South African Wars (1879–1915)

Ethnic, political, and social tensions between European colonial powers and indigenous Africans led to increasing hostilities, culminating in a series of wars and revolts, which had lasting repercussions on the entire region.

[1] As European powers – particularly Dutch Boers and the British – began to claim parts of southern Africa, it became apparent that expansion was imperative in order to maintain their political positions.

[4][5] The remainder were descended from German soldiers and sailors in the service of the Dutch East India Company's former administration[6] and a large number of French Huguenot refugees who resettled there after fleeing religious persecution at home.

[8] Beginning in 1818, thousands of British immigrants were introduced by the colonial government to bolster the local European workforce and help populate the frontier as an additional defense against the Xhosa.

It implemented a system of non-racial franchise – unusual in the restrictive world of the 19th century – whereby voters all qualified for the vote equally, regardless of race, on the basis of land ownership.

Sekhukhune considered Sekhukhuneland to be independent and not subject to the Transvaal Republic and refused to allow miners from the Pilgrim's Rest goldfields to prospect on his side of the Steelpoort River.

The inability of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR; 'Transvaal Republic') under President Francois Burgers to score a decided victory in the Sekhukhune War, presented the opportunity to the British to annex Transvaal in 1877.

In 1877, at the outset of the South African Wars, the British under Theophilus Shepstone annexed the state, and the Boers were forced to cede their independence in exchange for a small pension.

It had a more restrictive political system than the neighboring Cape Colony and its small (mostly British) white population had an uneasy relationship with the powerful independent Zulu Kingdom on their northern border.

Another factor was centuries of oppression and disaffection,[citation needed] brought to a head by the attempt by the new British Colonial Secretary, the Earl of Carnarvon (in office 1866–1867 and 1874–1878), to force the varied states of southern Africa into a British-ruled confederation.

This led the British Governor and High Commissioner for Southern Africa, Henry Bartle Frere (in office 1877–1880) to use the outbreak of fighting to overthrow both the Gcaleka Xhosa state (1877–1878) and the Cape Government (February 1878).

On 23 January, the Battle of Rorke's Drift, stationed with 150 men at an isolated outpost, repelled a huge force of Zulu tribes commanded by Prince Dabulamanzi kaMpande, achieving an improbable British victory.

As it became evident that the Bahananwa people were losing the war against the soldiers of Commandant-General Piet Joubert, they began surrendering, and subsequently their chief followed suit, on 31 July 1894, after a siege of more than a month.

Eventually there was a deadlock in the Matopo Hills, and assaults continued until Rhodes sent a captured royal widow, Nyamabezana, to the rebels, stating that if they waved a white flag, it would be a sign for peace, for the cost of the war was becoming too much for the British South Africa Company.

This occurred when the Transvaal issued an ultimatum on 9 October for the British to withdraw all troops from their borders and recall their reinforcements, or they would "regard the action as a formal declaration of war.

Conditions in the concentration camps worsened, and the problem was not brought to public attention until an Englishwoman Emily Hobhouse did her own investigation and sailed back to England with the intention of exposing Kitchener for what he was permitting.

Eventually Hilton a Boer guerrilla leader abandoned the Pretoria Delagoa Bay Railway Line as impossible due to blockhouses, barbed wire, ditches on either side, armoured trains, and frequent checks.

[66] With the discovery of diamonds in Griqualand West, gold in Witwatersrand and also coal in the Transvaal, the capacity of production changed the political and economic structure of South Africa.

Griqualand West, after the diamond rush, had been dominated by the overwhelming influx of settlers, and saw severe discriminatory laws arise already under the independent "Diggers Republic" of Stafford Parker (1870–71) and direct British rule (1871–1880).

[3] Reflecting the multi-national character of the Company workforce, some Germans were open to consideration as well,[3] and in the late 1680s they were joined by over a hundred French Huguenot refugees who had fled to the Netherlands following the Edict of Fontainebleau and had been subsequently resettled by the Dutch at the Cape.

Sandile kaNgqika was the dynamic and charismatic chief of the Rharhabe House of the Xhosa Kingdom, who led his army in a string of wars until he was killed by Fengu sharpshooters in 1878.

He had recently confederated Canada, initiating a unified, British-controlled government that meshed two cultures and create a bi-lingual society, and he wished to replicate that success in southern Africa.

On 11 December 1878, Frere's representative Sir Theophilus Shepstone informed the Zulu leader that he could either turn in the two men who led this raid into Natal and disarm his army, or face war.

[95] The mining magnate and British imperialist Cecil Rhodes brought about the second wave of the South African Wars, through his desire to control the continent and its diamond and gold resources.

[109] The Boer War has been the focus of a considerable body of fiction numbering over two hundred novels and at least fifty short stories in English, Afrikaans, French, German Dutch, Swedish and even Urdu if we count the translation of Rider Haggard's Jess in 1923.

Coincidentally, there has been a tendency to depict the struggle from the Boer point of view, as in W C Scully's The Harrow (1921), Daphne Muir's A Virtuous Woman (1929) and Manfred Nathan's Sarie Marais (1938).

Seen within the wider context of South African literature the racial theme that had to a large extent lain dormant in Boer War fiction during the imperial phase now begins to assert itself.

Race relations are a major preoccupation in Henry Gibb's four book saga: The Splendour and the Dust (1955), The Winds of Time (1956), Thunder at Dawn (1957) and The Tumult and the Shouting (1957), and Daphne Rooke's Mittee (1951).

Most writers since 1948, with some notable exceptions, have treated the war largely as the backdrop for historical romance: Stuart Cloete, Rags of Glory (1963); Sam Manion, The Great Hunger (1964); Wilbur Smith, The Sound of Thunder (1966); Dorothy Eden, Siege in the Sun (1967); Josephine Edgar, Time of Dreaming (1968); Daphne Pearson, The Marigold Field (1970); Jenny Seed, The Red Dust Soldiers (1972); Desiree Meyler, The Gods Are Just (1973); and Ronald Pearsall, Tides of War (1978).

This aspect of the war produced some of its finest responses in fiction, for example Herman Charles Bosman's short stories "The Traitor's Wife" and "The Affair at Ysterspruit", and Louis C. Leipoldt's novel Stormwrack (1980).