The January 1900 Battle of Spioenkop
By 1902 leaders on both sides were prepared to end a wasting war and to conclude what would still amount to an honourable peace through a negotiated end to hostilities. The Boer war effort was all but flattened. In Britain, the public had become weary of the conflict, and for its government there was no political gain in its continuation. For Milner, the destruction of the conquered republics had gone far enough. Anything further would worsen prospects for reconstruction, and jeopardise an opportunity for reconciliation with the defeated Boers in order to prepare them for a post-republican future under the British Crown.
To achieve that, Britain was willing to accept that there could be no dilution of white political power. While Chamberlain had insisted previously that blacks be granted limited voting rights, Jan Smuts, not the British victors, drafted Article Eight of the Vereeniging peace terms. Clause Nine of the final peace proposals granted the former republics the authority to decide on franchise matters when they received a representative constitution of their own. This curtailed the political aspirations of those who were not white.
This was a pointer to the exclusivity of political power the Boers were soon to possess. Even if the Boers were unable to keep English out of schools and the courts, holding on to all the reins of voting power was a significant gain for them, providing some dividend for the agonising cost of keeping up hostilities.
With London willing to strike fairly generous surrender terms in return for the Boers signing away their claim to independence, Boer peace delegates accepted by 54 votes to six what became known as the Peace of Vereeniging in May 1902. Numbers of commando bittereinders who were still prowling the countryside were said to be shattered and distraught by this news, unable to believe that for all their sacrifice they had ended up as subjects of King Edward VII. Some even declared their loss of faith in God. Among other Boer fighters, now united with their families, there was rejoicing at the end of the dreadful conditions of the last months of the war. British troops were simply relieved that it was all over at last. Few wished to prolong their stay in South Africa, especially those who had been cursed and spat upon by enraged Boer women whose homes they had destroyed.
The reality behind the rhetoric – black rifl emen with their white commander. Although both sides claimed to be conducting what they called a white man’s war, thousands of black auxiliaries undertook armed duties.
Almost three years earlier, a sombre Paul Kruger had warned that Britain would find conquering the Boer states no easy matter. In the sense that they were certainly not gained on the cheap, this was an accurate judgement. By the end of the war, the British had been obliged to mobilise almost 450 000 imperial soldiers to defeat Boer forces, which had been able to field roughly 80 000 combatants at most. Their extended resistance turned London’s South African campaign into the largest and most costly war fought by the British between 1815 and 1914. This was a colonial war which Britain’s Treasury estimated in September 1899 would require the despatch of at most 75 000 troops and funding of about £10 million for a campaign of two to three months. By the time the conflict finally ended, that cost had risen to £217 million. What this balance sheet reflected was the enormous military investment that the British Empire required to defeat two of the world’s smallest agrarian states.
Unlike other African armies that had resisted imperial invasion, the Boers had been able to maintain a lengthy defence despite their huge numerical inferiority and economic limitations. The republics had been able to compensate for these drawbacks by exploiting their few advantages to the full. These included superb horsemanship which provided mobility and speed, an ample supply of modern firearms, excellent shooting skills and tactical flexibility that enabled Boer forces to duck away from damaging confrontations and to fight mostly at times of their own choosing and on terrain that suited them.
At the same time, the Boer armies also had disadvantages – for example, when it came to discipline and authority. Their democratic arrangement whereby officers were elected and commandos voted collectively to go into battle was not necessarily an asset when war began to go badly and soldiers became dispirited. Boer commandos were, after all, made up of citizen-soldiers: individual civilians with differing wants and priorities who did not even fight in uniform.
The more drilled, disciplined and obedient British army overcame its inferiority, but it took time to weed out bungling commanders and to get urban working-class recruits to stop feeding mutton to cavalry horses. When London prevailed at last, it came at the high moral and political cost of waging war against the rural families in the Boer states.
In spite of the severity of their losses, Boers did not come away from their traumatic struggle for a free existence entirely empty-handed – as the years after 1902 would prove. They would have the benefit of mild peace terms and generous reconstruction aid intended to foster Anglo-Boer conciliation. As a well-disposed Winston Churchill put it, Britain would welcome the day when it could take the Boers by the hand and watch them returning peacefully to plough their fields.
