Politics of mineral control and Imperial wars in South Africa
It ended with a British victory and the annexation of both republics by the British Empire; both would eventually be incorporated into the Union of South Africa, a dominion of the British Empire, in 1910.
The conflict is commonly referred to as The Boer War but is also known as the South African War outside South Africa, the Anglo Boer War among most South Africans, and in Afrikaans as the Anglo Boereoorlog (Second War of Liberation)
The Second Boer War and the earlier, much less well known, First Boer War (December 1880 to March 1881) are collectively known as the Boer Wars.
It was the biggest ever small war of late Victorian new imperialism which finally completed the British conquest of southern Africa
Origin of the war in historical perspectives
The complex origins of the war resulted from more than a century of conflict between the Boers and the British Empire, but of particular immediate importance was the question as to which white nation would control and benefit most from the very lucrative Witwatersrand gold mines.
By 1790s growing imperial rivalry and jostling for spheres of influence and strategic sites in the Indian ocean was poisoning relations between British, France and the Netherlands.
This was resolved by Napoleonic wars of 1790-1815. During the Napoleonic Wars, a British military expedition landed in the Cape Colony and defeated the defending Dutch forces at the Battle of Blaauwberg (1806).
Driven by the demands of war and strategic imperatives imposed by trading interests, British forces invaded the Dutch-controlled cape.
After the war, the British formally acquired the colony (1814), and encouraged immigration by British settlers who were largely at odds with the Dutch settlers.
In the Cape the accumulative imperatives of efficiency and improvement cleared the way for free wage labour to supplant the bondage of the earlier Dutch slave-holding period.
An inflow of mercantile capital provided a room for credits for agricultural development, driving up land prices and closing doors to poor Boers.
Many Boers who were dissatisfied with aspects of British administration and policies, in particular with Britain's abolition of slavery on 1st December 1834.
Towards the end of 1830s thousand of pioneer migrants (Voortrekkers) left the Cape colony migrate away from British rule in what became known as the Great Trek. This represented the rebellious escape from the arrogance of British rule and economic ascendancy to find a new north frontiers.
The Trekkers initially followed the eastern coast towards Natal and then, after Britain annexed the Natal in 1843, journeyed northwards towards the interior.
There they established two independent Boer republics: the South African Republic (1852; also known as the Transvaal Republic) and the Orange Free State (1854).
The British recognized the two Boer republics in 1852 and 1854, but attempted British annexation of the Transvaal in 1877 led to the First Boer War in 1880–81.
After the British suffered defeats, particularly at the Battle of Majuba hill (1881), the independence of the two republics was restored subject to certain conditions; relations, however, remained uneasy.
Behind the increasing momentum and coordination of British conquest and intervention lay the discovery of diamonds(1867) at Kimberley, prompting a diamond rush and a massive influx of foreigners to the borders of the Orange Free State.
Gold made the Transvaal the richest and potentially the most powerful nation in southern Africa; however, the country had neither the manpower nor the industrial base to develop the resource on its own.
As a result, the Transvaal reluctantly acquiesced to the immigration of uitlanders (foreigners), mainly from Britain, who came to the Boer region in search of fortune and employment.
Then in 1886, discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand area of the South African Republic.
This resulted in the number of uitlanders in the Transvaal potentially exceeding the number of Boers, and precipitated confrontations between the earlier-arrived Boer settlers and the newer, non Boer arrivals.
British expansionist ideas (notably propagated by Cecil Rhodes) as well as disputes over uitlander political and economic rights resulted in the failed Jameson Raid of 1895.
Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, who led the raid, intended to encourage an uprising of the uitlanders in Johannesburg.
However, the uitlanders did not take up arms in support, and Transvaal government forces surrounded the column and captured Jameson's men before they could reach Johannesburg.
As tensions escalated, political maneuverings and negotiations attempted to reach compromise on the issues of the rights of the uitlanders within the South African Republic, control of the gold mining industry, and the British desire to incorporate the Transvaal and the Orange Free State into a federation under British control.
Given the British origins of the majority of uitlanders and the ongoing influx of new uitlanders into Johannesburg, the Boers recognized that granting full voting rights to the uitlanders would eventually result in the loss of ethnic Boer control in the South African Republic.
To the satisfaction of Lord Milner, British High Commissioner for South Africa, the June 1899 negotiations in Bloemfontein failed, and in September 1899 British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain demanded full voting rights and representation for the uitlanders residing in the Transvaal.
Paul Kruger, the President of the South African Republic, issued an ultimatum on 9 October 1899, giving the British government 48 hours to withdraw all their troops from the borders of both the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, failing which the Transvaal, allied to the Orange Free State, would declare war on the British government.
The British government rejected the South African Republic's ultimatum, resulting in the South African Republic and Orange Free State declaring war on Britain.
How historians interpret Anglo Boer War
Anglo-Boer war could not be termed as accidental war or unintentional war. It was emphatically a British rather than a Boer war.
There are several Historiographical interpretations of why South African war.
To Lord Salisbury, the then Britain’s premier when explaining it to the English people why they are at war, with the South Africa Republic (Transvaal) and Orange Free State; he stated that it was a conspiracy used by these republics to dismantle British supremacy in the region in order to impose a united Boer or Afrikaner republican dominion over the rest of southern Africa.
Anti Boers (Paul Kruger’s government) said the war was engineered as an ill-judged trial of armed strength in order that the Kruger party might remain in power. Kruger used the war to escape domestic reforms.
Evolutionists: For some scholars, the war was also grounded in those later Victorian biological and evolutionary arguments which accepted war as indispensable to progress, so the South African war was both natural and necessary.
Therefore, British wanted to sheer human evolutionary struggle through which progressive civilizations waged against stagnant, conservative and outmoded societies. To the Boers were seemed as medieval racial oligarchy, primitive stock-breeders or sluggish nomads whose parasitic life a drag on rates of economic expansion.
Thus, it a war between antique and modern centuries i.e. imperative of Darwinist militarism struggle for existence or survival for the fittest.
To Marxists: They interpreted war as a structural of the functional necessity of capitalist advance. It appeared as the form of bourgeois revolution to enforce and complete the South Africa transition from traditional non-capitalist civilization and production to a fully modern capitalist society
Radical opinion: It was perceived relationship between the war and imperialism; and that militarism had become an essential cog of newly expansionist capitalism.
Thus, the South Africa conflict revealed the manner in which war had become a weapon in the competitive struggle between capitalist nations for imperial areas as vital markets and for surplus capital.
Thus, the drive for European imperialism by the last quarter of the 19th century made the Anglo Boer war inevitable.
For John A. Hobson (1900) on the war in South Africa was charged with capitalist interests in the shape of Transvaal mining magnates pulled the lever of war and conquest as a contemptible alternative to the natural growth of commerce.
He also related it with the Jingoist act and manipulation of patriotism as a screen by suspiciously cosmopolitan capitalist forces.
Business men require screen for their interest using patriotic pretext to seek private gains.
For Liberal, Lloyd George, peace and prosperity of South Africa depended upon British supremacy something which would have been attained naturally and legitimately by pacific methods. No need of war
Events leading to war
Up to 1850s and 1860s there was no rival in European nation to challenge the Britons domination of external South Africa trade.
Transvaal republic attempts to establish an outlet to the sea through Delagoa Bay on the Portuguese territory of Mozambique had failed, sealing Boer commercial dependence on the British ports of Natal and the Cape.
Affairs remained like this until the beginning of the 1870s when the rapid development of the Kimberly diamond fields began to galvanize and transform the former mercantile agricultural economy.
However, when, in 1886, a major gold field was discovered at an outcrop on a large ridge some sixty kilometers south of the Boer capital at Pretoria, it reignited British imperial interests.
The ridge, known locally as the "Witwatersrand" (literally "white water ridge" a watershed) contained the world's largest deposit of gold bearing ore.
Although it was not as rich as gold finds in Canada and Australia, its consistency made it especially well suited to industrial mining methods.
With the 1886 discovery of gold in the Transvaal, the resulting gold rush brought thousands of British and other prospectors and settlers from across the globe and over the border from the Cape Colony (under British control since 1806).
In becoming wealthiest region in Southern Africa region with mushrooming revenue and investment; social framework of Transvaal changed. Production demands required a new mass inflow of cheap labour, and other immigrants from Britain and other countries leading to pressure over land and job security for Boers
This accelerated growing class stratification, worsening malaise of landless, laboring tenants and increasing difficulties of many other displaced poor whites.
The city of Johannesburg sprang up as a shanty town nearly overnight as the uitlanders ("foreigners," meaning non Boer whites) poured in and settled around the mines.
The influx was such that the uitlanders quickly outnumbered the Boers in Johannesburg and along the Rand, although they remained a minority in the Transvaal as a whole.
The Boers, nervous and resentful of the uitlanders' growing presence, sought to contain their influence through requiring lengthy residential qualifying periods before voting rights could be obtained, by imposing taxes on the gold industry, and by introducing controls through licensing, tariffs and administrative requirements.
Among the issues giving rise to tension between the Transvaal government on the one hand, and the Uitlanders and British interests on the other, were
i. Established uitlanders, including the mining magnates, wanted political, social, and economic control over their lives. These rights included a stable constitution, a fair franchise law, an independent judiciary, and a better educational system. The Boers, for their part, recognised that the more concessions they made to the uitlanders the greater the likelihood with approximately 30,000 white male Boer voters and potentially 60,000 white male uitlanders that their independent control of the Transvaal would be lost and the territory absorbed into the British Empire.
ii. The uitlanders resented the taxes levied by the Transvaal government, particularly when this money was not spent on Johannesburg or uitlander interests, but diverted to projects elsewhere in the Transvaal. For example, as the gold bearing ore sloped away from the outcrop underground to the south, more and more blasting was necessary for extraction, and mines consumed vast quantities of explosives. A box of dynamite costing five pounds included five shillings tax. Not only was this tax perceived as exorbitant, but British interests were offended when President Paul Kruger gave monopoly rights for the manufacture of the explosive to a non British branch of the Nobel company, which infuriated the British. The so called "dynamite monopoly" became a major pretext for war.
iii. British imperial interests were alarmed when in 1894–1895 Kruger proposed building a railway through Portuguese East Africa to Delagoa Bay, bypassing British controlled ports in Natal and Cape Town and avoiding British tariffs. At the time the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony was Cecil Rhodes, a man driven by a vision of a British controlled Africa extending from Cape to Cairo.
Cecil Rhodes and Jameson Raid
In 1895, a plan was hatched with the connivance of the Cape Prime Minister Cecil Rhodes and Johannesburg gold magnate Alfred Beit to take Johannesburg, ending the control of the Transvaal government.
A column of 600 armed men (mainly made up of his Rhodesian and Bechuanaland policemen) was led by Dr. Leander Starr Jameson (the Administrator in Rhodesia of the British South Africa Company (or "Chartered Company") of which Cecil Rhodes was the Chairman) over the border from Bechuanaland towards Johannesburg.
The column was equipped with Maxim machine guns, and some artillery pieces.
The plan was to make a three day dash to Johannesburg before the Boer commandos could mobilize, and once there, trigger an uprising by the primarily British expatriate workers (uitlanders) organized by the Reform Committee.
However, the Transvaal authorities had advance warning of the Jameson Raid and tracked it from the moment it crossed the border.
Four days later, the weary and dispirited column was surrounded near Krugersdorp within sight of Johannesburg.
After a brief skirmish in which the column lost 65 killed and wounded while the Boers lost but one man Jameson's men surrendered and were arrested by the Boers.
A few days after the raid, the German Kaiser sent a telegram ("Kruger telegram") congratulating President Kruger and the government of the South African Republic on their success, and when the text of this telegram was disclosed in the British press, it generated a storm of anti-German feeling.
In the baggage of the raiding column, to the great embarrassment of the British, the Boers found telegrams from Cecil Rhodes and the other plotters in Johannesburg.
Joseph Chamberlain, the British Colonial Secretary, quickly moved to condemn the raid, despite previously having approved Rhodes' plans to send armed assistance in the case of a Johannesburg uprising.
Subsequently, Rhodes was severely censured at the Cape inquiry and the London parliamentary inquiry, and forced to resign as Prime Minister of the Cape and as Chairman of the Chartered Company for having sponsored the failed coup d'état.
The Boer government handed their raid prisoners over to the British for trial. Dr. Jameson was tried in England for leading the raid.
However, the British press and London society inflamed by anti-Boer and anti-German feeling and in a frenzy of jingoism, lionised Dr. Jameson and treated him as a hero.
Although sentenced to 15 months imprisonment , Jameson was later rewarded by being named Prime Minister of the Cape Colony (1904–08) and ultimately anointed as one of the founders of the Union of South Africa.
Jan C. Smuts wrote in 1906, "The Jameson Raid was the real declaration of war and that is so in spite of the four years of truce that followed the aggressors consolidated their alliance the defenders on the other hand silently and grimly prepared for the inevitable."
Effects of James Raid
Strengthened the Kruger’s position
Solidified Transvaal alliance with Orange Free State (1897 military alliance)
Boosted Kruger’s previously rocky electoral popularity
Spurred the growth of anti-British, republicans and nationalist passions within the region
It had crystallized the linkages between Transvaal power, the wealth and needs of the mining industry uitlanders rights British supremacy and the prospects of a united South Africa.
By October 1899 the Transvaal State Artillery had 73 guns, of which 59 were new, including four 155-mm Creusot fortress guns, and 25 37mm Maxim Nordenfeldt guns.
The Transvaal army had been transformed; approximately 25,000 men equipped with modern rifles and artillery could mobilize within two weeks.
However, President Kruger's victory in the Jameson Raid incident did nothing to resolve the fundamental problem; the impossible dilemma continued, namely how to make concessions to the uitlanders without surrendering the independence of the Transvaal.
Their influence with the British government was, however, limited. Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister, despised jingoism and jingoists.
He also distrusted the abilities of the British army.
Yet he led Britain into war for three main reasons: because he believed the British government had an obligation to British South Africans; because he thought that the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, and the Cape Boers aspired to a Dutch South Africa, and that the achievement of such a state would damage Britain's imperial prestige around the world; and because of the Boers' treatment of black South Africans.
Kruger, seeing that war was inevitable, simultaneously issued his own ultimatum prior to receiving Chamberlain's.
This gave the British 48 hours to withdraw all their troops from the border of Transvaal; otherwise the Transvaal, allied with the Orange Free State, would declare war.
President Steyn of the Orange Free State invited Milner and Kruger to attend a conference in Bloemfontein.
The conference started on 30 May 1899, but negotiations quickly broke down, despite Kruger's offer of concessions.
In September 1899, Chamberlain sent an ultimatum demanding full equality for British citizens resident in Transvaal
News of the ultimatum reached London on the day it expired.
War was declared on 11 October 1899 with a Boer offensive into the British-held Natal and Cape Colony areas.
While the government of Lord Salisbury in Britain went to war to secure its hegemony in Southern Africa, the Boer republics did so to preserve their independence.
The expensive and brutal colonial war lasted two and a half years and pitted almost 500,000 imperial troops against 87,000 republican burghers, Cape “rebels,” and foreign volunteers.
The numerical weakness of the Boers was offset by their familiarity with the terrain, support from the Afrikaner populace, and the poor leadership and dated tactics of the British command.
Although often styled a “white man’s war,” both sides used blacks extensively as labour, and at least 10,000 blacks fought for the British.
In the first phase of the war, Boer armies took the offensive and punished British forces at Colenso, Stormberg, and Magersfontein in December 1899 (“Black Week”).
During 1900 Britain rushed reinforcements to the front, relieved sieges at Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking, and took Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, and Pretoria.
In the third phase, Boer commandos avoided conventional engagements in favour of guerrilla warfare.
The Boers had no problems with mobilization, since the fiercely independent Boers had no regular army units, apart from the 'States Artillery' of both republics.
The British commander, Lord Kitchener, devised a scorched-earth policy against the commandos and the rural population supporting them, in which he destroyed arms, blockaded the countryside, and placed the civilian population in concentration camps.
Some 25,000 Afrikaner women and children died of disease and malnutrition in these camps, while 14,000 blacks died in separate camps
In Britain the Liberal opposition vehemently objected to the government’s methods for winning the war.
End of War
Boer forces, which at the end consisted of about 20,000 exhausted and demoralized troops, sued for peace in May 1902.
The Treaty of Vereeniging(31 May, 1902) reflected the conclusive military victory of British power but made a crucial concession.
Other agreements included; British government to pat war damages, freed war captives from concentration camps, loans to rebuild the devastated republics (£3,000,000 for reconstruction), safeguard of Afrikaner language in future constitution, to restore free elections and self government at the earliest opportunity.
It promised that the “question of granting the franchise to natives blacks” would be addressed only after self government had been restored to the former Boer republics.
The treaty thus allowed the white minority to decide the political fate of the black majority.
Impact of war
The Second Boer War cast long shadows over the history of the South African region.
The predominantly agrarian society of the former Boer republics was profoundly and fundamentally affected by the scorched earth policy of Roberts and Kitchener.
a) The devastation of both Boer and black African populations in the concentration camps and through war and exile were to have a lasting effect on the demography and quality of life in the region.
b) Human Casualties were enormous, “the British Forces suffered 52,150 casualties of which 7,582 were killed in action or died of wounds and a further 13,139 died of disease”.
“On the Boers’ side about 4,000 men were killed on the battlefield, 7,347 died in prisoner camps or on parole and a further 26,370 women and children, in the concentration camps”. It is also believed that over 17,000 native Africans died in this war.
c) Massive impoverishment, destitute Boers and black Africans swelled the ranks of the unskilled urban poor competing with the "uitlanders" in the mines
d) Increased growth of anti imperialism among British politicians and society.
e) The growth of Anglo German antagonism
f) Changes in British foreign policy, military and politics
g) End of two Boers republics and strengthening of British imperialism
8) Union of South Africa of 1910 and birth of Republic of South Africa
h) The war also intensified racial relations in South Africa with Blacks the big victims in compromising the sectional interests in reconstruction and reconciliation
Concluding remarks
To conclude, it can be argued that the imperial conquest of South Africa achieved what it had set out to do: this was British control over what Lord Selborne at the Colonial Office described as ‘the richest spot on earth’, in the face of the challenges posed by German and American competitors, ‘cosmopolitan interests’ that would have been prepared to settle for reform within the Republic, and potential British supporters of an independent Anglophone Republic outside of the empire.
The conquest of the Republics created the framework for the construction of a new social and political order sought by the British and, to a large extent, by mining capital in the 1890s.
Under empire, white supremacy was assured, property rights secured, mining costs considerably reduced and black labour increasingly controlled.
Comment on the view that ‘the Boer War was blessing in disguise for Britain’.
How far can Britain’s part in causing the Boer War be justified?
Explain the causes and consequences of the Anglo Boer War.
Examine the aim and form of Britain’s assault on the sovereignty of indigenous African as well as Afrikaner states in the late 19th century.
Account for the outbreak of the South African war.
References
Sarkka, T. (2009). Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study in Late Victorian Political Thought. Jyvaskyla Studies in Humanities. University of Jyvaskyla
Freund, B. (2011). South Africa: the union years, 1910–1948 political and economic foundations. Cambridge history of South Africa.
Thompson, L. M. (2001). A History of South Africa. Yale University Press publications
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