The hopeless military plotter, Dr Leander Starr Jameson, later became prime minister of the Cape Colony.
Things did not go exactly the way Britain anticipated. The discovery of gold in the ZAR in 1886 dramatically transformed the position and future prospects not just of the ZAR, but of South Africa as a whole. Within just a few years, the Witwatersrand mines had become the world’s largest single source of gold, and the economic hub of the country shifted from land under the British Crown – the Cape Colony – to an independent republic on the highveld. Kruger was determined to use the revenue and taxes from surging industrial wealth to make the republic not only more modern, but also more self-sufficient and free to pursue its own destiny. From the outset this development looked ominous for Britain – it had no wish to see an independent republic become top dog in South Africa.
Externally, the ZAR lost little time in translating its new economic power into independent action. In 1894, it completed an eastward rail link from the Witwatersrand to Delagoa Bay, giving it access to the coast beyond the British sphere of influence and threatening the trade revenue of their colonial ports. In addition, the republicans imposed heavy duties on goods trains entering from the south, and erected other obstacles to frustrate free commercial traffic from British territory.
As if this were not enough, Pretoria also began to extend political and commercial relations with Germany, one of Britain’s great power rivals. One symbol of the increasingly close ties between Pretoria and Berlin was the role of German capital in assisting the formation in 1894 of a ZAR National Bank. For politicians and imperial officials in Whitehall such moves were profoundly disturbing to an existing order of exclusive British power in the region.
Although historians continue to differ over which factors are to be considered most crucial in causing the conflict in 1899, the mining wealth of the Witwatersrand cannot be anywhere other than in the centre of the picture.
By 1898 South Africa produced more than a quarter of all the world’s gold, making it a more vital market for British investment and trade than any other country under imperial influence, such as Australia or Canada. To sustain the riches of London as the financial capital of world trade, Britain needed a secure, efficient and prosperous goldmining industry that could be counted on to send its supplies of ore to the Bank of England and not to the Berlin or Paris vaults of its imperial competitors.
The Kruger government recognised that it was the tax revenue of the mines that was enabling the ZAR to become prosperous. Accordingly, it did what it could to provide profitable industrial conditions, while remaining attentive to the cries of rural Boer landowners that mining should not be allowed too great a share of the spoils, particularly cheap black labour. Yet, its measures in support of industry were not enough to appease the increasingly discontented, British-dominated mining industry.
Fearful of being swamped politically by an urban swarm of European immigrants who had little in common with Boer society, the ZAR authorities stood firm on excluding them from easily obtaining citizenship rights and political power. This infuriated Johannesburg Uitlander interests and the imperialist press in Britain, which began to campaign against what was depicted as ill-treatment of and discrimination against the Uitlanders. This movement was presented as a unified British imperial cause, although not all Uitlanders were British, and they included anti-capitalist radical miners and artisans who despised the British Empire even more than Boer republicanism.
