Boer War, Second (1899-1902). Fought between the British empire and the Boer republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, this war made British subjects of most southern Africans for 60 years and enshrined two white tribes as South Africa's rulers for 80. That one of those tribes, the Afrikaners, included the defeated Boers was testament to the latter's hard struggle during the war and to the ideals of British imperialism in the 20th century.
During the 1880s and 1890s the autonomy, trade, and traditional way of life of the Boer republics were threatened by the prosperity of the adjoining British colonies of Cape Colony and Natal, the creation of British Rhodesia in the north, the flood of substantially British uitlander workers into Transvaal gold mines, and pressure from empire-builders in London, Cape Town, and Johannesburg who sought to overturn the settlement of the First Boer War and create a federated South Africa under the Union flag. Late in 1895 Cecil Rhodes sponsored a raid led by Jameson to stir uitlanders against Boer rule and prompt British intervention. This was suppressed by the Transvaal authorities, but it provoked the Boer republics to prepare for war, and firmed imperial resolve to eclipse Boer power.
The republics had no armies but relied on district-based mainly mounted militias called commandos, led by elected officers and stiffened by police and modern artillery. Boer strategy was to strike swiftly before British reinforcements could arrive, rouse rebellion in the Cape, and win a negotiated peace. In October 1899 fast-moving commandos totalling perhaps 40, 000 men invested British border garrisons at Mafeking and Kimberley and invaded Natal, locking up a British force at Ladysmith early in November. A civil as well as imperial war got under way as hundreds of Cape Colonists took up arms on the Boer side, thousands of uitlanders formed volunteer regiments to fight beside British regulars, and small contingents from Canada and Australasia, arrived to join in the fighting.
Having spread their commandos thinly, the Boer offensive soon ran out of steam. But the arrival of a British army corps under Buller did not bring the speedy victory many expected. The army had too few mounted troops to keep pace with their enemy, and was divided in three. During ‘black week’, the ‘most disastrous for British arms during the century’ according to Arthur Conan Doyle, the army's three components were beaten at Stormberg in eastern Cape Colony (10 December), Magersfontein south of Kimberley (11 December), and, under the personal command of Buller, at Colenso south of Ladysmith (15 December). Buller was demoted to commanding only in Natal, and in a second failed advance, 1, 500 of his troops were shot down on Spion Kop (24 January 1900).
The Second Boer War, 1899-1902: conventional phase
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British losses could not be made good with Indian or African troops. Boers and Britons agreed that non-whites might labour and scout for them, on rare occasions fight for them, but must not be relied on as soldiers, lest white dominance of the region be unsettled. So more British regulars sailed for South Africa and white citizens around the empire roused themselves for the first time to share in the burden of an imperial war. More local and overseas volunteer regiments, mostly mounted infantry, were raised from the Imperial Yeomanry of Britain to the Bushman of Australia. Roberts, Britain's senior fighting general, arrived with Kitchener as his COS to swing a sledgehammer of over 180, 000 men against the hard nut of Boer resistance.
The Boers had the sympathy of Europe and of many Americans, and fashionable Parisiennes dressed themselves à la Boër. But the Americans were themselves busy annexing a hostile subject people in the Philippines, and German talk of a ‘continental league’ against Britain came to nothing. The trickle of foreign adventurers, idealists, and weapons that reinforced the Boers began to dry up once British diplomatic pressure on Lisbon closed off access to the Transvaal via Portuguese East Africa, and the Royal Navy's command of the sea allowed unhindered conveyance of men, horses, and stores to South Africa. But the disadvantages of splendid isolation were clear, and Britain would begin to make alliances with Japan, France, and Russia.
The Second Boer War, 1899-1902: guerrilla phase
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While Buller battled away in Natal, eventually relieving Ladysmith (28 February), Roberts marched 60, 000 troops against the Boer capitals. After relieving Kimberley (15 February) and defeating a large Boer force at Paardeberg (18-27 February), he overcame vast distances, lack of fodder, and a typhoid epidemic to enter Bloemfontein (13 March), Johannesburg (31 May), and Pretoria (5 June). After small detachments liberated Mafeking (17 May), the ecstatic street celebrations across the white empire yielded a new name, ‘mafficking’, for unruly crowd behaviour. At Diamond Hill east of Pretoria (11-12 June) Roberts pushed aside a Transvaal force under Louis Botha, and subsequent advances rounded up 4, 000 Boers in the Brandwater basin (29 July) and rolled east to Komati Poort (25 September). Fourteen thousand Boers gave up their weapons. The British empire annexed the republics, Buller and Roberts returned to England, Kitchener assumed command of what many thought had shrunk to a police action, and Transvaal president Paul Kruger fled to Europe to plead in vain for foreign support.
Many Boers would not accept defeat. Few were the natural guerrillas of legend, some having been townsmen before the war, but those remaining ‘on commando’ were largely young, fit, and defiant. Hard fighting and the succession of defeats had removed old and inflexible leaders and brought to the fore enterprising and determined ones, notably Botha in eastern Transvaal, De Wet in the Free State, and De la Rey in western Transvaal. Their aim was to harass their opponent into negotiations, and their opponent was vulnerable.
The British army was overstretched, trying to guard cities, gold mines, railway lines, and telegraph wires, escort convoys, and send out columns to pursue an elusive enemy. Its garrisons, baggage, and depots were exposed to raids, and many of its raw volunteers proved vulnerable when cornered. Even during Roberts's advance De Wet had pounced on isolated units east of Bloemfontein (31 March 1900) taking 1, 000 prisoners, and four months later his brother routed an Imperial Yeomanry battalion at Lindley (31 July 1900). Such spectacular feats grew common as the war progressed. Botha threatened Natal (7 September-2 October 1900), and De Wet broke into Cape Colony (10-28 February 1901). A few Boers even reached the sea at Lambert's Bay north of Cape Town (January 1901), exchanging shots with a British warship. Young Jan Smuts created confusion in the north-east Cape for many months (August 1901-April 1902). They did not always evade battle: De la Rey routed a British column at Tweebosch in western Transvaal and captured a British general, Lord Methuen, on 25 February 1902.
But the Boers were hopelessly outnumbered and their movements were more often flights from pursuing columns than real offensives. Roberts had responded to Boer raids by burning farms and destroying livestock and stores to deprive commandos of supplies and shelter. Kitchener continued these old-fashioned barbarities and copied ones recently employed in Cuba, building lines of blockhouses linked by barbed wire and herding women, children, surrendered Boers, and refugee blacks into concentration camps. Life in the camps was sometimes easier than subsistence on the war-torn veld, but malnutrition, disease, and neglect killed 42, 000 camp inmates. Liberal and international opinion was outraged. Patriotic opinion was unmoved.
Originally devised to protect railways, the blockhouse lines were extended from mid-1901 into the countryside, dividing it into cul-de-sacs into which columns might sweep the commandos. Mounted regulars and volunteers, led by bright young commanders such as Rimington, Plumer, and Benson, evolved into masterful horsemen adept at night marches and dawn attacks, often guided by some of the 5, 000 or more Boers, mostly poor farmers, who abandoned the cause of their often wealthy leaders. By early 1902 British columns were methodically sweeping the countryside. Armoured trains mounted with artillery and searchlights patrolled railway lines. Steam tractors began to free columns from dependence on railways and oxen. Boer leaders were faced with the choice of British rule or the destruction of their world.
The 31 May 1902 peace agreement at Vereeniging led to a federated British South Africa in which Boers and Britons shared power over non-white peoples who outnumbered them four to one. It had taken nearly 500, 000 white soldiers from around the British empire, aided by the labour of 100, 000 non-whites, to make British subjects of the Boers. Eight thousand blockhouses had been built and 3, 728 miles (6, 000 km) of barbed wire laid. Eight thousand British soldiers and 4, 000 Boers had been killed. Another 13, 000 Britons, 15, 000 non-whites, and 30, 000 Boers had died from disease or malnutrition. Thirty thousand farms had been destroyed. Also destroyed were the hopes of non-whites who had expected land and citizenship after a British victory. The war furthered military reforms throughout the British empire, allowing a rapid, united response to the German challenge in 1914. It also inspired J. A. Hobson's book Imperialism (1902), whose argument that the war proved that capitalism necessitated imperial expansion influenced Lenin and other communist leaders.
Bibliography
- Maurice, F., and Grant, H. M., Official History of the War in South Africa,
4 vols. of text,4 vols. of maps (London, 1906-10). - Nasson, Bill, The South African War 1899-1902 (London, 1999).
- Pakenham, Thomas, The Boer War (London, 1979).
- Smith, Iain, Origins of the South African War (London, 1996).
- Warwick, Peter, Black People and the South African War (Cambridge, 1983)
— Craig Wilcox/Hugh Bicheno
