Transvaal Republic

The Transvaal Republic, officially the South African Republic (Dutch: Zuid-Afrikaanse Republiek) is a nation in southern Africa and a member of the Alliance of Independent Nations. The Transvaal is one of the two remaining Boer republics, along with neighboring Orange Free State; and at it's height was the largest of the six original Boer republics.

Colonization
In 1652, a century and a half after the discovery of the Cape Sea Route, Jan van Riebeeck established a refreshment station at the Cape of Good Hope, at what would become Cape Town, on behalf of the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch transported slaves from Indonesia, Madagascar, and India as labour for the colonists in Cape Town. As they expanded east, the Dutch settlers met the southwesterly migrating Xhosa people in the region of the Fish River. A series of wars, called the Cape Frontier Wars, were fought over conflicting land and livestock interests.

The discovery of diamonds, and later gold, was one of the catalysts that triggered the 19th-century conflict known as the Anglo-Boer War, as the Boers (original Dutch, Flemish, German, and French settlers) and the British fought for the control of the South African mineral wealth. Cape Town became a British colony in 1806. European settlement expanded during the 1820s as the Boers and the British 1820 Settlers claimed land in the north and east of the country. Conflicts arose among the Xhosa, Zulu, and Afrikaner groups who competed for territory.

Great Britain took over the Cape of Good Hope area in 1795, to prevent it from falling under control of the French First Republic, which had invaded the Dutch Republic. Given its standing interests in Australia and India, Great Britain wanted to use Cape Town as an interim port for its merchants' long voyages. The British returned Cape Town to the Dutch Batavian Republic in 1803, the Dutch East India Company having effectively gone bankrupt by 1795.

The British finally annexed the Cape Colony in 1806 and continued the frontier wars against the Xhosa; the British pushed the eastern frontier through a line of forts established along the Fish River. They consolidated the territory by encouraging British settlement. Due to pressure of abolitionist societies in Britain, the British parliament stopped its global slave trade with the passage of the Slave Trade Act 1807 and then abolished slavery in all its colonies with the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.

In the first two decades of the 19th century, the Zulu people grew in power and expanded their territory under their leader, Shaka. Shaka's warfare led indirectly to the Mfecane ("crushing") that devastated and depopulated the inland plateau in the early 1820s. An offshoot of the Zulu, the Matabele people created a larger empire that included large parts of the highveld under their king Mzilikazi.

The Great Trek
During the 1830s, approximately 12,000 Boers (later known as Voortrekkers), departed from the Cape Colony, where they had been subjected to British control. They migrated to the future Natal, Orange Free State, and Transvaal regions.

From 1835 until 1838, Boer settlers started to cross the Vaal and they had several skirmishes with the Ndebele. On 16 October 1836, a Boer laager (or fortified circle of wagons) led by Andries Hendrik Potgieter, was attacked by an Ndebele force of about 5,000, who looted all of Potgieter's livestock, but were unable to defeat the laager. One of the Sotho-Tswana chiefs, Chief Moroko of the Barolong people, who had earlier fled the Difaqane to the south to create the settlement of Thaba Nchu, sent fresh livestock to Potgieter to draw his party's wagons back to the safety of the Rolong stronghold of Thaba Nchu, where the Sotho-Tswana chief offered the Boers food and protection.

By January 1837, an alliance of 107 Boers, sixty Rolong, and forty Coloured men, organised as a commando under the leadership of Potgieter and Gert Maritz, attacked Mzilikazi's settlement at Mosega, which suffered heavy losses, and early in 1838 Mzilikazi fled north beyond the Limpopo (to current day Zimbabwe), never to return to Tranvaal. Andries Hendrik Potgieter, after the flight of the Ndebele, issued a proclamation in which he declared the country which Mzilikazi had abandoned and forfeited to the emigrant farmers, but also denying land rights to the Sotho-Tswana who had saved him and assisted in the defeat of the Mzilikazi and the Ndebele. After the Ndebele and Sotho-Tswana claims to the territory had been suppressed by the Boer political leadership, many Boer farmers trekked across the Vaal and occupied parts of the Transvaal, often near Sotho-Tswana villages, dividing the population up as forced labourers. Into these areas, still partly populated by remnants of the Ndebele and Sotho-Tswana, there was also a considerable immigration of members of the various Sotho-Tswana chiefdoms who had fled during the Difaqane.

The first permanent European settlement north of the Vaal was made by a party under Potgieter's leadership. That commandant had in March 1838 gone to Natal, and had endeavoured to avenge the massacre of Piet Retief and his comrades by the Zulus. Jealous, however, of the preference shown by the Dutch farmers in Natal to another commandant, Gert Maritz, Potgieter speedily recrossed the Drakensberg, and in November 1838 he and his followers settled by the banks of the Mooi River, founding a town named Potchefstroom in honour of Potgieter. This party instituted an elementary form of government, and in 1840 entered into a loose confederation with the Natalia Republic Boer, and also with the Boers south of the Vaal, whose headquarters were at Winburg. In 1842, however, Potgieter's party declined to go to the help of the Natal Boers, then involved in conflict with the British. Up to 1845 Potgieter continued to exercise authority over the Boer communities on both sides of the Vaal. A determination to keep clear of the British and to obtain access to the outer world through an independent channel led Potgieter and a considerable number of the Potchefstroom and Winburg burghers in 1845 to migrate towards Delagoa Bay. Potgieter settled in the Zoutpansberg, while other farmers chose as headquarters a place on the inner slopes of the Drakensberg, where they founded a village called Andries Ohrigstad. It proved fever-ridden and was abandoned, a new village being laid out on higher ground and named Lydenburg in memory of their sufferings at the abandoned settlement. Meanwhile, the southern districts abandoned by Potgieter and his comrades were occupied by other Boers. These were joined in 1848 by Andries W. J. Pretorius, who became commandant of the Potchefstroom settlers.

Creation of the South African Republic
On 17 January 1852, the United Kingdom signed the Sand River Convention treaty with 5,000 or so of the Boer families (about 40,000 white people), recognising their independence in the region to the north of the Vaal River, or the Transvaal. The Orange Free State, a sister Boer republic, was granted independence around the same time. But while they had obtained independence, they were far from being a united people. When Pretorius conducted the negotiations which led to the signing of the Sand River Convention he did so without consulting the volksraad, and Potgieter's party accused him of usurping power and aiming at domination over the whole country. However, the volksraad, at a meeting held at Rustenburg on 16 March 1852, ratified the convention, Potgieter and Pretorius having been publicly reconciled on the morning of the same day. Both leaders were near the end of their careers; Potgieter died in March and Pretorius in July 1853.

On the death of Andries Pretorius his son Marthinus W. Pretorius had been appointed his successor, and to the younger Pretorius was due the first efforts to end the discord and confusion which prevailed among the burghers – a discord heightened by ecclesiastical strife, the points at issue being questions not of faith but of church government. In 1856 a series of public meetings, summoned by Pretorius, was held at different districts in the Transvaal for the purpose of discussing and deciding whether the time had not arrived for substituting a strong central government in place of the petty district governments which had hitherto existed. The result was that a representative assembly of delegates was elected, empowered to draft a constitution.

In December 1856, the Transvaal assembly met at Potchefstroom, and for three weeks was engaged in modelling the constitution 1856 of the country. The name Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (South African Republic) was adopted as the title of the state, and the new constitution made provision for a volksraad to which members were to be elected by the people for a period of two years, and in which the legislative function was vested. The administrative authority was to be vested in a president, aided by an executive council. It was stipulated that members both of the volksraad and council should be members of the Dutch Reformed Church, and of European blood. No equality of coloured people with the white inhabitants would be tolerated either in church or state. In reviewing an incident so important in the history of the Transvaal as the appointment of the Potchefstroom assembly it is of interest to note the gist of the complaint among the Boers which led to this revolution in the government of the country as it had previously existed. In his History of South Africa Theal says: "The community of Lydenburg was accused of attempting to domineer over the whole country, without any other right to pre-eminence than that of being composed of the earliest inhabitants, a right which it had forfeited by its opposition to the general weal." In later years this complaint was precisely that of the Uitlanders at Johannesburg. To conciliate the Boers of Zoutpansberg the new-born assembly at Potchefstroom appointed Stephanus Schoeman, the commandantgeneral of the Zoutpansberg district, commandant-general of the whole country. This offer was, however, declined by Schoeman, and both Zoutpansberg and Lydenburg indignantly repudiated the new assembly and its constitution. The executive council, which had been appointed by the Potchefstroom assembly, with Pretorius as president, now took up a bolder attitude: they deposed Schoeman from all authority, declared Zoutpansberg in a state of blockade, and denounced the Boers of the two northern districts as rebels.

Pretorius, while still president of the Transvaal, had been elected, through the efforts of his partisans, president of the Orange Free State. He thereupon (in February 1860) obtained six months' leave of absence and repaired to Bloemfontein, in the hope of peacefully bringing about a union between the two republics. He had no sooner left the Transvaal than the -old Lydenburg party, headed by Cornelis Potgieter, landdrost of Lydenburg, protested that the union would be much more beneficial to the Free State than to the people of Lydenburg, and followed this up with the contention that it was illegal for any one to be president of the South African Republic and the Free State at the same time. At the end of the six months Pretorius, after a stormy meeting of the volksraad, apparently in disgust at the whole situation, resigned the presidency of the Transvaal. J. H. Grobelaar, who had been appointed president during the temporary absence of Pretorius, was requested to remain in office. The immediate followers of Pretorius now became extremely incensed at the action of the Lydenburg party, and a mass meeting was held at Potchefstroom (October 1860), where it was resolved that: (a) the volksraad no longer enjoyed its confidence; (b) that Pretorius should remain president of the South African Republic, and have a year's leave of absence to bring about union with the Free State; (c) that Schoeman should act as president during the absence of Pretorius; (d) that before the return of Pretorius to resume his duties a new volksraad should be elected.

Discovery of Gold and First Boer War
In 1865 an empty exchequer called for drastic measures, and the volksraad determined to endeavour to meet their liabilities and provide for further contingencies by the issue of notes. Paper money was thus introduced, and in a very short time fell to a considerable discount. In this same year the farmers of the Zoutpansberg district were driven into laagers by a native rising which they were unable to suppress. Schoemansdal, a village at the foot of the Zoutpansberg, was the most important settlement of the district, and the most advanced outpost in European occupation at that time in South Africa. It was just within the tropics, and was situated in a well-watered and beautiful country. It was used as a base by hunters and traders with the interior, and in its vicinity there gathered a number of settlers of European origin, many of them outcasts from Europe or Cape Colony. They earned the reputation of being the most lawless white inhabitants in the whole of South Africa. When called upon to go to the aid of this settlement, which in 1865–1866 was sore pressed by one of the mountain Bantu tribes known as the Baramapulana, the burghers of the southern Transvaal objected that the white inhabitants of that region were too lawless and reckless a body to merit their assistance. In 1867 Schoemansdal and a considerable portion of the district were abandoned on the advice of Commandant-general Paul Kruger, and Schoemansdal finally was burnt to ashes by a party of natives. It was not until 1869 that peace was patched up, and the settlement arrived at left the mountain tribes in practical independence. Meanwhile the public credit and finances of the Transvaal went from bad to worse. The paper notes already issued had been constituted by law legal tender for all debts, but in 1868 their power of actual purchase was only 30% compared with that of gold, and by 1870 it had fallen as low as 25%. Civil servants, who were paid in this depreciated scrip, suffered considerable distress. The revenue for 1869 was stated as £31,511; the expenditure at £30,836.

The discovery of gold at Tati led President Pretorius in April 1868 to issue a proclamation extending his territories on the west and north so as to embrace the goldfield and portion of Bechuanaland. The same proclamation extended Transvaal territory on the east so as to include part of Delagoa Bay. The eastern extension claimed by Pretorius was the sequel to endeavours made shortly before, on the initiative of a Scotsman, to develop trade along the rivers leading to Delagoa Bay. It was also in accord with the desire of the Transvaal Boers to obtain a seaport, a desire which had led them as early as 1860 to negotiate with the Zulus for the possession of St Lucia Bay. That effort had, however, failed. And now the proclamation of Pretorius was followed by protests on the part of the British high commissioner, Sir Philip Edmond Wodehouse, as well as on the part of the consul-general for Portugal in South Africa. The boundary on the east was settled by a treaty with Portugal in 1869, the Boers abandoning their claim to Delagoa Bay; that on the west was dealt with in 1871.

In 1877, before the 1886 Witwatersrand Gold Rush, Britain annexed the Transvaal. The Boers viewed this as an act of aggression, and protested. In 16 December 1880 the independence of the republic was proclaimed again, leading to the First Boer War, which began on 16 December 1880 with shots fired by Transvaal Boers at Potchefstroom. This led to the action at Bronkhorstspruit on 20 December 1880, where the Boers ambushed and destroyed a British Army convoy. From 22 December 1880 to 6 January 1881, British army garrisons all over the Transvaal became besieged.

On 14 February hostilities were suspended, awaiting the outcome of peace negotiations initiated by an offer from Transvaal State President Paul Kruger. During this time British Major-General Sir George Pomeroy Colley's promised reinforcements arrived with more to follow. The British government in the meantime had offered a Royal Commission investigation and possible troop withdrawal, and their attitude toward the Boers was conciliatory. Colley was critical of this stance and, whilst waiting for Kruger's final agreement, decided to attack again with a view to enabling the British government to negotiate from a position of strength. Unfortunately this resulted in the disaster of the Battle of Majuba Hill on 27 February 1881, the greatest humiliation for the British.

On 26 February 1881, Colley led a night march of some 360 men to the top of Majuba Hill that overlooked the main Boer position. Early the next morning the Boers saw Colley occupying the summit, and started to ascend the hill. The Boers, shooting accurately and using all available natural cover, advanced toward the trapped British position. Several Boer groups stormed the hill and drove off the British at great cost to the British, including the loss of Major-General Colley. Many of the British were killed or wounded, some falling to their deaths down the mountain. This had such an impact that during the Second Boer War, one of the British slogans was "Remember Majuba." The Boers suffered only one killed and five wounded.

Hostilities continued until 6 March 1881, when a truce was declared, ironically on the same terms that Colley had disparaged. The Transvaal forts had endured, contrary to Colley's forecast, with the sieges being generally uneventful, the Boers content to wait for hunger and sickness to strike. The forts had suffered only light casualties as an outcome of sporadic engagements, except at Potchefstroom, where twenty-four were killed, and seventeen at Pretoria, in each case resulting from occasional raids on Boer positions.

The British government of William Gladstone was conciliatory as it realised that any further action would require substantial troop reinforcements, and it was likely that the war would be costly, messy and protracted. Unwilling to get bogged down in a distant war the British government ordered a truce.

The Pretoria Convention of 1881 gave the Boers self-rule in the Transvaal, under British oversight. Kruger was elected president in 1883 and the republic was restored with full independence in 1884 with the London Convention, but not for long. The Gold rush also brought an influx of non-Boer European settlers (called uitlanders, outlanders, by the Boers), leading to a destabilisation of the republic. Kruger was re-elected president in 1888 and 1893, each time defeating Piet Joubert.

Second Boer War
British expansionist ideas (notably propagated by Cecil Rhodes) as well as disputes over uitlander political and economic rights resulted in the failed Jameson Raid of 1895. This raid, led by (and named after) Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, was intended to encourage an uprising of the uitlanders in Johannesburg. However, the uitlanders did not take up arms to support the raid, and Transvaal government forces surrounded the column and captured Jameson's men before they could reach Johannesburg.

As tensions escalated, there were political manoeuvrings and negotiations to reach a compromise on the issues of the rights of the uitlanders within the South African Republic, control of the gold mining industry, and the British desire to incorporate the Transvaal and the Orange Free State into a federation under British control. Given that the majority of Uitlanders were of British origin, and that new uitlanders continued to arrive in Johannesburg, the Boers recognised that granting full voting rights to the uitlanders would eventually result in the loss of ethnic Boer control in the South African Republic.

To Lord Milner's satisfaction, the June 1899 negotiations in Bloemfontein only worked in favor of the Orange Free State, and in September 1899 British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain demanded full voting rights and representation for the uitlanders residing in the Transvaal. Paul Kruger, the President of the South African Republic, issued an ultimatum on 9 October 1899, giving the British government 48 hours to withdraw all their troops from both the borders of the Transvaal, failing which the Transvaal would declare war on the British government. The British government rejected the South African Republic's ultimatum, resulting in the South African Republic declaring war on Britain.

In January of 1900, after receiving word of the Transvaal's declaration of war on the British, Germany, under the direction of Chancellor Chlodwig von Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst sent a force of 9,500 Imperial troops to assist in the war alongside the military of the Transvaal. The British military began utilizing the first concentration camps in March 1900, which were used to contain Boer and Black African civilians as well as prisoners of war who were later scheduled to be imprisoned in continental British facilities. Black African militia uprisings took place beginning in April of 1900, and by August 1900 totaled 65,000 in size after conducting multiple successful raids on British encampments, assisted by Boer forces, and obtaining suitable military equipment.

By August 1900, the total fighting force was 162,500 Boers, Black Africans, Germans and Foreign Volunteers versus 325,000 British troops. Garrisons of Cape Dutch citizens as well as Black African citizens in the Cape Colony formed loosely under multiple commanders including Piet Frederick van Amstel, Marthinus Voederman and British-Jumaanian Anarchist Robert Waverley, totaling approximately 37,000, responding to British scorched earth policy in the Transvaal by destroying thousands of British-owned farms through various methods, inclusively the arson of farmhouses, barns and grain silos, widespread crop thefts, theft and destruction of farm equipment, as well as the murder of as many as 4,500 Cape British citizens and the rape and imprisonment of as many as 6,800 British women. For this reason they were originally known as the Britsverkrachters or "Brit Rapists", and later as the Cape Vrijmensen ("Cape Freemen"), a more endearing term.

In addition to the destruction of farms, Cape Vrijmensen militias were also known for burning British encampments and arriving ships in Cape Town and Mossel Bay. Riots led by the Vrijmensen militias broke out in British cities and towns across the Cape Colony, which led to the withdrawl of 100,000 British troops from the Transvaal to combat unrest in the Cape in November of 1900. Attempts to cross the Karoo Desert by British troops were mostly successful, but major opposition was faced in the predominately Vrijmensen controlled Western Cape which led to a high number of British casualties caused by ambushes and night-time raids. The Vrijmensen used a variety of explosives tactically against British soldiers, including the burial of dynamite reserves in the ground along major routes, which were detonated from higher ground as British brigades passed, a tactic which was later used by Boer soldiers in the Transvaal.

In January 1901, Transvaal resistance soldiers entered the city of Pretoria, which had previously been captured by the British in March of 1900, and using an alternating system of large violent attacks followed by strategic flanking of British troop formations and the siege of multiple major forts and encampments within the city of Pretoria, the resistance soldiers took the city by March 1901, but were driven out of Johannesburg during the same month, and retreated to defend their occupation in Pretoria. In May 1901, Vrijmensen militias conducted a massive raid on government buildings in Cape Town which resulted in the death of 11 Cape Colony government workers, including the newly appointed Cape Colony Governor C.R. Stramford.

In June of 1901, Bechuanaland native nationalists began an uprising against the British government of the Bechuanaland Protectorate with the objective of gaining full independence from the British, which caused British troops to leave the Cape Colony and move towards Bechuanaland. With the departure of troops from the Cape Colony, the Vrijmensen militias formed large convoys of laager wagons which were heavily armed with rifles and explosives as well as military supplies made way across the Karoo Desert into the Transvaal, where they engaged with eastwardly-mobile British troop formations from behind. Attacks by the Vrijmensen militias were equally compensated by attacks carried out by westwardly-mobile Transvaal troops, who formed offensive lines against British troop positions after receiving word that the militias were providing assistance. This military campaign was carried out over eight months and was later known as the Vicegrip Offensive.

In November of 1901 at the end of the Vicegrip Offensive, Transvaal resistance soldiers and Vrijmensen militias began a campaign to liberate concentration camps, starting with the British concentration camp at Potchefstroom. The liberation of the Potchefstroom camp was followed by the liberation of the Irene, Belfast and Barberton camps later in the month. With the number of resistance troops now outnumbering the number of British troops present in the Transvaal, the British called for a peace conference to be scheduled with the government of the Transvaal in December 1901.

In February of 1902, a temporary ceasefire was signed by the British and Transvaal governments, and a convention was held in the Cape Colony city of Kimberly. By March 1902, a non-aggression treaty is signed by the government of the Transvaal which prohibited the Transvaal from using military force to intervene in affairs regarding Natalia, Bechuanaland and the Cape Colony. In return Transvaal leaders ordered the British to release all prisoners from concentration camps and overseas prisons, to forfeit all concentration camp properties to the Transvaal government, and to decommission and raze all concentration camps in Natalia and the Cape Colony by 1905. Conventional tensions arise after the British government demanded the removal of German troops from the Transvaal in April 1902. The Transvaal government demands a formal cease-fire be signed before withdrawing any troops.

In May 1905, the British government agreed to sign a ceasefire under the condition that the Transvaal unanimously forfeits the Potchefstroom, Klerksdorp, Nylstroom and Lichtenburg districts, and agrees to sign a non-aggression treaty regarding these districts. After a month-long session of the Volksraad, the Transvaal forfeitted the Potchefstroom, Klerksdorp and Lichtenburg districts to the Cape Colony. The Nylstroom district was not forefitted, but instead the Transvaal offered to split the Pretoria district into Pretoria and Vereeniging-Johannesburg, then forefitting Vereeniging-Johannesburg to the British. The British accepted the counter, and signed the cease-fire. The British removed all troops from the Transvaal which were then sent to Bechuanaland to silence the uprisings, while all foreign troops were removed from the Transvaal, and Vrijmensen militias were disbanded and many left to return to the Cape Colony. The collection of agreements signed between the Transvaal and British governments later became known as the Treaty of Kimberly.