Until the discovery of the diamond deposits in what is now the
Kimberley district, some forty years ago, the Irish immigrants had
chiefly settled in the ports and along the coast. But among the
crowds who went to seek their fortunes at the diamond fields were
large numbers of adventurous Irishmen. The mission church established
at Kimberley became the centre of a new bishopric in 1886, when the
Vicariate of Kimberley, which for some time included the Orange Free
State, was established, and an Irish Oblate, Father Anthony Gaughran,
was appointed its first bishop. He was succeeded in 1901 by his
namesake and fellow countryman, the present Bishop Matthew Gaughran.

The gold discoveries on the Witwatersrand about Johannesburg produced
another rush into the interior in the days after the first Transvaal
war. A great city of foreign immigrants--the "Uitlanders"--grew up
rapidly on the upland, where a few months before there had been only
a few scattered Boer farms. Irishmen from Cape Colony and Natal, from
Ireland itself, and from the United States formed a large element in
the local mining and trading community. They were mostly workers. Few
of them found their way into the controlling financier class, which
was largely Jewish. The Irish were better out of this circle of
international gamblers, whose intrigues finally produced the terrible
two years' bloodshed of the great South African war. Many engineers
of the mines were Irish-Americans. Huge consignments of mining
machinery arrived from the United States, and many of the engineers
who came to fit it up remained in the employ of the mining companies.
Until after the war, the Transvaal and Johannesburg had depended
ecclesiastically on the Vicar Apostolic of Natal, but in 1904 a
Transvaal Vicariate was erected, and once more the first bishop was
an Irishman, Dr. William Miller, O.M.I.

We have seen how Irish the South African episcopate has been from the
very outset. Most of the clergy belong to the same missionary race,
as also do the nuns of the various convents, and the Christian
Brothers, who are in charge of many of the schools. Of the white
Catholic population of the various states of the South African Union,
the greater part are Irish. There are about 25,000 Irish in Cape
Colony in a total population of over two millions. There are some
7,000 in Natal, I,500 in Kimberley, and about 2,000 in the Orange
River Colony. In the Transvaal, chiefly in and about Johannes