When the second half of the 19th century began, South Africa was barely even a geographical expression, as Metternich had contemptuously called Italy. It certainly wasn’t a country, but merely an ill-defined area which included two Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, two British colonies, the Cape and Natal, and a number of African principalities. The British had acquired the Cape from the Dutch during the Napoleonic wars not quite in a fit of absence of mind, but with little enthusiasm, and although the Cape of Good Hope itself was of great strategic importance, commanding the passage to India and the Far East, James Stephen of the Colonial Office unpresciently called the lands of the interior ‘the most sterile and worthless in the whole Empire’.
Everything was changed by geology, or by its accidental interaction with human history. Just as it’s a random fact of life, but full of significance for all of us, that Shiites, although only a one-in-five minority among Muslims as a whole, happen to sit on top of most of the world’s oil, so a capricious Providence decided to place most of the world’s diamonds and gold beneath the bush and desert south of the Tropic of Capricorn.
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