JAMESON, LEANDER STARR

Leander Starr Jameson, (February 9, 1853-November 26, 1917), was a physician, politician, and administrator. He is remembered above all as the leader of the failed Jameson Raid of 1895-96 against the Transvaal Republic. He was also prime minister of the Cape Colony from 1904 to 1908.

PHOTO CAPTION: Leander Starr Jameson SOURCE: E A Library

Jameson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, the son of a lawyer and journalist, and studied medicine at University College in London. He came to the Kimberley gold fields in 1878 as a successful physician looking for adventure. He became friendly with Cecil John Rhodes. a Briton like himself, who was amassing power and prestige by amalgamating the companies mining the recently discovered diamond fields.
Rhodes and Jameson shared a dream of a united South Africa, a union of Briton and Boer under the umbrella of the British Empire. To effect his dream, Rhodes enlisted Jameson’s help in expanding British settler areas north of the Limpopo River into what is now Zimbabwe, under the aegis of Rhodes’ British South Africa Company. Rhodes wanted to settle the land to the north with English-speaking people to offset the dominance of the Boers in the south.
Through Jameson’s personality, and perhaps because of his medical knowledge, he won the confidence of Lobengula, the Matabele chief whose people had fled Shaka and settled in Bulawayo in southern Rhodesia. Lobengula gave Jameson and the British South Africa Company freedom of passage through his territory north into land occupied by the Mashona.
The Pioneer Column raised the British flag at Salisbury (now Harare) in 1890. Jameson then explored a route to Beira in Mozambique, and in March 1891 negotiated a treaty with Chief Gungunhana of Gazaland, giving the company access to an area east of Mashonaland. As this was under Portuguese jurisdiction, the Portuguese authorities arrested Jameson, but the dispute was settled later the same year by an Anglo-Portuguese agreement.
Jameson was appointed as administrator of Mashona land in 1891. In 1893 he was also named commander-in-chief of the company forces during the Matabele War which broke out between the Ndebele and the company in that year. After the war Jameson’s authority was extended to included Matabeleland as well as Mashonaland, thus covering what was later to become Southern Rhodesia.
On October 18, 1895. Jameson was also appointed resident commissioner of the Bechuanaland border strip that had also been acquired by the company. It was from this base that he was to launch the raid into the adjacent Transvaal for which he is best remembered.

On December 29, 1895, Jameson, with a force of 500 police and volunteers, eight maxim guns, and three pieces of field artillery, invaded the Transvaal Republic. The immediate aim of the raid was to overthrow the government of Paul Kruger, and to annex the Transvaal. Supposedly the raid was to be in support of an uprising of Uitlanders (i.e. non-Boer foreigners, especially English-speakers) in Johannesburg, capital of the Transvaal, who claimed ill-treatment by the Boer government. In reality, however, the plan was to annex the Transvaal in furtherance of Rhodes’s dream of making South Africa into a federation under the British flag and was to be undertaken at the behest of Rhodes, who at this time was prime minister of Cape Colony.
In effect, as far as the English-speakers were concerned, Kruger had indeed been collecting high import duties, as well as imposing heavy taxes on mining operations on the Rand. A Reform Committee comprised of uitlanders had therefore secretly been formed to plot Kruger’s ouster. Due to dissension among the conspirators in Johannesburg, however, the plot was to be indefinitely postponed. Jameson, however, decided to proceed on his own, without Rhodes’ consent.
The raid was a disaster. The Jameson expedition failed to cut the right telephone wires, so that the Transvaal government remained cognisant of their movements. The Johannesburg conspirators, thinking the raid had been canceled, failed to rise up. Jameson and his party were surrounded at Doornkop, outside Krugersdorp, some 20 miles from Johannesburg, on January 2, 1896, and obliged to surrender. Jameson and other leading figures were then put on trial. The British government dissociated itself entirely from the raid, and Rhodes’ political career received a set-back from which it was not to recover.
As a consequence of the raid, tensions and suspicions between Afrikaans-speakers and English-speakers in South Africa intensified. Within three years the Boer War (1899-1902) had broken out between Great Britain and the Boer colonies of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Looking back a few years later, Winston Churchill, the future prime minister of Britain, whose career led him to South Africa during these years, was to date “the beginning of these violent times in our country from the Jameson Raid”.
Although Jameson was humiliated, tried and convicted in England in 1896, and served a few months in jail, he returned to South Africa and within a few years had been elected to a seat in the Cape Parliament. In 1904 he became prime minister, a post he held until 1908, when he was returned to parliament for another four years as a member of the Opposition.
During his tenure in office (1904-1909), he worked toward a union of the four colonies. In 1910, the British and Boer colonies agreed to form a union. Ironically, Jameson, who had aggravated relations between Boer and Briton in 1896, was now a principal agent in their unification.
He retired from politics in 1912 and returned to England, where he died in 1917. His body was taken back to Africa and he was buried alongside Cecil John Rhodes in Matopos, Zimbabwe, at a place Rhodes had named the “View of the World.”

VIRGINIA CURTIN KNIGHT