24 January 2016

South Africa: Colonial Legacy of Mining Pioneers Poses a Dilemma for South Africans


The Portuguese set foot in South Africa in the 15th century, and the Dutch settled at the "Cape of Storms" in 1652. But the noses of the first interlopers into southern Africa were not sharp enough to fore-smell Kimberley's hidden diamonds or the Witwatersrand's entombed gold.


The group - of mainly Englishmen and Jews - that descended on Kimberley, following the discovery of diamonds was largely the same bunch of money-mongers who flocked to the Witwatersrand when news of gold broke.

By the time the Witwatersrand became the new Mecca of wealth seekers, Kimberley had already produced a diamond cartel led by Cecil John Rhodes - including such outstanding figures as Alfred Beit, Charles Rudd, Barney Barnato, Julius Wernher, J. B. Robinson, Jules Porgès, H. L. Eckstein, Lionel Phillips, and others.

In Kimberley, Rhodes persuaded most of these men - some of whom were initially his arch-enemies, such as Barnato - to form a cartel to control the price of diamonds in London, then the centre of the global diamond trade. De Beers became the cartelised company, named after brothers Johannes and Diederik De Beer, who had sold the land on which the diamonds were discovered.


What made Rhodes stand out was his profound understanding of the uselessness of money for its own sake. For him, money was an instrument in a big imperial "game". Difficult as it was, he did manage to convince some of the money-mongers who surrounded him to support his mega imperial schemes.

It got to the point where these men became so wealthy that their clout was felt in British politics. Rather disapprovingly, the English media coined and gave them the name "Randlords" - to make it plain that the "Rand" was the origin of the wealth of these insidious "Lords".

Bringing civilisation



The civilisation that waves at South Africans from the dizzying heights of Johannesburg's skyscrapers came to the country's shores with the Randlords. The highways on which the tyres of comfortable German cars glide would not be there without the Randlords.

Some of the country's top universities at which today's students wage protests are there thanks to the Randlords. This includes the University of the Witwatersrand, Rhodes University and the University of Cape Town. Even those not linked directly to the Randlords were build by the state using funds from the mining industry.



The big dilemma


The Kaffirs do nearly all the unskilled labour in South Africa. ... On the farms they, and not the farmers, do the planting and reaping and herding. ... They dig the trenches and lay the roads.



Thus, the Randlords left behind them a big dilemma: contemporary South Africa is not sure whether to thank them for bringing civilisation, or to curse them for complicating future race relations. Unfortunately they can't receive a memorandum of grievances, were the country's citizens to chant to their graves.

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