The Boer War

A History

Denis Judd, Keith Surridge

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857733160
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

The Boer War of 1899-1902 was an epic of heroism and bungling, cunning and barbarism, with an extraordinary cast of characters - including Churchill, Rhodes, Conan Doyle, Smuts, Kipling, Gandhi, Kruger and Kitchener. The war revealed the ineptitude of the British military and unexpectedly exposed the corrupt underside of imperialism in the establishment of the first concentration camps, the shooting of Boer prisoners-of-war and the embezzlement of military supplies by British officers. This acclaimed book provides a complete history of the Boer War - from the first signs of unrest to the eventual peace. In the process, it debunks several of the myths which have grown up around the conflict and explores the deadly legacy it left for southern Africa.

Part I

The Background to the War

1

British Rule, Confrontation and Compromise, 1815–1886

The confusion in which the British found themselves in the Transvaal and indeed throughout the whole of South Africa in the early 1880s, after their embarrassing defeat in 1881 at the battle of Majuba Hill – which effectively enabled the Transvaal to regain its independence in the war of 1880–1 – was a telling and cautionary illustration of the difficulties and hazards that very rapidly seemed an inevitable and chronic part of Britain’s involvement in the region following the formal annexation of the Cape of Good Hope in 1814.

The cardinal reason why Britain had retained control of the Cape, which it had taken from the Dutch during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, was that before 1869 and the opening of the Suez Canal, the only feasible sea route to India and the Far East was round the Cape. The acquisition of the maritime facilities of Cape Town, and the development of Simonstown as an increasingly important Royal Navy base, did not mean, however, that Britain’s role in the area was simply strategic. Although policy makers in London would ideally have wished to avoid involvement with the Cape’s hinterland, a number of factors and processes dragged Britain into an increasingly complicated, and for a considerable time, unrewarding and unprofitable entanglement with the whole of South Africa.¹

This happened partly because of the inexorable and pressing demands of the imperial frontier. Once they had become the new rulers of the Cape, the British had been obliged to take on the responsibility of governing, or at the very least controlling, the ‘Cape Dutch’, the Afrikaans-speaking European settlers, numbering some 27,000 in 1815. Whether they liked it or not, the British imperial authorities were also brought into direct and unavoidable confrontation with the various African tribespeople of southern Africa, as well as assuming responsibility for the Cape coloured population – a people who were mostly the result of two centuries of interracial sexual activity between the dominant white settlers and either local black women or females from among the descendants of slaves earlier brought to the Cape from the Dutch East India Company’s possessions in the East Indies.

The British administration of the Cape would undoubtedly have been more tranquil and easy if it had to deal predominantly with fixed local populations and stable patterns of commerce and trade. South Africa, however, was in some important respects frontier territory – often, when it came down to it, the equivalent to an American Wild West at the southern tip of Africa. Historically groups of white settlers had tended to push, according to their needs and ambitions, to the north, while various black tribes were also on the move. The Afrikaner political propaganda machine, especially after the establishment of apartheid in 1948, was used to asserting that as white settlers moved north, black tribespeople moving south met them head-on.

This was a partial truth. Overall, population movements throughout the region were not a simple matter of groups of people from the north colliding with groups migrating from the south. To fulfil their subsistence, economic, political and military needs, a wide variety of people within South Africa moved north, south, east, and west to wherever there was better grazing, free available land, and the chance to shake off persecutors or rulers – whether they were dominating rival tribes or the newly installed British imperial authorities.

Within this context, the Afrikaners of the Cape were simply another African tribe, although a white one and possessing great power. They were, moreover, sustained by a coherent and fundamentally inflexible ideology. The Afrikaner people were derived from several different nationalities – Dutch, Flemish, and German, with a strong and influential contingent of exiled French Huguenots. They shared an adherence to Calvinist principles and an intense dislike of overriding government authority. Seeing themselves as a racially pure elect in a black continent, and accustomed to decades of neglect by the Netherlands government, they overwhelmingly considered themselves to be the makers of their own destiny. In response, the British administrators of the Cape, who came like the British missionaries and settlers from a social and cultural environment strikingly at odds with the rough and isolated life of the hinterland, were disinclined simply to let the Afrikaner settlers do as they wished.

Some twenty years after the final establishment of British control in the Cape in 1814, relations between the Afrikaner volk and the imperial authorities had been stretched to breaking point. Fundamental to this disaffection was the Afrikaner conviction that the British were mounting both an overt and a covert assault on their privileges and position. It is clear that British administrators, and certainly the British settlers, had no ambitions to overthrow the Afrikaner people and to promote the black African tribes in their place. The humanitarian standards of the imperial administration, however, and the liberal impulses of the British evangelical missions, could easily be seen by the Afrikaners as a concerted threat to a set of convictions of nearly two centuries’ standing.

The irony was that neither British administrators nor British missionaries had a markedly separate political agenda for South Africa. Although often sensitive to the differing identities of local people, the British colonial empire was also governed according to certain common policies; these could not be waived simply to placate a few thousand Afrikaner farmers on the other side of the world. It was, however, the case that British missionaries often subscribed to a less dogmatic analysis of racial differences than the Calvinist, Dutch Reformed Church of the Afrikaners. The anxiety about their position at the apex of Cape society resulted in a distressingly predictable cycle of Afrikaner paranoia, attended by exaggerated fears and wild misconceptions. On this analysis, British rule frequently seemed to be wilfully and deliberately out of touch with Afrikaner sensibilities and, worse still, to be irredeemably biased towards the blacks.

A further problem was that Britain seemed determined to limit Afrikaner expansion to the north. There were obvious enough reasons for this. Like all colonial subjects, if the Afrikaners could be contained it would be easier to tax and administer them. If, however, they were allowed to shake off imperial control, their continued expansion to the north and east would inevitably bring clashes with the African tribes there and so disturb, perhaps for an impossibly long time, the peace and stability that the British so strongly desired for the Cape Colony.

Inevitably, perhaps, the Afrikaners saw things very differently. They claimed that the scourges of drought and cattle disease made the regular acquisition of new grazing lands an imperative. They pointed to their history of almost continuous frontier clashes with African tribespeople, conflicts that centred primarily on the possession of land and cattle. The ‘Kaffir War’ of 1834–5, though merely one of a long sequence, was attended by more than the usual measure of bloodshed, farm burning and cattle slaughter. As a result, the fighting stimulated further white settler movement into safer and more peaceful regions to the north.

In 1833 the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire was an even more fundamental blow to Afrikaner tradition and susceptibilities. In fact, comparatively few Afrikaner farmers owned slaves. Their lifestyle, however, did depend heavily upon the dirt cheap labour of farm hands and domestic servants, many of whom worked in exchange for produce or the use of a piece of land, rather than for wages. In this context, the abolition of slavery seemed to provide the clearest indication that the British were hell-bent on the subversion of the Afrikaner way of doing things in the Cape. As if this was not bad enough, many Afrikaners felt insulted by what they saw as inadequate British compensation, both for the freed slaves and for material losses incurred during the 1834–5 ‘Kaffir War’.²

In a response common among European settler communities far from home, especially those facing unpalatable changes and beset by threatening indigenous communities, feverish Afrikaner imaginations were soon feasting on fantasies of the British administration handing over vast tracts of available land to blacks, sponsoring mixed race marriages and even forcibly imposing Roman Catholicism on the devoutly Calvinist Boer population. These threats were perceived as merely the worst excesses of a deliberate programme of Anglicisation which had made English the official language in 1827, had brought about the scrapping of the Dutch military system, and had introduced some elements of the British legal structure.

Starting in 1834, one of the defining and climactic events of Afrikaner history took place. Known in Afrikaner folklore and mythology, and in numerous South African history lessons, as the Great Trek, the migration of some 14,000 Boers across the Orange River to lands to the east and the north indisputably changed the course of South African history. The Great Trek was essentially an act of civil rebellion, the rejection of a government whose policies seemed at variance with the self-interest of the trekkers. In their covered ox wagons, frequently accompanied by their black servants and labourers, thousands of Afrikaner families struck off into the wilderness hoping for better days, better land and, above all, wishing to break free from British rule, or indeed from the rule of any distant, centralising power.³

The intensity of Afrikaner hostility towards the perceived drift towards racial equality can be seen in the words of Anna Steenkamp, a sister of the Voortrekker leader Piet Retief, when she asserted that the Afrikaners trekked because of:

the shameful and unjust proceedings with reference to the freedom of our slaves – and yet it is not their freedom that drove us to such lengths, as their being placed on an equal footing with Christians, contrary to the laws of God, and the natural distinction of race and religion, so that it was intolerable for any decent Christian to bow down beneath such a yoke; wherefore we rather withdrew in order to preserve our doctrines in purity.⁴

In essence the Great Trek was equivalent to the seventeenth century migration of political and religious dissenters across the Atlantic, or to the flow of discontented, destitute and ambitious settlers to Australasia at the same period during the nineteenth century. Interestingly, by no means all of the Afrikaner population of the Cape left on the trek, and despite the British government-sponsored landing of some 5,000 English-speaking settlers at Albany in the eastern Cape in 1820, the Afrikaans-speaking section of the European population in the colony continued to comprise at least two-thirds of the whole white community well into the second half of the twentieth century – with all the political and social complexities and cross-currents that this involved.

The British did their best to tidy up in the aftermath of the Great Trek. They were not prepared to see an Afrikaner republic established on the Natal coast and in 1843 they annexed the territory, as a consequence driving the majority of Boer settlers inland, where many of them ended up in what became known as the Transvaal. Having denied the Voortrekkers access to the coast on the Indian Ocean, the British authorities now had to decide what policies to adopt toward the various Afrikaner settlements in what, after a process of amalgamation and takeover, became known as the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.

In a pragmatic, and to some extent tolerant, decision, Britain decided to let the trekkers get on with it. It is necessary to understand that at this time, and arguably for at least another half century, the Afrikaners were not a homogeneous, united people. There were, for instance, several small Boer republics established across the Vaal River as a consequence of the Great Trek and subsequent migrations, including Vryheid, Zoutpansberg and Lydenburg. The separate republics were quite often at odds with each other, even to the point of military conflict. Indeed, early in 1857, forces from the Transvaal, led by Marthinus Pretorius, actually invaded the Orange Free State in an unsuccessful attempt to bring about a forcible union between the Afrikaner republics – an ironic precursor of subsequent British imperial efforts to engineer a South African federation.

It is not difficult to see why the imperial government, in the years following the Great Trek and its subsidiary migrations, was not eager to assert control over the newly settled territories. They calculated, quite understandably as they perceived the situation, that the various ramshackle structures would simply fall apart, destroyed by the aggression of black tribespeople and undermined by their own obscurantist ideologies, backward pastoral economic practices and chronic bankruptcy.

There was, however, a properly structured constitutional and political settlement in the aftermath of the Great Trek, the British government eventually negotiating separate agreements with the two main Afrikaner republics. In 1852 the Sand River Convention recognised the independence of the 15,000 Transvaalers. Two years later, the Bloemfontein Convention acknowledged the sovereignty of the Orange Free State. Both treaties dealt with one of the major causes of British anxiety resulting from the great Afrikaner migration when they laid down guarantees for the security and integrity of the northern frontiers of the two major Boer republics. As a result of their undertaking not to push even further north, thus provoking clashes with African tribes, the Afrikaner people of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State were granted a free hand in their internal affairs. In particular, they now had complete control over the black tribespeople within their borders. Although it is not easy to see what Britain would have been able to do in practice to intervene in the republics’ internal administration, even if they had wished to do so, the settlements of the early 1850s were a plain indication of the British desire to live and let live – certainly it gives the lie to the notion that the imperial authorities were steadfastly dedicated to the wholesale emancipation of South Africa’s black people.⁵

The political and constitutional settlements of the 1850s can be seen primarily as an exercise in co-existence, or at least relevant to the co-existence of Afrikaans-speaking and English-speaking whites. For Britain, struggling to make sense of its new responsibilities in South Africa, it was also a comparatively low-risk, low-cost policy. Until 1870, the region – in effect a sub-continent – seemed, in comparison to other areas of European settlement, unprofitable and unduly troublesome. Neither capital nor British immigrants were drawn to southern Africa in any substantial quantity. Economically, the returns seemed poor, and the physical environment unreliable: there were severe droughts that put erratic pressure on agriculture, a generally impoverished soil, and the disruptions caused by cattle disease and plagues of locusts. In South Africa, the great staple products and crops so central to the expanding colonial economies of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, namely timber, wheat, wool, coffee, sugar and tobacco, all failed adequately to establish themselves. Of these staples, South African wool was the most successful, and by 1862 twenty-five million pounds were being exported annually, but the quality of the region’s wool, particularly that produced in the Transvaal, was among the poorest grades in the British market.

Until at least the 1860s, South Africa’s docking and maritime facilities, even those of Cape Town, were underdeveloped, which limited the opportunities for trade as well as employment for British immigrants. One result was that English-speaking migration to South Africa remained disappointingly low until the 1870s, even compared with some of the least attractive destinations for British immigration, such as the Australian colonies and New Zealand. On top of these difficulties there was also the intractable nature of much of the Afrikaans-speaking population and the chronic prospect of armed conflict with various African tribespeople over land-grazing rights, water supplies and cattle. No wonder English-speaking immigrants preferred the United States and Canada for so much of the nineteenth century.

Within the territories that were directly ruled by Britain in South Africa – first the Cape and, after 1843, Natal – the constitutional developments that characterised other British colonies of settlement also took place. In 1854 a new parliament met in Cape Town; interestingly, both parliamentary houses were elective and thus in advance of similar constitutional practice in Britain and in the colonies of European settlement in Australia or Canada. Equally interesting was the fact that the Cape franchise was open to those of all races, although the financial qualification for voting rights was sufficiently high to disenfranchise the vast majority of Cape coloureds and the overwhelming majority of blacks. Indeed, it was technically possible for a non-European to sit as a member of the Cape legislature, but the stark fact was that during the entire life of the Cape parliament, from 1854 to 1910, none actually did so.

In Natal, which was a separate British colony, constitutional developments lagged several decades behind those of the Cape, but they nevertheless followed the same pattern. The Natal constitution, like that of the Cape, although theoretically ‘colour-blind’, set the financial qualification for voting so high that very few non-Europeans managed to register. Thus the franchise arrangements in both the Cape and Natal allowed for the possibility that black or coloured people could become voters; in practice, however, the self-interest of whites, anxious to maintain their political supremacy, meant that the...

Table of contents

• Author Biography
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgements
• Maps
• Preface
• Preface to the 2013 Edition
• Introduction: An Irrepressible Conflict?
• Part 1 The Background to the War
• Part 2 The Combatants
• Part 3 The Campaigns, 1899–1902
• Part 4 The Ambivalences of War
• Part 5 The Peace
• The Aftermath: Winners and Losers
• Appendix 1: Chronology
• Appendix 2: Some Leading Figures
• Appendix 3: Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plates