Following the Battle of Blaauwberg (1806) Britain had officially acquired the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa from the Dutch in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars.

The Trekboers functioned as pioneers, opening up the interior for those who followed, and the British gradually extended their control outwards from the Cape along the coast toward the east, eventually annexing Natal in 1843.

The discovery of diamonds in 1867 near the Vaal River, some 550 miles (890 km) northeast of Cape Town, ended the isolation of the Boers in the interior and changed South African history.

The discovery triggered a diamond rush that attracted people from all over the world, turning Kimberley into a town of 50,000 within five years and drawing the attention of British imperial interests.

[6] Major-General Sir George Pomeroy Colley, after returning briefly to India, finally took over as Governor of Natal, Transvaal, High Commissioner of SE Africa and Military Commander in July 1880.

Although generally called a war, the actual engagements were of a relatively minor nature considering the few men involved on both sides and the short duration of the combat, lasting some ten weeks.

The fiercely independent Boers had no regular army; when danger threatened, all the men in a district would form a militia organised into military units called commandos and would elect officers.

Commandos being civilian militia, each man wore what he wished, usually everyday dark-grey, neutral-coloured, or earthtone khaki farming clothes such as a jacket, trousers and slouch hat.

The average Boer citizens who made up their commandos were farmers who had spent almost all their working lives in the saddle, and, because they had to depend on both their horses and their rifles for almost all of their meat, they were skilled hunters and expert marksmen.

[8] J. Lehmann's The First Boer War, 1972, comments "Employing chiefly the very fine breech-loading Westley Richards - calibre 45; paper cartridge; percussion-cap replaced on the nipple manually - they made it exceedingly dangerous for the British to expose themselves on the skyline".

As hunters they had learned to fire from cover, from a prone position and to make the first shot count, knowing that if they missed, in the time it took to reload, the game would be long gone.

Drawing on years of experience of fighting frontier skirmishes with numerous and indigenous African tribes, they relied more on mobility, stealth, marksmanship and initiative while the British emphasised the traditional military values of command, discipline, formation and synchronised firepower.

Nonetheless, Colley's force set out on 24 January 1881 northward for Laing's Nek en route to relieve Wakkerstroom and Standerton, the nearest forts.

In a display of diplomacy before the beginning of the Battle, British commander Sir George Colley sent a message on 23 January 1881 to the Commandant-General of the Boers, Piet Joubert, calling on him to disband his forces or face the full might of Imperial Britain.

Without waiting for a reply, Colley led his Natal Field Force – consisting of 1,400 men, an 80-strong Naval brigade, artillery and Gatling guns – to a strategic pass in the hills on the Natal-Transvaal border called Laing's Nek.

[10] At the battle of Laing's Nek on 28 January 1881, the Natal Field Force under Major-General Sir George Pomeroy Colley attempted with cavalry and infantry attacks to break through the Boer positions on the Drakensberg mountain range to relieve their garrisons.

General Colley had sought refuge with the Natal Field Force at Mount Prospect, three miles to the south, to await reinforcements.

The firepower was not matched and the fight continued for several hours, but the Boer marksmen dominated the action until darkness when a storm permitted Colley and the remainder of his troops to retreat back to Mount Prospect.

Colley was critical of this stance and, while waiting for Kruger's final agreement, decided to attack again with a view to enabling the British government to negotiate from a position of strength.

The Transvaal forts had endured, contrary to Colley's forecast, with the sieges being generally uneventful, the Boers content to wait for hunger and sickness to take their toll.

The forts had suffered only light casualties as an outcome of sporadic engagements, except at Potchefstroom, where twenty-four were killed, and seventeen at Pretoria, in each case resulting from occasional raids on Boer positions.

Historians lay much of the blame at the feet of the British command, in particular Major-General Sir George Pomeroy Colley, although poor intelligence and bad communications also contributed to their losses.

Colley's decision to initiate the attack at Majuba Hill when truce discussions were already underway appears to have been foolhardy, particularly as there was limited strategic value.

Once the Battle of Majuba Hill had begun, Colley's command and understanding of the dire situation seemed to deteriorate as the day went on, as he sent conflicting signals to the British forces at Mount Prospect by heliograph, first requesting reinforcements and then stating that the Boers were retreating.

[14] The British government, under Prime Minister William Gladstone, was conciliatory since it realised that any further action would require substantial troop reinforcements, and it was likely that the war would be costly, messy and protracted.

The Boers accepted the Queen's nominal rule and British control over external relations, African affairs, and native districts.

When in 1886 a second major mineral find was made at an outcrop on a large ridge some 30 miles (48 km) south of the Boer capital at Pretoria, it reignited British imperial interests.

This discovery made the Transvaal, which had been a struggling Boer republic, potentially a political and economic threat to British supremacy in South Africa at a time when Britain was engaged in the scramble for African colonies with France and Germany.

In 1896, Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, attempted to overthrow the government of Paul Kruger who was then president of the South African Republic or the Transvaal.

[8] The lure of gold made it worth committing the vast resources of the British Empire and incurring the huge costs required to win that war.