1
I knew this one
He was working
downstairs of my legal office in
Johannesburg which had moved from
Primrose building in Fraser Street to
Corporation Building, the first Town
Council offices. Downstairs was a
newspaper, the RAND MAIL, and the clang
of its printing press echoed harshly
through the building. There was only one
manual type of telephone in the building.
It was situated on the first floor near
the back entrance, overlooking the MAIL
offices.
At that time, my son earned some pennies
in his capacity of office-boy. His main
duty was to answer the telephone. Many a
time he shouted down to this gentleman
that he was wanted on the phone, and out
he would run, coat off and
cigarette-holder in mouth, to pound
upstairs. I also used to invite him to
different functions that I organised so
that he could meet people he was
interested in. No one had an idea that
the presiding genius in the dingy
editorial rooms would prove the twentieth
century genius of crime-stories
However, it seemed that he had developed
already then sort of a detective nose for
a reporters scoop
by train!
And I am calling him upstairs again!
Edgar
Wallace is speaking:
23
I was covering the Boer
War for the LONDON DAILY
MAIL, thereby securing a
world scoop on the
signing of the peace
treaty at Vereeniging
with a flair and
ingenuity that has still
to be matched, I think.
Lord Kitchener had gone
to great lengths to keep
secret the peace
deliberations, barring
correspondents from the
camp and placing armed
guards and barbed wire
around the compound.
I befriended one of the
guards who happened to be
in earshot of the
proceedings. Deploying an
early variety of
cheque-book journalism, I
persuaded the man to
carry three handkerchiefs
red (signifying
nothing happening), blue
(making progress) and
white (treaty about to be
signed). To the
bemusement of my
colleagues, I took to
making frequent train
trips to and from
Pretoria, a line which
conveniently passed close
to the wire of the peace
encampment.
One crisp May evening in
1902, as the up train
passed the camp, the
guard emerged to blow his
nose vigorously with a
white handkerchief. I had
this exclusive and, true
to form, a prearranged,
encoded method of
transmitting the news to
London. I merely sent one
line Have bought
you 1000 Rand Collieries
40s 6d which
indicated to the excited
editors of the DAILY MAIL
that peace was absolutely
assured. |
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1
Ohm Kruger was an exile
in far-off Switzerland.
The Boer War was over.
The old pioneering days were over
Queen Victoria was dead
Rhodes was dead.
Our mines were dead!
Whilst white men had killed each other,
hundred thousand black men had drifted
away during the past three years
back to their Kraals or into the towns.
It had not been their war. And it had not
been their mines.
The white man had allured the black man.
The white man had threatened the black
man.
When the white man had to do something
more important than to take care of the
mines, the black man re-started his life
where it had been uncoupled.
When the white man called again, the
black man stayed in the kraal.
Without black labour-force no functioning
mines.
Without functioning mines no
Johannesburg.
The white man conceived an idea:
He called the yellow man.
There had been a few Chinamen in
Johannesburg before the mass importation
began. They were mainly small tradesmen,
and how they ever managed to reach the
city and secure licences was a mystery,
in view of the Boers hostility to
the black and yellow races.
There was a small wood-and-iron corner
shop owned by two Chinamen near our house
in De Villiers Street, and children were
always warned never go near to it.
Because Chinamen, so the adults said, ate
chickens nests and little girls!
Also, they were apt to do one down over
change.
Now strange, high-pitched Chinese voices
rang through the streets and on squares
where weirdly gowned pigtailed men
celebrated their strange festivals.
They had rare occasions to celebrate.
They were sent down into the mines to do
hand-drilling in the rock. To drive
forty-eight inches into the rock face was
their daily task, with a bonus of one
penny per inch thereafter.
Far down there in the depths of the
earth, the sweat shone on their yellow
bodies, and in their scanty working garb
of ragged trousers it was impossible to
tell one man from another.
However, no sooner were they established
on the Rand than they started to grow
restless. They were men in a totally
strange land, thousands of miles from
their kinsfolk, and their only recreation
was card-playing and gambling. And what
gamblers they were! Sometimes a man owed
his fellow-gambler several months of
pay-ticket still to be earned. Sometimes,
despairing of meeting his debt, he
committed suicide.
A few had brought books and paint brushes
and lacquer with them, and whiled away
long hours painting fine miniatures. But
inevitably boredom began its deadly work.
There was much breaking of bounds,
thieving, assaulting of both Europeans
and natives and finally,
murdering.
The murders became so widespread that
something like a reign of terror set in
from Krugersdorp to Boksburg. A special
jail on the East Rand called the
Cindarella jail was set aside for
Chinese criminals.
As the crime wave grew, extra police were
stationed at danger spots, and compound
police, some of them Chinese, and
boss-boys had to control the gangs of
workers with semi-military discipline.
They were marched like soldiers from the
compounds to the headgears of the mines,
and back again.
As the tally of murdered Europeans grew,
a wave of hate against both the Chinese
and the mines mounted. Down with
the gold mines! was the feeling. As
usual gold was at the bottom of all the
trouble.
There was a great to-do overseas as well,
not on account of the crimes that were
being committed, but because of the
modern slavery which, the
British Press declared, was practised on
the mines. Feeling ran so high that the
British Government lost the election in
1905, and this in turn cast a gloom over
Johannesburg.
By 1906 the white bosses felt they could
never control the yellow men properly.
And something happened that helped them
to come to a decision. The great
experiment had lasted five years. There
was no doubting its success in saving the
mines, and at long last it began to have
a wonderfully salutary effect on the
Africans loafing in their kraals.
Gradually they began to realise what the
consequences to themselves would be if
the mines had to rely permanently on
imported labour. For the simple native
had now caught the white mans
craving for material goods. But to buy
them he must have money and where
could he earn money quicker than on the
mines?
He was compelled, therefore, to bestir
his lazy bones and get back to the mines
before all the job was taken for good by
the strange little yellow men from a land
he had never heard of.
Besides, suppose the yellow man
now teeming over the Rand in their
thousands should take it into
their pigtailed heads to acquire African
wives? Better go back to the mines and
get to work before it was too late!
The repatriation was gradual. The
strangest scene of all was enacted on the
veld when the yellow men burnt the
remains of those who had died on that
alien soil. Then they collected the ashes
from the funeral pyres, packed them in
carefully labelled urns, and carried them
home to the relatives in distant China in
obedience of Confucian Law.
No one was sorry to see the Chinamen go.
But the fact remained that in the years
they had laboured on the Reef, the value
of the gold yield had doubled. In 1903
the mines gave up fifteen and a half
million pounds worth of precious metal.
In 1909 the value of the yield was thirty
million, eight hundred thousand pounds
It would take almost seventy years before
the Chinamen would return to Africa
then with hammer and sickle,
and after a further thirty years
as Mr. Moons new tailors
We are rolling ahead!
Valid is the spoken word!
Click!
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