- 1859 . Fort Beaufort Advocate, 16 July, quoted in D.M. Moore, ‘The Local Historian and the Press’, Contree, 19 (1986), 7
- The term ‘Fourth Estate’ came to refer to the press when Edmund Burke declared famously, in the House of Commons in 1774: ‘There are three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sits a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.' Newspaper histories are rare in South African historiography but a good example of the potential of such studies is J. Mervis, The Fourth Estate: A Newspaper Story (Johannesburg, 1989)
- Hobson , J. A. 1900 . Manchester Guardian The role of the ‘imperialist press’ in influencing opinion both on the Rand and in Great Britain was first raised in scholarly writings on the war by, himself a correspondent for the pro-Boer, who was sent to South Africa in mid 1899. Hobson's three books, The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Effects (London, The Psychology of Jingoism (London, 1901) and Imperialism: A Study (London, 1902), stressed the role played by the mining capitalists, particularly Wernher, Beit/H. Eckstein & Co., through the Argus Company whi ch owned The Star and The Transvaal Leader, in the development of a pro-imperialist attitude both on the Rand and in England, in the monthsleading up to the outbreak of the war. Hobson failed, however, to detect the hand of Milner in the manipulation of Uitlander and British public opinion through the press: see I.R. Smith, The Origins of the South African War, 1899–1902 (London, 1996), 215 and 399. See also D. Cammack, ‘Class, Politics and War: A Socio-Economic Study of the Uitlanders of the Witwatersrand, 1897–1902’ (PhD thesis, University of California [Irvine], 1983);A. Jeeves, ‘The Rand Capitalists and Transvaal Politics 1892–1899’ (PhD thesis, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada, 1971);and A.N. Porter, ‘Sir Alfred Milner and the Press, 1897–1899’, Historical Journal, 16, 2 (1973), 323–39
- 1990 . Origins of the South African War 27 This belief was shared by Lord Selborne, Chamberlain and Salisbury: see Smith, 127. Cammack argues that the leadership of the Uitlander movement in the South African League and the UitlanderCouncil realised after June 1899 that if Uitlanders were enfranchised they would still constitute a minority and this played a key role in the pressure that these men exerted on the Imperial government to resort to arms: see D. Cammack, The Rand at War, 1899–1902: The Witwatersrand and the Anglo-Boer War (London
- The owner of the newspaper was Emanuel Mendelssohn who had originally approached Alfred Beit for help in financing his venture, but was rebuffed apparently on the grounds that he was thoroughly unscrupulous. As if to prove the charge, Mendelssohn then approached Kruger's government and obtained a government subsidy in the form of substantial government-sponsored advertising. The newspaper subsequently took a strong pro-Boer line in its editorials and articles: see Smith, Origins of the South African War, 216
- Humphriss , D. 1968 . Benoni, Son of My Sorrow 30 Cape Town There were only 1000 whites living in both Benoni and Brakpan in 1904 and this was reported to have been a ‘considerable increase on prewar days’: see (Krugersdorp had a white population of only 2 000 in 1903, apparently double the estimated number for 1898: see The Krugersdorp Standard, 11 Apr. 1903. The 1896 Census taken within a three-mile radius of Johannesburg's Market Square reveals that there were 39 454 whites living in the city, a figure that had grown to 82 839 by 1904, in a six-mile radius: see M.L. Lange, ‘The Making of the White Working Class: ClassExperience and Class Identity in Johannesburg, 1890–1922’ (PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1998, 29
- The word ‘jingo’ is descriptive of a specifically British war-mongering, arch-imperialist patriotism, apparently derived from the patriotic doggerel: see also C. Dugmore, ‘The Making and Unmaking of an Imperial Town: Krugersdorp, 1887–1905’ (Paper presented at the SAVAL Conference, University of the Witwatersrand, June 1998).We don't want to fight butBy Jingo—If we do, We've got the men, we've got the guns andWe've got the money too.See C. Dugmore, The Rise and Decline of the Jingo and an Imperial Town, Krugersdorp, 1895–1905' (Paper presented at the ‘Identity and Change in South Africa’ Interdisciplinary Colloquium, University of the Witwatersrand, Oct. 1997);
- 1899 . The East Rand Express, 16 June, ‘Notes on Current News’, ‘The Situation’
- 1899 . Ibid., 5 May, ‘Notes on Current News’, ‘Jubilant Leaguers’
- Hartley , J. 1995 . Understanding News London Although some ‘semiotic’ studies of the media suggest that events are so distorted by the language used in newspapers, through the process of selection, commission and omission and the ‘multiplying up’ of signs into ‘myths’, that ‘news-discourse’ does effectively ‘create’ the events that it ‘reports’. See (and J. Kress, ‘Linguistic and Ideological Transformations in News Reporting’, in H. Davis and P. Walton, eds, Language, Image, Media (Oxford, 1994), 120–139
- Pakenham , T. 1979 . The Boer War 45 New York
- 1997 . 24 Dagut argues that the new wave of British ‘settlers’, those who went to the diamond fields of Kimberley and ultimately to the Witwatersrand, picked up cues of ‘racial etiquette’ from the longer settled who ‘knew the native’ but then, through a process of ‘overconformity’, came to exceed their racism. This was particularly the case for the Uitlanders whose ‘…youth, preponderant masculinity, social volatility and economic vulnerability are very likely to have contributed to the especial virulence of their racial attitudes’: see S. Dagut, ‘Racial Attitudes among British Settlers in South Africa, c. 1850–1895’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, There were, of course, other important impulses behind such racism, including competition with black workers whose low wages undercut white workers on the labour market
- van Onselen , C. 1982 . Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886–1914 Vol. 1 , 13 vol.New Babylon (Johannesburg
- Pakenham . The Boer War 45
- Ibid.
- The ‘newspaper war’ complemented and promoted a ‘petition war’ as the pro-Boer Standard and Diggers' News tried to undermine the validity of the ‘Queen's petition' by claiming that many of the signatures were fraudulently obtained (that signatures had been appended in duplicate or even triplicate, that children signed it, that deceased person's names appeared on the petition, etc). Pro-Boers produced several ‘counter-petitions’ that were, in turn, discredited by the Star (by pointing out that many of the ‘British’ signatures were those of burghers and people employed in state occupations like the railway)
- 1998. . The East Rand Express, 30 Dec. This was the view expressed in the Dutch section of the newspaper (a remarkable feature in an English-language newspaper, itself expressive of the degree that it was pro-Boer), in the article, ‘De Edgar Zaak’
- 1899 . Ibid., 6 Jan., ‘Notes on Current News’, ‘The Incendiary Press’
- 1899 . Ibid., 20 Jan., ‘The League Fiasco.’
- Ibid. Cammack argued that this fear of a ‘capitalist Republic’, a company town writ large, was common among the cosmopolitan Uitlanders who pointed to other examples around the world where such situations had developed, such as Broken Hill in Australia and Bulawayo in Rhodes's ‘Charterland’: see D. Cammack, The Rand at War, 22
- Humphriss . Benoni 6
- Ibid., 45. Hill's politics are not all that clear but his diaries include letters from Keir Hardie, the British Labour leader, from 1897 to 1901. He took a strong pro-Labour stance in most of his article: University of the Witwatersrand (hereafter UW), Archives of the Church of the Province of South Africa (hereafter CPSA), William Hills' Diaries
- Humphriss . 1900 . Benoni 141. Apart from concerns over' another Kimberley’, the working class had a complex and problematical attitude towards ‘jingoism’ and all other kinds of ‘patriotism’. Richard Price took issue with the simplistic argument that the working class in Great Britain supported the imperialist position during the Anglo-Boer War. Price's careful and detailed analysis of working-men's clubs in the United Kingdom, the ‘Mafeking Night’ crowds and the ‘Khaki Election’ of, reveals that the working class were tolerant of pro-Boer peace movements and was generally indifferent to patriotism unless it could be brought ‘home’ to them, for example, when neighbours or friends returned from active service in South Africa. It was rather the clerks and other members of the lower middle class that disrupted peace meetings, who voted for the Conservatives in the 1900 elections and who resorted to ‘mafficking’ when Baden-Powell was relieved by British forces: see R. Price, An Imperial War and the British Working Class: Working Class Attitudes and Reactions to the Boer War, 1899–1902 (London, 1972). While a similar study is needed on the white working class on the Rand, the same argument can, perhaps, be applied to this region. Cammack has demonstrated the essentially middle-class nature of the South African League (many were mining engineers or lawyers, for example), and how hard these leaders had to work to distance themselves from being identified with the mining capitalists in the eyes of the workers: see Cammack, ‘Class, Politics and War’, 1, 28
- Humphriss . Benoni 142
- Worger , W. 1987 . South Africa's City of Diamonds: Mine Workers and Monopoly Capitalism in Kimberley, 1867–1895 New Haven See, for example
- Humphriss, Benoni, 150. At one point the Chamber of Mines pushed for a ‘Gold Thefts Act’ which would replicate the effects of the ‘Diamond Thefts Act’ in Kimberley where illegal diamond buying was tackled through a web of restrictions which included body searches, closed compounds for black workers (which hurt local white commercial interests) and close surveillance of both white and black workers. The IDB laws were greatly resented by white workers and they protested strongly through various embryonic trade unions and labour organisations against the Gold Law which the Kruger government wisely rejected: see Cammack, ‘Class, Politics and War’, 86
- Cammack does not refer to Benoni specifically but quotes from the Standard and Diggers' News to highlight a number of letters written by miners across the Rand who expressed fear of the Rand becoming ‘another Kimberley’ if the Boer government backed down over the franchise question. One letter warned: ‘…we shall be sounded individually, like we were at Broken Hill’: Cammack, ‘Class, Politics and War’, 170
- Ibid., 47
- 1899 . East Rand Express, 5 May, ‘Capitalists and Crises’
- Dugmore . ‘Rise and Decline of the Jingo and an Imperial Town’, 2. Two striking examples of co-operation and amicability between these two ‘races’—as they were called by contemporaries—are Gerrit van Blommenstein and William Moorcroft Edwards. The former was a popular law agent who was elected mayor after the war by the largely English-speaking municipal voters, while Edwards, a local farmer and Town Councillor, played a key role in the Krugersdorp and 30. District Farmers' Association that formed the nucleus of the Het Volk Party
- 1918 . R.F. Wallis was described as a ‘printer and publisher’ although he started out in Krugersdorp as a hotel proprietor in the 1890s: see The Krugersdorp Standard, 12 Oct., ‘Obituary’. E.R.J. Holmes, also described as a ‘printer and publisher’, was a co-owner of the ‘Standard Printing Co.’ with Wallis: see The Krugersdorp Standard, 20 Oct. 1906. The political affiliations of Stammers, Wallis and Holmes are not clear as these men left no diaries and were not of sufficient stature to appear in the Who's Who in South Africa. They seem, if anything, to be liberals who gravitated to the ‘Liberal Imperialist’ camp or ‘Limps’, as they were called, before the war. After the war the newspaper took an essentially pro-Milner and Tory line; for example, they favoured the importation of Chinese indentured labourers, a policy strongly opposed by both the Liberal and Labour parties in Britain
- The Monument commemorated the Boer defeat of the British in what became known later as the ‘First War of Independence’, in 1880–1. The monument apparently created no resentment among British Uitlanders in Krugersdorp and may even have evoked respect for the Boer's martial ability
- MacDonald , H. R. 1993 . Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890–1918 32 – 44 . Toronto See, for example
- The Jameson Raid, according to Van Onselen, ‘…started out as a plot within the confines of smoke-filled rooms in the houses of high finance, [and] ended as a low-level farce in the open veld near Krugersdorp’: Van Onselen, New Babylon, 13
- 1987 . Krugersdorp 100 Jare/Years 24 Krugersdorp See Dugmore, ‘Making and Unmaking of an Imperial Town’, 4. Kruger made the remark on the occasion of laying the foundation stone of Krugersdorp's Town Hall: see
- Pratt , A. 1913 . The Real South Africa London The term ‘New Babylon’ was used by Pratt in his post-war book on South Africa but it resonated with the Boers' attitude to Johannesburg: see (James Ramsay MacDonald opined in 1902 that Kruger had been right in ‘refusing to recognise Johannesburg as a civic community which had settled into an organic part of the state…Men rent beds not houses in the Golden City’: J. Ramsay MacDonald, What I Saw in South Africa (London, 1902), 103, quoted in Van Onselen, New Babylon, 27
- Cammack makes a similar point: ‘As the Uitlanders came to know the arme burgher and lost sight of the sturdy trekker who was so easily romanticized, the Boer community was seen to be lazy and desirous of living off the fruits of the industrious Uitlanders…’, extending this view of the western suburbs of Johannesburg ‘…to the whole Boer nation’: Cammack, ‘Class, Politics and War’, 26
- It should, however, be pointed out that Lis Lange's recent research on Johannesburg's white working class has suggested that far more co-operation and friendship existed between Engl ish-speaking workers in the town itself (as opposed to miners who tended to live in boarding houses or on the mines) which can be seen in number of Afrikaans-speaking names cited as godparents of the children of English-speaking workers in the baptismal records of the Anglican church in working-class suburbs: see ML. Lange, ‘The Making of the White Working Class’, especially Chapter One
- Leveson Scarth , G. 1899 . South Africa: Past and Present Bath Price argues that the stereotype of the Boer as ‘dirty, corrupt, immoral and shifty’, permeated the popular pro-war literature, citing as examples the following: (Knox Little, South Africa (1900), and A. Conan Doyle, The Great Boer War (London, 1900). See Price, An Imperial War, 12 fn. 1
- MacDonald , R. H. 1994 . The Language of Empire: Myths and Metaphors of Popular Imperialism, 1880–1918 Manchester See
- 1997 . For more on this point, see C. Dugmore, ‘The Church on the Rock: The Role of the Church in the Making of Krugersdorp, 1887–1899’ (Paper presented to the Interdisciplinary Post-Graduate Seminar, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
- For example storekeeper F.W. Lewis, contractor F. Cooper, Dr. Ernest Snell and hotel proprietor J. Lewis-Williams all had their children baptised in the local Anglican church by 1898: see UW, CPSA, Anglican Church Baptisms, Krugersdorp, AB 2012/JK. 7.5, 1894–9, various pages
- Cammack makes the point that the more rooted middle classes tended to support the South African League because it championed causes like better schools for Engl ish-speaking children and campaigned against the Kruger government's insistence that Uitlander children learn South African history and the Dutch language: see Cammack, ‘Class, Politics and War’, 103. While this argument is appealing, it does not seem to apply to Krugersdorp where the middle class appear to have faith in working ‘with the system’ to obtain reforms in a steady, consistent way from the Kruger government. This is especially clear in the way that the commercial and professional interests in the town worked with Boer officials through the elected ‘Sanitary Committee’ to improve conditions in the town, including the establishment of schools
- Cammack, ‘Class, Politics and War’, 47 and 88. Significantly, while Kruger sent in his police to arrest the strikers at Randfontein, Cammack argues that this did not turn the workers against Kruger as they tended instead to blame Robinson for the police action. The Kruger government developed a reputation for pro-labour legislation like the eight-hour working day and this accounts for much of the working class support for the pro-Boer cause in towns such as Krugersdorp and Benoni
- 1899 . Krugersdorp Standard, 13 May, ‘Troubled Waters’
- Bitensky , M. F. 1950 . 36 ‘The South African League: British Imperialist Organisation in South Africa, 1896 to 1899’ (MA dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, Branches were established at ‘Pretoria, Heidelberg, Florida, East Rand, Roodepoort and Johannesburg’. Bitensky later points out that ‘Johannesburg was always its main branch’ (p. 50), and while there appears to be no branch at Krugersdorp there were branches at both Boksburg and Benoni. The size of the League is difficult to estimate but branches had to have a minimum of 50 members and there were 74 branches around the whole of South Africa by 1900. Some League-organised public, open-air meetings in Johannesburg attracted thousands of interested spectators. The ‘Queen's Petition' had 21 684 signatures which is a considerable number even if some of the names were fraudulently obtained. A ‘Counter Petition’ only obtained 9 000 signatures
- Jowett , G. S. 1992 . Propaganda and Persuasion 8 London and V. O'Donnell, (National celebrations and overt patriotism are given as examples of ‘white propaganda’
- Zajonc . ‘Attitude Effects of Mere Exposure’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9, 2 (1968)
- Festinger , L. 1957 . A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance Stanford
- Quoted in Jowett and O'Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion, 153
- Ibid., 133
- Ibid., 134
- Clarke , I. F. 1966 . Voices Prophesying War, 1763–1984 London
- Ball-Rokeach , S. and de Fleur , M. L. 1976 . ‘A Dependency Model of Mass Media Effect’ . Communication Research , 3 : 3 – 21 .
- Hodge , R. and Kress , G. 1988 . Social Semiotics New York See
- Guillen , M. 1995 . Five Equations that Changed the World: The Power and Poetry of Mathematics 27 – 8 . London
- Krugersdorp Standard, 29 Apr. 1899 (loosely translates as ‘Wait a while’)
- 1899 . Ibid., 15 Apr. (loosely translates as ‘Everything will be all right’)
- 1899. . Krugersdorp Standard, 29 Apr.
- 1899 . The Krugersdorp Standard, 26 Aug., ‘British Tactics in the Field’
- Ibid.
- Jowett and O'Donnell . Propaganda and Persuasion 168: ‘[Portraying an enemy as an]…apelike barbarian [is] a familiar device used by both sides…[in a conflict].’
- 1899. . It is hard to avoid using the word ‘jingo’ to describe a leading article on Queen's Victoria's birthday, entitled ‘God Bless Her’ which was convinced that whether Tory or Liberal, Republican or Democrat, all must have thrilled with pleasure upon the occasion of the queen's eightieth birthday. It goes on to describe her…virtues as a mother, her powers as a ruler of a vast Kingdom and as Empress of Empire spreading over a territory equal in size to that of all the Russias…: Krugersdorp Standard, 27 May
- 1899. . It is argued that the newspaper was ‘virtually’ transformed to a ‘jingo’ newspaper because it never quite went to the excesses of the Star and as late as September it was still hoping for a solution that would dissappoint the ‘chauvinists on both sides’: see Krugersdorp Standard, 16 Sep. This is remarkably similar to the East Rand Express's leader in the same month which condemned the ‘spirit of patriots ranged on either side of the present squabble’: East Rand Express, 29 Sep. 1899, ‘Metamorphosis’
- 1902 . Krugersdorp Standard, 27 Sep., ‘The Future of the Town’
- 1899 . Ibid., 8 July, ‘More Light'the article used the words ‘hurry up’ and remarks that the ‘Presidential Dorp continues to grope in the dark after sunset’
- 1899. . Ibid., 5 Aug. The article did, admittedly, also attack the ‘Leader’ for using an incident in which an Uitlander nearly died for the lack of proper hospital facilities in Krugersdorp, to whip up anti-government feelings
- 1899 . Krugersdorp Standard, 15 July, ‘A Market Rig?’
- 1899 . Ibid., 9 Sep., ‘Do as I say, not as I do’
- 1899 . Ibid., 16 Sep., ‘The Dorp Excited’
- 1899 . Krugersdorp Standard, 29 July, ‘Police Terrorism’
- Ibid.
South African Historical Journal
Volume 41, 1999 - Issue 1