Britain ruled parts of South Africa for more than a century. It came for the sea route to India, stayed for diamonds and gold, fought Africans and Boers alike, and in 1910 handed the whole country to a white minority government. The road to apartheid ran through Westminster.
The Cape had been a Dutch East India Company colony since 1652, built on the land of the Khoekhoe and San and the labour of enslaved people brought from East Africa, Madagascar, India and Southeast Asia. In 1795, during the French Revolutionary Wars, Britain seized it to protect the sea route to India. It handed the Cape back in 1803, then took it again for good after defeating the Dutch garrison at Blaauwberg, near Cape Town, on 8 January 1806.
Britain ended the slave trade to the Cape in 1807, but not slavery. When slavery was abolished across the empire on 1 December 1834, Cape slave owners accepted it only because they were promised compensation. The freed people were forced to work four more years for their old masters as "apprentices". Full emancipation came on 1 December 1838.
Many Dutch-speaking farmers, the Boers, resented British rule and the end of slavery. From the 1830s thousands of them left the Cape in the "Great Trek", moving inland onto African land and setting up their own republics, later the Orange Free State and the South African Republic (Transvaal).
On the eastern frontier of the Cape, British forces and settlers fought a series of wars against the Xhosa kingdoms for most of the 19th century. In 1835 Governor Benjamin D'Urban ordered a major invasion in which thousands of Xhosa died. Land was taken step by step, and in 1820 Britain shipped in some 4,000 settlers to hold the frontier. In 1856–57 a prophecy that the dead would rise if the Xhosa killed their cattle led to the "cattle-killing", a famine in which tens of thousands died and the British took still more land.
Britain also annexed Natal on the east coast in 1843, after Boer settlers had moved in, and brought indentured labourers from India to work its sugar plantations from 1860.
In December 1878 the British High Commissioner, Sir Bartle Frere, sent the Zulu king Cetshwayo an ultimatum he could not accept, including the disbanding of his army. British forces invaded in January 1879. On 22 January 1879, at Isandlwana, a Zulu army overwhelmed a British camp, killing more than 1,300 soldiers and African auxiliaries. That night a small garrison held the mission station at Rorke's Drift, a defence Britain celebrated to cover the disaster.
Britain sent reinforcements and burned the royal capital at Ulundi on 4 July 1879. Cetshwayo was captured and exiled, and the Zulu kingdom was broken up into thirteen chiefdoms, which led to years of civil war. Zululand was annexed in 1887.
Diamonds were found around Kimberley in the late 1860s, and Britain annexed the area. Gold was found on the Witwatersrand in the Transvaal in 1886, and Johannesburg grew almost overnight. The mines drew in hundreds of thousands of African migrant workers, housed in closed compounds and paid far less than white miners. Cecil Rhodes made his fortune in Kimberley diamonds and became Prime Minister of the Cape.
Britain had already annexed the Transvaal once, in 1877, but the Boers rose up and defeated a British force at Majuba Hill on 27 February 1881, winning back self-government. After gold was found, the Transvaal became the richest state in Africa. In 1895–96 Rhodes's friend Leander Starr Jameson led an armed raid into the Transvaal, hoping to spark an uprising of foreign miners. It failed, but it made war more likely.
War broke out on 11 October 1899 between Britain and the two Boer republics. The Boers won early victories, but Britain poured in nearly half a million men and captured Pretoria in 1900. The Boers then fought on as guerrillas.
Britain's answer, under Lord Kitchener, was scorched earth: farms burned, crops and animals destroyed, and civilians rounded up into camps. Disease and poor food killed huge numbers. A count compiled after the war gave 27,927 Boer deaths in the camps, three quarters of them children. Black Africans were held in separate camps, which got even less attention. Researchers at the University of Warwick, working from the camp records, have confirmed at least 14,154 Black deaths, and some historians believe the true figure was around 20,000. Together, close to 40,000 or more people died.
Black South Africans also served the British army in large numbers as scouts, drivers and labourers, and many hoped the British victory would bring them rights. The war ended with the Treaty of Vereeniging on 31 May 1902. On Boer insistence, the question of African voting rights was put off until after self-government.
After the war, Britain's Liberal government chose reconciliation with the Boer leaders over rights for the African majority. The four colonies, the Cape, Natal, the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony, drew up a constitution at a National Convention in 1908–09. Britain's Parliament passed it as the South Africa Act on 20 September 1909, despite a delegation to London led by the former Cape premier W. P. Schreiner, with the Coloured leader Abdullah Abdurahman and the African editor John Tengo Jabavu, which asked for equal political rights.
The Union of South Africa came into being on 31 May 1910, with Louis Botha, a former Boer general, as Prime Minister. Only the Cape kept a limited non-racial vote, and Black people were barred from sitting in Parliament. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission later called the 1909 Act an act of wholesale dispossession and discrimination, passed not by a South African legislature but by the British Parliament.
In 1912 African leaders founded the South African Native National Congress, later the African National Congress (ANC). A year later the Union Parliament passed the Natives Land Act of 19 June 1913, which allowed Africans to own land only in reserves covering about 7 per cent of the country. Sol Plaatje, the Congress's secretary, wrote that the African was "not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth". In 1914 a Congress delegation went to London to ask Britain to intervene. Britain said it was a South African matter.
South Africa gained full sovereignty under the Statute of Westminster in 1931. In 1948 the National Party came to power and built apartheid on the foundations already laid. On 31 May 1961 South Africa became a republic and left the Commonwealth. Apartheid ended with the first democratic election on 27 April 1994, when Nelson Mandela was elected President.
South Africa's history did not start in 1652 or 1795. The Mapungubwe kingdom flourished in the Limpopo valley 800 years ago, and the Khoekhoe, San, Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, Tswana, Pedi, Venda and others built societies long before Europeans arrived. Our partner sites cover the continent's independence stories:
The National Army Museum in Chelsea covers the Zulu and South African wars. Rhodes's legacy is debated in Oxford. Colonial Office files and camp records are at The National Archives in Kew.
In Cape Town, see the Castle of Good Hope, the Slave Lodge museum, District Six Museum and Robben Island. In Johannesburg, the Apartheid Museum and Constitution Hill. In KwaZulu-Natal, the battlefields of Isandlwana and Rorke's Drift. In Bloemfontein, the War Museum of the Boer Republics and the Women's Memorial to those who died in the camps.
Entrance fees are included in the tour price; tips are not included but are always welcome.
Cape Town:
Johannesburg:
In London:
The diamond magnate who wanted Africa red from Cape to Cairo.
Rhodes's company colony north of the Limpopo.
The three territories that escaped the Union.
How Cape slave owners were compensated in 1834.
All of Britain's African territories, country by country.
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