When Shepstone arrived in Pretoria in January 1877, he wooed the ZAR burghers to secure their consent for annexing the republic as part of a plan to engineer a South African federation. He wrote later that of the 3 000 people he had canvassed before annexing the republic on 12 April 1877, only Paul Kruger was unequivocal in his rejection of such a move. ‘[He] positively declined to enter into the discussion if that might involve the independence of the state as a republic.’
Kruger took the lead in organising resistance. With the burghers seemingly paralysed by apathy and indifference, Kruger twice went to London as a member of a three-man delegation to persuade the Secretary of State for the Colonies to permit a referendum on Shepstone’s claim that the majority of the ZAR burghers favoured annexation.
Slowly Boer resistance mounted. Early in December 1880 mass meetings were held at Paardekraal in the ZAR, attended by thousands of burghers. A meeting on 11 December proclaimed the restoration of the republic. It was the beginning of an armed rebellion. The British were confident the rebels would quickly disperse after the first skirmish. But the burghers were armed with Westley Richard rifles that could kill from 550 metres and, as the enemy soon discovered, they were excellent shots. They destroyed a British column at Bronkhorstspruit, laid siege to the rest of the garrison in Pretoria and Potchefstroom, and attacked the column of Sir George Pomeroy Colley, who had arrived with reinforcements from Natal. On 27 February 1881 this force was routed at Majuba.
Able to draw on only 3 500 troops in all South Africa, the new ministry in London under William Gladstone was in no mood to hang on to the ZAR for the sake of Lord Carnarvon’s discredited federation scheme. Far from helping to achieve South African federation, annexation would stir up vociferous anti-imperial sentiment in Boer communities throughout South Africa. It was also condemned by more moderate English colonial opinion. To meet the ZAR’s demands and yet salvage some honour, Britain seized upon the formula of a ‘suzerainty’, under which Britain would retain an important say in the ZAR’s foreign and ‘native’ affairs.
The ZAR re-emerged in a much better state. The British administrators had reformed its chaotic finances and defective administrative machinery. A separate Department of Native Affairs gave centralised direction to local officials on how to collect taxes and labour service from blacks.
Paul Kruger was elected president in 1883. He believed that only a committed republicanism could act as a counter to British imperialism and Cape Afrikaners’ embrace of a colonial nationalism which readily incorporated imperial elements. In developing his republican ideology he stressed the historic links between the heroic acts of the Voortrekkers and the triumphant rebellion and between the burghers’ religious and political identity. The commemoration of these events, with the main festival at Paardekraal, became a grand political and religious occasion.
Although increasingly respected as a leader after he became president, Kruger struggled to build up the state in his first three years. He failed to persuade the Cape Colony to reduce custom duties on ZAR goods. This set the scene for a prolonged conflict between him and the two leading Cape politicians, Cecil John Rhodes – who harboured grand designs for extending British influence throughout Africa and uniting South Africa under the British flag – and J.H. (Onze Jan) Hofmeyr, who attached prime importance to the promotion of the interests of the Cape and his constituency (See Rhodes Hofmeyer and Kruger). Travelling through the republic, Kruger encouraged the burghers. Help, he said, would surely come, and so it did in 1886 when the rich and abundant goldfields of the Witwatersrand were discovered.
In a few deft strokes historian C.W. de Kiewiet depicts the impact of gold on the republic’s revenue: ‘In 1884 the Transvaal was barely solvent; three years later, in 1887, its revenue of £638 000 approached that of Natal; two years later again its revenue of £1 500 000 was in hot pursuit of that of the Cape. For every reluctant pound which the ZAR had to spend in 1883 it had twenty-five pounds.’
