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.

V.

The Concentration Camps

The concentration camps established during this war by the British Army arose directly out of this “scorched earth” policy and anti-guerrilla military strategy. These mainly tented camps were hurriedly established, close to railway lines, to receive the many tens of thousands of Boer and black civilians whose homes were deliberately destroyed and who were “concentrated” in these internment camps, which were poorly prepared, inadequately supplied, and soon became grossly overcrowded. Some 27,927 Boer civilians, mostly women and children, died as epidemics of measles and typhus raged through these camps during 1901. This was far more than the total number of combatants killed on both sides during the war. Three quarters of these deaths were of children under the age of 16. An estimated 20,000 black civilians also died, mostly in separate “black” camps, some as servants of Boer families in the “white” camps.

When the English social worker and pacifist Emily Hobhouse visited some of the camps and revealed to the British public what was happening in them, in June 1901, there was a public outcry. The Government sent out a Commission of Enquiry of six women under women’s suffrage leader Millicent Garrett Fawcett and the reforms recommended in their report, coupled with greatly increased resources and the transfer of the camps to civilian control, led to a rapid improvement in camp conditions by January 1902. The war ended in May 1902, but it was December before the last camps were finally closed and their inmates resettled on their devastated farms.

VI.

African Participation in the War

Fought in a region where the combined Boer and British populations (then just fewer than 1 million) were only about one fifth of the total, the South African War was not just “a white man’s war”. There was also large-scale African participation. Kitchener admitted arming more than 10,000 Africans and the figure was probably closer to 30,000. On the Boer side also, something like 10,000 Africans and Coloureds assisted Boer forces, although only exceptionally were they armed. At Mafeking, there were four times as many Africans as Europeans involved in the famous siege, and they played a crucial part in the defence of the town. Baden-Powell armed almost as many blacks as whites, for good practical reasons, but lied about this afterwards. It was also the black population who dug the defences, acted as spies and messengers, and rustled cattle into the town to supply it with food. While the Europeans were never acutely short of food, hundreds of Africans died from starvation and many others fled the town because of the grossly unequal distribution of food during the 217-day siege.

For many Africans in Natal and the Cape Colony the war provided a boom in employment opportunities, with better pay and better prices paid for agricultural produce, cattle, horses, and services of all kinds by the huge British Army at a time when recent drought and rinderpest, together with the cessation of work in the gold mines, had seriously affected the rural areas. For the rulers of some of the African societies so recently incorporated within the four white-settler states, the war provided an opportunity for them to secure or improve their positions through assisting the British. In several areas, Africans were armed by the British and effectively turned their territories into no-go areas for the Boer commandos. While the Boers faced mounting hostility from the African population—whose livestock they seized and whose labour they sought to commandeer—the British enjoyed widespread support and assistance from African and Coloured people during the war, most of whom looked to the defeat of the Boers for a new and better future when British rule was established throughout the region. These hopes were not without some foundation. In March 1901 the British Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, declared that it would be “a shameful peace” if they were left in the same position as that before the war, with not even ordinary civil rights. Yet peace between Boers and British was to require a British abdication on this issue. The exclusion of Africans and Coloureds from any political rights (outside the Cape Colony, where they had long benefited, in a very limited way, from its colour-blind franchise) was built into every attempt at peace negotiations during the war and formed Article 8 of the Vereeniging peace settlement in May 1902. There, the question of granting them the franchise was left “until after” the achievement of self-government. This effectively made their exclusion permanent.

VII.

The Peace Settlement at Vereeniging

In its last phase, this was no “gentleman’s war” but a ruthless imperial, guerrilla and civil war that devastated the country and led to accusations in Britain that it was being fought with “methods of barbarism”. In June 1900 the British government had declared that it would settle for nothing less than “unconditional surrender”, but peace negotiations were attempted and failed in February 1901 on terms not very dissimilar to those which were accepted after negotiations at Vereeniging on May 31, 1902. By early 1902, many of the Boer commandos were in a desperate state, short of horses and restricted to a few areas. Defections were increasing sharply. By the end of the war, a fifth of those Boers who were still fighting were fighting on the British side. After two weeks of painful discussion among the 60 Boer delegates at Vereeniging, 56 voted in favour and 4 against the terms of a peace settlement, which meant accepting the annexation of the two republics as British colonies (with the promise of a rapid advance to self-government within the British Empire) and recognition of the British monarch as their sovereign.

The terms were generous by the standards of the day. No war indemnity was ever imposed on the defeated republics; instead, the British offered the sum of £3 million (which later increased to more like £35 million) towards the reconstruction of the devastated country. There was an amnesty for those Cape Afrikaners (except the leaders) who had committed treason by rebelling against British rule; the promise of a speedy return for the many Boer prisoners-of-war in British camps overseas; and an undertaking that all those who had surrendered would retain their property.

VIII.

The Significance of the War

Who won the South African War? The British Army (which was assisted by over 30,000 volunteer troops from various parts of the Empire, including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; see Anzac: Early Involvements) certainly defeated the Boers militarily, and the two republics were annexed as British colonies. All Afrikaners came under British rule and the construction of South Africa as a modern state began under British auspices. Yet within six years, self-government had been restored and Boer majority governments were elected in both the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony. By 1910, a Union of the four states of South Africa had been established that was Boer-initiated and Boer-led. Boer defeat in the South African War and the experience of British imperialism—before, during, and after that war—made a crucial contribution to the rise of Afrikaner nationalism, which dominated the politics of South Africa for much of the 20th century.

Far more deaths occurred, even among the combatants, from disease than from actual combat, and the deaths of civilians dwarfed those of combatants. Out of a total of almost 450,000 British and Empire troops put into the field during the war, there were 22,000 deaths, two thirds of them from disease. For the Boer societies of the two republics—numbering fewer than 200,000 people—their losses and the extinction of their independence as states represented a national trauma. More than 7,000 Boer commandos were killed and total deaths, including those of the mainly women and children who died in the concentration camps, amounted to 34,000 (that is more than 10 per cent of the Boer population). The full extent of losses among the African population will probably never be known.

For Britain, this war was the biggest, costliest, and most humiliating war fought during the century of its imperial pre-eminence between 1815 and 1914. It involved over four times as many troops as the Crimean War and cost more than three times as much in money (about £430 million). As Rudyard Kipling said, this war had taught the British “no end of a lesson” and helped to prick the bubble of jingoistic British imperialism and War Office complacency. Zulu, Mahdist, Asante, and Afghan wars had led the British to think of colonial wars as “small wars”, in distant places, against exotic, non-European opponents who were poorly armed and easily defeated. Such wars were no preparation for the sort of war the British found themselves fighting in South Africa.

After the war, Secretary of State for War Richard Haldane instituted reforms that insured British forces were less ill-prepared than they might otherwise have been at the outbreak of World War I. But the central tactical lesson of the South African War eluded the British. It was not so much the crack marksmanship of the Boers, with their modern rifles, nor the blunders of British generals, which were responsible for those early British reverses in 1899. It was the fact that the smokeless, long-range, high-velocity bullet from a magazine rifle or machine-gun had, in combination with the trench, decisively tilted the balance of warfare in favour of defence. That lesson had to be learned again, in the bloody stalemates of the Western Front.