Gold mining

Prospectors established in 1886 the existence of a belt of gold-bearing reefs 40 miles (60 km) wide centred on present-day Johannesburg. The rapid growth of the gold-mining industry intensified processes started by the diamond boom: immigration, urbanization, capital investment, and labour migrancy. By 1899 the gold industry attracted investment worth £75 million, produced almost three-tenths of the world’s gold, and employed more than 100,000 people (the overwhelming majority of them Black migrant workers).

The world’s richest goldfield was also the most difficult to work. Although the gold ore was abundant, the layers of it ran extremely deep, and the ore contained little gold. To be profitable, gold mining had to be intensive and deep-level, requiring large inputs of capital and technology. A group system, whereby more than 100 companies had been arranged into nine holding companies, or “groups,” facilitated collusion between companies to reduce competition over labour and keep costs down. The gold mines rapidly established a pattern of labour recruitment, remuneration, and accommodation that left its stamp on subsequent social and economic relations in the country. White immigrant miners, because of their skills, scarcity, and political power, won relatively high wages. In contrast, the more numerous unskilled Black migrants from throughout Southern Africa, especially from present-day Mozambique, earned low pay (at century’s end about one-ninth the wage of white miners). Migrant miners were housed in compounds, which facilitated their control and reduced overhead costs.

The road to war

Even before the discovery of gold, the South African interior was an arena of tension and competition. Germany annexed South West Africa in 1884. The Transvaal claimed territory to its west; Britain countered by designating the territory the Bechuanaland protectorate and then annexed it as the crown colony of British Bechuanaland. Rhodes secured concessionary rights to land north of the Limpopo River, founded the British South Africa Company, and in 1890 dispatched a pioneer column to occupy what became known as Rhodesia.

While these forces jostled for position in the region at large, the domestic politics of the Transvaal became unsettled. Paul Kruger’s government made strenuous efforts to accommodate the mining industry, but it was soon at loggerheads with Britain, the mine magnates, and the British and other non-Afrikaner Uitlander (“Outlander”) immigrants. British policy makers expressed concern about the Transvaal’s potential as an independent actor, and deep-level-mine owners chafed at mine bosses’ corruption and inefficiency. The grievances of the Uitlanders, largely excluded from the vote, provided both cause and cover for a conspiracy between British officials and mining capitalists. An Uitlander uprising in Johannesburg was to be supported by an armed invasion from Bechuanaland, headed by Leander Starr Jameson, Rhodes’s lieutenant, who would intervene to “restore order.”

The plot was botched. The Uitlander rising did not take place, but Jameson went ahead with his incursion in December 1895, and within days he and his force had been rounded up. While Rhodes had to resign as prime minister of the Cape, British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain managed to conceal his complicity. The Jameson Raid polarized Anglo-Boer sentiment in South Africa, simultaneously exacerbating republican suspicions, Uitlander agitation, and imperial anxieties.

In February 1898 Kruger was elected to a fourth term as president of the Transvaal. He entered a series of negotiations with Sir Alfred Milner (who became high commissioner and governor of the Cape in 1897) over the issue of the Uitlander franchise. Milner declared in private early in 1898 that “war has got to come” and adopted intransigent positions. The Cape government, headed by William P. Schreiner, attempted to mediate, as did Marthinus Steyn, the president of Free State, even while he attached his cause to Kruger’s. In September 1899 the two Boer republics gave an ultimatum to Britain, and, when it expired on October 11, Boer forces invaded Natal.

The South African War (1899–1902)

While the government of Lord Salisbury in Britain went to war to secure its hegemony in Southern Africa, the Boer republics did so to preserve their independence. The expensive and brutal colonial war lasted two and a half years and pitted almost 500,000 imperial troops against 87,000 republican burghers, Cape “rebels,” and foreign volunteers. The numerical weakness of the Boers was offset by their familiarity with the terrain, support from the Afrikaner populace, and the poor leadership and dated tactics of the British command. Although often styled a “white man’s war,” both sides used Blacks extensively as labour, and at least 10,000 Blacks fought for the British.

In the first phase of the war, Boer armies took the offensive and punished British forces at Colenso, Stormberg, and Magersfontein in December 1899 (“Black Week”). During 1900 Britain rushed reinforcements to the front, relieved sieges at Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking, and took Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, and Pretoria. In the third phase, Boer commandos avoided conventional engagements in favour of guerrilla warfare. The British commander, Lord Kitchener, devised a scorched-earth policy against the commandos and the rural population supporting them, in which he destroyed arms, blockaded the countryside, and placed the civilian population in concentration camps. Some 25,000 Afrikaner women and children died of disease and malnutrition in these camps, while 14,000 Blacks died in separate camps. In Britain the Liberal opposition vehemently objected to the government’s methods for winning the war.

Boer forces, which at the end consisted of about 20,000 exhausted and demoralized troops, sued for peace in May 1902. The Treaty of Vereeniging reflected the conclusive military victory of British power but made a crucial concession. It promised that the “question of granting the franchise to natives [Blacks]” would be addressed only after self-government had been restored to the former Boer republics. The treaty thus allowed the white minority to decide the political fate of the Black majority.