Second Boer War (1899-1902): Britain Against the Boer Republics

The Second Boer War, fought from 11 October 1899 to 31 May 1902, was a conflict between the British Empire and the two independent Boer republics of southern Africa, the South African Republic (Transvaal) and the Orange Free State. It began with Boer victories and dramatic sieges, turned into a British advance that captured both capitals, and then became a long guerrilla war met by farm burning and concentration camps. It was the largest and costliest war Britain fought between 1815 and 1914, and it shaped the creation of modern South Africa.

Background and causes

The Boers, or Afrikaners, were descendants mainly of Dutch, German and French settlers at the Cape. Many had trekked inland in the 1830s to escape British rule and founded the two republics. Britain annexed the Transvaal in 1877, but the Boers won back their independence in the First Boer War of 1880–1881.

Everything changed with the discovery of vast gold deposits on the Witwatersrand in 1886. Johannesburg grew almost overnight, and the Transvaal became the richest state in the region. Thousands of foreign miners and businessmen, called uitlanders (outlanders), mostly British, poured in. President Paul Kruger’s government refused them the vote without long residence, taxed them heavily and granted monopolies, such as dynamite, that raised mining costs.

In 1895–1896 the Jameson Raid, an attempt backed by Cecil Rhodes to spark an uitlander uprising, failed humiliatingly and deepened Boer distrust. The Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain and the High Commissioner in South Africa, Sir Alfred Milner, then pressed the Transvaal hard over the franchise, while the Boers armed themselves with modern Mauser rifles and Krupp and Creusot artillery. Historians still debate how far British policy was driven by gold, by strategy and imperial prestige, or by Milner’s personal determination.

Talks between Milner and Kruger at the Bloemfontein Conference in May and June 1899 failed. As British reinforcements sailed, Kruger issued an ultimatum on 9 October demanding their withdrawal. It expired on 11 October 1899, and the Orange Free State under President Marthinus Steyn joined the Transvaal.

The Boer offensive and the sieges

At first the Boers, mounted citizen soldiers organised in units called commandos, outnumbered the British troops in South Africa. They invaded Natal and the Cape Colony and besieged three towns: Mafeking and Kimberley in the west, and Ladysmith in Natal. The British won costly actions at Talana Hill on 20 October and Elandslaagte on 21 October, but were driven back into Ladysmith, which was cut off from 2 November. The sieges of Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley held down large Boer forces but also gripped public attention in Britain.

Black Week and the British advance

The British commander, General Sir Redvers Buller, split his army to relieve the besieged towns. Between 10 and 17 December 1899 it suffered three defeats: at Stormberg on 10 December, at Magersfontein on 11 December, where the Highland Brigade was cut down by Boers dug into trenches at the foot of the hills, and at Colenso on 15 December, Buller’s own failed attempt to cross the Tugela River. The week became known as Black Week.

London responded by sending Field Marshal Lord Roberts as commander-in-chief, with Lord Kitchener as his chief of staff, together with tens of thousands of reinforcements from Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other parts of the empire. In Natal, Buller suffered another bloody setback at Spion Kop on 23–24 January 1900 before finally breaking through.

Roberts moved on the Orange Free State in February 1900. Cavalry under General John French relieved Kimberley on 15 February. The main Boer army in the west under General Piet Cronjé was surrounded at Paardeberg and surrendered on 27 February with about 4,000 men. The next day Buller’s troops entered Ladysmith.

Roberts took Bloemfontein, the Free State capital, on 13 March 1900. Mafeking was relieved on 17 May after 217 days. British forces entered Johannesburg on 31 May and Pretoria, the Transvaal capital, on 5 June. Britain proclaimed the annexation of the Free State as the Orange River Colony in May and of the Transvaal in September 1900.

The last major set-piece battle, at Bergendal (Dalmanutha) in late August 1900, broke the Boers’ eastern front. Kruger left for Europe, sailing from Lourenço Marques in Portuguese East Africa in October 1900, and sought foreign help in vain. Roberts handed over command to Kitchener in November and returned to Britain, believing the war almost won.

The guerrilla war

Instead the war entered its longest phase. Boer leaders such as Christiaan de Wet, Koos de la Rey, Louis Botha and Jan Smuts broke their forces into small, fast-moving commandos that raided railways, supply columns and isolated garrisons, relying on farms for food, horses and information. Smuts even led a raid deep into the Cape Colony in 1901.

Peace talks between Kitchener and Botha at Middelburg in February and March 1901 failed, largely over an amnesty for Cape rebels and the future of Black Africans’ rights. The commandos remained capable of striking hard: as late as 7 March 1902, De la Rey routed a British column at Tweebosch and captured its commander, Lord Methuen, whom he later released because of his wounds.

Kitchener answered with a strategy of attrition. British columns burned an estimated 30,000 Boer farmhouses and destroyed crops and livestock across the countryside. Lines of blockhouses, eventually around 8,000 of them linked by barbed wire, divided the veld, and mounted columns carried out large “drives” to sweep up commandos.

Displaced Boer women and children, and separately Black Africans from the farms, were moved into concentration camps. Poor sanitation, food shortages and epidemics of measles and typhoid caused tens of thousands of deaths before reforms reduced the death rate in 1902. The campaigner Emily Hobhouse exposed conditions in the camps, and the Liberal leader Henry Campbell-Bannerman condemned “methods of barbarism”.

African participation

Although often remembered as a “white man’s war”, the conflict involved Black and Coloured South Africans at every level. Tens of thousands worked as drivers, labourers, scouts and servants for both armies, and the British armed many thousands as guards and scouts, perhaps 10,000 to 30,000 by the end. Boer commandos were accompanied by African and Coloured agterryers (after-riders), who looked after horses, carried ammunition and sometimes fought. The Black journalist and interpreter Sol Plaatje kept a famous diary of the siege of Mafeking, and Africans in many districts suffered from the farm burning and were moved into camps of their own. Many Africans hoped a British victory would bring wider political rights; the peace settlement disappointed them.

Peace at Vereeniging

Exhausted, and with their families in camps and their land devastated, Boer delegates met at Vereeniging in May 1902. The Treaty of Vereeniging was signed in Pretoria on 31 May 1902. The Boers accepted British sovereignty; in return Britain promised self-government, granted £3 million for reconstruction and agreed that the question of votes for Black Africans would not be decided before self-government, which in practice excluded them.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1886: Gold discovered on the Witwatersrand.
• 1895, 29 December – 1896, 2 January: The Jameson Raid fails.
• 1899, 11 October: War begins as the Boer ultimatum expires.
• 1899, 10–15 December: Black Week: Stormberg, Magersfontein and Colenso.
• 1900, 27 February: Cronjé surrenders at Paardeberg.
• 1900, 28 February: Relief of Ladysmith.
• 1900, 5 June: British forces enter Pretoria.
• 1900, 29 November: Kitchener takes over command; the guerrilla war intensifies.
• 1902, 31 May: Treaty of Vereeniging ends the war.
• 1910, 31 May: Union of South Africa is formed.

Consequences and legacy

The war drew in the wider empire. Some 16,000 Australians, more than 7,000 Canadians and about 6,500 New Zealanders served, and the experience became part of each country’s emerging national story. In Natal, Mohandas Gandhi organised an Indian ambulance corps of stretcher-bearers who served at Colenso and Spion Kop. The execution in 1902 of two Australian officers of an irregular unit, Harry “Breaker” Morant and Peter Handcock, for killing prisoners, remains controversial in Australia.

The war shook British confidence. Early defeats and the poor health of many recruits led to army reforms and to wider concern about the nation’s fitness. Internationally it isolated Britain, which was criticised across Europe, and encouraged it to seek alliances, beginning with Japan in 1902.

In South Africa, the British under Milner tried to anglicise the former republics, but the Liberal government in London granted them self-government in 1906–1907. Former Boer generals Louis Botha and Jan Smuts led the new Union of South Africa formed in 1910. The memory of the camps and farm burning fed Afrikaner nationalism for generations, while the settlement left Black South Africans without political rights, a pattern that later hardened into segregation and apartheid.

Why it matters

The Second Boer War ended the independence of the Boer republics and created the political framework of modern South Africa. It foreshadowed twentieth-century warfare, with trenches, smokeless rifles, guerrilla tactics, mass internment of civilians and controversy at home over how the war was fought.