South African War

I

Introduction

South African War (1899-1902), also known as the Boer War, conflict fought between the British Empire and two Boer states—the Transvaal Republic (South African Republic) and the Orange Free State—in what is now South Africa.

II

Origins of the War

Until the late 19th century, South Africa was little more than a geographical name given to a poor and peripheral region whose only importance to Europeans lay in its strategic position on the sea-route to Asia. The Dutch had first established a settlement at Cape Town in 1652 as a supply station on the route to the colonies in the East Indies (modern-day Indonesia; see Dutch Empire). The British seized control from the Dutch in 1814, by which time the Cape had developed into a colony of about 20,000 Dutch settlers, known as Boers (Afrikaners). The Boers had seized large tracts of land from African societies such as the Khoikhoi and the Xhosa, and farmed it with African and imported slave labour. Despite increasing numbers of British immigrants during the 19th century, the Boer population of the Cape Colony always outnumbered the British by a ratio of about 3:2. A shortage of well-watered land, resentment at the “alien” British government, and the abolition of slavery in 1833 led substantial numbers of Boers to leave the Cape Colony in the Great Trek of 1835 to 1843 and migrate into the interior. There, despite resistance from African societies such as the Zulu, they established two independent Boer republics: the Transvaal (or South African) Republic (1852) and the Orange Free State (1854). These two states were separated from the coast by the British colonies of the Cape Colony and Natal, which became self-governing in 1872 and 1893 respectively.

Successive British governments sought to unify South Africa in a federation or union within the British Empire, along the lines of Canada (1867) or Australia (1901). In 1877, taking advantage of the weakness of the Transvaal government—whose commando forces were unable to defeat the Zulu on their own—the British annexed the Transvaal and attempted to impose a federation, but the opposition of the other states resulted in failure. The decisive defeat of the Zulu in the Anglo-Zulu War (1879; see Zulu Wars: The Anglo-Zulu War) freed the Transvaal Boers to rebel against British rule in the Anglo-Boer War (1880-1881), also known as the Transvaal War. A series of skirmishes between a few hundred men, this lasted scarcely three months and resulted in a British defeat at Majuba Hill (1881) and a peace settlement by which the Transvaal was granted a qualified independence under British suzerainty.

In 1886 gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand, which soon became “the richest spot on Earth”. Gold changed everything. From being the poorest and weakest of the four white-settled states in South Africa, the land-locked Transvaal soon became the richest. By the late 1890s it was producing a quarter of the world’s gold supply and had become the hub around which the whole future of the region would revolve. Substantial foreign investment, rapid railway-building, and a huge influx of foreigners (Uitlanders)—many of them British—accompanied gold-mining, along with an extensive system of African migrant labour. Yet the Transvaal, ruled by a Boer oligarchy under President Paul Kruger, remained outside the effective control of the British government. Perpetual conflict between the mining companies and Kruger’s government fuelled the Jameson Raid (1895), a conspiracy to overthrow Kruger’s government by means of an Uitlander uprising in the mining city of Johannesburg assisted by a raid led by Leander Starr Jameson. This was organized by Cecil Rhodes with the support of some of the mine-magnates and the connivance of the British High Commissioner and Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain—all of whom went to great lengths to cover their tracks when the episode ended in a fiasco. Jameson and his men were captured and briefly imprisoned by Kruger’s government, which was henceforth convinced that the Transvaal’s independence was in danger and that the British government would seek to overthrow it: by a peaceful internal takeover if possible, by war if necessary.

Between 1896 and 1899, Anglo-Transvaal relations were characterized by profound mutual suspicion, repeated challenges by the British government, increasing importation into the Transvaal of arms from Europe, and a hardening in the attitude of the British government, which feared a future “United States of South Africa” developing under Transvaal leadership and Boer control. The re-election of Kruger, for the fourth time, as President of the Transvaal in 1898 led the new British High Commissioner in South Africa, Sir Alfred Milner (1897-1905), to push for a confrontation in which either Kruger’s government would capitulate to British demands—for internal reforms and an Uitlander franchise in the Transvaal—or face a war, which Milner expected would be short and result in a British annexation of the Transvaal. Although Kruger attempted to meet some of the grievances of the Uitlanders and the mining industry, he was not prepared to allow political control of the Transvaal state to slip out of Boer hands through an extension of the franchise to Uitlanders, whom he feared would soon outnumber the Boers. Attempts at a negotiated settlement failed at the Bloemfontein Conference (June 1899) over the franchise issue. “It is my country you want,” Kruger told Milner. Both sides drew up ultimatums and prepared for war. Anxious to take advantage of the small number of British troops in South Africa before reinforcements arrived, Kruger’s government took the initiative and ordered Boer commandos from the Transvaal and its ally, the Orange Free State, to invade both Natal and the Cape Colony—thereby presenting the British government with a clear justification for going to war.

III

The Conventional War

When war broke out, on October 11, 1899, the two Boer republics were able to put an unpaid citizen army of about 35,000 commandos into the field against approximately 22,000 British troops already in South Africa. Jan Smuts (who was attorney-general in Kruger’s government) devised a bold strategy for the Boers of penetrating deeply into Natal and the Cape Colony and inspiring a rebellion among the Afrikaners in the Cape. The senior Boer generals, however, did not maintain the advance and Boer forces were diverted into laying siege to Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking. The Cape Afrikaners also failed to rally to the republican cause in substantial numbers despite repeated attempts to persuade them to do so. Even so, after a few early British victories at Talana and Elandslaagte (October 20-21) serious reverses were inflicted on the British forces culminating in Black Week (December 10-17, 1899) with Boer victories at Stormberg (December 10), Magersfontein (December 11), and Colenso (December 15).

The British War Office was poorly prepared for the war because many in Britain believed that Kruger’s government would finally capitulate to British demands rather than face the full might of the British Empire, and the British government had delayed preparations until September. If war came, it was expected to be “a short war”, over by Christmas. Sir Redvers Buller was sent out in mid-October with insufficient troops and was soon bogged down on the Tugela River in Natal unable to advance to the relief of Ladysmith, where Sir George White was besieged along with some 13,000 British troops. After Black Week, Buller was promptly replaced by Lord Roberts as commander-in-chief. Buller remained in Natal, where he suffered further reverses at Spioenkop (January 24, 1900) and Vaalkrans (February 5) before finally relieving Ladysmith on February 28.

Meanwhile, Lord Roberts’s main army, massively reinforced in the New Year, advanced steadily northwards up the central railway from Cape Town. Kimberley was relieved on February 15 and on February 27, after enduring several days of heavy bombardment, the Boer general Piet Cronjé surrendered with 4,000 men at Paardeberg. This marked a turning point in the war. The Boer forces were deeply demoralized and the way was open to Bloemfontein (capital of the Orange Free State), which the British occupied on March 13. A further advance across the Vaal River to Johannesburg was delayed for almost a month because of an epidemic of typhoid among the British troops.

IV

The Guerrilla War

Roberts was over-optimistic in believing that, with the British occupation of Johannesburg (May 31) and Pretoria (June 5), the undefended capital of the Transvaal, the end of the war was in sight. So were the British public, who took to the streets to celebrate the relief of Mafeking (May 17), where the inspiring leadership of Colonel Robert Baden-Powell, during a siege which lasted 217 days, made his name. President Kruger left for the Netherlands, via Mozambique, later in 1900 and died in exile in Switzerland in 1904. But the Boer leadership in the field, among them Louis Botha, Koos de la Rey, and Jan Smuts (from the Transvaal) and President Marthinus Steyn and Christiaan de Wet (from the Orange Free State) determined to continue to fight and turned the conflict into a guerrilla war.

By 1901, a British army of over 200,000 was fighting an anti-guerrilla campaign against small bands of mounted Boer forces whose total number was no more than 25,000. The Boer commandos—living off the land and operating in terrain they knew well—proved adept at hit-and-run tactics, seizing British weapons and horses, destroying railway lines, and evading capture. Before Lord Roberts left South Africa, at the end of 1900, a policy of reprisals and destruction of Boer farmhouses had already begun. This developed into a thorough-going “scorched earth” policy—to remove sources of food and civilian support from the mobile Boer commandos—under Lord Lord Horatio Kitchener, Roberts’s successor as commander-in-chief. Some 30,000 Boer farmhouses were destroyed, along with crops and large numbers of livestock. A gigantic grid of manned block-houses was established, linked by hundreds of miles of barbed wire, within which the Boer commandos were gradually restricted and worn down. Captured Boer commandos were shipped off to prisoner-of-war camps overseas as far away as Ceylon (Sri Lanka), St Helena, and Bermuda.