Second Boer War (South African War)

The Second Boer War was fought from 1899 to 1902 between the British Empire and two independent republics in southern Africa: the South African Republic (usually called the Transvaal) and the Orange Free State. Their white citizens were Boers, today usually called Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch, German and French settlers who had lived in southern Africa since the seventeenth century.

The war has several names, and each tells us something. In Britain it was long called the Boer War. Afrikaners called it the Tweede Vryheidsoorlog, the “Second War of Freedom”. Many South African historians now prefer the name South African War, because it affected everyone living in the region, including the Black African majority, Coloured people and Indians, not only the Boers and the British.

It was the largest and most expensive war Britain fought between 1815 and 1914. It is remembered for the early Boer victories, the guerrilla war that followed, and above all for the concentration camps in which tens of thousands of civilians died.

Long before Europeans arrived, southern Africa was home to Khoekhoe herders, San hunter-gatherers and many Bantu-speaking peoples, such as the Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, Tswana and Pedi, who farmed and kept cattle. From 1652 the Dutch East India Company built a settlement at the Cape. Over the next two centuries settlers spread inland, taking land and forcing many Khoekhoe and San into servitude.

Britain took the Cape in the early nineteenth century. In the 1830s and 1840s thousands of Boers left British rule in the “Great Trek” and moved inland, fighting and making treaties with African kingdoms. They founded the Orange Free State and the South African Republic, which Britain recognised in the 1850s. In both republics citizenship and land ownership were reserved for white men, and Black Africans had no political rights.

Britain annexed the Transvaal in 1877, but the Boers rose up and defeated the British at Majuba in 1881 in what is now called the First Boer War. The Transvaal regained self-government. By then British power in the region had grown, including through the defeat of the Zulu Kingdom in 1879.

In 1886 enormous gold deposits were found on the Witwatersrand in the Transvaal. Johannesburg grew almost overnight, and the Transvaal became the richest territory in southern Africa. Tens of thousands of foreign workers and businessmen, many of them British, arrived. The Boers called them Uitlanders (“outlanders”). The Transvaal government under President Paul Kruger taxed the mining industry and made it very hard for Uitlanders to gain the vote, because it feared that they would soon outnumber the Boer citizens.

Mine owners and British imperialists, notably Cecil Rhodes, wanted a government friendlier to mining and to British power. At the end of 1895 Rhodes’s associate Leander Starr Jameson led an armed raid into the Transvaal, hoping to trigger an Uitlander uprising. The Jameson Raid failed completely and made the Boers deeply suspicious of Britain. The Orange Free State drew closer to the Transvaal.

From 1897 the British High Commissioner Sir Alfred Milner pressed the Uitlander grievance hard, and talks with Kruger at Bloemfontein in 1899 broke down. Britain moved troops towards the border. On 9 October 1899 Kruger sent an ultimatum demanding their withdrawal; when it expired, the two republics went to war on 11 October.

Historians still debate the main cause: the British wish to control the gold mines, a broader struggle over who would dominate southern Africa, the rights of the Uitlanders, or the personalities of Milner and Kruger. What almost all agree on is that neither side intended to share power with the Black African majority; both claimed to rule over them.

First phase (October 1899 – January 1900): The Boers struck first. Their mounted commandos, armed with modern Mauser rifles, invaded Natal and the Cape and besieged the towns of Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking. In one week in December 1899, later called “Black Week”, the British lost three battles at Stormberg, Magersfontein and Colenso, and in January 1900 they suffered another bloody defeat at Spion Kop.

Second phase (February – September 1900): Britain sent huge reinforcements under Lord Roberts, with Lord Kitchener as his chief of staff. Kimberley was relieved in February 1900, the Boer general Piet Cronjé surrendered with about 4,000 men at Paardeberg on 27 February, and Ladysmith was relieved the next day. The British took Bloemfontein in March, relieved Mafeking in May and captured Johannesburg and Pretoria in May and June. Britain declared both republics annexed, and Kruger left for Europe.

Third phase (September 1900 – May 1902): Instead of surrendering, Boer leaders such as Christiaan de Wet, Koos de la Rey, Louis Botha and Jan Smuts turned to guerrilla warfare. Small commandos attacked railways, convoys and isolated posts and then disappeared into the countryside, supported by farms. Kitchener, now in command, responded by burning farms, building thousands of blockhouses linked by barbed wire, sweeping the land in huge “drives”, and removing civilians into camps.

At the start both sides said that this was a “white man’s war” and that Black Africans should not be armed. In reality the war could not be fought without them. Black and Coloured men worked as wagon drivers, labourers, messengers, scouts, spies and guards. The British army employed roughly 100,000 of them, and historians estimate that somewhere between about 10,000 and 30,000 Black men were armed on the British side, often as guards on blockhouses or as scouts, although the British government did not like to admit it.

On the Boer side, thousands of agterryers (literally “after-riders”), usually Black or Coloured servants, accompanied their masters on commando, looking after horses, cooking and sometimes fighting. Boer commandos often executed armed Black men or Coloured men they captured. In the Cape town of Calvinia in 1901, a Coloured blacksmith named Abraham Esau, who had organised local resistance to the Boers, was beaten and shot by a Boer commando; his story was later studied by the historian Bill Nasson.

African communities also pursued their own goals. At the siege of Mafeking, the Barolong people of the Mafikeng settlement helped defend the town, while the British commander Robert Baden-Powell cut the rations of Black residents, forcing many to leave or starve. The young Tswana interpreter Sol Plaatje kept a diary of the siege, one of the few Black eyewitness accounts of the war. In the western Transvaal, the Kgatla under Linchwe fought Boer commandos, and in May 1902, Zulu fighters of the abaQulusi killed dozens of Boers at Holkrantz in revenge for Boer attacks.

Many Black South Africans hoped that a British victory would bring them the rights enjoyed by some Black voters in the Cape Colony. Those hopes were bitterly disappointed. After the war, land taken during the fighting was often returned to Boer farmers, and the peace treaty postponed any decision on Black voting rights.

To defeat the guerrillas, the British destroyed the farms and crops that fed them. Tens of thousands of farmhouses were burned (a figure of about 30,000 is often quoted), and livestock was killed or taken. Women, children and old men who were left homeless, together with families of Boers who had surrendered, were moved into camps. The British at first called them refugee camps; the term “concentration camp” came into use during the war.

There were more than 40 camps for white Boer civilians. The camps were overcrowded and poorly supplied. For a time, families of men still fighting received smaller rations. Measles, typhoid, dysentery and pneumonia spread quickly. About 26,000–28,000 Boer civilians died, the great majority of them children under sixteen. For Afrikaners this became one of the most painful memories in their history.

Black Africans removed from the land were placed in separate camps, of which there were more than 60 (estimates range from 64 to about 80), with over 115,000 people by 1902. Conditions were often even worse. Many internees had to grow their own food or work for the army to buy food; the army ran the camps partly as a way to supply labour. The official figure of Black deaths is about 14,000, but because the records are incomplete historians believe the true figure was at least 20,000, and most of the dead were children.

In 1901 the British welfare campaigner Emily Hobhouse visited camps and published a report that shocked the public in Britain. The Liberal leader Henry Campbell-Bannerman condemned “methods of barbarism”. A government commission of women led by Millicent Fawcett confirmed many of her findings, and conditions in the white camps improved from late 1901. The Black camps received much less attention, and their improvement came later.

By 1902 both sides were exhausted. Boer representatives met at Vereeniging and, after bitter debate, accepted British terms. The Treaty of Vereeniging was signed in Pretoria on 31 May 1902. The Boers accepted British sovereignty; in return Britain promised self-government in the future, allowed the use of Dutch in schools and courts, and provided money for reconstruction.

One clause was fateful. It stated that the question of granting the vote to “natives” would not be decided until after self-government was introduced. In practice this meant that white voters would decide, and they did not extend the vote. When the former republics joined the Cape and Natal in the Union of South Africa in 1910, political power remained in white hands.

Black leaders responded by organising. In 1912 they founded the South African Native National Congress, later the African National Congress (ANC), with Sol Plaatje as its first general secretary. The Natives Land Act of 1913 restricted Black land ownership to a small part of the country, a step on the road to apartheid.

In South Africa, the war and especially the camps strengthened Afrikaner nationalism. Former Boer generals Louis Botha and Jan Smuts became leaders of the Union and worked for reconciliation with Britain, but other Afrikaners never forgave the British. The memory of suffering became part of a political movement that eventually brought the National Party to power in 1948 and introduced apartheid, a system that oppressed the very Black South Africans who had also suffered in the war.

In Britain, the war shook confidence in the empire. Early defeats and the poor health of many volunteers led to army reforms and to worries about “national efficiency”. The camps scandal damaged the government and helped the Liberals win the 1906 election. Wild celebrations after the relief of Mafeking gave English a new word, “mafficking”, for noisy public rejoicing.

For Canada, Australia and New Zealand, sending contingents was an important step in forming national identities within the empire. In South Africa, the lawyer Mohandas Gandhi organised an Indian ambulance corps that carried wounded British soldiers at Colenso and Spion Kop, hoping that loyalty would win rights for Indians; the young Winston Churchill, a war correspondent, became famous after escaping from a Boer prison. The war also saw new weapons and methods, from smokeless rifles to barbed wire and blockhouses, that anticipated features of the First World War.

Afrikaner memory centres on the camps and on heroic resistance. The National Women’s Monument in Bloemfontein, unveiled in 1913, honours the women and children who died in the camps, and Emily Hobhouse’s ashes were placed there after her death. For generations Afrikaner children learned about the war as a story of a small nation fighting for freedom against a mighty empire.

British memory long focused on battles, the sieges and imperial heroes, and on the poems of Rudyard Kipling. The camps were for many years remembered as a regrettable result of disorganisation rather than a central fact of the war. The execution of the Australian officer Harry “Breaker” Morant in 1902 became a lasting controversy in Australia.

For most of the twentieth century, Black South African experiences were almost absent from official memory. That began to change from the 1970s and 1980s, as historians uncovered Black participation and the Black camps. Around the centenary of the war (1999–2002), after the end of apartheid, South Africa emphasised the name “South African War” and the idea that the war belonged to all its peoples. Memorials and research now recognise the Black camp victims, although many of their graves are still unmarked.

The British side left enormous official records: military dispatches, the camp registers and monthly returns, parliamentary papers (“blue books”), the report of the Fawcett Commission, and the multi-volume official history. Newspapers sent many correspondents, among them Churchill and Arthur Conan Doyle, whose The Great Boer War (1900) was a popular pro-British account.

Boer perspectives survive in diaries, letters and memoirs such as Deneys Reitz’s Commando (1929), written by a young commando fighter, and in testimonies collected from camp survivors, especially women, which were published in Afrikaans in the decades after the war. Such testimonies are powerful, but many were gathered in the context of growing Afrikaner nationalism, and historians read them with care.

Black voices are much rarer in the written record, which is itself a historical problem. Sol Plaatje’s siege diary, lost for decades and published only in 1973, is a precious exception. Historians have also used camp records, claims for compensation, court records, missionary papers and African-language newspapers to recover Black experiences, and the British Concentration Camps database project based at the University of Cape Town has made camp registers searchable.

Older British histories told a military story of battles and generals, while Afrikaner nationalist histories stressed British cruelty and Boer heroism. Thomas Pakenham’s The Boer War (1979) reached a wide audience and used new archival sources; it gave serious attention to the camps and to Black participation, and argued that mining interests and Milner’s policy played a large part in causing the war.

Peter Warwick’s Black People and the South African War (1983) and Bill Nasson’s work, including Abraham Esau’s War (1991) and The South African War 1899–1902 (1999), transformed the field by showing that Black Africans were central participants and victims, not bystanders. Research on the Black camps by scholars including Stowell Kessler and Garrett Benneyworth has pushed the estimated death toll upward and examined the camps as systems of labour control.

The camps themselves remain debated. Some Afrikaner writers have called them genocidal. Many historians, including Elizabeth van Heyningen in her social history of the camps, argue that most deaths resulted from epidemic disease, especially measles, made deadly by overcrowding, poor sanitation, bad administration and military priorities, rather than from a plan to exterminate. Others stress that whatever the intention, the policy of clearing the land made civilians pay for a military strategy. Debate also continues over the causes of the war, from gold and capitalism to strategic rivalry and the ambitions of individual leaders.