Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (20 page)

Over the next few months the rebellion was put down with the loss of around 3,500 African lives. One of the rebel leaders, Bambatha, was killed in battle and when his body was found his head was cut off for the purposes of identification. When questions were asked in Parliament, Churchill was on a sticky wicket, and fell back on the question-begging claim that what had been done was not ‘half so discreditable to civilization’ as Kitchener’s treatment of the Mahdi’s body in 1898.
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He was, in fact, consistently infuriated by the behaviour of the Natal government and made serious efforts to improve the welfare of Zulu prisoners. In 1907 he wrote a striking minute condemning ‘the disgusting butchery of natives’ which to him demonstrated ‘the kind of tyranny against which these unfortunate Zulus have been struggling’.
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Elgin was less inclined to intervention than Churchill, which reflected both the older man’s innate caution and his perhaps more realistic appreciation of the powers of the Colonial Office, which were in practice quite limited. It was hard to control territories thousands of miles away using telegrams or written despatches; it was easy for those on the spot to use their supposedly superior knowledge of local conditions as an excuse for circumventing the wishes of Whitehall. Deferring to such knowledge was at any rate a standard tenet of imperial administration. As the battle over the execution of the twelve rebels showed, it was easier to put up with the criticism of a few Radicals at home than it was to hold British colonial governments to account. The Radicals were at any rate to be appeased by the successful (albeit rather drawn-out) ending of Chinese labour. By the time he was campaigning for re-election in 1908, Churchill was able to boast of ‘how the yellow plague had been stayed and the coolies sent home’ by the government of which he was a member.
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The outcome of the controversy over the Natal executions seemed to show that the Liberals had no intention of systematically overriding the judgement of local administrations. Further reassurance was given to the colonists in April 1906 when Churchill told the Commons that the government had decided to move ahead swiftly with full self-government in the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony (ORC – the former Orange Free State). Although he talked much of reconciliation between the races – British and Boer, that is – he emphasized that the government was committed to the maintenance of British supremacy in South Africa and that it did not intend that future constitutional arrangements should undermine this.
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This seemingly unexceptional statement came as quite a revelation to the jittery British South Africans. The Mayor of Johannesburg said that ‘with the exercise of a little charity the name of Mr Churchill might yet be favourably received in South Africa’.
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A corner had been turned. Churchill was now careful to make soothing noises about the need for Britain to have good relations ‘with the great self-governing Colonies’, and this helped win over opinion in Australia and New Zealand too.
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In June the
Transvaal Leader
noted with satisfaction how ‘Three months ago the extremists were applauding Mr Churchill to the echo; now he and his chief are regarded as foes to Liberalism’.
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Chamberlain was quick to ridicule the change in Churchill’s attitude. ‘In the early days of this government he did more than anybody else to produce a Radical millennium’, he claimed in a speech made shortly before a major stroke removed him from active politics. ‘He came into office like a bull entering a china shop. Now he roars as gently as any sucking dove.’
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III

At the same time as Churchill was dealing with the Chinese labour problem and with the sensitivities of the British in South Africa, he was thinking about the question of future constitutional arrangements in the Transvaal and the ORC. All these issues were intimately related. From the first, Churchill believed that it was necessary to grant full self-government fast, and in this he was in line with the thinking of his senior colleagues. The Tories had been a planning to grant the Transvaal so-called ‘representative government’, a kind of halfway house in which a (partly nominated) Executive Council would not be responsible to the elected legislature. Liberal ministers quickly determined to abandon this scheme and proceed directly to ‘responsible government’, with the executive accountable to the assembly. This was judged necessary in part to appease South African opinion, both British and Boer. Moreover, granting responsible government would mean offloading the charge of some awkward issues from London to Pretoria. As Churchill put it in an early memorandum on the issue, the representative government solution would mean giving much power to the locals; even so, ministers in Westminster would not be able to escape accountability in the House of Commons for what the Transvaal government actually did. Given the known proclivities of the South Africans, ‘Many things will be done of which we disapprove, which we shall be powerless to prevent, but which we shall be forced to defend, to the intense dissatisfaction of our supporters.’
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There was an obvious attraction to a solution which would put the responsibility for tricky questions such as the (at this point still unresolved) Chinese labour problem at arm’s length from the Colonial Office.

Ministers’ discussions on how to move forward coincided with the arrival of J. C. Smuts in London in January 1906 on a mission for the Boer Het Volk party. At the age of thirty-five – four years older than Churchill – Smuts was already established as a major figure in South African and imperial politics and would remain so until his death in 1950. He was a hugely talented but also puzzling, ambivalent and almost sphinx-like figure. A formidable general with a Cambridge education, he carried the New Testament in Greek and Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason
with him while on campaign during the Boer War. He came to count English Quaker feminists amongst his closest friends.
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After his initial faith in the British (and Cecil Rhodes in particular) was destroyed by the Jameson raid, he had fought vociferously against them; yet he then played a key role in the peace settlement, hoping for Boer–British solidarity in the face of threats to white supremacy. (In 1906, Churchill hoped to exploit such racial fears for imperial purposes. He believed that ‘ “the black peril” ’ would act as a ‘unifying force, drawing the two white races together [. . .] and leading them to turn gratefully to the military power of the Crown’.)
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Smuts’s subsequent career seemed to prove that such reconciliation was not merely an idle dream. He served in Lloyd George’s War Cabinet during World War I and provided crucial advice to Churchill during World War II, ‘the only man who has any influence with the P.M.’, according to Lord Moran.
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Yet his emergence as a great imperial statesman came at the cost of distrust from more extreme Afrikaner nationalists at home.

Racial issues were, of course, to be fundamental to South African politics far beyond the Edwardian period; Smuts’s attitude towards them was intriguing. This is not because his paranoid fears of the majority population’s ‘immemorial barbarism and animal savagery’ were unusual in a Boer leader. Rather it is because even in spite of them one cannot entirely escape a sense that he was uncomfortably aware of the defects of his own attitude and record.
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Despite his failure throughout his career ever to do anything meaningful on behalf of the rights of Africans, at the end of World War II he drafted the preamble to the UN Charter, which affirms faith in ‘fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, [and] in the equal rights of men and women’.
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Not long after this, Francis Williams, press secretary to Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee, met him at a reception in London. Williams, fully aware of the contrast between ‘Smuts, the political philosopher’ and ‘Smuts, the Prime Minister of South Africa’, offered some ‘rather empty compliments’ about the speech he had made earlier that day. Williams recalled:

He looked at me with the steady open-air stare which was one of his characteristics and said, ‘I know what you young liberals think when you hear me talking like that. You say: Why doesn’t he do better by the Africans in his own country instead of talking to us about human rights? Well, my friend, some day you’ll appreciate what an avalanche I’ve been holding back.’
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This should count as Smuts’s apologia, and it contained an obvious element of truth. In 1948, after Smuts’s election defeat at the hands of the Nationalist Party, the profound existing racial discriminations were made yet more severe with the advent of the apartheid system. It is genuinely tragic though, that such a generally intelligent and courageous individual consistently chose to accommodate the racial anxieties he shared with his fellow whites rather than to confront or transcend them. Even Churchill criticized him for this, observing privately in 1944 that, ‘while Smuts was a great Liberal, when it came to the negro question, he would just cut it off from all the rest of his Liberal views’.
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During Smuts’s 1906 mission, however, ‘the negro question’ lay somewhat in the background. His primary aims were to secure responsible government for the Transvaal and to ensure that the franchise was drawn up as far as possible in the Boers’ favour. He feared that his people might ‘continue the victims of that Jewish-Jingo gang’ but hoped that the Liberal government would grant ‘justice’.
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Yet although he was to establish a warm relationship with Churchill in later years, it is clear that at the beginning he had little confidence in either him or (probably) in Elgin. He had considerably more faith in Campbell-Bannerman; the Prime Minister had, after all, denounced the harsh treatment of the Boers during the war. At a one-to-one meeting with ‘C-B’ at 10 Downing Street on 7 February, Smuts made an emotive statement of the Boer case. He came to believe that his impact had been decisive. In fact, ministers had already made up their minds to grant responsible government quite independently, although he may have had some influence on the actual manner in which they proceeded, helping to ensure that the breach with Tory policy was made as overt as possible. If he was allowed to persuade himself that his influence had been critical then it was perhaps he, rather than the British, who was won over.
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But this did not lead to any outpouring of affection for Churchill. On the latter’s early ministerial trials Smuts commented: ‘I see our friend Winston is occupying the stage under the full limelight and that his pity for the Chinese-flogging Milner is no less Olympian than for the benighted radical who thought the Chinese indentures partook of the nature of slavery’.
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Increasingly aware that the government, not least thanks to him, was making itself unpopular in South Africa, Churchill was anxious to settle things quickly. Uncertainty about the future would contribute to the British population’s distrust of the home government, and would drive British voters away from the Transvaal, thus undermining the prospects of future British control. If the uncertainty was not ended, the British and the Boers might even join together ‘in common repudiation’ of the imperial government – a variant of the nightmare scenario he had feared after the Jameson Raid.
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By the end of July the government had drawn up detailed plans for a new constitution for the Transvaal (the ORC constitution was finalized a few months later). Announcing the details to the Commons, Churchill ended his speech with a stirring though unfruitful appeal to the Opposition to support it. ‘With all our majority we can only make it the gift of a Party’, he said; ‘they can make it the gift of England.’
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A striking though wholly predictable feature of the Transvaal constitution was the restriction of the franchise to whites. Churchill – whose views were fully in line with those of his colleagues – had already made clear in February that he was sensitive to the colonists’ anxieties about the ‘ever-swelling sea of dark humanity’ by which they were surrounded. At the same time he had stated the government’s commitment to the principle of ‘equal rights of civilised men irrespective of colour’.
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This salutary-sounding sentiment, which echoed Cecil Rhodes, carried with it much baggage. Similar slogans had been used in Cape Colony in the 1890s as a justification for the disenfranchisement of as many Africans as could be managed; being ‘civilised’ in that context meant meeting a significant property qualification and being able to fill in a form in Dutch or English.
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To his credit, Churchill criticized the fact that the principle had previously been applied in a very nominal way.
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It must be appreciated, though, that when Churchill spoke up for it himself he was not advocating full racial equality. Rather he promised only that the government would do what was in its power to ‘encourage’ a ‘careful, patient discrimination between the different classes of coloured men’. (By way of context, it should be remembered that the parliamentary franchise in Britain did not yet extend to all classes of men, let alone to women, although there was no prohibition on the basis of race.) The possible implication of this seemed to be that some British Indians might be deserving of the vote, but there was no definite commitment to actually obtain it for them. Churchill believed that Britain’s hands were to a great extent tied by Treaty of Vereeniging and, moreover, he clearly expected that ‘the African aboriginal, for whom civilisation has no charms’ would be excluded from the franchise.
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