Southern Africa became the site of the earliest European settlement in modern African history in 1652, when employees of the Dutch East India Company established a supply base on the shore of Table Bay, the site of the modern city of Capetown. Over the next 150 years, Dutch settlers settled on the land surrounding Table Bay and to the east along the coast, creating Cape Colony.

As the Dutch settlements expanded, they encountered both indigenous Stone-Age Khoisan and Iron-Age Bantu African peoples. The earliest encounters were with Khoisan who were decimated, enslaved or forced to flee. As subsequent generations of Europeans expanded further to the east, they encountered Bantu (mostly Xhosa) who became trading partners as well as armed opponents. The Dutch settlers, called Boers (from the Dutch word for farmer), created very large farms and found it necessary to import labor, so Cape Colony imported slaves while much of the rest of Africa exported them.

TIMELINE OF THE BOER- XHOSA WARS
Year	Note
1779	disputed border between Fish & Sundays Rivers
1793	disputed border to the west of the Sundays River
1799-1803	disputed border at Sundays River
1811-1812	first British intervention, border at Fish River
1818-1819	Xhosa withdraw beyond Keiskama River
1834-1835	Xhosa withdraw to the Kei River
1836	British returned land between the Kei and Keiskama Rivers to the Xhosa

During the Napoleonic Wars, the administration of Cape Colony changed. The British seized control in 1795, returned it to the Dutch in 1803 and seized it again in 1806. After 1806, they gradually extended their control along the coast to the east. The Boers resented British rule, even though British control brought economic benefits to the Boers.

British control increased the opportunities for farmers to export sheep and wool, and hunters to export ivory obtained from the interior. On the other hand, the British angered Boers by abolishing slavery in 1807, even though they mitigated the effect by passing the "Hottentot Law" in 1809 to require blacks to carry passes when moving about in public. Under this law, any black found without a pass (which listed the name of employer and location of residence) could be taken by any white for labor.

The discovery of diamonds in 1867 near the Vaal River, some 550 miles northeast of Capetown, ended the isolation of the Boers and changed South African history. The discovery triggered a "diamond rush" that attracted people from all over the world and turned Kimberley into a town of 50,000 within five years. At first, both whites and blacks worked independent claims in four areas surrounding Kimberley, but as the mines went deeper, they became more difficult to work, and a number of businessmen managed to consolidate them into larger mines. One of them was Cecil Rhodes who arrived in South Africa at age 16 and eventually gained control over most of the mines through his De Beers Consolidated Company. Another was Barney Barnato, the son of a London pub owner who arrived in 1873 at age 21 with a small amount of cash and "forty boxes of cheap cigars" which he used to buy mining claims. A third was Alfred Beit, the son of a Hamburg merchant who arrived in 1875 and stayed on to organize the consolidation of small mines so they could be exploited with heavy mining equipment.

Kimberley in 1870, only three years after Europeans started to mine diamonds

In 1886, a second major mineral find was made along a large cliff thirty miles south of the Boer capital at Pretoria. The cliff, known locally as the "Witwatersrand" (literally "white water ridge") contained the world's largest deposit of gold-bearing ore. Although it was not as rich as gold finds in Canada and Australia, its consistency made it especially well-suited to industrial mining methods.

Although the "Rand" became covered by small claims just like Kimberley, men like Rhodes, Barnato and Beit immediately invested their diamond profits in gold-mining. Due to the relatively low quality of the ore, large quantities were required to produce acceptable amounts of gold, and that could only be accomplished through large investments in heavy machinery. Other Europeans with access to capital became involved in gold mining too, and the diamond moguls were never able to achieve the same level of control as they had at Kimberley. By 1889, 124 companies, organized into nine "groups" based on their sources of financing, controlled the South African gold mines.

Although they resisted federation with the British, the Transvaal Boers could not ignore the threat possessed by the independent Zulu state to the southeast. The Zulu were a subgroup of the Nguni Bantu who occupied the eastern slopes and coastal plain of South Africa, a dry region with numerous small rivers that provided relative prosperity. The Nguni were semi- nomadic pastoralists who also planted staple crops during the winter rainy season and lived in small, independent homesteads that were loosely organized into relatively small states. That began to change at the beginning of the 19th century when a series of dry years followed decades of good rainfall, population growth and territorial expansion. The result was overcrowding that culminated in conflict over access to water and good land.

Southern Africa in 1870

With the major African kingdoms out of the way and the Boer Republics under British authority, the way was clear for British imperialists to carry out their plans. Perhaps the greatest of all British imperialists was Cecil Rhodes, the dominant European figure in southern Africa in the late 19th century. He came to Natal in 1869 to recover from tuberculosis at his older brother's farm. Instead of farming, Rhodes spent most of his time at Kimberley seeking diamonds. Over the next decade, Rhodes commuted between Kimberley and Oxford to earn a university degree at the same time he amassed a fortune in Kimberley diamonds.

Besides being a shrewd businessman, Rhodes was also a dreamer who wanted to unite the world under an Anglo-Saxon empire. He considered the American War for Independence to have been an enormous tragedy because of the way it divided English-speaking peoples, and he hoped that the English in Europe and America would eventually reunite. Rhodes even wrote in 1877 about his vision of an empire that included Africa, South America, the East Asian Coast, most of the Holy Land, and South Pacific islands.

By 1880, Rhodes was a multi-millionaire and well-known enough to run for election as an Member of Parliament in the Cape Colony. He became interested in the land north of the Transvaal, specifically Matabeleland and Mashonaland in the modern country of Zimbabwe. Originally, the land was occupied by the Shona people, but about 1840 the Matabele people conquered it as part of the Zulu wars. By the 1880s, Europeans believed that there was gold in Matabeleland, since it was located between rich mineral deposits in Katanga and Witwatersrand. The Matabele leader Lobenguela used diplomacy to pit European powers against each other, and eventually granted all mining concessions to Cecil Rhodes in the mistaken belief that all he wanted was gold.

With tensions between the British government and the two Boer Republics at an all-time high after the Jameson Raid, the appointment of Alfred Milner as High Commissioner for South Africa in 1897 was the equivalent of throwing kerosene on a fire. Milner had been a brilliant student at Oxford University and had served in Egypt where he developed a reputation as an authoritarian leader. Milner believed that the British were had a moral right and duty to rule inferior peoples and his job was to to reverse the decline of Britain's influence in world politics. As a result, he paid no attention to local views and ignored moderates on both sides. Instead, he encouraged the most radical of the Transvaal "uitlanders" to call for British intervention and used that to justify an ultimatum issued in September 1899. Transvaal's President Kruger responded with his own ultimatum, and after it expired on October 11, the two sides went to war.

The Boers struck first. Boer Republican commandos attacked Natal and Cape Colony in three directions and won battles against the British on all three fronts in December 1899. The following year, they got bogged down while besieging British garrisons at Ladysmith (Natal), Kimberley and Mafeking (Cape Colony). British reinforcements began to arrive in large numbers and by the end of the year, they had ended the sieges, captured 4000 Boers and occupied the Boer cities of Bloemfontein, Pretoria and Johannesburg. Transvaal President Kruger fled into exile through Mozambique and the British took over the entire railroad network. In December, the British annexed the two Boer Republics and the British commander returned to England.

His return was premature. The Boers continued to fight a guerilla war by seizing supplies, cutting rail lines and staging raids into the coastal colonies. A new British commander, Lord Kitchener, resorted to scorched earth tactics to stop them, including the use of concentration camps and the destruction of 30,000 Boer farms. Captured Boer fighters were exiled to Ceylon, Bermuda and St. Helena while nearly 28,000 Boer civilians, mostly children, died in the camps of dysentery, measles and other diseases. By 1902, the surviving Boer fighters were exhausted and by a vote of 54 to 6, their leaders agreed to sign the Peace of Vereeniging on May 31, 1902 in Pretoria.

The Anglo-Boer War raised questions at home and abroad about British imperial policy. Some opponents criticized the enormous cost of the war while others questioned what British interest was served by conquering European farmers who were fighting for their independence. The civilian death toll in the concentration camps also cast doubt on the morality of British imperialism. An English historian, J. A. Hobson, wrote a critique of the war in 1902 that suggested British industrialists had taken control of the government and used taxpayer money to further their own interests. In 1916, V. I. Lenin expanded on Hobson's criticism to denounce imperialism as "the highest stage of capitalism."