Masked Raiders: Irish Banditry in Southern Africa 1880-1899
by Charles van Onselen (Zebra)
In January 1895, in an article headed “A Sensational Saturday Night”, The Star of Johannesburg reported on the murderous activities of a notorious criminal with one arm, claiming that “This revengeful Corsican-like individual’s wooden arm is so arranged that, when he opens his hand, a mechanical dagger leaps out.”
The description is pure myth, though the criminal in question did indeed have only one arm. He was John McLaughlin, a robber and safe-dynamiter of Irish extraction, who led a band of brigands known as the Irish Brigade — not to be confused with the group of the same name that fought on the Boer side in the South African War of 1899-1902 (though there is a link, as this book outlines).
Quoting The Star‘s story, Charles van Onselen points out that the reference to McLaughlin as “Corsican-like” echoes the contemporaneous belief that the knife was somehow a specialist Italian weapon. He notes that a paper such as The Star was then “the poor and working man’s cheapest approximation to theatre”.
So not a terribly reliable source, then, or at least not on such details. McLaughlin was indeed “revengeful”, feeling betrayed by a close comrade, and he was taking his revenge. But he had not been knifing anyone; rather, he had been on a shooting spree, committing crimes he would be tried and convicted for a full 14 years later. The mythic or folkloric elaboration of the tale, however, was part of the way criminals such as McLaughlin were romanticised, made larger than life, and thus became quasi-legendary figures.
Van Onselen’s project here is to look into the stories of such men in the two decades between the discovery of gold and the outbreak of the war. He’s interested in their origins, their social context, and in the overlap of history and legend. He does this in a series of essays: having first set out the basics of the narrative and the characters, he circles in the succeeding chapters around their stories and the issues they raise. This has academic solidity, but the stories and the context are so interesting I often wished Van Onselen had written Masked Raiders as a straight narrative history, with the broader national and political context folded in.
Wild-West feel
The period has a distinctly Wild-West feel. The Zuid Afrikaansche Republik (ZAR) and the territories abutting it were not well policed, or at least until Jan Smuts became attorney-general. (The prisons of the ZAR were notoriously porous, leading to many daring escapes.) There were plenty of useful hiding places in the veld, and if need be robbers on the run could shelter with the still-independent African tribes, where they could hire out their services as mercenaries. Many were deserters from the British army in Natal.
The ZAR’s resistance to the extension of the railway into its territory meant that the “horse economy” had a longer life there, which also meant that highwaymen and coach-robbers could prey on mail coaches and other transports, particularly those moving gold from the Rand to safer places further south. On the Rand itself, they also happily raided banks and mining houses, stealing safes and dynamiting them open a few miles out into the wilds beyond the mining town. They also robbed black workers returning home from the mines. In February 1888, the Irish Brigade even invaded Johannesburg itself, like a military raiding party, rampaging through the town and pillaging as they went.
It’s not clear, as Van Onselen notes, whether this particular gang chose the name “Irish Brigade” for itself or whether it was dubbed that by the press. This gang was “ethnicised” rather than “ethnic”, though its leader, McLaughlin, and other members were of Irish descent, like the slightly earlier brigands who achieved fame at the time, the MacKeone brothers. But the connection is meaningful, because Van Onselen wants to show how such brigands were formed by their and their original communities’ confrontation with, first, colonialism (England’s long and brutal history in Ireland), and, second, by the Industrial Revolution. Thus he can explore their role as “marginals” engaged in forms of resistance to the great political and economic powers of the day.
This is what has been called “history from below”, a social history that rejects the “Great Man” or what you might call the Big Event reading of history. Van Onselen’s two-part masterpiece of 1982, New Babylon and New Nineveh, examined early Johannesburg and its people in this way, from washers’ guilds to alcohol production. The closing part of that magisterial study was reprised in The Small Matter of a Horse (1984), telling the story of “Nongolozo” Mathebula, the black African crime-lord who led a group of “marginals”, the Regiment of the Hills, on the Rand at the time.
Nongolozo, in fact, began to learn his criminal trade working for the MacKeone brothers, as Masked Raiders mentions. The Small Matter of a Horse is a precursor to this study of organised criminality, and Van Onselen’s riveting look at the pimp and possible murderer Joseph Silver, round the same era, in The Fox and the Flies, is a more recent angle on similar material.
Social bandit
Behind Van Onselen’s Raiders lurks another study, EM Hobsbawm’s Bandits (1969), which first set out the idea of the “social bandit”. This form of brigandage accords with the kind of legend represented by Robin Hood, who, in story at least, stole from the rich and gave to the poor, and that of the gentlemanly highwayman Dick Turpin in the 1700s (whose name one Irish-Brigadier appropriated). Such tales are largely fictional, of course, but they provide models for bandits who saw themselves (or were seen as) being on the side of the poor, and whose crimes were committed at the expense of the rich and powerful.
It’s not hard to see in such figures a form of resistance to power and exploitation: their actions are those of the dispossessed and downtrodden taking back some of what has been stolen from them by their overlords. It can be seen, too, how such criminality shades or develops into consciously anti-establishment activities by self-identified revolutionaries, and this is the trajectory Hobsbawm traces in Bandits. He is concerned with the development of class consciousness, and discovers its roots in a time when the agrarian economy is giving way to the industrial and the peasantry is being turned into a proletariat.
Van Onselen finds correspondences between Hobsbawm’s “social banditry” and the activities of the “Irish” bandits in South Africa, but he appears ambivalent about such links and mentions Hobsbawm and the idea of social banditry only glancingly at first. It’s as though he set out to uncover figures such as the MacKeones and McLaughlin as social bandits but then discovered that they were only vaguely any such thing; they may not even really have been, in Paul Kooistra’s formulation, “criminals as heroes”. The MacKeones, or their legends, fit the pattern more readily than McLaughlin, and it seems to be with some irritation that Van Onselen, weighing the terms “criminal hero” and “social bandit” against each other, asks: “Why does it have to be one or the other and not some of both?”
He acknowledges that it’s hard to see social bandits in men who robbed black mineworkers of what little they had (as even Nongolozo did). But Van Onselen still wants to make heroes of these men, even if only as men who “rose to the top of their profession as amalgam thieves, store burglars, bank-robbers, highwaymen and safe-robbers”. Hopefully they can even be seen as “men who, although motivated primarily by self-interest, were striking back at the financial might of the emerging mining houses and the power of the state as exercised by the offices of the mining commissioners”.
Van Onselen is himself striking back: in the same way social history undermines the Great Man or Big Event historical narrative, his bandits of a century ago resist and defy the simplified, triumphalist and self-serving “national” narratives of the (new) elite. He’s sometimes rather acerbic in this regard, though his note on crumbling archives speaks most poignantly of the present political priorities of a “national” history or history-making.
Masked Raiders is filled with fascinating information, rich in the textures of how these marginal lives were lived — the MacKeone family’s entanglement with a local chiefdom, the weird Victorian homosociality of the outlaw band (with its ideals of honour and proclamations of “manliness”) and, along with much more, the striking echo of the Jameson Raid as politics by banditry. Like Hobsbawm, Van Onselen quotes St Augustine: the state is ultimately the biggest, best-armed gang of all.