Faure's letter on Transvaal suzerainty

Properties2
tagsevent, correspondence, colonial, diplomacy
aliasesFaure's letter to Chamberlain, Faure-Chamberlain letter, brief van D. P. Faure aan Chamberlain

5 min read

Faure’s letter on Transvaal suzerainty is the letter written by D. P. Faure to minister Chamberlain, published in the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant of 28 May 1899 and reprinted as Appendix 12 of Van der Kemp’s 1900 article. The letter is Faure’s testimony, as the sole surviving non-interested witness of the conferences held in London in 1884 between the British government and the Transvaal deputation, that the British suzerainty over the South African Republic had been abolished by the London Convention of 1884 — except to the extent preserved in Article 4 — and that the later British contention to the contrary was without foundation.

Faure’s Position

Faure had been asked, on the advice of Lord Rosmead (then Sir Hercules Robinson), by Lord Derby to accompany the Transvaal deputation of 1884 as interpreter. He was therefore present at all the conferences held between the representatives of Transvaal and those of the imperial government. The British representatives — Lord Derby, Sir Robert Herbert and Sir Hercules Robinson (with Sir Evelyn Ashley perhaps present on one or two occasions) — were all dead by the time of writing; the only surviving Transvaalers — President Kruger, one of his colleagues, and his secretary — were interested parties. Faure, “as the only surviving non-interested witness, and as one who is in no way prejudiced in favour of the South African Republic — as is well known here,” therefore considered it his duty, in the interest of truth and justice, to offer his testimony.

The Substance of the Letter

Faure recalled a saying of Robinson in the course of one of their private conversations, that he could not understand why President Kruger was so eager to see the suzerainty abolished, “that it really meant nothing; that even if it did not exist, England would not allow Transvaal to make treaties with foreign powers that England considered detrimental to its own interests.” He therefore saw no objection to accommodating the Transvaal sensitivity. Lord Derby, at one of the conferences, observed that the deputation was making “a mountain of a molehill” of the suzerainty question — yet he refused to insert an article expressly repealing H.M.’s suzerain rights, because he had no wish to put weapons into the hands of the parliamentary opposition to attack the ministry — an argument the weight of which the deputation recognised, since there was a strong party in the House of Commons which had vigorously opposed the retrocession of the South African Republic and was now resolved to make no further concession.

While the negotiations were still in progress, Faure added, a public meeting had been held at the Mansion House under the presidency of Lord Shaftesbury, at which all the speakers had declared against further indulgence to Transvaal. No minutes had been taken of the conferences; all the representatives of the colonial department who had taken part in them were dead. Faure’s testimony was therefore the only surviving record of what had been agreed.

Faure’s Conclusion

Faure’s testimony was “that it was clearly understood and agreed by both contracting parties that H.M.’s suzerainty would be abolished, except to the extent determined in Article 4 of the London Convention which was signed thereafter.” The Transvaal deputation left London perfectly satisfied with the result of its mission, except as regarded the new border line. To show that this was no later-formed opinion or mistaken recollection, Faure cited a passage from an article he had written immediately after his return to the Cape, in the Volksblad (a Dutch paper of which he was then editor), in its issue of 17 April 1884: “Last but not least, the suzerainty is abolished … the most painful of their grievances is now removed. The Volksraad can from now on regulate its domestic affairs as it pleases.” He also cited an interview with Lord Rosmead published in the Saturday Review after his death on 3 November, in which Rosmead declared that he had designed the convention himself, that the concept of suzerainty had been withdrawn and the word intentionally omitted, and that the intention in 1884 had been to retract the claim of suzerainty made by England in the convention of 1881.

Van der Kemp’s Use of the Letter

Van der Kemp prints the letter as Appendix 12 of his article and refers to it twice in the closing pages — once in the discussion of the London Convention on Transvaal, and once in the comparison of the Transvaal suzerainty question with the Article 6 controversy of the Treaty of 1824. The parallel, in Van der Kemp’s reading, is exact: in both cases a clause inserted for the satisfaction of domestic opposition, and represented at the time as of no importance, was afterwards converted into a substantive restriction — in the one case the Acheh expedition of 1873, in the other the approaches to the Jameson raid and the South African War. The absence of formal minutes in both cases, Van der Kemp notes, is a further point of resemblance; in both, the historical record was left to be reconstructed from the recollections of survivors.

See Also

Source

Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819, by P. H. van der Kemp, in Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië, 6e Volgr., Deel VII (1900), pp. 159-239. Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit, LS.08781.

Graph View

Backlinks