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    The Boer War 1899–1902
    The Boer War 1899–1902
    The Boer War 1899–1902
    Ebook153 pages2 hours

    The Boer War 1899–1902

    By Gregory Fremont-Barnes

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    About this ebook

    Victorious in its previous campaigns in Africa against native armies, Britain now confronted an altogether different foe. The Boers proved to be formidable opponents, masterfully compensating for inferior numbers with grim determination, resourcefulness and strong religious faith. Their mobility, expert use of cover, and knowledge of the terrain, in which they employed powerful long-range magazine rifles, gave them initial advantages. By contrast the British suffered from inadequate transport, insufficient mounted troops and poor intelligence. Despite marshalling the immense resources of their empire, the British were to be severely tested in a war which one general described as 'the graveyard of many a soldier's reputation'.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateJun 6, 2014
    ISBN9781472810175
    The Boer War 1899–1902
    Author

    Gregory Fremont-Barnes

    Gregory Fremont-Barnes is Senior Lecturer in War Studies at Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. He has previously lectured around the world and holds a doctorate in Modern History from Oxford. He has written widely on military history, and currently lectures at Sandhurst on the conduct of the Falklands War. He lives in Surrey.

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      The Boer War 1899–1902 - Gregory Fremont-Barnes

      Background to war

      Historical roots of the conflict

      European settlement of southern Africa began in 1652 when the Dutch East India Company, in search of a provision station and port of call on the route to the East Indies, sent Jan Van Riebeeck to the Cape of Good Hope. Within a few years a farming community of settlers, ‘burghers,’ sprouted, supplying meat and vegetables to passing ships. By 1657 the Dutch fell out with the local native tribe and wrested grazing lands from them. Shortly thereafter the settlers moved into the interior, beyond the reach of the Dutch East India Company, and in doing so began a tradition of independent living which would become the hallmark of their descendants. But the burghers were not to be completely self-sufficient, for at the same time they brought slaves into their settlement. Shortly into the new century the burghers numbered about 1,800, including some Huguenots who had fled the persecutions of Louis XIV, and a thousand slaves. By the early 18th century these farmers, or Boers, had developed a dialect of Dutch which, over time, developed into Afrikaans, and a new race of people – Afrikaners – came into being. Some of them populated the area around Cape Town, but most lived in isolated farmsteads on the veld, living hard, frugal lives based on Dutch Calvinism and a fierce individualism. The land was, in their view, theirs by the grace of God, and they felt a natural superiority over the natives, with whom they frequently fought and whom they sometimes subjugated.

      The Cape remained a Dutch colony until 1806 when a British expedition, seeking to dispossess Napoleon’s ally of an important strategic post on the vital route to India, landed and seized the colony. The British formally annexed the Cape in 1815, and £6 million was given to Holland in compensation. Relations between the British authorities and the new wave of settlers, and the Boers, deteriorated with the abolition of slavery within the British Empire in 1833, which the Boers bitterly resented. This interference in their way of life not only threatened them economically, but introduced an element of democracy inconsistent with the Boers’ sense of their own racial superiority over black Africans.

      Therefore, between 1836 and 1840 approximately 4,000 ‘Voortrekkers,’ or early migrants, set out north on what became known as the ‘Great Trek’ in search of new lands to cultivate and freedom from British rule. Once across the Orange River the Boers divided between those settling in the Transvaal, and those who proceeded east into Natal. This second group, under Piet Retief, negotiated a treaty with the Zulus in February 1838, but Retief and his men were then treacherously massacred at a gathering ostensibly arranged to celebrate the agreement. Nearly 300 other Boers were also killed in a raid on their camp, prompting retaliation from those who remained. On 16 December the decisive battle of Blood River took place beside the Ncome, where 3,000 Zulus were killed out of a force of about 10,000 when they flung themselves against a wagon laager defended by a mere 530 Boers, of whom only three were wounded behind the tightly chained vehicles. Over succeeding decades there would be numerous other confrontations with indigenous peoples, but Blood River must be marked out as a seminal event in the development of Afrikaner identity. Thereafter, Afrikaners saw their victory as divinely given and the event led to the establishment of three communities – in the Transvaal, in the area that would become known as the Orange Free State, and in Natal.

      It was not long, however, before British influence extended into the new areas settled by the Voortrekkers. Britain annexed Natal in 1842, cutting off the Boers’ access to the sea by taking the strategic port of Durban. Nevertheless, by the Sand River Convention of 1852 Britain did recognize the sovereignty of the Transvaal (officially, the South African Republic or Zuid Afrika Republik (ZAR)), and two years later withdrew from the area north of the Orange River, which then became the Orange Free State. British interest in the region resumed with the chance discovery, in 1867, of diamonds. This discovery triggered a rush of several thousand prospectors to the area along the Orange, Vaal and Harts Rivers. But it was not until three years later that the discovery of diamonds in dry soil on a farm owned by Johannes Nicolaas de Beer caused the influx of tens of thousands of fortune-seekers and, in 1871, the mining town of Kimberley sprouted up with a population of 50,000 people, the focus of an extremely lucrative industry. At about the same time Britain annexed Griqualand West, an area also rich in diamonds, despite the outcry caused in the Orange Free

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