Boer War 1899-1902 / South African War /
Second Boer War / Anglo-Boer War

The discovery of the Witwatersrand goldfields in 1886 was a turning point in the history of South Africa. It presaged the emergence of the modern South African industrial state. Once the extent of the reefs had been established, and deep-level mining had proved to be a viable investment, it was only a matter of time before Britain and its local representatives found a pretext for war against the Boer republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State.

The demand for franchise rights for English-speaking immigrants on the goldfields (known as uitlanders = outlanders) provided a lever for applying pressure on the government of President Paul Kruger. Egged on by the deep-level mining magnates, to whom the Boer government seemed obstructive and inefficient, and by the expectation of an uitlander uprising, Rhodes launched a raid into the Transvaal in late December 1895. The raid’s failure saw the end of Rhodes’ political career, but Sir Alfred Milner, British high commissioner in South Africa from 1897, was determined to overthrow Kruger’s government and establish British rule throughout the subcontinent. The Boer government was eventually forced into a declaration of war in October 1899.

In 1899 the long-standing troubles between the British and the Transvaal Boers were rapidly approaching a crisis. President Kruger had always been restive under his vassalage to the British crown, as provided in the treaty of 1881 restoring the independence of the Transvaal Republic, and as reaffirmed in the London Convention of 1884 on the occasion of his visit to the British capital and metropolis; and his jealous fear of the preponderance in numbers of the British settlers in the Transvaal, who immigrated into that Republic in overwhelming numbers after the discovery of the Witwatersrand gold mines in 1886, caused him much anxiety and alarm and induced him and his Volksraad to enact very discriminating and disqualifying laws, throwing obstacles in the way of their naturalization and their consequent political enfranchisement; and these Uitlanders, or "Outlanders," were the victims of ceaseless persecution and much petty annoyance, making their situation intolerable.

The underlying causes of the troubles between the British and the Boers were a century old. The racial hatred between Boer and Briton is not a thing of new growth; it has expanded with the expansion of the Boer settlers themselves. In fact, on the Boer side, it is the only thing independent of British enterprise which has grown and expanded since the Dutch first set foot in the Cape. This took place in 1652. Then, Jan Van Riebeck, of the Dutch East India Company, first established an European settlement, and a few years later the burghers began life as cattle-breeders, agriculturists, and itinerant traders. These original Cape Colonists were descendants of Dutchmen of the lower classes, men of peasant stamp, who were joined in 1689 by a contingent of Huguenot refugees. The Boers, or peasants, of that day were men of fine type, a blend between the gipsy and the evangelist. They were nomadic in their taste, lawless, and impatient of restrictions, bigoted though devout, and inspired in all and through all by an unconquerable love of independence.

With manners they had nothing to do, with progress still less. Isolation from the civilised world, and contact with Bushmen, Hottentots, and Kaffirs, kept them from advancing with the times. Their slaves outnumbered themselves, and their treatment of these makes anything but enlivening reading. From all accounts the Boer went about with the Bible in one hand and the sjambok in the other, instructing himself assiduously with the Word, while asserting himself liberally with the deed. Yet he was a first-rate sporting man, a shrewd trafficker, and at times an energetic tiller of the soil.

Dutch domination at the Cape lasted for 143 years after the landing of Van Riebeck, but gradually internal dissensions among the settlers resulted in absolute revolt. Meanwhile the Dutch in Europe had lost their political prestige, and the country was overrun by a Prussian army commissioned to support the House of Orange. In 1793, in a war against allied England and Holland, France gained the day, and a Republic was set up under French protection, thereby rendering Holland and her colonies of necessity antagonistic to Great Britain. After this the fortunes of the Cape were fluctuating. In 1795 Admiral Elphinstone and General Craig brought about the surrender of the colony to Great Britain.

South Africa was an ideal place for the pioneer. The scenery was magnificent. There were mountain gorges or kloofs, roaring cataracts, vast plains, and verdant tracts of succulent grasses. There was big game enough to delight the heart of a race of Nimrods. Lions, elephants, hippopotami, rhinoceroses, antelopes, and birds of all kinds, offered horns, hides, tusks, and feathers to the adventurous sportsman. All these things the nomadic Boer had hitherto freely enjoyed, plying now his rifle, now his plough, and taking little thought for the morrow or for the moving world outside the narrow circle of his family experiences. With the appearance of British paramountcy at the Cape came a hint of law and order, of progress and its accompaniment—taxation. The bare whisper of discipline of any kind was sufficient to send the truculent Boer trekking away to the far freedom of the veldt.

British conquest in 1806 and the treaty of peace in 1815 transferred the Dutch colony of the Cape of Good Hope to Great Britain, which fortified her claim to the Cape Colony by the payment of six million pounds sterling, equal to thirty million American dollars, to Holland for her territorial claims in South Africa. The Dutch colonists had always been rebellious during their subjection to their mother land, and they did not like the transfer to British sovereignty any better, though they had more political liberty under British than they had under Dutch rule. The abolition of slavery in the British colonies by act of the British Parliament in 1833 angered the Boers, as these Dutch farmers in the Cape Colony were called, though they were compensated for their slaves.

This emancipation of their slaves, with the advent of British settlers in the Cape Colony, caused six thousand Boers to leave the Cape Colony in 1836-37 by going on the "Great Trek," as it was called, and settling in the British colony of Natal, where they established the "Republic of Natalia," which the British never recognized, and after wars with the natives and the British and the " Napier Treaties " in 1843, the Boers went on other treks and migrations and settled in the regions beyond the Orange and Vaal rivers, still within the limits of British jurisdiction. The Transvaal Boers resisted the British, but were defeated in the battle of Boomplatz, August 29, 1848, and reduced to submission.

The Boer War that followed the mineral revolution was mainly a white man’s war. In its first phase, the Boer forces took the initiative, besieging the frontier towns of Mafeking (Mahikeng) and Kimberley in the northern Cape, and Ladysmith in northern Natal. Some colonial Boers rebelled, however, in sympathy with the republics. But, after a large expeditionary force under lords Roberts and Kitchener arrived, the British advance was rapid. Kruger fled the Transvaal shortly before Pretoria fell in June 1900. The formal conquest of the two Boer republics was followed by a prolonged guerrilla campaign. Small, mobile groups of Boers denied the imperial forces their victory by disrupting rail links and supply lines.

Commandos swept deep into colonial territory, rousing rebellion wherever they went. The British were at a disadvantage, owing to their lack of familiarity with the terrain and the Boers’ superior skills as horsemen and sharpshooters. The British responded with a scorched-earth policy, which included farm burnings, looting and the setting-up of concentration camps for non-combatants, in which some 26 000 Boer women and children died from disease. The incarceration of black (including coloured) people in the path of the war in racially segregated camps has been absent in conventional accounts of the war and has only recently been acknowledged.

They, too, suffered appalling conditions and some 14 000 (perhaps many more) are estimated to have died. At the same time, many black farmers were in a position to meet the demand for produce created by the military, or to avail themselves for employment opportunities at good wages. Some 10 000 black servants accompanied the Boer commandos, and the British used Africans as laborers, scouts, dispatch riders, drivers and guards.

The war also taught many Africans that the forces of dispossession could be rolled back if the circumstances were right. It gave black communities the opportunity to recolonise land lost in conquest, which enabled them to withhold their labor after the war. Most Africans supported the British in the belief that Britain was committed to extending civil and political rights to black people. In this they were to be disappointed. In the Treaty of Vereeniging that ended the war, the British agreed to leave the issue of rights for Africans to be decided by a future self-governing (white) authority. All in all, the Anglo-Boer/South African War was a radicalising experience for Africans. Britain’s reconstruction regime set about creating a white-ruled dominion by uniting the former Boer republics (both by then British colonies) with Natal and the Cape.

The most important priority was to re-establish white control over the land and force the Africans back to wage labor. The labor-recruiting system was improved, both internally and externally. Recruiting agreements were reached with the Portuguese authorities in Mozambique, from where much mine labor came. When, by 1904, African resources still proved inadequate to get the mines working at pre-war levels, over 60 000 indentured Chinese were brought in. This precipitated a vociferous outcry from proponents of white supremacy in South Africa and liberals in Britain. By 1910, all had been repatriated, a step made easier when a surge of Africans came forward from areas such as the Transkeian territories and the northern Transvaal, which had not previously been large-scale suppliers of migrants. This was the heyday of the private recruiters, who exploited families’ indebtedness to procure young men to labor in the mines. The Africans’ post-war ability to withhold their labor was undercut by government action, abetted by drought and stock disease.