Second Boer War

The Second Boer War, fought from 11 October 1899 to 31 May 1902, pitted the British Empire against the two Boer republics of southern Africa, the South African Republic (Transvaal) and the Orange Free State. Britain won, annexing both republics, but only after a long guerrilla war in which its scorched-earth tactics and concentration camps caused tens of thousands of civilian deaths. In 1910 the former republics became part of the Union of South Africa.

The Boers, frontier farmers of mainly Dutch descent, had trekked away from British rule at the Cape and founded their republics in the 1850s. Britain annexed the Transvaal in 1877, but the Boers rose and regained their independence in the First Boer War of 1880–1881. The discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1884 then drew a flood of foreigners, the Uitlanders, mostly British, into the Transvaal. The republic's government under President Paul Kruger allowed them to vote only after 14 years' residence. In 1895–1896 the Jameson Raid, a failed armed attempt backed by Cecil Rhodes, prime minister of the Cape Colony, to spark an Uitlander uprising, deepened Boer distrust and pushed the two republics into a military alliance. Talks at Bloemfontein in mid-1899 broke down, and on 9 October Kruger issued an ultimatum demanding that British troops withdraw from the Transvaal's borders. When it expired, war began.

The Boers struck first, invading Natal and the Cape Colony and besieging British garrisons at Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking. The British suffered a run of defeats, including Stormberg, Magersfontein and Colenso during "Black Week" in December 1899, and Spion Kop in January 1900.

Britain responded by sending the largest force it had ever dispatched overseas, about 180,000 men by early 1900, and placed Lord Roberts in overall command, with Lord Kitchener as his chief of staff. Roberts relieved Kimberley in February 1900 and forced the surrender of Piet Cronjé's army of about 4,000 men at Paardeberg. Ladysmith was relieved at the end of February, and Mafeking, after a 217-day siege, in May. British forces took Bloemfontein in March, Johannesburg on 31 May and Pretoria on 5 June. Both republics were annexed, and Kruger left for exile in Europe by way of Portuguese East Africa, now Mozambique.

The war was far from over. Boer commandos under leaders such as Christiaan de Wet and Louis Botha turned to hit-and-run raids on railways, convoys and outposts. Under Kitchener the British answered with a network of more than 8,000 blockhouses linked by barbed wire, sweeping drives across the veld, and a scorched-earth policy of burning farms, destroying crops and killing livestock. Boer women and children, and Black Africans from affected areas, were moved into separate concentration camps. Overcrowding, poor food and disease killed about 26,000 Boer women and children and around 20,000 of the more than 115,000 Black Africans held in the camps. Although both sides had hoped to keep it a "white man's war", tens of thousands of Black Africans served, mostly with the British, as scouts, guards, drivers and later armed auxiliaries.

By May 1902, with around 15,000 Boers still in the field but their families suffering in the camps, the Boer leaders accepted terms. The Treaty of Vereeniging, signed on 31 May 1902, ended the republics' independence in return for reconstruction funds and a promise of eventual self-government, granted in 1906 and 1907. British military deaths numbered about 22,000, most from disease; Boer combatant deaths were about 6,000.

In 1910 the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony joined the Cape and Natal in the Union of South Africa, a self-governing dominion. Former Boer generals Louis Botha and Jan Smuts later led it into the First World War on Britain's side. Some historians see the war's unexpected length and losses as the start of doubts about Britain's global dominance.

Our 1880 and 1900 maps show the Boer republics beside the British colonies, and the 1914 map shows the Union of South Africa that replaced them.