William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

I had an open mind as to the procedure after securing the king and his entourage. We might make a complete job of it by killing Lobengula and smashing each military kraal… The contract went on to promise me the sum of £150,000 [a vast sum — multiply by 25 to get some idea of its contemporary value] if I succeeded. If I failed [and presumably was killed] I got nothing but provision for my widow. I was also to have my BE shares exchanged for Chartered company shares… I still believe the coup would have succeeded — I had the support of such splendid men — but, alas! it had to be dropped like a hot potato.

Because news of it leaked out and Rhodes (who was Prime Minister at the time) was arraigned before the Governor of the Cape. Rhodes denied everything, and Johnson adds: “I was then taken to Government house to confirm Rhodes’s innocence.” And so, he concludes, the “scheme for the forcible occupation of Rhodesia failed, but only for a short time. It was not long before once more, and this time successfully, I became involved in a fresh attempt to capture Rhodes’s hinterland.”

Here we see the thought-processes behind the Jameson Raid. We might indeed have had a Johnson’s raid to capture Matabeleland had Rhodes not been pre-empted. It must have seemed like a good idea, and he saved it up for another time. Notice, too, Johnson’s references to shares. Shares were the currency with which Rhodes bought men. Dr Jameson left his lucrative practice (£5,000 p.a.) in Kimberley to work for Rhodes, first as negotiator with Lobengula, then as Governor of Rhodesia. Why? For shares in Rhodes’s company, not for any imperialist’s dream. Wheatcroft is very good at illuminating the somewhat arcane workings of the various stock markets and the financial scams that went on. The most common method was insider dealing — what was known as the “ground-floor issue.” Stock of a new company was allocated to friends — the “vendor’s allocation”—the shares were floated, and in the bullish conditions that surrounded South African shares they could be sold again within days for enormous profits.

Rhodes himself was a past master at this. When he eventually secured the mining concession from Lobengula — known as “the Rudd Concession” after Rhodes’s partner — he knew he could gain the Royal Charter he so desperately needed, both to finance his pioneer expedition and to give him the administrative power and licence he required. Delicate negotiations ensued between the British South Africa Company, as Rhodes called his new venture, and the British Government in the form of the Colonial Office. Rhodes lied constantly throughout. He assured the Colonial Office that the BSA owned the Rudd Concession. Without this assurance the Charter would not have been granted. The BSA was a public company, with shares publicly quoted, and the value of those shares consisted precisely in the fact that the BSA owned the Rudd Concession. But it didn’t. The Rudd Concession was owned by a company called the Central Search Company who leased the concession to the BSA in return for 50 percent of BSA’s profits. Who were the directors of Central Search? Rhodes, Rudd, Beit, Rochefort MacGuire (an Oxford friend who worked for Rhodes), and two men called Cawston and Gifford (rival concession hunters who had been, in Rhodes’s favourite phrase, “squared”). Surreptitiously, Central Search became the United Concessions Company. Two years later United Concessions sold the Rudd Concession to BSA for £1 million (Wheatcroft says £2 million — either way multiply by twenty-five). It was a blatant and unscrupulous sequence of frauds: first, and fatally, on Lobengula and the Matabele, second on the City of London Stock Exchange, third on the shareholders of BSA, and finally on the Government of the United Kingdom. Rhodes painted another part of the map red and made a vast profit for himself and his cronies.

His career was a catalogue of similar delinquencies: some of them notorious, as with the collusion with Chamberlain over the Jameson Raid (they both brazenly lied under oath to a Parliamentary Committee), some of them less well-known, such as the falsifications of a smallpox epidemic in Kimberley in 1883 where a diagnosed smallpox epidemic was rediagnosed (on Rhodes’s instructions) by a committee of doctors led by, yes, the good Jameson as a “bulbous disease allied to pemphigus” (no such disease exists). The quarantine camps were taken down: inoculation more or less ceased, and black labour continued to flow into the mines (they would never have come if there was smallpox). There were hundreds of deaths, black and white, before health inspectors managed to have quarantine and inoculation reintroduced.

Some people did see Rhodes as he really was. One was Henry Labouchère, who described Rhodes as “a vulgar promoter masquerading as a patriot and the figurehead of a gang of financiers with whom he divided the profits.” Yet there is no denying there was something phenomenal about him that distinguishes him from the other Randlords and which accounts for the horrible fascination he exerts. In the 1890s he could claim to be the richest man in the world. Quite apart from his assets (De Beers had the virtual monopoly of the world’s diamonds), his salary from the company was £200,000 a year, while from his Gold Fields of South Africa Company he earned £300–400,000 a year. Share dealings and directorships would have brought his annual income up to a million. Multiply by twenty-five.

After the Jameson Raid, Chamberlain had occasion to reflect on his lucky escape. His heartfelt words still possess an eerie aptness: “What is there in South Africa, I wonder, that makes blackguards of all who get involved in its politics?”

1985

The Soccer War broke out in 1970 between El Salvador and Honduras. The catalyst was a qualifying match for the World Cup of that year, which El Salvador won three-nil. The hapless Honduran fans not only had to watch their team being beaten but then had to run the gauntlet of jubilant and violently hostile El Salvadoreans. Two were beaten to death, dozens wound up in hospital and 150 cars were torched. A few hours later El Salvador invaded Honduras and the Honduran air force commenced a retaliatory bombardment of Salvadorean industrial and strategic targets. Ryszard Kapuscinski, acting on a tip-off, was the sole foreign journalist there, busily wiring back reports to the Polish Press Agency about the sudden and increasingly savage conflict. A small Third World war, a bizarre footnote in twentieth-century history, needless human suffering, observed by a humane, unflinching eye — these are the familiar ingredients, the stock in trade of Kapuscinski’s exemplary reportage, a thirty-year-long record of folly, despair, danger and black humour which makes him the doyen of foreign correspondents, and, latterly, with the publication in English of his books— The Emperor, Shah of Shahs and Another Day of Life —a writer of genuine authority and distinctive, idiosyncratic vision. The Soccer War is a collection of his journalism from the sixties and the seventies, interspersed with fragments of reflection and autobiography. And although the book takes its title from an article written about Latin America most of its concerns are African and to do with various disasters that have afflicted that continent since the independence of Ghana in 1957. The book begins and ends in Ghana and in between voyages far and wide: to the Congo at the time of Lumumba’s assassination, Algeria during the abduction of Ben Bella, Nigeria in turmoil with the factional strife preceding the Biafran War and the Ogaden in the midst of one of its endless famines.