To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [15]
Both the British and Germans had already experienced that rapture while wielding Maxim guns to deadly effect elsewhere in Africa. This, to Europeans, seemed the machine gun's logical use: "It is a weapon," declared the Army and Navy Journal, "which is specially adapted to terrify a barbarous or semi-civilised foe." No one imagined that either British or German soldiers would ever find themselves in the role of Sudanese Arabs, experiencing their own Omdurmans in the very heart of Europe.
The next war was clearly going to be quite far from Europe. For even as Kitchener's Maxims were swiftly mowing down the Sudanese, Britain's relentless imperial march was running into unexpected problems at the other end of the African continent. The war about to begin there would be the country's last before 1914. In ways no one understood at the time, it would offer additional glimpses of the great cataclysm ahead. And among the actors would be several destined to play major roles in fighting—or resisting—the world war to come.
With its temperate climate and fertile river valleys, the southern tip of Africa had attracted Europeans for several hundred years, and immigrants from Holland, Britain, and elsewhere had wrested a large expanse of land from the indigenous inhabitants. By the late nineteenth century, what today is South Africa was divided into four parts: two British territories, Natal and the Cape Colony—which included vastly lucrative diamond mines—encompassed all the coastline and much of the interior, while inland were two landlocked autonomous states, the Orange Free State and the South African Republic, which lay across the Vaal River and so was known as the Transvaal. These two territories were controlled by Boers, descendants of early European settlers, whose language derived from seventeenth-century Dutch. After some decades of friction, the British had been content to leave the Boers alone, for their wide stretches of empty veldt seemed to offer few enticements for conquest.
Everything had changed in 1886, however, when at the small town of Johannesburg an itinerant prospector stumbled upon a rock that turned out to be an outcrop of the world's largest underground deposit of gold ore. This staggeringly rich lode extended downward thousands of feet into the earth and spread for more than a hundred miles sideways under the Transvaal plains. Fortune hunters from Europe and North America flocked to Johannesburg, at first living in tents. On their heels came builders, merchants, brewers, distillers, pimps and prostitutes, and the tiny settlement was swiftly transformed into a large city with gaslit streets. Within a dozen years, this patch of dry grassland was producing one-quarter of the world's gold, and, exasperatingly for the British, the Transvaal controlled it all.
At first Britain hoped that mere demography would conquer the Transvaal, since most of the gold-rush miners and deep-level mining companies were British. It was unthinkable that the Transvaal's black majority would ever have the right to vote, and so surely it would be just a matter of time before the new immigrants outnumbered the Boers. Then they could elect a government that would bring the Transvaal into the empire—and in the process reduce taxes on the mining barons. To the total frustration of London, however, the republic's president, Paul Kruger, a man of great bulk, enormous jowls, and a fringe of white beard, denied the new immigrants full citizenship. That Britons had a right to rule other people seemed the most obvious of global truths, but that uncultured farmers led by an ugly-looking man said to believe the earth was flat should rule over Britons seemed outrageous. In 1897, the year of the Diamond Jubilee, the British government