Boer War

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BOER WAR

anglo-boer crisis and the onset of war
transition to guerrilla warfare
forcing boer surrender
costs and outcome
bibliography

The origins of the Boer War (1899–1902), also known as the Anglo-Boer War or South African War, lay in British empire-building in the African subcontinent toward the end of the nineteenth century. Comfortably in control of the coastal colonies of the Cape and Natal by midcentury, imperial authorities adopted a mostly complacent view of their regional hegemony. Boer republicans who wanted freedom from crown authority were allowed to migrate to the northern interior and establish independent settler states (the Transvaal and Orange Free State) through conquest. Thereafter, except for a brief period of failed British federation pressure in the 1870s, these skinny agrarian republics were left largely to their own devices.

But the discovery of colossal gold deposits in the South African Republic (Transvaal) in 1886 soon transformed this picture. Within little more than a decade, the Witwatersrand mines had become the world's largest single source of gold, and the economic hub of South Africa had moved from British territory to a free Boer republic. Meanwhile, London was also growing increasingly uneasy about Germany currying diplomatic and commercial favor with the Republic government of Paul Kruger (1825–1904). Previously, British coastal supremacy had meant control of the whole of South Africa. This was all changed by the rise of a wealthy Transvaal with continental European friends. Anxious British politicians now saw the threat of a possible loss of strategic Cape naval facilities to a European great-power rival in league with an expansionist and upstart Boer ally.

Concerns about the challenge to British regional hegemony posed by the robust development of the Republic were accompanied by a no less pressing worry. With London the financial core of world trade, and the supremacy of British sterling backed by gold, City financial markets had an interest in ensuring not only that Transvaal bullion went to London rather than Berlin or Paris, but also that mining conditions were as favorable as possible. On this latter front, British mining magnates (or Randlords) were disgruntled.

anglo-boer crisis and the onset of war

Through the 1890s there were allegations that the Kruger state was too lethargic in its response to the needs of the mining industry, was incapable of grasping the modernity of capitalist industrialization, and was too deeply in the pocket of agrarian

Boer notables. Some mine owners argued that tilting the balance of power in the Republic in favor of the primary needs of long-term gold production required the toppling of its government. British policy did not require actual control of the Transvaal mines, as informal capitalist influence could assure London's position. But it did require the upholding of British supremacy in South Africa, and that could be held to include a decisive say in the strategic needs of its vital mineral production. Within the capitalist and imperialist political elite a loose common purpose emerged to bring the republicans to heel.

The 1895 Jameson Raid, a botched coup against the Transvaal, fanned anti-imperialist Boer sentiment and alerted Kruger to the imperative of war preparedness. Meanwhile, tactical British demands for Republican citizenship reform to ease access to the franchise for mainly English uitlanders (foreigners) on the Witwatersrand grew increasingly menacing. Pushed to the end of its tether, the South African Republic, in a military alliance with its sister republic of the Orange Free State, declared war on Britain in October 1899. It was a desperate first-strike gamble by Boer republicanism to preserve its independence against intensifying imperial aggression.

In the ensuing colonial conflict, Britain anticipated a short war and an easy victory. Instead, it experienced a shock. Before badly organized and indifferently led imperial forces could be reinforced, well-armed and skillfully deployed Boer burgher (citizen) armies lunged deep into British colonial territory, inflicting several major defeats in set-piece battles at the end of 1899. Knocked back on their heels, the British were expected to make terms, especially given popular pro-Boer pressure from European capitals. But the Boers were wrong. For a determined London, there could be no loss of face anywhere in the empire. With British forces reorganized, stiffened by massive reinforcements, and strengthened by more competent general command, the tide began to turn early in 1900. Slowly breaking the regular Boer armies through sheer weight of numbers, increasingly adept use of ground, and improved mobility, the British pushed north inexorably. By June 1900, the republican capitals of Bloemfontein and Pretoria had been pocketed, Kruger had decamped to exile in the Netherlands, and Boer armies were disintegrating. With the Republics conquered, the British commander-in-chief, Frederick Sleigh Roberts (1832–1914), declared the war at an end.

transition to guerrilla warfare

Now it was the turn of the British to be wrong. Down, but by no means out, younger and more agile Boer generals like Christiaan Rudolf de Wet (1854–1922) and Jacobus Hercules ("Koos") De la Rey (1847–1914) rallied the remaining fighting rump of their forces, made a tactical switch to highly dispersed guerrilla warfare, and for nearly two more years sustained an effective irregular campaign against an occupying imperial army. Living off the countryside, mounted Boer commando bands delivered destructive glancing blows, raiding British garrison posts, cutting communication lines, sabotaging enemy supply depots, swooping on convoys, and riding deep into the Cape Colony to conquer vulnerable outlying districts. As the whole axis of the war swung toward guerrilla struggle, die-hard republican patriots kept the British bleeding in the hope of forcing a peace that would not entail the political ignominy of unconditional surrender.

Imperial generals responded by waging a fierce campaign of attrition. To deprive roving commandos of the lifeline of food supply, intelligence, and moral sustenance provided by rural homesteads, Roberts's successor, Horatio Herbert Kitchener (1850–1916), expanded a punitive scorched earth policy, destroying livestock, incinerating crops, and looting and burning thousands of farms in the Boer states. Displaced Boer women and children, as well as African farm tenants and laborers were penned into a network of unhygienic concentration camps, where thousands died mainly from epidemic diseases. For Kitchener, the camps served the purpose of keeping civilian enemy families hostage: only by surrendering would commandos ever again be reunited with their kin. Thousands of Boer republican prisoners-of-war were shipped off to internment in other imperial territories, including India and Ceylon, and the property of prominent war leaders was either confiscated or destroyed. By 1902, roughly half the small white settler population of the Boer states were either incarcerated in camps or being held as war prisoners. For the Boer republicans, the experience of 1899–1902 was close to that of total war.

forcing boer surrender

The British also laced the countryside with thousands of blockhouses around which their forces, mustered into flying columns, mounted sweeping drives against commandos, systematically squeezing resisting guerrillas into pockets of the countryside that could be cordoned off. As their belligerent capacity was throttled, Boer war unity evaporated. Numerous desperate, poorer republicans lost faith in their struggle, and either scrambled to surrender or turned against their former compatriots, serving in the imperial forces as armed National Scouts.

Britain's implacable resolve to grind its enemy into surrender, sliding republican morale in the field, deepening economic misery, and the suffering of women and children eventually eroded the

will and capacity of remaining Boer resistance. By 1902, shrewd commanders like Jan Christian Smuts (1870–1950) and Louis Botha (1862–1919) were coming to terms with the futility of their position. It was one that was also being made increasingly perilous because of African and Colored involvement in what was supposed to have been a "white man's war," either through collaboration with British forces, partisan resistance to Boer authority, or hostile intervention to reclaim lost agricultural land. Facing the disintegration of society as they had known it, and responsive to British willingness to strike a negotiated peace settlement, republican military leaders accepted what became known as the Peace of Vereeniging on 31 May 1902. Although its terms required the Republics to sign away their independence, Britain footed the bill for the Boers' war debt, and made available massive reconstruction resources. Having drawn the teeth of its republicanism, Britain now needed to conciliate Boer society as its power in South Africa rested on the collaboration of white settlers. Where their supremacy over the black majority had been eroded by Anglo-Boer hostilities, the postwar effort was to restore authority.

costs and outcome

By the end, the British had put almost 450,000 imperial troops into the field, the Boers at most around 80,000 combatants. In the largest and most costly war fought by Britain between 1815 and 1914, it had taken the world's greatest empire nearly three years to defeat two of the colonial world's smallest agrarian states, with a combined settler population of under 250,000 inhabitants. About 28,000 refugees, or over 10 percent of the Boer population, died in camps, as well as some 20,000 displaced Africans. Although officially depicted as a war between European powers by both sides, the republicans conscripted around 10,000 trusted black retainers as fighting auxiliaries, while the black labor contribution to the British war effort topped 100,000 men, as many as 30,000 of whom bore arms.

With Boer society fractured between die-hard republican patriots and those who had thrown in their lot with the British, and with hundreds of thousands of the region's black majority entangled in its campaigns, the war was never a straightforward Anglo-Boer confrontation. It also took on the character of a civil war between segments of South African society. Peace brought to an end not merely bloodletting, but also the social and political crisis spawned by this bitter colonial conflict.

See alsoAfrica; Colonies; Great Britain; Imperialism; Jingoism.