Afrikaner Bond

“ Millions of honest persons all over the world were deluded—there was a bitter cry of almost universal indignation. The Boer Government posed as innocent; the designs of the Afrikaner Bond were not even suspected—its ranks, in sympathy with those delusions sped on filling up faster than ever, and the father of lies was scoring another very sensible triumph. ”

“ Let the Government rather prove to England its sincere friendship and agree to deal well by the Uitlanders, treating them as privileged guests, then the unhappy strain in relations will cease. Above all, renounce that wicked Afrikaner Bond with its motto of conquest. The demand for franchise is England's device of self-protection against Bond designs. England will desist from that demand if we renounce the Bond and prove our friendship. ”

“ A liberal franchise in favour of the Uitlanders would at one stroke correct that evil, and counteract the other impending danger as well. With a large accession of legitimized voters working in accord with England's desire for peace and progress, that good influence would be potent, first to shackle Bond action and ultimately to reduce it to Colonial limits. The Transvaal would then no longer be the giant ally, the arsenal, and the treasury of the Afrikaner Bond, and that organisation would then be checkmated into impotence for evil. ”

“ This was marred by Afrikaner Bond doctrines and intrigues proceeding from a Hollander coterie, the formula being "Afrika voor de Afrikaners"—the aims including the usurpation of British authority in the Colonies, supremacy of the Boer nation under one great Republican federation, and an affiliated status with Holland which should restore that people, all to the prejudice of England, to a political and economic significance and power surpassing its former epoch of European and Colonial eminence. ”

“ But during the past twenty years public interest has by degrees been successfully aroused by the activities of the Afrikaner Bond; the former apathy and distaste to the consideration of public concerns have given place to a more lively identification even with politics, but the tendency of being swayed by men of influence of their own kind remains unchanged.
The Boers are great smokers—tobacco appears to have no hurtful effects whatever upon them, but seems rather to serve as a grateful sedative. ”

“ This diagnosis appears particularly applicable to President Krüger and State Secretary F.W. Reitz, both men of sincere piety (perhaps also to Mr. Schreiner) , who would have abandoned their project and renounced and repudiated the Afrikaner Bond if ever they had doubted its legitimacy of principle. So also with most of the other Boer leaders and their clergy too. The agencies must have been exceedingly subtle, and the jugglery and artifice superhuman, to operate such processes of reasoning, such deception and aberration in honest-minded and even godly persons. ”

“ These cannot possibly compete with the educated Hollanders in quest of good positions, nor are they taught any handicrafts, and the galling prospect is inevitable that they will have to content themselves with very humble stations in life, dependent even upon the more prosperous Uitlanders. No wonder these Boers fell an easy prey to the seductions and deceptive fallacies of the Afrikaner Bond doctrine of conquest, for dispossessing England of her Colonies, and to resume a free hand for expansion northwards as well. ”

“ The ablest men in Holland and South Africa exercised themselves with that task with an ardour impelled by jealous hatred against the English and intensified by successive revelations of more startling discoveries of gold and other mineral wealth in the Transvaal. It was then, about thirty years ago, that a well-informed, influential and unscrupulous coterie in Holland devised the fell projects which developed into that potential association since known as the Afrikaner Bond. ”

“ There are plenty of respectable Boers in whose ears those expressions still tingle.
The man, who is no speaker, was, nevertheless, apt to grow warm and impressive, drawn out probably by interruptions and opposing views. The speeches terminated on one occasion by one of the party saying in violent Bond fashion: "The English hired the Zulus to massacre our people. They robbed us of Natal, and drove us from the Colonies. There can be no peace with them until we have our own. God helps them who help themselves. Whoever takes their part is against us and against every true Afrikaner." ”

“ It had “paralysed our political life.” “In fact,” he goes on to say, “the Bond has sacrificed the welfare of the country for years to the selfish attainment of one object, namely, the supremacy of the Dutch-speaking inhabitants of the Cape Colony, regardless of the rights of others; the imagined good of an ignorant clique of the Dutch has been preferred to the good of the country. These men must not have power; they are wholly unfit to have it. The Bond is a body striving solely for its own benighted ends, and founded and conducted on race lines.” ”

“ The Imperial Government is no step-mother, and the federation of Southern Africa will doubtless be on similar lines to those of the Canadian Dominion. Certainly no system will be forced upon the people contrary to their wishes, but the resurrection of Bond power in the Cape Colony would absolutely prevent any well-considered and statesmanlike plan, in which all men would receive fair play utterly regardless of race extraction. In fact the British and the Africander Bond theories are diametrically opposed. ”

“ God is with us. It is his will to unite us as a people”—“to make a united South Africa free from British authority.” The two actual founders of the Bond party were Mr Borckenhagen, a German who was residing in Bloemfontein, and Mr Reitz, afterwards state secretary of the Transvaal. Two interviews have been recorded which show the true aims of these two promoters of the Bond at the outset. One occurred between Mr Borckenhagen and Cecil Rhodes, the other between Mr Reitz and Mr T. Schreiner, whose brother became, at a later date, prime minister of Cape Colony. ”

“ In lieu of reforms, Bond projects and armaments were secretly pursued with redoubled vigour towards the climax which should install Afrikanerdom supreme in South Africa, financially as well as politically.
BLOEMFONTEIN FRANCHISE CONFERENCE—BOER ULTIMATUM
Capitalists had already begun to feel nervous about the final security of their investments; operations and credit became restricted, fresh projects were abandoned and a persistent withdrawal of capital set in. Trade and prosperity were progressively waning, accompanied with still more ominous portents for the Uitlanders' future. ”

“ The association known as the Africander Bond was started as a species of political nursery wherein to expand the ideas of the budding Boer, and "coach" him in his duties as a free-born subject. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," as we all are aware, and it seems to have been the object of this organisation to implant just sufficient knowledge in the mind of the ignorant farmer to foster his hostility to Great Britain, without encouraging him to progress sufficiently to gauge the advantages to himself of peace and goodwill with a sovereign power. ”

“ In the Cape the Afrikander Bond had been formed, and its more than dubious attitude to the British connexion alienated Merriman from the Dutch extremists. “My quarrel with the Bond,” he said in a speech at Grahamstown in 1885, “is that it stirs up race differences. Its main object is to make the South African Republic (the Transvaal) the paramount power in South Africa.” The Bond had caused the fall of the Scanlen administration because the Ministry opposed the attempt of the Transvaal Boers to seize Bechuanaland. ”

“ Not knowing at the time that State Secretary Reitz was an inveterate Bondman, that old Free State patriot had roundly denounced to him the wickedness of Bond aims, and added the remark that the establishment of a united Boer Republic apart from British supremacy in South Africa was a deceptive dream. England has a mission in Africa—that of the Boers can only be subordinate to it. It would need the aid of a powerful maritime combination to supplant England. The case of America does not present an analogy ”

“ His control over the Bond enabled him for many years, while free from the responsibilities of office, to make and unmake ministers at his will, and earned for him the name of “Cabinet-maker of South Africa.” Although officially the term “Afrikander” was explained by Hofmeyr to include white men of whatever race, yet in practice the influence of the Bond was always exerted in favour of the Dutch, and its power was drawn from the Dutch districts of Cape Colony. The sympathies of the Bond were thus always strongly with the Transvaal, as the chief centre of Dutch influence in South Africa ”

“ While in itself acknowledging no single form of government as the only suitable form, and whilst acknowledging the form of government existing at present [the Bond] means that the aim of our national development must be a united South Africa under its own flag.
In the following year the Farmers’ Protection Association was amalgamated with the Bond, and the joint organization fell under the control of J. H. Hofmeyr, the leader of the Dutch party in Cape Colony. ”

“ The Afrikander nationalists of the Cape hated England no less than did the republican nationalists, though they feared her more. The policy which the Bond had adopted after the occupation of the Republics by the British forces was perfectly definite. Its object was to avert the final disaster of the war by securing the maintenance of the Republics as independent centres of Afrikander nationalism. ”

“ The very fact that one heard these unwise people openly say that every Boer ought to be killed, and that even women and children ought to be suppressed if one wanted to win the war, gave abroad the idea that England was a nation thirsting for the blood of the unfortunate Afrikanders. This mistaken licence furnished the Bond with the pretext to persuade the Dutch Colonists to rebel, and the Boer leaders with [164] that of going on with their resistance until their last penny had been exhausted and their last gun had been captured. ”

“ During the period of Brand’s presidency a great change, both political and economic, had come over South Africa. The renewal of the policy of British expansion had been answered by the formation of the Afrikander Bond, which represented the racial aspirations of the Dutch-speaking people, and had active branches in the Free State. ”

“ In any case, we may expect soon to see a considerable influx of capitalists, farmers, and traders, and they cannot but give an impetus to South Africa’s reviving fortunes, let political ineptitude do its worst. I have endeavoured to show wherein lie the chief obstacles to progress in the new colonies. In the old—Natal would in any case seem to have an era of immediate prosperity before her—the future is darkened by considerations all too apparent for the most optimistic or blind to overlook or ignore. The Africander Bond and the Dutch Reformed Church have not buried the hatchet. ”

“ By representing the new British population, which followed in the wake of the mineral discoveries, as "fortune-seekers" and adventurers and not genuine colonists, the Bond endeavoured, not merely to widen the natural line of cleavage between the townsman and the countryman, but actually to detach the older British settlers from sympathy with the mother country, and, by drawing them within the sphere of Afrikander nationalist aspirations, to make them share its own antagonism to British supremacy. ”

“ It is a sad reflection to note that the entire wealth which constituted the national heirloom of the Transvaal will have been wasted, and comes far short to cover the actual war expenditure. In regard to preventive measures against another Bond war, nothing appears clearer than the necessity of applying the lex talionis upon the Hollander element in South Africa (though not in that inhuman fashion as was practised upon the English refugees before and at the commencement of the war) . ”

“ The point of view of the astute Afrikander statesmen is different from that of the guerilla leader; but each party is equally hopeful of the ultimate victory of the nationalist cause. Of the attitude of the Bond in this month of February, 1901, Mr. Kipling writes from Capetown:
"Some of the extremists of the Bond are for committing themselves now, fully, to the Dutch cause, De Wet and all; but some of the others are hunting for some sort of side-path that will give them a chance of keeping on the ground-level of the gallows, within hail of a seat in the next Parliament. ”

“ Simon's Bay as a naval and military station on the road to India, and give over all the rest of South Africa to the Afrikanders." [21]
This general statement of the purpose of the Bond was supported by reiterated appeals to racial passion:
"The little respect which the Afrikander had for British troops and cannons [up to the Majuba defeat] ," he writes, "is utterly done away. And England has learnt so much respect for us Afrikanders that she will take care not to be so ready to make war with us again.... The Englishman has made himself hated, language and all. ”

“ My fear is that there will be some half-action insufficient to crush the Dutch, and sufficient to exasperate them. He relies on the promised support of the Colonial Ministry. They may promise, but I will believe only when I see it that a Cape Ministry and Legislature will oppose the Boers in earnest. They will encourage us to entangle ourselves, as they did with the Diamond Fields, and then leave us to get out of the mess as we can. South Africa cannot be self-governed in connection with this country, except with the good-will of the Dutch population. ”