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the boer war
The 3-year war between Britain and the Boer Republics in 1899 shaped South African politics for a century. Until very recently it has been largely neglected – perhaps because it reveals the barbarous nature of British imperialism so clearly. Geoff Ryan explains.
This was never simply a war between British and Boers (the Afrikaans-speaking white population of Dutch origin). Not all Boers sided with the Boer Republics (the Orange Free State and the South African Republic – usually called the Transvaal).
By the end of the war a quarter of all Boers involved were fighting on the side of the British. A small number of English speaking white South Africans sided with the Boers.
The Boer War was even less the ‘White Man’s War’ claimed by both sides. South Africa’s Black population fought on both sides. Women, Black and White, were also involved. On the Boer side a few women fought as commandos, while large numbers died in concentration camps. Many Boer and African women were raped.
Responsibility for the war lay overwhelmingly with British imperialism. It was deliberately engineered by the British South Africa Company of Cecil Rhodes, Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain and British High Commissioner in Cape Town, Alfred Milner.
Rhodes and Chamberlain had already tried to provoke war in 1895. The former Radical, Chamberlain, had turned ardent imperialist and began to look favourably on annexing the Transvaal.
The disastrous Jameson Raid was an unofficial invasion of the Transvaal. But it was not simply a mad adventure but one incident in a process that made war between Britain and the Boer Republics virtually inevitable.
Central for Britain was the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand in 1885. The Transvaal’s new found wealth meant the Cape’s previous economic dominance was rapidly eclipsed. The Transvaal could not only resist British attempts at incorporation in a Cape dominated federation, but also threaten to incorporate the Cape in a Boer Republic.
This threatened Britain’s position in South Africa and, more importantly, its control of the sea, vital for the security of India.
Gold revenues allowed the Transvaal to pay for completion of a railway to the Portuguese-held port of Delagoa Bay (modern Maputo in Mozambique), providing an independent route to the sea. This enabled the Transvaal to embark on a tariff war with the Cape railways during the 1890s, which helped precipitate the war.
The Transvaal’s economic backwardness, its citizens’ narrow and puritanical outlook, and the geology of the Johannesburg gold fields meant that the economic potential of the Witwatersrand could only be fully exploited by foreign mining firms. Only they were able to raise the large-scale capital required to extract the gold. Foremost in this were men who had experience in the recently discovered diamond fields at Kimberley, the most important of whom was Cecil Rhodes.
Uitlanders flocked to the gold fields around the small town of Johannesburg and transformed it into a sprawling mass of shanty towns full of bars and brothels. Such developments were at odds with the strict Calvinist ideology of many of the mainly rural Boers. Their President Paul Kruger saw Johannesburg as ‘an evil place full of evil people’). Religious fundamentalism was accompanied by virulent racism.
The Uitlanders rapidly outnumbered the Boers on the Rand, though they remained a minority in the Transvaal as a whole. The response of Boer leaders was to deny the Uitlanders voting rights. Their attitude hardened after Kruger made a rare visit to Johannesburg in 1894 and was met by a hostile demonstration.
After the arrival of Sir Alfred Milner in Cape Town as High Commissioner in 1897, the issue of British suzerainty was again raised. The British refused to negotiate seriously with Kruger, even when he offered more than either the Uitlanders or British were demanding.
When the Boers opened the fighting in October 1899 the British were badly prepared. They assumed that the Boers would put up some spirited resistance but would then be easily beaten. The Boers outnumbered British troops by four to one - although 85,000 reinforcements were on their way.
Despite a British victory at Elandslaagte, by the end of November Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley were besieged. Attempts to relieve the sieges of Ladysmith and Kimberley proved disastrous. Eventually it would require 450,000 soldiers (including volunteers from Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) to win this ‘small war.
The belief that ‘it will all be over by Christmas’ was not the only echo of the First World War. In the early stages of the war the Boers made effective use of trenches. When British troops launched full-scale attacks they were cut down.
The last set-piece battle took place in August 1900. By then both Boer capital cities, Bloemfontein and Pretoria, had been captured. Yet the war continued for another two years, now as guerrilla warfare.
The British employed brutal tactics to end it. In order to isolate the Boer guerrillas, farms were burned, crops destroyed, animals slaughtered. These policies made it difficult for guerrillas to operate.
Boer soldiers often went hungry and found it difficult to obtain fresh horses - a necessity for the war they were fighting. On occasions they were virtually without clothes, reduced to improvising with sacks. Desperate Boer commandos put on the uniforms of captured British soldiers despite a proclamation by Kitchener that any Boer found wearing British uniform would be executed. This proclamation was rigorously carried out.
Two years earlier in Cuba the Spanish had built concentration camps. The British adopted this tactic - tens of thousands of Boer women and children were forced into them. Because of the appalling conditions 25,000 died - a tenth of the entire Boer population.
The conditions were probably not deliberate. British army hospitals were equally bad inside; medical and nursing skills were largely lacking. Far more British soldiers died from disease than in combat. People died because of ignorance of the effects of concentrating large numbers of people in unhygienic surroundings. But their suffering also reflected cruel indifference.
Today, British imperialism shows rather greater concern for the well-being of its armed forces. Its attitude to its ‘enemies’ remains just as callous, as the people of Yugoslavia or Iraq can testify.
After an international outcry conditions inside the camps improved. Moreover, the internment of women and children tended to stiffen Boer resolve. The British therefore adopted a different tactic - Boer women and children were to be left on the veldt, pressurizing men to abandon the guerrilla struggle to take care of them. The perilous situation of women on the veldt was an important factor in persuading some Boers to switch sides.
These and other tactics brought the brutal might of the British Empire to bear on the Boers and gradually wore them down. Commando units in Cape Colony and the Orange Free State were able to continue activity, but those of the Transvaal rapidly became ineffective and demoralized. It was this turn in the Transvaal that eventually won the war for Britain.
However the real losers were not the Boers but the Black population. Both sides had involved Blacks in the struggle. For example, Black Africans played a major role in the defense of Mafeking, armed by Baden Powell. He later cynically lied and claimed they had all run away at the first sound of fighting.
At least as many Africans as Boers died in British concentration camps, and probably far more. They were denied tents to shelter from the harsh South African climate, unlike Boer women and children. But all this has been obliterated from history until very recently.
British and Boers may have gone to war with each other but neither was prepared to contemplate Black Africans having any control over South Africa. White solidarity counted for far more than majority rights.
In the treaty that ended the war, Britain paid £3 million pounds to Boer farmers for the destruction of their land, houses and animals. It contained provisions for self government for the Boer Republics within a unified South African state, within a short period of time. The voting rights of Blacks would be left to these republics. So much for the British government claim that they had gone to war in the first place because of the undemocratic nature of voting rights in the Boer republics!
By 1910 Britain had established the Union of South Africa. This safeguarded British strategic and economic interests and ensured White domination. The Boers were able to regain control over the Transvaal and Orange Free State and make significant gains throughout the colony. The Black population would be kept in subjection by both English and Afrikaners for another 85 years.
This article originally appeared in Socialist Outlook, the newspaper of supporters of the Fourth International in Britain.
