The History of South Africa under British Rule

South Africa is the imperial history that will not be over. The British were the first imperial power to impose a constitutional order on the Cape Colony, and they were the last to leave: the country remained a dominion, and then a Commonwealth member, until 1961. They abolished slavery throughout the empire in 1834, and they presided over the mineral revolution that produced the deep structures of modern South African inequality. They fought the Boers twice, governed the country through the Hertzog years, and watched the National Party come to power in 1948 without doing very much to prevent it. The apartheid system that followed was built in part on foundations that the British had laid.

The British Capture of the Cape Colony

The British seizure of the Cape Colony from the Netherlands in 1806, during the Napoleonic Wars, was a strategic move to protect the sea route to India. The Cape Colony had been established by the Dutch East India Company in 1652 as a refreshment station on the route to the East Indies, and it had grown into a substantial colony of Dutch-settler (Afrikaner) farmers, known as Boers, and the indigenous Khoikhoi and San peoples. The British takeover in 1806 was confirmed by the Congress of Vienna in 1814, and the Cape Colony was governed as a Crown colony. The British administration abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1834, both measures that produced long-running tensions with the Boer settlers.

The British also imposed a system of racial classification that, in the long run, hardened into the structures of the apartheid state. The 1828 “Fingo Fingo” decree of Lord Goderich extended legal equality to the Cape Khoikhoi; but the 1850s Pringle Ordinance and the later Masters and Servants Acts gave employers, white and coloured, a heavy-handed apparatus for controlling African labour. The Convention of 1884, which annexed the territory of Goshen and Stellaland to Bechuanaland, completed the British penetration of the interior.

The Boer Settlers and the Great Trek

The British takeover of the Cape produced several decades of tension between the British administration and the Boer settlers. The British abolition of slavery throughout the empire in 1834, with compensation paid to the slave owners but not the slaves, was particularly controversial, and the Great Trek of 1836–1840 saw thousands of Boer families leave the Cape Colony to establish their own independent republics in the interior. The voortrekkers, led by figures such as Piet Retief and Andries Pretorius, established the Natalia Republic, the Orange Free State, and the South African Republic (Transvaal), and they fought a series of wars with African peoples, including the Zulu kingdom.

The Great Trek was, in the judgment of the historian Hermann Giliomee, “the central event in the history of Afrikaner nationalism.” The Trekkers were motivated by a combination of grievance (the abolition of slavery, the Anglicisation policy) and a sense of divine vocation. Their republics were built on the appropriation of African land, and the consequences of that appropriation — the Mfecane wars of Shaka Zulu, the displacement of the Ndebele and the Sotho — have shaped southern Africa ever since.

The Discovery of Diamonds and Gold

The discovery of diamonds in 1867 at Hopetown and gold in 1886 on the Witwatersrand transformed the economy of southern Africa and led to a renewed British interest in extending control over the Boer republics. The diamond discoveries around Kimberley attracted British and European immigrants and created the modern mining industry. The gold discoveries on the Witwatersrand produced the great mining city of Johannesburg, and the wealth of the gold mines financed the modernisation of southern Africa.

Cecil Rhodes, the British Cape Colony prime minister and the founder of the British South Africa Company, was the most consequential figure in the British expansion of this period. Rhodes’s career — a country boy from Hertfordshire who made a fortune in the Kimberley diamond fields and then set out to redraw the map of Africa — embodied the entanglement of capital and empire that the 19th century produced. His “Cape to Cairo” scheme, which aimed at a continuous British dominion from Cairo to the Cape, was always more slogan than plan, but it expressed the conviction of a generation that British power could organise the world.

The British defeat of the Zulu kingdom in 1879 and the annexation of the Transvaal in 1877 set the stage for the Boer Wars. The 1879 Anglo-Zulu War, in which the British lost the Battle of Isandlwana before winning the war, established the limits of British military prestige in southern Africa. The 1877 annexation of the Transvaal produced the First Boer War of 1880–1881.

The Boer Wars

The Boer Wars were two conflicts fought between the British Empire and the Boer republics. The First Boer War (1880–1881) was a short conflict in which the Boers successfully defended their independence, culminating in the British defeat at the Battle of Majuba Hill in February 1881. The Second Boer War (1899–1902) was a much longer and more serious conflict that ended with the British conquest of the Boer republics. The British campaign, led initially by Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener, involved the use of trench warfare, scorched earth policies, and the controversial concentration camps, in which more than 27,927 Boer civilians (mostly women and children) died in the white camps, alongside an estimated 14,000 Black African internees.

Emily Hobhouse, the British welfare worker who visited the camps in 1901, wrote to the Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain: “I wish to state emphatically that the terrible mortality among the women and children in the camps is not due to any epidemic, but to the policy of the British Government.” Hobhouse was right, and the admission has shaped British historiography of the war ever since. The war produced a deep and lasting bitterness on both sides.

The Union of South Africa

The 1910 Union of South Africa brought the Cape Colony, Natal, the Transvaal, and the Orange River Colony into a single dominion. The new state was self-governing in domestic affairs, with Louis Botha of the South African Party as the first prime minister and Jan Smuts as a key minister. The South Africa Act of 1909, passed by the British Parliament, defined the constitutional arrangements, and the British Crown retained control over foreign policy and defence. The Union’s political system was dominated by Afrikaner and English-speaking whites, and the rights of the African majority were increasingly restricted. The Natives’ Land Act of 1913 allocated only about 7 percent of land to African reserves, leaving the remainder for white ownership.

The 1913 Act was, as the historian W. M. Macmillan noted in The Cape Colour Question (1927), “the foundation of the South African colour bar.” It defined the parameters of African land ownership for almost a century. The subsequent Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 and the Hertzog Bills of the 1930s extended the system of racial discrimination to the towns and the labour market.

Apartheid and the End of the British Presence

The British government’s gradual withdrawal of its influence over South Africa culminated in the Statute of Westminster of 1931 and the Status of the Union Act of 1934, both of which confirmed the sovereignty of the South African Parliament. The National Party victory of 1948 and the establishment of the apartheid system effectively ended any residual British influence, although South Africa remained a dominion and, until 1961, a member of the Commonwealth.

The 1961 republic and the 1961 departure from the Commonwealth, both promoted by Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, marked the final end of the British connection. The subsequent apartheid system, which lasted until 1994, and the political career of Nelson Mandela, are the most significant legacies of the British period in South Africa. As Frederick Cooper has argued, the British in South Africa — as in much of Africa — “created the conditions in which a more thoroughgoing racial state could be built, and then left.”

Historiographical Note

The historiography of British South Africa is one of the more contested in the imperial literature. The older Afrikaner nationalist accounts — embodied in the work of G. W. Eybers and C. F. J. Muller — emphasised the role of British “treachery” in the South African War. The liberal-revisionist tradition, led by W. M. Macmillan and continued by C. W. de Kiewiet and, more recently, Hermann Giliomee, has produced a more balanced picture, in which the British and the Afrikaners are jointly responsible for the racial state. The current debate, exemplified in the work of T. J. Lemon, Saul Dubow, and Bill Freund, is over how far the apartheid system can be read back into the British period. Dubow’s Land, Labour and Racial Discrimination (1978) and Lemon’s White on White (1996) are indispensable.

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