CHAPTER TWO
The Pro-Boer Republican (1897–1902)
Erskine Childers, a leading theorist of Gladstonian fiscal doctrine for the British Empire, claimed that ‘the whole history of South Africa bears a close resemblance to the history of Ireland’.1 This idea was only justifiable according to the British Empire’s plan after 1886 to turn Ireland into a similar colonial, financial entity. As Gladstone himself explained, the only motive of his Irish policy lay in imperial ‘finance devices … too subtle and refined’ to be announced to the general public. For security reasons, however, it was ‘of great consequence that in Ireland, with a view to holding in the people’, these realities remained ones to which Irish public attention should never be drawn.2 Some historians have claimed falsely that the provenance of Gladstone’s Irish policy ‘must be explained in terms of parliamentary combinations’ arising from electoral results,3 as if T.P. O’Connor’s return for Liverpool in 1885 necessitated a dramatic alteration of government policy. However, the reality was quite different. ‘Ireland’s future had now become more unionist and imperial’4 precisely because ‘the position of the landlord in Ireland has been directly associated with [the formation of] State Policy all along’ and it had now been simply arranged that the Irish Party would serve as a ‘body of moderate men’ suited ‘to take their place’ in forestalling any possibility of an opposition to British rule arising in Ireland. This was to be done not least by deliberately not acknowledging publicly in Ireland what the British government’s policy for Ireland was in reality.5 The perpetuation of a permanent secret service within Ireland was a reflection of this intent.
This trend in British governmental policy regarding Ireland was essentially why deep paradoxes arose in Irish party-political nomenclatures after 1886 and continued long thereafter. For instance, in Dublin, the independent nationalist MP William Field found his material support from Tory (‘unionist’) businessmen in demanding greater Irish fiscal autonomy and independence from Britain. By contrast, the chief ‘home rule’ parliamentary representative,William Martin Murphy, who was a ‘nationalist’ wholly committed, with the Jesuits’ enthusiastic support, to overthrowing the historic legacy of the Protestant ascendancy, was one of three Irish Party figures who not only supported those British raids for South African gold that led to the Anglo-Boer War but also made and developed his fortune from the related British colonial (‘gold coast’) railway schemes in West Africa.6 In this way, the general impact upon Irish society of the Anglo-Boer War might be typified as having been an illustration of the maxim that ‘the bond of Empire was at all times stronger than that of [the] Union’. This was because ‘the Empire … offered career opportunities—male and female, clerical and lay, that were simply not available in Ireland’, making the Empire seem like a more sensible guide to political and economic developments than the old (eighteenth-century) Irish nationalist adage of ‘perish the empire and live the [Irish] constitution’.7 Griffith would take a contrary view. In the short term, however, such considerations evidently mattered very little to him compared to the purely personal issue that he was receiving a working holiday. Indeed, as Griffith could never afford from his own wages to take a holiday longer than a few hours in the Dublin countryside,8 his time in South Africa was undoubtedly one of the most colourful episodes of his life.
During his travels Griffith met people of various nationalities for the first time: native Africans, Indians, Dutch ‘Boers’, Portuguese, Germans, Egyptians, Japanese and even the English. Having travelled across England to Southampton, he boarded a steamship bound, via the Mediterranean and Suez Canal, for Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique). The ship stopped first at the tropical island of Zanzibar, a territory recently acquired by the British off the coast of German East Africa (Tanzania). Here he went on a British guided tour of the capital city, which brought to life for him ‘a beloved storybook of our childhood’:
One cannot thoroughly appreciate or understand the Arabian Nights until he has visited an Arab city—until he has wandered through the narrow, tortuous streets with palaces towering to the sky … Sometimes we went into the courtyards of the princely merchants … and cooled ourselves under his palm-tree; sometimes we mingled with the whirling stream of Arabs, Swahilis, Singhalese, Egyptians, Japanese, Banyans and Parsees in the bazaar, and sometimes we explored the narrow dirty back streets, scarcely three-feet wide, lit by occasional lanterns … [observing] the fish-market and the slave-market and a mosque or two.9
In Mozambique, Griffith spent most of the time ‘lying all the morning round the deck, revelling in delicious laziness’. He learnt some phrases in a Hindu dialect and repeatedly defeated a German traveller in chess (‘I comforted him with large beer and the assurance that I was the champion chess-player of the Celtic race’).10 At night, however, he invariably envied his fellow travellers for their female companionship. This prompted him to rely even more than usual on the traditional refuge of loveless young men: his pipe, which he christened as his companion ‘Nicotina’:
On such a night—it is better to think Shakespeare than to quote him. Pray, what have I to do with lovers? I saw the Queen rising from the waves, and Helen and Maeve and Joan in her beautiful mob. Begone, O Aphrodite! Nicotina alone I serve—can your caresses drive her image from my heart? … My heart weeps …I cast aside my Nicotina. Shall I ever for one instant feel the divine joy of this one-time vilest of men, who loves and is beloved?11
Griffith shared in the British travellers’ bemusement at the ostentatious aspects of Portuguese culture. A Portuguese port town appeared to him to be full of diminutive soldiers, ‘black-moustached and yellow-faced’, who were inappropriately ‘carrying enormous sabres’. Life in the town appeared to Griffith as carnivalesque, bordering on the grotesque:
Every third day is a great saint’s day … The troops fire off their guns, the band plays at the kiosk, and the governor illuminates his residence. We go to the church and stare at the red-white-and-blue saints, dressed in tinsel-paper with cardboard crowns stuck on their heads …‘These Portuguese’, said a Saxon to me as we lay on deck that night, blowing our tobacco-clouds up in the face of divine Astarte, ‘are useless in the world … If England or America had magnificent Delagoa the trade and commerce of South Africa would be doubled in five years; but these little pride-inflated, lazy nincompoops, with their big swords and ten thousand saints, are ruining the country.’ 12
Such manifestations of British cultural prejudice against less industrialised Mediterranean nations were not alien to the Dubliner Griffith. His strong sense of identification with his English companions would disappear, however, whenever they boasted of the political achievements of the British Empire. At Zanzibar, for instance, several English travellers asked Griffith for his opinion of Britain’s performance in the recent Anglo-Zanzibar War. This had ended in just forty-five minutes after a British gunboat blew up the palace of the Sultan who had declared war. Griffith replied by expressing disapproval of the Empire, after which the English, who had hitherto been ‘very pleasant fellows as travel-companions’, turned on him with seething hatred, prompting Griffith to conclude that ‘each had a tiger sleeping in his heart’ that was born of a militant British nationalism.13
The nature of African town life led Griffith to the conclusion that Christian missionary work often went hand-in-hand with colonial exploitation. In one particular town, he found that the six richest men were Christian missionaries. Each man, it seemed to him, treated the natives simply as slaves:
He came to enlighten the heathen and in the process of enlightenment acquired wealth sufficient to enable him to live comfortably … He had converted six heathens who hewed wood and drew water for him, while he smoked his pipe and said it was good. As money is the root of all evil he gave them none but he occasionally hired