Bad Shippards of the law lead us on the Rhodes to perdition

Industrial sabotage is in the air: Eskom machinery being deliberately broken so that those with repair contracts can fix them; high-grade coal being swapped for low-grade coal and resold.

I have another sabotage story to tell, courtesy of the historian Robert Vicat Turrell. It comes from 147 years ago, but is no less relevant.

On Christmas Day in 1875 the heavens opened over the De Beers mine in Kimberley. Diamond diggers watched their claims fill with water. They rushed to the pump the

De Beers mining board had acquired to drain their claims, wondering why it was silent, only to find that it had been sabotaged. It was a calamity. Diggers would not be able to work their claims until deep into the new year; many faced ruin.

The engineer employed to work the pump, a Mauritian the record identifies as a Mr E Hateau, was hauled before a public commission of inquiry. There, he confessed that he had been bribed to break his pump. The culprit, he said, was a 22year-old water-pump contractor named Cecil John Rhodes.

The backstory was this. In early 1875, Rhodes had won a contract to drain De Beers mine. But he had concealed from the mining board that the pump he owned was second-rate. As soon as the rains came, the mine flooded. Furious, the board suspended Rhodes’s contract and told him to acquire a better machine. He promptly ordered one from England. In the meantime, as an interim measure the board acquired its own pump and the services of Hateau.

As Rhodes’s pump made its slow journey from England, Hateau, it turned out, was doing a far better job than expected. By December, it seemed De Beers would not need Rhodes at all. That, Hateau alleged, is why Rhodes paid him to sabotage the existing pump: to save a contract now threatened with cancellation.

The attorney-general of Griqualand West at the time was a man named Sidney

Shippard. He was also a close friend of Rhodes. Shippard was an alumnus of Oriel College, Oxford, where Rhodes was studying, and the two men had been members of the same dinner club for the past three years.

Shippard’s course of action was shrewd. He did not bring charges against Hateau and he did not investigate Hateau’s allegations against Rhodes. He simply waited. In the meantime, Rhodes hightailed it out of Kimberley and spent the next 18 months in England. Between Shippard’s calculated inaction and Rhodes’s absence, the matter died.

What might have happened had an impartial attorneygeneral properly investigated Hateau’s highly plausible allegations? Rhodes was only beginning to acquire the investments that were to make him famous. A setback at that formative stage might have ruined him, and we would never have heard of Cecil John.

No Pioneer Column would have marched into Mashonaland in 1890, and no army would have defeated the Ndebele in 1896, since that column and that army were Rhodes’s entrepreneurial creations. Rhodesia would never have existed. The Ndebele, like the Bangwato to the south, may have made it into the 20th century with their polity intact.

Why does this story matter? After all, it is from a long time ago. It is actually in the tale’s very age that its value lies. For it shows that the consequences of a failed justice system are enormous, almost beyond comprehension; they can reverberate for more than 100 years.

Of all the public institutions not working in SA right now, there is a case to be made that the failing criminal justice system is the most consequential. I will not name names for fear of legal action, but think of the people who are out there shaping SA’s future today who ought to be in jail.

The signs of life that have recently come from the justice system the start of prosecutions of major players in state capture are extremely important. If I have a new year’s wish, it is that the National Prosecuting Authority gets the resources and the protection it needs to grow stronger.