The results included embarrassment of the British government; the replacement of Cecil Rhodes as prime minister of the Cape Colony; and the strengthening of Boer dominance of the Transvaal and its gold mines.

The arrival of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama at Calicut, India, in 1498 opened a gateway of free access to Asia from Western Europe around the Cape of Good Hope; however, it also necessitated the founding and safeguarding of trade stations in the East.

[4] As the volume of traffic rounding the Cape increased, the VOC recognised its natural harbour as an ideal watering point for the long voyage around Africa to the Orient and established a victualling station there in 1652.

[4] A small number of longtime VOC employees, however, expressed interest in applying for grants of land with the objective of retiring at the Cape as farmers.

In time, they came to form a class of former VOC employees, vrijlieden, also known as vrijburgers (free citizens) who stayed in Dutch territories overseas after serving their contracts.

[5] Over generations, this settled European population came to form a distinct identity as Afrikaners (formerly sometimes Afrikaander or Afrikaaner, from the Dutch Africaander[6]) or Boers (farmers).

Disregarding the Voortrekkers' effortful attempt to claim independence, Britain annexed the Natalia Republic in 1843, which became the Crown colony of Natal.

After the First Anglo-Boer War, Gladstone's government restored the Transvaal's independence in 1884 by signing the London Convention, not knowing that the colossal gold deposits of the Witwatersrand would be struck two years later by Jan Gerrit Bantjes (1843-1911).

As the largest and oldest state in Southern Africa, the Cape was economically, culturally, and socially dominant; the population of Natal and the two Boer republics were mostly subsistence farmers.

President Paul Kruger called a closed council, including Jan Gerrit Bantjes, to discuss the growing problem and it was decided to put a heavy tax on the sale of dynamite to non-Boer residents.

Jan G. Bantjes, fluent in both spoken and written Dutch and English, was a close confidant of Paul Kruger with their link dating to the Great Trek days.

Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, had a desire to incorporate the Transvaal and the Orange Free State in a federation under British control.

Stead that he feared that a Uitlander rebellion would cause trouble for Britain if not controlled by him:[13] It seemed to me quite certain that if I did not take a hand in the game the forces on the spot would soon make short work of President Kruger.

[13]In mid-1895, Rhodes planned a raid by an armed column from Rhodesia, the British colony to the north, to support an uprising of Uitlanders with the goal of taking control.

As part of the planning, a force had been placed at Pitsani, on the border of the Transvaal, by the order of Rhodes so as to be able to quickly offer support to the Uitlanders in the uprising.

The force was placed under the control of Leander Starr Jameson, the administrator general of the chartered company (of which Cecil Rhodes was the chairman) for Matabeleland.

Jameson, with 600 restless men and other pressures, became frustrated by the delays and, believing that he could spur the reluctant Johannesburg reformers to act, decided to go ahead.

However, the transmission of the first telegram was delayed, so that both arrived at the same time on the morning of 29 December, and by then Jameson's men had cut the telegraph wires and there was no way of recalling him.

The British Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, though sympathetic to the ultimate goals of the raid, realized it would be a mistake since the uitlanders were not supportive.

Accordingly, news of his incursion quickly reached Pretoria and Jameson's armed column was tracked by Transvaal forces from the moment that it crossed the border.

Around noon the Jameson armed column was around twenty miles further on, at Krugersdorp, where a small force of Boer soldiers had blocked the road to Johannesburg and dug in and prepared defensive positions.

The tired raiders initially exchanged fire with the Boers, losing around thirty men before Jameson realized the position was hopeless and surrendered to Commandant Piet Cronjé.

For conspiring with Jameson, the members of the Reform Committee (Transvaal), including Colonel Frank Rhodes and John Hays Hammond, were jailed in deplorable conditions, found guilty of high treason, and sentenced to death by hanging.

After his release from jail, Colonel Rhodes immediately joined his brother Cecil and the British South Africa Company in the Second Matabele War taking place just north of the Transvaal in Matabeleland.

On his death in 1917, he was buried next to Cecil Rhodes and the 34 BSAC soldiers of the Shangani Patrol (killed in 1893 in the First Matabele War) in the Matobos Hills, near Bulawayo.

As tensions quickly mounted, the Transvaal began importing large quantities of arms and signed an alliance with the Orange Free State in 1897.

Joseph Chamberlain condemned the raid despite previously having approved Rhodes' plans to send armed assistance in the case of a Johannesburg uprising.

He believed that, as he had given Rhodes his word not to divulge certain private conversations, he had to abide by that, while at the same time he was convinced that it would be very damaging to Britain if he said anything to the parliamentary committee to show the close involvement of Sir Hercules Robinson and Joseph Chamberlain in their disreputable encouragement of those plotting an uprising in Johannesburg.Finally, Cousins states that in his reflections, Bower has a particularly damning judgement on Chamberlain, whom he accuses of 'brazen lying' to parliament, and of what amounted to forgery in the documents made public for the inquiry.