Second Boer War

• 1. Introduction

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  The Second Boer War began on the 11th of October 1899, when Boer forces crossed into British-held Natal and the Cape Colony. What followed was a conflict that would last nearly three years, involve 180,000 British troops at its peak, and cost the lives of at least 26,000 Boer civilians in concentration camps. How did a dispute over gold mines and voting rights spiral into one of the most brutal colonial wars in history? And why do some historians regard this war as the moment the British Empire's sense of its own invincibility first cracked? The answers lie in a century of mounting tension between two very different peoples who both believed South Africa was theirs by right.

• 2. Gold, Grievance, and the Uitlander Question

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  In June 1884, a prospector named Jan Gerrit Bantjes discovered what would prove to be the world's largest deposit of gold ore on a ridge 69 kilometres south of Pretoria, a feature known locally as the Witwatersrand. The find transformed southern Africa almost overnight. Johannesburg sprang up as a shanty town, and tens of thousands of foreigners, known as Uitlanders, poured in from the Cape Colony and beyond.

  The Boers, who called themselves farmers and had built their independent republic at great cost, watched this influx with deep unease. The Transvaal government required 14 years of residence before Uitlanders could vote. That single rule lay at the heart of a widening dispute. With roughly 30,000 white male Boer voters in the republic and potentially 60,000 white male Uitlanders along the Rand, President Paul Kruger recognised that meaningful concessions would mean the end of Boer independence.

  Beyond the franchise, the Uitlanders resented a "dynamite monopoly" that Kruger granted to a non-British branch of the Nobel company, covering the explosives that the gold mines consumed by the ton. A box of dynamite costing five pounds carried five shillings of tax. British imperial interests were further alarmed when Kruger proposed a railway through Portuguese East Africa to Delagoa Bay, which would bypass British-controlled ports entirely.

  At the Cape, Prime Minister Cecil Rhodes nursed a vision of a British-controlled Africa stretching from the Cape to Cairo. Working with Johannesburg gold magnate Alfred Beit, Rhodes hatched a plan to force the issue. In 1895, Leander Starr Jameson led a column of 600 armed men equipped with Maxim machine guns across the border from Bechuanaland toward Johannesburg. Four days later, surrounded near Krugersdorp, Jameson's column surrendered after losing 65 killed and wounded. The Boers lost one man.

• 3. The Road to War

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  Jan Christiaan Smuts, writing in 1906, called the Jameson Raid "the real declaration of war," and the four years that followed bore him out. The failed raid united Transvaal Boers behind Kruger, drew the Orange Free State into a defensive pact with the Transvaal in 1897, and alienated many Cape Afrikaners from Britain. It also embarrassed the British government: telegrams found in Jameson's baggage linked Rhodes and other conspirators to the plot, and Rhodes was forced to resign as both Cape Prime Minister and chairman of the British South Africa Company.

  Kruger used the intervening years to rearm. He imported 37,000 Mauser Model 1895 rifles chambered in 7x57mm, supplied by Germany, along with 40 to 50 million rounds of ammunition. By October 1899, the Transvaal State Artillery had 73 heavy guns, including four 155mm Creusot fortress guns. The Transvaal army could mobilise approximately 25,000 men equipped with modern rifles and artillery within two weeks.

  Diplomatic efforts collapsed at the Bloemfontein Conference in May 1899. The conference started on the 30th of May, but Kruger had no intention of granting meaningful concessions and Milner had no intention of accepting delays. On the 9th of October 1899, Kruger issued an ultimatum giving Britain 48 hours to withdraw troops from the Transvaal border. The editor of the Times reportedly laughed out loud on reading it, calling it both amusing and useful. The Globe dismissed the Transvaal as a "trumpery little state." The British government, however, was less confident. Prime Minister Salisbury had already admitted to Queen Victoria that Britain had no army capable of meeting even a second-class Continental power.

• 4. Black Week and the Boer Offensive

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  War was declared on the 11th of October 1899, and the Boers struck first two days later at the Battle of Kraaipan. With about 33,000 soldiers against 13,000 British troops available at the front, the Boers moved quickly. They besieged the British garrison at Ladysmith, and smaller forces at Mafeking and Kimberley.

  The Boers brought a particular kind of soldier to this fight. They were farmers who had spent their lives in the saddle, skilled stalkers and marksmen who had learned to fire from cover and from a prone position. At community gatherings, target shooting on hens' eggs perched on posts 100 metres away was a regular sport. They used modern, smokeless Mauser rifles and understood the tactical value of trenches in ways the British army did not yet appreciate.

  The middle of December 1899 crystallised British difficulties into a ten-day catastrophe. During what became known as Black Week, running from the 10th to the 15th of December, the British suffered defeats on three separate fronts. General Gatacre lost 135 killed and wounded and over 600 troops captured at Stormberg on the 10th. At Magersfontein on the 11th, Boer commanders Koos de la Rey and Cronje had dug trenches in an unconventional position, drawing the Highland Brigade into a killing ground. After nine hours of intense heat and thirst, the brigade broke in retreat. The British lost 120 killed and 690 wounded.

  The worst blow came on the 15th of December at the Second Battle of Colenso, where 21,000 British troops under General Buller tried to cross the Tugela River to relieve Ladysmith. Eight thousand Transvaal Boers under Louis Botha repelled every crossing attempt. Buller ordered a retreat, abandoning wounded men and ten field guns. His forces lost 145 men killed and 1,200 missing or wounded. The Boers suffered 40 casualties, including 8 killed.

• 5. Roberts, the Sieges, and the Occupied Republics

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  Buller was replaced as Commander in Chief by Lord Roberts, who assembled a new headquarters team including Lord Kitchener from the Sudan, the American scout Frederick Russell Burnham from the Klondike, and officers drawn from Afghanistan and Calcutta. Roberts had inherited a force that would grow to 180,000 men, the largest Britain had ever sent overseas.

  Roberts launched his main attack on the 10th of February 1900. A cavalry division under French executed a massed charge on the 15th of February that split the Boer defences at Kimberley, ending its 124-day siege. Roberts then pursued Piet Cronje's 7,000-strong force across the veld. At the Battle of Paardeberg from the 18th to the 27th of February, Roberts surrounded and bombarded Cronje into surrender with 4,000 men.

  In Natal, Buller mounted his fourth attempt to relieve Ladysmith at the Battle of the Tugela Heights, which started on the 14th of February. He finally broke through on the 26th of February, at a total cost of 7,000 British casualties over the course of the siege. Buller's troops entered Ladysmith on the 28th of February, the day after Cronje's surrender.

  Roberts captured Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State, unopposed on the 13th of March 1900. The Relief of Mafeking on the 18th of May 1900, after a 217-day siege, triggered riotous celebrations in Britain and gave the Edwardian era a new slang word, "mafficking." Roberts took Johannesburg on the 31st of May and the Transvaal capital Pretoria on the 5th of June. He declared the war over on the 3rd of September 1900. President Kruger, unable to escape by land, eventually left southern Africa aboard the Dutch warship De Gelderland, sent by Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. He died in exile in Clarens, Switzerland, in 1904.

• 6. Guerrilla War and the Concentration Camps

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  Roberts had been wrong. The Boer commanders had met at Kroonstad before losing their capitals, and had planned a guerrilla campaign targeting railways and supply lines. By September 1900, Britain nominally controlled both republics but found it controlled only the ground its columns physically occupied.

  Boer commando units were sent back to the districts from which their members were recruited, where they had local knowledge, local support, and the ability to live off the land. Their orders were to strike fast and withdraw before British reinforcements could arrive. Across the vast distances of the republics, 250,000 British troops could not control the territory effectively using columns alone. As soon as a column left a district, British authority evaporated.

  Kitchener, now in command, responded with two overlapping strategies. The first was an expanding network of blockhouses, eventually numbering over 8,000 structures across the republics, linked by barbed wire to divide the veld into manageable sections. Each blockhouse cost between 800 and 1,000 pounds and took three months to build. Over 50,000 British troops, more than 50 battalions, were assigned to blockhouse duty. Not one bridge or railway section guarded by a manned blockhouse was destroyed during the war.

  The second strategy was scorched earth. British columns burned homesteads, destroyed crops, poisoned wells, and drove Boer and African civilians into concentration camps. Over 100,000 Boer civilians were forcibly relocated. In the camps, 26,000 died of starvation and disease. Indigenous Africans were interned separately, in 64 tented camps; 20,000 died there. A journalist named Emily Hobhouse eventually brought conditions in the Boer camps to British public attention, and the Fawcett Commission was convened, after which conditions in those camps improved. Improvements came far more slowly to the African camps.

  Among the unexpected presences in this war was Mohandas Gandhi, who at the Battle of Spion Kop organised an Ambulance Corps of 300 free burgher Indians and 800 indentured Indian labourers to serve on the British side. In Mafeking, the writer Sol Plaatje noted seeing horsemeat treated as food for the first time.

• 7. The Treaty and the Aftermath

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  By early 1902, British tactics of containment and denial were finally wearing down the Boers. Yet around 15,000 Boer fighters, almost half the total fighting strength, were still in the field in May 1902. Kitchener's campaign was expensive in time and money, and Britain was running short of both.

  Kitchener offered terms to the remaining Boer commanders. The "Bitter-enders" had repeatedly rejected British peace offers, including terms offered in March 1901, driven by hatred, loyalty to fallen comrades, religious conviction, and a desire for independence. But women and children were dying in the camps every day, and continued resistance looked increasingly futile. Most Boer commanders accepted the terms in the Treaty of Vereeniging, signed on the 31st of May 1902.

  The former Boer republics became the British colonies of the Transvaal and Orange River. The Boers received funds for reconstruction and a promise of limited self-government, which was granted in 1906 and 1907. In 1910, the Transvaal and Orange River colonies were merged with Natal and the Cape to form the Union of South Africa, a self-governing dominion of the British Empire.

  A trial for British war crimes, including the killing of civilians and prisoners of war, had been opened in January 1902, the first such proceeding of its kind in the modern era. International opinion had been broadly sympathetic to the Boers throughout the war: volunteers from the German Empire, the United States, Russia, Ireland, and even parts of the British Empire such as Australia had fought on the Boer side. Within Britain itself, significant opposition to the war had persisted from the beginning. Leander Starr Jameson, whose botched raid had helped ignite the entire conflict, was later named Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, serving from 1904 to 1908, and was eventually recognised as one of the founders of the Union of South Africa.