On this day (11/10/2024) 125 years ago, the South African and Orange Free Republics declared war on Britain. Also known as the Boer War, the Anglo-Boer War, and the South African War, the Second Boer War was the result of decades of tension between British uitlanders (or white foreigners) and the “Boers” (the Dutch and Afrikaans word for “farmers”), over British influence in southern Africa.
Many of the Boers were white Afrikaans-speaking Dutch settlers, whose ancestors had established the Dutch East India Company colony at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. The British occupied the Cape on multiple occasions during the Napoleonic Wars and in 1806, British rule became permanent. Consequently, an estimated 12,000 to 14,000 Dutch settlers chose to migrate away from British-administrated regions in the “Great Trek” that began in 1835. This was in part due to the fact that many Boers opposed Britain’s decision to abolish the slave trade in 1833—as Wayne Dooling has written, the “ability of the freed slaves to negotiate the price of their labour undermined the profitability of settler agriculture”.[1] The Voortrekkers, migrating eastward from the Cape, established two independent republics, the Transvaal or South African Republic and the Orange Free State.
Britain attempted to annex Transvaal in 1877, resulting in the First Boer War of 1880–1881. After Britain was defeated, an uneasy peace was maintained until tensions again escalated upon the discovery of a lucrative concentration of gold in Transvaal in 1886. The establishment of the Witwatersrand gold mines, and the consequent requirement for more workers, led to an influx of British uitlanders to the region, so that uitlanders outnumbered Boers within the Boer republic of Transvaal. In 1896, the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, the notorious arch-imperialist and white supremacist, Cecil Rhodes, along with the colonial politician, Leander Starr Jameson, attempted to instigate an uprising amongst uitlanders and to overthrow the Transvaal government led by president Paul Kruger.[2] The attempt failed, but Britain still aimed to incorporate Transvaal and the Orange Free State into a British-controlled federation.
Subsequent negotiations concerned with the introduction of voting rights for uitlanders failed. The British colonial secretary demanded full enfranchisement for uitlanders in September 1899. As a result, Kruger issued an ultimatum on 9 October: the British government should withdraw all troops from Transvaal and the Orange Free State within 48 hours. When this did not transpire, war was declared.
Engravings printed in The Graphic depicting the aftermath of the battle of Magersfontein.The first months of the war saw Boer victories at Stormberg, Magersfontein, Colenso, and Spion Kop. But in February 1900, the Boer fronts collapsed. Crucially, the Boer general, Piet Cronje, surrendered at the major battle of Paardeberg. Accordingly, press coverage from the early months of 1900 was optimistic about Britain’s military successes. “[W]e shall soon have in South Africa a very much larger army than the Boers can meet successfully”, as one writer penned for The Graphic.[3] In a subsequent article on “Indian Loyalty”, the same writer stated that the Queen-Empress Victoria had been given “assurance” from Indian officials that:
“great chieftains, great landowners, great merchants, and great religionists [were] united as one man to approve and extol the upholding in South Africa of that British supremacy which has brought such immeasurable blessings to themselves and their ancient race.” [4]
We see here a typically philanthropic framing of Britain’s expansionist imperialism in India and, correspondingly—so the author saw it—in South Africa, a narrative strategy which obfuscates the principles of extraction and economic exploitation that underpinned much of Britain’s interest in maintaining influence in Transvaal.
Some parts of the British press, however, expected the military campaign to be complete within months, and its protraction meant that the war became less and less popular.[5] This was compounded by revelations at home about the conditions within British concentration camps during the Second Boer War, where civilians were subject to inadequate medical arrangements, unhygienic conditions, and limited supplies of poor quality food. 28,000 women and children are thought to have died in the camps after being forcibly removed from their towns and villages, their homes burnt, their crops destroyed, and their livestock killed. As part of commander Herbert Kitchener’s “scorched earth” approach to the war, many Black people too were forced into the camps to deprive Boer commandos of the means to reach food producers, and were used as labourers for the gold mines which re-opened in 1901. At least 20,000 Black people are thought to have died in camps over the course of the war.[6]
After over two years of violence, Boer forces surrendered on 31 May 1902, accepting peace under the terms of the Treaty of Vereeniging. The two republics were absorbed into the British empire, with the promise of eventual self-government, which was established in 1910. A war crimes trial, the first such prosecution in British military history, was raised in February 1901.
[1] Wayne Dooling, “The Making of a Colonial Elite: Property, Family and Landed Stability in the Cape Colony, c.1750–1834,” Journal of Southern African Studies 31, no. 1 (March 2005): 162.
[2] Fransjohan Pretorius, “The Boer Wars”, Mar 29, 2011, BBC History, available online via <https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/boer_wars_01.shtml>
[3] The Graphic, 3 Feb, 1900, image 2, available online via <https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/41664/3rd-february-1900>
[4] The Graphic, 3 Feb, 1900, image 2, available online via <https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/41664/3rd-february-1900>
[5] Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (London: Random House, 1979), 439–495.
[6] Pretorius, “The Boer Wars,” available online via <https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/boer_wars_01.shtml>