Episode 298 - Lights, Camera, Capital! How Scottish Lensmen Saved Joburg’s Gold

Welcome back to the History of South Africa podcast with me your host, Des Latham. This is episode 298 - Lights, Camera, Capital! How Scottish Lensmen Saved Joburg’s Gold.

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Back to the episode.

The Cape Colony had succeeded the imperial government in administering the diamond fields around Kimberley starting in 1880. Over time, Cape rule was influenced to a great extent by Cecil Rhodes, then the rule was dominated by this colossus. He was the most visible of the new crop of mine owners who were to loom over South Africa’s economic and political history for the next fifty years — until the Nationalist party government came to power in 1948.

By 1890, De Beers’s owner had played a significant role in the extension of British rule into Bechuanaland, and then beyond into Central Africa. All the while Rhodes developed an astonishing ideology of empire, creating what he saw as a unique role for what he called the English Race. What is not as well known, or remembered, was how Rhodes was above all a pragmatist and opportunist, an ideological shape-shifter, who transferred his allegiances from imperial to Cape Settler, and then back again. A little bit of modern tech bro mixed with starry eyed silicon valley.

It was this shape-shifting that caused deep mistrust, particularly amongst the white working class of the period — and ironically from the view of South Africans in the 21st Century — it was these workers who would create some of the first major confrontations between mine owners, and mine workers. These days its presumed that the National Union of Mineworkers, allied as it was to the African National Congress, was the home of an anti-capitalist sentiment but radical white marxists threatened Johannesburg’s capitalists repeatedly — particularly in the early 20th Century.

Starting in the diamond fields, then Barberton and Johannesburg, new identities were being forged by the discovery of valuable resources — new identities which transformed South Africa. In the early days, before gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1886, the Zuid Afrikaanse Republiek was regarded as the poor cousin — even of the Orange Free State. Endless poverty wracked the region, it could not collect any taxes of value, and it’s citizens, the people of the Transvaal, were rebels, frontiersmen, almost impossible to control.

The Transvaal had been annexed by the British, then fought their first war against the empire, and won. Natal’s English residents had delighted in the annexation, and now delighted in the discovery of gold. Like Rhodes, these residents shifted allegiances from the empire, to settler logic, and back to empire. The mixture of people and politics was almost unending.

In London, the dominant political view of South Africa was that it was better governed under a British dominated state - and be the paramount power. Meanwhile, Dutch Afrikaners had changed their identity partly due to the continuous and vexatious struggle against the British view and partly due to the encroaching reality of late Victorian innovations. Like Electricity, the steam trains, and new sciences, geology, chemistry.

The coming of gold increased the ZARs capacity to become an economic actor. Paul Kruger’s government latched onto two main ideas. One was to turn the mines into cash through a dynamite monopoly owned by the Transvaal state, and the other was the railway franchise.