Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Jameson’s raid set the tone for next century
These reports, drawn from our archives, reflect some of the events which have animated readers of the Argus’s 160-year-old titles
IN HOT February weather at opposite ends of the 20th century, the big crowds that gathered in the streets – in Pretoria in 1896, and in Cape Town in 1990 – had, on the face of it, nothing in common.
It could be there was something alike in the fervour of their republican convictions – the avenging Transvaalers in the wake of the Jameson Raid fiasco and the clamorous solidarity of the anti-apartheid masses at the cusp of their triumph – though any comparison risks seeming forced.
What is beyond dispute is that the crowd-pulling events on those sweaty February days slightly less than 100 years apart book-ended the defining rise and fall of racial nationalism in South Africa’s 20th century.
The report of February 4, 1896 – “The Reformers – trial at Pretoria” – is perhaps tellingly bland. There is no mention of the crowds of jeering burghers who turned out to scoff at the accused as they made their way to trial in the Transvaal capital’s “Second Raadsaal”. The men, called “the Reform prisoners”, were fingered as co- conspirators in Leander Starr Jameson’s – though really Cecil Rhodes’s – botched “raid” on the Transvaal, which the plotters had hoped would trigger a revolt against Paul Kruger’s burgher government and deliver the gold-rich republic into imperial hands.
We have this glimpse of the courtroom scene: “There was very limited accommodation for the public, the whole of the floor being reserved for prisoners and officials. One side of the hall was set apart for the Reform prisoners, who were provided with cane- bottom chairs. Shortly before 10 o’clock an armed escort marched up to the gaol for the five prisoners who were detained in custody.” Among these was then-Cape prime minister Cecil Rhodes’s brother, Colonel Frank Rhodes.
The fallout of the raid cost Rhodes his premiership. The key accused in the Reform trial were found guilty of treason and initially sentenced to hang – but all were freed before the year was up.
But the impact of the failed raid ran deeper. Writing 10 years later, the former guerrilla and later widely admired, if often chronically unimaginative, prime minister Jan Smuts noted: “The Jameson Raid was the real declaration of war... And that is so in spite of the four years of truce that followed... (the) aggressors consolidated their alliance... the defenders silently and grimly prepared for the inevitable.”
The misery and upheaval of the Boer War was one thing; the effect it had on national political sense- making was another.
The unification of the four parts of South Africa in the 1910 Union settlement was predicated on securing peaceful relations between formerly belligerent whites – commonly referred to at the time as “the race problem” – at the expense of “the native problem” which, as it concerned the citizenship and rights of the majority, was a deferral that would come at high cost.
In a much later February, it was British prime minister Harold Macmillan who alerted South Africans that, in his memorable phrase, “the wind of change is blowing through this continent”.
Addressing the combined houses of Parliament on February 3, 1960, Macmillan noted: “Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.”
Our report (“Macmillan’s message to Union”) went on: “The British prime minister said there were some aspects of South African policy which it was impossible for Britain to support and encourage without being false to her own deep convictions about the political destinies of free men to which, in British territories, the British government were trying to give effect.”
The BBC reported at the time: “Nationalist Party politicians listened to him in silence and a number refused to applaud when he had finished.”
If the speech was a landmark in signalling Britain’s acceptance that the days of the empire were over, and marked the beginning of apartheid South Africa’s isolation, apartheid itself had a while to go yet. Only a month after Macmillan’s speech, the Sharpeville massacre – followed soon by the banning of the ANC and the PAC – intensified global abhorrence of apartheid.
The message was slow to get through; even nearly 30 years later, on February 6, 1986, the front-page headline “SA could have black president – Pik Botha” was deeply controversial to many.
“We have stated categorically that apartheid is disappearing, is dying,” ( Botha) told foreign correspondents. “As long as we can agree on the protection of minority rights… then it would possibly become unavoidable that in future you might have black presidents of this country.”
“Possibly… unavoidable” went too far for president PW Botha, who repudiated his foreign minister a few days later.
Yet, of course, Pik Botha was right; only four years later, president FW de Klerk set the real reform ball rolling in a speech on February 2, 1990 which changed everything and, in law at least, ensured apartheid died a death. On that morning, thousands of Mass Democratic Movement marchers converged on central Cape Town to demand the very things which, unknown to them, De Klerk was conceding a few blocks away in Parliament. “Thousands of protesters gathered on the Parade after a mass march through the streets of Cape Town… and cheered and whistled as speakers informed them president De Klerk had unbanned the African National Congress and other organisations,” the report read. “Traffic policemen escorted singing and dancing groups through the streets. The pro- test march that brought Cape Town to a standstill had turned into a celebration. The first news of the unbanning was greeted with caution before the crowd accepted that it was true and the chanting began: ‘ANC... ANC...’.”
From Stockholm, the ANC’s then-foreign affairs secretary, Thabo Mbeki, was quoted as saying De Klerk’s speech “goes a very long way to meeting the ANC’s demand that political conditions must be created for everybody to participate in a peaceful political process”.
It was the only way forward, De Klerk told stunned MPs.
“The alternative is growing violence, tensions and conflict. The well-being of all in this country is linked inextricably to the ability of leaders to come to terms with one another on a new dispensation. No one can escape this simple truth.”
It was the simple truth put aside all those years ago in the wake of – and, in a sense, because of – Jameson’s illjudged raid in the first days of 1896.