Why didn’t Kruger go east?

A friend contacted me the other day to ask, if Kruger was so determined to grab a sea port, why didn’t he invade Portuguese East Africa and snatch Delagoa Bay / Lourenço Marques[1] (modern-day Maputo), rather than attacking the British Empire instead.

It’s an interesting question, and one which I thought was worth exploring a little more.

Though no longer a Great Power, Portugal still held vast colonies across the globe and the jackals were closing in on Lisbon’s steadily-declining Empire at the end of the 19^th Century.

In the early 1890s, a ridiculously small Rhodesian force had bested the ill-prepared and scattered colonial Portuguese garrison, helping themselves to the disputed territory of Manicaland[2] and only being prevented from taking the port of Beira – much to the chagrin of Rhodes[3] – thanks to interference by ‘the Imperial factor’.[4]

And they were not the only ones with their eyes on Portuguese territory; at the time of the Jameson Raid, the German Kaiser had told his ministers, ‘The moment has come when Germany can obtain the Protectorate over the Transvaal, and later on, over the Orange Free State,’ and had advocated seizing Delagoa Bay from the Portuguese. However, and though she was rapidly building a fleet to challenge the Royal Navy, Germany was not quite ready for war with the British Empire—as was admitted by Prince von Bülow in 1897.

Without having to worry about getting past the Royal Navy, and with much larger forces than the nascent Rhodesia, it would seem – at first glance – simple for Kruger’s men to have swarmed over the border to take the port, along with a good chunk of the rest of the territory. A glance at the map above will illustrate just how vulnerable the Portuguese position at Delagoa Bay was, especially as Boer forces could have been supported by the railway line from Pretoria.

That said, the same issue that faced the Rhodesians would undoubtedly have faced Kruger: Portugal was England’s oldest ally, and there was no way that London would have sat back and watched the Transvaal help themselves to this strategic port – especially as the 1891 Anglo-Portuguese Treaty gave Britain first refusal on the territory. As soon as a Boer threat emerged (and bearing in mind that calling out the various Kommandos and moving them to the border would have taken some weeks), a Royal Navy landing party / army expeditionary force would swiftly have been despatched to help secure Lourenço Marques. With the backing of the fearsome firepower of the British fleet, this would surely have been enough to repulse any such any attempt to take it. One only needs to look at their record in 1899 / 1900 to see just how abysmally poor the invading Boers were at taking defended towns – and none of those had been under the guns of a couple of RN battleships.

This was undoubtedly the reason why, for years, the Transvaal had instead been trying to gain control of Delagoa Bay by more underhand means. Despite the fashionable modern view that the Jameson Raid was the catalyst for tensions in the region, the reality is that both the Transvaal and Germany had been trying to improve their political positions and influence in the region long before Jameson’s folly.^[5] Germany had been putting constant pressure—including naval demonstrations off Delagoa Bay—on Britain’s loyal (but increasingly feeble) Portuguese allies, and encouraged the Transvaal to assert itself against the existing British paramountcy.^[6]

In 1894 the Transvaal’s preference to German interests (at the expense of British ones) increased the tension, and all the while France, Germany, and the Transvaal hovered in readiness to snap up possessions from the steadily declining and perennially cash-strapped Portuguese Empire.^[7] The British Consul in Lourenço Marques summed the Transvaal’s policy up as ‘one of quiet acquisition aimed at undermining Great Britain’s right of pre-emption should Portugal decide to sell’.[8] The policy that won Kruger virtual control of Swaziland (something else which is studiously ignored by today’s Kruger apologists) was slowly being applied to Portuguese East Africa.^[9] Indeed, such was the ‘intimidation practiced by Transvaal and German Governments through their respective consular agents’^[10] that it became necessary to register British companies abroad in order to conduct business in the Portuguese colony.

Despite the restrictions of British suzerainty over the Transvaal, the ever canny Kruger, via his special envoy, Dr Leyds, continued to defy London by signing treaties with European Powers through the Orange Free State. In a speech to a secret session of the Volksraad in 1897, Kruger crowed that this arrangement seemed destined for success, and then referred to the insidious expansion of the republic at the expense of the Portuguese:

‘…we shall then settle our affairs, internal and foreign, without British intervention … we shall have what is unquestionably our right, and with the concurrence of the European nations, a voice in securing proper administration in Delagoa Bay, our own port.’^[11]

So there can be no doubt that Kruger had long coveted Delagoa Bay – he just knew he had to be careful in how he went about it gaining control of it.

To understand why Kruger took on the might of the British Empire in 1899, rather than biting off a chunk from the decidedly in-decline Portuguese one, it is also necessary to be cognizant of his actual war aims – rather than the self-pitying rubbish that today’s True Believers like to tell one another. For all the latter-day excuses and NP propaganda, the simple fact is that Kruger wished to replace Great Britain as the paramount power in the region, and – as he and his clique openly declared – to build an Afrikaans Empire from the Zambesi to the Cape.[12]

As even the pro-Boer reporter, William T. Stead,[13] put it in 1897, the Boer ideal was ‘an ‘Anti-British Federation in South Africa’. Mr Secretary Leyds has been appointed a kind of a Boer Minister in Europe, where he will no doubt do his utmost to encourage the idea that the federated Dutch Republics can be relied upon by anyone who wishes to destroy British supremacy in South Africa’.

Writing in 1902, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle succinctly summed up Kruger’s war aims:
‘It would be a misuse of terms to call the general Boer designs against the British a conspiracy, for it was openly advocated in the press, preached from the pulpit, and preached upon the platform, that the Dutch should predominate in South Africa, and that the portion of it which remained under the British flag should be absorbed by that which was outside it’.

And General Maurice, in the Official History, put it thus:
Both Kruger and Steyn aimed at results other than those achieved by the initiatory victories of 1880-1. They cherished the hope that the time had come for the establishment of a Boer Republic reaching from the Zambesi to Table Mountain; but, for the accomplishment of so great an enterprise, external assistance was necessary, the aid of their kinsmen in the south, and ultimately, as they hoped, an alliance with other Powers across the seas.
The authorities at Pretoria and Bloemfontein realised fully that, though they might expect to have sympathisers in the colonies, active cooperation on any large scale was not to be counted on until successes in the field should persuade the waverers that, in casting in their lot definitely with the republican forces, they would be supporting the winning side.
The conquest of Natal and the capture of Kimberley would, it was thought, suffice to convince the most doubtful and timid. As soon, therefore, as the British troops in Natal had been overwhelmed and Kimberley occupied, the Boer commandos in the western theatre of war were to move south across the Cape frontier to excite a rising in that colony. A situation would thus be created which, as they calculated, would lead to the intervention of one or more European Powers, and terminate in the permanent expulsion of all British authority from South Africa.^[14]

Needless to say, violently snatching Delagoa Bay / Lourenço Marques from the Portuguese would not have achieved any of this – on the contrary, it would only have served to further alert a still-complacent London to Kruger’s aggressive ambitions.

And it is well worth noting Maurice’s final point; with remarkable naïvety, Kruger foolishly fancied that, by attacking the British Empire, London’s rivals would ignore Britannia’s undisputed rule of the waves, and blindly jump in to support his ‘crusade’.[15] In contrast, Portugal was a declining minor power, and one which did not inspire jealousy – any unprovoked invasion of her territory was thus unlikely to have been viewed favourably in the various European capitals. Whether for altruistic reasons, or simply because they wanted it for themselves, the reaction of most European powers to a Transvaal invasion of the area around Delagoa Bay would have been to oppose such a flagrant move. As such, it would have been counter-productive in terms of Kruger’s dreams of gaining a Great Power ally – even though it would have been no more blatant a land grab than was his invasion of British territory (something which was greatly enjoyed by London’s European rivals).

And again, as Maurice mentions, the other factor to consider is that, by attacking the British territory of the Cape Colony in 1899 (in addition to Natal and Rhodesia), Kruger’s great hope to spark a general uprising, and that many tens of thousands – perhaps hundreds of thousands – of Cape Boers would revolt, and throw of the yoke of the British Empire.[16] Though this was proven to be ludicrously far-fetched in the event, a more concerted invasion on this Front was the only way he might have actually won the war – which is why instead launching his main effort against staunchly loyal Natal was such a brainless strategic blunder. Either way, an invasion of Portuguese territory would obviously have had zero chance of sparking such an uprising and, with it, the formation of the long-cherished ‘Third republic’.[17]

Basically, a Boer invasion of Portuguese territory in the 1890s did not have a lot going for it.[18] An unprovoked attempt to grab Delagoa Bay would almost certainly have brought the British in on Portugal’s side, and not even the most swivel-eyed Apartheid-era propagandist could later have spun that into being ‘British aggression’. Furthermore, an attack on Portuguese territory would also have lost Kruger much of the sympathy he enjoyed in Europe – indeed, it is not completely implausible to suggest that some of the European Great Powers would even have sent troops in support of Portugal, akin to how various International contingents fought side-by-side in the Boxer Rebellion.[19]

In summary, even if the Great Powers had somehow let Kruger get away with such a flagrant land grab in the late 1890s, snatching Lourenço Marques would not have meaningfully helped him to achieve his overarching aim – which was to supplant Great Britain as the preeminent power in the region. Having his own port might have given him a bit of kudos, but would not have significantly improved his strategic position when he launched his attack on the British Empire. Not only would it have been instantly blockaded / bombarded into atoms by the Royal Navy in the event of war, but an unprovoked attack on Portuguese East Africa could only have upset the Europeans, and shaken London out of their lethargy – perhaps making even the most defiantly head-in-the-sand Little Englander finally take the threat to Britain’s South African territories seriously.

NOTES:

[1] The names were used pretty much interchangeably

[2] Keppel-Jones, Rhodes and Rhodesia, p.201

[3] Kane, The World’s View, p.67

[4] For more on this oft-overlooked part of history, read ‘The If Man’

[5] Porter, The Origins of the South African War, p.52

[6] Porter, The Origins of the South African War, p.53

[7] Porter, The Origins of the South African War, p.97

[8] The 1891 Anglo-Portuguese Treaty gave Great Britain pre-emptive rights to take control of what is now Mozambique in the event of Portuguese financial difficulties.

[9] Porter, The Origins of the South African War, p.101

[10] Porter, The Origins of the South African War, p.96

[11] Porter, The Origins of the South African War, p.137

[12] The South African War Reappraised, p.209

[13] William Thomas Stead (1849–1912), one-time passionate Imperialist turned pacifist and Boer-sympathizing pioneer of investigative journalism. Stead perished in the sinking of the Titanic, having gallantly given his life jacket to another passenger

[14] Maurice, History of the War in South Africa, Vol.1, p.48

[15] Cd.369, p.6

[16] Of course, and despite the fantasies of some both then and now, the Cape Colony was not under some sort of British jack-boot. It had been granted self-governing status back in 1872, and there was no discrimination against the Cape Dutch in the way that Kruger’s regime persecuted the English-speaking residents of the Transvaal

[17] Scholtz, Why the Boers Lost the War, p.133

[18] Though such an annexation might well have followed a republican victory in the Boer War, as Kruger looked to continually expand his Empire

[19] Though it was fought at the height of the Boer War, the British Empire nevertheless deployed 12,000 men to help put down the Boxer rebellion as part of the Eight Nation Alliance. This coalition also included contingents from France, Russia, Japan, the USA, Germany, Italy and Austro-Hungary