in the mines, and shafts were sunk TEE UITLANDER GRIEVANCES 109 which required years of quarrying before they could even reach the deep level reef. Johannesburg rapidly became a large manufacturing and residential city. Nor were the Uitlanders confined to Johannesburg and the Witwatersrand. Pretoria, Heidelberg, Krugersdorp, Aliddelburg, Standerton, Barberton, and Pietersburg rapidly became Uitlander, in other words, English to\vns. The land itseK, the surest evidence of permanent occupation, largely passed into English hands. In spit« of the efforts of the Government to check this process, the Uitlanders before the outbreak of the war owned about two-fifths of the private land of the Transvaal. Eor this the burghers had been paid value to the amount of £6,112,718. The value of the land registered in the names of the burghers themselves was only estimated at £3,492,477. These figures, like others taken from the public records of the Transvaal, can only be accepted as approximately accurate. The advent of the Uitlanders, and the development which Transforma- took place in consequence of the investment of their capital, country and energy, and intelligence into the country, completely modified ^^ revenues the character of the Transvaal. Economically the poor squatter-state became a wealthy mining community. Politic- ally the peasant democracy became a narrow oligarchy of wealthy landowners, carrying on its administration through a large bureaucracy mainly imported from abroad, and rehing for its support on the rifles of the old democracy, rendered dependent and to a great extent pauperised by a regular system of doles and largesses. Side by side with this Boer patriciate and its Hollander and Boer clients lived the Uitlander ])lehs of the Transvaal, condemned to permanent political impotence. The revenue upon which the ruling oligarchy and its dependents subsisted was drawn entirely from this last section of the population. In 1886, the year of the great gold discovery, the revenue of the Transvaal was about £200,000. In 1899 it was over £4,000,000. The whole of the commerce, mining, and other active industries of the coimtry have always, even before 1886, been in the hands of the Uitlanders. The Dutch population has taken no part in them. The difi'erence between £200,000 and 110 THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA £4,000,000 may, therefore, without injustice be taken as representing the contributions of the Uitlanders to the revenue. In other words, the Uitlander community contributed nineteen-twentieths of the revenue of the State. Uitlanders The Boers and their sympathisers have always urged that brought as the taxation of the Uitlander was only a small royalty which much wealth into country the Transvaal imposed upon its own property, which in its as they generosity it allowed the Uitlanders to remove from the extracted from it. country. Apart from the assumption that all the potential wealth of a country belongs in the ordinary proprietary sense to the class that holds political power, whether that class has any share in the creation of the wealth or not, this argument neglects the fact that the greater part of the wealth of which the Transvaal Government took its toll was not the gold brought out of the mines, but the capital brought into the country by the Uitlanders themselves. Individuals and individual companies may have made enormous profits ; but, as a body, the Uitlander community took no more out of the Transvaal than the due return for the capital and energy it expended in the country. Uitlanders On the general question of the rights of immigrant in Transvaal populations in new countries, there can, among Englishmen by con- ventional at any rate, be very little discussion. Immigration is a right, not necessity for the development of new countries. And once by favour. the immigrant is settled in his new home he has a moral right to claim a voice in the political control of the country whose economic destiny he is shaping. It is by freely acknowledging the White Man's Birthright that the British Colonies and the United States of America have prospered and grown great. But the Uitlanders had even stronger claims than those possessed by ordinary immigrants in other countries. They were not in the Transvaal by the grace of the Boers, but by their own right—a right secured for them by the Sand Kiver Convention, and by the Conventions of 1881 and 1884. In 1855 the provisions of the Sand Eiver Convention were supplemented by an invitation to Europeans of good character to enter the country with full promise of protection. So again in 1883 Article XIV. of the Convention of London was anticipated by an invitation and i TEE UITLANDER GBIEVANCES 111 full promise of protection to persons desirous of working the mines of the Transvaal, issued by instruction of President Kruger and the Transvaal deputation and published in the London Press towards the end of December of that year. The Uitlanders have always claimed the right to enter the Transvaal, travel, reside, own land, and carry on their business without undue taxation or interference, and with assurance of full protection for their persons and their property. The British Government has consistently stipulated that this right for foreigners and British subjects should be a condition sine qua non of the self-government accorded to the Dutch Eepublic, and the EepubHc has consistently accepted the condition and accompanied it by formal invitation to settlers to take advantage of it. There is no room for misunderstanding on the point. The Uitlanders before the war were in the Transvaal by rights specially preserved to them and specially acknowledged in every charter of existence of the South African Eepublic.
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