South Africa (Dutch: Zuid-Afrika) is the southernmost region of the African continent, in the late nineteenth century the theatre of overlapping British, Boer, and indigenous polities. Van der Kemp invokes South Africa in the closing pages of his monograph as the setting for the Transvaal suzerainty question, which he treats as a structural parallel to the Acheh reservation in the London treaty of 1824.
The Transvaal — or South African Republic (Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek, abbreviated Z.-A. R.) — was a Boer republic lying inland of the British possessions of the Cape of Good Hope and Natal. In 1884, after the London Convention had been negotiated, D. P. Faure warned the British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain that the dispute over British suzerainty “threatens to take the form of a burning question of the day, and may perhaps have the consequence that the peace of South Africa is endangered” (Van der Kemp, 1900, p. 214). South Africa here appears not merely as a geographical setting but as the stake of imperial rivalry — a region whose fragile peace rested on the precise construction of a single treaty clause.
Van der Kemp’s interest in South Africa is comparative. He draws attention to the way in which a clause originally inserted “for the sake of the opposition,” and at the time dismissed as insignificant, came to be revived as a “war-ram” — precisely the pattern, in his view, that characterised the Acheh reservation in the London treaty of 1824. D. P. Faure, the journalist of the Volksblad at the Cape, serves as Van der Kemp’s chief witness, since Faure had himself accompanied the Transvaal deputation to London in 1884 as interpreter and was thus the “sole surviving uninterested witness” of the negotiations between Lord Derby, Sir Robert Herbert, and Lord Rosmead on the one hand and President Kruger on the other.
See Also
- Transvaal
- Cape of Good Hope
- Paul Kruger
- D. P. Faure
- Joseph Chamberlain
- Lord Derby
- Sir Hercules Robinson
- Sir Robert Herbert
- London Convention on Transvaal
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.