BOOKS OF THE DAY
African Scenario
African Portraits. By Stuart Cloete. (Collins 12s. 6d.) THE author of this book describes it as a biography of Paul Kruger, Cecil Rhodes and LoBengula. He speaks in his opening words of " plaiting a triple cord of three great lives," and in his prologue appears to claim to be writing history. These lofty aspirations he haefailed to justify. There is -much of interest in the story of 'Lotengula; the savage Matabele potentate who died as his "king- dom " fell in ruin under the impact of European expansion. There is still more of interest in the story of Paul Kruger, the old Dopper President of the South African Republic, who fell likewise in resistance to the irresistible, and there is much pathos in both. But it is straining language to apply the epithet " grcat " to either of them ; and if Paul ,Kruger was, as Mr. Cloete would have it, a champion of liberty, it was a liberty strictly reserved for people of like mind and tradition with his own.
Rhodes, beyond question, was a great man ; but to pretend to write his life or to add anything to our historical knowledge or appreciation of it without having consulted-the standard authorities on the subject, the two weighty volumes of Sir Lewis Michell or Professor Basil Williams's admirably judicial biography, is altogether too light-hearted. Yet this it would appear from the bibliography at the end of the volume, as well as from internal evidence, is what Mr. Cloete has done.
Mr. Cloete has a vivid imagination and can write vividly, though he would be wise to use less fustian ; but the violence of his pre- judices and the recklessness of his inaccuracy alike deny him the title of historian or of scholar. For example, writing of the Zulus, Mr. Cloete tells us that " Clu Clu, brother of Panda; murdered Panda." Charity might suggest that " Clu Clu " is a strange mis- print for " Cetewayo " ; but Cetewayo was the son, not the brother, of Panda, and did not murder his father. Actually, Mr. Cloete appears to have taken this statement bodily, complete with misprint and twofold -error, from the letterpress by Mrs. Millin, whom he follows in docile fashion throughout, of a little picture-book about South Africa published a year or two ago. This is a small but characteristic example of his carelessness, of which countless instances might be given. His chronology is so confused that it is often difficult to determine what period he has in mind. Thus " in 187o," he tells us, " diamonds and gold had been discovered in Africa." And with their "discovery the old Africa of the hunters and rarmers died." The diamonds of Kimberley certainly had been found by that date, but it was a very long trek in 1870 from Kimber- ley to the Transvaal, and it was not till x886, with the discovery of the Witwatersrand, that gold was- found in sufficient quantities to trouble the pastoral simplicity of Paul Kruger's Republic. But Mr. Cloete's prejudice is worse than his inaccuracy. Mining, to him, appears to be in itself a disreputable occupation. " Gold- hunters and prostitutes": this genial collocation recurs. The results of mining operations are more thin once described as " scrofulous," and this repetition cannot be attributed to any poverty in the voca- bulary of a master of metaphor who can describe an American writer as having sought to prove that Rhodes devised his scholarships as " the Machiavellian keynote to his arch of British imperial infiltration into the United States."
Our author appears to be obsessed by a not uncommon fantasy, that the typical pioneer of the South African mining industries was a flamboyant ruffian who had stepped out of the pages of Bret Harte with a bowie-knife in one hand and a bottle in the other, while the Boer farmer of his day was a blameless patriarch beguiling the long leisure of the back veld by perusal of the Old Testament Scriptures. No-one will grudge Mr. Cloete his romantic admiration of the latter generally'and of Kruger in particular, or deny the virtues of the Boer character ; nor need it be denied that there was a raffish fringe to the mining camps of Kimberley and Johannesburg. But the ordinary farmer and the ordinary miner were alike ordinary human beings ; and the gold-mining industry, of the Witwatersrand could not have been established by the creatures of Mr. Cloete's dreams. Rhodes was not an ordinary human being, and Mr. Cloete does not fail to be impressed by his greatness,. by his Titanic energy, or by the vast sweep of hii " thoughts," as Rhodes called his ideas. But the writer's myopia distorts his treatment even of him. He tells us that while Kruger was a man of great integrity " Rhodes was a man of no integrity at all "; and indicates, without quite clearly saying so, that 'he- believes the legend that Rhodes was privy to or procured the murder of Grobler, Kruger's emissary to the Matabele. Quite clearly, and in defiance of all impartial testimony, he accuses Rhodes and,his lifelong friend Jameson of having en- gineered the " Victoria incident " with the deliberate intention of provoking the Matabele War of x893. " Labby " himself hardly did worse than that.
After this we do not expect anything like fair treatment of the Johannesburg reform movement or of the unhappy story of Jame- son's ill-starred raid into the Transvaal ; and so are not disappointed. We do not expect any understanding of Milner's character or policy, though we might have expected some knowledge of the facts of his pre-South African career. Still less do we expect a dispassionate account of the war of 1899-1902, or an appreciation of the truth that that tragedy, like all tragedies, was a conflict of right with right, a conflict destined to be resolved in the Union of South Africa, not less through the magnanimity of Jameson than through that of Botha with Smuts at his right hand. This book, then, is not history, though it is readable enough. It abounds in stories, some of them sensa- tional though in all probability apocryphal, and many of them familiar, though often told in the wrong context, but still amusing.
DOUGAL MALCOEM,
Previous page
