History of South Africa podcast

Welcome back to the History of South Africa podcast with me your host, Des Latham. This is episode 291, The miracle of South Africa’s railway engineering and a little bit of commentary thrown into the mix. This episode is part history, party histrionic.

Play sound - old steam train

Yes, it’s the instantly recognizable sound of a steam train which I have traveled in around the world. First trip, pre-school from Nkwalini station to Empangeni where one of the main sugar mills of Zululand could be found. My grandmother Mavis Alport was the chaperon as young Desmond and brother Gary clambered aboard the snorting beast, a visceral experience.

Exciting stuff, this steam-train business — except for the small matter of my eyes, which had been staring rapturously out of the window towards the engine, drinking in all that romance of steam trains. What everybody who has actually ridden behind a coal-fired boiler already knows, is that romance travels with shrapnel. Tiny incandescent shards of burnt coal, riding the slipstream like malevolent little embers with a grudge, aimed directly at my cornea.

Granny Mavis warned me, of course. But I was a farm boy possessed of that particular strain of confidence found only in the terminally under-informed, and so I ignored her, leaned further out, and gave the shrapnel a bigger target.

Moving goods around a country is not only about commerce, it is about strategy, and often, military strategy. The key to being able to get your soldiers and machines from A to B quickly is being able to exploit the railways. Even now, Russia and Ukraine rely on railways to move their tanks and arms. During the Second world War, when a track was blown up, often the engineers could repair the broken section within a day or two. Everything about locomotives is about speed, and always has been.

In South Africa commerce relies on aviation and trucking companies to move things around, but that’s only because our railways are somewhat shoddy and have degenerated because keeping them going requires maintenance, and that’s not something that most contemporary politicians have as a skill set.

And so the cycle turns, gloriously, predictably. Why replace a sleeper when you can convene a task team to explore the sleeper question, with international best-practice benchmarking, naturally, at a five-star conference venue?

Maintenance is a thankless art. Nobody erects a plaque to the man who tightened a bolt in 1899 and thereby prevented a derailment in 2024. As you’ll hear later, the gangers and navvies are a distant memory on our dusty veld.

The 19th century's rolling stock revolutionised South Africa, shrinking the country where trips of weeks and months turned into days and even hours.

After the line reached Kimberley in1885, and the celebrations subsided, the Cape Government was under pressure by capitalists like Cecil John Rhodes to extend it beyond the Cape and into the Orange Free State, on to the Transvaal and from Natal inland. Once established a Southern African customs union could follow as a way to maximise free trade. However, some in the Cape were not entirely sold on that idea.

The Afrikaner Bond for example was initially skittish. Bond members were mainly farmers who regarded a vast matrix of tracks across the territory as a possible increased risk as competitors from further afield could access Cape markets.

Nevertheless, the surveyor's maps had been drawn up. One ambitious plan was to extend the Midland Line—which already connected Port Alfred and Port Elizabeth to Grahamstown—even deeper into the interior. That extension was duly completed when it met the Western Line at De Aar.

And this is where there was a problem. It involved that old bugbear of trade - something called tariffs - and that other fetter of growth, nationalism. Each of these colonies and fledgling Republics collected customs duties at points of entry and if there was a free trade area, they’d lose that income.

In 1883 Joseph Moss, regarded as the wealthiest black man in Kimberley, stood before the newly formed Africander League in the diamond mining city. Africander spelled A F R I C A N D E R. It which was not what you’d imagine, the Africander League was made up of black and coloured men before whom Moss pronounced

“We are Africans — we are not like Englishmen, who return to their own land. You are not here for a certain period to make money alone and then return to England to make yourselves great men…”

Moss looked around the room at the faces of black and brown

“…You are born here, your interest is here…”

Because South Africa was not their place of birth, most Englishmen in Kimberley did not view it as their homeland. Within a generation, however, their descendants born on South African soil would be confronted with a historic question of identity: were they British, or were they South African?

As Moss spoke he would have been aware of a similar sentiment amongst Dutch speaking South Africans, a rising Afrikaner nationalism. There were only two main differences between the Africanders and the Afrikaners

One was a matter of spelling - the black League was spelled Africander and the Dutch Bond was spelt Afrikaner.

Secondly, the black Africanders of Kimberley spoke English, while the white spoke Dutch as well the new taal of South Africa, Afrikaans.

It is one of the overriding historical facts of the last 150 years that so much resonated between these people and yet, so much was going to end up segregating them. Both of these Afrikaners regarded Africa as their homeland, yet were feited to spend their days separated because of the perceived differences based on skin colour.

IT was a surface difference and by the late 1880s, that difference was being reinforced by English politicians and millionaires in South Africa like Cecil John Rhodes.

As the diamond and gold mines developed and the ownership crystalised around a handful of men, vast changes were taking place across southern Africa, the future was swiveling about on the fulcrum of politics. Farming interests dominated local settler politics, and in the Cape more scientific farming practices advanced rapidly with the establishment of the Department of Agriculture.

There was another struggle on the go in the colony - between a progressive largely English-speaking modernising elite, and poorer, more conservative sheep farmers. From the mid-1880s onwards, Cape legislation was introduced making it compulsory to dip sheep in order to curb infection.

This gave rise to the most wide-spread popular agitation among Dutch speaking Afrikaners — agitation which threatened to split the party representing their interests, the Afrikaner Bond. It further reinforced the ethnic solidarity between Afrikaners on isolated sheep farms of the northern Cape in particular. And living next door to these farmers were the mine owners of Kimberley, led by Cecil John Rhodes.

Throughout the late 1880s, Cecil John Rhodes had maintained links with his British-based network of mine owners and financiers by sending storms of telegrams and letters, and maintained an excellent engagement with Cape politicians. By the time of gold discoveries, he had built a much closer working relationship with Afrikaners too, much to the surprise of most considering that he was an imperialist who loved Latin and Greek, and Afrikaans was not Greek to him.

In February 1887 Cecil formed Goldfields of South Africa with Charles Rudd who is another to loom large in South African history. At first Goldfields spluttered along, with most of it’s slim profits being invested into De Beers, and his new venture, the British South Africa Company.

Rhodes began to schmooze Transvaal politicians which was quite difficult seeing that he couldn’t speak Afrikaans, or Dutch, or in fact, any South African language.

It could be said that Cecil Rhodes quest for hegemony over the diamond industry of South Africa was quickened by rumours of significant gold discoveries in the Transvaal.

Others say not, because no-one was aware in these heady days of just how valuable the Motherlode of Main Reef was to become. First a quick note.

The easiest way to picture Kimberley in 1886–87 is not as a collection of neatly separated modern mining companies, each with its own mine. It was more like a gigantic underground chessboard, where the four great diamond mines around Kimberley—De Beers, Kimberley, Dutoitspan and Bultfontein—had originally been divided into hundreds of individual claims.

A claim was essentially a small piece of ground, and in the early days an individual digger or small partnership could own one or several of them. As the workings became deeper and more dangerous, those little claims were progressively bundled together into larger holdings and companies. By the mid-1880s, therefore, you had companies that owned groups of claims inside a particular mine, while the word "mine" referred to the entire diamond-bearing pipe or working area.

So, if you were standing in Kimberley in 1886 and somebody said, "I'm working in the Kimberley Mine," that did not necessarily mean he worked for a company called Kimberley Mine. He might have worked for Kimberley Central, or the French Company, or Standard, or one of the smaller interests that still held claims there. The mine was the physical hole in the ground; the companies were the owners of pieces of that hole.

In 1886–87 the whole industry was therefore in the middle of a gigantic transition from hundreds of little claim-holders hacking away independently at the diamond-bearing ground, toward a handful of enormous corporations controlling entire mines.

Underground mining was replacing the enormous open pits because the old workings were becoming dangerously deep; companies were sinking shafts and driving tunnels down into the pipes. At the same time, Cecil John Rhodes and Barney Barnato were consolidating ownership above ground.

By 1886 Rhodes wasn’t powerful enough to overcome other significant owners in Kimberley, although most of the other entrepreneurs believed amalgamation was good for diamonds — no-one wanted to be dominated by Rhodes — or each other. And Rhodes was seeking domination.

While the majority of those in Kimberley scrabbled and scratched, the magnates were high on the hog. They frequented the Kimberley Club, launched by 74 well-heeled citizens who pledged 100 pounds each, a double storey structure that impressed as it rose from the flat Griqualand surrounds. Evenings were full of dinners and dances, black tie and evening dress abounded, awash in the blaze of the new electric lights, the first in South Africa, which twinkled inside the homes of the rich, and splashed along the streets. Men and women mingled, thronged and thrusted, the tuxedo dressed elites sat in their plush chairs in the Kimberly club, pressing the electric bells to call waiters who slid effortlessly across the plush velvet pile and Turkish carpets.

Most evenings sitting side by side in the lounge were Cecil John Rhodes and his friend and co-shareholder Alfred Beit, sipping on their favourite tipple which was black velvet, a mixture of champaign and stout beer. Suitably fortified, they would dance, but let me hasten to add, not together, Rhodes with the plainest girl apparently while Beit, who was a short man, often sought out the tallest women. A weird vaudeville show and watched by a few sober enough to register irony. Alfred Beit was the key to what happened next because he had already drawn the attention of one of the most powerful capitalists in the world — Nathanial Natty Rothschild of Rothschild’s bank in London. Beit wrote a letter of introduction for Rhodes, who sailed off to England where he met Natty Rothschild. The first meeting didn’t start well. Rothschild was frosty.

In the last few episodes we have tracked the miraculous discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand — the importance of which cannot really be overstated. While diamonds placed South Africa on the map, gold was going to convert the struggling region into a financial paradise for British financiers — and therein lies the imperial rub.

However, it’s time to step back a tad to provide an historical overview for the late 1880s and it’s also time to zoom out of southern Africa to take a good hard look at global events.

For centuries before European powers drew border lines across maps of the continent, the western Indian Ocean functioned as a single economic basin. Fleets of dhow’s linked Gujarat, the Persian Gulf, the South Arabian coast, and the Swahili littoral, their journey’s dictated by the predictable rhythm of the monsoon winds which blow southwest toward Africa from November to March and reverse northeast toward Arabia and India from April to September, This was a commercial matrix of city-states fueled by the exchange of African ivory, timber, gold, and slaves for Indian textiles, Chinese porcelain, and Middle Eastern metalwork.

The Sultanate of Zanzibar was born directly out of this maritime deep history. In 1840, Sultan Seyyid Said of Oman moved his royal court from Muscat to Stone Town on the island of Zanzibar. By anchoring his authority off the East African coast, he consolidated control over the lucrative trade routes stretching deep into the African interior to the Great Lakes. The island served as a massive commercial emporium and agricultural power, built heavily on clove plantations operated by slaves while Indian merchant financiers—the banyans—backed the long-distance caravans into the mainland.

Sultan Barghash bin Said was a proud son of the legendary Seyyid Said, inheriting the throne of Stone Town in 1870 while his brother Majid was bequethed Oman itself. Sharper and more ambitious than Majid, Barghash spent his eighteen-year reign modernizing Zanzibar—building piped water systems, telegraph links, and grand stone palaces. But his survival relied on a faustian bargain.

Guided by Sir John Kirk—the British Consul-General who became his shadow advisor—Barghash aligned his dynasty entirely with London. Kirk was the single most influential British official in East Africa during the late 19th century. A Scottish physician, naturalist, and explorer, he first gained prominence as David Livingstone’s trusted second-in-command on the Zambezi Expedition between 1858 and 1864. In 1866, he was appointed to the British Agency in Zanzibar, eventually rising to become Consul-General and Political Agent. When German agent Carl Peters began seizing territory on the mainland, London chose European alliance-building with Berlin over its promises to Zanzibar.

In 1873, under direct British gunboat pressure, Barghash signed the treaty that outlawed the maritime slave trade and shut down Stone Town's notorious public slave market. It was an act of political self-mutilation; it deeply alienated his own Omani elite and rich plantation owners, but Barghash traded his domestic standing for what he believed was an ironclad guarantee of British protection over his mainland empire.

Unfortunately, that gamble proved fatal. The Foreign Office in London watched the global map with growing anxiety as rival flags sprouted across the continent. What infuriated British diplomats most was a sudden, unnatural alliance between their two greatest rivals: France and Germany. Furious over Britain’s unilateral grab of Egypt in 1882, the French teamed up with Otto von Bismarck to check British ambition.

London had tried a sly maneuver in West Africa—signing a treaty with a weak Portugal to recognize Portuguese control over the mouth of the Congo, effectively using Lisbon as a buffer to keep other powers out. But Bismarck saw right through it.

Onwards!

Or more accurately - downwards! Because we’re continuing the saga of early gold digging around the farm Langlaagte, and the other farms like Turfontein, it is 1886, hundreds of treasure hunters have descended on the empty veld just south of the Witwatersrand Ridge.

First a quick note about Kimberley, where the mining magnates were locked in a struggle for supremacy trying to secure control over the lucrative industry. As you heard last episode, one of these, JB Robinson, had run into cash difficulties but was determined to travel to the Witwatersrand to assess for himself just how much gold could be mined in the Main Reef discovered by the two Georges.

He’d borrowed 20 000 pounds from another Kimberley magnate Alfred Beit, and along with Beit’s partner Maurice Marcus, launched the Robinson Syndicate with a total capital of 30 000 pounds. Then he leapt aboard a stagecoach for the gruelling four day trip between Kimberley and Potchefstroom where he arrived on the 22 July 1886.

When this archetype converged on the Witwatersrand in 1886, they encountered a landscape defined by absolute physical indifference. The main reef was not an easy vein of rich quartz waiting for a prospector’s spade as you’ve heard. It was a mysterious sloping and tilted sheet of ancient pyritic conglomerate, the banket, plunging deep into the earth’s crust.

On the surface, the highveld in July is icy at night, sometimes sleet blows when the antartic fronts charge up from the south, sweeping the ridge with handfulls of pain. When Robinson pitched up and set about breaking the land to fit his intent, it was a virgin of veld, clean and wide open. Within a decade the land had been utterly transformed by thousands of men forcing their way along the sloping banket, intent on finding treasure.

JB Robinson spent a few days crunching through the conglomerate and realised that this reef was like no-other. How deep it went was still unknown, but that it was extensive was obvious.

Petronella Oosthuizen, the widow, owned Portion D of LAnglaagte Farm, and her fortunes were indeed improving by the day. Robinston made a b-line straight for her house, and secured mining and water rights from the widow on July 27th 1886, paying 450 pounds with an additional option to buy the farm outright for 6000 pounds.

In September the canny investor did just that, and also negotiated mining and water rights from the owner of Langlaagte Portion B, Anna de Beer Mulder. That cost Robinson one thousand pounds.

Robinson later faced criticisms and a whispering campaign, it was rumoured that he had used his charm to seduce Petronella Oosthuizen before negotiating her land away.

Petronella was paid the equivalent of 7 million Rand for her land — not a little — but in comparison to it’s value, not a lot either.

But he didn’t stop there. Remember Robinson had a war chest of 30 000 pounds and was determined to buy up as much land as he could. He purchased fifty percent of a portion of Vogelstruisfontein Farm, the other half was owned by prospector Jan Bantjies as well as 50 percent of the Turfontein Farm — next door to Langlaagte. By snapping up the 12 000 hectares, Robinson was the first of a wave of Kimberley’s rich who would make the journey north to the Witwatersrand.

The second wave included Cecil John Rhodes. There is a bit of a myth about his involvement, that he was a late comer to the scene. That is inaccurate, if you cast your memory back to a far earlier episode, I explained how Rhodes had bought the farm Roodepoort near the gold bearing reefs more than ten years earlier — there it was a purchase based on a whim. A bit of luck you’d say.

Rhodes had been present that day in April 1886 when Kimberley shop keeper Alexander had crushed conglomerate brought to Kimberley from the Witwatersrand, he had seen the public panning demonstration that revealed a gleaming line of wealth and was impressed as was JB Robinson.