II.

Tensions Leading to War

Throughout the 19th century, after Britain had acquired the Cape of Good Hope in 1814 and expanded its possessions in southern Africa, ill feeling mounted between the Dutch-descended population, called Afrikaners, or Boers, and British settlers. This resulted in the Afrikaner migration called the Great Trek (1835-1843?) and the consequent establishment of the Afrikaner republics: Natal, Orange Free State, and the South African Republic. Natal became a British colony in 1843, but Britain granted independence to the Transvaal territories in 1852 and to the Orange Free State in 1854. In the late 1850s, the Transvaal territories formed the South African Republic. The British annexed the South African Republic in 1877, but an Afrikaner revolt restored the republic’s independence in 1881. The stage for war was set in 1884, when gold was discovered in the Witwatersrand, a region then encompassing parts of the southern Transvaal. The discovery lured thousands of British miners and prospectors to settle in the area, the influx being so great that the city of Johannesburg was created almost overnight. The Afrikaners, primarily farmers, resented the newcomers, whom they called Uitlanders (“foreigners”), and in token of their feeling, taxed them heavily and denied them voting rights. The resentment on both sides grew, ultimately leading to a revolt by the Uitlanders in Johannesburg against the Afrikaner government.

This revolt was instigated by the British colonial statesman and financier Cecil Rhodes, then prime minister of the Cape Colony, who desired to bring all of southern Africa into the British Empire. In December 1895, Leander Starr Jameson, a friend of Rhodes, led a band of 600 British armed men in an unauthorized attempt to support the rebellious Uitlanders in the South African Republic. Called the Jameson Raid, the venture resulted in Jameson’s capture and imprisonment and in Rhodes’s resignation. Jameson later served as premier of the Cape Colony from 1904 to 1908.

Direct negotiations to solve the South African problem proved unfruitful, and hostility between the Afrikaners and the Uitlanders continued unabated. The president of the South African Republic, Paul Kruger, was unyielding in his opposition to the Uitlanders. In 1899 the recently appointed British governor of Cape Colony, Alfred Milner, who strongly resented the Afrikaners’ treatment of British subjects, issued orders to build up the 12,000-man British army contingent then in southern Africa. The force eventually grew to include 500,000 men. On October 9, 1899, Kruger demanded the withdrawal of all British troops from the Transvaal frontiers within 48 hours, with the alternative of formal war.