Once upon a time when your father and mine—my white brother— were lusty barbarians, the Ethiop was a mighty man, a warrior, a sailor, a poet, an artist, a cunning artificer, and a philosopher.15
Contemporary imperialist propaganda, issued by each of the European powers, invariably justified their financial exploits in Africa by portraying their adversaries as ‘robbers and murderers with a penchant for harpooning pious Christians’. Griffith, however, typified this as a denial of ‘the solemn truth the Japanese has grasped, that the Art of Destruction must be learned from the Christian nations’.16 He even suggested that life in Africa had probably been ‘comparatively godly’ before the Europeans had built their Christian churches there, in the halcyon days when ‘there were no crawling capitalist conspirators infesting the country’.17 Griffith’s cynicism regarding organised religion at this time included the Irish Jesuits, whom he accused of having substituted ‘the Gospel of Khaki’ (the British Army) for ‘the Gospel of the Prince of Peace’ (Christ) through their desire to benefit financially from British imperial colonialism.18
In Pretoria, Griffith discovered that the Dutch ‘Boer’ colony had become very militarised as a result of recent British raids into the territory. Here he met John James Lavery, a British businessman of Irish descent who had purchased a small newspaper in the town of Middelburg. Lavery was looking for some editorial assistance and Griffith seized this opportunity. Some local historians have dated the beginning of his editorial work to May 1897, although Griffith recollected that ‘it was a pleasant autumn evening when I struck the town’.19 The Courant was a badly printed country paper with a circulation of only 300 copies, some of which reached larger towns such as Johannesburg and Pretoria, and it was designed for the British citizens living within the Dutch colony.20 The newspaper office was tiny and grubby and ‘when I found the office I felt sorry I had come, but the die was cast … . We were sometimes short of type and often short of paper in the Courant offices, but our subscribers accepted this as inevitable.’ Griffith typified his work for this paper as provocative, prompting readers to ‘complain when I started writing in its columns’:
It had been the policy of the Courant to please all parties—the English for preference. I explained to its owner that if he wanted me to edit his paper, its policy must be one that would please myself. He agreed, and I pleased myself by arguing that the Boer and no one but the Boer owned the Transvaal, that the Queen’s writ didn’t run there and shouldn’t run there, and the God Almighty had not made the earth for the sole use of the Anglo-Saxon race. This offended the Englishmen and they sent word they would drop round one evening, burn down the office and finish the editor off. But they didn’t.21
In fact, Griffith’s job consisted mostly of reporting on local business matters, although he also drew attention to the formation of Maud Gonne’s L’Irlande Libre (Paris).22 Life in the town itself was dull as it contained only ‘two hotels, a Dutch church, an English church, and a jail’:
It was the centre of the coal-mining district … The young English managers of the mines played billiards all the month round in the town and ‘let things rip’, as they elegantly termed it. The shareholders in England paid for their fun.23
The most colourful episode to occur for Griffith in Middelburg was to meet Olive Schreiner, a daughter of Dutch and English Protestant missionaries who had the reputation in London, which she occasionally visited, of being the leading literary figure in South Africa. Prior to their meeting, Griffith had dismissed her literary reputation by arguing that ‘she has not grasped, or mayhap “disdained”, the fact that the literature of a people must be of and from the people’. He suggested that not unless someone ‘arises who can understand and sympathise with the ideals and aspirations of the people of this portion of the world, black as well as white, there can be no African literature’. Such a writer, he noted, would need to have ‘powers of expression and genius’ but such qualities were ‘as scarce in Africa as millionaires are plentiful’.24 When he actually met Schreiner, however, Griffith found that she was ‘a charming woman’. Later, he was delighted to find that she became a critic of British imperialism in South Africa,25 as indeed many contemporaries did.26
Griffith’s time with the Courant was cut short after he responded to the horsewhipping of an English townsman by a Dutch Boer landowner by writing that the former had received just what he deserved. The offended English party not only won a court case against the landowner but also pressed libel charges against the Courant, demanding five thousand pounds compensation from a paper that had a grand capital of thirty pounds. As a result, Lavery was arrested, receiving a sentence of either six months hard labour or a fine of one hundred pounds. Fortunately for Lavery, the population of Middelburg paid the fine but considerable ill feeling had developed and so the paper was disbanded.27 Griffith left the town in October 1897 with neither regrets nor, it seems, any sense of shared responsibility for Lavery’s misfortune. It was an example of which Griffith’s hero, John Mitchel, probably would have been proud. Noting how ‘I eventually managed to kill the paper’, Griffith recalled that while ‘there were some drawbacks to journalism in Middelburg … on the whole, it was exhilarating.’28
Returning to Pretoria, Griffith joined an Irish workers-benefit society named after John Daly, an imprisoned IRB leader who had recently been returned unopposed to parliament for Limerick city as a protest vote (his candidacy was immediately disqualified). Together with John MacBride, Griffith depended upon Solomon Gillingham, a successful baker of Irish descent and secret correspondent of Mark Ryan in London, to help him settle in the Dutch city. Through this channel, funds were forwarded to London for a fenian-amnesty agitation while an address was made to that wing of the American Clan na Gael that funded Ryan’s London activities.29 In this address, which was reprinted by W.M. Murphy’s Dublin newspaper, Griffith expressed a desire that Irishmen worldwide would use the centenary of the 1798 rising as an opportunity to ‘repudiate forever … the sham miscalled “constitutional action”’,30 which was the description that the Irish Party gave to their appeals to the British imperial parliament to better manage Irish affairs. Mark Ryan’s American contacts, secretly known as the Irish National Brotherhood (INB), were not reliable. Their propaganda was valued, however: as early as 1894 Griffith had persuaded the Celtic Literary Society to become subscribers to the Irish Republic (New York).31
It has been rumoured that Griffith was involved in a secret conspiracy in South Africa that planned to rob a local goldmine in order to finance an Irish revolutionary organisation.32 This seems unlikely, although the clear connection of his South African circle with a trans-Atlantic ‘Fenian’ communications network (this, as Griffith knew, had also existed during the first Anglo-Boer War)33 does at least explain the existence of a rumour. Griffith did work for a time as an overseer in a gold mine near Johannesburg where he nearly had a fatal accident. He later told the orphaned Dublin Protestant writer James Stephens that ‘I could have been a fairly wealthy man if I had the luck in those days to want to be dishonest’ because many individuals doing the work he was doing ‘were able to retire after a few years and buy theatres’ due to their subtle larceny.34
In Johannesburg Griffith occasionally received letters from William Rooney,35 which no doubt related to the activities of the 1798 centenary movement. Within weeks of Griffith’s departure, a 1798 Centenary Committee, led by John O’Leary, Henry Dixon and Fred Allan, was established by the YIL. Shortly thereafter, at a YIL convention chaired by P.N. Fitzgerald, it was proposed that centenary clubs should be established nationwide with a view to creating a new nationalist organisation.36 This 1798 centenary movement quickly grew large, but the Irish Party and the Catholic clergy launched a concerted campaign to wrestle control of the movement out of the IRB’s hands.37
The first circular distributed by the Centenary Committee argued that if the celebrations were to have ‘permanent beneficial results’ they would need to encompass equally the viewpoints of ‘the three great sects’ in Ireland. It was also argued that the United Irishmen’s greatest chance of attaining a fair constitution for Ireland had not been in the 1798 rebellion but rather in those political developments that had occurred prior to the government’s suppression of the Irish Volunteers during 1794 and the driving of the reformist United Irish movement underground.38