The Boer War - a forgotten conflict

British Empire fights Dutch white settlers over African diamonds and gold

Greetings to Gold and Silver Level Templar Knights! I’ve always been intrigued by the Boer War - a forgotten war between the British Empire and Dutch white settlers in southern Africa. Let’s take a closer look at this terrible conflict.

The Boer War - a huge and bloody conflict that dominated the news at the turn of the 20th century. The biggest military conflict since the wars against Napoleon Bonaparte. And a grim foreshadowing of the two World Wars that lay ahead. Yet today, it's large forgotten. Why?

It's quite a tale...

The Dutch arrive in South Africa

Let's go back to Europe's first contact with the southern tip of Africa...

The Portuguese got to the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 and for decades fought and traded with the local Khoekhoe people. Then in 1652, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC for short) established the Cape Colony. Like the Portuguese, they wanted to protect the lucrative spice trade routes to the east.

The Dutch initially traded with the Khoekhoe but tensions rose as the new settlers decided to sink firmer roots and seized land for agriculture. The Khoekhoe were introduced to the notions of private property and capitalism - and they didn't like what they saw. Violent conflict arose but posed no threat to Dutch control. Worse was to follow. The Dutch took to coercing local Africans into slave labour on their estates.

One result of this was outbreaks of smallpox in the 18th century that thinned out the Khoekhoe population. The Dutch tackled this problem by importing slave labour from Portuguese controlled Angola and Mozambique, Madagascar, and even the Dutch East Indies - hence the "Cape Malay" population of Cape Town today.

The growing white population in the Cape was predominantly Dutch but also included Huguenots (French Protestants fleeing Catholic persecution) and Germans. A variant of Dutch, Afrikaans, became the lingua franca and the Dutch Reformed Church was the main religion. The economy was land-based and relied heavily on slaves. Together these white settlers became known collectively as the Boers, the Afrikaans word for 'farmers'.

Britain seizes the Cape Colony

In 1795, France invaded the Netherlands. This was revolutionary France that had just guillotined its king Louis XVI, his wife Marie Antoinette, and declared itself a republic. Relations with Britain were souring rapidly and very soon a Corsican general, Napoleon Bonaparte, would take power in France and lock the two European imperial powers into a prolonged war.

The last "stadtholder" (ruler) of the Netherlands, Prince William of Orange, fled to England and begged the British government to protect the Dutch colonies from the French. London didn't need a second invitation. The Dutch said protect. The British heard invade. In 1806, a decisive battle wrested control of the Cape Colony from the Dutch Boers, placing it in British hands. The following year Britain prohibited the slave trade followed by a total ban on slavery in 1833.

All of which was too much for the slave-owning Boers. They upped sticks embarking on the Great Trek northwards into the African interior to create new republics free from British interference. This exodus, for about a decade from 1835, became part of Boer folklore. A stream of kakebeenwoens (covered wagons) crossed the rugged landscape. These Boers became known as the voortrekkers (pioneers). Dressed in dopper coats and kappies (bonnets), fighting the Zulu and Ndebele peoples, and stricken by malaria and hunger. All of which stiffened their resolve.

Once in their new homeland, they established the Orange Free State, Transvaal, and the short-lived Natalia republic. From the start the British made it crystal clear they would not be recognising these new Boer-run homelands. At some point, the writ of Queen Victoria would extend across the whole of South Africa.

And two things motivated Britain to crush Boer independence: gold and diamonds. Once it became clear that these minerals lay in abundance under the surface of South Africa, British voices urging all-out war dominated.

Below is a centenary celebration in 1938 of the Voortrekker covered wagon movement (article continues below).

Diamonds unearthed in the Transvaal

In 1867, a sparkly rock was picked up by the daughter of a poor labourer working on the farm of a Boer, Schalk van Niekerck. Contemporary newspaper reports stated that the girl took the strange, shiny stone to her mother who gave it a quick glance, shrugged her shoulders, and returned the find to her daughter as a plaything.

Sadly for the family, eagle-eyed Nikerck was riding by and offered a little money to the girl suspecting the stone was of considerable value. She laughed, saying who had ever heard of selling a stone and handed it over for free. He sold it on for £500 - or nearly £50,000 at today's value. Once the news was out that large diamonds were present in the area, the prospectors swarmed in.

The Boers had imagined that leaving the southern coast of South Africa and setting themselves up in the interior would guarantee their peace and independence - barring a bit of hostility from the African tribes they had dispossessed. But sniffing a minerals-led bonanza, the British began encroaching. In 1877, they brazenly annexed Transvaal.

The Boer leader, Paul Kruger, complained to the British government in London but there was little sympathy for a people seen as uncouth and vulgar. Descriptions by British diplomats of Kruger are highly unflattering with the implicit assumption that everybody in South Africa would be better off united under Queen Victoria and her civilised empire upon which the sun would never set.

The disagreeable Kruger pictured below.

The First Boer War breaks out

The greasiness of Kruger's hair and his constant spitting were detailed in the pages of the posh British newspapers to the horror of imperial decision makers in the gentlemen's clubs of Pall Mall. How could these backwards farmers be entrusted with so much territory - under which sat so much wealth?

Kruger and the Boers could see where this was all heading. In 1880, they gave up attempts at peaceful negotiation and revolted.

Not everybody in London thought the empire should be immersing itself in South Africa. One member of parliament calculated that the cost of controlling the Transvaal would be like sending a million soldiers to subdue Ireland. The empire was already in the throes of violent conflict in Afghanistan and had the vast expanse of India to pacify. Why on earth trigger yet another war?

But the British war party had a more compelling argument: think of the diamonds! Britain had just won a war against the Zulus. It could mop up the Boers. Those rustics were no match for soldiers fresh from fighting in the Khyber Pass. Then the mining companies would roll in to extract the diamonds and gold sitting under the Transvaal.

But...that was not how things turned out.

The first Boer War of 1880 to 1881 was a three month skirmish in which the guerrilla tactics of the Boers bested the well-trained British troops. Prime Minister William Gladstone in faraway London ordered a truce to be negotiated. The Boers would continue running the Transvaal under nominal British oversight.

Then years later, the biggest gold find in history occurred at Witwatersrand making a second Boer war inevitable.

The Second Boer War

Africa was rapidly carved up by the European powers in the last quarter of the 19th century. To either side of South Africa, the Portuguese ruled Mozambique and Angola, the Belgians were in the Congo and Germany was staking claims to part of south-west Africa. Plus there was always the French.

Britain strove to carve a corridor through eastern Africa starting in Egypt, absorbing Sudan, Uganda and Kenya, but then running into what was German-controlled Tanzania (without Zanzibar) until the First World War - when Britain took it. After Tanzania, the corridor continued with Northern and Southern Rhodesia (Zambia and Zimbabwe today) until it hit the Boer controlled republics of Orange Free State and the Transvaal. That blocked the corridor again, cutting off the Cape Colony.

However, things were moving rapidly in Britain's favour. So-called Uitlanders ("foreigners" in Afrikaans) flooded into Transvaal digging for gold and diamonds. The demographic balance tipped away from the governing Boers. As many of these prospectors were British, the empire supported their calls for greater political representation and the vote. Imperialism and economic greed could be presented as a struggle for civil rights and universal suffrage.

Paul Kruger wasn't falling for it. Although keen to avoid fighting the British, hotter heads prevailed among the Boers. The Second Boer War was fought on a grander, bloodier scale to the first conflict and lasted from 1899 to 1902. It drew in hundreds of thousands of soldiers from across the British Empire - Canada to India and Australia. The Boers, however, proved to be a formidable and terrifying enemy.