Sources
Introduction
Prologue
Chapter 01
Chapter 02
Chapter 03
Chapter 04
Chapter 05
Chapter 06
Chapter 07
Chapter 08
Chapter 09
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88

 
TAZARA ... a journey by rail through world-history © KJS / 2009
The Controller
CHAPTER 30  



No, the locomotive does not fail us …
I need time to contemplate, here in my hall …

What caused me to have these cattle-wagons coupled to the train?
What caused me to connect the train’s public address system to their passengers?
What caused me to connect their lives with mine?

At that time when our war-hero burnt the homes of our enemies …
At that time when our war-hero let waste away their children and women…
At that time when our war-hero wanted not victory but complete subjugation of the enemy …
At that time I belonged to those who knew nothing about it …

In May 1902 peace was declared and the long tragic chapter of the Boer-British war ended. It was an honour, that our war-hero had requisitioned my old house in Johannesburg, in the Oval at Jeppestown. Our next house was a fine place in Saratoga Avenue, Doornfontain. I reopened my old offices in Primrose Buildings, Fraser Street, opposite the Second Stock Exchange. It was a very busy centre, because most of the stockbrokers and Tattersall’s bookies shared offices in the vicinity. More Exchange and racecourse business took place in Fraser Street at that time than anywhere else in town …

At that time — please, believe me — I had not the slightest notion that our war-hero had introduced concentration camps to subjugate the enemy!

We all … have been somehow dragged into it …

Stop! Perhaps, I should formulate more precisely … perhaps, someone else is taking notes?

I had reached the age of thirty in 1896; and I had acquired considerable reputation among people I lived with. I did not take notes of speeches by politicians anymore, I was a politician myself. The battle for water made me one in those early days when Johannesburg was just a digging place for gold and diamonds. In 1893, more than five hundred ratepayers had signed a petition, asking me to stand as their representative on the newly founded Sanitary Board.
All available water of the White Waters Ridge was used for the pumps in the mines. Drought brought miseries to the Ridge besides the water shortage. The precious vegetables withered away. Food for the mules and oxen grew scarce. They transported away everything what was produced in Johannesburg, they transported everything what was consumed in Johannesburg; they needed more and more food which became less and less affordable.
When diamonds and gold-deposits were found 1869 in Kimberley and 1886 in White Waters Ridge — „Witwatersrand“ called by the Boers who administered it as their territory — it did not take much time until the „white waters“ oozed away in the mining shafts. But no Boer would give up his god-trusting farm-work in order to involve himself in mining. Here and there, a Boer would sell a piece of farmland to a speculating Uitlander, as he would call a foreigner, for sure — but soon, the Uitlanders did represent two third of the population in the Boer-Republic of President Paulus „Oom“ Kruger, and we, the Britons, were the majority. The Boers did not like to sell to us what they grew on their farmland.
When we started to shoot rockets into the sky to try to milk rain-clouds, we received a shocked reprimand from Kruger’s capital Pretoria for our, as they called it, blasphemous action. A sturdy burgher named „Oompje“ Halyard rose in wrath in the Volksraad and delivered one of the most remarkable protests ever made in a parliament.
„How much longer,“ he thundered, „are these godless people in Johannesburg to be allowed to continue this outrage? Day by day they are sticking their fingers in the eye of the Lord!“
So, if we were capable to use a rocket-technique to milk rain-clouds why then did we not close the forty-mile-gap from Johannesburg to the Southern border of Transvaal with a railway-line? Thanks to the hostility of Kruger and his people which deprived us of the right to participate in decision-making!
But this time the wily President realised that the miners had been tried far enough. Word went from Pretoria that a bonus of £20 would be paid to the first 250 wagons of foodstuff to reach Johannesburg from beyond the Transvaal border. The wagons rolled in, and the town was saved.
However, for the sake of the Republic itself Kruger could not deny Johannesburg its railway indefinitely. The gold now pouring from the furnaces must be fed to a greedy world as safely and quickly as possible. To entrust such precious cargo to the hazards of even the fastest mule transport was madness.
Kruger gave orders for a railway to be built, and again, promptly and painfully, found himself at war with his old enemy Cecil Rhodes. The sickly boy who had come to South Africa twenty years ago was now nearing the zenith of his power. He had become the Colossus, whose powerful gaze dwelt ceaselessly on the map of Africa from the Cape far up towards the mighty Congo and even beyond, planning, administering, dreaming.
His almost mystical vision of the Africa that was to be had long cherished as its central feature a railway stretching from the Cape to Cairo — a huge iron spine from which the ribs would grow in due time. The day had not yet come to push the great project forward. But meanwhile he was busy linking the Cape with the Transvaal border.
The last forty miles from the border to Johannesburg proved a problem which rapidly acquired the temper of high explosive. Kruger had given the concession for all railways within the Transvaal to a Netherlands company, with the idea that the line from Pretoria to Delagoa Bay in Portuguese East Africa should be completed first.
Puffing clouds of smoke on his verandah, the old president thought happily of the traffic that would roll over the Delagoa line, bringing much needed funds to his treasury. To his circumscribed mind it was all so simple. Johannesburg was 349 miles from Delagoa Bay, 482 miles from Durban, and 1.000 miles from Cape Town. Obviously the shortest route was the cheapest, and Rhodes could stamp and fume on the border as much as he liked.
But things did not turn out that nice simple way at all. Kruger had forgotten that the Netherlands Railway Company, having won a priceless monopoly, might be expected to earn riches for itself. To his bewildered mortification, the railway from the Cape to Johannesburg was completed in September 1892, more than two years before the line to Delagoa Bay, which was opened in October 1894. And just over a year later a third coastal link with Durban came into being.
Most mortifying of all, Kruger learned that even the thousand-mile long Cape line would carry goods to the Rand at a cheaper rate than that to Delagoa Bay. No wonder Kruger once growled in anger against Rhodes: „That young man I like not! He goes too fast for me!“
So, there were these two men: old Oom Paul, puffing clouds of smoke on his Pretoria stoep, and scheming always how better to oppress and humiliate the Uitlanders! Then there was the Good Giant, Cecil Rhodes, whose shadow stretched from the Cape to the Zambezi ...
For a long while the Uitlanders, denied the vote, struggled by constitutional means to gain their rights. Their voice was the Transvaal National Union, a body drawn from all classes who felt that conditions were becoming intolerable. They reached the limit of their patience during 1895, when the Volksraad in Pretoria made it plain that they had no intention of bringing about reforms. Then the thought of revolution reared its dangerous head …
The real power behind the scenes was Cecil Rhodes himself; but his position was difficult. He was head of the big Rand company known as Consolidated Goldfields, which gave him natural interest in Transvaal affairs. But he was now also Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, and that complicated matters severely.
Nevertheless, Rhodes was vitally interested in the Transvaal. He suffered as much as anyone from the tremendous taxations imposed by the Volksraad; and his imperialistic spirit longed to see a fairer form of government in the country, and his fellow-Englishmen enjoying the rights of full citizens.
So a plan for outright revolution was launched on its fateful way. It was not the idea of any particular man. Certainly Rhodes did not want it. It simply grew out of many discussions.
Briefly, the plot was this. The leaders in Johannesburg would deliver an ultimatum regarding their rights to the Volksraad. It would without doubt be treated with contempt, whereupon the revolutionaries would seize power in Johannesburg and declare themselves the provisional government of the Transvaal. The same night they would raid the State arsenal in Pretoria, the capital. Thus, armed and holding the reins of power, they would appeal to the rest of South Africa and the world, and submit the future of the Transvaal to a referendum in which every white person would join.
Naturally all this could not be accomplished without some uproar, and the moment retaliation began, argued the plotters, they would have a reasonable excuse for the intervention of an organised British striking force.
That was the crux of the whole scheme. The nearest border from which such a force could come was Bechuanaland, with no railway-connection and therefore two days’ march away. But how could the men be assembled secretly, yet fully equipped and prepared to ride with all speed to the aid of the revolutionaries?
It was a knotty problem. And with it there entered into the affairs of the Transvaal a man whose name was shortly to resound throughout South Africa, Great Britain, and doubtless in foreign capitals where the activities of Britain and her associates were watched with the keenest interest.
The man was Dr. Leander Starr Jameson — doctor of medicine, administrator, soldier and a close friend and confident of Rhodes who had drawn him deeply into his plans for developing Africa. At a critical moment in his dealings with the Matabele king, Lobengula, Rhodes turned to Jameson and begged him to go north and soothe the despot. Jameson went to Matabeleland, handled the touchy tyrant with admirable diplomacy, and later accompanied the Pioneer Column sent North by Rhodes and his Chartered Company to occupy the territory called Mashonaland. Not long afterwards he became Administrator of the new country, and proved himself altogether a fitting lieutenant for the „maker of history“ ...
The cloak of fantasy began to unfold the whole enterprise. Rhodes, after some argument with London, had bought „for railway construction“ a strip of the Bechuanaland Protectorate where Jameson‘s force could safely gather. So „that construction parties“ might be protected, the Colonial Secretary gave permission for a band of men to be recruited at Pisani on the border.
About eight hundred men came forward, some from disbanded Imperial Police, some from the Mashonaland Mounted Police, the rest from here and there.
For three weeks the men were drilled and trained at Pisani in warlike exercises. Without knowing clearly what it was all about, they grew more and more eager for action. But in Johannesburg confusion and uncertainty now reigned. While hopes and fears ebbed to and fro, the burghers calmly gathered in Pretoria to celebrate Naghtmaal, and thus innocently frustrated the plot to seize the arsenal, on which so much depended.
The supply of arms and ammunition smuggled into Johannesburg was not nearly large enough for the Reformers’ needs. And the leaders had become so divided in opinion and swayed by anxious fears that the more level-headed saw clearly that the best course was to postpone the whole scheme.
Even Rhodes in Cape Town had grown anxious and uncertain that he declared: „I‘m sure the right thing is to give up the scheme.“
One of the oddest features of the whole fantastic plot was the free and easy way in which compromising letters and telegrams were sent to and fro. So it was inevitable that news of the scheme and Jameson’s intentions were openly discussed in Pretoria, and even seeped through to London.
In Johannesburg the people themselves were strangely divided. A share-market boom was on, and speculators were much more concerned with buying and selling than with the plot thickening around them. Others watched and listened fearfully to the warlike talk, then hastily packed their belongings and rushed to the small railway yard at Braamfontein to buy tickets and flee elsewhere. At one time over five thousand people were lined up to board the trains — surely a world record queue for those days.
When Dr. Jameson ignored Rhodes’ order to abandon the coup and let his eight hundred men loose on 29th December 1895 — my wife and my three kids were enjoying Durban‘s sea-front
We received first-hand news of the raid in a strange and tragic way. We were on the train returning from Durban which passed the down train from Johannesburg at Glencoe Junction. The two trains pulled up side by side and there was much cheery talk and laughter as friends and acquaintances greeted each other. All the news of the raid was passed to those returning from the coast.
Jameson and his men were caught in a trap set by the Boers; he would surrender within the next hours.
Then the trains parted — ours to bear us safely home, the other one plunged over the bridge into the Glencoe River, killing thirty-two people and injuring over fifty.
Doctor Jameson had lost eighteen men killed and about forty wounded.
Can I calculate both figures against each other?
I can, because as one of the very few witnesses I saw that the world had been saved from a worse scenario — at least for a while …
I am talking about the confrontation of the two world powers, Great Britain and Germany. The worst international reaction was set in motion by the German Kaiser Wilhelm, who sent Kruger a telegram, which became famous, congratulating him on his firm stand against the „invaders“. Some time before this he had taken another step which annoyed Britain, and which gave me one of the most interesting nights of my life.
Together with other members of the Sanitary Board I had been taken to Lourenço Marques as the guest of the well-known Johannesburg financier, Solly Joel. The official reason for the trip was never disclosed, but the guests spent some cheery evenings playing poker.
One night Joel said to me: „Why don‘t you go down to the wharf to see the men-o‘-war?“ I thought this rather strange, but took the hint.
The visit was well worth while, for I found the stage set for a first-class international incident. Lying at anchor in the harbour were German warships. Although I did not know it at the time, the Kaiser had offered to send marines from these ships to Pretoria if Kruger wanted them to reinforce the Boer Commandos for the anticipated clash with the British.
The German warships were an ominous spectacle. But what made my heart beat faster was the realisation that beyond them in the bay were British warships, silently and decorously watching. It was not hard to imagine what would have happened if a false move had been made. And, splendidly exciting as a ringside view of such an incident would have been, I prayed that it would not happen. For if two Great Powers had flown at each other’s throat in that humid, peaceful port the consequences would have been fearful beyond imagining.
Luckily for the world nothing happened, thanks to the Foreign Minister for Portugal, the Marquis de Soveral, who adamantly refused to allow the Germans to pass through Portuguese territory. The rival warships quietly went their separate ways … And for another nineteen years Britain and Germany maintained a polite if hair-trigger peace.
But at our corner of the world another war between Boers and Britons was postponed for only a few years.
Before the Jameson-raid the Transvaal-government had handed the important dynamite business over to one Lippert, a German financier friend of Kruger‘s. This Lippert Concession, as it was called, was bitterly resented by the mine-owners, who had to pay heavily for their dynamite. The discontent it aroused was one of the chief causes of the Reform Plot. As a result of the political troubles and quarrels, after the Raid there was not sufficient storage space for the dynamite. So, on 19th February 1896, a train full with deadly cargo had been left standing the third day already in the blazing sun. That day, a shunting engine sent to move the dynamite trucks bumped against them. Nitroglycerine may have oozed out of the cartridges, and the concussion of the engine immediately set off a monstrous explosion.
The number of dead reached nearly one hundred, with scores of native bodies never recovered.


In less then four years the second Boer War would begin. At the end of this war I would loose my house to the winner of this war …

The TAZARA-Express will soon follow the tracks of this man, who as almost no one else has coined the military history of the British Empire — and who, for the first time, realised in Africa a railway-scheme exclusively for military purposes.

That is why the cattle-wagons remain attached …
That is why the KNOWING VOICES won’t be silenced …

Valid is the spoken word!




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