London Convention on Transvaal (1884)

Properties2
tagsevent, treaty, diplomacy, colonial
aliasesLondensche conventie van 1884, Transvaal Convention of 1884

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The London Convention on Transvaal of 1884 — in Dutch the Londensche conventie van 1884 — was the agreement between Great Britain and the South African Republic (Transvaal) that succeeded the Pretoria Convention of 1881 and purported to settle the relations between the two states after the British defeat at Majuba. Van der Kemp invokes the convention — and the celebrated controversy over the British suzerainty to which it gave rise — as a striking parallel, in his view almost an exact counterpart, to the Acheh reservation in the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 17 March 1824.

The Suzerainty Question

The Pretoria Convention of 1881, following the British reverse at Majuba, had re-established the independence of the Transvaal Boers subject to a British suzerainty — a vague supremacy reserved in article 3, under which the republic might not conclude treaties with foreign powers without British approval. By 1884 a deputation from Transvaal, led by President Paul Kruger, proceeded to London to seek the removal of this suzerainty, which the Boers regarded as their most painful grievance. The British representatives — Lord Derby, Sir Robert Herbert and Sir Hercules Robinson — considered the matter of little moment.

Van der Kemp draws on a remarkable letter from D. P. Faure to minister Chamberlain, published in the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant of 28 May 1899 (Appendix 12 of Van der Kemp’s article), in which Faure — who had served as interpreter to the Transvaal deputation on the advice of Sir Hercules Robinson (then Lord Rosmead) — gave his testimony as the sole surviving non-interested witness. Faure recalled Robinson’s private observation 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.” Lord Derby, at one of the conferences, observed that the deputation was making “a mountain of a molehill” — yet he refused to insert an article expressly repealing H.M.’s suzerain rights, lest he furnish the parliamentary opposition with weapons against the ministry.

The Article 4 Compromise

The result was article 4 of the London Convention of 1884, by which the South African Republic undertook not to conclude any treaty with any state other than the Orange Free State without British approval. The Transvaal deputation, satisfied that the suzerainty had been abolished, returned to Pretoria. As Faure wrote in the Volksblad of 17 April 1884: “Last but not least, the suzerainty is abolished … the most painful of their grievances is now removed.” Yet the British opposition and (later) the British government continued to maintain that the suzerainty survived in the treaty. The Faure letter of 1899 was published precisely to refute this contention and prevent “the peace of South Africa being endangered.”

Van der Kemp’s Comparison

Van der Kemp’s purpose in invoking the Transvaal parallel is to show that the manoeuvre employed in 1824 — inserting into a treaty, for the satisfaction of domestic opposition, a clause ostensibly of no importance, but later construed as a substantive restriction — was no isolated incident in British colonial diplomacy. “One sees,” he writes, “the whole question of the denial of our Sumatra supremacy, because it was not expressly stated, because the Acheh reservation, presented as innocent, was inserted — treated in exactly the same way in the famous question of the suzerainty of England over the Transvaal.” In both cases (Van der Kemp argues) the clause was originally proposed as nothing significant; in both cases the weaker party acquiesced in that characterisation; and in both cases the clause was eventually converted into a “war drum” — in the one instance the Acheh expedition of 1873, in the other the approaches to the Jameson raid and the South African War.

Van der Kemp also points to the parallel in the absence of formal minutes: just as no minutes were kept of the oral communications in 1824 between the Dutch plenipotentiaries and Captain Elout (and between the British and Dutch plenipotentiaries over Acheh), so no minutes were kept of the conferences with the Transvaal deputation in 1884. The historical record, in both cases, 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.

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