Category Archives: South Africa

by Joel | 17 April 2025 · 1:33 am

Labour, Het Volk, and Asiatic Exclusion

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 247-249, 253:

In 1906 and 1907 the Chinese Question on the Rand emerged as a key issue in two major political elections: the general election in Britain and the election for responsible government, or home rule, in the Transvaal. Both elections brought new parties into power that spelled the speedy demise of the Chinese labor program and, moreover, influenced broader political trajectories. In Britain, the Chinese Question helped the Liberal Party overturn more than twenty years of nearly unbroken Conservative rule and galvanized the trade unions to form the Labour Party, which would by the time of the Great War eclipse its Liberal ally as the main opposition to the Tories. The emergence of Labour as an independent political force was inextricably linked to a self-conscious identity that placed it at the center of an imperial white working class. Labour not only acted in solidarity with British workers in the settler colonies, it also expressed a self-interested vision of the colonies as destinations for working-class emigration as a hedge against domestic economic uncertainty. The trade union movement put its own stamp on social imperialism, claiming it from Milner and Chamberlain in a more class-based, yet eminently racialized, politics.

In the Transvaal, the Chinese Question emerged as a common complaint among diverse interests, which hurt the political fortunes of the establishment Progressive Party, dominated by the mining interest. It proved a sensational issue that helped stir Afrikaans-speaking voters to the new Het Volk party organized by the former Boer commandos Jan Smuts and Louis Botha. Het Volk won the election; a few years later, in 1910, Botha would be premier of the newly federated Union of South Africa, with Smuts in his cabinet. Their ascent signaled the electoral strength of Afrikaners in South Africa, even as Afrikaner politics would remain diverse across the subcontinent, from racial hard-liners in the Orange River Colony to moderates in the Cape Colony. Notably, Botha, and especially Smuts, while advocating for white supremacy and racial segregation, committed themselves to the mining interest and more broadly to British imperialism.

South Africa was the most bluntly racist of the British settler colonies. But it was of a piece with Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, all established as dominions of the British Empire, the concept of “dominion” signaling not a colony but a polity akin to a country, and one that indeed signaled its own dominion over native peoples. Dominions possessed maximum autonomy within the British Empire, which protected the rule of local white settlers while conveniently distancing the metropole from the openly racist modus operandi of native removal, racial segregation, and Asiatic exclusion—tenets of white settlerism that had, in fact, been forged in the United States.

…

THE ARGUMENT AGAINST Chinese labor was not just that it cost whites jobs. Critics believed that an additional, if not greater, danger lay in the prospect that indentured Asian labor would lead to a settled Asian population of merchants and traders. The use of indentured Indians on the Natal sugar plantations was an object lesson in the consequences of importing indentured colored labor. Indian indenture had led inexorably to a free, settled population, including merchants and traders who undersold white businesses. By 1905 there were more Indians than whites in Natal, and they were migrating to the Transvaal. Whites worried that the small population of Chinese merchants in Johannesburg would likewise grow, especially with an indentured labor force potentially offering an ethnic market. They warned that the “imported Asiatic gains a grip on a country with wonderful rapidity.” Although Natal passed laws to restrict immigration of Asiatics, the colony was “a back door wide open” because indentured Indian laborers were not required to repatriate at term: “the indentured coolie of to-day is the free man of tomorrow, and the free man becomes the trader.”

Leave a comment

Filed under anglosphere, Australia, Britain, Canada, democracy, economics, labor, migration, nationalism, New Zealand, South Africa, South Asia, U.S.

by Joel | 8 April 2025 · 9:49 pm

Zhang Deyi, Qing Ambassador to U.K.

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 204-206:

DESPITE ANOTHER ROUND of protest—including a trade union rally of eighty thousand in London’s Hyde Park—the Chamber of Mines and the Transvaal government moved with dispatch to set up a program. Transvaal agents, who had already laid the groundwork for recruiting in China, went into high gear. In fact, recruitment in Yantai (Chefoo) in Shandong province had started in January, before the ordinance was finally approved.

But there was just one problem: China had not approved the program. The lapse violated long-standing diplomatic protocols, established in 1860, regarding the recruitment of Chinese labor to territories within the British Empire. The Foreign Office did not show Ordinance no. 17 to the Chinese ambassador in London, Zhang Deyi, until mid-February. Zhang promptly intervened via the Foreign Affairs Department in Beijing (Waiwubu, the successor to the Zongli Yamen). Everything ground to a halt while Zhang Deyi and the Foreign Office commenced negotiations in London in March. The Transvaal Chamber of Mines called the delay “quite unexpected” and “much to be regretted.”

When Harry Ross Skinner had recommended importing Chinese indentured labor for the gold mines, he had predicted that China would respond “passively” to such a project. The Foreign Office should have known better. Zhang Deyi was no naïf—he was a seasoned diplomat with forty years of experience in the Qing foreign service. His appointment as Qing ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in 1902 was his eighth assignment abroad. He had begun his career as a young translator on the Qing’s first overseas mission in 1866 and in the Burlingame delegation in 1868; he had then served in various capacities in Chinese embassies, mostly in Europe. Zhang was also one of China’s most prolific diplomat-diarists, who wrote and published eight books chronicling his trips (Figure 20).

Nor was Zhang a stranger to South African affairs. From 1896 to 1900, he had served as councilor in the Qing legation in London, and from there he closely followed the South African War. As ambassador, Zhang was well aware of the debates taking place in South Africa over proposals to import Chinese labor. He worried that the mining companies would abuse Chinese workers in the manner that had made Peru and Cuba the most notorious destinations of the nineteenth-century coolie trade. He further worried that ill treatment of indentured Chinese in South Africa would have negative effects on overseas Chinese communities throughout Africa, from Mauritius to Tanganyika to the Cape Colony. He knew indentured Chinese labor emigrants were vulnerable to the “three harms”—low wages, tight controls, and poor benefits. As early as February 1903—nearly a year before the Transvaal passed Ordinance no. 17—Zhang reported to Beijing that South Africa was likely to recruit Chinese labor. He wrote repeatedly throughout the year that China should forbid labor from going to South Africa without a convention with Great Britain. He was furious when he learned that recruitment was already taking place in Yantai before China had agreed to the program.

On May 13, after three months of negotiation in London, Foreign Secretary Lord Lansdowne and Ambassador Zhang Deyi signed the Emigration Convention of Great Britain and China of 1904. The convention underscored the distance traveled from the mid-nineteenth-century heyday of the coolie trade. It stipulated a minimum age of twenty for emigrants and inspection to ensure that laborers were of sound body and mind. Contracts were to be written in Chinese and English and specify wages, hours, and rations; free passage and return; and the right to free medical care and medicine. It required witness from both Chinese and British officials. It gave China the right to station a consul or vice-consul in the colony and gave Chinese workers “free access to the Courts of Justice to obtain the redress for injuries to his person and property” as well as access to postal facilities for sending letters and remittances to their families.

Zhang pressed hard for a prohibition on corporal punishment, but he was unable to insert an outright ban into the agreement because, the Foreign Office informed him, Transvaal law provided for corporal punishment for certain offenses for “everybody, including whites.” The British assured Zhang that floggings would be administered only by order of a magistrate or judge after trial and conviction, and only with government-approved instruments, and that it would not exceed twenty-four lashes. Although the agreement showed improvement in China’s ability to negotiate protections for its emigrant workers, enforcement of the terms of the ordinance would be determined on the ground.

Brief articles about Zhang Deyi (張德彜) can be found in Chinese, Japanese, and German Wikipedia, but not in English Wikipedia.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, China, labor, language, migration, publishing, South Africa

by Joel | 6 April 2025 · 2:46 am

Recruiting Chinese to South Africa

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 199-200:

THE IDEA OF RECRUITING Chinese to South Africa was not entirely novel. During the nineteenth century, nearly sixty thousand Chinese indentured workers labored on French plantation island colonies off the east African coast and in German, British, and French colonies on the continent. The Chinese presence in South Africa dates to the eighteenth century, when the Dutch East India Company shipped Malay and Chinese convicts from Batavia to the Cape Colony. During the 1870s and ’80s a few hundred Chinese artisans and workers arrived in the Cape Colony and Natal, along with greater numbers of Indians, contracted for infrastructure construction after the opening of the diamond fields. Voluntary merchant emigrants from southern China followed in their path. By 1904 there were 2,398 Chinese in all of British South Africa, more than half of them living in the Cape Colony. Chinese in the Cape worked mostly as small traders and also as cooks, carpenters, basket weavers, fish sellers, and wagon drivers.

There were hardly any Chinese in the former Afrikaner republics. The Orange Free State excluded Chinese from settlement altogether. The ZAR excluded from citizenship “any of the native races of Asia, including ‘Coolies’ [Indians and Chinese], Arabs, Malays and Mohammedan subjects of the Turkish Dominion.” It forbade Asiatics from walking on footpaths and pavements; from driving public carriages; from riding in first- and second-class railway compartments; and from buying or possessing liquor. The anti-Chinese laws of the former Afrikaner republics remained in place when power transferred to the British after the South African War.

Notwithstanding these restrictions and discriminations, Chinese carved out small niches in Johannesburg. By 1890 there were more than a hundred Chinese in the town, shopkeepers, laundrymen, and market gardeners; by 1904 the Chinese population of the Transvaal was about nine hundred. Chinese often did business in poorer white districts. Unlike white-owned shops, the Chinese sold at low prices, in small quantities, and on credit.

The Chinese in Johannesburg at the turn of the century followed the same patterns of social organization Chinese practiced across the diaspora. In the 1890s, they formed a huiguan called the Kwong Hok Tong (guanghetang) or Cantonese Club. It built a “clubhouse” on leased land in Ferreirastown, the original settlement of Johannesburg, which now lay at the city’s fringe. The house had several reception rooms, six bedrooms, a kitchen, and a latrine. Membership cost five pounds for initiation and dues according to one’s occupation. The club rented rooms at two pounds a month; kept a library of books and periodicals; and held social events and meetings that drew as many as 150 people. Yeung Ku Wan (Yang Feihong), a collaborator of Sun Yatsen who arrived in South Africa in 1896, formed a second group, the Xingzhonghui (Revive China Society). Photographs of members of both groups show educated men dressed in Western-style clothing.

Thus in 1903, when the idea of importing Chinese labor for the gold mines circulated, there was already a history of Chinese migration to South Africa and a small but established Chinese community in Johannesburg. These served as both precedent and warning—for both Chinese and whites.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, China, labor, migration, nationalism, Netherlands, religion, South Africa

by Joel | 3 April 2025 · 8:23 pm

Effects of Witwatersrand Gold

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 193-195:

THE MINING OF Witwatersrand gold had both global and regional effects. At the level of world trade and finance, the economic historian Jean-Jacques Van Helten argues that expansion of international trade in the 1880s and ’90s required an enlargement of the overall money stock and hence the world supply of gold. The gold standard was not yet universal, but since the 1870s it had become the basis of international payments among the leading industrial countries. Witwatersrand gold, along with gold discoveries in the 1890s in Western Australia and Canada, increased the global supply of gold and strengthened the position of Britain, which was already the center of the international financial market.

Van Helten presents the late-century gold discoveries as a fortuitous meeting of a demand, but it also might be considered a stimulus, a new phase of capital accumulation, that powered the expansion of trade and foreign investment. Although this accumulation built on previous decades of gold discoveries in North America and Australasia, South African gold helped inaugurate a new period of capitalist development, the so-called New Imperialism, in which monopoly and finance capital came to the fore; when the great powers scrambled to carve up Africa, the last continent to fall to European colonialism; and Germany and the United States nipped at Britain’s heels for position at the top of the world economic order.

The supremacy of the pound sterling (i.e., gold) in international finance and trade lay at the heart of Great Britain’s strategy to maintain global dominance. The City of London reaped handsome profits from international investment and trade, both within the empire and without: the British compensated for desultory investment in domestic industries by exporting “old” English manufactures to sheltered markets within the empire. The colonies were induced to buy these products (often at artificially high prices) while they in turn sold primary products to the rest of the world (wool from Australia, cotton from India). These enabled Great Britain, in turn, to offset its trade deficits from importing wheat from the United States and Argentina for domestic consumption.

In southern Africa, labor patterns that had been established on the diamond fields carried over to the Rand. The rapid capitalization of diamond mining had reduced independent diggers to wage workers while the industry relied increasingly on African migrant laborers contracted on meager wages and confined to compounds. White miners adopted an aggressive racism to police the color line in order to protect their superior position and wages.

The mining of gold also shifted the center of economic power from the Cape Colony to the heretofore isolated and undeveloped Transvaal. Lord Selborne, who served as undersecretary to Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, considered the Transvaal “the richest spot on earth,” the key to South Africa’s future. “It is going to be the natural capital state and centre of South African commercial, social and political life,” he wrote in 1896.

By then, Johannesburg had grown to a cosmopolitan city of 100,000, with a large population of uitlanders (foreigners), British and other Europeans, who were aggrieved over political exclusions (fourteen years residency for naturalization and the franchise) and high taxes. Mine owners agitated against high railway tariffs and inflated prices set by state monopolies over essential resources (especially dynamite). More broadly for the British Empire, political instability in the Transvaal threatened to unravel the assumptions of its superior position in southern Africa based on commercial and financial domination, British immigration, and geopolitical power. After the failed Jameson raid of 1895 (a botched coup d’état backed by Cecil Rhodes and other leading mine magnates), ZAR president Paul Kruger stiffened his resolve. The British did not want the vote, he said. They wanted his state.

Leave a comment

Filed under Australia, Britain, Canada, China, economics, language, migration, nationalism, Netherlands, South Africa

by Joel | 18 March 2025 · 6:25 am

Chinese Gold Rush Destinations

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 14-15:

GOLD MINING IS famously risky, with high stakes, often compared to gambling. Driven by the desire for wealth, gold seekers took great risks that were explainable only by the potential for reward. Gold fever drove daring, hard work, technological invention, and political experimentation, as well as violence against humans and against the environment. The cold calculus of business, banking, and geopolitical interests harnessed gold fever for profit and advantage. For companies and nation-states, the desire for gold led to enormous expenditures of capital for digging and operating deeper and deeper mines. But the deeper the ore, the scarcer it was and the lower its grade, such that more and more rock had to be excavated for smaller and smaller yields of the precious metal. In the Witwatersrand gold mines in South Africa, for example, in 1905 it took on average 2.3 tons of ore to yield one ounce of gold worth $20.67. Hence the relentless drive for cheap labor in order to make gold mining payable.

Thus, at the turn of the twentieth century, South Africa recruited sixty thousand indentured Chinese mine laborers to work in highly capitalized and industrialized, deep underground mines. Their indenture marked an important difference in experience from that of the independent prospectors who went to North America and Australasia. But there were also broad similarities in the patterns of Chinese workers’ culture and resistance. This book tracks the migration of Chinese gold seekers to California, to the Australian colony of Victoria, and to the deep mines of the Witwatersrand. It considers how their experience and reception contributed to the evolution of their identity as “Chinese,” to China’s identity as a nation, and to their identification in the West as a global racial danger.

Leave a comment

Filed under anglosphere, Australia, industry, labor, migration, nationalism, slavery, South Africa, U.S.

by Joel | 5 February 2024 · 6:13 am

Dilemma of Imperial India in 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 212-214:

For [Viceroy] Wavell, a respected general with a reflective mind – his collection Other Men’s Flowers is one of the most entertaining of all English verse anthologies – Britain ‘made an entirely wrong turn in India twenty-five years ago.’ He thought that if the Indians had been seriously offered the kind of Dominion status within the Commonwealth that ‘white’ territories such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa had obtained around the time of the First World War, there would have been a good chance of keeping India united. In the early 1930s Gandhi and other Congress leaders went to London for talks and were assured that soon India would gain a kind of self-government – but not yet. No date was given, and all goodwill with the nationalists was lost when in 1939 Wavell’s predecessor, Lord Linlithgow, declared war on Germany ‘on behalf of India’ without consulting any Indians at all. The Australian and Canadian governments, for example, were asked beforehand and made the decision for themselves. The British expected a million Indians to fight against the Germans.

Nehru, who loathed fascism and the Nazis rather more than some of Britain’s ruling elite did, said that it was hard for the people of India to fight for the freedom of Poland when they themselves were under foreign occupation. ‘If Britain fought for democracy she should…end imperialism in her own possessions and establish full democracy in India. A free and independent India would gladly co-operate…with other free nations for mutual defence against aggression.’

The British establishment tended to believe the dictum of the most magnificent of all the imperial grandees sent to oversee the smooth running of the empire: Lord Curzon. As Viceroy at the turn of the century, Curzon had declared, ‘As long as we rule in India we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it we shall drop straightaway to a third rate power…The rest is redundant.’ Few believed this as instinctively as did Winston Churchill, the most romantic of imperialists, who had battled all his political life to maintain British rule in India. Yet Churchill probably did as much as anyone to hasten its end.

When he was Prime Minister he had no intention of ever giving up the Jewel in the Crown. He told the War Cabinet that even if he was forced by the Indian nationalists into making some concessions, ‘I would feel under no obligation to honour promises made at a time of difficulty.’

Churchill regarded any notion of Britain leaving India, or even India being granted Dominion status, as ‘criminally mischievous’. He retained the sentimental attachment to the idea of the Raj that he had held as a junior cavalry officer on the North-West frontier in the 1890s. Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India during the war, said, ‘Winston knew as much about India as George III did of the American colonies…He reacts instinctively and passionately against any government for India other than the one he knew forty years ago.’

Leave a comment

Filed under Australia, Britain, Canada, democracy, Germany, nationalism, New Zealand, South Africa, South Asia, war

by Joel | 22 February 2023 · 5:57 am

Growth of Colonial Kenya

From White Mischief: The Murder of Lord Erroll, by James Fox (Open Road Media, 2014), Kindle pp. 11-13:

Nairobi was established in 1899, on the frontier between the Masai and Kikuyu, as the last possible rail depot before the track climbed 2,000 feet up the Kikuyu escarpment, the eastern wall of the Great Rift Valley. For anyone looking down into the vast floor of the valley for the first time, the sheer scale of the landscape was over powering—something quite new to the senses.

Tea was taken at Naivasha station, the beginning of the highlands, and from there on, up to Gilgil and then to Nakuru, the promised land was slowly revealed, in all its immense variety and beauty. After some miles of thorn and red rock, you emerged into thousands of acres of rolling English parkland, a haze of blue lawn rising and falling to the horizon, untouched by the plough and apparently uninhabited. Some of it resembled the landscape of the west of Scotland, with the same dramatic rock formations, grazing pastures, dew-laden mists. Streams rippled through the valleys, wild fig (sacred to the Kikuyu) and olive grew in the forests; the air was deliciously bracing, producing an ecstasy of well-being, and the quality of the light was staggering. There were scents too, the indefinable flavour of peppery red dust and acrid wood smoke that never fail to excite the deepest nostalgia.

And yet unless the land was productive and profitable, there was no point to this “lunatic express,” as its opponents had described it in England. It had been built for prestige and super-power competition, and its only effect was to drain the Colony’s budget.

The Commissioner for East Africa, Sir Charles Eliot, a distinguished Oxford scholar and diplomat, produced a scheme in 1901, soon after his arrival, of recruiting settlers from the Empire to farm the land. The idea was simply to make the railway pay for itself, by hauling freight from the uplands to the coast. The development of the Colony was a secondary consideration, indeed almost an accident. A recruitment drive was launched in London, and the first wave of settlers arrived in 1903 from Britain, Canada, Australia and South Africa. The photographs depict them as “Forty-niners” from the Yukon—a much rougher crowd than the later arrivals, who were drawn mainly from the Edwardian aristocracy and the British officer class. Nevertheless, there were many peers among these first arrivals—Lord Hindlip, Lord Cardross, Lord Cranworth, for example—and victims of the English system of primogeniture, such as Berkeley and Galbraith Cole, younger sons of the Earl of Enniskillen.

There were millionaires, too, like the amply proportioned American, Northrop MacMillan, a close friend of Theodore Roosevelt. There was the fabulous Ewart Grogan, a fiercely chauvinist Englishman who had walked from the Cape to Cairo. There were fugitives, wasters, speculators.

Above all there was the man who became the settlers’ unchallenged leader from the turn of the century until his death in 1931, Hugh Cholmondeley, 3rd Baron Delamere, who had first set eyes on the Kenya Highlands in 1897, at the merciful end of a 2,000 mile camel ride from Somalia. He had returned to England for six unhappy years, to look after his estates, but the Kenya bug had infected him too, and he returned in 1901 to buy land.

Lord Delamere was a natural leader of the settlers. He had inherited an enormous estate in Cheshire and vast wealth besides, soon after leaving Eton—where he had distinguished himself as a reckless and unruly boy, untouched by the civilising classics. He was arrogant and wasteful, with a sudden, violent temper; his political instincts were austerely feudal, and physically he was small and muscular, and in no way handsome. But he had the gift of supreme confidence in himself and in his vision of the future for the Colony, which was inspired by an old-fashioned sense of duty to the Empire—the duty, quite simply, being to annex further territory on its behalf.

Kenya was always more fashionable among the aristocrats than Uganda or Tanganyika after the First World War. Uganda was a little too far from the sea, along the railway, and Tanganyika, until then, had been a German colony. The pick of the sites in the Kenyan White Highlands had an English air, almost like the rolling downs of Wiltshire, all on a supernatural scale and under such an immense sky, that when you are first exposed to it, you may be seized both with vertigo—from the sheer speed and height of the clouds—and folie de grandeur. Such grandiose surroundings were irresistible to the English settlers and often went to their heads.

Leave a comment

Filed under anglosphere, Australia, Britain, Canada, economics, Germany, Kenya, migration, nationalism, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda

by Joel | 16 September 2021 · 10:58 am

Negative Human Development in Resource States

From The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth, by Tom Burgis (PublicAffairs, 2016), Kindle pp. 211-212:

In 1970, the year the Olympic movement expelled South Africa, the government passed legislation formally stripping blacks of their citizenship and restricting them to destitute “homelands,” and the authorities appointed a barbaric new commanding officer at Robben Island prison to watch over Mandela and his fellow inmates, South Africa produced some 62 percent of the gold mined worldwide. From the early 1970s to 1993 gold, diamonds, and other minerals accounted for between half and two-thirds of South Africa’s exports annually.

South Africa’s gold and diamonds provided the financial means for apartheid to exist. In that sense white rule was an extreme manifestation of the resource state: the harnessing of a national endowment of mineral wealth to ensure the power and prosperity of the few while the rest are cast into penury and impotence. None of Africa’s resource states today come close to the level of orchestrated subjugation of the majority that the apartheid regime achieved. Neither do they employ apartheid’s racial creed, even if ethnicity has combined poisonously with the struggle to capture resource rent in Nigeria, Angola, Guinea, and elsewhere. But as their rulers, in concert with the multinational corporations of the resource industry, horde the fruits of their nations’ oil and minerals, Africa’s resource states have come to bear a troubling resemblance to the divisions of apartheid.

While the children of eastern Congo, northern Nigeria, Guinea, and Niger waste away, the beneficiaries of the looting machine grow fat. Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize–winning Indian economist who has examined with great insight why mass starvation occurs, writes, “The sense of distance between the ruler and the ruled—between ‘us’ and ‘them’—is a crucial feature of famines.” That same reasoning could be applied to the provision of other basic needs, including clean water and schooling. And rarely is the distance Sen describes as wide as in Africa’s resource states.

Many of Africa’s resource states experienced very high rates of economic growth during the commodity boom of the past decade. The usual measure of average incomes—GDP per head—has risen. But on closer examination such is the concentration of wealth in the hands of the ruling class that that growth has predominantly benefited those who were already rich and powerful, rendering the increase in GDP per head misleading. A more revealing picture comes from a different calculation. Each year the United Nations ranks all the countries for which it can gather sufficient data (186 in 2012) by their level of human development, things like rates of infant mortality and years of schooling. It also ranks them by GDP per head. If you subtract a country’s rank on the human development index from its rank on the GDP per head index, you get an indication of the extent to which economic growth is actually bettering the lot of the average person in that country. In countries that score zero—as Congo, Rwanda, Russia, and Portugal did in 2012—living standards are roughly where you might expect them to be, given that country’s GDP per head. People in countries with positive scores enjoy disproportionately pleasant living conditions relative to income—Cuba, Georgia, and Samoa top the table with scores of 44, 37, and 28, respectively. A negative score indicates a failure to turn national income into longer lives, better health, and more years of education for the population at large. Of the ten countries that come out worst, five are African resource states: Angola (–35), Gabon (–40), South Africa (–42), Botswana (–55), and Equatorial Guinea.

Equatorial Guinea’s score (–97), comfortably the worst in the world, is all the more remarkable because its GDP per head is close to $30,000 a year, not far below the level of Spain or New Zealand and seventy times that of Congo.

Leave a comment

Filed under Africa, Angola, Congo, democracy, economics, energy, Equatorial Guinea, industry, labor, nationalism, Nigeria, South Africa

by Joel | 26 January 2021 · 6:42 am

Revival of the Boers, 1907

From Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2008), Kindle pp. 492-493:

Lord Milner left South Africa in 1905 with little to show for his attempts to anglicise the Afrikaner population other than a few thousand British immigrants who had been established on the land and a depth of hostility among Afrikaners greater than anything that had existed before the war. A census in 1904 showed the total white population in the Transvaal to number 300,000; Johannesburg’s population had risen from 76,500 before the war to only 83,000; the Witwatersrand’s population now numbered 117,000; but the rural population gave Afrikaners an overall majority. In his final speech in Pretoria, Milner complained about the obstruction he faced from opponents, not from Afrikaners, but from British citizens. ‘Serious injury’ had been done to the ‘best interests’ of the Transvaal, he said, through ‘perpetual fault-finding, this steady drip, drip of deprecation, only diversified by occasional outbursts of hysterical abuse’.

Milner’s efforts were soon undone. In Britain, as the tide of jingoism receded, the Anglo-Boer war came to be seen more as a costly and inglorious episode rather than an imperial triumph. In parliament, the Liberal opposition criticised the use of low-paid Chinese labour in the gold mines, claiming it was tantamount to ‘Chinese slavery’. What made matters worse was the discovery that Milner had authorised the flogging of Chinese labourers – without reference to magistrates – in cases of violence and unruliness. ‘At the time,’ Milner told his successor, Lord Selborne, ‘it seemed to me so harmless that I really gave very little thought to the matter.’

In January 1906, a Liberal government under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman came to office, inclined to grant the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony self-government. General Smuts hastened to London to meet the new prime minister. ‘I put a simple case before him that night in 10 Downing Street,’ wrote Smuts. ‘It was in substance: Do you want friends or enemies?’

Five years after Britain had conquered the Boer republics, at a massive cost in lives, the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony were handed back to Afrikaner leaders. In February 1907, Het Volk won a clear majority over FitzPatrick’s Progressives and formed a government under Louis Botha as prime minister. In November 1907, Orangia Unie won all but eight seats in the legislative council and Abraham Fischer became prime minister. To Smuts, it was ‘a miracle of trust and magnanimity’.

To Milner, it was ‘a great betrayal’.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, China, democracy, economics, labor, migration, nationalism, South Africa

by Joel | 25 January 2021 · 6:47 am

Foreign Volunteers in the Boer War

From Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2008), Kindle pp. 433-435:

Stung by accusations that the war had been mismanaged, the British government ordered a change of command and appointed as commander-in-chief Field Marshal Frederick Roberts – ‘Lord Bobs’ – a diminutive, 67-year-old war hero, blind in one eye; but it was decided to leave Buller in charge of the Natal army. Two more divisions – the last readily available – were despatched from England. The government also realised that it had been trying to fight the wrong kind of war, relying too much on slow-moving infantry battalions to deal with mounted Boer riflemen using highly mobile tactics; British mobility needed to match Boer mobility. Britain called for civilian volunteers to join a new ‘Imperial Yeomanry’. Some 20,000 men from the ‘hunting and shooting’ fraternity signed up, including thirty-four members of parliament and peers. The City of London paid for one thousand volunteers. Further reinforcements came from other parts of the empire – from Canada, Australia and New Zealand. By January 1900, the total number of troops Britain had shipped to South Africa had reached 110,000. Additional support was provided by uitlander refugees and colonial volunteers formed into two mounted corps of their own – the Imperial Light Horse and the South African Light Horse – financed in part by Wernher, Beit & Co.

Even members of the Indian community in Natal – originally immigrants employed as indentured labourers to work on sugar plantations – volunteered to serve as stretcher-bearers. Their organiser was a 28-year-old lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi, who had arrived from India in 1893, spending a year in Pretoria before settling in Durban. Gandhi expressed sympathy for the Boer cause but considered he was bound by loyalty to Britain. ‘I felt that, if I demanded rights as a British citizen, it was also my duty, as such, to participate in the defence of the British Empire.’ The Natal authorities at first turned down Gandhi’s offer. But after Black Week, their attitude changed. Gandhi’s ambulance corps of ‘free’ Indians and indentured labourers recruited 1,100 volunteers.

Just as the British won support from the empire, so Boer ranks were bolstered by foreign volunteers. Some 2,000 uitlanders – Germans, French, Dutch, Irish, Irish-Americans, Russians, Scandinavians, even some English – joined the Boer cause. Another 2,000 foreign volunteers arrived from abroad. A retired French army colonel, Count de Villebois-Mareuil, enlisted, hoping to capture Cecil Rhodes. ‘History will add a fresh flower to the glory of France,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘To take Kimberley and see the face of the Napoleon of the Cape.’ He rose to the rank of Vecht-generaal – combat general – but was killed in action in April 1900. In all, the Boer allies were able to raise armed forces totalling more than 70,000 men. In addition, about 10,000 Africans served as auxiliaries to Boer commandos – retainers, porters, gun-bearers and labourers – many of them conscripted under duress.

Yet early Boer advantages were soon frittered away by poor strategy. By committing such a large proportion of their forces to the siege of three towns, Boer generals lost the opportunity to drive deeper into Natal and the Cape Colony when both areas were highly vulnerable to mobile attack. As their forward thrusts began to ebb, they turned to a more defensive stance, preparing for a much tougher British assault. By December, the Boer offensive had reached its limits. Unlike 1881, there had been no crushing blow to induce the British to negotiate.