Page 27 - SARB: 100-Year Journey

Soldiers on the battlefield at Paardeberg during the Anglo-Boer War. /Getty Images
Nearly 100 000 people were killed, including more than 20 000 British soldiers and about 14 000 Boer fighters. Non-combatant deaths included about 26 000 Afrikaner women and between 13 000 and 20 000 black South Africans. Many non-combatants succumbed to hunger and disease, including in British concentration camps.
The Treaty of Vereeniging came in May 1902, marking the official end of the war. The British lost more men in battle, but the Boers were forced to surrender because they were unable to sustain the financial cost of the war and a scorched-earth approach by the British. Afrikaner leaders Louis Botha and Jan Smuts persuaded their brethren who wanted to fight to the last man, that a peace deal was the only viable pathway to eventual self-government. Besides, the two sides had come to an agreement that they needed to unite against black South Africans for a chance to possess land and mineral wealth.
It is impossible not to notice that the war was fought by two settler groups that ultimately conspired and collaborated together to own the spoils of colonial dispossession. The Treaty of Vereeniging excluded black South Africans, relegating them to non-entities who did not warrant a mention in the final product. But the reality on the ground was that they did exist: black South Africans were the numerical majority in terms of the composition of the population, but were a political minority with regard to their rights. Matters were to come to a head in the years before the founding of the SARB.
17