The southern part of the African continent has, for nearly a hundred and fifty years, been witness to a set of epic struggles to create within it a single unified state and, within that, forms of citizenship that are both identifiably “South African” and more or less collectively owned. The never-ending nature of these twinned tasks has echoes in contemporary mantras about the healthiness of “nation-building,” just as surely as the underlying anemia remains manifest in the name of a place and a people that are, arguably, still more of an expression of geography than a reflection of a collectively lived experience. Perhaps it is significant that it was only a decade after the discovery of diamonds, in the late 1860s, that these struggles first took on recognizably modern political forms. An early attempt to promote federation among the dominant white settlers was, however, thwarted by the still largely separate identities of the two British coastal colonies (the Cape and Natal) and two inland Afrikaner-Dutch or “Boer” republics (the Orange Free State and the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek) that sprawled over southern Africa—enveloping, albeit imperfectly, their distinctive and very different indigenous African, imported Asian, and Colored (people of mixed descent) laboring populations.
The lack of a sufficiently strong economic spine at the center of the country inhibited meaningful political integration for at least two decades after the discovery of diamonds. But when important deep-level gold reefs were discovered in the Witwatersrand region of the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek in the mid 1880s, it not only enhanced the possibilities for greater regional economic integration but gave new impetus to imperial interests that were, in part, founded on the role of gold in international trade and finance. British imperialism, which often stalked its quarry with cultural and commercial feints before finally pulling down its prey through conquest and formal annexation, was for some time frustrated by the presence of the two independent Boer republics. Yet, within little more than a decade and half, the Orange Free State and the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek had both been subjugated in the course of the bloody South African War of 1899–1902.[1]
In the aftermath of the war, an imperial administration freed from accountability to a domestic electorate set about reconstructing an economy that was by then predicated unambiguously on gold. At the same time, British civil servants, municipal officials, and their cultural adjuncts were hard at work in the heartland of the former Afrikaner-Dutch republics helping to forge new identities—first as “British South Africans” and then, later still, as white “South Africans.” Some scholars, for good reasons, identify these new identities as partly underpinning the act of union that followed in 1910. Although challenged by an Afrikaner rebellion only four years later, they did much to shape South African politics between the two world wars and right up to the present day.[2]
It is easy to understand why any search for the emergence of an overarching form of “South Africanism” should be rooted in the postwar reconstruction period. In the wake of military conquest, British imperialists could address directly the problem of constructing the political identities that would eventually form the building blocks of an enlarged and unified state. What is as interesting, however, is to probe just how difficult the hardest nuts in this process, the two Boer republics, were to chew over and digest prior to the act of union. In the case of what ostensibly was the hardest nut of all—the Z.A.R.—there are compelling reasons for pushing such an examination back into the 1890s in order to understand more fully the extent to which the informal processes of British imperialism were leaching out Afrikaner-Dutch republican identities prior to the South African War. The latter exercise has not been undertaken despite the fact that there was already a substantial British working class presence on the Witwatersrand by the mid 1890s, and that elements sympathetic to British imperialist ambitions had mounted an attempt at a coup de état in 1895 which precipitated a brief but important period of reform within the republic. The resulting lacunae in the historiography may have something to do with the way that the Z.A.R. was portrayed at the time. It may too have contributed to a lack of appreciation of the many and varied ways in which Kruger’s economic, political and social policies interacted with a gold mining industry which was itself mutating extremely rapidly between 1895 and 1899. It is also possible that certain of those misperceptions have lingered, dogging the ways in which modern historians view President S. J. P. Kruger and his reform-minded administration.
Were one fully to address these deficiencies, it would be necessary to take a fresh look at the rural economic foundations of the Z.A.R. and to try to understand the origins and nature of its early attempts at industrialization before the discovery of gold on the Rand. It would also help to chart how the original Kruger plan for industrialization later intersected with the development of the deep-level mines, giving rise to unforeseen social consequences that could be exploited by international gangsters. A better understanding of these unintended developments in the urbanized Witwatersrand area would in turn allow one to form a more rounded judgment of the demands made on the Kruger government’s legislative program and civil service, and on the police force’s ability to enforce the law in ways more acceptable to capitalists sympathetic to imperial ambitions in the region.
Any attempt to answer so formidable an agenda would, however, take more space than could be accommodated within the confines of a single article. What follows, then, is a briefer attempt to sketch the form that a more extended argument might take. This essay, using as a case study the modernization of the office of the state attorney in the Z.A.R., will document the struggle for control of the office of the Johannesburg public prosecutor and the police force, as embodied in the careers of two men who, in many ways came to embody the cultural and political tensions involved in the complex process of becoming South Africans—Jan Christia(a)n Smuts and Frederick Edward Traugott Krause. Superficially a clash of personalities, their struggle allows us to explore in microcosm the emerging contest of ideas over the course that the Z.A.R. would follow and over the role that law and law-enforcement agencies would play in fulfilling that course.
Context: The Bedrock Foundation and Changing Nature of the Political Economy
The Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek under the Leadership of President S. J. P. Kruger, 1883–1899
The South African War of 1899–1902 has cast long shadows over both the history of the region and the historiography of the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek. With few exceptions, the Z.A.R. under the leadership of President S. J. P. Kruger, who was elected to office in 1883, 1888, 1893 and 1898, is portrayed as an essentially backward agricultural state, presided over by a Calvinist patriarch and served by an archaic, corrupt, stubborn, administration. These supposedly crippling inadequacies—evident in the early 1880s—are seen as becoming ever more pronounced after the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 when the president and his administration were overwhelmed by an industrial revolution—the social, political, and economic demands of which they were incapable of addressing. Viewed from this perspective, the South African War was almost a historical necessity that prepared the way for the postwar reconstruction administration presided over by Alfred (Lord) Milner and his largely Oxford trained “kindergarten” who swept aside impediments inhibiting the development of a modern industrial state that could assume its rightful place within the wider British Empire.
But while there are several telling brush strokes in this portrayal, the resulting picture is more akin to na¨ve art than to realism, where attention to detail and a refinement of technique leaves one with sharper images. This is so despite the fact that admonitions to be more careful in assessing Kruger’s leadership and his hard-pressed administration’s achievements have been around for some time. Thirty years ago, in a work that remains puzzlingly neglected, C. T. Gordon urged historians to be wary of portraying Kruger as “a granite Cromwellian patriarch entirely unmoved by the fierce blasts of what modern times would call ‘the winds of change’ assailing his state.”[3] At almost the same time, H. J. Simons and R. E. Simons, exploring the twinned variables of Class and Colour in South Africa, argued that, “left to itself few agrarian societies were so richly endowed or well equipped as the Transvaal for an industrial revolution,” and went on to laud the Kruger administration’s many achievements made under adverse political circumstances.[4] The portrayal of Kruger as antediluvian may have become more muted in recent times, but the supposed inability of the Z.A.R. administration to address adequately the demands of a modern mining economy and a society composed largely of immigrants remains largely intact.[5]
There are good reasons for taking the earlier cautionary notes seriously. Besides a mastery of presidential politics that spanned nearly two decades, Kruger demonstrated an openness of mind in adapting economic and social policies to the changing needs of the republic. Nor were these policies mere responses to the shifting demands of the mine owners. Indeed, some of his most important policies predated the emergence of a demanding capitalist society on the Witwatersrand. Encouraging local industrial development through the granting of concessions to selected manufacturers, for example, grew from ideas put to him in the early 1880s by “Sammy” Marks and A. H. Nellmapius, two trusted east European Jewish entrepreneurs who had either seen or heard of similar policies implemented in Tsarist Russia. Likewise, several surprisingly flexible initiatives governing aspects of social life on the Witwatersrand predated the advent of deep-level mining and the influx of tens of thousands of immigrant—Uitlander/foreign—workers.[6]
But while there is evidence that points to the Kruger administration’s ability to be creative and even proactive in some areas of the social, economic, and political urban life of his republic during the first ten and arguably less challenging years of his presidency, there is other evidence that suggests that his willingness to adopt new policies became notably more hesitant, perhaps only reflexive, in the early 1890s. If so, there were good reasons for it. Growing discontent within his small enfranchised rural constituency first became evident in 1893 when Kruger only narrowly avoided being defeated by his rival for the presidency, General P. J. Joubert. The advent of deep-level mines, with their greater sensitivity to direct and indirect costs, made increased demands of the Kruger administration and contributed to the frustrations of a section of the mining industry that became involved in an abortive attempt to overthrow his government in 1895. The Jameson Raid, the increasingly important role of gold in international finance, and British imperial ambitions as embodied in Kruger’s nemesis, Alfred Milner, all heightened the pressure and tension to which the Z.A.R. administration was being subjected by the time the elderly Kruger faced his fourth and final presidential election early in 1898.[7]
Kruger’s first term of office, which commenced in 1883, came in the wake of a successful armed struggle waged by his burghers against the British in the “first war of independence” (1880–81). He presided over a republic the economic fortunes of which depended almost exclusively on agriculture and which attempted, through the concessions policy, to foster the development of a modest manufacturing sector that would add value to the products of his Dutch- and Afrikaans-speaking Boer constituents. By the time that he embarked on his second term of office, in 1888, the republic was already set upon an economic course in which the needs of this small manufacturing sector had to be reconciled not only with those of agriculture, but with those of emerging primary industry on the Witwatersrand and a growing immigrant population. When he took office for the third time, in 1893, the Second Volksraad, dealing specifically with the political pressures emanating from the anglicized, urbanized Witwatersrand, had already been in existence for three years, and it was clear that the basis for the country’s economic future had again changed. The future by then lay with gold mining, a manufacturing sector serviced by a concessions policy that had been overtaken by unforeseen economic developments and, only as a poor third, agriculture.[8] When Kruger took took office for the fourth time, in 1898, the changing economic needs of primary industry and the growing political demands of an immigrant urban proletariat, which had been opportunistically adopted by Milner, were already paramount. This meant that the independence of the republic was under military threat by increasingly aggressive British imperialists and mine owners in search of more pliant state structures.
Any president—let alone one having to cope with changes wrought by a distant industrial revolution and imperial ambitions—would have been hard pressed to keep abreast of such fundamental shifts in priorities within a fifteen-year period. Adjustments of this order demanded not only political adroitness of the sort that Kruger undoubtedly commanded, but the ability constantly to realign his executive and civil service in ways that allowed them more effectively to address changing circumstances. The manner by and moments at which Kruger altered the composition of his executive and the civil service have, as we have already noted, yet to be studied in detail. Even so, in those rare instances where the bare outlines of the story have been plotted, there is evidence of a flexibility and suppleness of purpose that is seldom foregrounded in accounts of the Kruger state.
When he took up the presidency in 1883, Kruger was reluctant to recruit Afrikaners drawn from either the Cape Colony or the neighboring republic of the Orange Free State to his executive or civil service. In his view, the exposure of most native-born and locally educated Afrikaners to undesirable forms of anglicization left them with suspiciously soft political centers and unsuited to manning an administration that, if anything, was a distant offshoot of mother Holland.[9] Instead, he made use of a trip to the Netherlands, in 1884, to recruit several civil servants and teachers who had been educated and trained in the continental tradition. Among these and other recruits who later became a source of considerable political tension in the Z.A.R. were Dr. Willem Leyds, a gifted young attorney trained in the classic codes of civil law and administration, and Nicolaas Mansvelt, who became Kruger’s “Superintendent of Education” in 1891.
By his third term of office, in 1893, “Kruger’s Hollanders,” as this cohort of administrators were derisively referred to, had become increasingly unpopular not only among the president’s growing number of “progressive” burgher opponents, but among a powerful group of Rand-based British and European notables. In the aftermath of the Jameson Raid, Kruger embarked on a program of accelerated reform—most of it focused on the increasingly troublesome urbanized Witwatersrand. In the face of mounting criticism from the mine owners and their imperial allies, he announced an Industrial Commission of Enquiry, which convened in 1897. After the commission, the lukewarm reception of its findings, and a decisive victory in the presidential election in 1898, Kruger showed ever greater willingness to reduce his dependence on Dutch administrators and advisers and recruited a growing number of Afrikaners of Cape or Free State origin whose deepening nationalist sympathies he had less reason to doubt. Many of these new men were products of an English legal education that, unlike that of Leyds and his colleagues, was based on the common law and entailed a commitment to a judiciary largely independent of the civil service.[10]
While several of Kruger’s earliest administrators and advisers enjoyed the right to practice law in the Z.A.R. by virtue of their legal education in Amsterdam or elsewhere in Holland, most of those appointed after 1895 had studied law in London and secured admission to the English bar as “barristers” (“advocates”). This offered them an alternate route into the legal profession in the colonies and independent states of southern Africa. Almost all senior appointments to the Kruger administration after 1895, and especially after 1898, had gained admission to the English bar by examination at one of the four “Inns of Court” clustered around the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand—Gray’s Inn, the Inner Temple, Lincoln’s Inn, and the Middle Temple. Among several others appointed during the latter part of Kruger’s presidency were F. W. Reitz (state secretary, 1898, former president of the O.F.S., and member of the Inner Temple) and perhaps his closest political adviser in the negotiations leading up to the outbreak of the war, the talented president of the Orange Free State, Marthinus Theunis Steyn (Inner Temple).
On closer examination, however, the rather neat distinction drawn between those trained on the continent where the legal systems were informed largely by the civil law, and those exposed to the more insular English legal training where the common law prevailed, is sometimes difficult to sustain. Nor is this distinction of much help in understanding other factors that might have influenced the role and function of senior advisers and administrators, such as age, family history, gender, language, personality, and temperament. Indeed, there were several cases, including some that will be explored below, where legal practitioners had been either partially, or wholly, exposed to a legal education in both traditions. M. T. Steyn presents us with one such example. Having embarked on a legal training in Holland, Steyn, who despite his republican upbringing was anything but an anglophobe, soon discovered that his Dutch was not up to the task and moved to England where he eventually qualified at the Inner Temple. That said, however, such moves remained the exception rather than the rule.[11]
Some young Afrikaners, like Melius de Villiers, who went on to become the chief justice of the Orange Free State, obtained all their legal qualifications in South Africa. But most who went abroad, understandably, undertook their legal studies in only one of the systems, with the English rather than the continental system proving more popular. Thus, while J. B. M. Hertzog obtained his doctorate in law in Amsterdam in 1892 and went on to play a prominent role in the South African War, many equally eminent men of the time were members of either the Inner or Middle Temple, including J. G. Kotzé who was chief justice of the Z.A.R. until the constitutional crisis of 1898, and Sir Henry De Villiers, chief justice of the Cape Colony, who was called on to mediate in the same crisis.
In adapting the personnel in his administration to changed political circumstances in the Z.A.R. after the Jameson Raid, Kruger therefore had not only to take into account the emerging nationalist credentials of a new generation of modernizing Afrikaners drawn from the Cape Colony or the Orange Free State, but the different legal traditions in which they had been educated. The president’s problems were exacerbated by the fact that there was no simple divide between appointments made prior to 1895—when the continental Dutch tradition dominated those posts in his administration requiring legal expertise—and those made after the Raid, when he leaned more heavily on those who had passed through the Inns of Court. In a small but significant number of cases there was an awkward period of overlap during which advisers or administrators who had passed through the “old school” were required to work closely with younger Afrikaners who were products of the “new school.” This attempt to marry the older continental and the “new” English tradition in the executive and the civil service was not always conflict free. Those from the “old school” who had been appointed before 1898 sometimes sensed that, in career terms, they were yesterday’s men and that recent youthful appointees were ambitious, anxious to modernize, and ready to reshape the bureaucratic ethos of the Z.A.R. civil service in ways that were more in keeping with Kruger’s changed priorities.
The resulting tensions were not, of course, spread evenly through the administration. Indeed, if anything, they were confined to but one relatively small part of the civil service. It was in the office of the state attorney, in what today would be termed the Ministry of Justice, that the potential for conflict was greatest. But even here the problem hardly pervaded every corner of the republic and, even after 1895, it remained confined largely to the Witwatersrand. Significantly, it was in the Uitlander capital, Johannesburg, where the problems of law enforcement were most pressing, and especially in the office of the public prosecutor that tensions were most pronounced. Inevitably conflicts that were largely structural in origin were further exacerbated by deep-seated personal differences that could be traced back to, among many other things, education, gender, personality, religion, socialization, temperament, and value systems.
A Case Study: The Struggle for Control of the Johannesburg Public Prosecutor’s Office, 1898–99
What follows is a detailed four-part account and analysis of the tensions that arose between State Attorney J. C. Smuts, and those whom he appointed to office in 1898, and F. E. T. Krause, Johannesburg’s senior public prosecutor and those who reported to him. The first section provides brief biographies of four of the principal actors embroiled in this contestation. The second sketches the origins of the most pressing social problems on the Witwatersrand, the rise of organized crime, and the Kruger administration’s changing priorities relating to “moral offences” associated with alcohol, gambling, and prostitution. The third explores the ways in which the tensions between the state attorney and the “first public prosecutor” came to a head in 1898–99 as a result of an important case arising from the international traffic in “white slaves.” The fourth and final section outlines the remarkable oppositional symmetry that continued to punctuate the careers of Smuts and Krause long after the South African War and the immediate fate that befell them and their closest allies during the conflict of 1899–1902.
I. The Social Roots of the “Old” and “New” Administrative Elites in the Kruger State
In order fully to understand the alliances that developed among the officials in the Johannesburg public prosecutor’s office in 1898–99 as well as the tensions that came to separate the two factions that emerged, it is necessary to explore briefly the cohorts from which the four principal contestants were drawn, their social origins, school education, legal training, and their respective career and professional networks.
The “Old School”
F. E. T. Krause (1868–1959). The son of German immigrants to the Orange Free State—Dr. C. J. B. Krause and Frederika Kellner—Frederick (“F. E. T.” or “Fritz”) was one of twelve children. His father, trained by the Berlin Missionary Society, left the church and, in 1854, became district surgeon in Bloemfontein where F. E. T. was born in 1868. A child of a modest-sized city and a product of the northern plains, Krause was educated at Grey College. He matriculated from the Cape university and like four of his brothers, two of whom became medical practitioners and two who became lawyers, aspired to a tertiary education. He enrolled at Victoria College, Stellenbosch, obtaining a B.A. (Hons.) degree in Literature and Philosophy in 1888. Already a staunch republican in spirit, he made his way back north to the Z.A.R. but, after a look around Pretoria and the Witwatersrand, left almost at once for Holland. In 1888, he registered as a law student at the University of Amsterdam at a time when student morals in the university towns were the subject of considerable concern in certain quarters. Not long thereafter he was joined in the law faculty by another recent graduate of Victoria College, J. B. M. Hertzog.[12]
In 1890, having obtained his degree cum laude, Krause crossed the North Sea and enrolled as a student at the Middle Temple and then stayed at Christ College, Cambridge, where for some months he enjoyed all the privileges of a registered student. The following year his brother—Ludwig Emil (“Lodi”)—and J. C. Smuts enrolled as law students at the same college. By then, however, Krause, had already moved on to the École de Droit in Paris, where he once again chose to further his legal studies informally while adding French to the English, Dutch, and German that he already spoke fluently. After six months spent in Paris during the notoriously “naughty nineties” he returned to Amsterdam, where he was awarded a Doctorate in Law in 1893—just twelve months after J. B. M. Hertzog had obtained the identical qualification.[13]
In the same year, 1893, Krause returned briefly to England and successfully completed the examinations of the Middle Temple, which gained him admission to the English bar. Later that year he was admitted to the bar in the Z.A.R. In Pretoria, his outstanding legal qualifications and enthusiasm for the nationalist cause caught the eye of Dr. Hermanus Coster, one of “Kruger’s Hollanders,” who, in 1895, secured him an official position in the Pretoria High Court. The following year Coster, the state attorney who had been trained in Leiden, chose Krause as his junior counsel—the only South African in his team—when he was called upon to prosecute the mining-house “reformers” behind the Jameson Raid.
It was during this legal-political endeavor, which further stiffened Krause’s nationalist resolve, that his attention was first drawn to J. Douglas Forster, the Kimberley-based correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette whose writings were to have a profound effect on his later life. Forster, a graduate of the Middle Temple, was a jingo whose refusal to master Dutch confined him to practicing law in the Cape Colony. When new opportunities presented themselves on the Rand, however, he assumed a stage name and joined forces with a French actress in a touring theatrical company while his wife either left, or was sent, to live in England—a controversial development that Krause was later wont to use for his own purposes. Later, Forster assisted in the defense of Baron von Veldheim when the latter was prosecuted by Krause for the assassination of the mine magnate Woolf Joel. Forster probably blotted his copy book further when, still later, he became the president of the Johannesburg branch of the imperialistic South African League.[14]
In mid-May 1896, after Krause had helped secure the prosecution of the reformers, Herman Coster was instrumental in getting Krause appointed as Johannesburg’s first—as in principal—public prosecutor This new position, in addition to the usual criminal work associated with such office, left him responsible for all prosecutions arising from infringements of recent morality legislation governing alcohol, gambling, and prostitution. In a brash mining town dominated by hard-living black migrant workers and immigrant white miners, which the novelist Olive Schreiner described in passing as “a great fiendish hell of a city … filled with brothels and gambling halls,” this proved an enormous responsibility. His task was complicated by the notoriously corrupt Z.A.R. police force, manned as it was largely by the poor, illiterate, but wily sons of farmers who happened to be burghers.
After just four months in his new office, Krause challenged the chief of police, Commandant D. E. Schutte, about the inadequacies of the charge office and, in a manner that was more congruent with the continental tradition, secured direct control of both the detective and police forces. This development also brought him into personal contact with a “detective division” that was something of a law unto itself in that it had functioned as an entirely independent unit without any lines of authority linking it to the office of the state attorney in Pretoria. In a manner reminiscent of the role played by “investigating magistrates” in Europe, Krause and the local landdrosts (magistrates) then used all information emanating from anonymous or signed letters of complaint to maintain their own lines of communication to informants in the local underworld. These included certain French and German pimps who would have been able to communicate with Krause either verbally or in writing but, for whatever reasons, excluded the numerous Polish- or Russian-Jewish pimps in the city. Krause also saw to it that the number of public prosecutors in Johannesburg was increased from three to four and that they, in turn, were supported by a team of twenty-two legal clerks—each of whom, should the occasion arise, was empowered to act as assistant public prosecutor.[15]
By 1897 Krause and his closest personal and professional colleague, who had also been educated in Holland, were in full control of an extended office that he had fashioned and staffed in a manner in keeping with his legal training and that, for purposes of day-to-day business, was operating almost independently of the state attorney’s office thirty miles distant in Pretoria. This growth of autonomy in the Johannesburg office was further underwritten in Pretoria, albeit unintentionally, when the office of state attorney was occupied by three different incumbents in the thirty-six months between 1895 and 1897—first by the “progressive” Ewald Esselen after Kruger’s narrowly won election in 1893, and later by the “Hollanders” Drs. Herman Coster and Schagen van Leeuwen.[16]
Krause, at the time, was described as “a popular” figure in local legal circles. He had no serious hobbies but admitted to being something of a bibliophile and, in even milder form, to being a bit of a “sportsman.” In a press interview on the eve of his thirtieth birthday he revealed that he was living with his aged mother in a house in Wolmarans Street, but that he had embarked on building a new residence in Rissik Street. In the 1890s the latter was an address that was not markedly less cosmopolitan or tranquil than were most in the ribald and rowdy inner-city. Krause married a noted feminist and divorcee who was of Anglo-Irish descent in Johannesburg, in 1907, at the age of 38.[17]
C. Broeksma (1863–1901). Krause’s closest collaborator and confidant in Johannesburg was Cornelis Broeksma, the city’s “second public prosecutor.” Little is known about Broeksma’s childhood or adolescence. Born in Assen, Drente, in 1863—and five years older than Krause—Broeksma received his early schooling in Holland before emigrating to southern Africa in early 1882 at the age of nineteen. In the Orange Free State, he became a clerk in the office of the state attorney in Bloemfontein and studied law. In 1886, having qualified as a “law agent,” he moved to Dewetsdorp where, for some time, he ran his own practice and, in 1891, married seventeen-year-old Francina Vionel. The couple’s first child was born in 1892.
In 1895, by the time that the Broeksmas’ second child was born, the couple were living in Pretoria. It was presumably just after the Jameson Raid and Krause’s appointment as first public prosecutor that the Broeksmas moved across to Johannesburg. Second in rank only to the first public prosecutor, Broeksma soon earned the confidence and respect of Krause who, later in life, continued to refer to him as the “second public prosecutor” even after J. C. Smuts had appointed his own protégé, F. R. M. Cleaver, to the same position in 1898, thereby effectively relegating Broeksma to the position of “third public prosecutor.” Broeksma, a man with profound republican loyalties, was deeply religious, closely associated with local Dutch Reformed Church initiatives, and strongly opposed to the abuse of alcohol.[18]
The “New School”
J. C. Smuts (1870–1950). Born on the farm Bovenplaats near Riebeeck West in the Cape in 1870, Jan Christian Smuts was two years younger than F. E. T. Krause. Although not the offspring of a missionary couple, like Krause, Smuts was nevertheless raised in a deeply religious home set amidst the rugged beauty of the Winterhoek Mountains. Educated at home until the age of twelve, he was destined to become a minister but was clearly not beyond having to struggle with more worldly things. In 1886, aged sixteen, he wrote a letter to a potential mentor, Professor Charles Murray, asking him to keep a watchful eye over him in Stellenbosch where he planning to move to, since “as you know, such a place, where a large puerile element exists, affords fair scope for moral, and what is more, religious temptation….”[19] He shunned institutional accommodation, boarded privately, and matriculated at the Stellenbosch Gymnasium before proceeding to Victoria College, where, in 1891, he obtained the “mixed degree” in literature and science. In October of the same year, and just months after F. E. T. Krause had been attached briefly to the College on an informal basis, Smuts was formally enrolled to read law at Christ College, Cambridge.[20]
Smuts, who had courted a fellow student, Sybella Margaretha (“Isie”) Krige while in Stellenbosch, was reported as having been “utterly desolate” throughout his first year at Cambridge. Despite the presence of a small group of South Africans including F. S. Malan, N. J. de Wet, and F. E. T. Krause’s younger brother, “Lodi,” Smuts remained a loner who pined for the mountains of the western Cape. With his personal problems compounded by a singular lack of funds, Smuts focused almost obsessively on his legal studies, breaking from his books only to attend the Presbyterian church and to take long, unaccompanied, walks in the featureless fenland. This Spartan existence eased slightly in late 1892 or 1893 when he went walking in the Derbyshire hills, sometimes accompanied by a young lady by the name of Ethel Brown who resided in Belper along with her widowed mother and a sister. After this summer interlude he corresponded for a time with Miss Brown and when they reestablished contact later in his career Smuts, already famous, requested—without success—that she return the letters he had written to her.[21]
It was also at about this time, in 1892, that Smuts started reading the works of the American poet Walt Whitman and reflecting more critically on the implications of his own, somewhat harsh, Christian upbringing. This process was facilitated, consciously or unconsciously, by his association with a reclusive don, H. J. Wolstenholme, a “lapsed Christian who retained his Christian conscience.” During this same period of brooding introspection about self and personal values, Smuts made entries in a small black notebook in which he jotted down ideas and random thoughts. One entry in this notebook, however, seems to have caught the attention of Smuts’s principal biographer, Hancock. In a passage that still today conceals as much as it reveals, Hancock noted that:
It contained, among many other things, the plan of a novel about a promising young man who succumbed to a temptation which, no doubt, assailed Smuts himself often enough. “A Cape Youth, clever, high-minded, bent upon the effectualisation of his personality, comes to Europe.” The opening sentence of a success story? On the contrary! The high-minded youth goes out one evening with a loose woman. From that moment “the radiant colours of promise” darken to shadow, to storm, to catastrophe—”Cf. Oedipus Rex, Walt Whitman.” The story gathers pace as a melodrama of sin, suffering, remorse, suicide. There but for the grace of God, he may have said, goes J. C. Smuts.[22]
Who could this “high-minded” youth have been? Many first novels are at least partly autobiographical but Hancock appears to have weighed this possibility and found it largely wanting. The “promising young man” could also have been modeled on one or another of the South African students who moved in Smut’s tiny circle of legal friends in England or perhaps it was somebody based in “Europe” whom he or his friends knew, or had heard about. No one knows for sure and perhaps we will never know.
Smuts’s unwavering attention to his studies meant that his ideas for the novel were never taken any further. After three years at Christ College he was the first person to sit for both parts of the Law Tripos in one year and was placed, as Hancock reminds us, “not only first but ‘brilliantly first.'” He then visited Strasbourg and, on his return to London some weeks later joined the chambers of John Roskill and enrolled as a student in the Middle Temple. In December 1894, just six months after completing his course at Cambridge, he sat for the honors examination at the Inns of Court, where he again finished top of his class and won two more prizes to add to the other scholarships that had helped ease his financial plight. It was at about this time, and probably through the Middle Temple, that he met another young South African barrister, F. R. M. Cleaver.
Yet even during the heady moments of professional achievement, as in 1894, Smuts’s interest in the ways that personal values articulated with questions of sexuality were never far from his mind. Even if he had wanted to avoid them, Victorian England would not allow it. London was passing through a decade of intense social ferment during which time issues surrounding the age of consent, pornography, and prostitution were seldom out of the public eye. As Smuts recorded in shocked tones, “I have seen the Kreutzer Sonata of Tolstoy exposed for sale in a window among obscene and immoral book intended to pander to the vices of the licentious.”[23] His on-going interest in Whitman was pursued through reading in the British Library during the early months of 1895.
Smuts’s objective was to “study the evolution of a personality” and he spent much time pondering Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Engaged in a voyage of intense inner discovery, he found Whitman’s unconventional views on sexuality fascinating. “Whitman,” he observed, “refuses to believe in this inherent depravity of our sexual nature.” He also noted that “In Whitman’s view sex is the foundation and starting point of all that is most noble in human character, most inspiring in human activity, and most precious to society.”[24] Whitman’s then largely unfashionable views seem to have had a profound effect on the twenty-five year old Smuts. Some time later he recorded that:
Whitman did a great service to me in making me appreciate the Natural Man, and freeing me from much theological or conventional preconceptions due to my very early pious upbringing. In was a sort of liberation, as St. Paul was liberated from the Law and its damnations by his Damascus vision. Sin ceased to dominate my view of life, and this was a great release as I was inclined to be severely puritanical in all things.[25]
But the resulting book-length manuscript failed to find an English publisher and, by September 1895, Smuts was back in Cape Town practicing as an advocate, doing some teaching, and becoming increasingly interested in South African politics. Like a good number of Cape Afrikaners he was critical of some of the policies and practices of their northern republican cousins. All of this changed when Rhodes and his conspirators launched the Jameson Raid. Smuts, along with several other young Afrikaners of the same class—many of whom went on to fight the South African War to the very bitter end—felt that, while their loyalty to a republican ideal remained undiminished, there was a pressing need for Kruger to attend urgently to the modernization and reform of the Z.A.R.[26] Early in 1897, with his interest in politics mushrooming, Smuts left for Johannesburg to set up a practice as an advocate and returned to the Cape only briefly, in April of that year, to marry Isie Krige, who accompanied him back to the Witwatersrand.
By late 1897 Kruger and Smuts, who had started out from very different points, were for a complex variety of personal, professional, and political reasons on paths of political convergence. After his electoral triumph in early 1898 Kruger found himself with more room for domestic political maneuvers than he had enjoyed for half a decade. He dispatched W. J. Leyds to Europe to act as a lobbyist for the republican cause and in June appointed Smuts as state attorney—the first Afrikaner to hold the position since it had been occupied half a decade earlier by the progressive-minded Ewald Esselen.
Smuts at once set about rearranging the office and powers of the state attorney, the role and staffing of the Johannesburg public prosecutor’s office, and reorganizing the deficiencies of the Z.A.R.’s notoriously corrupt detective division. He appointed several young reform-minded Afrikaners, including Louis Jacobsz (born Winburg, Orange Free State, 1863, Grey College, and the Inner Temple 1887) and advocate Andreas Stockenström to his Pretoria office. This sharpening of executive power was designed, among other things, to deal with socio-economic problems hampering the performance of the Witwatersrand mining industry in the recession that had followed on the Jameson Raid. In particular, he was concerned to clamp down on the illicit sale of gold amalgam that was costing the mine owners dearly and to address himself to the clutch of interrelated “moral” questions affecting the lives of black and white workers spread along the Reef.
Alcohol, gambling, and prostitution not only hampered the economic performance of the mining industry but tended to draw together the diverse strands of an unsettled industrial proletariat that could become more racially integrated than might be either politically acceptable or socially desirable. Smuts tackled these questions with such energy and focus that, by August 1899, Friedrich Eckstein, speaking on behalf of the Chamber of Mines, paid public tribute to the successes of the State Attorney, his newly appointed chief detective, and the police.[27]
F. R. M. Cleaver (1870–1900). Ferrar Reginald Mostyn Cleaver, like Smuts, was a product of one of southern Africa’s mountain districts rather than a man of the plains where the relatively populous and cosmopolitan urban centers were to be found. Born on the farm Zuringkrans in the Bethlehem district of the eastern Orange Free State in 1870, Cleaver was subjected to the same sort of isolated primary socialization that Smuts had experienced and enjoyed the horse-riding and hunting and love of nature that was part of outdoor living. The child of English-speaking parents, Cleaver was taught by his mother and then sent to St. Andrew’s College, Bloemfontein, a school run along the lines laid down by the Church of England. From there he went on to Grey College, where Krause was his senior by two years.[28]
At Grey, a bilingual institution bent upon cultivating a broader white “South African” identity, “Dick,” sometimes “Reg,” Cleaver won a state bursary and, on the advice of a Smuts confidant, Dr. M. J. Farrelly, went to London. In 1889, he enrolled for the LL.B degree of the University of London and the Middle Temple. During vacations he visited France and Germany as well as Holland where he spent enough time to acquire Dutch spoken with a distinctive accent. On admission to the Inns of Court, in June 1892, he practiced as a barrister in London for two years and was involved in several high-profile appearances including some, such as the Tower Hill anarchist case, where the accused were driven by political motives. During these twenty-four months and through his association with the Middle Temple, Cleaver would have again encountered Krause and, perhaps for the first time, Smuts who shared many of his attitudes as a modernizing Afrikaner. It is impossible to know, but it was presumably during the same period, at the age of twenty-two, that Cleaver experienced what, in the terminology of the day, was called “a disappointment in love.” Indeed, it may have been the same disappointment that drove Cleaver to abandon London in late 1894 and return to South Africa in an attempt to win the hand of his “Sophie.” He chose a dramatic and historic moment to return home and in 1895, while based in Johannesburg, was admitted to the bar of the Z.A.R.[29]
As with Smuts, almost all reservations that Cleaver might have had about Kruger’s Dutch-dominated administration were swept away by the Jameson Raid. He became a naturalized burgher of the Z.A.R. and, while critical of certain aspects of Kruger’s domestic policies, remained intensely loyal to the president and the republican cause. Like Krause, still a bachelor at the outbreak of the South African War, Cleaver—and again like Krause—shared a cottage with his elderly mother in Yeoville, Johannesburg.
II. Legislation, Public Morality, and the Roots of Organized Crime on the Witwatersrand; 1886–1899.
Alcohol
In 1881—before the discovery of alluvial gold at Barberton and fully a half a decade before the emergence of the reef on the Witwatersrand—the Z.A.R. Volksraad passed a resolution allowing A. H. Nellmapius, one of Kruger’s small band of east European confidants, the sole right to manufacture and bottle spirits from fruit and grain products grown by Boer constituents. Lacking any sizeable local market, however, “The First Factory Ltd.,” remained in the economic doldrums until the development of Johannesburg in 1886. By 1892 the “Hatherley Distillery,” the principal shareholder of which was another of Kruger’s “Russian” economic advisors, Sammy Marks, was a thriving business that sold most of its cheap product to mineworkers, black and white.
Between 1886 and 1895, some licensed and scores more unlicensed victuallers along the Witwatersrand, many of them poor Jewish immigrants fleeing pogroms in their native Russia or Poland, sold enormous quantities of cheap liquor obtained from Pretoria’s Hatherley Distillery to miners in Johannesburg and the surrounding towns. With the advent of the deep-level mines and their more demanding cost structures in early 1895, however, mine owners—previously content to have their black workers spend their wages on liquor acquired from a distillery in which they, too, owned shares—became increasingly concerned about low levels of law enforcement, excessive alcohol consumption, falling levels of productivity, and rising wage bills. In mid-1896 the Chamber of Mines abandoned its earlier, officially unformulated policy and requested that the state prohibit all black workers from purchasing or consuming alcoholic spirits.
In an era when Kruger was only reluctantly coming to terms with the fact that the primary industrial base of the Z.A.R. had already shifted from agriculture, where the votes of his burghers lay, to gold mining, which was dominated by unenfranchized Uitlanders, the Volksraad struggled to accept the viewpoint of the Chamber of Mines but eventually accommodated it in the form of Act 17 of 1896. However, when “total prohibition”—”total” only for black workers—came into effect on 1 January 1897, it was far from successful. Scores of unlicensed liquor sellers, many of them Jewish, simply banded together in time-honored fashion to form tightly integrated family-bound crime syndicates that, with the active assistance of a corrupt police force, continued to sell poor-quality alcohol to Africans at inflated prices.
This unsatisfactory situation persisted through most of 1898 as Kruger and his allies up and down the supply chain tried to find other ways of circumventing the mine owners demand for “total prohibition.” It was only in mid-1899, amidst a rare display of unity by Smuts, Krause, Broeksma, and Cleaver, precipitated by a newspaper campaign mounted by the mine owners, that there was a decline in the sale of illicit spirits to black workers.[30] Interestingly, and as will become clearer below, the same unity of purpose could never be achieved among the same set of public prosecutors on the more racially sensitive issue of prostitution.
Prostitution
In 1881 the agricultural, feudal-like, Z.A.R. had no home-grown laws governing prostitution. Nor was there much need for such legislation. To the extent that prostitution constituted a social problem on the subcontinent, it was confined largely, although not exclusively, to the port cities of the Cape Colony and, as predictably, to the diamond-mining center of Kimberley. The discovery of alluvial gold near Pilgrim’s Rest and shortly thereafter on the reef of the Witwatersrand, in 1886, changed all of that. The Z.A.R. suddenly had within its borders a half-dozen mining towns dominated by thousands of black migrant and white immigrant workers. This male influx, in turn, drew hundreds of black and white prostitutes into the booming Z.A.R. from within southern Africa, from places as far apart as Australia and California or, as we shall see, from any number of English-and non-English-speaking countries across the world.
The first prostitutes on the Rand goldfields were women drawn from the Kimberley diamond fields. Many of them were “colored” women from the Cape who attached themselves to liquor and gambling outlets where they plied their trade without the aid of pimps. But, as early 1892, larger numbers of “continental women” drawn from France, Belgium, and Germany were making their way to Johannesburg where they were housed in brothels and subjected to the depredations of the pimps who had accompanied them. The organization of prostitution along retail business lines continued apace throughout the great boom that accompanied the development of the deep-level mines. But the business took a further and decisive turn when scores of east European Jewish and Franco-American gangsters, along with hundreds of prostitutes who had honed their skills on New York’s Lower East Side under Tammany Hall, fled the United States in the era of municipal reform that followed on the revelations of the Lexow Committee in 1894.[31]
An influx of gangster-pimps from Manhattan using modern advertising techniques, including the distribution of printed calling cards, placed the local trade in commercial sex on an even more business-like footing and ensured increased turnover. It also helped integrate aspects of the procurement, recruitment and distribution of prostitutes into a network that embraced the wider Atlantic world. French and east European pimps utilized sophisticated modes of underworld communication to ensure that, by 1895, the brothels of the Witwatersrand were the preferred destination for a significant number of women to whom the Victorian press referred, sometimes with but little hyperbole, as “white slaves.”[32]
By the mid-nineties the New York pimps had organized themselves into a loosely integrated but extensive network that controlled hundreds of retail alcohol outlets as well as scores of brothels and gambling joints on the Witwatersrand. This organization, based on male Russo-Polish ethnic solidarities, took on a far more sharply defined form, however, just six weeks after Smuts took up his position as state attorney. July 1898 saw the arrival in Johannesburg of the mastermind behind the “American Club,” Joseph Silver. Silver, real name Joseph Lis, was born in Kielce, Poland, in 1869 and had served his apprenticeship as burglar-pimp in the London’s East End in the mid-1880s before moving to New York’s Lower East Side. There he had acquired first hand experience of Tammany Hall and the vice trade and spent some time in Sing Sing Prison. Later, through a combination of betrayal and cunning, he managed to acquire valuable experience as a “private detective” before returning to England to resume an extended career in crime.[33]
The Z.A.R.’s legal system and police force were simply overwhelmed by the rapid emergence and large scale of organized prostitution on the Witwatersrand. The politically “conservative” Hollanders who dominated Kruger’s first two administrations were drawn from “liberal” metropolitan European environments. There prostitution was seen as an unavoidable problem—a “necessary evil”—that could not be eradicated through legislation and something best left to form part of a wider repertoire of social measures that the state used to control its working classes. Dutch administrators had little or no inclination to interfere with an urban phenomenon that they saw as unfortunate by-product of modern living. As late as 1895 there were no effective state or municipal regulations governing individual, let alone organized, prostitution on the Witwatersrand.
Kruger’s politically “conservative” but socially “liberal” continental advisers had, however, failed to come to terms with changing local complexities. Laissez-faire policies that might credibly have held sway for a brief period in the earliest days of the Z.A.R. were mercilessly exposed by the ravages of time. The Z.A.R. was—at least in part—a theocratic settler state in Africa where a small number of burghers enjoyed the vote and not part of an emerging mass democratic state in a European setting. The Witwatersrand was hardly culturally or racially homogenous, and home to neither a stable, nor even a properly housed or domesticated, population. Johannesburg could hardly be compared to continental cities when it came to class, crime, color, culture, or demography. The Dutch model simply did not fit. Pretoria’s policy, or lack of thereof, raised a growing number of objections from local administrators, burghers, clergymen, landlords, residents, tenants, and teetotalers.
By April 1895 Johannesburg’s Landdrost van den Berg was looking to the provisions of the British model of the Contagious Diseases Act, used on the Kimberley diamond fields, as a template to draft the by now “urgently needed” regulations for the control of prostitution. Predictably, draft regulations that made only grudging provision for “controlled brothels” were questioned by “Kruger’s Hollanders.” For the next eighteen months, while the draft regulations shuttled endlessly between Pretoria and Johannesburg, Rand prosecutors were forced to resort to an antiquated sixteenth-century Roman-Dutch law in their largely unsuccessful attempts to enforce some public propriety in the city. Throughout this period a still growing number of American, French, German, and Russian pimps tightened their hold on the police, prostitutes, and imported “white slaves.” By October 1896, however, the president had tired of both the state attorney’s and the Johannesburg authorities’ attempts to settle on regulations for a form of legalized prostitution. In his new and uncompromising mood to accelerate social reform on the Witwatersrand, Kruger demanded that his advisers at once draft legislation that would seek to eradicate prostitution entirely. This was a move calculated to match the “total prohibition” on the sale of alcohol to Africans that was to take effect on 1 January 1897.[34]
When the Volksraad met in February 1897 the second bill on the order paper was what was to become the Immorality Act—Ontucht Wet, No. 2 of 1897. When it came into effect four weeks later, scores of pimps and prostitutes were subjected to physical molestation by angry white workers, various unemployed elements, and petty criminals as they boarded the train for Cape Town at Park Station. But, as was the case with “total prohibition,” the new legislation was heeded only by the faint-hearted. Those at the core of the commercialized sex trade simply tightened their organization and raised prices to meet the changed circumstances. By mid-1897 armed New York gangster-pimps were said to be conducting a “reign of terror” along stretches of western Commissioner Street while police corruption remained a pervasive problem.
Krause, wary of internecine gang warfare, told the police that he was willing to prosecute prostitutes only if he was convinced that the brothel had been subject of bona fide complaints and not simply the target of rumors or anonymous letters addressed to the public prosecutor. Rightly or wrongly, stories then started doing the rounds in some police circles that, regardless of the evidence produced, certain houses of prostitution— including a large French establishment at 19 Sauer Street—appeared to be “protected” and that it was impossible to obtain warrants for the arrest of the pimps or prostitutes operating there. Matters became more complicated when, in one of the first test cases under the new legislation, Judge Jorissen was so critical about a French prostitute having been prosecuted for sexual intercourse with an African miner who, like other black workers was subjected to the all-male mine compound system, that the jury found the accused, Louise Roger, not guilty. From that point on there was a further deterioration in the situation right up to the moment that J. C. Smuts became state attorney in June 1898. Indeed, in the very week that Smuts took up office, the newspapers ran an account of a fifteen-year-old girl who had been decoyed from her home in Vilna Krevo, Lithuania, by a member of the American Club, taken abroad to London, and then forced into a life of prostitution in a brothel at 35 Anderson Street.[35]
III. The “New” School against the “Old”: Smuts, Krause, and the Case of Joseph Silver
In order to understand Smuts’s complex and varied roles in the reform of the Z.A.R. administration in the post–Jameson Raid period, it is important to understand that he had joined a government that was already preparing for a war with Britain. It is sometimes forgotten that one of his earliest and most important tasks—and one that he set to work on with a will—was the reorganization of the republic’s somewhat ramshackle secret service.[36] Within days of assuming office Smuts was intimately involved in setting up clandestine lines of communication and in intelligence-gathering operations that, among other things, provided him with valuable information about corruption in law-enforcement agencies on the Witwatersrand. Thus, Smuts came to his more orthodox state duties as a person increasingly familiar with the advantages of dealing with matters that were not routed through everyday, cumbersome, or poorly secured bureaucratic circuits. Preparing for a conventional war Smuts was, at the same time, acquiring certain attitudes of mind and discipline that were well-suited to dealing with an inefficient public prosecutors office, a corrupt police force, and seasoned international gangsters.
In his more conventional role as state attorney, there were at least four pressing matters that demanded his attention by June 1898. First, the organization, reorganization, and manning of his own office. Second, the relationship of his office in Pretoria to, as well as the functioning and manning of, the public prosecutor’s office in Johannesburg. Third, the corruption, independence, and leadership of the detective division on the Witwatersrand. Fourth, the adequacy of the legislative instruments at his disposal for dealing with organized crime as well as the role of syndicates in illicit gold sales, alcohol, gambling and prostitution rackets, and the steadily growing menace of “white slavery.”
It was difficult to know where to begin to address these problems, let alone how to solve them. Moreover, the situation was not without a deep, underlying, irony. In essence, Kruger was asking that his Hollanders and their Amsterdam acolytes such as Krause—politically “conservative” but socially “progressive” in matters of public morality—make way for Smuts and the new men from the Inns of Court who were politically “progressive” but, by personality and legal training, far more “conservative” on matters of public social policy. Nowhere was this contradiction more evident, or likely to give rise to conflict and tension, than in the office of the Johannesburg public prosecutor.
Within months of his appointment Smuts recruited into his Pretoria office not only Andreas Stockenström, grandson of the more famous grandfather of the same name, but the remarkable Louis Johannes Jacobsz. Seven years older than Smuts and a product of the Inner Temple, Jacobsz had, at age thirty-two, resigned from his position as a puisne judge in the Orange Free State High Court when he felt that he was unqualified to decide upon the fate of the men who appeared before him. A renowned horseman and sportsman who, like Smuts, was a great walker and nature-lover, Jacobsz proved to be an ideal assistant state attorney and was much admired by colleagues including Cleaver.[37]
The man for whom Smuts most wanted to find a position, however, was Jacob de Villiers Roos, born in Somerset West in 1870. In August 1898 Smuts wrote to Roos, whose letters of naturalization he and F. W. Reitz had signed only the previous month, and told him that he wanted him to be part of a reorganized public prosecutor’s office in Johannesburg. Although there was no vacancy at the time of writing, Smuts felt that Roos should wait for one to appear or, if that failed, he would try to create a position for him.
But Roos was a man with a politically troubled past. In 1891 and 1892 he and Eugene Marais had owned and edited the “progressive,” stridently anti-Kruger, and Pretoria-based newspaper, Land en Volk. For reasons that remain unknown, the state attorney could not secure him a position in Johannesburg, and Roos later went on to become one of, if not the most, outstanding civil servant in the period after Union in 1910.[38]
Reforming the Z.A.R. police force on the Witwatersrand proved to be far more difficult than attracting men of quality to the state attorney’s office in Pretoria. From its earliest days the Z.A.R. police force in Johannesburg had been manned by a poorly paid, ragbag of illiterate and semiliterate sons of the soil whose primary virtue was that they were burghers. From the outset unsuited to dealing with an unruly migrant and immigrant mining population made up largely of foreigners, the police became ever more deficient and ineffectual after the advent of the deep-level mines and the emergence of organized crime syndicates. There was no code of discipline to which the chief of police could resort to try to blend the men under his command into a professional unit, while a poor, undifferentiated salary structure rendered men in the ranks easy targets for bribery and corruption. In 1894, in an extraordinary “open letter” addressed to members of the public through the columns of a local newspaper, the commandant of police, D. E. Schutte, set out the problems very bluntly. “I acknowledge the rottenness of the entire police force,” he wrote, “but decline to accept the disgrace attached thereto, having striven to reorganise the same, but failed through lack of support.” Only a few months later, in 1895, the men under his command were forced to go on strike in an attempt to get their wages paid.[39]
Schutte’s successor, G. M. J. van Dam, did not have a much easier time of it and was very sensitive to criticism directed at either the detectives or the regular police at his disposal. As already noted, he had fought and lost an early battle with Krause about control of the charge office while the force itself remained hopelessly understaffed. In June 1899, the inner city boasted a population of nearly 25,000 people while the entire Z.A.R. police force in Johannesburg consisted of thirty-five men, of whom only half were on duty at any one time. Thus, while it remained Smuts’s ambition to have the detectives and police on the Witwatersrand reporting directly to the state attorney’s office rather than to the first public prosecutor, this proved difficult to accomplish.[40]
Instead of confronting van Dam or Krause directly about problems in the charge office, or among the detectives and police, Smuts chose to wait for complaints to surface in Pretoria where, sometimes in the presence of the president himself, he could deal with the matter authoritatively and expeditiously. In mid-October 1898 a delegation of clergymen met Kruger and members of his executive to complain about the selective manner in which the existing legislation—Ontucht Wet, No. 2 of 1897—appeared to be implemented in Johannesburg. After an investigation that was probably undertaken by his assistant, Jacobsz, Smuts saw to it that the man responsible for enforcing the legislation, Detective J. J. Donovan, was dismissed. Only weeks later, when the chief detective, Robert Ferguson, was caught buying gold amalgam that was being passed on to Count Sarigny, the state attorney saw to it that he too was dismissed.[41]
With Kruger now personally appraised of the situation in regard to the Ontucht Wet on the Witwatersrand, Smuts used the weeks that followed to focus his attention almost exclusively on the Johannesburg public prosecutor’s office, the police, prostitution, and the role of the New York gangsters in “white slavery.” His first step was to get Act 2 of 1897 repealed and then to have the legislation governing prostitution redrafted so that those who had been successfully prosecuted for moral offenses were deported and banished from the Z.A.R. This legislation, Act No. 23 of 1898, came into effect in mid-December 1898. Even as this new legislation was making its way through the Volksraad, however, the state attorney was putting pressure on Krause and his colleagues to act take action against the Polish-Russians in the “American Club.” But here Smuts’s efforts in the closing months of 1898 met with a rather mixed response.[42]
While the pressure on those involved in the vice trade was still mounting after the clergymen’s visit to Kruger, there occurred—quite fortuitously—a split in the ranks of the American Club. In late October 1898, three of the New York pimps, David Krakower, Henry Rosenchild, and Morris Rosenberg withdrew from Joseph Silver’s operation and set up a smaller, rival, enterprise. Not content with this potentially dangerous step, Krakower went further and helped first to alienate and then recruit Silver’s reputed “wife,” “Lizzie Josephs,” into a small ring of prostitutes to whom, in return for a monthly fee, he offered “police protection.” Silver responded by beating Lizzie Josephs into submission and then, using corrupt morality squad policemen on the American Club’s payroll, got Krakower and his associates charged with “theft by means of fraud.” Seen from Pretoria, these divisions presented Johannesburg public prosecutors with an ideal opportunity to expose the inner workings of the New York gangsters and to obtain some badly needed prosecutions. For whatever reason, Krause, in whose portfolio all prosecutions under the immorality legislation fell, chose to assign the case to Cornelis Broeksma. The hearing was set for the Second Criminal Court in the first week of December 1898.
Even before the case went to trial, however, Krause was suddenly confronted by a most alarming set of allegations put forward by the recently dismissed head of the morality squad, Detective J .J. Donovan. In the course of another, separate, police investigation Donovan revealed that, during the period in which he was responsible for dealing with offenses under the Ontucht Wet, he had experienced the utmost difficulty in getting Krause to provide him with warrants for the arrest of certain pimps and prostitutes. More specifically, he had found it impossible to obtain warrants to act against the inhabitants of 19 Sauer Street, the brothel run by a Franco-American pimp, Francois Saubert and “Bertha” Hermann. Hermann was a notorious Lower East Side madam whose payment of $30,000 in bribes to Manhattan police and other exploits had gained international exposure only a few years earlier, when W. T. Stead had used the findings of the state’s Lexow Committee as the basis of his own sensationalist disclosures of corruption in New York City in his Satan’s Invisible World Displayed.[43]
With the new morality legislation already in his back pocket but still unpromulgated, Smuts waited to see the outcome of the case against Krakower and find out how Donovan’s allegations against the first public prosecutor would unravel. His patience was well rewarded. The preliminary hearing before Landdrost van den Berg in the case against Francois Saubert alias Francis Benjamin and Mathilda Hermann, on 23 November 1898, proved to be a revelation. Donovan repeated his allegations and reiterated the problems he had had in obtaining warrants for those residing at 19 Sauer Street. Somewhat unusually, Krause took the stand to put his own version of events and to cross-question Donovan. In the course of his testimony Krause made it clear that, instead of using the provisions of the Ontucht Act of 1897 to eradicate prostitution as intended by Kruger and the Volksraad, he and Commandant van Dam had viewed prostitution as a “necessary evil” and that, in the continental tradition, they had sought to control rather than eradicate brothels and merely to prevent soliciting in public by prostitutes. As reported in the press the following morning, Krause said:
The instructions received by Donovan with my knowledge and consent were that soliciting in the streets and sitting in the windows were to be put a stop to. Further, that where houses were suspected by the police to be brothels were to be found, they must only take the initiative against such a house when a bona fide charge was made against the house. Or if it was discovered to be a disorderly house; in other words, where they found that excessive drinking was going on, or where there were frequent rows.[44]Perhaps more to the point, this evidence squared perfectly with an earlier affidavit made by, and sworn to, the first public prosecutor some two weeks earlier.[45] The papers in the case, Landdrost van den Berg ruled, would be forwarded to the state attorney.
Smuts was not pleased. He chose this as the moment to appoint Cleaver as “second public prosecutor” in the Johannesburg office. He made it clear that Cleaver was to assume sole responsibility for implementing the provisions of the existing act, as well as those contained in the new law, Act 23 of 1898, when they came into force a few days later. Moreover, in order to enforce the new law, Cleaver was to have access to the services of another recent Johannesburg appointee, L. B. Skirving, as well as those of a private detective. Cleaver, in secret service fashion, was also to bypass the first public prosecutor for any prosecutions arising from Act 23 and take instructions only from the state attorney in Pretoria. For all routine matters Cleaver was to report to Krause. This arrangement left Cleaver with two lines of accountability and a certain vulnerability.[46]
The new arrangements were calculated as a smack in the face for Krause and Broeksma. In one move Smuts had not only signaled his dissatisfaction with the way that the first public prosecutor had been dealing with the law on prostitution, but effectively demoted Broeksma from second to third prosecutor. If Smuts harbored residual doubts about the wisdom of having demoted Broeksma, they would have been further eroded when the case against David Krakower came to trial on 3 December 1898.
Broeksma did his best, but Krakower, an experienced professional criminal, had taken the precaution of retaining the very able L. E. van Diggelen as his attorney. With the shadows of suspicion cast by the Hermann hearing still angling in across the courts, van Diggelen chose to cast light on the doings of the American Club, raising awkward questions about the motives of the morality squad and the competence of the office of the public prosecutor. So effectively was this tactic employed that the hearing groaned beneath the weight of charges and countercharges that pointed to the possibility of a “conspiracy,” and all the charges against Krakower and his associates were dismissed.[47]
The finding was disappointing and embarrassing for Broeksma and Krause in equal measure. The public, who referred to the Ontucht Wet as the “Untouched Wet,” attributed much of the blame for the deepening judicial shambles to the pervasive influence of the New York gangsters. For Cleaver and Smuts the findings helped confirm suspicions about American Club involvement in “white slavery.” With Act 23 of 1898 only days away from becoming law and Krakower and his associates vulnerable to a counteroffensive by the New York gangsters, it was probably as good a moment as any for Cleaver to take the initiative against Silver and his closest associate, Sam Stein.
Cleaver tried to use the split within the ranks of the gangsters to obtain the affidavits and evidence that would allow him to move against the “white slavers” in the American Club. This proved to be exceptionally difficult, since Commandant van Dam and most of the police were unwilling to assist. He also encountered unusually persistent and stiff opposition from another, less predictable, quarter. At the time, he maintained a discreet silence about the principal source of the opposition within his own ranks choosing to confide only in Smuts, his mother, and an uncle whom he told that he was “surrounded by enemies and spies.” Looking back many years later, however, Mrs. Cleaver Sr. was more than willing to lift the veil far enough for any intelligent reader to determine exactly who her son’s main adversary was.
… in certain quarters his appointment gave great umbrage. He met with anything but a cordial reception in the department, or a smooth path. Every step was watched and scrutinised in order to find something against him. He was reported to Pretoria as having spoken unprofessionally of his superiors in the department; but Jan Smuts, the State Attorney, stood faithfully by him. The police were through and through the reverse of what he desired, and were against him to a man. He had been appointed with an authority entirely independent, but was galled by inference, and a continual reference to himself as “my assistant”. When all these things failed to move him, he was under cover of a request for amicable help, crushed with work properly belonging to others. Night after night he sat in his office at home working at these things until midnight—one—two—or three o’ clock in the morning.[48]
With Krause and Broeksma from the “old school” ranged against him, the man from the “new school”—Cleaver—was forced to turn to a source of help that stretched back even beyond the Inns of Court —Grey College. L. B. Skirving, yet another recent appointment along with Arendt Burchardt, the private detective, came to constitute the inner core of the “untouchables” that Smuts set to work in the Johannesburg office. Additional support came from two young constables who were facing charges of perjury—S. G. Maritz and S. van Vuuren—but who the state attorney believed to have been framed by Donovan’s successor in the morality squad, Lieutenant M. T. Murphy. Not long thereafter Murphy was indeed found to have been protecting brothels and prostitutes managed by Joseph Silver.[49]
Salmon Gerhardus Maritz, born in Kimberley, had become a Z.A.R. burgher because of the Jameson Raid and joined the police in Johannesburg shortly thereafter, aged nineteen. By 1898, still only twenty-two and assigned by Smuts to work with Cleaver, Maritz was a veteran of the “special division” that had tried, unsuccessfully, to help enforce “total prohibition.” He had then been moved to the morality squad where, under the eye of M. T. Murphy, the Ontucht Wet was being applied with an equal lack of success. Maritz was distressed to find that in both the liquor and morals squad his senior officers, like him ostensibly good Afrikaners and passionate republicans, had been bribed and corrupted. Kruger’s attempt at social reform on the Rand was being scuppered by foreigners whose economic mobility contrasted sharply with the poverty of many of the burghers to be found in the poorest quarters of the city. In the “special division” officers were targeted by Polish-Russian immigrants working in family syndicates, and in the morality squad by the American Club. In Maritz’s eyes, however, the root cause of corruption lay in the Jewishness of the perpetrators rather than in any nexus of cash, class, and criminality. Silver and his cohort helped light within Maritz the fiercest and most virulent flames of anti-Semitism that were later to bedevil his very turbulent career.[50]
With the help of Burchardt and Skirving, and the muscle of Maritz and van Vuuren who soon became embroiled in a bloody fist-fight with other policemen, Cleaver worked up his cases against Murphy and Silver. The “Bowery Boys,” alarmed at how established practices governing their interactions with police and prosecutors were wilting in the face of this initiative, counterattacked, focusing their energies on Cleaver. Repeated attempts to deflect Cleaver from his chosen path through the use of blackmail, bribes, and death threats spoke volumes about how the American Club had gained its ascendancy over the preceding three years. Its actions were also more or less of a piece with other, similar developments that had either already occurred, or were starting to emerge, in centers like Buenos Aires, New York, and Rio de Janeiro.[51]
Despite the assistance of his incorruptible inner circle, Cleaver remained galled by his lack of progress. By mid-December and with the new act already in force, he still lacked definitive evidence that would ensure the successful prosecution of Silver and the demise of the American Club. He then made the crucial decision to increase the pressure on those gangsters who had become alienated from Silver in the hope of obtaining the breakthrough that Smuts demanded. On 29 December 1898, Krakower, Rosenchild, and Rosenberg were arraigned in the Second Criminal Court on new charges of having procured women for immoral purposes. This time, however, not even van Diggelen could save them. The state’s case, led by Cleaver, had been prepared with unusual thoroughness. When the hearing was adjourned until 6 January, Krakower and the others, on the advice of their attorney, used the intervening period to engage in plea-bargaining. Amidst great secrecy, and with the help of van Diggelen, Cleaver now prepared to strike at the very heart of the American Club.[52]
On the evening of 9 January 1899, Cleaver took command of a posse of armed and mounted police and, with the assistance of Maritz, raided a brothel at the center of the of the city’s vice district, at 45 Anderson Street. They arrested Joseph Silver, Lizzie Josephs, and Sam and Jenny Stein along with four of their madams. With the principal offenders behind bars and unable to interfere with terrified witnesses, Cleaver twice got the case against Silver and Stein remanded and used the intervening month not only to dispose of several cases of perjury and corruption pending against members of the morality squad, but to probe more fully the connections between the Bowery Boys, the police, and the office of the prosecutor. Silver, who had mastered the art of political intrigue while serving as a “special agent” investigating police corruption in New York City at the height of Tammany Hall’s influence, picked up on the tensions permeating the prosecutor’s office almost at one. He fired off a letter to the landdrost hearing his case, pointing out that “Cleaver [wished] to elicit information that would lead to the disgrace of Dr. Krause and ex Chief Donovan.”[53] The hostility between Cleaver and Krause and, to only a slightly lesser extent, between Smuts and Krause was almost palpable.54 Krause was living through one of the most dangerous moments of his career, and the pressure showed. On 31 January 1899, a Johannesburg newspaper reported that because of the “strain” arising from “recent criminal prosecutions” the first public prosecutor was taking some badly needed leave.[55]
A week later, on 7 February, Silver’s preliminary hearing got under way in the Third Criminal Court and ended eight days later, on 14 February, when he and Stein were committed for trial at the next session of the Pretoria assizes. By now fully aware of the gravity of the charges brought against him, Silver did as he had done in an equally serious matter heard in London less than twelve months earlier and hired the most formidable legal defense that his money could buy. His choice was J. G. Kotzé, the controversial ex chief justice of the Z.A.R. whom Kruger had dismissed after a constitutional crisis in February 1898. Kotzé, who in 1895 owed four thousand pounds to the Corner House mining group for personal loans, was in the throes of rebuilding his legal practice. He may have been short of cash, but not of legal or political expertise. A graduate of the Inner Temple, he had also chosen to oppose Kruger in the 1893 presidential election without resigning from his position on the bench. Neither the state attorney, nor Cleaver, could have conceived of a more formidable courtroom opponent.[56]
Kruger’s men, however, were up to the task. On 18 April, Silver and Stein appeared before Judge Esser in the Pretoria High Court and after a trial lasting five days, Silver was convicted and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labor to be followed by banishment from the Z.A.R. For Kruger, bent on the reform of the judicial system and the social structures on the Witwatersrand, the outcome of the trial was a vindication in that the “new” school had eclipsed the “old.” For Smuts, but more especially so for Cleaver, it was a personal as well as a professional and political triumph. The Transvaal Leader, hardly a friend of Kruger’s or of his civil servants, saluted the achievement and was fulsome in its praise. “Until Mr. Mostyn Cleaver took this foul thing in both hands, and crushed it in the head, no one dared move. He has risked his position, his character, and his life, and we must give every sort of praise for his courage.”[57]
But, as in the case of Krause, the victory came at a cost. Within weeks Mrs. Cleaver Sr. noted that: “The strain of official work, joined to a very poignant private anxiety, was telling grievously upon his health” and shortly thereafter her son experienced a nervous breakdown.[58] The clash between the “new” and the “old” schools might have been precipitated by issues arising from the American Club case, but the underlying problems in the public prosecutor’s office had hardly been resolved. In the long run they played themselves out not only in cases of “nervous exhaustion,” but in imprisonment and even death.
IV. Sequels
Joseph Silver was incarcerated in the Johannesburg Fort where, in early August 1899, he sodomized an African cleaner for which he was successfully prosecuted and sentenced to an additional six months’ imprisonment. This sexual offense earned him a permanent place in the lexicon of black South African prison gangs, where the procurers of younger men for sexual practices are, to this day, known as Ama Silva.[59] Only ten days after his conviction, however, and with the outbreak of the South African War drawing ever nearer, Silver was, presumably for security reasons, moved to a more modern and secure facility in the remote western Transvaal. Shortly thereafter he escaped from the Potchefstroom prison and made his way first to Kimberley and then Cape Town where, for several years, he operated alternatively as brothel owner, police informant, private detective, professional gambler, policeman, shopkeeper, and pimp. He subsequently made his way to German South West Africa, Germany, France, Belgium, Argentina, Chile, the United States, England, and Norway where at various times he again operated as bank robber, burglar, hotel proprietor, police spy, safecracker, and “white slave” trafficker. Silver died at some unknown place after 1917, a man whose criminal record had, at various moments in his career been drawn to the attention of Sir Edward Grey, Paul Kruger, Theodore Roosevelt, Tsar Alexander II, Jan Smuts, and many lesser officials on four continents.[60]
The young constable who arrested Silver, S. G. Maritz, better known as “Manie” Maritz, went on to fight with distinction in the South African War and to emerge as a general. In 1912 he was appointed as commandant in the newly formed South African Police Force but left almost at once to become a major in the Union Defence Force. A lieutenant-colonel in the army by late 1914, Maritz was deeply disturbed by Smuts’s decision to invade German South West Africa as part of the imperial war effort and, under his leadership, virtually an entire command of a thousand strong rebelled and took up arms in an attempt to restore the Boer Republics that had been lost in the South African War of 1899–1902. While the other rebels eventually handed themselves over to government forces in 1915, Maritz made his way first to South West Africa and then on to Angola. By the late 1930s and still smarting from his earliest experiences with “Jews” like Joseph Silver, he cast aside the more orthodox mantle of white South Africanism, became a fully fledged antisemite, and wrote a poor man’s version of Mein Kampf entitled My Lewe en my Strewe. He died in a car accident outside Pretoria Central Prison in 1940.[61]
For F. E. T. Krause, the South African War marked the start of a painful six-year-long hiatus in what was to become an exceptionally long career. In 1900, when the military tide of the orthodox campaigns had turned against the Boer forces, Kruger appointed Krause as “special commandant” responsible for the Witwatersrand. In a position akin to “military governor,” Krause was responsible for the safeguarding of the mines in and around Johannesburg. But in the face of continuing military reverses and the steady advance of the British Army under Lord Roberts, factions within republican ranks started debating the virtues of destroying the mines before abandoning the Witwatersrand to continue the struggle, through guerilla warfare, in the countryside. Among those who advocated the destruction of the mines, Krause claimed in private correspondence, were the state secretary, F. W. Reitz, State Attorney J. C. Smuts, and Judge Antonie Kock.[62]
In May 1900, shortly before the city was formally handed over to the British under Roberts, “General” Kock and his men arrived prepared to sabotage the mines but, on Krause’s instructions, were arrested. Widely credited with having saved the Rand mining industry, Krause was granted parole as a prisoner-of-war and made his way to London. Under the banner of the Middle Temple he practiced as a barrister and took a close interest in the war, monitoring the British press. In mid-1901, his attention was drawn to an article in the Pall Mall Gazette that was extremely hostile to the republican cause and written by his old adversary and president of the South African League’s Johannesburg branch, J. Douglas Forster. Outraged, Krause wrote a letter to Cornelis Broeksma in which he urged his former colleague to dig into Forster’s shady sexual past so that he might be exposed, but then went further, instructing Broeksma, “You know the man. It is your duty to bring the matter to the notice of our people so that legitimate action can be taken against him and they can shoot him or get rid of him in some manner….”[63] Unknown to Krause, however, Broeksma—suspected by British authorities of being in league with yet another member of the “old school” in Europe, W. J. Leyds—was already under arrest in Johannesburg. Krause’s letter was intercepted by British Intelligence.64 88
“In Mr. Broeksma,” wrote Lt.-Colonel David Henderson of British Military Intelligence, “we have discovered the channel of communication with Dr. Leyds and his gang at the Hague.”65 Broeksma was charged with, and pleaded guilty to, breaking the oath of neutrality, encouraging others to break the oath, treason, and high treason and sentenced to death when he appeared before a military tribunal. Two weeks later, on 30 September 1901, he was executed by firing squad in the Johannesburg Fort, where Joseph Silver, too, had only recently been incarcerated.[66]
Back in London, charged with “attempting to solicit a person to commit murder” Krause was made to face the legal music in the Old Bailey rather than before a military tribunal. On 17 and 18 January 1902, before Lord Chief Justice Alverstone, he was confronted by the prosecutor, Sir Edward Carson, and defended by Rufus Isaacs K.C.—later Lord Reading—whose services were largely paid for by the ubiquitous W. J. Leyds of the “old school.” The trial, in which four of the principal parties—Carson, Isaacs, Krause, and Forster—were all graduates of the Middle Temple, was marked by technical legal argument and irony. But there was no irony in the outcome. After ten minutes of deliberation the jury found Krause guilty. He was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, the maximum term allowed by the law. Immediately thereafter the “Benchers of the Middle Temple” withdrew their recognition of his right to practice law in England and Krause’s always formal and rather tenuous link to the principal institution of the “new school” was terminated. The rupture was now complete.[67]
In August 1903, on being released from prison Krause, still disbarred in England, returned to South Africa, where members of the Cape bar raised no objection to his starting a legal practice the following year. Krause’s republican heart and political spirit, however, longed for the north. In an attempt to clear the way for his readmission to the Transvaal bar he appealed, unsuccessfully, to the “Benchers of the Middle Temple” for readmission to their ranks as a barrister-at-law. In May 1905, with the support of the chief justice, he was readmitted to the Transvaal bar after an application to the Supreme Court.[68] His republican sympathies undiminished, Krause was elected by the volatile innercity Afrikaner working class constituency of Vrededorp as a Het Volk representative in the Transvaal Legislative Assembly from 1907 to 1909. His “liberal” views on prostitution remained unchanged and, true to his word, from February to May 1908 he successfully defended a founding member of the “American Club,” Harry Epstein, on charges of living off the proceeds of immoral earnings by employing a combination of learned argument and repeated requests for remands. On being found not guilty, however, Epstein went to Krause’s chambers, stole all the documents relating to his case, shaved off his moustache, and then fled the country.[69]
In November 1909, Krause, slowly clawing back his legal status was granted a “free pardon” by the British monarch. This occasioned a note from Smuts the politician who, exercising the utmost economy with words, congratulated him “on this act of justice.” With most of his formal political and professional difficulties behind him, Krause built up a substantial legal practice and took on several controversial cases that, as in the matter of Forster, sometimes involved political motives. He was made a K.C. in 1912. In 1921, the “Benchers of the Middle Temple” by unanimous vote restored all the privileges and rights to him as from the date of his disbarment. Twenty-four months later, in 1923, Krause was appointed a judge in the Transvaal Provincial Division of the Supreme Court, where he served until he was made judge president of the Orange Free State Provincial Division ten years later. He retired as judge president on reaching the compulsory retirement age of seventy in 1938 and was ninety-one years old when he died in 1959. To his dying day he held Smuts in particularly low regard and considered his reputation as a statesman to have been constructed largely by “the imperialist press for their own purposes.”[70]
Krause’s bête noire, F. R. M. Cleaver, was, by then, long dead. At the outbreak of the South African War he became a military policeman in Johannesburg but, anxious to enter the fray as an English-speaking new South African burgher, took leave and succeeded in enlisting in the joint expeditionary forces that invaded the northern Cape. In May 1900, having seriously injured his leg, he was taken prisoner-of-war in Pretoria and sent to Greenpoint. Later he was moved from Cape Town to Diyatalawa in Ceylon, where he played a prominent part in camp life before succumbing to enteric fever in November 1900.[71]
Cleaver’s mentor’s career is so well known—at least in outline—that it need not detain us unduly. After playing an outstanding role in the South African War and the peace negotiations that followed, Smuts went on to hold several important ministerial positions both in the Transvaal and Union governments. He played a prominent role in World War I and was present at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference. In the same year, he succeeded Louis Botha as South African prime minister and was one of the moving forces in drafting the framework for the League of Nations and later, in 1945–46, in drawing up the Human Rights Charter of the United Nations. A man of ideas as well as action, he was, in the closing years of his life, made rector of St. Andrew’s University and, in 1948, when he lost a vital election at home, chancellor of the University of Cambridge.
What is less well appreciated or understood, however, is the oppositional symmetry that marked the careers of Smuts and Krause in later years. Biographies of Smuts make little mention of his interactions with Krause, and there is a puzzling silence about his official or private view of a man who once worked for him, was a prominent colleague in Het Volk, went on to become a judge, and ended his career as a judge president. In private Krause was more forthcoming in his criticism of Smuts’s political views and it is perhaps worth sketching out the differences in the two men’s actions, beliefs, and temperaments.
Smuts married his Afrikaner student sweetheart from Stellenbosch days, Isie Krige, in 1897, when he was twenty-seven years old. Isie Krige, who is said to have had a substantial intellect in her own right, chose to play a minor role in public and to confine most of her energies to assisting in the career of her more famous husband and to supporting members of her family.[72] Krause, by contrast, got married at the age of nearly forty, to a divorcee—an immigrant nurse of mixed English-Irish descent, Annette Wallis (née Bowyer) whom the Sunday Times, at the time of the marriage, described as “one of the prettiest English women living in the Transvaal.” The description was misleading. An ardent suffragette and successful municipal politician, Annette Krause was intensely active in public life and in the National Council of Women of South Africa. While Isie Smuts’s view on the votes for women is unknown, Annette Krause and her husband believed that both “Botha and Smuts were violently opposed to granting the vote to S.A. women.”[73]
There were other contrasts that marked the private and public lives of F. E. T. Krause and J. C. Smuts. It has already been noted that Krause had alleged that while Smuts was bent on destroying the gold mines in 1899, he was opposed to it. In 1908–9, while colonial secretary, Smuts made extensive use of various acts to deport foreign-born pimps from the Transvaal. Krause, in at least once instance that was reminiscent of the earlier conflict surrounding the American Club, chose to defend the gangster Harry Epstein.[74]
After the South African War Smuts drew increasingly close to the mine owners and either initiated or supported sometimes violent action against striking white workers in 1907, 1913, and 1922. Krause, chairman of the Mining Regulations Commission of 1907–10, represented a working-class constituency and was far more sympathetically disposed to white miners.[75] When Samuel “Taffy” Long was charged with murder before a special court held in the wake of the “Rand Revolution” of 1922, it was Krause who defended him. Krause could not, however, prevent Long from being sent to the gallows—an outcome that was, in part, attributable to the objections of the prime minister, Smuts.[76] In November 1923, in the wake of the Long decision and as a newly appointed judge, Krause declared the mining regulations that he had helped draft in 1910 to be invalid.[77]
On broader political questions, too, it was not unusual to find Smuts and Krause at opposite ends of the spectrum. When Smuts as minister of defense and mines ordered the invasion of German South West Africa in 1914 and Generals C. F. Beyers, C. de Wet, J. Kemp, and S. G. Maritz rebelled, it was Krause, a nationalist and the son of a German immigrant, who led the defense.[78] It follows that Krause showed a life-long preference for the stronger nationalist and republican sentiments of General J. B. M. Hertzog, another product of the “old school.” For Krause, who never once referred in private or in public to his earlier conflict with Cleaver, General Smuts, a “new school” man, was simply too young, too British, and far too sympathetic to imperialist causes to warrant supporting.
Conclusion
In a recent survey of South African history it is suggested that “Afrikaners harboured an enormous sense of injustice which helped to make them impervious to any criticism of their style of control in the Transvaal.” “Boer self-righteousness,” the author suggests, “comes through powerfully in books like A Century of Wrong, in which Jan Smuts, youthful Attorney-General [sic] in the Transvaal [sic] after graduating at Cambridge had a hand.”[79] This view is largely of a piece with those that portray fully formed and obdurate “Afrikaners” in the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek as dominating an essentially unresponsive administration presided over by a dour and inflexible President Kruger.[80]
The assumptions underlying such hoary observations need to be questioned anew. A good starting point would be to go back and reexamine Kruger and his east European advisers’ very earliest plans for economic development. Kruger’s concessions policy, which predated the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand, was designed to encourage the emergence of a few modest manufacturing enterprises that would process products derived from the dominant agricultural sector. The underlying logic of the much-maligned concessions policy was subverted, however, when gold was discovered in 1886 and the Witwatersrand mining industry rapidly became the preeminent economic activity in the republic. A manufacturing sector designed to serve an agricultural industry dominated by burghers was suddenly required to articulate with, and serve the needs of, a primary industry dominated by a foreign elite itself struggling to cope with demands of a multi-cultured, unenfranchised, proletariat based in burgeoning urban areas.
Nowhere were the resulting contradictions and problems more evident than in the production of liquor, the belated attempt to implement prohibition for black miners, and the subsequent emergence of organized crime syndicates. Policies governing the use of alcohol and the regulation of prostitution—prominent and related features in the history of most industrializing societies—acquired additional significance in the Z.A.R. where Kruger’s political constituency had a vested interest in the production of alcoholic spirits.
It is against the same backdrop of a rapidly changing Z.A.R. economy that the emergence, composition, function, and efficiency of the republican administration needs to be charted and tested anew. Viewed from this more revealing angle it is easier to make sense of the early importance, changing role, and eventual demise of “Kruger’s Hollanders.” Recruited as political “conservatives” capable of coping with the modest administrative demands of a burgher republic founded on a small agricultural economy, “Kruger’s Hollanders,” who on social matters tended to be “liberal,” were unexpectedly called upon to formulate and implement policies relating to crime and questions of morality for a modern mining proletariat in an urban setting. A reluctance by the Hollanders to legislate in matters relating to alcohol and prostitution was originally tolerated by the conservative but politically adroit Kruger. After the Jameson Raid, however, when the mine owners’ demands for the control of alcohol and prostitution and associated criminal activity escalated and overlapped with his own Calvinist inclinations, Kruger—working from a new and stronger domestic political base—had less reason to entertain the use of Dutch advisers and administrators whose “liberalism” slowed his new social reform initiatives.
Kruger’s attempts at political, economic, and social reform after 1895, along with the ironies and paradoxes that accompanied them, need to be taken far more seriously and analyzed with much greater care. This is no easy task for, as one careful observer has noted, “the Kruger government could perhaps have built up a moderate reform image, but in the shadow of the Uitlander presence this was not an easy reputation to earn.”[81] After the Raid and the election of 1898 Kruger was willing to draw in English-trained lawyers who had graduated at the Inns of Court. This was not only to help him implement reforms but also to provide him with political advice as the net of British imperialism tightened around the republic. Far from being “impervious” to new sources of advice or falling back on the counsel of archetypal “Afrikaners” wrapped up in notions of “self-righteousness,” he consciously sought out partly anglicized younger men whose perspectives, skills, and training would facilitate the modernization of the Afrikaner state.
It is within this latter context that we should also take note of recent, suggestive, studies that reexamine the making and remaking of the white South African political identities in the two decades that culminated in the formation of the Union in 1910. Here there are at least two dimensions that demand attention. First, we need to examine the ways in which certain English speakers with links to the mining industry, such as Percy Fitz-Patrick, were, to the alarm of at least some imperialists, becoming “British Afrikanders,” while, at the same time, native Dutch speakers like Smuts and several others drawn in part from the ranks of the Inns of Court were becoming Engelse-Afrikaners, to the intense displeasure of tougher-minded nationalists like Hertzog and Krause.[82] To the extent that a white South African male political identity emerged before and after Union, it was, in part, a function of the way in which changing notions of “Afrikanerness” in both the relatively anglicized Cape Colony and in the former Boer republics were beginning to blend on the margins with a sense of “British Englishness” that was also mutating.
These processes marked deep and profound shifts in the very foundations of white society. While many of the roots of these processes are to be found in the postwar reconstruction period and ideas proclaimed by English speakers, some may also be traced back to certain Afrikaans-speaking notables in antebellum society. In addition to this we also need to take far greater account of the social origins, tertiary education, and class trajectories of men like F. R. M. Cleaver, F. W. Reitz, M. T. Steyn, Sir Henry de Villiers, and others. Among these and other important actors, few played a more important political role in outlining what a new identity for white South Africans might be than J. C. Smuts.[83]
This brings us to the second point that demands closer scrutiny. Once the evolution, making, and remaking of the white “South African” male political identity between 1890 and 1910 has been probed fully in ways that are only now being opened up, the findings will contribute to another important debate that is already in motion. Nowhere in Africa is there a greater need to draw a distinction between the formal annexation of states and expansion of empire, and the more subtle and less formal processes of imperialism, than in southern Africa.[84]
Indeed, it is only when the important distinction between empire and imperialism is more comprehensively explored that we will enhance our understanding of older questions as to why it was that, while Britain won the South African War, it was not long before it witnessed the rebirth of other, even more challenging forms of Afrikaner nationalism that consciously sought to include voting men and women. Seen from this perspective, the clash between J. C. Smuts and F. E. T. Krause for the control of the office of the Johannesburg public prosecutor in 1898–99—at one level a mere clash of personalities possibly informed by differing notions of masculinity, morality, and sexuality—assumes greater significance. Also at stake were very different ideas about the state, the role of the law, and the way that the civil service articulated with law enforcement agencies. These, in turn, contributed to life-long differences between two lawyer-politicians that derived from legal traditions embraced at important formative junctures in their careers. There are many chapters still to be written before we will know fully the origins and evolution of that enigmatic being—the white “South African”—let alone his still decentered successor, the “new” South African.
Charles van Onselen is a research professor, Faculty of the Humanities, at the University of Pretoria.
Notes
1.�See Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, “Lord Milner and the South African State,” History Workshop Journal 8 (1979): 50–80.
2.�See, for example, Saul Dubow, “Colonial Nationalism, the Milner Kindergarten, and the Rise of ‘South Africanism,’ 1902–10,” History Workshop Journal 43 (1997): 53–85, and his “Imagining the ‘New’ South Africa in the Era of Reconstruction,” paper presented to the Canadian Association of African Studies, Quebec, May–June 2001.
3.�C. T. Gordon, The Growth of Boer Opposition to Kruger, 1890–1895 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 21. But see also 278–79.
4.�H. J. and R. E. Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850–1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 61.
5.�For a summary of more recent turns in the historiography, see, for example, I. R. Smith, “The Origins of the South African War (1899–1902): A Reappraisal,” South African Historical Journal 22 (1990): 24–60, and, more especially, 51–52. See also below, notes 79 and 80.
6.�Charles van Onselen, New Babylon, New Nineveh: Everyday Life on the Witwatersrand, 1886–1914 (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2001), 1–48. Also see, Richard Mendelsohn, Sammy Marks: “The Uncrowned King of the Transvaal” (Cape Town: David Philip, 1991).
7.�See Marks and Trapido, “Milner and the South African State,” 50–80 and, from a very different perspective, D. W. Kruger, “The British Imperial Factor in South Africa from 1870 to 1910,” in The History and Politics of Colonialism, 1870–1914, ed. L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 325–51. The Jameson Raid, precursor to the South African War of 1899–1902, was a poorly organized attempt at a coup d’ état undertaken by several hundred armed invaders in 1895–96, planned by the Cape premier, Cecil Rhodes, and leading figures in the Witwatersrand mining industry with real and imagined grievances against the Kruger government. See I. R. Smith, The Origins of the South Africa War, 1899–1902 (London: Longman, 1996), 70–104.
8.�See J. S. Marais, The Fall of Kruger’s Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 23–45. The concession granted by Kruger for a horse-drawn tramway system in Johannesburg offers a fine example of the resulting paradoxes and misunderstandings. See van Onselen, New Babylon, New Nineveh, 165–202.
9.�See G. J. Schutte, De Hollanders in Krugers Republiek, 1884–1899 (Pretoria: Communications of the University of South Africa, C 63, 1968), 40; E. L. P. Stals, ed., Afrikaners in die Goudstad, Deel 1, 1886–1924 (Cape Town: Hollandsch Afrikaansche Uitgevers Maatschappij, 1978), 95; and Mordechai Tamarkin, Cecil Rhodes and the Cape Afrikaners (London: Frank Cass, 1996), 126. (My thanks to Professors J. Bergh, A. Grundlingh, and H. Giliomee for drawing some of these sources to my attention.) Kruger, of course, also had well-documented, earlier, differences with the established Cape, Afrikaner, church—see T. R. H. Davenport, South Africa; A Modern History (Johannesburg: Macmillan, 1987), 89.
10.�See H. R. Hahlo and Ellison Kahn, The Union of South Africa: The Development of Its Laws and Constitution (London: Stevens & Sons, 1960), 234–37, and Hahlo and Kahn, The South African Legal System and Its Background (Cape Town: Juta, 1968), 131–33. In a much broader but still comparative context, it is interesting to note the influence that an education in Holland has had on the writing of Afrikaner history. See P. H. Kapp, “Kontinentale kontak en invloed op die Afrikaanse gesiedbeofening,” Historia 45.2 (2000): 411–37.
11.�On M.T. Steyn, see Johannes Meintjes, Die Vader van sy Volk; Die Lewe van President M.T. Steyn (Cape Town: Tafelberg Uitgewers, 1970), 1–24; or Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson, eds., The Oxford History of South Africa, vol. 11, 1870–1966(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 318–19.
12.�On the concern about Dutch student morality at the time, see, for example, J. W. Meijer, “Dr. H.J. Coster, 1865–1899” (M.A. thesis, University of South Africa, Pretoria, 1983), 10. The entry of Krause, Hertzog, and several other Afrikaners into the Faculty of Law at the University of Amsterdam is also recorded in Geschiedenis van het Amsterdamsch Student-eleven, 1632–1932 (Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger, 1932), 622.
13.�For the bare outlines of F. E. T. Krause’s extended career, see entries in D. J. Potgieter et al., eds., Standard Encyclopedia of Southern Africa (Cape Town: Nasou Limited, 1972), 5: 457; and A. A. Roberts, A South African Legal Bibliography (Pretoria: Wallachs’ P. & P. Co., 1942), 263. See also Ellison Kahn, Law, Life and Laughter: Legal Anecdotes and Portraits from Southern Africa (Cape Town: Juta, 1991), 119–25. There is, however, a contemporaneous and more detailed summary of Krause’s earliest professional achievements in an interview recorded on the eve of his thirtieth birthday in Standard & Diggers’ News (Johannesburg), 28 April 1898.
14.�F. E. T. Krause’s private probing of Forster’s morals was made public many years later and reported on by Mr. Justice V. G. Hiemstra in an essay aimed at a popular audience. It contains several ambiguities and misleading suggestions but nevertheless remains a valuable source—see “In die Skaduwee van die Dood,” Die Huisgenoot, 14 Aug. 1959. But, long before that, Krause had taken note of Forster’s private life for his own purposes—see South African National Archives, Pretoria (hereafter, SANA), W. J. Leyds Archive, 1900–1933, L.A. 261, vol. 1, “A Short account of the events preceding and connected with the Trial of F.E.T. Krause,” (1932), 4–5.
15.�Ibid., 4: “My department controlled the Police and Detective Forces. . . .” On the reorganization of the Johannesburg Public Prosecutor’s Office, see Standard & Diggers’ News, 28 April 1898. On Krause’s access to an independent line of pimp-informants, see, for example, SANA, Johannesburg Landdrost’s Papers, Public Prosecutor (Incoming Correspondence), vol. 1940, Leon Lemaire to Messrs. Schutte, van den Berg, and Dr. Krause, 5 Oct. 1899.
16.�See, for example, van Onselen, New Babylon, New Nineveh, 123–25.
17.�See Standard & Diggers’ News, 28 April 1898, and Potgieter et al., eds., Standard Encyclopedia, 5: 457.
18.�See J. Ploeger, Afrikana Aantekeninge en Nuus (June 1988), 211–15, and University of Pretoria Library, ZA 929.2, C. Broeksma “Genealogische overzicht van het geslacht Broeksma” (unpublished typescript, dated 1 Jan. 1985).
19.�Trewhella Cameron, Jan Smuts: An Illustrated Biography (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1994), 12.
20.�See, for example, W. J. De Kock, ed., Suid Afrikaanse Biografiese Woordeboek (Cape Town: Nasionale Boekhandel, 1968), 1: 769–70.
21.�W. K. Hancock, Smuts, vol. 1, The Sanguine Years, 1870–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 41–42. There is a silence about Smuts’s masculinity and his sexuality in the only other major study—Kenneth Ingham, Jan Christian Smuts: The Conscience of a South African (Johannesburg: Palgrave Press, 1986), although, on p. 17, there is a reference to his liking for “beautiful women.”
22.�Ingham, Jan Christian Smuts, 34. For a view on the evolution of Smuts’s masculinity, as distinct from his sexuality, see Shula Marks, O.B.E., “White Masculinity: Jan Smuts, Race and the South African War,” Raleigh Lecture presented at the British Academy, London, March 2001.
23.�J. C. Smuts, Walt Whitman; A Study in the Evolution of Personality (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), 88.
24.�Ibid., 89–90.
25.�Hancock, Smuts: Sanguine Years, 48.
26.�On class and resistance in the Boer War, see H. Giliomee, “Republicanism, Colonial Patriotism and Imperialism, 1880–1910” (unpublished seminar paper, University of Stellenbosch, 2001), 33–34.
27.�See van Onselen, New Babylon, New Nineveh, 16.
28.�See D. W. Kruger, ed., Suid Afrikaansche Biografiese Woordeboek (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1977), 3: 162.
29.�See F. R. M. Cleaver, A Young South African: A Memoir of Ferrar Reginald Mostyn Cleaver, Advocate and Veldcornet (Johannesburg: W. E. Hortor, 1913) [Edited by “His Mother”], vii–xiv.
30.�See “Randlords and Rotgut” in van Onselen, New Babylon, New Nineveh, 47–108.
31.�For the wider context of this movement, see Charles van Onselen, “Jewish Marginality in the Atlantic World: Organised Crime in the Era of the Great Migrations, 1880–1914,” South African Historical Journal 43 (2000): 96–137. There is a brief and rather unsatisfactory account of gambling on the early Rand to be found in C. de Wet, “Die Aard en Omvang van Misdaad aan die Witwatersrand sedert die Ontdekking van Goud to 1896” (M.A. thesis, University of Pretoria, 1958), 70–72.
32.�See van Onselen, “Jewish Marginality,” 96–137.
33.�Ibid., 128.
34.�Ibid., 123–27.
35.�Ibid., 130–31.
36.�See H. J. G. Kamffer, “Om een scherpe oog in ‘t zeil te houden; Die Geheime Diens in die Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek” (D.Phil., University of Potchefstroom, 1999), 218–29. (I am indebted to Professor J. W. N. Tempelhoff for drawing this important source to my attention.)
37.�See C. J. Beyers, ed., Dictionary of South African Biography (Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council, 1987), 5: 377–78; see also Cleaver, A Young South African, 19.
38.�See W. J. De Kock, Jacob de Villiers Roos, 1869–1940: Lewenskets van ‘n Veelsydige Afrikaner (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1958), 37.
39.�See van Onselen, New Babylon, New Nineveh, 66.
40.�Ibid. and Cleaver, A Young South African, 27.
41.�van Onselen, New Babylon, New Nineveh, 90 and 137.
42.�Ibid., 138.
43.�Ibid., 132.
44.�See “The Ontucht Law,” Standard & Diggers’ News, 24 Nov. 1898; and van Onselen, New Babylon, New Nineveh, 136.
45.�SANA, Pretoria, Z.A.R. Collection, Staatsprokureur, “Geheime Notulen,” vol. 193, File 1197/98, Affidavit by F. E. T. Krause, 5 Nov. 1898.
46.�See Cleaver, A Young South African, 20.
47.�See especially, “A Pimpsverein,” Standard & Diggers’ News, 7 Dec. 1898.
48.�Cleaver, A Young South African, 2–3.
49.�Ibid., 22
50.�See S. G. Maritz, My Lewe en my Strewe (Johannesburg: S. G. Maritz, 1939), 7–8.
51.�See, for example, E. J. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight against White Slavery, 1870–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); and van Onselen, “Jewish Marginality in the Atlantic World,” 102–9.
52.�See van Onselen, New Babylon, New Nineveh, 141–42.
53.�SANA, Z.A.R. Collection, Johannesburg Archive, Kriminele Landdrost, Inkomende Stukke, 1899–1900, vol. 1720, J. Silver and S. Stein to the Honourable Mr. Dietzsch, Landdrost, Third Criminal Court, 2 Feb. 1899. See also van Onselen, New Babylon, New Nineveh, 142–43.
54.�Note, for example, the extremely sharp tone in two telegrams from Smuts to Krause dated 11 and 12 January 1899 as reproduced in W. K. Hancock and Jean van der Poel, eds., Selections from the Smuts Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 1: 196.
55.�See Standard & Diggers’ News, 31 Jan. 1899.
56.�On the background to the constitutional crisis of 1898, see M. Chanock, The Making of South African Legal Culture, 1902–1936: Fear, Favour and Prejudice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 36–37. On Kotzé himself see De Kock, ed., Die Suid Afrikaanse Biografiese Woordeboek, 1: 458–61. The debt with the Corner House is noted in Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Randlords (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985), 161. Given the moral and political issues at stake, it is perhaps understandable that there is a remarkable silence about the Silver case in J. G. Kotzé, Biographical Memoirs and Reminiscences, 2 vols. (Cape Town: van Riebeeck Society, 1941).
57.�As quoted in Cleaver, A Young South African, 4.
58.�As quoted in ibid.
59.�See Charles van Onselen, The Small Matter of a Horse: The Life of “Nongoloza” Mathebula, 1867–1948 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1984).
60.�Joseph Silver is the subject of a biography currently being researched and written by the author.
61.�On Maritz’s later career see, for example, De Kock, ed., Die Suid Afrikaanse Biografiese Woordeboek, 1: 535–38.
62.�See SANA, Collection A 296, National Council of Women of South Africa, “A short life sketch of Annette Krause” (no author, dated 6 Aug. 1957—but probably by F. E. T. Krause). (I am indebted to Dr. Louise Vincent for drawing this and other items in this collection relating to the Krause family history to my attention.) Toward the end of his life, Krause seems to have changed his mind about the position that Reitz and Smuts took in the debate about the destruction of the mines. See, for example, the version that he offered V. G. Hiemstra in “Die Regter wat oor Politiek Tronk toe is,” Die Huisgenoot, 7 Aug. 1959. On Judge Antonie Kock see Kahn, Law, Life, and Laughter, 111–15.
63.�See Potgieter et al., Standard Encyclopedia of Southern Africa, 6: 457; and V. G. Hiemstra, “In die Skaduwee van die Dood,” Die Huisgenoot, 14 Aug. 1959.
64.�Ibid.
65.�As quoted in J. Ploeger, “Die Optrede van Cornelis Broeksma (1863–1901),” Afrikana Aantekinginge en Nuus (June 1988), 215.
66.�Ibid., 216. See also, University of Pretoria Library, ZA 929.2, C. Broeksma, “Genealogischche overzicht van het geslacht Broeksma,” 69.
67.�See V. G. Hiemstra, “In die Skaduwee van die Dood,” Die Huisgenoot, 14 Aug. 1959. It is worth noting how a portrait of Krause, R. B. Howes, “The Hon. Mr. Justice Krause,” South African Law Journal 40 (1923), 385–88, and an entry in Potgieter et al., eds., Standard Encyclopedia of Southern Africa (1972), 5: 457, both choose to simply gloss over these difficulties and ignore the fact that Krause was imprisoned in London. But contrast this with the entry in Roberts, Legal Bibliography, 263. For Isaacs’s version of the trial, see By His Son, Rufus Isaacs, First Marquess of Reading (London: Hutchinson, 1943), 80–86.
68.�See Transvaal Law Report: Supreme Court 1905, Ex parte Krause, 1905 TS, 221–234. Also Jerold Taitz, ed., The War Memoirs of Commandant Ludwig Krause, 1899–1900 (Cape Town: van Riebeeck Society, 1996), xx.
69.�For Krause’s postwar views on prostitution, see Transvaal Legislative Assembly Debates 1908, 1423–25. On the Epstein case and its context, and for the context of Krause’s political work in Vrededorp, see van Onselen, New Babylon, New Nineveh, 156–57, and 311–67, and various indexed references to be found in E. L. P. Stals, Afrikaners in die Goudstad, vol. 1.
70.�V. G. Hiemstra, “‘N Groot Afrikanerheld word Gevonnis,” Die Huisgenoot, 21 Aug. 1959; also Potgieter et al., eds., Standard Encyclopedia of Southern Africa, 6: 457. His reinstatement at the Middle Temple is recorded in SANA, Dr. W. J. Leyds Archive, L.A. 261, “A Short Account of the events preceding and connected with the trial of F. E. T. Krause,” 25.
71.�See Kruger, ed., Suid-Afrikaanse Biografiese Woordeboek, 3: 162–63; and Cleaver, A Young South African, 187–200.
72.�See, for example, Ingham, Jan Christian Smuts, 51.
73.�See Sunday Times, 23 June 1957; and SANA, Collection A 296, National Council of Women of South Africa, F. E. T. Krause to Mrs. W. Eybers, President, N.C.W.S.A., undated 1955.
74.�See van Onselen, New Babylon, New Nineveh, 156–58.
75.�See Simons and Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa, 90–91 and 301.
76.�Ibid.; see also “The Hon. Mr. Justice Krause,” 388. Also, Chanock, The Making of South African Legal Culture, 7–11.
77.�Simons and Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa, 301.
78.�”The Hon. Mr. Justice Krause,” 388.
79.�William Beinart, Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1994), 62.
80.�In this context it is perhaps interesting to note how the older images of Kruger and his administration lingered on in the literature for some twenty years after they were first criticized by Gordon and the Simonses (see notes 3 and 4 above). See, for example, C. Saunders, consultant ed., and C. J. Bundy, historical advisor, Illustrated History of South Africa: The Real Story (Cape Town: Readers Digest Association, 1988), 238, where the views of a contemporary observer, the Californian engineer, W. Hall, are cited if not with approval, then at very least uncritically. Hall believed that Kruger was “corrupt,” “venal” and “inefficient.” There was, argued Hall, “a general inability of the Boers to understand capitalism, industrialisation and progress.”
81.�T. R. H. Davenport, South Africa; A Modern History, 95.
82.�See, for example, Stanley Trapido, “Percy FitzPatrick, British Afrikanders, Capitalist Interests and the Origins of the South African War,” paper presented to the Southern African History and Politics Seminar, Oxford, June 2001.
83.�See Dubow, “Colonial Nationalism,” 60–70.
84.�See, for example, I. R. Phimister, “Empire, Imperialism and the Partition of Africa,” unpublished seminar paper, University of Sheffield, July 2001.