The Covenant (114 page)

He thereupon changed his name to Barney Barnato, bought himself several suits of slick clothes, and indulged in a fancy which had tantalized many an earlier vaudevillian.

At a considerable personal cost, he assembled a moderately good theatrical company, purchased himself a set of Shakespearean costumes, and offered South Africa its first performance of
Othello
, with himself in the title role. Frank arrived at the mines too late to see the opening performance, but when all the young gentlemen purchased tickets to a subsequent exhibition, he went along to a steaming tin-roofed shed crowded with a noisy audience that cheered madly when “Our Barney” strode onstage. His Desdemona, unfortunately, was six inches taller than he and appeared to be wrestling with him whenever they embraced; also, his makeup was so black and so thick that when she touched him her skin came away smeared while his showed white empty spaces.

“But he’s rather good!” Frank whispered to the men beside him.

“Wait till the afterpiece!”

“What happens?”

“You won’t believe it.”

When the final curtain fell, with Desdemona dead and pretty well besmudged, the young actor who played Cassio came forward to announce that in response to unusual demand, Mr. Barnato, who had already excelled in
Othello
, would now give his classic rendition of Hamlet’s soliloquy, at which the crowd began to roar and whistle. After a few minutes Mr. Barnato, his face wiped clean, appeared in a whole new costume. “Watch this!” the young gentlemen whispered.

While Frank gaped, Mr. Barnato nimbly gave a flip-flop and ended standing on his head. Maintaining perfect balance for a surprisingly long time, he began to recite the soliloquy, but as he came to the better lines, he gave wild gestures with his hands, stabbing at “bare bodkin” and waving madly at “fly to others that we know not of.” At the concluding words “and lose the name of action” he gave an amazing flip and landed back on his feet. The applause was shattering, for as Mr. Rhodes admitted acidly when his young men returned, “The remarkable thing is not that he can do it, but that whilst on his head he can speak so powerfully and deliver such convincing gestures. I’ve never seen a better Hamlet.”

These two titans, Rhodes the taciturn plotter, Barnato the vaudevillian, fought each other for years, and then one night they stood face-to-face in the cottage of a man destined to be famous in South African history: Dr. Leander Starr Jameson. At four in the morning, after eighteen hours of tense bargaining, a deal was struck whereby Othello would eventually surrender all his control to Mars for a check whose photograph would be widely displayed throughout the world: £5,338,650. As Barnato capitulated, bleary-eyed and worn down, he said, “Some people have a fancy for one thing, some for another. You, Rhodes, have a fancy for building an empire. Well, I suppose I must give in to you.” But he refrained from doing so until Rhodes promised that he would personally sponsor Barnato for membership in the ultra-exclusive Kimberley Club, where no Jewish Othello from Whitechapel would normally be welcomed.

If Barney’s recitation of
Hamlet
had been surprising to Frank, his campaign for election to Parliament was stupefying: he purchased a whole new set of Paris suits, an imperial landau pulled by four dappled horses, European gilded uniforms for six footmen, a handsome costume for a postillion who rode ahead blowing a long trumpet, and a brass band of eighteen to follow behind. “I voted for him,” Frank told the young gentlemen, and to his delight he found that they had, too. And he suspected that Mr. Rhodes had done the same, for as he once said, “There are few men in this world who achieve everything they seek. Barney Barnato is one. He’s played
Othello
to applause. He’s recited
Hamlet
on his head. He’s won the boxing championship of the diamond mines for his weight. He’s had his own imperial guard. He’s been elected to office. And he’s the richest Jew in the country, with a full-fledged membership in the Kimberley Club. What more could he want?”

The young gentlemen were saddened when they heard that this man who had conquered the world by courage and sheer brazenness had committed suicide by throwing himself off the England-bound
Scot
in the middle of the Atlantic.

When Cecil Rhodes acquired control of the diamond fields, his attention was free to focus on the greater goals of his life; mere money, of which he now had prodigious supplies, interested him little except as a path to power. In the years when he was one of the richest men in the world, he continued to live with his young gentlemen in austere surroundings. “Every man has his price,” he assured Saltwood, “and often it’s a hankering for luxury. With enough money you can buy any man. For example, the king up in Matabeleland wants guns. Above everything else, he wants guns. So let’s see that he gets them.”

Selecting a team from among his Kimberley staff, he began to suborn the king, and this left him free to study the perpetual problem: “Frank, we have at our end of the continent a priceless land governed by three races. English—who ought to rule. Boers—who don’t know how to rule. And Kaffirs—who should never be allowed to rule. What’s to be done?”

He allowed Frank to study this problem for some days, then gave his own answer: “It’s clear that England was intended to govern all of Africa. We’re people of vision, decency, honor. We know how to govern, and to everyone we govern we bring added virtues. So we must gain control.

“The Boers? I love them. In some ways they’re sturdier than the English. But they lack vision. They will never be able to provide good government. The republics they occupy must become part of our enterprise, and I think I see ways of accomplishing this. When they join us, they must be given every consideration, for we need them. But join they must.

“The Kaffirs? I stand ready to offer full citizenship to any man regardless of his color, so long as he is civilized. Would it be proper for them to have the vote while they remain in barbarism? I say they must be treated as children, and we must do something for the minds and brains the Almighty has given them.” He added, “We must lord it over them until they gain civilization. Above all, Frank, never let them have alcohol.”

Upon analysis, Frank found that all of Mr. Rhodes’ basic beliefs
were debatable: at Majuba the Boer armies had knocked the devil out of regular British troops; Germany was moving defiantly into Africa and had already annexed the southwest lands along the Atlantic Ocean, her moves outsmarting the English; in the mines, Kaffir workmen were proving at least as capable as whites. But Mr. Rhodes had several million pounds to support his objectives, and Saltwood had none, so it was the former’s views that prevailed.

To Rhodes, diamonds were the fire of his life, the glittering foundation of his fortune, so it was not surprising that he had been lukewarm to the discovery of gold two years earlier on the Witwatersrand (White Water Ridge), some five hundred miles to the north in the heart of the Boer republics. He did, however, stake his claim to a share of the golden fortunes, launching a great company that made him a Croesus, with unlimited power to undermine the Boers, keep the blacks obedient, and drive his highway of empire straight to the heart of Africa.

What happened next was inexplicable. In the Cape Parliament, Cecil Rhodes invariably sponsored full partnership for any Afrikaners who resided in the province, and they reciprocated by electing him to office, and would do so till he died. They liked his courage and admired his abilities. But now he decided to destroy the Boer republics in the north because, as he explained to Saltwood, “They must come in with us.”

“But if they don’t want to?”

“Then we shall force them.”

His reasoning was simple. The diamond mines at Kimberley were located on farmland which the English by infamous chicanery had forced to become part of their colony; English law governed the diamond fields. But the gold mines were located within the boundaries of one of the Boer republics; here Boer law prevailed, and this raised problems.

In the gold fields, which proliferated at a rate far greater than that seen in either Australia or California, there were Englishmen galore, and hundreds of Australians, and many Frenchmen, and Italians and Canadians and not a few American citizens who flocked in on ships from all the ports of the world. They were noisy, undisciplined, and a menace to the stolid Boers who wanted to be left alone on their farms; they swooped down on Witwatersrand like vultures finding a carcass on the highveld, and with them they brought contention, violence and every possible threat to the phlegmatic Boer way of life.

The self-governing Boers retaliated with the most imprudent laws: an Uitlander (Outlander) could vote for the Volksraad only after fourteen years’ residence; before that apprenticeship he remained a second-class citizen, entitled to cast his ballot only for a separate assembly subject to Boer veto; dynamite required in mining was made by a Boer-favored monopoly, and prices for it became prohibitive; any infraction of a score of meticulous laws must be judged in a Dutch-speaking court according to laws not promulgated in English. Investment of money, movement of men and the mining of gold all fell under Boer law, and no concessions to reason were granted.

Rhodes, with his relentless determination to bring disparate elements in Africa under English rule, was convinced that the arrogant conduct of the Boers was ill-advised and must lead to rebellion unless modified. He decided to intervene personally with the forbidding Boer leader, Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger, that rumbling volcano of a man who ruled his little world from the stoep of his unpretentious dwelling on a tree-lined street in Pretoria.

“I will go to him privately this time,” he told his young men, “and invite him like a gentleman to join with us.”

“What can you offer him in return?” someone asked.

“Membership in the British Empire,” Rhodes said without hesitating. “What more could a ruler of a petty state want?”

Before any of the young men could point out that many nations about the world wanted a good deal more, Rhodes continued: “I will see President Kruger next week, and we will talk like two grown-up men. Frank, you will come with me, so make sure you learn all there is to know about him.” During the next days Saltwood sought out anyone in Kimberley with knowledge of the titanic man with whom Cecil Rhodes was about to grapple. The diamond magnate had met the Boer leader before, in his capacity as a Cape politician; this time he would go unofficially as a private citizen, with his eye not on local affairs but on world empire.

“First of all,” one of the young gentlemen told Saltwood, “he’s known as Oom Paul, Uncle Paul. He’s twenty-eight years older than Mr. Rhodes and will demand due respect. He’s very vain, you know.”

“And ugly as sin,” another said. “His face is all crags without the grandeur of mountains. His nose is marked with bumps, and his eyes are hooded. He stands leaning backward, with his great belly projecting forward. But because of his height … He’s much taller than Mr. Rhodes and will treat him like a little boy.”

The first instructor resumed: “He was in the Great Trek, you know. Killed some of Mzilikazi’s warriors. Extraordinary strength. Extraordinary bravery. He’s fought in all the wars.”

“But what you must remember, in all his life he’s had only three months of schooling. He boasts, ‘Only book I ever read was the Bible, but since that contains all knowledge worth knowing, it’s enough.’ ”

“Do not,” the first man warned, “react in any way if he mentions the earth.”

“I don’t understand,” Frank said, seeking to build up his portrait of the Boer leader.

“Oom Paul believes the earth is flat. The Bible says so. And if he finds that either you or Mr. Rhodes holds it to be round, he’ll stomp out of the room. He’s also convinced that the Boers have been given their republics by God Himself, so Mr. Rhodes will be forced to prove that joining our empire is what God proposed, not Mr. Rhodes.”

“The one thing in your advantage, Frank, is that even though Kruger hates colonial Englishmen, he despises Uitlanders. Calls them the atheistic rabble stealing his land. He sees the English miners, Australians and Americans as impious and immoral, and he’s not going to concede them anything. But if Mr. Rhodes can insinuate that he feels the same way about the Uitlanders …”

“It must be done with tact,” the oldest of the gentlemen warned. “Oom Paul is beloved by his Boers. He’s a dictator, because he knows he has total support, no matter what he does. He’ll be imperious, objectionable, insulting and infuriating. But consistently he outsmarts the Uitlanders sent to deal with him. He’s a brilliant manipulator. You are not meeting an ordinary man.”

One of the younger men added, “And remember, the world is flat.”

Frank went to sleep that Thursday night with three adjectives reverberating:
“Stubborn, opinionated, God-driven,”
and he concluded that in contesting with Oom Paul, Mr. Rhodes might be in for a difficult tussle, but then the adjectives that depicted Mr. Rhodes began echoing:
“Relentless, self-assured, empire-driven,”
and he began to wonder if perhaps it might be President Kruger who would need help. Before he fell asleep he recalled the description of Kruger’s appearance: “Ugly as sin,” and he reflected that spiritually Mr. Rhodes might be described with those same words.

Late on a Friday afternoon they arrived in Pretoria in Mr.

Rhodes’ private coach, and they retired early so as to be up fresh and ready for their important meeting; Frank observed that Mr. Rhodes took special care with his shaving, as if he were seeing a princess, and adjusted his tie and high-collared coat so as to make the best appearance. In a carriage they rode through this extremely Boer town until, on a handsome street, they came upon an unpretentious cottage, somewhat Oriental in style, marked by a wide stoep on which stood a comfortable armchair. In it, so that all Pretoria could see him consulting with his people, sat Oom Paul himself, a hulking giant of a man, shoulders hunched forward, belly out, legs spread wide, his hooded eyes inscrutable, his beard framing his massive face. He was holding court for whoever chanced to pass by.