History of South Africa podcast

With that weird fact it’s time to dive into this week’s episode, which is all about the bandits of Johannesburg, the izigebengu, Zulu for criminal, crooks, nasties. It’s a tale of highwaymen, muggers, thieves, who targeted travelers to and from Johannesburg, specialising in holdups, the kind you see on old fashioned Hollywood westerns. There was nothing romantic about a gang in kerchief masks, waving guns around, threatening Victorian ladies and black workers, taking their hard earned cash and other valuables.

I’m using Charles van Onselen’s fantastic essay published by the Oxford University Press as one of the sources for this episode — and our story begins with the birth of a boy, one of six children, born to a Zulu woman called Nompopo - Mzuzephi kaDumisimali arrived in 1867, his name Mzuzephi means where did you find him?

The family moved with father Dumisimali to a farm owned by Tom Porter on the headwaters of the Thukela, on the slopes of the Drakensberg near modern day Bergville. Dumisimali was an induna there, a headman, and Nompopo and his children worked on the Porter farm in return for the use of land. There’s not much known with any certainty about this important period in the boy's life, it seems that Mzuzephi led a rather solitary existence. He had a few friends drawn from neighbouring properties, such as the farm Nineveh, but there were few peers on the Porter property and herding, by its very nature, could be a lonely occupation.’

To make matters worse the youngster was not particularly close to any of his siblings and, as an adolescent, the boy was largely deprived of Numisimani’s company since the father tended to spend much of his time away from home. Little Mzuzephi enjoyed smoking cannabis, and for the rest of his life the lad from Bergville remained addicted to dagga.

A classic tenant farmer situation. When Mzuzephi turned 16 - in 1883, he began working as a gardener for a man in Harrismith — and as a groom looking after horses. When one of the horses disappeared while in his care, he was told that he’d have to work for two years without pay to cover the cost of the loss.

Aggrieved by what he felt was an injustice, Mzuzephi was sent to Johannesburg by Tom Porter to seek work and during the trip, the lad escaped and gave himself a new name. Jan Note. For the next year he worked as a houseboy as the job was known in the Johannesburg suburb of Jeppe, sending cash payments to his mother via migrant friends. The problem of the missing horse pursued him relentlessly, and eventually he scraped together 3 pounds to pay back the farmer. His brother had arrived in Joburg seeking work on the new gold mines in 1887, and tried to convince Mzuzephi to come home and pay the farmer back himself but he now distrusted what he regarded as the skewed justice system.

Mzuzephi decided to go dark once more, breaking his ties with home, and moved to Joburg’s southern suburbs. The town was perceived as a place of freedom and opportunity by blacks and whites, thousands were flooding in from Europe and throughout southern Africa — the Witwatersrand beckoned with its offer of steady employment if not outright treasure. That was somewhat misplaced, Joburg mines were very much a place of boom and bust, feast and famine, where yesterday’s immigrant and today’s worker were tomorrow’s unemployed. And so, like in all parts of the world, the mishmash of human beings, the redundant miners, unemployed clerks, failed businessmen, ex-colonial troopers, deserters from the British army all gathered together in their new jobs, cardsharks, pimps, canteen pianists, bottle-collectors, the pickers of the 19th century, billiard-markers, fences, skittle-alley attendants, petty thieves, burglars, safe robbers, illicit alcohol sellers, and of course, highway robbers.

Most of these professions persist in Johannesburg today.

This is a slightly longer episode - because Venture Capitalism needs intensive scrutinty.

Yes 300 weeks of non-stop episodes, all I can say is thank you for listening. Our numbers have grown, the show has posted over 3 million downloads — it’s all the threes today.

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With contemporary commerce concluded it’s time to take a closer look at historical commerce.

Cecil Rhodes became Cape Prime Minister in 1890 - thus solving a riddle of business. Who could convince politicians to act in the best interests of investors? Well when the investor himself became the politician, problem solved.

It is something that has characterised the Trump Presidency — once the barbarian has control over the keys of the kingdom, opening the doors of profit supersedes opening of doors of perception.

Sorry to mangle concepts, but I think you know what I mean.

And there is a direct link between Rhodes, Railways and his political ambitions. It’s one of the reasons I have spent some time describing both the De Beers chairman’s rise to power, and the role of the railways in South Africa. Rhodes came to prime minister of the Cape Colony thanks in part to his interest in developing a regional rail network. Later in this episode we’ll dive deeper into the Transvaal Railway experience, which will feature a London-based capitalist of note, Nathanial, natty Rothschild.

Just as an aside, Nathanial’s descendent Natty Rothschild the fifth featured recently in the Trump families attempt to build a luxury resort on an Albanian Island. History and contemporary realities have collided in that story, which is not for us, but folks, keep an eye on the saga going on right now. The Jinks are high. Nathaniel Philip Victor James "Nat" Rothschild (born in 1971) is a British-born financier, investor, and corporate executive who currently holds the title of 5th Baron Rothschild and he is Jared and Ivanka Kushner’s deep pocketed friend.

Nat Rothschild’s introduced Kushner and Trump to the Albanian coast during their shared travels, bridging his long-standing familiarity with European elite real estate destinations to Kushner’s deployment of private equity capital. It’s led to riots. Let’s see how Jared and Ivanka’s big day out in Albania ends.

IN Cecil Rhodes’ case, Rhodes introduced Rothschild to the possibility of profit through land acquisition. Let’s probe matters.

Skipping smartly back to 1890.

Everything is about angles, particularly when you’re building infrastructure. The Cape Government of Gordon Sprigg had introduced a railway bill in the Cape parliament in 1888, the line proposed to be built from Kimberley to Fourteen Streams, Vryburg, Gaborone, and from there, northwards.

Cecil Rhodes walked a political tightrope, balancing advocating for railroads, harbours and unity — while the colonial office expected that the Cape Colony would not overburden its finances. Railway construction presented opportunities for state-building and patronage. Sprigg had been pursuing major rail building initiatives since 1889, both to the north into the Free State and Transvaal, but also within the Cape itself.

His big problem is that he wasn’t rich and needed to fund his dream.

It turned into a pork-barrel idea, frightening both English and Afrikaans lawmakers in the Cape parliament and he lost the confidence of his cabinet. The old split between eastern Capers and western Capers emerged again, along with the inevitable split between conservatives and liberals.

The economic policies of the states and colonies in South Africa conflicted in many ways, partly because of their varying political policies. The Transvaal desired economic and political independence while the Cape Colony advocated unification with other states.

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Politics and economics were not inter-related, in in many ways, led directly to confrontation between these early states of the South Africa.

The Free State for example was economically closer to the Cape than to the Transvaal, while politically it was the other way around. Even the two British-coastal colonies, the Cape and Natal, differed in their economic policies.

The discovery of gold exacerbated these differences. The Boer Republics believed they deserved some of the import duties on goods flowing through the ports. The first tariff barrier instituted in 1881 which was partly caused by an economic depression leading to the Transvaal imposing an import duty on goods entering the ZAR including tobacco, mielies and liquor which were all from the Cape or Natal. The Cape responded by imposing their own tariffs on Transvaal tobacco.

The region that faced the most pressure was the Free State, slap bang in the middle of the subcontinent. President Johannes Brand was anxious to cooperate with the Transvaal politically, but wary of entering any economic agreement lest it mess up his relationship with the Cape. Bloemfontein needed the Cape’s ports more than they needed the Transvaal’s meat. At a trade conference between the Cape, the Free State and Natal in 1888, the three states agreed to free trade amongst themselves, the the Cape and Natal couldn’t agree on common import tariffs on goods shipped to Southern Africa from abroad.

Natal wanted low tariffs to handle more goods in Durban, while the Cape Colony wanted to protect its own goods by imposing higher import tariffs. The free trade agreement broke down when Natal bypassed the Free State, and built a railway line straight to the goldfields from Durban which broke the terms of the deal.

A year later, in 1889, new Free State President Francis William Reitz met with Transvaal president Paul Kruger at a Potchefstroom conference and signed a trade and political. The Transvaal agreed to block a rail connection from the south or west - ie from the Cape or Natal — without the consent of the Free State, which meant any line built from Cape Town to Johannesburg would have to cross Free State territory. Things were moving fast on the land — not least a large group of mercenaries who had gathered under a false flag. There were shenanigans planned, perhaps even skullduggery, because Cecil John Rhodes was about to indulge in a bamboozle, nay, worse, a hornswoggle. And shenanigan is a relevant word, because etymologists have traced its earliest recorded appearances in print to the mid-1850s Californian gold rush, it popped up in San Francisco, Sacramento, and the Sierra Nevada.

It was a phrase made famous by gold prospectors, when weights were fiddled, and diggers claims were stolen. And Cecil and his column were after gold - land - and empire. So too were a faction of Boers led by Louis Adendorff who had negotiated their own secret land grant known as the Chibe Concession directly with local Shona chiefs in Banjailand - southeastern Zimbabwe. One thousand armed Boers were preparing to cross the Limpopo River and establish a new Boer Republic right across the middle of Rhodes’ intended empire.

While the Shona in the west of Mashonaland had been cowed by the Ndebele, further north and east it was a different story they were still largely independent of the Lobengula’s reach. To access this region, Rhodes and his British South African Company mercenaries, the Pioneer column, had to navigate serious geographical and political obstacles.

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.

I was contacted recently by a listener who’s built an app - it’s called learnclash - a mini-quiz, where people duel each other on history questions — and science. Play real people in quick trivia duels on LearnClash, free on iPhone and Android. Code DESMOND gets you a month of Premium free: https://learnclash.com/sahistory.

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.

297 dear listener, is what’s known as a Kaprekar Number - if you square 297 the resulting digits can be split into two parts - right side and left side. If you add up those two parts you get the original number 297 squared is 88, 209.

Left part is 88, right part is 209. Add these together and voila! 297, a Kaprekar Number.

Maths is fascinating - so too, the story of Zulu king Dinuzulu necklace. IN the annals of historical facts, Dinuzulu’s necklace was claimed to have been found by Robert Baden-Powell, who started the scout movement. These beads are presented to Scout leaders following their Wood Badge leadership training. There’s a lot of conflicting evidence about this of course, did Baden-Powell find the beads, or take them? Were they Dinuzulu’s beads - or those of a Zulu woman, possibly one of Dinuzulu’s wives? Which was important, because In 1888 Baden-Powell was serving with the British Army in Africa. During this period Baden-Powell visited an abandoned camp where Chief Dinizulu, had been based.

The beads were traditionally carved from South African yellowwood, or acacia wood, with a soft central pith that allowed them to be threaded on a rawhide lace.

As you heard last episode, Dinuzulu had surrendered to the British, and was placed in a Pietermaritzburg jail — although jail is probably too strong a word. He was invited to spend time indoors with his retinue at the cost of the Natal taxpayer - arrested as the Zulu rebellion ebbed away in 1888.

It was the three main ringleaders, Dinuzulu, Ndabuko and Shingana, who faced the much more serious charge of high treason and public violence. They had to wait until February 1889 for their trial to begin, and by 27th April it was over. Although energetically defended by one of the best advocates of the province, Harry Escombe, all three were found guilty and were sentenced - ten years for Dinuzulu, 15 for Ndabuko and 12 for Shingana.

While the isolated rock in the Atlantic may seem a harsh sentence, it was not as cruel as it appeared at first glance. As a royal man, Dinuzulu would live in a house, not a cell. He would be joined by his attendants. Ndabuko and Shingana were married, each was allowed to bring one of their wives. But Dinuzulu was too young to have taken a wife, and was allotted two umndlunkulu, young women born of chiefly houses as his friends with benefits.

One was Umkasilomo, the daughter of Ntuzwa of the Mdlalose, and Zihlazile, whose father was Qethuka of the Magwaza. An Inyanga, Paul Mthimkhulu, was also packed off along with the uncles, the nephew and their women companions to St Helena to mind their spiritual and physical health.

Eventually, after a series of hearings and appeals, the party was taken by train from Eshowe to Durban amidst tight security, where in February 1890, they embarked on the mail steamer Anglican bound for St Helena.

Back in Episode 290 I covered some of the details of the build up to this Charter being awarded by the British government — part of Cecil John Rhodes’ grand plan to colonise Africa on Great Britain’s behalf.

By early June 1889 the Charter for the British South Africa Company had achieved the approval of enough influential people in London to move forward - it now needed government sign-off, and Queen Victoria’s stamp of approval.

There were stumbling blocks, two of the senior staff at the Colonial Office, John Bramston and Edward Fairfield, opposed the idea. They were overruled by the secretary of state for the Colonies, Lord Knutsford, as well as the permanent undersecretary, Robert Herbert.

Lobengula had written to the colonial office, repudiating the Rudd Concession which lay at the very heart of Rhodes’ claim to have convinced the Ndebele king to allow him into Matabeleland and surrounding regions to explore for gold. The three men who’d negotiated with Lobengula included James Maquire, who was in London.