certificate
of naturalization having been 21 November 1901. He had thus assumed
British citizenship at the earliest date open to him.
He
arrived at a critical moment in South African history and in the
history of South African mining. Rhodes had died on 26 March 1902. The
Transvaal and the Orange River Colony had just ceased to be under
military administration; a long, bitter and costly war had been fought;
'reconstruction' called for new financial burdens on the mining
industry; Kimberley had undergone a siege and the gold-mining industry
had seen its output drop disastrously; a serious labour shortage
threatened at a time when increased output was essential. For a decade
and a half, ever since the time of the Rhodes-Rudd concession in the
north, there had been in Britain a mounting volume of'left-wing'
criticism of the mining interests in South Africa; what would now be
called 'monopoly capitahsm' was under attack, and J. A. Hobson, the
distinguished economist, could cite South Africa, together with the
United States, as a classical example of it. The emotions roused by
the South African War had held back the tide for a moment; but 'Chinese
slavery' proved an irresistible battle cry a few years later for the
'anti-imperialist' forces of liberalism and labour; the mining
interests were called upon to pay the price. So much for the wider
background; the coming years were to be full, also, of technical
problems, particularly for the diamond industry. Its leading place as a
dynamic force impelling South Africa towards the future had been lost
when the Witwatersrand was discovered and exploited. In 1885 the
production of Cape Colony diamonds was valued at £2,228,000 while the
Transvaal gold production was only £6,000. By 1891, the relative values
had changed to £3,556,000 and £2,924,000 respectively. By 1898, just
before the war, the values were £4,128,000 and £16,241,000. In 1902
diamond output was valued at £4,949,000 and gold output at
£7,297,000—this, of course, was the effect of the war, but the trend of
events was unmistakable. Kimberley, as a source of wealth, had ceded
primacy to Johannesburg, but it was to be another decade and a half
before Ernest Oppenheimer was finally to move there.
