Africa During the Scramble: A White Man's War?
- May 15
- 10 min read
By Gary Oswald.
In October of 1899, after a long crisis, the two Boer states of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic declared war on the British Empire and sent their armies to invade British Natal and the Cape Colony.
There is a great irony of the Second Boer War,in that the Boer states had only defensive political aims but offensive military ones. They wanted only their independence, to remain rulers of their own domain and of the black African underclass they oppressed. They were fighting for the pre-war status quo. But militarily, their great advantage was their mobility (every Boer soldier had a horse, whereas few British soldiers did) and so they were better on the offensive. Hence the Boers started this war, rather than waiting for the British to do so, and went on the offensive first.
The Boers had other advantages. They were more experienced marksmen, thanks to both their history in fighting black Africans to take their land and the way many of them worked as hunters or farmers; and they could mobilise quicker due to that history of frontiersmen serving as militia, meaning they also had a numerical advantage. They had better intelligence thanks to Afrikaner civilians in the British colonies and familiarity with the landscape of South Africa, so they knew where the British Army was a lot more often than the British knew where they were. And they had high morale thanks to their previous military victories and the idea that their cause was just and blessed by God.
They also had sympathy within Europe, as white settlers, in a way black African nations simply would never get. This meant they received aid and volunteers from Europe but also that they could still trade through Portugal (the UK did consider a full embargo of Portuguese ports in Mozambique in response but ended up only enforcing a weapons embargo). The combination of that sympathy and the mineral riches in the Transvaal meant that the Boers began the war as the best armed of any African states during this period, having their own machine guns and artillery and in particular smokeless guns, which meant they could shoot without giving away their positions. While a lot of African armies in this period were unfamiliar with their better guns, because they lacked the ammunition to practice with it and so used outdated tactics such as standing up rather than crouching down to fire, the Boers had no such problem.
And economically they coped with their entire male white workforce going to war, because they used black labour as a substitute. The farms would be run by the Boer women, using black African labour, and the mines (which had lost over sixty thousand workers when many of the uitlanders were expelled to the Cape Colony) were kept running by slave labour of black Africans. Wartime regulations allowed Africans to be conscripted into the mines and kept there on much reduced wages (ironically the exact forced labour that the mine owners had hoped they would get in the British Empire). These mines then paid for the war effort through trade with the Portuguese.
Even on the front lines, while black Africans were (with an exception we’ll get to later) not trusted with guns by either side, as many as a hundred thousand served with the armies of both sides as labourers and drivers. When we talk about the Boer Army digging trenches, what we normally mean was the Boers getting their black African labourers to dig them drenches, which they then, fresh, got to shoot from.
The Boer armies, quickly drove out into the Cape Colony, outmanoeuvred the British in their way due to their superior mobility and besieged the diamond town of Kimberley. This gave the Boers an advantage in that now they knew that the British must come to relieve that town (not the least because Cecil Rhodes was there and he was politically important to rescue) and so they could prepare for them to do so and ambush them. And they did this multiple times, preventing Kimberley from being rescued and allowing them to launch their own counter attacks further into the Cape Colony.
On the Natal front, they did even better, thanks to appalling British leadership, which saw the entire Natal Army pinned down in Ladysmith when they didn’t retreat in time, leaving Durban essentially defenceless.
This was probably the point where the British were most vulnerable, with most of their reinforcements still arriving by sea. Alfred Milner, High Commissioner for Southern Africa, made the argument that Natal should be abandoned and all troops committed instead to the Cape Colony, on the basis that if the Boers took Natal, the British settlers would resist them but if the Afrikaners in the Cape revolted on mass, British authority there would never be properly restored. He asked for all fifty thousand men the British had available to them to stay in the Cape, both to deter any Afrikaner rebellion there and to relieve Kimberley. He was obviously refused, the British Empire could not suffer the indignity of sacrificing a white colony, but throughout the war more troops were sent to the Cape Front then the Natal Front for that reason.
And because the Boers could prepare for them, the troops that were sent to the Natal front were stunningly unsuccessful, the Boers defeating them in numerous battles and preventing Ladysmith from being relieved. They also began to use the defensive trenches system to reinforce their positions, the system that would prove so deadly in the upcoming First World War.
Afterwards, there was criticism that the Boers had not properly taken advantage of those early victories. That by tying the British up in sieges, they tied up their own armies too and as such failed to ever truly launch attacks deep into Natal and the Cape Colony, which would have done far more to win the war than taking Kimberley or Ladysmith. But that take ignores several aspects. For a start, the Boer armies were militias who were under only the loose control of their commanders. Thousands deserted and returned to the farms during the war, and the further they were asked to operate from their bases, the more that would happen. Secondly, such attacks would allow the British to take a defensive aspect that would, in this era of machine guns and trenches, restore to them the military advantage.
The problem the Boers had was not their timidity, but the fact they were not facing Gladstone’s government but Salisbury’s. Instead of a government that was unwilling to commit to a war for empire, they found a government and a public that had huge enthusiasm for it. No loss truly shook their morale and stopped volunteers from across the Empire from signing up. Even the surrender of Kimberley, Ladysmith, or Mafeking on the Botswanan border probably doesn’t change that so much as stir up more calls for vengeance.
In total, six hundred thousand troops from the British Empire ended up in South Africa and there was no real appetite for peace without victory. The Boers found out what a lot of other African States already knew: if winning was a priority for a European empire, it did not matter how many of their soldiers you killed, they could always send more. They had to be willing to come to terms for you to win, and if they were in the First Boer War, they weren’t any more.
In Spring 1900, the weight of new reinforcements told. First Kimberley, then Ladysmith, and then Mafeking were relieved. And at the Battle of Paardeberg, a Boer army was entirely destroyed when their general dug in when he should have retreated. Even if that was a close-run thing, with the British coming within days of giving up before they won, but it was the first major loss of a Boer army. Shortly after that British troops entered the Boer capitals of Bloemfontein and Pretoria in March and June respectively. Both states were annexed to the British Empire, and the British thought the war, lasting less than a year, was over.
They were wrong.
The Boer armies had been left somewhat intact because the British had thought they would surrender if their Capitals fell and so didn’t want to lose men by attacking them. While there was some talk of surrender, these armies, encouraged primarily by the men of the Orange Free State, resolved to continue a guerrilla war. One of the reasons the Orange Free State soldiers argued for this was they felt the British had committed an unforgivable crimes at Mafeking: they had armed black men.
Mafeking was a British fortress town deep on the Transvaal’s borders, controlled by a small force of Rhodesian soldiers led by Robert Baden-Powell, later founder of the British Boy Scouts. Baden-Powell’s Job was to draw off Boer soldiers from the two main fronts of the Cape and Natal. If left alone, his men could raid deep into the Transvaal, so the Boers had to send men to deal with him, and every man sent to besiege Mafeking was one who wasn’t marching into Durban or stirring up rebellion in Cape Town. A fifth of the Boer army was sent to this relatively minor front, though once Baden-Powell was safely pinned down in Mafeking, they were able to redeploy most of those soldiers. By December 1899 the surrender of Baden-Powell’s garrison probably would have had no actual effect on the war at all; but it would have harmed his career, so it never happened.
Instead, he armed black residents. While the British had previously conquered most of South Africa with primarily black armies, they had disarmed all their black natives in 1878 as part of the preamble to removing their vote. (This had briefly been rescinded in 1880 when faced with a new rebellion) Baden-Powell was taking a step which no other Boer War officer had done.
Boer forces had routinely raided African farms for corps, burnt them out afterwards, and massacred any black natives who they captured, killing thousands of Africans. Thousands more fled to the nearest British towns such as Mafeking for refuge. Baden-Powell was no stranger to this tactic himself, having fought in Rhodesia, and he would routinely flog and execute the Africans in his town for stealing food, but he was ruthless enough to take advantage of the opportunity, using the refugees as a workforce both as labourers, who dug him trenches, and as armed soldiers.
They did all this while Baden-Powell put them on rations much lower than that of the white residents of the town and had them pay for that food from their wages, whereas the white residents got it for free. The white residents literally survived at their expense, whereas the black residents had to compete with horses for oats.
Having used this labour force to its largest potential, and having his fortifications now finished, in March 1900 he simply cut the black labourers (but not the soldiers) off from food entirely with the hope that they would leave the town and free up more rations. Thousands left, where hundreds starved to death before they reached a town and many more were killed by the besieging Boer soldiers, including several hundred women who were raped and beaten before being shot.
Despite this, it was the black soldiers who continued to do most of the fighting when Boers made further attacks on Mafeking, saving the town. When the town was relieved those troops, of course, were dismissed, sent back to their burned-out farms with whatever wages they still had.
Which given the success of this tactic here, and the fact that until 1878 the British in South Africa had relied primarily on black soldiers, does beg an AH Question. If the Boer's initial assaults had been even more effective, either because of an earlier deceleration of war, more aggressive action, or better sieging, would the British have turned to black recruits en mass? And if so, does that effect South Africa after the war?
Well the British generals had actually asked for this in our timeline and were refused because of the idea that it would offend the settlers of the Cape and Natal. You'd need that motive to be off the board, perhaps because the Natal had been surrendered or the feared Cape Rebellion actually happened instead of localised rebellions. I have doubts about this, there is a massive difference between sympathising with the Transvaal and willing to give up your own comfy life for them; and so enough Boers remained loyal, and in the Cape Parliament, that the British needed to placate them by not arming other groups. They didn't even fully arm white British loyalists in the Cape until 1901, let alone black Africans. You'd need them to be truly desperate for that to change.
In order to get to that point across the war rather than just in Mafeking, you would need Boer success that is frankly unrealistic. But if you did get that, it would be a step that a lot of Boers would struggle to forgive and it's not impossible that it would then force the British to return to empowering black Africans as their preferred tools of control, as little as they would want to. After all, the use of armed black men in Mafeking, in what was understood to be a white man’s war, outraged the Boers to the point they wrote repeated letters to Baden-Powell telling him to cease. It was loudly trumpeted in their towns as proof as to why God did not support the British and why no surrender could be allowed.
And it must be noted that it was arming the men, not the different rations for white and black labourers, which was controversial. In the other besieged British towns, the same discrepancy existed. Infant mortality in Kimberley during the siege was 50% among white woman but rose to 94% among black women, because their rations were a tenth of white civilian rations. Black civilians starved in all of these cities so that white civilians, and white soldiers who had bigger rations still, did not. Nobody had a problem with black people dying in a white man’s war, as long as they weren’t killing in it.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.
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