An Agent in Pretoria? Fred Jeppe, the Cartography of the Transvaal and Imperial Knowledge Before 1900

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe German-born technocrat Friedrich Heinrich (Fred) Jeppe (1833–1898) is identified more than any other individual with the nineteenth-century cartography of the South African Republic (Transvaal). Many existing studies note that he was an Anglophile who served the short-lived British colonial government (1877–1881), a bureaucrat who operated within the settler republics that preceded and followed it, and a figure whose work extended beyond the realm of cartography narrowly. Very few, however, have considered his role as a passive and, at times, active agent who channelled information to the British government at least until his own death in June 1898. Based on extensive archival research, this essay highlights Jeppe's British connections to draw out a different, more partisan thread in the life and work of this meticulous mapmaker, one that had a direct effect on military intelligence just before the conflagration of the South African War in 1899.