Page 24 - SARB: 100-Year Journey

The Boer army loading their artillery in preparation for battle at Ladysmith during the Anglo-Boer War. /Getty Images
The Anglo-Boer War, 1899−1902
In 1899, war broke out between the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) and the Orange Free State, on the one side; and the British Empire, on the opposite end. The conflict was the culmination of long-standing enmity.
The discovery of gold – and the resultant influx of mostly white immigrants from Europe, the United States (US) and Australia – created political and social dislocations that had a profound impact on the history of South Africa. There were two particularly significant developments.
Having previously assumed that the two Boer republics of the Free State and the ZAR were pastoral territories from which no riches could be extracted, the unearthing of gold in present-day Johannesburg changed the attitude of the rich diamond miners and their friends in the Cape, and in Britain. The Witwatersrand was the largest known operating gold deposit in the world at a time when the United Kingdom’s monetary system was increasingly dependent on gold.
British politicians claimed they were keeping the two Boer republics honest to the 1881 peace treaty (known as the Pretoria Convention that ended the First Boer War between the Transvaal Boers and Britain) and the subsequent 1884 treaty (known as the London Convention that governed relations between the ZAR and Britain), which were signed well after the discovery of “alluvial deposits of gold in the Transvaal in 1873”. (Arndt, 1939). But this rang hollow in light of the failed coup against the ZAR in 1895, sponsored by Cecil John Rhodes and others, with the private support of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. But it was a fiasco.
‘The Reform Movement’, a collective made up of mining magnates and upper-class personalities supported by Rhodes, sponsored the shambolic Jameson Raid. This cast of characters was bound together by dissatisfaction with the ZAR government’s supposedly discriminatory attitude towards the foreign gold-seeking immigrants, whose rising numbers were threatening to overwhelm the white Afrikaner citizens of the ZAR. In addition, the mining companies had become increasingly unhappy with the taxes the ZAR government was levying on them.
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