# Chapter Twelve — Unhappy Unions

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## Ireland’s Troubles

While Great Britain was claiming African land for itself, it was having troubles much closer to home. The island of Ireland, just off the coast of England, was demanding the right to rule itself—and the British were refusing.

The quarrel between Ireland and England had been going on for hundreds of years. In 1541, the English king Henry VIII had claimed Ireland as his own. Even though Henry VIII became a Protestant, most of Ireland remained Catholic.

The Protestant kings and queens who came after Henry VIII did not treat the Catholics of Ireland well. Protestant rulers took land away from Catholics and gave it to Protestants. Catholics were told they couldn’t buy land, or even inherit it from their relatives. Catholics weren’t allowed to join the army. And even though Ireland had its own Parliament, only Irish Protestants were allowed to be in it.

In 1801, the British government dissolved Ireland’s Parliament. From now on, the Irish would have to send their representatives to the British Parliament. Ireland had lost even more of its independence—but even worse times were coming.

In 1845, reports of a strange new problem were beginning to spread across Europe. Potato plants in Holland had begun to blacken and wither. Beneath the stems, the potatoes were rotting in the ground. Soon, potato plants in France and Britain were rotting too.

The farmers of Ireland called this potato rot the “murrain” or the “blight.” They hoped desperately that the rot wouldn’t spread into Ireland. Hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers were actually living on farms owned by British landlords who lived in England. They grew wheat and oats for their landlords—and potatoes for themselves. The wheat and oat crops were shipped off to England to be sold. Only the potatoes remained in Ireland. If the potatoes rotted, the Irish would have very little to eat.

One September morning in 1845, an Irish farmer in his field pushed his hand into the ground to check on his potatoes. His fingers found only soft, rotten mush. Desperately, he began to dig. A horrible stench rose up out of the ground. All of the potatoes beneath the thick stem had rotted away in the ground.

The blight had come to Ireland.

Most people didn’t realize that the potatoes were dying because of disease. Some thought that electricity or train smoke had somehow poisoned the ground. Others blamed the rot on bird droppings. But what everyone did see was that Ireland had no potatoes to eat—and none to plant for the next year.

The potato crop failed again the following year, and the year after that, and the year after that. No one knew how to stop the potato plague. People in Ireland began to die of hunger in the hundreds, and then in the thousands, and then in the hundreds of thousands. So many people died in one town that the town’s church built a coffin with a false bottom. When the coffin was carried to a grave, the body would drop out of the bottom of the coffin into the ground—so the coffin could be reused. Travellers throughout Ireland found dead men and women in houses, fallen beside the road, and lying in fields.

But over in England, many of the English members of Parliament didn’t believe that the Irish were really starving. After all, the Irish were always making a big fuss over nothing! British landlords paid no attention to the suffering of the farmers who rented their lands. When the starving men couldn’t pay their rent, the landlords evicted them (forced them to leave their homes).

Many landlords were doing something even more cruel. Even though the potatoes were rotting, the wheat and oat crops were still growing. But instead of allowing the hungry farmers to eat this food, English landlords insisted that it be shipped out of Ireland and sent to England, just as always. One Irishman who lived during the potato plague, John Mitchel, wrote about standing on the shore of Ireland, surrounded by starving people—and weeping as ships filled with food sailed away towards England.

Not all Englishmen ignored the plight of Ireland. The prime minister of England, Robert Peel, knew that something had to be done. He believed that Ireland needed to be able to buy cheap food from the United States and other countries, so that the Irish could survive until the potato plague was over.

But there was a problem. Thirty years before, the British Parliament had passed laws called the “Corn Laws.” These laws said that anyone in Ireland or England who bought food from another country had to pay a huge tax on it. The Corn Laws were meant to protect British farmers. Since grain grown in Ireland and Britain was so much cheaper than grain brought from another country, British merchants would be more likely to buy from British farmers.

Robert Peel thought that a famine was a very good reason to *repeal* (get rid of) the Corn Laws. Surely, he thought, Parliament would see that the Irish needed to be able to buy cheap food from other countries. But Parliament refused. The members of Parliament told Robert Peel that England should just leave Ireland alone to work out its own problems.

Robert Peel kept on insisting that the Corn Laws should be repealed. At last, he won the fight. Parliament agreed to get rid of the tax. But before very much grain could reach Ireland, Robert Peel lost his position as prime minister. His help for Ireland had made him very unpopular. And the next prime minister wasn’t as concerned for the Irish as Robert Peel. As a matter of fact, he remarked that the Irish were starving because they weren’t working hard enough to help themselves.

Five years after the plague began, farmers began to see healthy potatoes in their fields. By 1850, the blight was over. But Ireland was changed forever. Almost a million Irish were dead. Another million had left their homes and gone to other countries; over eight hundred thousand had gone to the United States. In Ireland itself, hatred of English rule had grown even stronger. More and more Irish began demanding the right of home rule—the right to make their own laws and to hold their own Parliament, just as Canada and Australia did.

Once again, the British Parliament resisted. This time, they were joined by many Irish Protestants. Protestants were afraid that an Irish Parliament would be mostly Catholic—and that Protestants would suffer. They wanted Ireland to stay under the Protestant government of England.

For years, the debates went on and on.

In 1886, the prime minister of Britain, William Gladstone, finally asked Parliament to vote on a law that would give Ireland home rule. This law, the “Home Rule Bill,” wouldn’t make Ireland independent from Great Britain. But it would allow the Irish to have control over their domestic affairs (issues that had to do with life in Ireland, and that only affected the Irish).

Gladstone and his supporters hoped that the Home Rule Bill would help to heal some of the hatred between Ireland and England. A famous cartoon published in a newspaper, just before the British Parliament voted on the Home Rule Bill, shows a tall beautiful woman named “Britannia” (representing the British Empire) standing at a crossroads beneath two road signs. One sign says “Home Rule” and points down a road where William Gladstone is standing. Gladstone is holding an olive branch of peace, with a label tied to it that says “Freedom, Friendship.”

But above Britannia’s head, another sign points in the opposite direction. It says “Perpetual Coercion.” This meant that if the British kept on running Ireland’s affairs from England, they would always have to use force to make the Irish follow their English laws. On the road to Perpetual Coercion stands another politician, a man who was against Home Rule—holding a pair of handcuffs.

When the Home Rule Bill came up before Parliament, the members of Parliament voted against it. Great Britain had chosen the road of Perpetual Coercion. And that decision would lead to a hundred years of chaos, unrest, and violence in Ireland.

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## The Boers and the British

It was a hot February night in the South African town of Mafeking. The shabby, tin-roofed buildings lay quiet. Moonlight glinted from the metal roofs and fell down over a deep, black trench dug around the town, with an earthen wall thrown up on the other side. Beyond the earthen wall, the tents of a besieging army stretched out, almost as far as the eye could see.

Inside his headquarters—a wooden building with a plain tin roof—the British commander of Mafeking sat, writing out instructions. He had been in this little town for almost four months. The soldiers camped outside weren’t letting any food through. And the people of Mafeking had very little left to eat.

So it was vital that the horse that had died that afternoon be used properly. The commander, Robert Baden-Powell, was listing all of the ways in which the horse could be eaten. He wrote:

1.  Send the mane and tail to the hospital for stuffing mattresses and pillows.
2.  Send his shoes to the foundry, to be melted down into bullets.
3.  Boil the skin, head, and feet all day, and then chop it up and add flavoring to it. Then we can eat it. We’ll call it “brawn.”
4.  Mince up all of the horseflesh, stuff it into the intestines, and cook it; then we’ll have sausages to feed the men.
5.  Boil the bones into soup, and serve the soup to the townspeople.
6.  After the bones are boiled, pound them up into powder and mix them with the flour—it’ll make the flour last longer.

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Robert Baden-Powell laid down his pen and leaned back in his chair. He could hear the boom of guns from outside the walls. The siege might go on for months yet. But if the people of Mafeking could eat horses, perhaps they would survive until the British army arrived to rescue them.

Why was Mafeking under siege?

To understand this, let’s go back a few years. Do you remember the “Scramble” for Africa? In the years after 1880, European countries decided to divide up Africa among themselves. Most European governments ignored the African tribes who were already living there, and simply claimed the land for themselves.

But down in the south of Africa, Europeans had already been living for over a hundred years. These Europeans, called “Boers,” were descendents of Dutch men and women who had once worked at the Dutch trading port called Cape Town. These Dutch settled down to farm South African land for themselves and established a Dutch colony called Cape Colony.

A hundred years later, the British marched into Cape Colony and occupied it. Now, Cape Colony was British territory and had to follow British laws. But one of those laws made the Boers angry. The British government decreed that every slave in Cape Colony would be set free, and that free Africans would be allowed to own property.

Many of the Boers believed that God intended all Africans to be slaves to whites. They refused to live in a colony where blacks would be living right beside whites, as free men and women. Thousands of Boers left Cape Colony, travelled north, and settled down in two new South African colonies called the Free State and the Transvaal. They began to call themselves *Afrikaners*, instead of Boers, to show that they were no longer Dutch settlers, but rather Africans of European descent.

Great Britain was too busy dealing with its other colonies to worry about the Free State and the Transvaal, so the British government agreed to recognize the Free State and the Transvaal as independent South African countries. Anyway, this land that the Boers had claimed didn’t seem to be very valuable. It was dry and rocky.

But one day a boy, minding sheep along the banks of the Orange River, got bored and wandered along the bank, picking up pretty rocks. He put one shiny rock in his pocket to take home and show his parents. His mother gave the pretty rock to a neighbor who admired it.

The rock turned out to be a huge diamond.

When prospectors went to look at the banks and riverbed of the Orange River, they found more diamonds, scattered throughout the dirt and washed up between the stones. An enormous mine called the Big Hole was dug on the farm of two brothers named Nicolaas and Diederick de Beer. Thousands of diamonds were brought up out of the Big Hole. Today, the De Beers Consolidated Mines company is still the most famous diamond company in the world. The Big Hole is now a museum, where you can go down into the ground and see the diamond that started it all—now called the “Eureka Diamond.”

The diamond rush brought thousands and thousands of miners to the fields and riverbanks of South Africa. The land where the diamonds were found lay right between the two Boer colonies, the Free State and the Transvaal, and the British-run Cape Colony. Neither the Boers nor the British had claimed it, so the British announced that the land would belong to the British Empire. Now, the British controlled Cape Colony *and* the diamond-filled fields of South Africa. British power was growing!

In the year 1886, not too long after the diamond fields were discovered, miners found gold in the Boer country Transvaal. Soon, the Boer government of Transvaal realized that the gold deposits were enormous—almost half of the gold known to exist in the whole world.

But it would cost a lot of money to build mines huge enough to get all of that gold out of the ground. No one in the Transvaal had quite that much money. So the government of the Transvaal made a deal with the British. British prospectors and businessmen could come into the Transvaal and mine the gold, as long as the people of the Transvaal got to keep part of it.

Only four years after the agreement was made, the British governor of the Cape Colony, Cecil Rhodes, sent British officials up north of the Transvaal and the Free State to build another colony—a British colony named Rhodesia, after himself—on the other side of the Boer states. Now, the Transvaal and the Free State would be squeezed between two British powers. British businessmen were already in the Transvaal, mining gold and meddling in local politics. And then Cecil Rhodes gave his officials permission to invade the Transvaal itself.

The people of the Transvaal could see that the British intended to take over their country and the Free State as well. So in 1899, the Afrikaners in both the Transvaal and the Free State declared war on Great Britain. The British called this war the “Boer War.”

Two days after the war began, Afrikaner soldiers surrounded the little town of Mafeking. Mafeking was a railroad town that lay in the British territory of Cape Colony, just over the line from the Transvaal. The British commander at Mafeking, Robert Baden-Powell, was surprised by the invasion. He only had a thousand men with him, and the Afrikaners were fierce fighters. But he was determined not to surrender. He ordered his men to dig trenches around the town, and to throw the dirt up into walls to protect Mafeking. When the Afrikaners started to shoot into the town, Baden-Powell had fake forts built inside the trenches, so that the Afrikaners would shoot at the fake forts instead of at the buildings that had people inside them. He sent his men out at night to shout at the Afrikaner camps with a tin megaphone, so that no one could sleep! And because he needed all of his men to fight, he recruited young boys from the town’s inhabitants to act as messengers and helpers. These “boy scouts” were the beginning of the modern Boy Scouts.

Outside Mafeking, the war was going badly for the British. In December, after two months of fighting, British soldiers lost three huge battles in one week. At Mafeking, the siege went on, and on, and on—for 217 days! It went on so long that both sides agree to make Sundays cease-fire days. On Sunday, no one would shoot at anyone else. That way, both sides could rest, cook food, and play games.

After seven months, British reinforcements finally reached Mafeking, drove away the Afrikaners, and set the people of Mafeking free. Back in England, the British were so delighted that parties were held all night, all over Great Britain. For years afterwards, the British used the verb “to maffick” to mean “to rejoice with great noise and riotous celebration.”

Now the tide of the battle had turned. The Afrikaners began to surrender. The British took control of cities in the Transvaal and in the Free State. The war was about to end.

But as it came to an end, Great Britain behaved in a way that made many British ashamed of their government. Even though fighting between the Afrikaner army and the British army had officially ended, small groups of Afrikaner guerillas roved through the countryside, attacking British camps and soldiers. These attacks went on for two years. The British seemed unable to halt them.

So the British government ordered that all families who lived in the areas where the guerillas roamed be rounded up and put into camps. British officials suspected that these families were supplying the guerillas with food, water, and weapons. These “concentration camps” put all Afrikaners who might support the guerillas in one small area where the British could watch them.

There were sixty-six of these “concentration camps” for whites, and fifty for blacks. Life in the camps was horrible. None of the Afrikaners were fed very much, but the black camps were worse; each day, the British spent less than a penny per person on food for their black prisoners. Diseases like measles, chickenpox, and pneumonia swept through the camps, killing thousands. Twenty thousand white Afrikaners died in the camps. According to British records, fourteen thousand black Africans died as well—but the British didn’t keep careful track of all of the deaths in the black camps. Probably, many more died.

In 1902, the Afrikaners and the British signed a treaty called the Peace of Vereeniging. This “peace” united all of the colonies together into one nation, under British control, called the Union of South Africa. But within this Union of South Africa lived three groups that hated each other—white British, white Afrikaners, and black Africans. The Peace of Vereeniging formed a South African nation in which there would be very little peace.

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