Kipling in South Africa

Dan Jacobson

The first piece of verse by Rudyard Kipling I committed to memory – without even knowing I was doing so – was incised in large Roman capitals on a wall of the Honoured Dead Memorial in Kimberley, South Africa. During the Anglo-Boer War, Kimberley was besieged for some months by forces from the two Boer republics, the Transvaal (De Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek) and the Orange Free State. Among those trapped in the city during the siege was Cecil Rhodes, former prime minister of the Cape Colony and the most prominent among the mining magnates drawn to South Africa by the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley and subsequently of gold in Johannesburg. Rhodes had deliberately moved from Cape Town to Kimberley once it became clear to him that war between Britain and the two ‘Dutch’ republics was imminent: this he did out of a sense of noblesse oblige to the city in which he had made his first and greatest fortune, and which he felt to be peculiarly ‘his’ thereafter. (Many other people, the Boer leaders among them, felt the same way about it, which was why they had made Kimberley one of their prime targets.) Once the siege was lifted, Rhodes returned to his house and estate outside Cape Town, and immediately commissioned his favourite architect, Herbert Baker, to find a prominent site in Kimberley and to design for it a memorial to the imperial troops and local militiamen who had died defending the city.

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[1] Umr Singh constantly parrots the official line that the Anglo-Boer war was ‘a white man’s war’, with the local blacks – and Umr Singh himself – excluded from combat because of the colour of their skin. Hence the title, and various developments of the story’s plot. The fact is that throughout the war both sides used large numbers of blacks as spies, scouts, porters and personal servants; and, more to the point here, the British also put significant units of armed blacks into the field. This the Boers never dared to do, lest the guns they distributed be turned against them.

[2] In Following the Equator (1897), Mark Twain wrote: ‘In the opinion of many people Mr Rhodes is South Africa; others think he is only a large part of it. These latter consider that South Africa consists of Table Mountain, the diamond mines, the Johannesburg goldfields, and Cecil Rhodes . . . I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.’

[3] Lion’s Head is a peak guarding the western flank of Table Mountain; the ‘Line’ refers to the equator. Though he did not revisit South Africa after 1908, in later years Kipling declined the executors of Rhodes’s estate’s repeated requests to return The Woolsack to them – presumably because he could not bear to make this symbolic break with his friendship with Rhodes and his memories of the time he and his family had spent in the country. After Kipling’s death in 1936 The Woolsack did finally fall into the hands of the executors, who passed it on to the University of Cape Town. Today it is used as one of the many administrative buildings on the campus.

[4] Presumably the blacks were simply too far outside the realm of politics, as the term was commonly understood, to be brought into consideration. More than twenty years after the end of the Anglo-Boer War, Roy Campbell, who remains the finest lyric poet in English that South Africa has yet produced, and who was as sensitive to the local idiom as anyone could be, wrote a lengthy satire in rhyming couplets about the country’s political and intellectual life. Entitled The Wayzgoose, it focuses on two typically South African simpletons, Johnny (the English-speaker) and Piet (the Afrikaner). ‘Think not that I on racial questions touch,’ the refrain of the poem runs, ‘For one was Durban-born, the other Dutch.’ (Durban in those days was the most British, the most true-blue-Tory, of South Africa’s cities.)

[5] When T.S. Eliot went public with his admiration for Kipling by producing A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1941), readers who regarded Eliot as the high priest of an austere, highbrow Modernism were surprised to learn of his enthusiasm for a poet written off by most intellectuals of the day as little better than a music-hall balladeer. In fact, Kipling’s influence on Eliot (himself far more of a deliberately self-made Englishman than Kipling ever was) had already shown itself in two of his own ‘historical’ or ‘country-house’ poems, ‘Burnt Norton’ and ‘Little Gidding’.