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.