Page 38 - University of Pretoria Research Review 2017

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Cowboy Capitalist
Charles van Onselen, Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship
In many countries with weak ethical, moral and political foundations there is often a deep chasm between those who have financial power and those who hold high political office. The resulting divide is most frequently bridged via large-scale corruption.
Those in powerful state offices seek to enrich themselves by using their influence and fraudulent instruments to plunder the private or the public sectors of the economy, while those in high finance or industry seek to gain improperly by offering an assortment of inducements to politicians and those in their extended patronage networks. In order to understand more fully the long-term rise or decline of political systems and societies, scholars in the humanities and social sciences often need to hone in on the two-way link between crime and politics.
Living through the seemingly never-ending process
of ‘nation-building’, modern South Africa often comes across as being hopelessly corrupt and morally bankrupt. While there may be a good deal of evidence to underpin this gloomy perception, it is frequently accompanied by profound amnesia on the part of those who feel that systemic crises of these proportions are peculiar to the 21st century, or that they can be traced back to failings that can also be defined racially.
Those who live with this dangerous, simplistic notion need constant reminding that South
Africa can trace its modern, 20th century incarnation back to precisely the same nexus of divides between money and power on the one hand, and culture and class on the other; problems that are considered peculiar to the here-and-now.
It was the class and cultural divide between the Boers and their ruling agrarian political elite in Pretoria, men with a land-focused vision of the future, and their adversaries in Johannesburg (the so-called ‘Randlords’) who insisted on an economy that was to be predicated immediately and nearly exclusively on industry, that gave birth to the unsuccessful Jameson Raid of 1895. That led to the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 which, in turn, was followed by the cobbled-together and racially exclusionary ‘settlement’ of whites-only rule in 1910.
Not long after the epoch-changing mineral discoveries of the 1870s and 1880s, gangs of indigenous Africans such as the ‘Ninevites’, and immigrant whites, such
as those in the ‘Irish Brigade’, were involved in crimes that were often informed by a sense of injustice. The Witwatersrand gold mine owners, the conspirators behind the Jameson Raid, were also intent on larceny but their ambitions were loftier than those of mere bank robbers, burglars or highwaymen. They aspired, by means of a coup d’état, to steal an entire country
to address their own sense of injustice that a newly industrialising country was being run by an ill-educated rural elite. If the under-classes of the 1890s were intent on crime-as-politics, then the new, aspirant Rand ruling class was engaged in politics-as-crime.
The Cowboy Capitalist (Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2017) is the story of the arch conspirator behind the plot to steal the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek in 1895: John Hays Hammond. He was an avaricious American who peddled his experiences of mining in California and the Wild West to Rhodes and Jameson so that they might foment a coup d’état that might benefit the British Empire. As in many societies that are bent on self- destruction by refusing to distinguish clearly between crime-as-politics and politics-as-crime, the book offers an engaging historical tale as well as a set of lessons for life in South Africa today.