John Buchan and East Africa
Michael Redley
John Buchan only briefly visited East Africa. He went for a few days to Lourenco Marques in Portuguese East Africa early in 1902, during his time as private secretary to the High Commissioner for South Africa, Lord Milner. His imagination was stirred by what he saw. He told a friend in England that it had 'a quaint flavour all of its own which I liked, and the road down is through magnificent subtropical mountain scenery' (JB to St Loe Strachey, 4 April 1902). A novel on imperial themes which he never completed was to have been set partly in Portuguese East Africa. A year later, in 1906, he located his masterly fictional colloquium on imperialism, A Lodge in the Wilderness, on an escarpment in the East Africa Protectorate, which became the Colony, and in 1963 the Republic, of Kenya.
As an editorial writer and book reviewer, Buchan produced more than a dozen pieces on East Africa for The Spectator before the First World War. But that was the high point of his interest. Oddly enough, despite friends who were to be deeply involved with East Africa, he was never to refer to it again in print. There will be a certain amount of guesswork in what follows because facts are scarce. But what was Buchan's connection with East Africa, and why did he fasten on to it in the way he did?
Its origins lay in South Africa. Lord Milner's administration which Buchan joined on his arrival there in October 1901 was dedicated to post-war reconstruction of the country. Milner gave Buchan several areas of the administration of the occupied Boer republics to oversee. However the job which he made particularly his own during his two years in the country was the administration of rural settlement for whites in the conquered territories of the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal.
Buchan was set by Milner to study the local land market, and to draft proposals for the valuation and compulsory appropriation of land. The aim was to develop land settlement schemes quickly, putting in numbers of small farmers attracted for the purpose from Britain or already living locally, before large land companies moved in to hold the land against future profit, delaying indefinitely the resurrection of the rural economy in the conquered Boer republics. He sought out frontiersmen, both Boer and British, to gauge the potential of land for development in different parts of the territory, and visited promising areas, often remote from already established farms, where large-scale schemes could be organised to attract a critical mass of new capital to restart the rural economy. He also wrote articles for anonymous publication in Britain drawing attention to opportunities for land settlement and farming in South Africa, and urged his friends and contacts in the press to whip up support for the Milner policy against its detractors in London (JB to St Loe Strachey, 15 February 1902).
The project was to grow in scale and importance over the next two years until Buchan was forced to choose between staying in South Africa to run the Land Department of over a hundred staff which he had built up (of which by December 1902 he was acting head), or returning to the heart of the Empire to pursue, as he hoped, a career in politics or imperial administration. The hazards of establishing new agricultural enterprises before the urban market for their produce had sufficiently recovered, with the prevalence of crop and animal diseases and the uncertainties of rainfall, had been seriously underestimated. Demand for land on the schemes was never as great as Buchan had hoped. Against that unpromising background progress was nevertheless made, with the first of Buchan's settlements starting in the Barberton district of the Transvaal in July 1902 and half a dozen more following on in the next few months (Buchan 1940, 110-11; JB to St Loe Strachey, 10 June 1902). The magnet of politics at the heart of things proved too strong and Buchan returned to another life in Britain, with a hitherto unsuspected talent for business and administration. He said later that there came to him in the rural wilderness of South African a civic and political sense which never left him. But it is also true that he found there the means of earning a living which was to provide for the rest of his life the essential backdrop to his activities as a writer (Buchan 1940, 124; JB to St Loe Strachey, 10 December 1902).
There was, though, a less straightforward aspect of Buchan's work with Milner on land matters which also led directly to his connection with East Africa. The settlement of land in the former Boer republics was a political ploy to establish the imperial connection in a form which would survive the end of direct British rule. Buchan recruited from the refugee camps what he called 'a corps of scouts of my own, mostly Dutchmen', who passed among the Afrikaner farmers as land agents, ostensibly acting solely in the interest of their clients, but in fact buying the land at knockdown prices for resettlement by British immigrants (JB to St Loe Strachey, 12 March 1902 and 25 September). He administered secret funds which allowed land to be bought from impecunious Boer farmers. Land grants under Buchan's control at the margins of the settled farming areas were deliberately used to reward National Scouts, 'loyalists' among the Boer population who had fought on the side of the British, and thus to entrench adherence to the British Empire as part of the fabric of rural life in the former Boer republics. Milner and his staff regarded their mission as winning the race against time to establish British influence as a hedge against the resurgence of Afrikaner power when politics returned with the ending of martial law. Buchan's work on rural settlement was his own direct contribution to achieving this objective. The experience of working 'in the shadows' was to prove compulsive, and Buchan returned to it repeatedly in various capacities throughout his life.
This long article is continued in issue 27 (2002) of the John Buchan Journal. To order, click on Ordering.
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