Lessons of South Africa

...There was the misanthropic roue J .B...

...Before long, they had constructed a row of shanty towns near the diamond fields at Kim-berley and carved up the land into a thousand small claims: A map Wheatcroft reproduces looks like a checkerboard on drugs...

...Images of the "yellow peril" are reviving in union halls and board rooms around the country, and even in such unlikely places as the Nation...

...Soon they were winning pass laws, the compounding of blacks, restrictive hiring and, in some cases, total exclusion...

...Middle-class liberals may tsk-tsk these instances of unbrotherly behavior (often, while supporting trade and immigration policies that contribute to the problem), but until genuine answers are found for those whose livelihoods are on the line, prejudice and racism in this country will surely grow...

...Some English and Jewish settlers arrived to add to the mix, and the Dutch farmers, or Boers, fled inland to avoid contact with outsiders, but two-thirds of the way into the 19th century, on the eve of the diamond rush, South Africa remained "a number of miscellaneous territories, a ramshackle collection of polities, a congeries of peoples, united by little more than poverty...

...For many he was its supreme embodiment...

...Whether Kitchener's harsh methods were necessary for military success in the Empire is a question best left to the experts...

...Successful Kitchener certainly was, and to that extent his fame and position weredeserved.But kitchener, for all its huffing and puffing, really manages to prove only one thing— that the Man Behind the Legend was not the kind of person you would want to have to dinner...

...How, one wonders, would Euro-Americans have acted if the surrounding native Indian population had outnumbered them by ratios of 5:1 and 10:1...

...Consolidation of claims led to monopolization to prevent overproduction, the plague of the diamond industry...

...Ever since diamonds were found along the Orange River in 1869 and gold was discovered a few years later on the Witwatersrand, events have unfolded with all the ineluctability of a classic Greek tragedy...

...The white miners, by contrast, faced a direct economic threat from the endless supply of black laborers, who were always ready to work for less than they...

...Kitchener was not sadistic, Warner explains at one point: "On suitable occasions he liked to be kind...

...Cycles of boom and bust wiped out many of the rest, until those who remained were the hardiest, the shrewdest, and the most unscrupulous...

...These men together with a few others, most of them Jews, would become known as the Randlords...

...The Afrikaners never forgot...

...During World War I, his stern, extravagantly mustachioed face stared out from a famous recruiting poster over the caption, "Your Country Needs You...

...The situation is not identical to that of South Africa's white miners a century before, yet it is too close for comfort...

...In Cape Colony, where Rhodes was prime minister before the Boer War, many "coloreds" and a number of blacks had the right to vote...

...Inevitably, after this initial spurt of free-for-all digging, holdings began to be merged and class divisions developed...

...A shepherd's discovery of an 83.5-carat gem touched off the transformation into modern South Africa, bringing in hordes of eager fortune hunters from as far away as Russia, Australia and the United States...

...and, of course, Cecil Rhodes, later to be the arch-imperialist proclaiming: "I would annex the planets if I could...

...His career coincided with the British Empire's Golden Age...

...These patterns were repeated in the gold mines, "only faster, more violently, more dramatically...

...Kitchener may not have been a great man, the Prime Minister's wife is said to have remarked, but at least he was a great poster...

...The Randlords brought an especially brutal form of capitalism to South Africa, they did not bring racism...

...This biography takes on an almost comical tone as Warner dutifully chases after his subject, trying to rescue him from himself...

...Warner, however, has a tough case on his hands...

...Kitchener...

...Some miners were swept away by disease...

...When the Boers tried to maintain authority in their territories by regulating the industry, the Randlords helped precipitate the war that gave England—and consequently the mine owners—complete control of South Africa...

...But in the 1920s, radical striking whites marched under the red flag and the slogan, "workers of the world unite and fight for a white South Africa.' In these circumstances, it is difficult to see what other paths were available...

...Almost from the day the diamond mines opened, the white workers were pressing for discriminatory legislation to limit job competition from blacks...

...On racial issues, their Progressive Party was relatively enlightened...

...He began to build his fortune by importing Kimberley's first large water pump, and then branched out into refrigeration, selling ice cream to the miners...

...Warner's volume is more an anti-book than a book...

...There was simply no meaningful political constituency for egalitarian policies...

...Robinson, who first had the idea of bringing in black laborers to work his mines...

...When Great Britain acquired it during the Napoleonic Wars, the inhabitants of the colony numbered 26,000 Dutch, 30,000 slaves and approximately 30,000 aboriginal Hottentots...

...Its main purpose is to answer the general's many critics, and a tone of defensiveness pervades its pages...

...The capitalists behaved like capitalists, and the Boers like the besieged minority they were...

...Most disturbing in this regard were the white miners who, in 1948, joined with the Boers to overturn the Randlords' Progressive government and install the Nationalist Party with its program of apartheid —disturbing not only for the monstrosity they helped to create in South Africa but also for what their actions may portend here...

...An obsessively ambitious, if talented, careerist who never paused to question any of the dogmas of his highly dogmatic day, Kitchener was clearly a thoroughly unpleasant sort, alienating practically everyone he worked with (his troops nicknamed him "He Who Must Be Obeyed...

...ONE MAN WHO LEFT an indelible mark on South Africa was Lord H.H...

...As the South Africa example shows, people in need tend to strike out at the most visible targets, and the most vulnerable...

...A few years ago in Michigan, some unemployed auto workers murdered a young Chinese they thought was Japanese...

...Geoffrey Wheatcroft's crisp and engaging account of the great diamond and gold magnates, The Randlords( Atheneum, 314pp., $17.95), concentrating on what is no doubt the most important chapter in South Africa' s history, leaves the impression that alternate paths have been few indeed...

...The Randlords declared: "We do not want a white proletariat in this country...

...It established a storehouse on the Cape that gradually grew into a small colony, though for the first 200 years no one was especially interested in the area except the people who lived there...

...The Transvaal Republic they established in 1846 was founded on the premise of noequality "in church or state" between the races...

...This eminent Victorian and Edwardian has been the subject of several biographies...

...The seeds of modern South Africa were sown by the Randlords' enemies, the reactionary, exclusionist Boers and the white mine workers...

...Once production was restricted, the magnates moved on to the next stage, control of marketing...

...Korean merchants are encountering racial hostility in New York City's black communities...

...Others succumbed to alcohol, madness or suicide...

...The story Wheatcroft tells is grander even than that of America's Robber Barons, and one wishes he had been less modest in his ambitions: The book could easily have been twice as long...

...Kitchener was a tough old bird, the veteran of the grueling Sudanese campaign against the fanatical followers of the Mahdi, and, following his South Africa stint, thecommand-er-in-chief in India...

...Since the price of gold was fixed, competition was determined primarily by production costs...

...As 19th-century laissez-faire liberals, they were ready, in the interest of making money, to exploit anyone, black or white...

...As the chief of staff of the British forces during the 1899-1902 Boer War, he was responsible for the scorched-earth policy that destroyed the Boers' farms and dumped their women and children into concentration camps where thousands died...

...Having fought over land with the blacks for generations, and having only reluctantly given up slavery in the 1830s at British insistence, the Boers depended on the concept of white supremacy f or their very identity...

...The West came to the region in 1652 in the form of the Dutch East India Company...

...To prevent theft, the diggers were compelled to undergo searches, and since the stones could be swallowed, upon leaving the mines black workers were confined naked for 10 days and purged...

...The latest is Philip Warner's Kitchener: The Man Behind the Legend (Atheneum, 247 pp., $15.95...

...After white workers protested strip searches, the owners employed larger numbers of blacks...

...This put constant downward pressure on wages and led to still greater reliance on cheaper black labor...

...With the advent of the global economy, American workers are, for the first time, in direct competition against low-wage and sweatshop labor in the Third World...

...The workforce was subjected tocontrols of a different kind...

...It was, in the eyes of its nominal rulers in London, "not merely worthless, but pernicious...

...Kitchener was not a martinet, he was not a homosexual, he liked animals...

...the colorful vulgarian Barney Barnato, a semiprofessional prizefighter and music hall entertainer who started out as a shady, small-time diamond dealer...

...their 1948 vote was to some degree an act of revenge...

...To be extracted, gold required more capital than diamonds, giving the Kimberley barons a head start in the struggle for ownership and also accelerating consolidation...