Nowhere in Africa did the European
presence grow more rapidly than in
the south. During the eighteenth century,
Dutch settlers from the Cape
Colony began to migrate eastward into
territory inhabited by local Khoisanand
Bantu-speaking peoples entering
the area from the north. Internecine
warfare among the Bantus had largely
depopulated the region, facilitating
occupation of the land by the Boers,
the Afrikaans-speaking farmers descended
from the original Dutch settlers
in the seventeenth century. But
in the early nineteenth century, a
Bantu people called the Zulus, under a
talented ruler named Shaka, counterattacked,
setting off a series of wars between
the Europeans and the Zulus.
Eventually, Shaka was overthrown,
and the Boers continued their advance
northeastward during the so-called Great Trek of the mid-
1830s. By 1865, the total European population of the area
had risen to nearly 200,000 people.
The Boers’ eastward migration was provoked in part by
the British seizure of the Cape from the Dutch during the
Napoleonic Wars. The British government was generally
more sympathetic to the rights of the local African population
than were the Afrikaners, many of whom saw
white superiority as ordained by God and fled from British
rule to control their own destiny. Eventually, the
Boers formed their own independent republics, the Orange
Free State and the South African Republic (usually
known as Transvaal). Much of the African population in
these areas was confined to reserves.
The discovery of gold and diamonds in the Transvaal
complicated the situation. Clashes between the Afrikaner
population and foreign (mainly British) miners and
developers led to an attempt by Cecil Rhodes, prime minister
of the Cape Colony and a prominent entrepreneur
in the area, to subvert the Transvaal and bring it under
British rule. In 1899, the so-called Boer War broke out
between Britain and the Transvaal, which was backed by
the Orange Free State. Guerrilla resistance by the Boers
was fierce, but the vastly superior forces of the British
were able to prevail by 1902. To compensate the defeated
Afrikaner population for the loss of independence, the
British government agreed that only whites would vote in
the now essentially self-governing
colony. The Boers were placated, but
the brutalities committed during the
war (the British introduced an institution
later to be known as the concentration
camp) created bitterness
on both sides that continued to fester
for decades.
World History
