south african war union essay

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Related links, south african journal of science, on-line version  issn 1996-7489 print version  issn 0038-2353, s. afr. j. sci. vol.107 n.5-6 pretoria may./jun. 2011, http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/sajs.v107i5/6.709 .

BOOK REVIEW

The war for South Africa

Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

Postal address

Book Title: The war for South Africa: The Anglo-Boer War 1899-1902

Book Cover:

Author: Bill Nasson ISBN: 978-0-624-04809-1 Publisher: Tafelberg; R176.76 * Review Title: The war for South Africa

It is a remarkable fact that the centenary of the Union of South Africa last year passed by largely unnoticed by the South African public. Though the centenary of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 attracted the attention of the media, the most important consequence of the war, that South Africa became a unified political entity in 1910, was forgotten. However, 110 years ago, the societies of South Africa were at war with each other, fighting to determine who should control the region and what sort of political system should prevail. The British victory in the struggle ensured that, instead of an ill-fitting assortment of Boer republics, African kingdoms and settler colonies, there would be a unified state, knitted together by barbed wire, blood and blockhouses. The new state had some seemingly irreconcilable political differences to manage - protecting the interests of British imperialism whilst simultaneously placating embittered Afrikaners and politically frustrated Africans - but its failures should not obscure how significant unification was, nor that unification was made possible by, and influenced by, war.

There are thus good reasons for us not to forget the war that made South Africa; and Bill Nasson's book is a fresh, lively and thought-provoking reminder not to do so. It is, without doubt, the best general study of the war now available. Though Thomas Packenham's The Boer War is still immensely enjoyable, Nasson's book has a more even coverage of events and is more up to date. The war for South Africa is a complete re-write of Nasson's earlier book on the subject, The South African War, 1899-1902 , written over a decade ago. The present book has benefited from an engagement with much of the new literature that was produced around the centenary of the war, in 1999, and also reflects some of the debates surrounding that centenary. Even 10 years ago the intelligentsia of the New South Africa were questioning the war's relevance to the nation, and some of Nasson's most perceptive writing records that debate. With his customary love of the absurd and his sardonic sense of humour, Nasson's views are far from being politically correct. But there is a lot worth ridiculing when ill-informed politicians attempt to make usable heritage out of a complex and contested past.

The causes of the war have long been a favourite topic to set as an essay question for students of South African history. Nasson's treatment of this question is exemplary and brief. He deals with the relationship between capitalism and imperialism most succinctly, pointing out that whatever the role was that was played by gold and mining interests, the fundamental question was 'Who was South Africa for?' It boiled down to Boer independence versus British control. The claims of Africans were seen as being largely irrelevant. Because Nasson is primarily a social historian this is not, primarily, a military history and he takes care not to lose sight of what impact the war was having on society at large. He does not allow himself to get bogged down in the sort of detail that delights military historians. Instead Nasson briskly discusses the tactics and strategies that evolved as the war took on a life of its own. His is a narrative that downplays the glory and heroism of men in combat to concentrate on the sufferings of ordinary men and women. There are few heroes or villains in these pages. The sieges of Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley, that so inspired the Victorian public to eulogise their plucky defenders, are here portrayed as largely inconsequential. There are no lavish, set-piece battle accounts. Some well-known characters do not feature at all in this history (Kipling, Sol Plaatje) whereas other, lesser-known actors are promoted to our attention (Robert Kekewich). But whoever or whatever Nasson discusses is enlivened by his judicious writing, well spiced with telling quotes and quirky observations.

Nasson's chapters on the aftermath of the war and its impact on South African memory and the heritage industry are particularly impressive. If a nation's political maturity can be judged by the way in which its politicians interpret a complicated and divisive past then we have some way to go until adulthood. In his discussion of the causes of the war Nasson keeps one eye on contemporary events, such as the Allied invasion of Iraq or intervention in Afghanistan. When is it permissible to force war on another country? How does one ensure that one wins the peace after the war as well as the war itself? To what extent is it possible to distinguish between combatants and civilians in military strategy? All of these questions make the South African War a very modern war, a war not just of the 20th century but of the 21st century too. In the end, it seems, if the questions are too hard to answer, the temptation is for politicians to forget about the past completely or to get it spectacularly wrong in the name of inclusive nation building.

Nasson's conclusions are, throughout, objective and fair. This is not a revisionist history with new accusations of atrocious conduct or revelations of genocidal intent. Nor is it an apology for either side. There are no moral pronouncements or value judgements. It is, instead, a careful, subtle reading of the historical context in which actions took place. The military historian John Keegan has reminded us that war is a cultural activity. This means that, when we study wars, we must understand the cultures of those who fight them if we wish to understand the ways in which they are fought. Nasson has this broad, cultural empathy and he shares it with us in a fast-moving, energetic prose style that entertains whilst it instructs and that eschews the use of cliché. This is an outstanding history of the war by an outstanding historian.

© 2011. The Authors. Licensee: OpenJournals Publishing. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. * Book price at time of review

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South African War, Union, Segregation

Department of History, University of Kwazulu-Natal

• Published: 08 June 2020
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This chapter examines the politics of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Africa. It considers the South African War and itsrole in shaping modern South Africa through the postwar program of reconstruction under the watch of Milner’s kindergarten, in the context of the British imperial project. Factors that led to the war are outlined, including the role of Randlords, followed by a discussion of the reconciliation between the British and the Boers at the expense of black South Africans, the standoff between Smuts and Gandhi, reconstruction, segregation, the marginalization of black South Africans, and the genesis of organized black resistance to white minority rule under which union was forged.

Brian Porter famously claimed that the British were “absent-minded imperialists,” 1 while Ronald Hyam argued that there was “no such thing as Greater Britain, still less a British empire—India perhaps apart. There was only a ragbag of territorial bits and pieces.” 2 John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson contended in their 1950s essay that the British did not have direct formal control over their empire but that their growing economy “integrated remote parts of the globe.” 3 They argued that “the usual summing up of the policy of the free trade empire as ‘trade not rule’ should read ‘trade with informal control if possible; trade with rule when necessary’.” 4 John Darwin suggested that informal empire “represented a pragmatic acceptance of limited power” and reflected “the force majeure of circumstance than the triumph of a principle.” 5 Informal empire ultimately proved unsustainable and local crises in various regions forced the British to adopt formal methods of empire. 6

South Africa provides one instance where the British sought to impose formal control. War between the Boers and the British in 1899 was essentially a struggle between contending white powers for political hegemony in South Africa. 7 The causes and sequence of events leading to the war continue to be debated, but among the factors mentioned by historians are the conflicting political ideologies of British imperialism and Boer republicanism; Britain’s determination to protect its strategic interests in the region in the face of German competition; mineral discoveries on the Witwatersrand, which drew in migrants and magnates in large numbers; the demand for full democratic rights for the mainly British immigrants ( Uitlanders ), which the Transvaal government resisted; the role of mining magnates in promoting war to uphold their economic interests; and the failed attempt by Cecil John Rhodes and Leander Starr Jameson to overthrow the government of Paul Kruger in the Transvaal in 1895, which heightened tension and distrust between both sides.

British attempts to unify the Afrikaner republics and British colonies in a self-governing dominion under white control in order to safeguard Britain’s interests predated the mineral discoveries that transformed the political economy of South Africa. “Inspired by a grandiose imperialist vision,” Lord Carnarvon and Sir Bartle Frere in the 1870s and Sir Alfred Milner and Joseph Chamberlain in the 1890s, colonial secretaries and high commissioners, respectively, were especially active in seeking to secure British interests in South Africa. 8

Britain’s determination to bring South Africa under its influence was a direct cause of the First Anglo-Boer War (1880–1881), which was the only war the British lost in the nineteenth century. The Boers, who had migrated from the Cape, established the independent republics of the Transvaal (or South African Republic) and the Orange Free State (OFS), which were recognized by Britain at the Sand River (1852) and Bloemfontein (1854) conventions, respectively. British expansion in Southern Africa began with the annexation of Basutoland in 1868. Colonial Secretary Lord Carnarvon proposed a confederation of South African states in 1875 in the hope that political stability would lead to economic growth under British rule. The discovery of diamonds in 1867 near the confluence of the Orange and Vaal Rivers and gold on the Rand in the 1880s transformed the political economy of South Africa and rendered the British imperial project more urgent. 9

Defeat in the First Anglo-Boer War did not deter the British, whose policy mold should be seen in the context of the scramble for Africa. Britain’s economic investments were most significant in Egypt and Southern Africa. Its occupation of Egypt in 1882 to defend its “substantial economic interests” triggered events that led to conflict and imperial expansion in West Africa in 1898 and at Fashoda in East Africa later in the year, 10 and that eventually led to war in South Africa. The discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand brought in its wake thousands of European prospectors, and the white population of South Africa increased from 621,000 to 1,117,000 between 1891 and 1904. 11 The Boers regarded the prospectors, especially the English, as Uitlanders (literally, “outlanders”) who posed a threat to their control of the Transvaal, and restricted their voting rights. Only foreigners who had been in the country for fourteen years or more could vote. This caused tension between the Transvaal and British governments as the latter exploited the situation for its own purposes. 12

The Kruger government’s desire to remain independent grew firmer as the Transvaal became the largest producer of gold in the world and replaced the Cape as the economic hub of South Africa. Britain needed a stable gold supply to maintain its preeminent economic position in the world, which made the Transvaal especially attractive. The gold reefs in the Transvaal were very deep, and individual miners soon gave way to large multinational companies. One of the architects of British imperialism in southern Africa was the magnate Cecil John Rhodes, who arrived from Britain in 1870, established a monopoly of the world diamond supply over the next two decades, and became premier of the Cape Colony in 1890. Rhodes was an ardent imperialist. His last will and testament stated: “I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.” He saw the doggedly independent Paul Kruger and the Transvaal as standing in the way of settler colonial expansion that would facilitate the formation of self-governing components of a British Empire.

Rhodes was determined to prevent the Transvaal from acquiring a route to the sea, which would affect the economies of Natal and the Cape Colony and threaten Britain’s hegemonic position in South Africa. He became emboldened when Joseph Chamberlain became colonial secretary in 1895 and Sir Alfred Milner high commissioner in South Africa in 1897. Like Rhodes, they were determined to change the regime in the Transvaal and thus magnified differences between the Transvaal and British colonies. Rhodes publicized Uitlander grievances, both real and imagined, in his newspapers and together with Jameson plotted an Uitlander uprising to oust Kruger. The so-called Jameson Raid began on 29 December 1895 but ended in disarray owing to differences among the Uitlanders themselves and the fact that most did not feel sufficiently aggrieved to rise against the government. Jameson surrendered on 2 January 1896, and Rhodes paid a political price—he had to resign as premier of the Cape Colony.

Rhodes may have been marginalized politically, but his imperial vision was very much alive. Matters came to a head when Kruger was reelected president in 1898, and his determination to maintain the Transvaal’s independence came up against ardent advocates of British imperial expansion, Milner and Chamberlain, who exploited the question of the Uitlander franchise to heighten political tensions in the Transvaal, eventually leading to war. The war that broke out on 10 October 1899 proved longer, costlier, and more difficult than the British had anticipated. Indeed, British defeats in the initial months in Mafeking, Ladysmith, and Kimberley “induced a sense of crisis for imperial power, and called into question national fighting efficiency and British ‘racial’ vitality, initiative and competence.” The Boers, on the other hand, “fought and resisted with agility, guile, and tenacity in what in many ways came to resemble a people’s war, with numerous rural women involved in the republican war effort or otherwise sucked into hostilities.” 13 British war methods included a scorched-earth policy and imprisoning inmates in concentration camps, which destroyed the agrarian basis of Boer society. An estimated 28,000 Boers died in the camps. 14

While many Boer leaders refused to countenance surrender, it was clear by early 1902 that the British could not be defeated. A younger generation of Afrikaner generals led by the likes of Jan Christiaan Smuts and Louis Botha were pragmatic enough to realize that the very existence of the Afrikaner people depended on the sacrifice of republican independence, at least in the short term. 15 Smuts was born in 1870 in the Cape Colony and studied law at Cambridge University. He returned to South Africa in 1895 and practiced as an advocate in Cape Town. He moved to Johannesburg after the Jameson Raid and in 1898 became state attorney and advisor to the executive council in President Paul Kruger’s government. He distinguished himself in the South African War as a general in the republican forces and was the Transvaal government’s legal adviser at the Vereeniging Peace Conference in 1902. 16 Smuts strongly supported the Treaty of Vereeniging. Facing down Boer militants, he told delegates that “from the prison, from the camps, the graves, the veld, from the womb of the future the nation cries out to us to make a wise decision… We fought for independence, but we must not sacrifice the nation on the altar of independence.” 17

It is now widely acknowledged that this was not a “White man’s war,” a fact reflected in the change in nomenclature from “Anglo-Boer” to “South African” War. Research in the past few decades has underscored black people’s participation in the war and its impact on them. Around a quarter of Boer manpower in the early stages of the war consisted of Africans, who contributed as wagon drivers, guides, and scouts, as well as soldiers, and by its end there were more Africans serving in the British army as scouts, bearers, and transport drivers than there were white fighters on the Boer side. 18 Africans were also placed in segregated, disease-ridden, and unhygienic internment camps, resulting in thousands of deaths, with some estimating that the number of deaths was possibly higher than those suffered by whites, while many died of hunger and starvation. Some Africans gained control of large swathes of the countryside on the Highveld, staking their claim to lost land and making it difficult for Boer commandos to move around, 19 while others looted livestock and robbed Boer farms, with the result that the Boers felt that they were fighting the war on two fronts. Mohandas K. Gandhi led a small contingent of Indian stretcher bearers who served in northern Natal and were active in the siege of Ladysmith in particular. Many whites on both sides of the political divide became concerned about the impact of the war on “the African mind” and were keen to end hostilities. 20

Most historians agree that the war was pivotal in shaping the history of twentieth-century South Africa. Shula Marks described it as South Africa’s

“Great War,” as important to the shaping of modern South Africa as was the American Civil War in the history of the United States. South African Union, on the imperial agenda since the failure of confederation in the 1870s, was born in its ashes, as whites on both sides joined hands to shore up white supremacy against the background of rumours of revolt by restive Africans. If, at one level, it was a war about colonial self-determination—however limited—at another, it was also a war for the survival of a settler society, and about the credibility and international reputation of the British Empire. 21

The years following the war saw Britain seeking reconciliation with its former Boer opponents and eventually granting self-government to a Boer-dominated Union of South Africa in 1910, at the expense of black South Africans, 22 who remained largely powerless with their primary role being to provide unskilled migrant labor.

The truce reached at Vereeniging on 31 May 1902 saw the Boers and British resolve their differences, with the Boers forced to give up their independence in return for the release of prisoners and certain economic and political safeguards, such as the right to keep firearms, the right to their property, and relief for victims of war. Unlike in Canada and Australia, white South Africans settled on unification rather than a federal system even though Natal had argued strongly for a federal structure. Importantly, Clause 8 of the treaty excluded the granting of any form of franchise to Africans until after self-government, which meant that the status of Africans would be determined locally, and in fact they would be excluded from the franchise when the Transvaal and Orange River colony were granted self-government. Many educated and politicized Africans, Indians and Coloureds were disappointed that they gained nothing from the truce. The African leader L. T. Mvabaza told the British prime minister Lloyd George when an African delegation visited London in 1919:

During the Anglo-Boer War of 1899 to 1902, we took the British side as British subjects and fought against the Boers, but when the Peace time came, and the Treaty of Vereeniging was signed our rights were sacrificed. For, then and there, the “colour bar” was accepted by the British. Hence, the question of colour was introduced and sanctioned as a principle of British constitution in South Africa for the first time in the annals of Great Britain. 23

Segregation

The terms of the truce essentially compensated the Boers and sought to maintain the status quo between white and black. Its terms satisfied the Boers as well as British mining capital, which secured control over what Lord Selbourne at the Colonial Office had described in 1899 as “the richest spot on earth.” 24 Generals Botha and Smuts emerged as the most powerful Boer leaders and worked hand in glove with the British in the period from 1902 to 1910 to create a South Africa of white power and privilege, an exclusively white self-governing community whose economic edifice was built on the land dispossession of Africans and a migrant labor system that powered enormous profits from the mines. 25 In the words of J. X. Merriman, a liberal politician from the Cape, whites were reconciled “over the body of the blacks.” 26

A major policy imperative of Milner, who was the high commissioner and governor of the Transvaal from 1897 and Orange River Colony until March 1905, was to get the mining industry up and running. This depended on a plentiful supply of labor, an efficient bureaucracy, and the co-option of the white working class. 27 Milner was pleased that many British soldiers remained in South Africa after the war, as he wanted English migrants to outnumber the Afrikaners by at least three to two in order to lay the foundation for an English-dominated white South Africa. While he believed that whites shared a common outlook on the basis of race and culture, many white migrants came from a working-class background and became involved in worker organizations that challenged mining interests. 28 In contrast, the Boers were able to mask their differences and present a more united front than the English.

Milner’s Kindergarten, the name given to the coterie of Oxford-educated bureaucrats that he appointed to help reconstruct the republics, subscribed to firm ideas of segregation. They saw the empire as divided between Europeans and non-Europeans; at its most extreme between the “civilized” English and “uncivilized” Africans. There was also a substantial Asian population (Indians, Japanese, Chinese) that “occupied a liminal space between these two racial extremes in South Africa as well as within the Empire.” 29 Indians saw themselves as British citizens in terms of Queen Victoria’s edict of 1857, and their struggle for their rights as subjects of the empire was raised powerfully by Gandhi, who spent most of the years between 1893 and 1914 in South Africa.

In his speech at the opening of the British Parliament in 1902, King Edward VII seemed to set the agenda when he called for the “equality of all the white races south of the Zambezi,” rather than “civilised races,” as was the usage prior to the war. 30 Milner, however, was convinced of the need for white supremacy in South Africa: “The white man must rule, because he is elevated by many, many steps above the black man; steps which it will take many centuries to climb, and it is quite possible that the vast bulk of the black population may never be able to climb at all.” 31 Milner declared that he was an “Imperialist out and out.” The empire was bound by the “tie of blood, language, history and traditions common to the British people.” 32 Milner was also aware that whites in South Africa would not tolerate any form of equality with blacks. In a May 1904 speech, he said that it was impossible to make allowances on the race question because of the “extravagance on the part of almost all the whites—not the Boers only—against any concession to any Coloured man.” 33

Lionel Curtis, who was the assistant colonial secretary of the Transvaal from 1903 to 1906 and a key member of Milner’s Kindergarten, opposed the Cape policy of granting franchise to educated Africans. He wrote in 1906 that “the white community must be self-governing; the black community must be ruled autocratically.” Curtis rejected the idea of a few educated blacks entering the portals of white society. He argued that their racial origins would always trump individual personal “success.” 34 Curtis wrote in 1907 that the task of whites was to implement “the best form of government for maintaining the race barrier.” Self-government was only for “progressive” societies at the top of the civilizational ladder (Europeans), while “static” non-Western societies had to be ruled through “autocratic” and “efficient” bureaucracies. 35 Curtis stated in his 1906 farewell speech that his policy had aimed to “keep the Transvaal a white man’s country” and save it from the fate of places like Jamaica and Mauritius, where whites had been displaced from power. 36 Philip Kerr, another member of Milner’s Kindergarten, wrote in 1916 that the fact that humans were divided on a “graduated scale of civility and barbarism was one of the most fundamental facts in human history.” 37

These views were consistent with Smuts’s views on the “Native question,” which were revealed in a letter to the journalist W. T. Stead in January 1902. He described as “shocking” the use of “armed Barbarians [Blacks] under white officers in a war between two white Christian peoples,” as this effectively made blacks “arbiters” in the dispute and thus give them the “casting vote.” This “Frankenstein Monster” would result in South Africa’s relapsing into “barbarism.” 38 While the war would “one day only be remembered as a great thunderstorm, which purified the atmosphere of the subcontinent,” the “evils and horrors of this war will appear as nothing by comparison with its after effects produced on the native mind.” 39 In similar vein, Louis Botha, the Union of South Africa’s first prime minister, testified before the South African Native Affairs Commission (SANAC) that Africans “looked down upon Afrikaners” as a defeated people.

In a talk entitled “The White Man’s Task” at the Savoy Hotel in London on 22 May 1917, Smuts warned that whites had to work hard to forge racial unity because they were living among a mass of Africans who were “uncivilised”: “We know that on the African Continent at various times there have been attempts at civilisation. Where are those civilisations now? They have all disappeared, and barbarism once more rules over the land and makes the thoughtful man nervous about the white man's future in Southern Africa.” Smuts made it clear that in his view there could be “no intermixture of blood between the two colours (white and black). It is probably true that earlier civilisations have largely failed because that principle was never recognised, civilising races being rapidly submerged in the quicksands of the African blood.” Smuts was also determined not to allow Asian migration: “If thousands of Orientals settled in South Africa, the Westerners must go to the wall. Westerners are not prepared to commit suicide and their leaders will not permit them to be reduced to such straits.” 40

In the immediate postwar years in the Transvaal and Orange River Colony, “the most distinguished generals of the guerrilla war were transforming themselves into politicians.” 41 Botha formed Het Volk (“The People”) in January 1905 in the Transvaal, and Afrikaners in the Orange River Colony regrouped under the Oranje Unie led by General Hertzog and Abraham Fischer. These parties represented various Afrikaner interests, and their platform included self-government, job creation for poor whites as a way of appealing to urban workers as well as improving relations between capital and labor, and unity between British and Afrikaner. Hertzog, for example, stated in July 1905 that “it was much better for us to go to the grave with our grievances than to His Majesty’s Government.” Yet less than a year later, in May 1906, he would say at the first party congress of the Oranjie Unie that “broken friendships are restored, and we must … labour that the people of this land shall be cemented together to build up a great and worthy country.” 42

Afrikaners’ quest for self-government was helped by the coming to power of a Liberal Party government in England, led by Henry Campbell-Bannerman, in December 1905. When Smuts traveled to London seeking self-government for the Transvaal, albeit limited to white people, he told Campbell-Banerman that “the only security for the British connection lies—not in armies and ostentatious loyalty of mine-owners—but in the trust and goodwill of the people of South Africa as a whole.” Smuts was convinced that “under the British flag there are peace and contentment, there are justice and equal rights for all, and there is free scope to follow their national ideals and destiny.” 43 Campbell-Bannerman was amenable to Afrikaner demands, pointing out that “though there was an element of risk attached to that course, the alternative of continued forceful suppression of Afrikaners seemed impossible … [and] the increasing tensions in the European system made it essential to stabilise South Africa at once.” 44

The British acceded to Afrikaner demands for self-government, and the Transvaal was granted Responsible Government in 1906, with the Orange River Colony following a year later. 45 The South African Native Congress (SANC) adopted a resolution in 1906 that this move was premature, “considering the very low moral tone of the average colonist in regard to native treatment and their feeling and demeanour towards the native races.” 46 Self-government effectively put the Afrikaners in power in South Africa, meaning that the Afrikaner-British balance of political power was maintained. Smuts emerged as a key figure in the Transvaal, moving from a Boer general fighting the British to calling for the unity of the white “races” of South Africa and eventually becoming “the Henchman of the Empire.” 47 He strove for an Anglo-Afrikaner alliance as a way of forging South African nationhood and preventing further imperial interference. After winning the 1907 election, gave ministerial places to English-speakers and worked with mining magnates, even though the party’s support base was mainly Afrikaners and workers. 48

Milner’s policies had divided the British in the Transvaal. He allied himself with deep-level gold-mining interests while professionals, artisans, and even some diamond mining and outcrop gold–mining executives supported self-government. Lionel Phillips, arguably the most influential representative of mining capital, was aware that in the years just after the war Smuts had labeled the Transvaal government as “almost completely dictated by the magnates.” 49 Phillips had been involved in the Jameson Raid but now realized the need to use financial clout as a way to influence the Het Volk government, because he felt that with the granting of Responsible Government, “the Africander tide is again rising.” 50 For his part, Smuts was aware that mining capital was the main source of income for the Transvaal government and that attacking capital by threatening nationalization could bring swift retribution from Britain and possibly ruin the Afrikaner nationalist project.

There was also the added threat in the Transvaal of a militant white working class dominated by a British born leadership. When around five thousand white mineworkers who felt threatened by the use of Chinese, Afrikaner, and African labor to undertake limited skilled work went on strike in May 1907, Smuts and Botha had no qualms about using force and scab labor to break the strike for the benefit of British Randlords. The state (under Boer control) and capital (in British hands) acted in tandem to protect common interests. As Yudelman points out, there was a gamut of seemingly contradictory demands—mine owners wanting to drive down labor costs, white organized labor seeking to preserve its racial advantage, the government wanting to keep the mines profitable while pushing for more white Afrikaners to enter the mines—out of which a symbiotic relationship emerged between mining capital and the Het Volk government. The government needed the revenue from the mines, and the mine owners needed stability to accumulate capital. 51

White workers also sought to protect their racial privileges. For example, the South African Labour Party (SALP), which was formed in 1910, had a clearly segregationist political platform aimed at confronting both capital and cheap black labor. As Shula Marks points out, “A fusion of militant labor and racist visions was common to the political platform of the imperial working class, whether in South Africa, Britain or Australia.” 52 Jonathan Hyslop’s insightful work shows that, in the first decade of the twentieth century, the white working class was bound together in places like Australia, Canada, South Africa, and Britain into an imperial working class by the movement of people across the empire and the common ideology of white laborism, whose critique of capital for exploiting workers was bound up with a strong racial component, and which was determined to protect the organized power of white workers internationally. 53

Africans, Indians, and Coloureds hoping to find redress under British rule in the Transvaal were extremely disappointed by growing antiblack legislation. For example, Gandhi hoped that Indians’ grievances would be addressed as the treatment of Asians was one of the issues that the British cited in the lead-up to war. Lord Landsdowne, then Secretary of State for War, told a meeting in Sheffield, England, in 1899: “Among the many misdeeds of the South African Republic I do not know that any fills me with more indignation than its treatment of these Indians.” Sir Mancherjee Bhownaggree, the second Indian MP in the British Parliament, would say after the war that he had been “led by the assurances of Cabinet Ministers to cherish the anticipation that the war had for one of its main objects the rescue of British-Indians from the harsh treatment to which they were exposed by the late Boer Republics.” 54

Indians faced discrimination in all South African territories. They were banned from the Orange River Colony; there were restrictions on their entry to the Transvaal and the Cape and segregatory measures for those in the colony; and while Natal continued to import indentured labor until 1911, there were immigration, trade, and residential restrictions and a tax on free Indians aimed at forcing them to return to India. There were many anti-Asian meetings in Natal and the Transvaal in particular. For example, at a meeting on 23 January 1907 at the Builder’s Association on Smith Street, Durban, a Colonial Patriotic Union was formed with the aim of keeping Asians out of Natal and restricting the trading rights of those already there in order to prevent Indians’ “getting the possession of the whole town and drive the proper owners out.” 55 The Durban Political Association (DPA) under Duncan McKenzie passed resolutions calling for the compulsory repatriation of Indians and restrictions on trading by refusing new licenses or the transfer of licenses. It also called for a federation of South Africa “as a white man’s country.” 56 It was in the Transvaal that Gandhi pioneered satyagraha (passive resistance). White Natal was fully behind a unification project based on segregation. Although few in number, Indians commanded the attention of the imperial authorities because of concern that anger about their treatment in South Africa would agitate Indians in India.

Many African and Coloured leaders conveyed their disillusionment in their evidence before SANAC that British policies did not reflect the “philanthropic” and “kindhearted” treatment that British officials had led them to believe they would receive in return for their loyalty; instead, they were denied land and forced onto the labor market as the traditional basis of their societies was destroyed. Milner appointed SANAC to formulate a national policy for Africans in a future unified South Africa. The commission heard evidence between 1903 and 1905, and its recommendations included measures that in time would be implemented as segregation by the South African state. This included its proposal of territorial segregation to divide the country into black and white areas, which lay behind the 1913 Land Act, the foundation of the policy of segregation; pass laws to control the movement of Africans whose labor was required on the mines and farms and in urban areas; protection of white workers, which would bear fruit in the “Civilised Labour Policy”; and separate political representation for Africans, who were to be controlled through their own traditional institutions. 57

SANAC met at a time of reduced labor supply for the mines and farms because the war had disrupted recruitment in Mozambique, and many Africans from South Africa were loath to return to the Rand because they had accumulated money and cattle or obtained work repairing roads and railways damaged during the war, while others complained of terrible living and working conditions and low wages as the mines, anticipating a flow of labor under British rule, cut wages by half. 58 Officials had to use the South African Constabulary and Native Affairs Commissioners in many rural areas to force Africans back onto farms. The status quo was gradually restored in rural areas as the native commissioners and British administrators persuaded African tenants to pay rent and taxes and return cattle and guns. 59 While some of these restrictive measures had existed previously in one form or another, “it was only during Milner’s Reconstruction administration that they were combined into an overarching general policy.” 60 In the years following union, segregationist policies helped to establish a firm policy of cheap labor for the mines and agriculture by entrenching influx control to prevent permanent African urbanization. 61

While these policies would take effect in future years, the shortage of mine labor had to be addressed as a matter of urgency. The British were not in a position to force African labor to the mines and sought unskilled labor from abroad. Milner tried to recruit Indian indentured workers, but the scheme failed because the Indian government refused the proviso of compulsory repatriation. This increased the ire of Milner and others in the Transvaal, who felt that they were being denied the “desirable” class of Indian (workers), while the parasitical class (traders) was allowed entry. 62 Milner wrote in early 1903 that Chinese labor “would release an immense quantity of niggers for agriculture etc. which they much prefer & I think it ought to be quite possible to keep the yellow man for unskilled labour pure & simple & to ship them home again when they have done it.” 63 Between 1904 and 1907, 63,000 indentured workers were imported from northeastern China and were repatriated by 1910 once African labor became available. 64

It became clear in the period after 1902 that blacks would be denied a meaningful political role in any future dispensation. Indeed, in Natal, Africans had been subject to segregationist measures through the reserves established in the nineteenth century and the imposition of a hut tax and measures such as curfews and pass laws to control influx into urban areas. Difficult economic conditions in the postwar period were compounded by the government’s setting aside several million acres of land in Zululand for white settlement in 1905; stock and crop diseases; and the imposition of a poll tax on males not eligible for the hut tax. Bhambatha of the Zondi led the Zulu Rebellion in April 1906, which lasted several months, led to great loss of life on the Zulu side (3,000, against 30 whites), and generated enormous tension and fear among whites. The Natal government believed that Dininzulu, son of the former king Cetshwayo, was behind the uprising and in 1908 tried him on a charge of treason. Dininzulu was found not guilty in March 1909 but was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for harboring rebels; in the interim, a commission of inquiry corroborated most African grievances.

Unlike those of the other territories, the 1853 Cape constitution had a qualified male franchise based on income and property that did not discriminate on the basis of race. However, owing to economic inequality, the majority of voters were white. Changes in 1872 and 1887, which included an educational test, made it even more difficult for Africans to qualify to vote, and those who did constituted a tiny elite. The Cape liberal model of “civilized” racial mixing was pushed to the margins as whites debated a union of South Africa. Cape liberalism was, in fact, began to decline in the late nineteenth century, and there was some overtly racial legislation, such as the establishment of a segregated location for Africans in Cape Town in 1902 and the introduction of compulsory educational segregation in 1905 by the School Board Act. Such legislation meant that “Cape liberalism was certainly dented by 1910.” 65

There was a considerable black political awakening and organization in the postwar period leading up to union in 1910. Mission-educated ( amakholwa ) African teachers, farmers, and traders in Natal and the Cape had moved from war as a tool of resistance to petitioning for their rights from the 1860s. While there were a number of local and regional organizations, a loosely structured South African Native Congress (SANC) was formed in 1898 by African political leaders in the Eastern Cape such as Thomas Mqanda, Jonathan Tunyiswa, and Walter Rubusana, to push back against “growing racial discrimination and deteriorating economic conditions.” SANC’s strongest support was in the Eastern Cape and the Transkei, though support grew gradually in other parts of the country. 66 Other organizations that emerged during the Boer War period, a time of profound social, economic, and political crisis for South African society, were the Natal Native Congress (1900), the Cape Native Congress (1902), the Transvaal Native Vigilance Association (1902), and the Orange River Colony Native Vigilance Association (1903). 67 The Transvaal Native Congress (TNC) was formed on the initiative of SANC in 1905 by leaders of independent African churches, chiefs, and secular groups and often intervened on behalf of African mineworkers. The African Political (later People’s) Organisation (APO) was formed in Cape Town in 1902; its program, which placed strong emphasis on improving Coloured education and extending the Coloured franchise to the northern colonies, was shaped to a large extent by the Scottish-trained medical doctor Abdullah Abdurahman, who was president from 1905 to 1940.

In 1902 SANC sent a resolution to the British government calling for protection of the interests of African and Coloured people in the face of moves to curtail their freedoms. SANC passed a resolution at its April 1906 congress that political unity “founded on the political extinction of the Native element would be shortsighted” and criticized the Cape government’s failure to protect Africans rights and attacks on Africans by the “capitalistic press.” It also defended African workers’ consumption of beer. 68 Delegates questioned how the British government could reconcile its commitment to South Africa as a “white man’s country” with its “solemn pledges of protection to the weaker races” and stated that they preferred being ruled directly by the British to the racist white governments. Delegates viewed the removal of the “imperial factor” with “extreme gravity.” 69

These organizations and African-owned newspapers, such as John Tengo Jabavu’s Imvo Zabantsundu in King William’s Town; Walter Rubusana’s Izwi Labantu ( Voice of the People ) in East London; Silas Morema and Sol Plaatjie’s Koranta ea Becoana ( Bechuana’s Gazette ); Plaatjie’s Tsala ea Batho ( The Friend of the People ); the Pietermaritzburg-based Inkanyiso yase Natal ( Light of Natal ); and John Dube’s Ilanga lase Natal were elitist, accommodationist, and essentially conservative, highlighting the grievances and aspirations of the African bourgeoisie in the main; but they occasionally spoke out against the terrible treatment of African workers in the mines, employers’ failure to provide medical care, the pass laws, lack of employment opportunities for educated Africans, and so on. 70 However, it was only with the founding of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) in 1912 that these issues appeared on the national stage.

Eight years after the truce of Vereeniging, the Union of South Africa came into being on 31 May 1910 with the unification of the Transvaal, Natal, the Cape Colony, and the Orange River Colony. It was founded as a dominion of the British Empire, with the British monarch represented by a governor-general in South Africa.

The movement toward unification was given impetus from around 1905 by the need for a unified native policy to make labor available for the farms and mines in different parts of the country; the need for a common railways, customs, and tariffs policy to eradicate competition between these self-governing colonies; and the fear of a national African uprising following the Bhambatha Rebellion in Natal. The quest for unity was driven by both imperialists and anti-imperialists. Imperialists hoped that a British electoral majority would help to secure their interests in the region, while republicans anticipated that unification would both address the problems common to the colonies and create a common purpose among white South Africans to end imperial interference in the region.

Shula Marks notes that this rapid unification “was partly a product of the tremendous white insecurities unleashed by the war. … White unity was forged in the face of the fear of Africans brought on by the war.” 71 The struggle between white and white did not take place in a vacuum; “at any given time, there was either a resistance war going on somewhere or one had just finished, or there were rumours of another (African) outbreak.” 72 The white colonies feared that rebellion could spread to their territories and felt compelled to unite to thwart such danger.

Milner left South Africa in April 1905, and the quest for unification on the British side was led by the likes of his successor as high commissioner, Lord Selbourne, and Lionel Curtis. Selborne and Curtis prepared the so-called Selborne Memorandum, which was introduced in the Cape Parliament in July 1907 and advocated strongly for unification because disunity was “crippling the power of government to remove obstacles from the path of enterprise.” 73 In 1908 the Kindergarten published The Government of South Africa , which, in two volumes written mainly by Curtis, argued in favor of unitary government as most appropriate in the particular circumstances in South Africa. The Kindergarten established a public association called the Closer Union Societies and a journal entitled The State to publicize their vision of a unified South African state within the British Empire. 74

South Africa, they hoped, would join Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as self-governing dominions, which were “a crucial supplement to Britain’s strategic strength at a time of growing international tension in Europe.” 75 These dominions were to be white ruled. Lord Elgin wrote to his successor as Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Crewe, in 1908 that giving equality to “civilised men” in South Africa would be dangerous because a time will come when “the natives will control the elections. Are we prepared to subordinate the whites to native rule under such circumstances?” 76 Sir Charles Lucas, of the Dominion Department, was of the view that Britain would not “confront its Dominions on the issue of imperial citizenship,” since they were of more value to Britain than Britain was to them; in any case, he added, most “Coloured people were unfit to rule.” 77

In his farewell speech in Johannesburg in March 1905, Milner described the British Empire as a group of states, “all independent in their own local concerns, but all united for the defence of their own common interests and the development of a common civilization; united not in an alliance—for alliances can be made and unmade … but in a permanent organic union.” His vision was of an empire consisting of a group of white self-governing communities bound by a common “civilization” in which the various “elements would gravitate towards each other in a ‘natural’ way, and … each played a role in sustaining the entity as a whole.” 78 Speaking in Ottawa, Canada, in 1908, Milner stated that it was a great boon “for every white man of British birth, that he can be at home in every state of the Empire from the moment he has set foot in it, though his whole previous life may have been passed at the other end of the earth.” 79

The immediate reaction to unity among white South African leaders was subdued, but this changed by early 1908, when Jameson’s Imperial Party was defeated by the South African Party in the Cape. The latter was led by the English-speaking John X. Merriman but was composed mainly of members of the Afrikaner Bond, while the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony had become self-governing. This meant in effect that three of the four self-governing colonies were under anti-imperialist governments, and their leaders, according to Leonard Thompson, began to seriously countenance union and were able to “control the process of unification” rather than follow the lead of British administrators. 80 However, Vineet Thakur, Alexander E. Davis, and Peter Vale argue that the Kindergarten “understood itself as having a background role in the process,” with Lord Selborne writing to Lionel Curtis in February 1909 that without his penning The Government of South Africa , “we never should have got such an excellent form of constitution. … Milner’s Kindergarten will have more profoundly influenced the history of South Africa than any combination of Afrikanders (sic) has ever done.” 81

A National Constitutional Convention was organized with meetings held in Durban and Cape Town between October 1908 and February 1909, when a report and draft constitution were prepared, and an amended draft was unanimously adopted on 1 June 1909. Natalians favored federation, but their Zulu “problem” and the economic incentives of unification left them with no option but to become a part of the union. 82 In July 1909 the four governments sent delegates to London, where they discussed the draft constitution with Lord Crewe. The British government subsequently passed the South Africa Bill, and thus was born, in 1910, the Union of South Africa.

The most highly contested issue was the African franchise. Delegates from the Cape Colony pushed for an education and property franchise, while the other three colonies demanded an all-white male one. SANAC reported in 1905 that of 135,168 voters in the Cape, 18,279 were African, mainly in the eastern parts. Merriman, the Liberal politician from the Cape, had written to Smuts on 6 March 1906 that disenfranchisement did not offer “any prospect of permanence. Is it not rather building on a volcano, the suppressed force of which must someday burst forth in a destroying flood, as history warns us it has always done?” Smuts replied that he did not believe “in politics for them” (black South Africans). 83 Delegates agreed to maintain the status quo in each colony. Thus, Africans had a qualified franchise in the Cape, but only whites could stand for election to the national parliament on their behalf. Coloureds enjoyed the franchise but from 1930 were restricted to electing white representatives. While all white males had the right to vote, Boer women in particular, who had made great sacrifices during the war and had become highly politicized, were denied it. It was not until 1930 that white women got the vote.

Black South Africans were wary of the move toward unification. The newspaper Izwi Labantu stated in an editorial on 16 July 1907 that under the watch of racists and capitalists South Africa would “be a glorious country for corporation pythons and political puff-adders, forced labor and commercial despotism, but no fit place for freedom to live in.” 84 African fears of the consequences of unification intensified, and countrywide meetings culminated in March 1909 in a South African Native Convention in Bloemfontein, where the draft constitution was discussed. The sixty delegates accepted that union was necessary for progress, deemed it the responsibility of the British government to ensure that Blacks were given the same privileges as whites, and called upon the British government to extend the franchise to Africans and Coloureds and to remove the color bar in the Union parliament. They resolved that if the National Convention did not remove the color restrictions in the draft constitution, they would send a delegation to England to rally against the draft South Africa Act. 85

The delegation went to London in June 1909. Walter Rubusana, Daniel Dwanya, and Thomas Mapikela represented the SANC in the delegation and the physician Abdullah Abdurahman the APO delegation. Both delegations were led by W. P. Schreiner, a Cape Liberal barrister and MP, and the brother of the author and antiwar campaigner Olive Schreiner. 86 The African Political Organisation (APO) convened a national congress of Coloureds in April 1909, at which delegates called for the extension of the franchise to “all qualified men irrespective of race, colour or creed throughout the contemplated Union.” 87 In an editorial in its newsletter APO , dated 5 June 1909, the leadership was confident that English people would “never be dragooned into bartering away the glorious reputation won by their ancestors as lovers of freedom and asserters of the rights of humanity.” Schreiner told Reuters on 3 July 1909 that the delegations had come “to try to get the blot removed from the Act, which makes it no Act of Union, but rather an Act of Separation between the minority and the majority of the people of South Africa.” Schreiner wanted South Africa to move up to the Cape’s standards as far as the rights of Blacks were concerned, and not down to those set by the Boer republics. The APO and SANC delegations secured the support of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, the London Missionary Society, and the South African Native Races Committee. 88

Schreiner’s delegation met with Lord Crewe, the colonial secretary, on 22 July 1909. Schreiner reported that the Lord Crewe “received them courteously and responded sympathetically, but without giving any assurance that the desired amendments would be made.” Schreiner was declined permission to address the House of Commons on 27 July 1909. Instead, the African and Coloured delegates were allowed to present a petition to the House of Commons “requesting political rights to all qualified men, irrespective of race, colour or creed.” They called on the British government to remain true to the “traditions” of Empire and its principle of fair play and not sanction what was in effect a “white man’s Bill” that embodied a “poisonous principle.” 89

Mohandas K. Gandhi, who was then based in the Transvaal and had been loyal to the Empire in order to advance the rights of Indians in South Africa, led a delegation of the Transvaal British Indian Association (TBIA) to London at the same time in an attempt to ward off discriminatory legislation against Indians. His mission to seek guarantees for the civil rights of Indians failed. Instead, he witnessed these rights’ being eroded under British rule. The racially segregated delegations to London affirmed the absence of a working relationship between Gandhi and African and Coloured leaders. According to Andre Odendaal, this was because Indians were concerned about their civil rights rather than focusing on the “wider issue of the future effects of union on the black population.” 90 One of the issues that recent work raises is the need to reexamine this period in South African history to ascertain the ways in which black leaders were implicated in the project of empire and the sowing of racial divisions.

The delegations stood little chance of a sympathetic hearing from the British government, which saw the Boers as reliable custodians of their interests in South Africa and were not prepared to risk that. During debate on the bill in the House of Lords on 27 July 1909, the South African government delegation sat in the chamber of the House, where MPs meet, but the likes of Abdurahman, Gandhi, and Jabavu were forced to sit in the Strangers’ Gallery for visitors. 91 The bill passed in the House of Lords. The newspaper Imvo Zabantsundu stated on 3 August 1909 that “the natives will have to give up the expectation that England will any longer look after their interests and they will have to face the fact that they must work out their own political salvation and destiny.” 92 The bill was debated in the House of Commons on 16 and 19 August. In a final appeal to the MPs, Jabavu wrote to The Times on 19 August: “What the Imperial Parliament is being asked to sanction will be used as a precedent in future legislation against all native advance, and the Parliament will be quoted for all times as having put its seal on discrimination.” 93 In the House of Commons’ debate, the conservative MP Arthur Balfour stated that “to suppose that the races of Africa are in any sense the equals of men of European descent, so far as government is concerned, as society, as the higher interests of civilization are concerned, is really, I think an absurdity.” 94

The House of Commons passed the bill on 19 August 1909. In moving the bill, the British prime minister H. H. Asquith said: “It would be far better that any relaxation of … restrictions … should be carried out on the initiatives of the South African Parliament rather than they appear to be forced upon them by the Imperial Parliament.” 95 From a British perspective, vetoing the bill would have meant losing their influence in the region and may have involved further military involvement in future to suppress Africans, factors that were sufficient to disregard African rights. Louis Botha’s dining with King George V during this trip symbolized reconciliation between the British and the Boers. 96 The black delegations failed miserably in their objective of stopping the bill, but the coming of union marked the first instance of nationwide African political organization, which would pave the way to the founding of SANNC in 1912.

Influential British thinkers were already thinking ahead. In early September 1909, a few weeks after the bill was passed, Milner presided over a meeting in the United Kingdom, which was attended by members of the Kindergarten, including Curtis, some members of the Indian Civil Service, businessmen, and some South Africans, such as Rob Holland, who was secretary to Jameson of Jameson Raid fame; as well as Viscounts Howick and Wolmer, the son-in-law and son, respectively, of Lord Selborne. The meeting discussed Curtis’s proposals for reshaping the British Empire at a time when its military supremacy was being challenged by emerging global powers such as France, Germany, and the United States. They set themselves the task of strengthening the self-government of the different (white) dominions (Australia, South Africa, Canada, and New Zealand) while maintaining imperial hegemony. Milner would observe that the roots of such an imperial scheme were in South Africa, where the contribution of the dominions in the South African War, and that of the South African colonies during the Bhambatha Revolt, emphasized the need for white unification and empire-wide cooperation among white self-governing states. 97

Porter argues that British policy following the South African War was vindicated as the

Boer leaders were reconciled; from sniping at British cavalry behind kopjes some of them even became British imperialists: “I fought against the British,” said Botha, “but I am a firm upholder of the Commonwealth.” One of them [Smuts] in 1917 became a member of the British war cabinet. And their loyalty was demonstrated beyond doubt when at the outbreak of the Great War they put down a nationalist rebellion of Afrikaners, their own people. 98

Union saw a regrouping in white politics with the Afrikaner parties, Het Volk in the Transvaal, the South African Party (which included the Afrikaner Bond), and the Orangia Unie in the Orange Free State. These joined forces to form the South African National Party under the leadership of Louis Botha, which formed the first government of the Union of South Africa in 1910. With more weight given to rural votes, Afrikaners would strengthen their hold on government over the next few decades and assume power in 1948.

Approval of the bill opened up a new chapter in African resistance. This period laid the foundation for a segregated state and policies that led to overcrowding and poverty in the African rural areas, the stunting of African commercial farming, a system of migrant labor, and proletarianization. Imvo Zabantsundu counseled that the “Native and Coloured people must now realise that an entirely new chapter in South African history is opening. … They must become united politically and … must work for the creation of a new political party.” 99   Naledi ea Lesotho , a newspaper started in 1904 by Solomon Monne and published in Basotho, wrote that Britain had thrown Africans and Coloureds “overboard to trust to chance” and left them in the “care of a relentless guardian whose guardianship extends only as far as they administer to his wants and no further.” It was time for “every Native organ to work for the consolidation of all blacks into one whole.” 100 Black South Africans’ inability to organize as effectively as white South Africans, both in the lead-up to union and subsequently, was due to a lack of resources, unfamiliarity with the machinery of government, control of the media by whites who had the power to shape public opinion, and differences between educated urban Africans and rural chiefs. In 1912 a group of mainly middle-class educated African leaders led by Pixley Ka Izaka Seme, who had returned from studying in the United States, came together to form the South African Native National Congress (later the African National Congress), which, by the 1940s, was prepared to work with whites, Indians, and Coloureds in adopting more confrontational opposition to white minority rule.

The turn of the twentieth century had witnessed a bloody war between Boer and Brit. In the aftermath of the 1902 peace treaty, a period of negotiation and incremental passing of governmental authority culminated in the Union of South Africa in 1910. The period after saw the contentious but gradual coming together of Afrikaners and the British. It is no coincidence that as white power consolidated so African resistance came together in a national organisation in 1912 which sought to wield unity across “tribal” and regional lines, and eventually also began to reach out to other disenfranchised groups. It was a process fraught with tensions and backward and forward steps but gradually a momentum was built by the late 1940s and came to spectacular fruition in the 1950s.

Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850–2004 (London: Pearson/Longman, 2004), 151.

Ronald Hyam, Elgin and Churchill at the Colonial Office, 1905–08: The Watershed of the Empire (London: Macmillan, 1968), 1.

John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review 6 (1953): 1–15, at 1.

Gallagher and Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” 5.

John Darwin, “Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial Expansion,” English Historical Review 112, no. 447 (1997), 614–642, at 619–620.

Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, “The Partition of Africa,” in The New Cambridge Modern History , vol. 11, Material Progress and World-Wide Problems, 1870–1898 , ed. F. H. Hinsley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 594.

The terminology used in this chapter requires clarification. Boer is the name that the republicans acquired; it was the Dutch and Afrikaans word for farmers (most Boers were stock farmers living in a near-subsistence, precapitalist economy. They are also referred to as Afrikaners although, strictly speaking, Afrikaners should include non-Boers who speak Afrikaans. White is used to refer to Europeans, whether English or Boer or others from continental Europe. Indian refers to migrants (indentured and free) who arrived from South Asia. Coloured refers to those of mixed racial ancestry who occupied an intermediate status between those identified as white and those identified as African. The indigenous people were referred to as Natives in the period under discussion but in the postapartheid period have been termed black African in the census and are referred to as black or African in common parlance. The South African Native Affairs Commission (SANAC) of 1903–1905 defined Natives as “an aboriginal inhabitant of Africa, south of the Equator, and to include half-castes and their descendants by Natives.” It should be noted that in the 1970s, in the context of the Black Consciousness Movement, black was used to refer jointly to Africans, Coloureds, and Indians, and this is how it is employed here.

Leonard Thompson, “Great Britain and the Afrikaner Republics, 1870–1899,” in The Oxford History of South Africa , vol. 2, 1870–1966 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 289–324, at 290.

Thompson, “Great Britain and the Afrikaner Republics,” 292–300.

P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914 (LondonAddison-Wesley Longman Ltd, 1993), 369.

William Beinart, Twentieth-Century South Africa (Cape Town and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 70.

Thompson, “Great Britain and the Afrikaner Republics,” 309.

Bill Nasson, The South African War, 1899–1902 (London: Arnold, 1999), 6.

Nasson, The South African War , 7. There are countless diaries, memoirs, and reminiscences of the sufferings of the Boers during the war.

Shula Marks, “War and Union, 1899–1910,” in The Cambridge History of South Africa , vol. 2, 1885–1994 , eds. Robert Ross, Anne Kelk Mager, and Bill Nasson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 161.

See W. K. Hancock, Smuts , vol. 1, The Sanguine Years, 1870–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).

F. S. Crafford, Jan Smuts (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1946), 61.

Marks, “War and Union, 1899–1910,” 162.

Fransjohan Pretorius, “Boer Attitudes to Africans in Wartime,” in The South African War Reappraised , ed. Donal Lowry (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 98–110, 106. Also see Jeremy Krikler, Revolution from Above, Rebellion from Below: The Agrarian Transvaal at the Turn of the Century (Oxford: Clarendon University Press, 1993); B. E. Mongalo and K. J. du Pisani, “Victims of a White Man’s War: Blacks in Concentration Camps during the South African War (1899–1902),” Historia 44, no. 1 (1999): 148–182; P. [Peter] Warwick, Black People and the South African War, 1899–1902 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Liz Stanley, “Black Labour and the Concentration Camp System of the South African War,” Journal for Contemporary History 28 (2003): 190–213.

Bill Nasson, Abraham Esau’s War: A Black South African War at the Cape, 1899–1902 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 10.

Marks, “War and Union, 1899–1910,” 157–210, at 157.

Simon Smith, “Imperial Policy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History, 1800–2000 , eds. David Brown, Gordon Pentland, and Robert Crowcroft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198714897.013.26, 4.

In Jackie Grobler, A Decisive Clash? A Short History of Black Protest Politics in South Africa, 1875–1976 (Pretoria: ACACIA, 1988), 19.

Marks, “War and Union,” 165.

Marks, “War and Union,” 175.

In Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Quest for Racial Equality (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2008), 231.

Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, introduction review of Lord Milner and the South African State , History Workshop 8 (1979): 50–73.

Beinart, Twentieth-Century South Africa , 70.

Vineet Thakur, Alexander E. Davis, and Peter Vale, “Imperial Mission, ‘Scientific’ Method: An Alternative Account of the Origins of IR,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 46, no. 1 (2017): 3–23, at 13.

Bala Pillay, British Indians in the Transvaal: Trade, Politics, and Imperial Relations, 1885–1906 (London: Longman, 1976), 97.

In Pillay, British Indians in the Transvaal , 138.

Martin Legassick, “British Hegemony and the Origins of Segregation in South Africa, 1901–1914,” in Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth Century South Africa , eds. William Beinart and Saul Dubow (London: Routledge, 1995), 43–59, at 47.

In Thakur, Davis, and Vale, “Imperial Mission,” 16.

In Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line , 217.

In Thakur, Davis, and Vale, “Imperial Mission,” 15.

Marks, “War and Union,” 163.

Hancock, Smuts: The Sanguine Years , 149.

In C. De Jong and Philip Glass, Satyagraha: M. K. Gandhi in South Africa, 1893–1914 (New York: Tanam Press, 1983), 15.

Leonard Thompson, “The Compromise of Union,” in The Oxford History of South Africa , vol. 2, 1870–1966 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 325–364, at 335.

In T. R. H. Davenport, The Afrikaner Bond: The History of a South African Political Party, 1880–1911 (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1966), 259.

In Bernard Friedman, Smuts: A Reappraisal (Johannesburg: Hugh Keartland, 1975), 14.

Thompson, “The Compromise of Union,” 335.

Marks, “War and Union,” 180.

Grobler, A Decisive Clash? , 24.

J. C. Smuts, Jan Christian Smuts (Cape Town: Heinemann & Cassell, 1952), xiv.

Marks, “War and Union,” 189.

Crafford, Jan Smuts , 67.

Maryna Fraser and Alan Jeeves, All That Glittered (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 177.

David Yudelman, The Emergence of Modern South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 1984), 75.

Marks, “War and Union,” 179.

Jonathan Hyslop, “The Imperial Working Class Makes Itself ‘White’: White Labourism in Britain, Australia, and South Africa Before the First World War,” Journal of Historical Sociology 12, no. 4 (1999): 398–424.

L. E. Neame, The Asiatic Danger in the Colonies (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1907), 59–60.

Indian Opinion , 26 January 1906.

Indian Opinion , 2 February 1906.

Report of the South African Native Affairs Commission, 1903–1905 , 6 vols. (Cape Town, 1905).

Marks, “War and Union,” 168.

Marks, “War and Union,” 173.

Nigel Worden, The Making of Modern South Africa: Conquest, Segregation and Apartheid (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 73.

Worden, Making of Modern South Africa , 73–74.

Pillay, British Indians in the Transvaal , 135–139.

Walter Nimocks, Milner’s Young Men: The “Kindergarten” in Edwardian Imperial Affairs (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1968), 37.

See Thembisa Waetjen, “Poppies and Gold: Opium and Law-Making on the Witwatersrand,” Journal of African History 57, no. 3 (2016): 391–416.

Worden, Making of Modern South Africa , 69.

Peter Limb, The ANC’s Early Years: Nation, Class and Place in South Africa before 1940 ( Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2010), 83.

Limb, ANC’s Early Years , 76.

Limb, ANC’s Early Years , 86.

In Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line , 225.

Limb, ANC’s Early Years , 90–93.

Donald Denoon [with Balam Nyeko and the advice of J. B. Webster], Southern Africa since 1800 (London: Longman, 1972), 100.

Marks, “War and Union,” 191.

Thakur, Davis, and Vale, “Imperial Mission,” 13.

Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line , 225.

Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line , 232.

Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line , 233.

Thakur, Davis, and Vale, “Imperial Mission,” 9.

Thompson, “The Compromise of Union,” 348.

Thakur, Davis, and Vale, “Imperial Mission,” 14.

Marks, “War and Union,” 193.

In Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line , 224.

Grobler, A Decisive Clash? 2 2.

Brian Willan, Sol Plaatje: A Biography (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1984), 139.

André Odendaal, Black Protest Politics in South Africa to 1912 (repr., Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1984), 218–219.

Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line , 230.

Odendaal, Black Protest Politics in South Africa to 1912 , 214.

Grobler, A Decisive Clash? 33.

Odendaal, Black Protest Politics in South Africa to 1912 , 225.

Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line , 227–228.

Thakur, Davis, and Vale, “Imperial Mission,” 10–11.

Porter, The Lion’s Share , 210–211.

In Odendaal, Black Protest Politics in South Africa to 1912 , 225.

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Boer War. Soldiers in Johannesburg, 1900, Catalogue ref: COPY 1/447

The South African War

Lesson at a glance, how did the british conduct war in 1899-1902, teachers' notes, external links, connections to curriculum.

For more than a century, some form of conflict had existed between Britain and the Boers in southern Africa, mainly over the amount of influence and expansionist ideas the former had in the area. In 1877, Britain had moved to annex the Transvaal Republic, bringing it under its control, and this eventually led to what is known as the First Boer War in 1880-1. After a number of defeats handed to the British, independence was restored but relations never recovered.

Tensions remained for a number of reasons. The immigration of large numbers of uitlanders (foreigners), largely because of a diamond rush, meant that these, mainly English-speaking, individuals soon came close to outnumbering the Boer population. Britain supported the rights of these uilanders and confrontations were common. Britain also continued to be expansionist in its outlook as it looked to control gold mining in the region and continued to attempt to bring the Transvaal and the Orange Free State under British control. This eventually culminated in the failed Jameson Raid in 1895.

Eventually, in 1899, Joseph Chamberlain, the British Colonial Secretary, demanded full voting rights for uilanders living in the Transvaal, and mobilised its military forces near the borders of the Transvaal and Orange Free State. The President of the South African Republic, Paul Kruger, issued an ultimatum which was rejected by the British government, leading to the declaration of war from Kruger and the Orange Free State.

Use this lesson to find out how the British civil and military authorities carried out the South African war in 1899-1902 and how the public responded to the conflict.

Look at Source 1.

A report written by General Redvers Buller, Commander of British forces in South Africa, describing their defeat at Colenso during an attempt to cross the Tugela River, 15th December 1899, Catalogue ref: WO 32/7887.

• Who is General Buller reporting to?
• Why is he making this report?
• How soon after the attack was this written?
• According to Buller, what was the British plan of attack?
• How did Boer forces halt the British artillery’s advance?
• Did Buller consider the weather a factor in the British defeat?
• During so called ‘Black Week’, the British were also defeated at the Battles of Magersfonein and Stormberg. Can you find out why the Boers were so successful?

Look at Source 2a.

A letter from Colonel Alexander Thorneycroft, who led the first British attack at the Battle of Spion Kop on 23-24 January 1900. The British were also defeated here with many casualties, Catalogue ref: WO 105/5

• What does Thorneycroft’s letter reveal about the conditions soldiers experienced during battle?
• What does the letter infer about British chance of success?
• Can you use 4 words to describe the tone of the letter?
• What does the letter tell us about the outcome of the battle?

Look at Source 2b.

Photograph of dead soldiers in trenches at Spion Kop, 26 January 1900, Catalogue re: COPY 1/452

• What do the photograph and the letter tell us about British casualties during the battle?
• Why do you think this photograph was taken?
• How do you think it would have been received?
• Which source is more useful to the historian researching the Battle at Spoin Kop? Explain your reasons.

Look at Source 3.

Art work called ‘Souvenir of Two Heroic Defences’, 1900, Catalogue ref: COPY 1/166.

This document comes from The National Archives copyright collection. It refers to the sieges of Ladysmith and Mafeking which both ended earlier that year. Ladysmith was besieged by Boer forces for 118 days, and suffered from food shortages and disease, before forces under commander of Redvers Buller broke through on 28 February. Mafeking was under siege for 217 days, and liberated on 17 May 1900, and turned British commander, Colonel Robert Baden-Powell, into a national hero.

• Why do you think this souvenir image was produced?
• What is the significance of the town hall and hospital in the image?
• Why do you think that two frames were left blank at the top left and bottom right of the artwork?
• How would you describe the scenery in the image?
• In what ways could this source be viewed as propaganda for Britain’s role in Boer war and the British Empire?
• Why do you think the artist wanted to ensure copyright for this artwork?

Look at Source 4a.

Original caption: ‘Photograph of crowds outside Mansion House on 19th May, 1900. Lombard Street in the background and portrait of Baden-Powell’. Catalogue ref: COPY 1/446/304

This photograph was taken in London after the siege of Mafeking was lifted in May 1900. You can spot left of centre, someone holding the portrait of Robert Baden-Powell.

• How would you describe the scene shown in the photograph?
• Why do you think people in Britain celebrated in this way when Mafeking was relieved?
• How does the photograph suggest that Robert Baden-Powell was seen as a national hero?

Look at Source 4b.

Original caption: ‘Photograph: News vender with placard on which is “Express, Saturday May 19. Hurrah!! Mafeking Relieved. Papers under right arm, one in left hand. Contents bill on Pavement’. Catalogue ref: COPY 1/446/306

The 18th May came to be known as Mafeking Night, such was the expression of delight witnessed across the British Empire once British forces had arrived at Mafeking. These scenes even resulted in the addition of a new word to the English language, ‘to maffick’, meaning to celebrate with boisterous rejoicing and hilarious behaviour.

• Can you describe the location of the photograph?
• What makes it possible to date the photograph?
• How is the fall of Mafeking recorded in this newspaper?
• What do both photographs tell us about how people in Britain viewed the war at this time?

Look at Source 5a.

Original caption: ‘Photograph: Two boys selling papers: Relief of Mafeking’. Catalogue ref: COPY 1/446/320

This photograph was registered by a photographer on the 18th May 1900 who lived in Chelmsford, Essex.

• How can we tell that photograph has be staged?
• Does it reveal anything about the public reaction to the relief of Mafeking?
• How useful is this to historians of the South African War?

Look at Source 5b.

Described as ‘Pearson’s Great Coloured War Sheet’ this image was created in 1900 and shows different scenes that relate to the war in South Africa. Catalogue ref: COPY 1/170

• Describe 4 scenes shown in the source
• Can you explain why some scenes have more prominence in the image?
• What elements do you think are missing from the image? Can you explain why?

Look at Source 6.

Extracts from a memo to recruit more men into Imperial Yeomanry with details of requirements. Catalogue ref: WO 108/375

After the initial military disasters at the start of war in South Africa, it was necessary to raise a Mounted Infantry force. A mobile army, with soldiers who could fight on horseback was vital. British authorities recruited men from its colonies (mainly from southern Africa), and also from the United Kingdom. Those from Britain who joined the Imperial Yeomanry would probably not have otherwise joined the armed forces. Recruitment took place for three contingents throughout 1900 and 1901 and raised over 13,000 men.

• How does the source infer the popularity of the Imperial Yeomanry?
• What requirements were necessary for acceptance into the Imperial Yeomanry?
• Why do you think mounted forces like the Imperial Yeomanry were used in South Africa?
• What do you think made the Imperial Yeomanry popular among those who would not have ordinarily served in the armed forces?

Look at Source 7.

A monthly report on the political feelings amongst Boer prisoners of war held captive on the island of Bermuda in 1901. Catalogue ref: CO 37/237

Approximately 5,000 Boer prisoners were transferred to Bermuda during the course of the South African War, and were held on 5 small islands. Prisoners were split up according to their attitudes towards the war, and those who believed that the war should be continued against the British were held on Darrell’s Island, is a small island within the Great Sound (ocean inlet) of Bermuda.

• Why do you think prisoners of war were sent as far away as Bermuda?
• Why do you think prisoners were split up according to their attitudes towards the war?
• What does Morrice say his opinion is of those who express a willingness to submit to British rule?
• What motivations does he point to for active disloyalty amongst the Boers?
• What does Morrice say about the subjects covered in correspondence sent by the prisoners?
• Why do you think their letters home were checked?
• What does this source infer about the treatment of prisoners by the British?

Look at Source 8.

Extracts 8a-d from a report ‘To the Committee of the Distress for South African Women and Children’, compiled and written by Emily Hobhouse to investigate the mistreatment of those held in British camps, which includes reports and letters after visiting many of them, 1901, Catalogue ref: WO 32/8061

The latter stages of the war had descended into guerrilla warfare, and refugee camps had initially been set up to shelter civilian families. The British policy, under Lord Kitchener, of burning farms and homesteads to prevent the Boers from accessing supplies soon resulted in an influx of civilians into these ‘concentration camps’ or refugee camps.In total, forty-five camps were built for Boer internees, and an additional sixty-four were built for black Africans. It is estimated that 26,000 Boer women and children died, as well as over 14,000 black inmates, mainly as a result of disease and malnutrition.

• What do these extracts reveal about living conditions in these camps?

Read again those extracts which relate to individuals/families in camps. Explain the following:

• Why were they brought to the camp?
• What had they done?
• Were other members of their family directly involved in the war in some way?
• What was the state of their health whilst in the camp?
• How does this system of ‘concentration camps’ represent a war against civilians?
• What can be inferred about the impact of the war against the civilians of South Africa in terms of (a) its economy (b) its population (c) Boer fighters?

Look at Source 9a.

Photograph entitled ‘General view, Springfontein Camp’, 1901, Catalogue ref: CO 1069/215

• Why do think that this photograph was taken?
• What does this photograph suggest about the living conditions in and size of the camp?
• What other sources would help to gain insight about camp conditions?

Look at Source 9b.

Photograph entitled ‘Hospital, Springfontein Camp’, 1901, Catalogue ref: CO 1069/215

Look at Source 10.

Telegram from Lord Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, 12 July 1901, Catalogue ref: WO 32/8061

After some public pressure, the British Government felt the need to improve living conditions in the ‘concentration camps’ and take better care of the inmates. This included submitting monthly figures of the number of men, women, and children held, and the number of those who had died that month. The record was broken down per region and numbers of men, women, and children.

[Note: This source uses language which is of its time however is entirely unacceptable and inappropriate today].

• What can this source tell us about the conditions faced by people held in the camps?
• What can the figures for each camp tell us about those who were mainly held in these camps?
• Look at the number of deaths. What does this infer about those who suffered most? Can you explain your reasons?

The conflict in South Africa can broadly be split into three phases, the first of which involving initial attacks by Boer forces on British held territory. This resulted in the sieges of the towns of Kimberley, Ladysmith, and Mafeking, and also the battles during, so-called, ‘Black Week’. Here, Boer forces beat British forces in a series of engagements at Stormberg, Magersfontein, Colenso, and Spion Kop. Before this, the British government were confident that a victory could be secured easily, but the defeats caused a drastic change in policy. The government called on able-bodied men to volunteer to serve their country, many answering this call, either joining the regular British Army, or amateur forces such as the Militia, Yeomanry, and Rifle Volunteers in order to demonstrate their patriotism. The change in thinking also resulted in the sacking of Sir Redvers Buller, who had been in charge of British forces during the conflict’s early stages, who was replaced by Lord Roberts.

Naturally, the number of British troops (as well as other troops from across the British Empire) increased and this is when the war entered its second phase. By the middle of 1900, after a series of offensives, the three sieges at Kimberley, Ladysmith, and Mafeking were successfully relieved, the latter resulting in an outpouring of jingoism and celebration in Great Britain. Thereafter, the British Army were also able to capture Natal, Cape Colony, and the Transvaal by the beginning of the summer 1900.

That year marked the high point for popular support for the war in Britain. This was expressed in a variety of ways, including the production of paintings, photographs, music, poetry, plays, and all kinds of ephemera. Soldiers were regularly celebrated as they boarded boats and trains bound for South Africa, and warmly welcomed with parties and banquets when they returned. Figures such as Robert Baden Powell, whose force had been besieged at Mafeking, and Lord Roberts, became national heroes.

The third stage lasted for two more years, and militarily became a guerrilla style war, rather than one fought as pitched battles. Boer Commandos would attack troop columns, ammunition depots, and railways before retreating, in order to frustrate British forces. A ‘scorched earth policy’, one designed to stop supplies from reaching the Boer guerrillas, was adopted by Lord Kitchener, which essentially destroyed much in the path of the British Army.

This policy also included the establishment of concentration camps, where many thousands of women and children would eventually die of malnutrition and disease. Public support for the war soon started to wane in Britain, especially after investigations and reports about the conditions in the camps were published by people like Emily Hobhouse, and when it became apparent that the war could not be won quickly.

Eventually though, Boer forces surrendered in May 1902, and the subsequent Treaty of Vereeniging absorbed the Transvaal and the Orange Free State into the British Empire, with the promise of future self-government. The conflict was Britain’s economically most costly since the Napoleonic Wars and resulted in 150,000 military casualties (killed and wounded) on both sides, as well as the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, largely as a result of British actions.

This lesson is designed to introduce students to different historical sources relating to the conduct of British military operations during the South African War, as well as to the popular responses to the war in the United Kingdom.

Students are introduced to material produced for and by the civil and military authorities, ephemera created to celebrate British participation on the conflict, and to the work of individuals such as Emily Hobhouse.

Students can examine extracts from Hobhouse’s report to the Committee of the Distress for South African Women and Children, which investigated the conditions faced in British run concentration camps, and drew on interviews and witness testimony.

They also examine official military reports, and correspondence sent to and from prominent military figures, such as Sir Redvers Buller and Lord Kitchener, about the conduct of the war, and conditions experienced by British and colonial soldiers during the conflict.

Various photographs and artwork are also used as evidence of reactions to the conflict in the United Kingdom, including to events such as the relief of Ladysmith and Mafeking.

Students can work in pairs or small groups to study each source and report back to the whole class to discuss the answers to the questions. Alternatively, they can work through the tasks independently. Teachers may wish to break this lesson into two or more parts given the large number of sources to examine. All sources are transcribed and difficult language defined in square brackets.

In order to consider the theme of military conflict over time, students could also discuss the following extension questions relating to wider developments:

• How did the nature of the conflict in South Africa differ from that experienced during the First World War?
• What can the response to the South African War tell us about wider attitudes to the British Empire in the later 19th and early 20th centuries?

Illustration image: Photograph showing Boer War soldiers in Johannesburg, 1900, Catalogue ref: COPY 1/447

Source 1: A report written by General Redvers Buller, Commander of British forces in South Africa, describing their defeat at Colenso during an attempt to cross the Tugela River, 15th December 1899, Catalogue ref: WO 32/7887.

Source 2a: A letter from Colonel Alexander Thorneycroft, who led the first British attack at the Battle of Spion Kop on 23-24 January 1900. The British were also defeated here with many casualties, Catalogue ref: WO 105/5

Source 2b: Photograph of dead soldiers in trenches at Spion Kop, 26 January 1900, Catalogue re: COPY 1/452

Source 3: Art work called ‘Souvenir of Two Heroic Defences’, 1900, Catalogue ref: COPY 1/166.

Source 4a: A photograph with crowds outside Mansion House in London after the siege of Mafeking was lifted in May 1900. In the photograph, left of centre, someone is holding a portrait of Robert Baden-Powell. Catalogue ref: COPY 1/446/304

Source 4b: A photograph of a newspaper seller Catalogue ref: COPY 1/446/306

Source 5a: Photograph of two boys selling papers: Relief of Mafeking’, Catalogue ref: COPY 1/446/320

Source 5b: Described as ‘Pearson’s Great Coloured War Sheet’ this image was created in 1900 and shows different scenes that relate to the war in South Africa. Catalogue ref: COPY 1/170

Source 6: Extracts from a memo to recruit more men into Imperial Yeomanry with details of requirements. Catalogue ref: WO 108/375

Source 7: A monthly report on the political feelings amongst Boer prisoners of war held captive on the island of Bermuda in 1901. Catalogue ref: CO 37/237

Source 8: Extracts 8a-d from a report ‘To the Committee of the Distress for South African Women and Children’ by Emily Hobhouse to investigate the mistreatment of those held in British camps, 1901, Catalogue ref: WO 32/8061

Source 9a: Photograph entitled ‘General view, Springfontein Camp’, 1901, Catalogue ref: CO 1069/215

Source 9b: Photograph entitled ‘Hospital, Springfontein Camp’, 1901, Catalogue ref: CO 1069/215

Source 10: Telegram from Lord Kitchener to the Secretary of State for War, 12 July 1901, WO 32/8061

History of Black week South Africa – 10th – 17th December 1899 https://historywm.com/films/a-black-week-for-the-british-army

Timeline and Photographs of the Boer War – The National Army Museum https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/boer-war

Sources and Key Events from South African History Online, including the role of black South Africans in the conflict https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/second-anglo-boer-war-1899-1902

Key stage 5

AQA A level History The British Empire, c1857–1967: Imperial consolidation and Liberal rule, c1890–1914: Relations with indigenous peoples; challenges to British rule; the causes and consequences of the Boer War

Edexcel A level GCE History The British experience of warfare, c1790–1918: The Second Boer War, 1899–1902

Key stage 4

OCR GCSE History SHP Britain in Peace and War, 1900–1918 Differing attitudes towards the British Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century including responses to the Boer War

Key stage 3 Challenges for Britain, Europe and the wider world 1901 to the present day

The Union at War: South African Society, 1914-1953

• Ian van der Waag
• Endnote/Zotero/Mendeley (RIS)

Copyright (c) 2018 Ian van der Waag

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

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The Union War Histories and the Battle for the History of the Second World War in South Africa

Military History has three primary audiences: the general public, academe, and the armed forces – each has its own beliefs regarding the purpose and utility of the military past. Recognising the value of a war history for South Africa, Jan Smuts created the Union War Histories section in 1941. Yet the men appointed to write this history realised that they would never be able to satisfy all three competing readerships. This paper examines the research production of the Union War Histories section as well as the official and public response to their work, which is placed within a wider historiographical process. The notion of a historiographical progression – of an intersecting chain of counter narratives – is posited: accounts by journalists, official historians, personal narrators and regimental historians, leading to a post-participant historiography. This is a progression that seems to hold true for South Africa’s other wars, and indeed the wars of other countries.

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The quantity and quality of military historical work on the participation of South Africa in the Second World War, with few exceptions, namely that of a few significant academic contributions over the last decade, lags appreciably compared to the plethora of titles offered on all aspects of the war in the buoyant international market. This article investigates and evaluates more important South African primary and secondary sources pertaining to the Union Defence Force’s participation in the Second World War, highlighting available sources and limitations in published material. Possible opportunities for further research are identified where there are areas of historiographical hiatus. Reasons are offered for what amounts to a rather threadbare South African historiography, especially when compared to the prolific historiographical output of other belligerents. The article offers a brief survey of primary sources, identifying some of the archives that have received scant attention. Then follows an analysis of secondary sources broken down into official, semi-official and general history that examines their methodological integrity and completeness with a view to identifying what historical contributions may still be made in the light of what has been produced.

Scientia Militaria - South African Journal of Military Studies

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Evert Kleynhans

The Department of Defence Archive in Pretoria is the repository of all military documents generated by the Union Defence Force, the South African Defence Force and the South African National Defence Force. This makes it the foremost source of primary information for researchers of South African military history. However, an almost total ban on access to archival documents from 1 January 1970 onwards complicates research into later periods. In fact, anyone researching post-1970 military-related topics has to apply for access to archival documents through the Promotion of Access to Information Act. The traditional weapon in the armoury of the historian – the systematic trawling of archives – is thereby negated, while the methodology of post-1970 historical research differs significantly from commonly accepted historical practices. Finding aids, the only access route to classified information in this analogue archive, offer only the briefest descriptions of the content of files, and researchers need almost esoteric intuition to identify documents that are even remotely relevant to their research. Additionally, a fee is payable for declassification, and the process can take several months to complete. This review article reports on the theoretical workings of the Promotion of Access to Information Act, and uses an actual research example as a case study to illustrate the practical implications of conducting research at the Department of Defence Archive in South Africa based on classified military documentation.

Deon Fourie

Military history has an enthusiastic following that might astonish historians in other fields. Amateur military historians and readers often have experienced military life and became emotionally bound to it in a way unknown to readers of other history. The amateur military historians&#39; facile writing enables readers - civilians and soldiers - to participate vicariously in warfare. The amateurs imagine there is only one true unqualified history, seldom check evidence thoroughly or consider alternative views. They forget that memories fade, the battlefield is confused, that the soldiers sees only a fragment of the fighting and that history cannot be tailored for the sake of friendship. Professional military history writing was always neglected in South Africa. Few regular officers wrote about their wars. Amateur writers have predominated in the field, journalists being the major contributors. However, a recent generation spent in military service has been producing numerous books, ...

The First World War in Africa has been considered a sideshow compared to the catastrophe that took place in European theatre of war. As a result, the historiography of South Africa’s participation in the First World War has reflected this relative lack of interest. South Africa’s contribution to the First World War is dominated by Jan Smuts who played a leading role during the campaign in Africa and later in the British War Cabinet and at the Paris peace conference. Smuts has been harshly criticised by British historians, a situation that has persisted for decades. However, there are positive signs that South Africa’s role in the First World War is finally being reassessed.

Donal Lowry

After a century of racial oppression and apartheid in South Africa, there are few, as Donal Lowry has remarked, who can “remember a time when entire continents seemed to be moved by the Boer ’heroes of liberty.’ ”[1] Nevertheless, the anniversary of the South African, or Anglo-Boer, war of 1899-1902 has witnessed visits to its historiographical as well as to its physical battlegrounds. A slew of books have marked the centenary, including the three collections reviewed here, while it has also evoked a good deal of discussion in South Africa about the nature and nomenclature as well as the place in the new South Africa of what was purported by the major belligerents at the time to be ”a white man’s war.“

Life Writing

Gary Baines

At the age of 18, I was drafted in to the South African Defence Force. I was a reluctant conscript who became increasingly uneasy in the knowledge that I was being trained to defend the apartheid system. I was deployed on the Namibian-Angolan border in the very early phase of what came to be known as the ‘Border War’. About 30 years later, I began to write about the war in my capacity as a professional historian. While I sought to produce scholarly work on the subject, I realised that my personal experience of having served in the army informed my approach to writing about the ‘Border War’. Indeed, I was persuaded by Simon Schama’s view that ‘all history tends towards autobiographical confession’. Like a confession, my ‘Border War’ project seeks to recuperate my sense of self-worth. To this end, this autohistoriographical essay about the ‘Border War’ explores the interstices of experiential knowledge and academic expertise. It seeks to come to terms with my embodiment as a veteran, with the modalities of memory that define my experience of military service and attempt to ascertain how these might have influenced my approach to the history of the ‘Border War’.

Ideally, an historian, if he is to acquit his task, must know the total range and types of sources available to him, in and around the topic of his enquiry. Knowing what his colleagues have published is essential. However, it is hardly possible to compile, and keep up to date, a full bibliography. Selection is both subjective and arbitrary; and a selection of books, articles and manuscripts is no exception. Nonetheless, a serious researcher will attempt to make a survey of all the material, archival and secondary, which may conceivably be relevant to his topic. Geoffrey Elton has described this as &quot;a broadfronted attack upon all the relevant material&quot;. This is of primary importance to historical scholarship. First and foremost, it is pointless to duplicate work once all the major issues and questions involved, have already been thrashed out by other historians. It has been said that history is an endless debate. This is true. However, debating historians must have somethin...

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“PW and Sons” was inspired by a somewhat cynical nickname that many conscript soldiers knew the South African army by. The name alluded to the then Prime Minister, Pieter Willem Botha, who was often regarded as the architect of their national service. The personal accounts contained in this books are by men who completed their national service within South Africa, primarily and who did not go to South West Africa or Angola during the border war, either because they serve too late to be posted there, or because the service was considered to be essential elsewhere. This is part of a series of books of personal accounts of South African Servicemen from 1966 – 1998. The more established books in the series are `Pro Patria’ originally published in 1995, and `Grensvegter?: South African Army Psychologist’ published in 1996 – both republished via Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing in 2021. The originals of `Pro Patria’ and `Grensvegter?’ have been cited in several articles by Gary Baines, Professor of History at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa.

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Gr. 10 HISTORY T4 W1: The South African War and Union

This week will focus on the background to the South African War: mining capitalism

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History Grade 10 - Topic 6 Essay Questions and Answers

Impact of the 1913 Land Act

Based on the 2012 Grade 10 NSC Exemplar Paper:

Grade 10 Past Exam Paper

Grade 10 Source Addendum

Grade 10 Past Exam Memo

The Land Act of 1913 was the final nail in the coffin for Black South Africans in the 20th century and a step to Apartheid. Discuss this statement with reference to the social and economic impact of the Land Act and how it laid the foundation for the system of Apartheid. [1]

Sol Plaatje, a member of the SANNC and an activist against the implementation of the 1913 Natives Land Act wrote in his book, Native Life in South Africa,  concerning the Act that: “Africans were born as pariahs in the land of their birth”. [2]   The 1913 Land Act stipulated that Africans were restricted to own 7% of the land in South Africa, while the remaining 93% of the land were allocated to white settlers. [3] The impact of this new law was far-reaching since it impoverished African communities, while enforcing racial segregation. The following essay will discuss the economic and social impact of the Natives Land Act and how it laid the foundation for the system of Apartheid.

Firstly, the Natives Land Act impoverished black South Africans, since they were not given enough land to become independent farmers. [4] The land allocated to them were also overused and infertile which lessened their agricultural production and their income. According to the law, Africans were also not allowed to rent land allocated to white settlers, which forced them to live in overpopulated and impoverished reserves. [5] Since Africans were not allowed to rent land, sharecropping also became illegal. Sharecropping refers to the practice where various farmers, regardless of race, could sow on the same land and split the profit. Under the Natives Land Act this practice was declared illegal and previous sharecroppers were destitute and impoverished without a source of income. [6] This forced many Africans to become cheap labour tentants or farm labourers, since they could not farm independently on the land allocated to them. Other Africans were forced into the mining industry and were given minimum wages. [7] Ultimately, the Native Land Act impoverished Africans, since they were left destitute without their land, roaming around without enough fertile soil to feed their cattle or themselves. This forced Africans to sell their livestock to survive or kill the livestock for meat while becoming cheap labour as labour tenants or miners. [8]

Secondly, the Natives Land Act had a vast social impact on Africans. The Act promoted the racial ideology that white settlers were superior to Africans and therefore the races had to be divided by law. [9] This enabled the Union of South Africa to pass legislation that gave 93% of the country, with its rich resources, to the white population, while forcing Africans into servitude. After this legislation was accepted, Africans were evicted from their land and were forced to wander around with their cattle and possessions in extremely hot and cold weather. [10] Those who pitied destitute Africans were also forbidden by law to give them a place to stay, since they would be fined 100 pounds or be imprisoned. [11] This forced Africans to live in overpopulated and infertile areas, where they were malnourished and sick. [12] Africans hardly had enough food to feed themselves and therefore it was no surprise that they were often forced to kill their livestock or sell them before they died of hunger. [13]

After the implementation of the Natives Land Act, the SANNC was established in 1913 to fight against the new law and to promote racial equality. [14] Members of the SANNC, which included Sol Plaatje, sent a delegation to Prime Minister, Louis Botha in 1914 which showed the impact of the Natives Land Act. This delegation failed, which resulted in the SANNC travelling abroad to Britain to ask for them to intervene [15] . However, since the delegation occurred at the start of the First World War, Britain did not want to lose the support of the white settlers in South Africa. After the South African War, Britain’s relationship with the Afrikaners were still fragile and they did not want to lose their support by intervening with their new racist policies. This led to Sol Plaatje writing his book, Native Life in South Africa, which documents the delegations sent to Louis Botha and to Britain, while portraying how Africans became “pariahs” in the land of their birth. [16]

While the SANNC actively fought against the Natives Land Act, they could not overturn it. The Natives Land Act became the precursor to Apartheid, since it led to the establishment of various other laws, such as the Urban Areas Act (1923), the Natives and Land Trust Act (1936), The Group Areas Act (1950) and the Natives Act (1952). These laws controlled the movement of employed Africans into the cities (Urban Areas Act) [17] , while illegalizing ownership of land by Africans that are allocated to white settlers (Native Land Act, Land Trust Act, Group Areas Act) [18] and forced Africans to wear passes (Natives Act). [19]

In conclusion, the Natives Land Act impoverished Africans and forced them into destitution based on their race. This then made the Act a precursor to further racist legislation that segregated black and white South Africans based on the racial hierarchy where the white man was viewed as superior to the black man. Africans became pariahs in their home country and while they tried to oppose the Natives Land Act, Britain refused to intervene, which enabled the Union of South Africa to continue issuing racist legislation.

Tips & Notes:

• Check out our Essay Writing Skills  for more tips on writing essays.
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This article was originally produced for the SAHO classroom by Ilse Brookes, Amber Fox-Martin & Simone van der Colff

[1] The Department of Basic Education, “National Senior Certificate: Grade 10 History Marking Guideline 2017”, (Uploaded: November 2017), (Accessed: 28 October 2020), Available at: https://www.awsumnews.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/HISTORY-GR10-MEMO-NOV2017_English.pdf

[2] Sol Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, 16.

[3] Author Unknown, “1913 Natives Land Act Centenary”, South African Government, (Uploaded: Unknown), (Accessed: 13 September 2020), Available at: https://www.gov.za/1913-natives-land-act-centenary

[4] Author Unknown, “The Natives Land Act of 1913”, South African History Online, (Uploaded: 27 August 2019), (Accessed: 13 September 2020), Available at: https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/natives-land-act-1913

[6] Mtshiselwa, N., & Modise, L. “The Natives Land Act of 1913 engineered the poverty of Black South Africans: a historico-ecclesiastical perspective”, Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae, (Vol. 39), (2013).

[7] The Department of Basic Education, “National Senior Certificate: Grade 10 History Marking Guideline 2017”, (Uploaded: November 2017), (Accessed: 28 October 2020), Available at: https://www.awsumnews.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/HISTORY-GR10-MEMO-NOV2017_English.pdf

[9] Author Unknown, “The Homelands”, South African History Online, (Uploaded: 17 April 2011), (Accessed: 13 September 2020), Available at: https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/homelands

[10] The Department of Basic Education, “National Senior Certificate: Grade 10 History Marking Guideline 2017”, (Uploaded: November 2017), (Accessed: 28 October 2020), Available at: https://www.awsumnews.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/HISTORY-GR10-MEMO-NOV2017_English.pdf

[11] Ibid.  

[12] The Department of Basic Education, “National Senior Certificate: Grade 10 History Marking Guideline 2017”, (Uploaded: November 2017), (Accessed: 28 October 2020), Available at: https://www.awsumnews.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/HISTORY-GR10-MEMO-NOV2017_English.pdf  

[16] Sol Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, 16.

[17] Author Unknown, “1923. Native Urban Areas Act (No.21), O’Malley: The Heart of Hope, (Uploaded: Unknown), (Accessed: 20 September 2020) Available at: https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv01538/04lv01646/05lv01758.htm

[18] Author Unknown, “1936. Native Trust and Land Act No. 18”, O’Malley: The Heart of Hope, (Uploaded: Unknown), (Accessed: 20 September 2020), Available at: https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv01538/04lv01646/05lv01784.htm

[19] Author Unknown, “Pass laws in South Africa, 1800 – 1994”, South African History Online, (Uploaded: 21 March 2011), (Accessed: 20 September 2020), Available at: https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/pass-laws-south-africa-1800-199

• Author Unknown, “Pass laws in South Africa, 1800 – 1994”, South African History Online, (Uploaded: 21 March 2011), (Accessed: 20 September 2020), Available at: https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/pass-laws-south-africa-1800-199
• Author Unknown, “1936. Native Trust and Land Act No. 18”, O’Malley: The Heart of Hope, (Uploaded: Unknown), (Accessed: 20 September 2020), Available at: https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv01538/04lv01646/05lv01784.htm
• Author Unknown, “1923. Native Urban Areas Act (No.21), O’Malley: The Heart of Hope, (Uploaded: Unknown), (Accessed: 20 September 2020) Available at: https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv01538/04lv01646/05lv01758.htm
• Author Unknown, “The Homelands”, South African History Online, (Uploaded: 17 April 2011), (Accessed: 13 September 2020), Available at: https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/homelands
• Author Unknown, “The Natives Land Act of 1913”, South African History Online, (Uploaded: 27 August 2019), (Accessed: 13 September 2020), Available at: https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/natives-land-act-1913
• Author Unknown, “1913 Natives Land Act Centenary”, South African Government, (Uploaded: Unknown), (Accessed: 13 September 2020), Available at: https://www.gov.za/1913-natives-land-act-centenary
• Mtshiselwa, N., & Modise, L. “The Natives Land Act of 1913 engineered the poverty of Black South Africans: a historico-ecclesiastical perspective”, Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae, (Vol. 39), (2013).
• Plaatje, S.,  Native life in South Africa, Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion, Fourth Edition, 1914,  (Uploaded: 26 August 2019), (Accessed: 8 November 2020), Available at: https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/native-life-south-africa-and-european-war-and-boer-rebellion-sol-t-plaatje
• The Department of Basic Education, “National Senior Certificate: Grade 10 History Marking Guideline 2017”, (Uploaded: November 2017), (Accessed: 28 October 2020), Available at: https://www.awsumnews.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/HISTORY-GR10-MEMO-NOV2017_English.pdf  

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