Litnet

Hierdie is 'n ou laai van Henn, gee jou 'n oordosis uit 'n woordeboek en beskou dan daarmee die debat gewonne. Maar die werklike historiese konteks en toepaslike feite die sal jy nie uit Henn kry nie. Daarom is bogenoemde 'n perfekte uiteensetting. Net so min soos sy 'katolieke kerk' bestaan, was apartheid die skuld van Brittanje of sy chow 'n bewys van rasse. Het Henn hoegenaamd 'n houvas op die werklikheid, die feite van die bestaan soos dit daarna uitsien en waarmee gedink word. 

Hello, 

Dirk

Neelsie is soos 'n standard ses seuntjie wat wil voorgee hy weet meer omtrent S.A. geskiedenis as die geleerde intelektueles hierbo deur jouself en Wouter aangehaal, nl. Dugard, John; Bethlehem, Daniel L.; Du Plessis, Max; John Darwin; en selfs Gilomee.

Ek self is hoegenaamd nie naastenby in die intelektuele klas van genoemde geleerdes nie, maar sal beslis nie my verwerdig om my tyd en energie te mors op die bekrompe Neelsie wat alle onderwerpe vanuit 'n verstompte en kortsigtige lewensbeskouing probeer regverdig; en dit sê veel.
 

Die jonger geslag sal waarskynlik nie weet nie, maar daar was 'n tyd toe 'God save our Queen'  na afsluiting van bioskoopvertonings gesing is en daar op amptelike posstukke, l 'in her majesty's service' gestaan 

 'n Artikel 'History of South Africa, soos dit in Encyclopedia Brittanica verskyn, bied nogal 'n goeie oorsig, oor die Suid Afrikaanse geskiedenis.  'n Mens hoef nie noodwendig met al die bevindinge saam te stem nie want dit is duidelik dat feitlik onmoontlik is om 100% objektief gebeurtenisse te beoordeel.

Introduction
history of the area from prehistoric times to the present.
The prehistory and history of South Africa span nearly the entire known existence of humans and their ancestors—some three million years or more—and include the wandering of small bands of hominids through the savanna, the inception of herding and farming as ways of life, and the construction of large urban centres.

Through this diversity of human experience, several trends can be identified: technological and economic change, shifting systems of belief, and, in the earlier phases of humanity, the interplay between physical evolution and learned behaviour, or culture. Over much of this human career, South Africa's past is also the past of a far wider area, and it is only in the past few centuries that this southernmost country of Africa has had a history of its own.

Prehistory
The earliest creatures that can be identified as direct ancestors of modern humans are classified as australopithecines (literally, “southern apes”), of which the first specimen to be described (in 1925) was the skull of a child from a quarry site at Taung (now in Northern Cape province). Subsequently, more australopithecine bones have been found preserved in limestone caves in the Transvaal region, where they had originally been deposited, up to three million years ago, by predators and scavengers.

 Australopithecines walked upright, fashioned simple tools from stone and bone, and lived by gathering plant foods and scavenging for meat.In common with that of other parts of the world, South Africa's prehistory has been divided into a series of phases based on broad patterns of technology. The primary distinction is between a reliance on chipped and flaked stone implements (the Stone Age) and the ability to work iron (the Iron Age).

The Stone Age, which in itself spans almost all human history, is further divided into early, middle, and late stages. The simple stone tools found with australopithecine fossil bones fall into the earliest part of the Early Stone Age.
The Early Stone Age
Early humans were evolving both in their physical form, gaining greater dexterity and mental ability, and in their cultural adaptations to the world. In recognition of the physical changes that were taking place, the fossil bones are divided into different genera and species. The genus Homo developed from and evolved alongside the genus Australopithecus before superseding the more archaic form. Early species of Homo also made stone tools that belong to the Early Stone Age; most Early Stone Age sites in South Africa were probably left by people classified as Homo erectus.

Simply modified stones, hand axes, scraping tools, and other bifacial artifacts were used for a wide variety of purposes, including butchering animal carcasses, scraping hides, and digging for plant foods. Most Early Stone Age archaeological sites in South Africa are the remains of open camps, often by the sides of rivers and lakes, although people also lived in rock shelters, such as Montagu Cave in the Cape.

The Early Stone Age was a period of very slow change: for more than a million years and over a wide geographic area, there were only the slightest differences in the forms of stone tools. However, the slow alterations in physical appearance that took place over the same time period are sufficient for physical anthropologists to recognize new species in the genus Homo. By about 500,000 years ago, some people were sufficiently modern in appearance to be considered an archaic form of Homo sapiens: important specimens belonging to this physical type have been found at Hopefield in Western Cape and at the Cave of Hearths in Mpumalanga.

 The Middle Stone Age
Sometime after 200,000 years ago this long episode of slow cultural and physical evolution gave way to a period of more rapid change. Hand axes and big bifacial stone tools were no longer made, and people began to use stone flakes and blades to fashion scrapers, spear points, and parts for hafted, composite implements—a technological stage that has become known as the Middle Stone Age.There are numerous Middle Stone Age sites in South Africa.

 People continued to live in open camps, while rock overhangs also were used for shelter. Day-to-day debris has survived to provide some evidence of early ways of life, although plant foods, which must have been important, are rarely preserved. Middle Stone Age bands hunted medium-size and large prey such as antelope and zebra, although they tended to avoid the largest and most dangerous animals such as the elephant and rhinoceros. Sometimes they collected tortoises and ostrich eggs in large quantities, as well as seabirds and marine mammals that could be found along the shore. The rich archaeological deposits of Klasies River Mouth Cave, on the Cape coast west of Port Elizabeth, preserve the earliest evidence in the world for the use of shellfish as a food source.Klasies River Mouth Cave also is important for the evidence it provides for the emergence of anatomically modern humans.

Some of the human skeletons from the lower levels of this site, possibly as old as 115,000 years, are modern in form. Equally early fossils have been excavated at Border Cave, in the mountainous region between KwaZulu/Natal and Swaziland. This archaeological evidence is consistent with the results of research by geneticists, some of whom believe that there was a single ancestral population of modern humans living in Africa about 200,000 years ago.

 Although it is still uncertain that there was indeed only a single centre for this last stage of human evolution, there is no doubt that the Border Cave and Klasies River Mouth people were some of the earliest representatives of modern humans.

The Late Stone Age

About 40,000 years ago people again began to change their basic techniques of toolmaking. Small, finely worked stone implements known as microliths began to become common, and the heavier scrapers and points of the Middle Stone Age less frequent. Archaeologists refer to this new technological stage as the Late Stone Age. The new ways of working stone again reflect an accelerating pace of change. In contrast to the almost static millennia of the Early Stone Age and the slow cultural changes of the Middle Stone Age, Late Stone Age people were far more responsive to changes in their environment.

The numerous collections of stone tools from South African archaeological sites dating to the past 40,000 years show, in consequence, a great degree of variation through time and across the subcontinent.Like their predecessors, Late Stone Age people relied heavily on plant foods, the remains of which have been well preserved at sites such as Melkhoutboom Cave, De Hangen, and Diepkloof in the Cape region. Animals were trapped and hunted with spears and arrows on which were mounted fine stone blades.

 In many areas people moved with the seasons, following game into higher lands in the spring and early summer months, when new flushes of plant foods could also be found. When available, rock overhangs were occupied; otherwise, windbreaks were used for shelter. Coastal resources were important, resulting in numerous shell middens scattered along the full length of the South African coastline. Shellfish, crayfish, seals, and seabirds were collected or caught along the shore, and fish were caught on lines, with spears, in traps, and possibly with nets.Late Stone Age communities are the first to have left evidence for complex systems of belief, probably because sophisticated symbolic abilities are uniquely part of the anatomically modern condition—earlier forms of humans probably did not think in this way.

 There are numerous engravings on rock surfaces, mostly on the interior plateau, and paintings on the walls of rock shelters in the mountainous regions of South Africa, such as the Drakensberg and Cedarberg ranges. Dating is difficult, but it is clear that the art spans at least the past 25,000 years. South African rock art was originally seen either as the work of exotic foreigners such as Minoans or Phoenicians or as the product of primitive minds.

 Now it is widely accepted that the paintings were closely associated with the work of medicine people: shamans who were involved in the well-being of the band and often worked in a state of trance. Specific representations include trance dances, metaphors for trance such as death and flight, rainmaking, and control of the movement of antelope herds.

Pastoralism and early agriculture

About 2,000 years ago, new ways of living came to South Africa. From their earliest years, human communities had lived by gathering plant foods and by hunting, trapping, and scavenging for meat. However, people began to make use of domesticated animals and plants. In the east, where rainfall is adequate, crops could be grown and cattle, sheep, and goats herded near permanent villages and towns. In the west, where the climate is arid or where rain falls at the wrong times of the year for African cultivated plants, domestic livestock were kept by nomadic pastoralists, who moved over wide territories with their flocks and herds.

The origin of nomadic pastoralism in South Africa is still obscure. Linguistic evidence points to northern Botswana as a centre of origin, and this is supported by sheep bones, found in the same archaeological levels as pottery, that have been dated to about 150 BC from Bambata Cave in southwestern Zimbabwe. It is still unclear whether new communities moved into South Africa with their flocks and herds or whether established hunter-gatherer bands took up completely new ways of living.

However, the results of archaeological excavations have shown that by the first few centuries AD sheep were being herded fairly extensively in Eastern and Western Cape provinces and probably in Northern Cape as well.Surviving traces of sites where herders lived tend to be elusive. One of the best-preserved camps is at Kasteelberg, on the southwest coast near St. Helena Bay, where pastoralists kept sheep, hunted seals and other wild animals, and gathered shellfish, repeatedly returning to the same site for some 1,500 years.

Such communities were directly ancestral to the Khoikhoi herders who encountered European settlers at the Cape of Good Hope in the mid-17th century.The archaeological traces of farmers in the eastern regions of South Africa are more substantial. The earliest sites date to the 3rd century AD, although it is probable that farmers were already well established by this time.

Scatters of potsherds with distinctive incised decoration mark early village locations in Mpumalanga and parts of KwaZulu/Natal. The Iron AgeThese first farmers had knowledge of ironworking, and their archaeological sites are grouped together as the Iron Age. The Early Iron Age represents the arrival in South Africa of new groups of people, having strong connections with East Africa and directly ancestral to the Bantu-speaking communities who form the majority of South Africa's population today.Early Iron Age farmers grew crops, cutting back the vegetation with iron hoes and axes, and herded cattle and sheep.

 They also relied heavily on gathering wild plant foods, some hunting, and collecting shellfish if they lived near enough to the coast. Where conditions for agriculture were favourable (such as in the Tugela [Thukela] River valley in KwaZulu/Natal), villages grew to house several hundred people. There was probably some trade between different groups of farmers—evidence for specialization in salt making has been found in Mpumalanga—and with the hunter-gatherer bands that continued to occupy most parts of South Africa. Finely made, life-size ceramic heads from Lydenburg in Mpumalanga, dated to the 7th century AD, are a shadow of the complex systems of belief that have largely been lost to history.

Early Iron Age villages were built in low-lying areas, such as river valleys and the coastal plain, where forests and savannas allowed slash-and-burn agriculture. However, from the 11th century, farming communities began to settle the higher-lying grasslands beneath the Drakensberg and on the interior plateau. In many areas they started making different forms of pottery as well as villages built of stone. It is probable that these and other changes in patterns of behaviour reflect the increasing importance of cattle in both economic and social life. By convention, this later phase of precolonial farming is known as the Late Iron Age.

Other changes came in the north. Arab traders had begun to establish small settlements on the Tanzanian and Mozambican coasts in their search for ivory, animal skins, and other exotica. The trade beads they offered in return began to reach villages in the interior, the first indications that the more complex economic and social structures associated with long-distance trade were developing.

The arid Limpopo River valley, eschewed by the earliest farmers, became a focal point of settlement as a natural trade route. Sites such as Pont Drift (about AD 800 to 1100) and Schroda (dated to the 9th century) show that their occupants were rich in both livestock and trade beads.This was the setting in which Mapungubwe developed as South Africa's first urban centre. Starting as a large village like Schroda and Pont Drift, Mapungubwe rapidly developed into a town of perhaps 10,000 people.

 Differences in status were marked out clearly: the elite lived, and were buried, on the top of the stark sandstone hill that is at the centre of the town, while ordinary people lived in the valley below. The hilltop graves contained lavish burial goods, including a carefully crafted gold rhinoceros, and excavations have provided evidence for specialized crafts such as bone and ivory working, all suggestive of social and economic differentiation.

 Mapungubwe was abandoned sometime in the 12th century, after having been occupied for perhaps 200 years. It is likely that both the town's founding and its decline were closely related to trade—to the possibilities that the connection with the coast along the Limpopo valley offered for the accumulation of wealth and to the capture of this trade by Great Zimbabwe, farther to the north.Europeans had long envied the riches of the Arab world, and in 1488 the first Portuguese ships rounded the Cape of Good Hope, pursuing a share of the lucrative Arab trade with the East.

 Over the following century, numerous vessels made their way off the South African coast, but the only direct contacts came with the bands of shipwreck survivors who either set up camp in the hope of rescue or tried to make their way northward to Portuguese settlements in Mozambique. From the early 17th century, the Portuguese control of the Cape sea route was challenged by both the British and the Dutch. In 1615 the British founded a short-lived settlement at Table Bay, and in 1652 the Dutch East India Company set up a small garrison under the slopes of Table Mountain, charged with the task of provisioning the Dutch fleets.

Settlement of the Cape Colony

The Dutch East India Company, always mindful of unnecessary expense, did not intend more than a minimal presence in the southernmost part of Africa. However, farming beyond the shores of Table Bay proved necessary, and in 1657 nine men were released from their contracts with the company and granted land along the Liesbeek River. In the same year, the first slaves were brought to the Cape, and, by the end of the century, the stamp of Dutch colonialism in South Africa was clear.

Settlers, aided by increasing numbers of slaves, grew wheat, tended vineyards, and grazed their sheep and cattle from the Cape peninsula to the Hottentots Holland Mountains, some 30 miles away. A census of 1707 listed 1,779 settlers, owning 1,107 slaves.In the initial years of Dutch settlement at the Cape, Khoikhoi pastoralists were keen to trade. However, the garrison's demand for cattle and sheep seemed insatiable, and the Khoikhoi became more wary.

The Dutch began to push farther into the interior, seeking livestock in return for tobacco, alcohol, and trinkets. Numerous conflicts followed, and many Khoikhoi communities were decimated by smallpox, particularly in 1713. At the same time, colonial pastoralists, or trekboers, began to move inland beyond the Hottentots Holland Mountains with their own herds. By the end of the 18th century, the Khoikhoi chiefdoms had been largely decimated, their people either dead or reduced to conditions close to serfdom on colonial farms.

The San (or Bushmen)—small bands of hunter-gatherers who had hung on to old ways of life in isolated areas—fared no better. Pushed back into marginal areas, they were forced to live by cattle raiding, justifying in colonial eyes their systematic eradication. Men were slaughtered and women and children taken into servitude.

Trekboers were in constant search of new pasturage, and they and their families spread northeast as well as north, moving toward the grasslands long occupied by Late Iron Age farmers. For many generations these communities had lived in settlements concentrated along the low ridges that break the monotony of the interior plateau. Population estimates are difficult, but some of these larger villages must certainly have housed several hundred people.

Cattle were kraaled (penned) in elaborately built stone enclosures, the ruins of which survive today across a large part of Free State and in the higher areas of the Transvaal region. Extensive networks of exchange brought iron for hoes and spears from specialized manufacturing centres in the Mpumalanga Lowveld and the deep river gorges of KwaZulu/Natal.Thus, by the closing decades of the 18th century, South Africa fell into two broad regions.

The west—including the winter rainfall region around the Cape of Good Hope, the coastal hinterland northward toward the Namibian border, and the dry lands of the interior—was dominated by the advancing frontier of colonial settlement. Trekboers were taking increasingly more land from the Khoikhoi and from remnant hunter-gatherer communities, who were killed, were forced into marginal areas, or became labourers tied to the farms of their new overlords. In the east—where summer rainfall and good grazing made mixed farming economies possible—Late Iron Age farmers had long been established in both coastal and valley lowlands and on the Highveld of the interior.Meanwhile, Cape Town had been developing as South Africa's second urban centre, although it was many years before it reached the size of Mapungubwe some five centuries earlier.

The initial grid of streets had been expanded, linking the company's garden to the new castle that overlooked Table Bay. Houses—with flat roofs, ornate pediments, and symmetrical facades—sheltered officials, merchants, and visitors en route between Europe and the East. The administration of town and colony was in the hands of a governor and council, and the economy was in principle directed by the economic interests of the Dutch East India Company; in practice corruption and illegal trading were the order of the day. Both town and colony depended for their existence on the slaves, who by now outnumbered their owners. Martin Hall Growth of the colonial economy

 During the century from about 1770 to about 1870, the region now known as South Africa was integrated more fully into the world capitalist economy. The decisive moment was the seizure of the Cape Colony by Britain in 1806 as a strategic base (securing the developing empire in India), market, source of raw materials, and outlet for surplus people. Britain possessed world hegemony between the 1810s and '60s, and its shadow loomed over southern Africa.By the 1860s the Cape Colony had spawned the subcolonies of Natal, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal. Whites settled to the edges of the Kalahari desert in the west, the Drakensberg and Natal coast in the east, and the tsetse-fly- and mosquito-ridden Lowveld along the Limpopo River valley in the northeast. Africans were dispossessed of much of their land, and many of them were forced to work for the settlers.

The settler population increased from about 20,000 in the 1780s to about 300,000 in the late 1860s. It is impossible to estimate the African population accurately, but it is likely to have been between 2,000,000 and 4,000,000.After the 1760s African societies were increasingly affected by ivory and slave traders operating from Delagoa Bay, Inhambane, and the lower Zambezi (in modern Mozambique) as well as by traders and raiders based in the Cape to the south. In response to these invasions, surviving African farming peoples evolved a number of sister states different in structure, scale, and military capacity from anything that had gone before. The most successful were the Pedi and Swazi in the eastern Highveld, the Zulu south of the Pongola River, the Sotho in the Caledon valley, the Gaza along the lower Limpopo, and the Ndebele in southwestern Zimbabwe. Possessing agriculture, these African societies proved resilient, unlike the hunting societies in the Cape, the Americas, and Australia. But unlike, for instance, states in China, they were unable to repel the invaders altogether, possibly because food surpluses had been insufficient to support a military class able to force unification early enough.

Nor, even at their height in the 1860s, were the African states able to unite. They were able to protect their peoples from proletarianization and impoverishment for only a brief period. Accentuated competition among the European nations and the discovery of gold and diamonds in the 1860s led to a new imperialist offensive: between the 1870s and '90s the African states were destroyed by Europeans exploiting African divisions and using new breech-loading rifles and the first machine guns.After the 1770s the Dutch settlers and African farming peoples collided.

 Dutch trekboers advanced across the semidesert Karoo of the central Cape and met agricultural peoples along a line running from the lower Vaal and middle Orange river valleys to the sea around the Gamtoos River (west of Port Elizabeth). West of this line the nonagricultural Khoi groups had already been badly disrupted by European invaders. The Boers were weakly controlled by the Dutch East India Company, a mercantilist organization that monopolized a sparse trade and was unenthusiastic about colonization. Rebellions against the company—as, for instance, by the burghers of Swellendam and of Graaff-Reinet in 1795—became frequent. In the 1780s armed clashes over land and cattle began between the Boers and Xhosa groups such as the Gqunukhwebe and Ndlambe in the Zuurveld between the Sundays and Fish rivers.

The Boers developed a commando system in these continuous forays.In contrast to this eastern frontier, the longer-settled areas of the western Cape had evolved a less fluid agricultural economy of grape and wheat farms run by imported slave labour. Slaves were treated harshly, and punishments for assaulting whites were brutal—for instance, death by impalement. Escaped slaves formed Maroons—small, self-sufficient communities—or fled into the interior.

Because slave birth rates were low and settler numbers were increasing, the Dutch in the 1780s stepped up the enserfment of surviving Khoi (pejoratively called “Hottentots”) to help run the farms. Many Khoi in the east joined Xhosa groups in a major counteroffensive against colonialism in 1799–1801, and there were slave rebellions in 1808 and 1825.The Dutch refusal to grant citizenship rights (e.g., access to land) to “Coloured” offspring of unions between whites and Khoi or slaves produced aggrieved groups of people, classified as “Basters,” who were Christian, spoke Dutch, and had an excellent knowledge of horses and firearms.

 Many fled north toward and over the Orange River in search of land and trading opportunities. After merging with independent Khoi groups, such as the Kora, they formed commando states under warlords, the more successful of whom came from the Bloem, Kok, Barends, and Afrikaner families. By the 1790s they were trading with and raiding local African communities such as the Rolong, Tlhaping, Hurutshe, and, farthest north, Ngwaketse. These groups coalesced into larger aggregations of people, who competed with each other to control trade routes going south to the Cape and east to Mozambique. By about 1810 Moleabangwe of the Tlhaping and Makaba of the Ngwaketse, for example, were already powerful rulers.

Along the southeast coast the Portuguese and some British and French were trading beads, brass, cloth, alcohol, and firearms in return for ivory, slaves, cattle, gold, and minor items such as wax and skins. During the late 18th century, high volumes of ivory were exported from Delagoa Bay annually, and slaves were taken from the Komati and Maputo river regions and sent to the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean and to Brazil. There they worked sugarcane, coffee, and other plantations that met the needs of Europe's rising population. By 1800 trade routes linked Delagoa Bay northwest to the Soutpansberg (where copper was obtained from the Venda), west to the Tlhaping and Hurutshe, and south to the Zuurveld—thereby linking the Cape and coastal trade routes with the central interior.

This European trade was a primary cause of structural transformation within societies inland of Delagoa Bay. Warlords reorganized military institutions to hunt elephants and slaves. Profits from trade enhanced patronage capabilities, attracted followers, and raised military potential and, in turn, the capacity to dominate land, people, and cattle. Near the bay, Tembe and Maputo were already powerful states by the 1790s. To the west emerged the Maroteng of Thulare, the Dlamini of Ndvungunye, and the Hlubi of Bhungane. Between the Pongola and Tugela rivers evolved the Mthethwa of Dingiswayo south of Lake St. Lucia, the Ndwandwe of Zwide, the Qwabe of Phakatwayo, the Chunu of Macingwane, and, south of the Tugela, the Cele and Thuli. These groups competed to dominate trade and were the more militarized the closer they were to the Portuguese base. Accentuated European impact, c. 1810–35British occupation of the CapeIn 1795 the British responded to France's overrunning the Dutch Republic by occupying the Cape. After returning it at the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, they reannexed the colony in 1806 after the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars. Prior to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the Cape became a vital base for Britain—the Cape economy was meshed with Britain's. London Missionary Society and Methodist missionaries, as well as hunters and traders, ranged into Transorangia (the territory in the interior to the north and south of the Orange River) and the Transkei, mapping and exploring. Until 1825 Cape wines were given preferential access to the British market. Merino sheep were introduced, and serious sheep farming was begun to supply wool to British textile mills.T

he infrastructure of a new type of colony was established. English replaced Dutch as the language of administration; in 1825 the Dutch rix-dollar was replaced by sterling; newspapers opened in Cape Town after 1824; British colonial governors were brought out; and in 1825 an advisory council for the governor was established, which was upgraded into a legislative council in 1834 with a few “unofficial” settler representatives. In 1813 most of the British East India Company's privileges were abolished (the company's last monopoly on the Chinese trade ended in 1833), after which the number of merchants increased and shipping trade expanded. After 1813 the Dutch loan farm system—whereby white colonists paid a small annual fee to the government but did not acquire ownership of the land—was gradually replaced with a virtual freehold system of landownership.In 1820 a large group of British settlers arrived.

Together with a high white birth rate and wasteful land usage, this produced an accentuated land hunger. To secure colonial hegemony and to alleviate the settler land shortage, the British applied massive military intervention against Africans on the eastern frontier. Until the 1840s the British did not envisage the colony expanding to include African (“Kaffir”) citizens: the latter were to be expelled across the Fish River, the unilaterally proclaimed eastern border of the colony

.The first step in this process was the onslaught of the British army against the Zuurveld Gqunukhwebe and Ndlambe in 1811–12. In the aftermath of this war, Graham's Town (now Grahamstown) was established as the military pivot of a line of forts. The removal of about 20,000 people eastward across the Fish aroused tensions that British governors exploited by divide-and-rule strategies. This exacerbated tensions between the Ngqika and the Ndlambe and Gcaleka, leading to the Battle of Amalinda in 1818. The Thembu and Mpondo farther east were established as British allies against all three of these peoples.

An Ndlambe attack on Graham's Town in 1819 provided the pretext for the annexation of the next swath of African territory, to the Keiskamma River. The 1820 settlers took the African lands. Khoi soldiers were settled along the Kat River in 1829, and Rharhabe groups (e.g., Maqoma's) were repeatedly harried from their lands in the early 1830s. When the Rharhabe despairingly counterattacked in December 1834, Governor Benjamin D'Urban ordered the colossal invasion of 1835; thousands of Rharhabe were killed. In April 1835 the British crossed the Great Kei River and ravaged Gcaleka territory; on May 12 they murdered the Gcaleka chief, Hintsa. Only the intervention of the British colonial secretary, Lord Glenelg (to the fury of the settler expansionists), halted the seizure of all African land to the Great Kei. D'Urban's pioneering attempt to rule conquered Africans with white magistrates and soldiers was overturned by Glenelg; instead, for a time, Africans east of the Keiskamma retained their autonomy and dealt with the colony through diplomatic agents

.A chronic problem for the British was how to procure labour to develop the new settler farms and to build the towns. Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 and pressured other nations to do the same. Some slaves continued to be imported into the Cape after 1807 (for example, “prize negroes”—slaves seized by the Royal Navy and reenslaved in the Cape), but they were not enough. An 1809 ban on Africans crossing the border aggravated the labour shortage, and the British, like the Dutch, were forced to enserf the Khoi (by the Caledon and Cradock codes of 1809 and 1812).Anglo-Boer commandos illegally captured San women and children (exterminating many of the men), as well as Africans from across the eastern frontier. More serfs (called “apprentices”) were captured by the Griqua raiding states led by Andries Waterboer, Adam Kok, and Barend Barends along the Vaal, Molopo, and Caledon rivers from among the Taung, Hurutshe, Rolong, Kwena, and Fokeng peoples.

The prisoners, known as Mantatees, were imported mainly into the eastern Cape in exchange for firearms, gunpowder, and horses; they were set to work on the farms. One Griqua raid on an unidentified people at Dithakong in 1823 was accompanied by the British government agent John Melvill and the Kuruman missionary Robert Moffat. White farmers also raided for labour north of the Orange River.The need to align the Cape with the growing imperial antislavery ethos and to facilitate labour distribution produced an overhaul of labour policy in 1828. Ordinance 50 freed the Khoi to choose their employers but brought little tangible change to their positions; innumerable disincentives existed if they preferred not to work. Ordinance 49 permitted black labourers from east of the Keiskamma to come into the colony for work under control of contracts and passes issued by soldiers and missionaries.

At first this permission was insufficient, and in August 1828 Anglo-Boer armies (supported by Khoi, Thembu, Gcaleka, and Mpondo auxiliaries) attacked the Ngwane east of the Great Kei at Mbolompo, returning with prisoners. More spectacularly, in its operations of 1835, the British army and its Khoi and African collaborators seized thousands of Rharhabe and Gcaleka women and children. Known as “Fingo,” they were dispatched as labourers throughout the Cape, so that by 1837 the Cape Colony's labour supply was assured, though only temporarily. Ironically, these illegal measures coincided with the formal abolition of slavery in 1834–38. Ex-slaves, Khoi and Fingo, were now controlled by the Masters and Servants Ordinance of 1841.

This imposed criminal penalties for breach of contract and desertion of the workplace and increased the legal powers of settler employers.

The Delagoa Bay slave trade

Concurrent with these events in the Cape, the slave trade at Delagoa Bay had been expanding since about 1810 as the Brazilian plantations grew. During the late 1820s, slave exports from the Delagoa Bay area reached several thousand a year, in anticipation of what proved to be an ineffective attempt to abolish the Brazilian trade in 1830. After a dip in the early 1830s, the Bay slave trade reached a peak in the late 1840s.The impact on hinterland societies was increasingly profound. Makhasane's Maputo and other groups became surrogate slavers and joined the Portuguese soldiers in inland raiding. Along the Limpopo and Vaal river networks Bay slavers competed with Griqua slavers supplying the Cape. The Gaza and Jele near St. Lucia moved north to slave; the Jele, or Ngoni, later resituated themselves west of Lake Nyasa, liaising with Arab slavers. Slavers burned crops, and famines were common.

 Many groups, including the Ngwane, Ndebele, and some Hlubi, fled westward into the Highveld mountains during the 1810s and '20s. The Ngwane were attacked in sequence by Bay, Griqua, and British slavers. The Patsa (Kololo) of Sebetwane, on the other hand, moved east out of Transorangia, ran into Bay slavers, migrated west into Botswana, where in 1826 they were attacked by an alliance of Ngwaketse and white mercenaries, and ended in Zambia in the 1850s exporting slaves to the Arabs and Portuguese. These migrations all produced further destabilizations. Emergence of the eastern statesBy the 1820s four main defensive state clusters had emerged between the Soutpansberg and the Drakensberg: Sekwati's Pedi in the Steelpoort valley, Sobhuza's Dlamini in the eastern Transvaal, the Mokoteli of Moshoeshoe (Mshweshwe) in the Caledon River region, and Shaka's Zulu south of the Black Mfolozi River. The Pedi received refugees from the Limpopo and coastal plains. Moshoeshoe's people absorbed refugees from throughout eastern Transorangia; they became formidable raiders and by the mid-1830s were able to defeat the Griqua and Korana raiders.

Between about 1812 and 1825 Shaka welded the Chunu, Mthethwa, Qwabe, Mkhize, Cele, and other groups into a militarized state with fortified settlements called amakhanda. Zulu amabutho (regiments) defended against raiders, provided protection for refugees, and, the evidence suggests, began to trade in ivory and slaves themselves.From 1824 the Zulu faced competition from Cape colonists who came to Port Natal (renamed Durban in 1835) and organized mercenary armies. Although on a smaller scale, these were comparable to the Portuguese prazero armies along the Zambezi and to the warlord state set up by the Portuguese trader João Albasini in the Soutpansberg in the 1840s.

 During the 1820s European raiders joined Zulu amabutho in raids north of the Black Mfolozi River and also operated south of the Mzimkhulu River—where slaves were being exported on French ships in 1825. In 1828 Francis Farewell's raiders, in alliance with Zulu groups, seized women and children in the same area. Trade conflicts helped split the Zulu elite into rival factions, a split that led to Shaka's assassination in 1828. The succession of Shaka's half brother, Dingane, was accompanied by civil wars and by increasing interference in the Bay trading alliances.

In 1833 the Portuguese governor at Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), Ribeiro, was killed in one of these wars. White warlords in Natal such as Henry Flynn, Nathaniel Isaacs, and John Cane continued to slave and hunt elephants. By the mid-1830s consortia of Cape merchants were planning the formal colonization of Natal with its superb agricultural soils and temperate climate. The British left the less desirable Delagoa Bay region to the Portuguese, who traded slaves out of Lourenço Marques for another half-century.

The expansion of white colonialism, c. 1835–1870

The Great Trek

After about 1834 a previous trickle of Boer migrants north of the Orange River suddenly became an organized flood. This later became known as the “Great Trek.” The common view that this was a bid to escape the policies of the British—for instance, the freeing of the slaves—is difficult to sustain, as most of the ex-slave owners did not migrate (most trekkers came from the poorer east Cape), and in 1835 the labour shortage had been alleviated.

The trek was the explosive culmination of a long sequence of colonial labour raids, grazing probes, land seizures, punishment commandos, and commercial expansions. Whites possessed weaponry that was always technologically one step ahead of that of the Africans. They also had the instructive examples of how small groups of raiders in Natal and Transorangia had wrought havoc over large areas and how the British army had induced terror in Africans.

The trekkers were not backward feudalists escaping the modern world, as some historians have maintained; they were energized people extending their frontier. The trek was as inevitable a development as the North American colonists' push across the Alleghenies in the 1760s.Several thousand Boers migrated with their families, livestock, retainers, wagons, and firearms into a region already destabilized and partially depopulated by Griqua and coastal raiders. Only when they came up against Mzilikazi's Ndebele (who in the early 1830s had moved from the southeastern to the western Transvaal) were they confronted, as at Vegkop in 1836. However, the Boers—in alliance with Rolong, Taung, and Griqua allies—crushed the Ndebele during 1837, taking their land and many cattle, women, and children. The Ndebele fled north, resettling around the Matopo and Malungwane hills in Zimbabwe

.By the early 1840s the trekkers had penetrated much of the Transvaal. A grouping of commando states emerged based on Potchefstroom, Pretoria, and, from 1845, Ohrigstad-Lydenburg in the eastern Transvaal. Andries Hendrik Potgieter, Andries Pretorius, Jan Mocke, and others competed for followers, attacked weaker African chiefdoms, hunted elephants and slaves, and forged trade links with the Portuguese. The development of farms was slow and inevitably depended on forced labour, as had been the case in the Cape prior to the 1830s. For a quarter of a century until the 1860s, moreover, the Pedi and Swazi in the east and even Kwena and Hurutshe groups in the west were strong enough to curb Boer expansionism.Other Boers turned east into Natal and allied themselves with the resident British settlers.

There was an inescapable confrontation between this coalition and Dingane's Zulu. The Zulu, though like the Ndebele scoring initial successes, were overpowered at Blood (Ncome) River in 1838 and the Ama
Qonqo Hills in 1840. The Boers, aided by Zulu civil war, annexed land to the Black Mfolozi River and set up Mpande as a puppet over the much-reduced Zulu kingdom. Colonial military strategies perfected along the Fish and Great Kei rivers in the eastern Cape were transplanted to the Tugela and Pongola.

The whites began to carve out farms in Natal as they had done along the eastern frontier. Further slave and cattle raids on Ncaphayi's Bhaca south of the Mzimkhulu provided the pretext for British annexation of Natal in 1843. The Zulu were returned land between the Mfolozi and Tugela and for the time being left independent. Mpande (reigned 1840–72) was a formidable ruler and further built up Zulu military capacity, which his son, Cetshwayo, used effectively against the British invaders at Isandlwana in 1879.

The British in Natal

The coming of thousands of British settlers to Natal in the 1840s and '50s meant that for the first time black Africans and white settlers lived together (however uneasily) on the same land. In 1845 a diplomatic agent (later secretary of native affairs) was appointed: Theophilus Shepstone—a prototype of later chief native commissioners. Reserves for blacks were set aside (Harding Commission, 1852), and missionaries and pliant chiefs were introduced to persuade them to work.

 After 1849 Africans were subjected to a hut tax that was designed to raise revenue and force them into labour; isibhalo (forced) labour was used for road building; and Africans on state land and white farms were made to pay rents. To meet these burdens, the more resilient African cultivators—or squatters—grew surplus crops to sell to the growing towns of Pietermaritzburg and Durban.The British were reluctant, though, to annex the Transorangian interior.

No strategic interests were involved. Boer trade links with Delagoa Bay posed little threat, as Portugal was a virtual client state of Britain. The tasks of eroding African resistance and developing the land were left to the Boers. The policy was muddled and never clearly enunciated. Financial constraints operated. A halfhearted attempt was made to protect Britain's long-standing Griqua client states. Sir George Napier in 1843 and Henry Warden in 1849 attempted to arbitrate a border between Moshoeshoe's Sotho state and the Boers west of the Caledon River. After further war with the Rharhabe on the eastern frontier in 1846, the aggressive governor, Colonel Harry Smith, in 1847–48 finally annexed the regions between the Fish and the Great Kei rivers (establishing British Kaffraria) and between the Orange and Vaal (Orange River Sovereignty).

These moves provoked further war with the Xhosa (joined once more by many Khoi) in 1851–53 and a free-for-all in the sovereignty, with unsupported British politicians ineffectively trying to influence events.A striking feature of this period was the capacity of the Sotho people to fend off military conquest by the British and Boers. After defeating and absorbing the rival Tlokwa of Sekonyela in 1853–54, Moshoeshoe became the most powerful African leader south of the Vaal-Pongola. His soldiers utilized firearms and, in the cold Highveld, horses—the keys to political and military survival

. Attempts at Boer consolidation

Faced with these unprofitable conflicts, the British temporarily withdrew, and the Transvaal and Orange Free State Boers were given independence at the Sand River and Bloemfontein conventions of 1852 and 1854, respectively. The access of Africans to guns and gunpowder was prohibited. Both Boer groups wrote constitutions and established Volksraade (parliaments), although their attempts at unification failed. For more than a decade consolidation among the Boers was hampered by civil wars and the struggle with the material environment. Nevertheless, the Orange Free State's economy grew rapidly, and by the 1860s the Boers were exporting significant amounts of wool via Cape ports.

The Cape economyCapitalist infrastructure came earlier in the Cape because of its older colonialism and its seacoast links to the empire. Banks and insurance and limited-liability companies were founded in the 1840s and '50s. The ending of ceilings on interest rates in 1860 attracted capital, which was loaned against rising property values. A class of prosperous colonial shopkeepers, financiers, traders, and farmers emerged. Cape Town grew to more than 30,000 people in the 1850s.

 Port Elizabeth, established in 1820, became an important trading centre and harbour. Representative government came in March 1853: the Legislative Assembly had elected members, but an executive was appointed from London; only in 1872 was the executive made responsible to the assembly. Franchise qualifications were relatively low. Some Africans could even vote, but the numbers were too small to have political impact. These nominal rights were reduced later in the century and abolished outright in 1936.The colonial attacks of 1811, 1819, 1835, 1846, 1851, and 1858 deprived Africans of most of their land between the Sundays and Great Kei rivers and produced impoverishment and despair.

 From 1855 British magistrates were imposed in British Kaffraria, and the power of the Xhosa chiefs was destroyed. Following a severe lung sickness epidemic in 1854–56, the Xhosa killed many of the remaining cattle and in 1857–58 were unable to grow many crops (for reasons that are still not entirely clear). The subsequent starvation drove yet more thousands of Africans into the Cape Colony to work. In British Kaffraria, as in Natal, the hut tax was introduced in 1849. African citizens of the Cape Colony (Fingo) were controlled under the Masters and Servants Act of 1856 (an updating of Ordinance 50 of 1828 and the 1841 ordinance), and non-Cape Africans were regulated by the Kaffir Employment Act of 1857 (an updated version of Ordinance 49). In 1865 British Kaffraria was fused with the Cape Colony, and thousands of newly defined Fingo resettled east of the Great Kei, thereby creating Fingoland. The Transkei—the hilly country between the Cape and Natal—became a large African reserve, the still independent parts of which were annexed in the 1880s and '90s. Mpondoland fell in 1894.

White missionaries and their black catechists worked sedulously from the 1820s to undermine African cosmologies and seduced Africans into desiring European manufactures they had previously done well without. The techniques for destroying African cultures and for forcing Africans to work pioneered in the Cape and Natal were exported to the rest of Africa after the 1880s. For a time, nevertheless, there was room for a small class of African peasant farmers (producing for the market and liable for rents and taxes), who used plows and sold surplus grain to the towns in competition with colonial farmers. Difficulty in obtaining capital, as well as legal and political discrimination, drove most of them out of business in the decades following the South African War of 1899–1902.The Cape economy, narrowly based on wine and wool, was not particularly prosperous. Wool exports, though soaring to 12,000,000 pounds (5,440 metric tons) in 1855, lagged far behind those of Australia and were susceptible to drought and market slumps, as in the early 1860s. Roads were built with African labour, but only a few miles of railway were constructed before 1870.

 Attempts to broaden the economic base were not at first successful. Guano (droppings of gannets and cormorants used as fertilizer) was exploited on off-coast islands; copper began to be mined in Namaqualand; hunters operating as far as the Zambezi sent out much ivory; and traders, hunters, missionaries, and full-time prospectors surveyed and sampled the rocks. The efforts of the last were rewarded with the discovery of diamonds in the Vaal valley and of gold in the Tati valley in 1866–67 and in the northern and eastern Transvaal in 1871. Disputes in the north and eastTo the north, colonial communities and the African states cooperated and competed with each other, the advantage slowly moving to the colonists. Mswati's Dlamini Swazi and Manukosi's (Soshangane's) Gaza supplied slaves both to the Transvaal Boers and to the Portuguese. Mswati's people overran much of the Lowveld, incorporating many groups (the emakhandzambile) and exchanging captured children for firearms and horses with the Transvaal settlers.

The death of Manukosi in 1858 led to a Gaza civil war in which the Swazi, the Boers, and the Portuguese all intervened. In 1864, when Mswati controlled the land almost to Lourenço Marques, the Gaza (under the victor, Mzila) migrated northward into the Búzi River area of eastern Zimbabwe.Farther south the Zulu competed with the Swazi and the Boers to dominate the Pongola and Ingwavuma valleys and with the Boers to control the Buffalo (Mziniathi) River area. A Zulu civil war in 1856 (the Battle of Ndondakasuka on the lower Tugela River) elevated Cetshwayo over Mbuyazwe, and he effectively ruled Zululand from the early 1860s. Shepstone interfered not only in Zulu politics but also in an Ndebele succession dispute, attempting to oust Lobengula in favour of a pretender in 1869–72. Marthinus Pretorius, the Transvaal leader, annexed huge areas, at least on paper. To the irritation of settler farmers and plantation owners, few Zulu went south to work in Natal. Instead, a supply of Mozambican indentured labourers (some of them effectively forced) was organized.

 This evolved in the following decades into a steady flow of migrant labour. However, initially there was not enough labour to satisfy the new sugar plantations, and, from about 1860, indentured labourers from India were brought over to do the work.Moshoeshoe's Sotho continued their tenacious hold on their lands along the Caledon River and were for a time able to supply the Boers of the Orange Free State with grain and cattle. The Boers, however, coveted the fertile Caledon valley. Moshoeshoe mobilized 10,000 men to defeat them in the war of 1858; but, with the consolidation of the Orange Free State under Johannes Henricus Brand in the early 1860s, the Sotho were defeated in 1865–66 (Treaty of Thaba Bosiu, 1866), and only British annexation of Moshoeshoe's territory in 1868 prevented complete Sotho collapse.

The decline of the African states

As the 1860s came to an end, the great African states began to weaken. This was symbolized by the death of a generation of powerful leaders: Manukosi in 1858, Sekwati of the Pedi in 1861, Mswati and Mzilikazi in 1868, Moshoeshoe in 1870, and Mpande in 1872. Just as in Germany, Italy, Canada, and Australia, so in southern Africa capitalism required the unification of communications, currencies, financial institutions, and governments. Besides, the Zulu, Swazi, and Pedi were needed as labourers, and their land—the last large fertile areas controlled by Africans—was coveted.Governor George Grey had already proposed a federated South Africa in 1858, and in the late 1860s the discovery of gold and diamonds brought matters forward.

The annexation of Basutoland in 1868 was followed by the British seizure of the diamond fields from the competing Griqua, Tlhaping, and Boers in 1871 (the Keate Award); Colonial Secretary Lord Carnarvon's more determined federation plan of 1875; Shepstone's invasion of the Transvaal in 1877; and the British invasions of Zululand and Pediland in 1879. A bid to seize Delagoa Bay was overturned by the arbitrating French president, Patrice, Count de Mac-Mahon, in 1875; and Swaziland was left to collapse internally. With the collapse of Zulu resistance in the 1880s, the invasions of the Gaza and Ndebele kingdoms in 1893–96, and the crushing of Venda resistance in 1898, there were by 1900 no autonomous African societies left in the subcontinent. Julian R.D. CobbingDiamonds, gold, and imperialist intervention (1870–1902)Between 1870, when the diamond rush to Kimberley began, and 1902, when the South African War ended, South Africa was transformed.

 Midway between these dates, the world's largest goldfields were discovered in 1886 on the Witwatersrand. An economic backwater became a major supplier of precious minerals to the world economy. A scatter of disparate statelets—British colonies, Boer republics, and African kingdoms—came under British control. Predominantly agrarian societies began to urbanize and industrialize. Political responses included a nascent Afrikaner nationalism and the first modern political organization in black societies. These dramatic changes were propelled by two linked forces: the development of a capitalist mining industry and a sequence of imperialist interventions by Britain.

Diamonds and confederation

A chance find in 1867 drew several thousand fortune seekers to alluvial diamond diggings along the Orange, Vaal, and Harts rivers. In 1870 richer finds were made in “dry diggings,” and a large-scale rush followed. By the end of 1871, nearly 50,000 people were living in a sprawling, polyglot mining town that in 1873 was named Kimberley.Initially, individual diggers, black and white, worked small claims by hand. Production was rapidly centralized and mechanized, and ownership and labour patterns more starkly divided along racial lines. Joint-stock companies bought out diggers; a new class of mining capitalists oversaw a transition from diamond digging to mining industry.

 By 1889 concentration became monopoly when De Beers Consolidated Mines (controlled by Cecil Rhodes) became the sole producer. While some white diggers were kept on as overseers or skilled workers, the workforce consisted mainly of African migrant workers, housed in closed compounds by the companies from the mid-1880s.Diamonds were discovered in a zone whose sovereignty was already disputed. The Orange Free State, the South African Republic, the western Griqua under Nicolaas Waterboer, and southern Tswana chiefs all pressed competing claims.

 At a special hearing in October 1871, Robert W. Keate (lieutenant governor of Natal) found in favour of Waterboer. Waterboer was persuaded to request British protection against his Boer rivals, and the area was annexed as Griqualand West.The annexation of the diamond fields signaled a more forward policy under a Liberal ministry but fell short of the ambitious confederation policy pursued by Lord Carnarvon, colonial secretary in Benjamin Disraeli's 1874 Tory government.

He sought to unite republics and colonies as a self-governing federation in the British Empire. Carnarvon was influenced by Theophilus Shepstone, secretary for native affairs in Natal, who urged a coherent regional policy with regard to African labour and administration.Carnarvon concentrated at first on persuading the Cape and the Free State to accept federation. A conference in London in August 1876 revealed how chilly these parties were to the proposal. His southern gambit frustrated, Carnarvon embarked on a northern strategy.

 The South African Republic (Transvaal) was virtually bankrupt, and support for President Thomas F. Burgers was dwindling. During the London conference, news arrived of a military humiliation of Burgers' forces at the hands of Sekhukhune's Pedi. Carnarvon commissioned Shepstone to annex the Transvaal. Shepstone entered the republic in January 1877 and against only token resistance proclaimed it a British colony in April

.Deft as the annexation was, administration of the new possession was maladroit. Empty coffers and insensitivity to Afrikaner resentments led to a clash over tax payments, and, under a triumvirate of Paul Kruger, Piet Joubert, and Marthinus Wessel Pretorius, the Transvaal Boers opted to fight for independence. British defeats, especially at Majuba, hastened a decision to which William Gladstone's cabinet was already inclined. Republican self-government was restored, subject to an imprecise British “suzerainty” over external relations. Confederation received its quietus with these events.

Wars of conquest

Seizure and retrocession of the Transvaal overlapped with a sequence of wars that completed the conquest of African societies. Imperial troops tipped the balance decisively against societies that had previously withstood subordination to settler control. A century of military conflict on the Cape frontier ended with the Cape-Xhosa war of 1877–78, and between 1878 and 1881 the Cape Colony defeated rebellions in Griqualand West, the Transkei, and Basutoland. Sir Bartle Frere, governor of the Cape and high commissioner for southern Africa from March 1877, rapidly decided that independent African kingdoms must be tamed if political and economic integration of the region were to become reality.Frere identified Cetshwayo's Zulu kingdom as a major obstacle to confederation.

An impasse was engineered, and British and colonial troops invaded Zululand in January 1879. The annihilation of a large British force at Isandhlwana slowed the invasion, but imperial firepower ultimately prevailed. For the Zulu, political dismemberment followed upon military defeat. Divide-and-rule policies precipitated civil war in 1883, and in 1887 Zululand was annexed. British troops also took part in 1879 in a campaign that crushed Pedi military power in the northern Transvaal. Afrikaner and African politics in the CapeBy the mid-1870s, 240,000 whites in the Cape constituted about one-third of the colony's population.

Cape revenues accounted for three-quarters of the total income in the region's four settler states in 1870, and the diamond discoveries stimulated railways, public works, banking, and commerce. Although by 1870 some two-thirds of the settler population spoke Dutch or Afrikaans, political power was exercised largely by an English-speaking elite of merchants, lawyers, and landholders. In the last quarter of the century, heightened political and cultural awareness among Cape Afrikaners took organized form, and the period also saw new forms of political expression and mobilization among black voters.The Afrikaner Bond, founded in 1880, initially represented poorer farmers and espoused an anti-British Pan-Afrikanerism in the Cape and beyond. By 1883, however, under Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr, the organization was realigned.

Supported mainly by wealthier farmers and urban professionals, the Bond championed the Cape's commercial interests within a framework of regional British imperial dominance. In 1890 Hofmeyr threw his support behind Cecil Rhodes, enabling the latter to become prime minister of the Cape. The Rhodes-Hofmeyr alliance was based on their mutual desire for economic expansion northward.A major cleavage opened between Bond politicians and English speakers loosely defined as Cape liberals. The latter grouping had material as well as ideological interests in the prosperity of an African peasantry, and in several eastern Cape electoral districts black voters were crucial in electing liberal “friends of the native.”

The Bond was hostile toward a commercializing black peasantry and pursued more restrictive franchise qualifications.The piecemeal annexation of the Transkeian territories to the Cape between 1872 and 1894 greatly increased the number of Africans in the colony. Peasant production for local markets and the emergence of literate clerks and teachers enabled individuals to qualify for the vote. The rise of the Afrikaner Bond and new laws affecting franchise qualifications and taxes stimulated more vigorous African participation in electoral politics after 1884. In the eastern Cape, new political and educational bodies were created, as were the first African newspapers and African-controlled churches. The period also witnessed the first political organizations among Coloureds in the Cape and Indians in Natal and the Transvaal. Gold miningIn 1886 prospectors established that a 40-mile belt of gold-bearing reefs existed, centring on modern Johannesburg. The rapid growth of a gold-mining industry intensified processes started by the diamond boom: immigration, urbanization, capital investment, infrastructural development, proletarianization, and labour migrancy. By 1899 the gold industry employed 109,000 people (of whom 97,000 were African migrant workers);

it produced 27 percent of the world's gold and had attracted investment worth £75 million.The world's richest goldfield was also the most difficult to work. Although abundant, the layers of gold-bearing rock ran extremely deep, and the gold content of the ore was low. To be profitable, gold mining had to be intensive and deep-level with large inputs of capital and technology. These factors ensured that production was in corporate hands almost from the outset, and amalgamation of companies proceeded rapidly. By 1898, 124 companies were arranged in nine holding companies, or “groups.”

The group system facilitated collusion between companies to reduce competition over labour, the costs of which were crucial to their profitability. 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, were able to win relatively high wages. African migrants from throughout southern Africa, especially from Mozambique, were unskilled and low-paid (earning at century's end about one-ninth the wage of white miners).

The mine magnates sought assiduously to limit the ratio of white to black workers and to peg migrant wages as low as possible. Migrant miners were housed in compounds, which facilitated their control and reduced overhead costs. The road to warEven before gold was discovered, 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, which Britain countered by creating the Bechuanaland protectorate and annexing the crown colony of British Bechuanaland. Rhodes secured concessionary rights to land across 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 South African Republic became unsettled.

Few 19th-century states could have adjusted with ease to the changes engendered by the gold discoveries, and certainly not a preindustrial society ruled by agrarian notables, whose president believed the world was flat. Although Paul Kruger's government made strenuous efforts to accommodate the mining industry, it was soon at loggerheads with Britain, the mine magnates, and the Uitlander (“Outlander”) immigrants.British policymakers were anxious about the Transvaal's potential as an independent actor; deep-level-mine owners chafed at corruption and inefficiency; and Uitlanders were largely exclu

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Beste Cornelius

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