THE DARKEST WEEK
On October 11, 1899, after years of trying, Cecil Rhodes finally got the war he wanted in southern Africa. Rhodes, the wealthiest man in Britain, perhaps even the entire world, had a heavily vested interest in a new outbreak of hostilities between Great Britain and the Boer republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Rhodes’s De Beers diamond mine in Kimberley controlled 90 percent of the world’s diamond supply, and after the discovery of fabulously rich gold deposits in Transvaal in 1886, he had joined forces with fellow diamond magnate Alfred Beit and other “gold bugs” to corner the market for that precious mineral as well.
With Rhodes’s encouragement, thousands of Britishers poured into Transvaal’s Witwatersrand region, known as the Rand. These uitlanders (outsiders), as the Boers, longstanding Dutch settlers in the region, called them, soon outnumbered the original residents three to one, creating a new boomtown at Johannesburg that almost overnight became the largest English-speaking city in Africa. The uitlanders, alleging ill treatment at the hands of the Boers, demanded that the British Crown intervene.
The uitlanders complained, not without reason, that the Boers had effectively disenfranchised them by severely restricting the voting rights of non-Boers. In addition, the Boers had imposed crushingly high taxes on the newcomers, with the revenues being diverted to other areas of the Transvaal. Most infuriating of all to the British miners was a tax on dynamite, an absolute necessity in their work. Rhodes, then serving as prime minister of Britain’s Cape Colony, added his considerable voice to the uitlanders’ demands. Both in public and in private Rhodes pressed the British government to more aggressively intervene. The fact that Great Britain had agreed by treaty to stay out of the political affairs of Transvaal and the Orange Free State did not seem to give him pause.
Rhodes pressed Britain to more aggressively intervene in South African affairs.
In late 1895 Rhodes went a step further by organizing a guerrilla raid on Johannesburg aimed at triggering a largescale revolt by British immigrants there. The raid, led by Leander Starr Jameson, a top executive of one of Rhodes’s mining companies, was an abysmal failure. The Boers quickly rounded up Jameson and his men after they crossed the border from neighboring Bechuanaland, and the uitlanders in Johannesburg failed, at any rate, to rise up. Nevertheless, the raid dramatically worsened relations between Great Britain and the Boers. “The Jameson Raid was the real declaration of war,” Jan C. Smuts, a high-ranking Boer statesman and soldier, later observed. “The aggressors consolidated their alliance, the defenders on the other hand silently and grimly prepared for the inevitable.”
Faced with deteriorating political, social, and racial conditions in Transvaal, the republic’s formidable president, Paul Kruger, issued an ultimatum to Great Britain in early October 1899. Kruger demanded that the British and their South African colonies immediately cease interfering in his country’s affairs, remove their troops from the Transvaal border, and recall any military reinforcements that might be on the way from England. Otherwise, Kruger warned, he would “with great regret be compelled to regard the action as a formal declaration of war.” Though Kruger and his.
