The Two Frontiers-America and South Africa.docx

Listening to the Better Angels of Our Nature: Ethnicity, Self-Determination, And the American Empire Chapter Fourteen The Scramble for Africa Part 3 –The Two Frontiers: American and South-African David Steven Cohen “Among the many terrestrial frontiers arising from the expansion of colonial settlements after Europe’s Age of Discovery those of North America and south-eastern Africa were predominant,” writes Noël Mostert. “They were similar in many respects. There is an easy analogy between the passage of tented wagons across wild terrain and conflict with indigenous inhabitants. In other respects they were profoundly different. In North America the indigenes were overwhelmed. In southern Africa, however, it often looked as though it would go the other way.” Noël Mostert, Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. xvi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Trek#/media/File:Grand_trek.jpg https://www.magnoliabox.com/products/covered-wagon-crossing-american-plains-42-26832217 Historians Leonard Thompson and Howard Lamar have written the most comprehensive comparison of the North American and Southern African frontiers. Leonard Thompson and Howard Lamar, “The North American and Southern African Frontiers,” pp.14-40. In The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared, edited by Leonard Thompson and Howard Lamar (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981). They begin with what the two frontiers had in common. Both were part of the expansion of Europe and capitalism. Both had a similar chronology, beginning with in 1492 by the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus in 1492 in the case of the Americas and in 1497 by the Portuguese Vasco da Gama in 1497 in the case of South Africa. Both began with searching for establishing trade with Asia either by a Northwest Passage or around the Cape of Good Hope. Thompson and Lamar argue that both the South Africans and the Americans celebrated their respective frontiers as “expressions of ethnocentric nationalism” and individualism. In 1893 historian Frederick Jackson Turner from Wisconsin delivered an address titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” at a meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago held in conjunction with the World Columbian Exposition celebrating the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas. Turner noted that in 1890 the U.S. Bureau of the Census official noted the closing of the American frontier. Turner set out to explain what the frontier had meant in the shaping of our national character. First, we note that the frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people. . . . In another way the advance of the frontier decreased our dependence on England. . . . The legislation which most developed the powers of the national government, and played the largest part in its activity, was conditioned on the frontier. . . . The growth of nationalism and the evolution of American political institutions were dependent on the advance of the frontier. . . . The public domain has been a force of profound importance in the nationalization and development of the government. . . . But the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. As has been indicated, the frontier is productive of individualism. . . . The frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted democracy. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1921), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22994/22994-h/22994-h.htm Turner's essay crystallized a recurrent theme in American thought -- that American culture was the product of the frontier. His frontier thesis influenced generations of historians that followed. Today, much of the frontier thesis has been refuted, and the advent of the New Social History, women's history, and ethnic history have fragmented historical thinking. No longer is there a synthesis in American history, which the frontier thesis at least had provided, although there may well be a synthesis implicit in these new approaches. Any attempt to create a new synthesis would have to involve the significance of ethnicity in American history. In an address I gave at a conference on New York History at Bard College published in New York History under the title "Reflections on American Ethnicity" and republished in a collection of my essays in Folk Legacies Revisited (Rutgers University Press, 1994) and in the textbook titled The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity in the United States (Pearson, 2000) and posted online under the title “The Significance of Ethnicity in American History,” I noted that in 1892 there was another event of symbolic importance, notably the opening of the federal immigration station on Ellis Island. I argue that Frederick Jackson Turner viewed the national character of the United States in terms of his own region: the West. But many of the characteristics of the frontier, such as the log cabin, the Conestoga wagon, the Kentucky rifle, and the cowboy were introduced to America by European ethnic groups, such as the Finns, the Germans, and the Spaniards. Rather than viewing the frontier in the ethnocentric movement of the border between settlement and the wilderness, it is better seen in terms of the boundaries between various Native American culture areas and various European (French, Dutch, Swedish, English, and Spanish) and African (Congo, Ibo, Dahomey, Angolan, Bantu, etc.). But there were also substantial differences between the American frontier and the South African. There was a difference in geography. North America is in the northern hemisphere and has a temperate climate, while South Africa is in the southern hemisphere and has a Mediterranean climate with some arid zones. Thus, North America was more suitable for agricultural and stock raising expansion into the interior as far as the 100th meridian and along the Pacific coast, but the western three fifths of South Africa was not suitable for agriculture except for stock-raising. Lenore A. T. Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr. say that the Native American population of North America in 1500 ranged anywhere from one to eighteen million people. After contact with Europeans, their numbers drastically reduced by disease and warfare. They state that between 1.5 and 1.8 million Indians lived within the continental United States in 1776. In 1890 when the federal government declared the so-called ‘Indian Wars” to be officially ended, they estimate that only 248,000 Indians remained within U.S. boundaries out of a total population of 63 million (i.e., 0.4 percent). Depending on which estimate of Native Americans in North America in 1500, anywhere from two-thirds to 95 percent of the population had declined in the 400-year period from 1500 to 1900. Thus, they conclude the United States “destroyed 80 to 85 percent of Indians during the first century of its existence.” Lenore A. T. Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr. “The Demography of Native North America: A Question of American Indian Survival,” pp. 224-26. In The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, edited by M. Annette Jaimes. (Boston: Sound End Press, 1992), pp. 23-53. http://sites.millersville.edu/bduncan/221/indigenous/ Clark Wissler in his classic study of the Indians of North America divided the North American Indians into cultural groups based on linguistic family groups. These included the Algonkin or Algonquian family (including among others the Penobscot, Narraganset, Pequot, Massachusett, Wampanoag, Mahican, Delaware or Munsee, Shawnee, Miami, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Sauk and Fox, Ojibwa or Chippewa, Ottawa, Illinois, Menomini, and Cree), the Iroquois family (including the Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Huron, Erie, Susquehanna, and Cherokee), the Moskhogean family (the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Natchez, Alibamu, Taensa, Tunica, and Seminole) the Caddo family (the Pawnee, Wichita, and Caddo), the Siouan family (the Dakota, Mandan, Hidatsa, Crow, Assiniboin, Winnebago, Biloxi, Iowa, Missouri, Osage, Quapaw, Ponca, Omaha, Oto, Kansas, Saponi, Monacan, Manahoac, and Catawba among others), Penutian family (the Maidu, Klamath, Chinook, Nez Percé, Klikitat, Umatilla, Yakima, Wallawalla, Palouse, Tenino, Mixe, Zoqaue, Huave, and Sarsi) and the Nadene family (the Haida, Tlingit, Athapascans, Navaho, and Apache among others), the Aztec family (the Shoshoni, Comanche, Paiute, Snake, Ute, Hopi, and Pima among others), and the Tanoan family (the Pueblo, Kiowa, Aztec, and Maya). http://infomapsplus.blogspot.com/2013/04/native-americas-first-nations.html In addition, Wissler stated that these tribes can be divided into regional culture areas that crosscut these linguistic groups, including the Eastern Woodland region (e.g. Iroquois, Ojibway, Delaware, Naskapi), the Southeastern region (Creek, Natchez, Seminole), the Plains region (the Dakota, Pawnee, Crow, and Blackfoot); the Southwest region (Zuni, Navaho, Apache, Pima), the California region (Pomo and Maidu); the Plateau region (Nez Percé and Spokan), and the North Pacific Coast (Tlingit, Nootka). The composite stereotype of Native-Americans combines culture traits from several different regions. For example, the tepee and the feathered headdress were the culture traits found only in the Plains region, the term squaw for an Indian woman comes from the Algonquian language family in the Eastern Woodland region, the totem pole was found only in the North Pacific region. Clark Wissler, Indians of the United States, rev. ed. (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1966). There were wars between Native American tribes prior to the arrival of Europeans. Among the Eastern Woodland Indians these wars often involved the torture and either death or adoption of captive warriors in what historian Daniel K. Richter has called “mourning wars.” Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), p. 33. After Europeans arrived, the competition for the fur trade led to the Mohawks in the 1620s fighting against the Mohegans, who were aligned with the Dutch, and the “Beaver Wars” (1640s to 1680s) between the Iroquois, who were now allied with the British, versus their fellow Iroquois-speaking Hurons, Erie, and Susquehanna, who were allied with the French (See, New Netherland and the Cape Colony). During King Philip’s War (1675-1676) the Mohawks allied with the New England colonies against the Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Abenaki Indians. In the Tuscarora War (1711-1713) the Cherokee, Yamasee, Cheraw, and Catawba Indians allied themselves with the Carolina settlers against the Tuscarora, and in the Yamasee War of 1715 the Cherokees allied themselves with the Carolinians against the Yamasee and Creek Indians. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Niger-Congo_map.png In South Africa there were two major native linguistic families: the Khoe and the Bantu. The Khoe language family has two major groups: the San and the Koikhoi. The San (also known as Bushmen) were hunter-gatherers whose territory original covered present-day Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and South Africa. Traditionally, the women gathered fruit, berries, tubers, and bush onions. The men hunted using poison arrows and spears. Their diet also consisted of insects, such as grasshopper, beetles, caterpillar, moths, butterflies and termites. In South Africa, there traditional homeland was the Kalahari Dessert. The Khoikhoi, sometimes known as the Hottentots (a term they disliked), were a pastoral group who migrated to the Cape from modern-day Botswana about 2,000 years ago. They raised sheep, goats, and cattle in the fertile river valleys. After they came in contact with Portuguese explorers and merchants circa 1500 A.D., their population decreased due to smallpox. The Dutch East India Company drove the Khoikhoi off their traditional grazing lands and enclosed them for farms. Some Khoikhoi became bondsmen or farm workers on Dutch farms (See, New Netherland and the Cape Colony). Some Dutch settlers intermarried with Khoikhoi women, resulting in a mixed-race population known as the Griqua, some of whom left the Cape Colony and migrated into the interior where they formed the states of Griqualand West and Griqualand East. In the early 1800s Andries Stockenstrom, the Commissioner General of the Eastern Districts established the “Kat River” settlement as a buffer zone between the Cape Colony and the Bantu-speaking Xhosa to the east. The people of this mainly autonomous region became the Afrikaans-speaking Gonaqua Khoi. The Bantu-speaking population in South Africa also is divided into two major linguistic groups: the Sotho and the Nguni. The Sotho were distributed in the region from Botswana across the Transvaal and Orange Free State to Lesotho. The Nguni lived in scattered homesteads, whereas the Sotho and the Shona lived in centralized urban settlements. The Sotho homeland was the upper plateau, whereas the Nguni lived below the Great Escarpment in the richest region of South Africa. The two largest Nguni groups are the Xhosa and the Zulu. According to Noël Mostert, This was the essential political difference between the two otherwise similar nations upon whom the burden of resistance to white penetration of the South African interior was to fall, and it was in their coastal habitat, that confined shelf between the Great Escarpment and the Indian Ocean, that the running contest for undisputed possession of the land was mainly fought between white and black across most of the nineteenth century, with the Zulu fighting for the north-eastern section of it, and the Xhosa the south-western. Mostert, op. cit., p. 80. The Xhosa consist of three main groups: the Pondo, the Tembu, and the Xhosa proper. They all shared a common ancestry and similar customs and ways of life centered on their cattle-raising. Their cattle enclosures were called kraals. Pondoland is on the border between the Cape Province and the Natal. The Pondo were the last black nation to come under Cape colonial administration in 1894. Over the centuries the Xhosa conquered Khoikhoi groups and merged with them. Winnie Mandela was Pondo, her husband Nelson Mandela was a prince of the Tembu royal family, and Steve Biko was Xhosa. Like the American Indian tribes that sided with the American colonists and later the American government against other Native American tribes, the Khoikhoi sided with the British in South Africa against the Xhosa in the so-called frontier wars. However, when the Cape government began to force the Khoikhoi in the Kat River region to become laborers on white farms, some of the Khoikhoi in 1850 joined the Xhosa in their war against the Cape government. After the defeat of the Xhosa, the Cape Colony in 1853 granted the Khoikhoi the right to vote providing that they owned some property. But in the 1880s, like in the United States, the enactment of a literacy test restricted the franchise. Thompson and Lamar estimate that there may have been 200,000 San and Khoikhoi hunters and herders and between two and four million Bantu-speaking farms in southern Africa circa 1500. The Khoikhoi herders and San hunter-collectors were also isolated and vulnerable, but the Bantu-speaking farmers were less isolated and therefore less vulnerable to these diseases. In 1700 there were there were only about 1,200 in southern Africa. In 1800 there only 20,000 people of European descent in South Africa, in 1900 a little over one million in South Africa. Thompson and Lamar, op. cit., pp. 19, 23, 27. Today, the Zulu population is the largest ethnic group in South Africa with 10.7 million, and the Xhosa are the second largest ethnic group with an estimated population of 7.5 million. Black Africans constitute 76.4 percent of the current population, with whites only 9.1 percent, “Coloured” 8.9 percent, Asian 2.5 percent, and other 0.5 percent. In North America, Thompson and Lamar say, successive immigrations from various parts of Europe and the incorporation of French- and Spanish-speaking populations in the nineteenth century introduced ethnic diversity to the United States even though English was the official language of the government. In South Africa the white population was divided into two ethnic groups—the Dutch-speaking and the English-speaking peoples. In both North America and South Africa the European immigrants brought with them attitudes of cultural and racial superiority over native populations. “By the nineteenth century many whites were concluding that Indians and Africans were genetically inferior--,” they write, “a conclusion that was reinforced when respected European scientists produced schemes classifying people in racial categories, with whites preeminent and Indians and Africans far below them.” Ibid., p. 17. I have suggested five eras of the peopling of North America (the pre-historic migration of Native Americans from Asia, the colonial settlement of European and African peoples, the nineteenth-century immigration of peoples from northern Europe, the late nineteenth century immigration of peoples from China and southern and eastern Europe, and the post 1965 immigration of peoples from Africa, Asia, and Latin America). What makes American ethnicity distinct from other multi-ethnic nations is the formulation of James Madison that the country is so large and diverse that it provides a multi-ethnic solution to the problems most common in multi-ethnic nations (See, The Significance of Ethnicity in American History). Thompson and Lamar note that was military competition between Great Britain, France, and Spain for territory in North America between 1600 and 1820, but in South Africa there was no competition with the Dutch East India Company control of the Cape Colony until after 1820. Thompson and Lamar suggest four phases of frontier expansion in South Africa. http://www.southafrica-travel.net/history/eh_trebu.htm First, between 1652 and 1700 Europeans established a colony on Table Bay and the arable land thirty to forty miles into the interior. The second, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, white stock farmers called trekboers occupied the arid land eastward toward the Fish River and northward toward the Orange River. The third, between 1835 and 1870, stock farmers migrated into the less arid lands in the eastern two-fifth of the region in what became known as the Great Trek and the settlers known as the voortrekers. In the fourth phase, white settlers took control of the territory as far as the Limpopo River, as well as German Southwest Africa (Namibia, today), Rhodesia (Zimbabwe, today), and Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique, today). https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/atwar/boer During the first two phases, despite meager resources, whites were able to gain control of vast areas because the indigenous Khoisan hunting and herding peoples were too few, too weak, and too divided among themselves to prevent it. In the later phases, white advances into the areas previously controlled by Bantu-speaking farming peoples were facilitated by the catastrophic intra-African disturbances known as the Mfecane—wars sparked off between 1816 and 1828 by the rise of Shaka’s military Zulu state that disrupted and demoralized most of the African chiefdoms throughout the region, left desirable areas on the Highveld grassland and in Natal denuded of their inhabitants, and thus open to settlement, and provided whites with ready- made allies, such as the Mfengu and other refugees from Shaka. Thompson and Lamar, op. cit., p. 23. The Fish River was the dividing line between the Cape Colony and the Xhosa peoples. Beyond the Fish River and a wooden and grass land ideal for the raising of cattle, which was the mainstay of the Xhosa. But the Xhosa were engaged in a long civil war the followers of the young Ngquika and those of his uncle Ndlambe. Although Ndlambe was a famed Xhosa general, the Ngquika was able to defeat and imprison him in Ngquika’s capital known as the Great Place beyond the Keiskamma River, where the land was almost impassable because of mimosa thickets. http://brideralab.gq/833595-shaka-zulu-quotes.shtm Since their arrival in the northern part of Natal in the seventeenth century, the Zulu Ngoni broke into independent states surrounded by the Swazi to the north, the Sotho to the west and the Tembu-Oibdi-Xosa to the south. In 1816 Shaka became the headman of the Zulu, and in 1818 he organized an army of so-called impis to attack the Zwazi. He became known as the “Black Napoleon.” They revolutionized the weapons of Zulu warfare, replacing the traditional assegai (long spear) with the iklwa (short, stabbing spear with a broad spearhead). One of his generals named Zwide broke with Shaka and fled with Ngoni refugees to the north to present-day Transvaal. Around 1834 under Zwide’s son Zwangendaba, the Ngoni crossed into present-day Zimbabwe where they conquered the Rozwi Bantu people, who occupied the region since 1639, when they overthrew the Monomotapa Empire of the Sotho people. The clans fleeing the Zulu war zone included the Soshangane, Hlubi, Ndebele, and Mfengu. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaka#/media/File:Shaka%27s_Empire_map.svg The Zulu attack on their neighbors to the north, the Swazi, put pressure on their neighbors to the south, the Xhosa, who began to attack the Boer settlements. The Boers request that the British allow them to organize commando units, but this request was denied. Instead the British declared the west bank of the Fish River to be neutral territory, and evicted the Boers who lived there. The Xhosa moved into this open country, which infuriated the Boers. Shaka was assassinated in 1828 by his half-brothers, Dingaan and Mhlangana, and Dingane became the Zulu leader. Under Dingaan, the Zulus along the Natal coast rebelled against the Boers, but the Zulus were defeated at Blood River, and Chief Dingaan was killed. Thompson and Lamar argue that in both North America and South Africa, the frontier meant to Europeans “free land.” The concept of the land occupied by native populations as “free” was also cited by Frederick Jackson Turner, who wrote: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” Turner, op. cit. “The United States paid citizens for military duty with grants of land, and in the nineteenth century the government offered virtually free land to promote settlement. Thompson and Lamar say that the Afrikaner government did much the same in the Transvaal. But there was a difference in native land ownership. While the Khoisan hunters and herders rarely owned land, with the exception of in Botswana and Namibia, the Bantu-speaking farmers retained all the land in Basutoland (Lesotho today), half of the land in Rhodesia (Swaziland and Zimbabwe today), most of the farm land in eastern Botswana and northern Namibia, much of the land in Mozambique, and one-third of the land in the eastern part of present-day Republic of South Africa. In the United States the government policy of Indian removal to reservations and in 1887 so-called “severalty” (granting individuals Indians plots of 160 acres or less). The remaining land was made available to white settlers. “The practical result of this misguided reform,” write Thompson and Lamar, “was that of the 130 million acres still owned by the Indians, 90 million were thrown open to public sale. In short, the Indians had not only lost a continent, they were physically confined to tiny reservation whose resources were not sufficient to sustain life.” Thompson and Lamar, op. cit., p. 34. Thompson and Lamar also assert that there was a difference between the South Africa and the North America when it came to religion. They say that the Dutch and German colonists in the Cape who were recruited by the Dutch East India Company were not particularly religious, with the possible exception of the French Huguenots who came between 1688 and 1689. Missionaries weren’t a major factor on the South African frontier until the nineteenth century under British rule. Between 1803 and 1813 a large number of mixed-blood Coloreds left the Cape Colony to be near missionary stations along the Orange River. They constituted a series of so-called Griqua states that attacked Bushmen, hunted wild game, and stole stray cattle. In 1843 three synods were created within the Dutch Reformed Church: one for Transvaal, one for the Orange River country, and one for the Cape. In 1853 conservative members of the Transvaal synod, known as “Doppers,” established their own body to stress racial separation (apartheid), predestination, and fundamentalism. They viewed the Boers as the people chosen by Christ and the Bantu as the inferior descendants of Ham. In contrast, the Spanish, French, and English settlers in North America set out to convert the Indians to Christianity from the very beginning. In the late nineteenth century under the so-called Peace Policy, Protestant missionaries were sent to Indian reservations not only to convert the Indians to Christianity, but to make them into farmers in what Thompson and Lamar called “a policy of cultural genocide.” Ibid., p. 32. In 1857 the Xhosa to the east of the Cape Colony underwent a nativist religious movement in which they believed that if they abandoned their traditional religion, destroyed the crops and their cattle, the British and the Boers would be swept into the sea and the Xhosa heroes would rise from the dead. The result was a widespread starvation, which marked the end of the Xhosa as a united tribe. The conquest of Matabeland was followed by a plague of locusts in 1890, a draught in 1894, and an infestation of rinderpest (a cattle-killing disease) in 1896. Among the Ndebele a rumor was spreading that a god named Mlimo had prophesized from a cave in the Matopo Hills that there was a disaster coming to the white man. In March 1896 a general insurrection by the Ndebele erupted in the four main towns of Matabeland: Bulawayo, Gwelo, Bellingwe, and Mangwe in more than 200 Europeans were massacred. Pakenham calls the revolt “the first nationwide war of independence in any of the new colonies created during the Scramble.” It is not clear how large a role the oracular cult of ‘Mlimo’ (or the Shona cult of ‘Mwari’) played in instigated the revolt. Perhaps the priest of Mwari fomented the rebellion for their own reasons and made a ‘marriage of convenience.’ Or perhaps the oracular priest most influential in the revolt, Mkwati, was important only because one of his wives was the daughter of Uwini, the secular leader of the Gwelo district. Ibid., p. 500. These nativist revivals among the Xhosa are similar to nativist movements among Native-America dating back to the Handsome Lake and his half-brother Cornplanter among the Seneca Indians in 1799, the Shawnee chief Tecumseh and the his brother, the “Prophet,” from 1810 to 1813, and the Ghost Dance among the Dakota Sioux in 1890 (See, Native-American Revitalization). http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_burgher1.htm Historian Ray Allen Billington writes that there wasn’t a single American frontier. He divides the frontiers of North American into three major frontiers. The first he called the “Colonial Frontier,” including the establishment of the colonies New Spain in the Caribbean, Central America, South America, and Mexico and New France in the St. Lawrence and Mississippi Valleys; the English colonies of Virginia, the Carolinas, Maryland, and Georgia; Plymouth Plantation, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and Rhode Island by the English and New Netherland and New Sweden by the Dutch and Swedes, respectively, later New York and New Jersey; the expansion of these colonies from the coastal plain into the piedmont east of the Appalachian Mountains; the series of wars between Britain and France (King Williams War 1687-1697, Queen Anne’s War 1702-1713, King George’s War 1744-1748, and the French and Indian War 1754-1763) in which the British was able to drive the French out of Canada; destroy the Pequot Indians, and drive the Algonkian Indians into the Trans-Appalachian West. https://www.sutori.com/story/identity-period-3-1754-1800-timeline The second, according to Billington was the “Trans-Appalachian Frontier,” in which after the American Revolution 1776 to 1783 the newly formed United States of America was able to drive the British out of the region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River; attempt unsuccessfully to invade Canada during the War of 1812; drive the Algonquian Indians west of the Mississippi River; and force the Cherokee Indians on the “Trail of Tears” from their homelands in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee to reservations west of the Mississippi River. http://www.thomaslegion.net/us_expansion_map_and_territory_and_territorial_expansionism_maps.html The third frontier he called “the Trans-Mississippi Frontier” in which bought the French land west of the Mississippi River in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the United States purchased Florida from Spain in 1819, annexed Texas after its rebellion against Mexico in 1835-1836, conquered the remaining Spanish holdings in the Southwest during the Mexican War 1846-1848, settled the dispute over the northern boundary of the Oregon Territory by treaty with Great Britain in 1846, purchased the Gadsden Strip along the Mexico-US border in 1853, purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867; fought a series of Indian Wars in the later nineteenth century resulting in the decimation of the tribes west of the Mississippi River and forcing the survivors to live on reservations. In the series of wars between Great Britain and France for control of north America (King William’s War from 1689 to 1697, Queen Anne’s War 1702-1713, King George’s War 1744 to 1748, and the French and Indian War 1754 to 1763) Native Americans allied themselves with one or another European power (e.g. the Huron with the French, the Iroquois and Cherokee with the British). During the American Revolution (1776-1783) the Cherokee, Creek, and most of the Iroquois allied themselves with the British, while the Tuscarora, Oneida, Stockbridge and New England tribes supported the American colonists. The Delaware, Seneca, and Shawnee tried to remain neutral, but finally decided to side with the British. In Creek War (1811-1814) the Choctaw fought with Andrew Jackson against the Creek in the Southeast. On the Western Plains prior to the arrival of Europeans there had been wars between Native-American tribes for territory, resources, captives, and honor. The introduction of horses and guns by the Spaniards only changed the nature of this warfare. The development of the demand for buffalo hides in the nineteenth century, resulted in tribes such as the Lakota Sioux and the Blackfeet originally from the Eastern Woodlands moving into the Great Plains and fighting with the Crow and each other for more territory. The Sioux then allied with the Arapahos and Cheyenne against the Pawnees and the Shoshone, who allied themselves with the Americans. The most famous Shoshone was Sacajawea, who guided Lewis and Clark across the West. Meanwhile the nomadic Comanches Indians in the Southern Plains fought with the sedentary Pueblo and Navaho Indians, pushing the latter into Arizona. There is one frontier factor that Thompson and Lamar fail to mention. “One of the driving forces in introducing slavery into the interior,” writes Fred Morton, “were the Dutch-speaking sheep and cattle farmers and poor itinerant herding families on the Cape frontier. Of modest means and disconnected from the plantation slave-labor system anchored at the Cape, these farmers (Boers) and itinerants (Trekboers) met their sizable need for labor by enslaving the indigenous Khoekhoen (Khoi, also called Hottentots) and San (bushmen), usually acquired in commando raids with the connivance of officials.” Fred Morton, “Slavery in the South African Interior During the 19th Century,” (April 2017), http://africanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277734-e-77 Unlike in the United States, slaves in South Africa were allowed legally to marry after 1824, wives and husbands could not be separated from their children their children until a certain age, the number of hours they worked were restricted, punishment was strictly controlled, and slaves could own property and buy their freedom even against the wishes of their owners. In 1807 British abolished the slave trade throughout the British Empire. Between 1652 and 1807 an estimated 60,000 slaves were imported to South Africa mainly from India, but also from Angola, southeast Africa, and Batavia. The United States did something similar under the provision of the U.S. Constitution that abolished the international slave trade in 1808. When the British Parliament banned the slave trade in 1807, the Boers, who were now British citizens, objected because they were dependent on Hottentot labor. Britain followed this in 1833 by abolishing slavery itself throughout the British Empire with the exception of the possessions of the British East India Company, including Ceylon (Sri Lanka, today) and the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic. But South Africa had become a British colony in 1814 and so the abolition applied there. In the fall 1835 the Boers decided to move across the Orange River to be outside the jurisdiction of Britain. This came known as the Great Trek. In 1839 they established the Natal Republic to establish their own outlet to the sea through the port of Durban. However, the British had passed the Cape of Good Hope Punishment Act in 1836, which stated that British citizens were still subject to British law, even if they settled outside British territory. In response the Boers in the Highveld developed a system of inboekstelsel (indentureship). Under this system young people (known as swart ivoor or “black ivory”) who were captured in raids were bound out as apprentices until the age of 25 for males and 21 for females or sold to other Boers in Trans-Orangia. Although prohibiting slavery, the Sand River Convention of 1852 left the inboekstelsel system intact. A similar system was instituted in the United States by those states that gradually abolished slavery, making the children born to slave parents prior to the enactment of the law “apprentices for life.” In 1843 Britain formally annexed Natal, however, it didn’t become a separate crown colony until 1856. Donald L. Wiedner argues that British occupied the colony to counter the Boers’ trek into the interior, to protect the Bantu from the Boers, and to continue the British monopoly on commerce. Donald L. Wiedner, A History of Africa South of the Sahara (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), p. 263. Previously, Natal’s economy consisted of wild game, ivory, and trade with the Zulu. Agricultural crops such as cotton, coffee, and sugar were tried by failed. The British government isolated the Bantu on a series of reservations. However, at first the Zulus were not included in this system, and they retained their sovereignty until 1879. Because of a labor shortage, planters in Natal hired Malayan, Chinese, Mauritian Creole, and Malagasy laborers. In addition, the government of Natal arranged for indentured servants from India. The Boers’ attempt to establish new republics in the Transvaal was finally settled in 1852 by the Sand River Convention which recognized four Boer republics, which two years later were united into the Orange Free State. The Boers would no longer be considered British subjects. After the passage of the San River Convention, the Boers founded the Orange Free State in 1854 and the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) also known as the Transvaal, in 1858. While paying lip service to the abolition of slavery north of the Vaal River in its constitution, the inboekstelsel system continued in practice. But when gold was discovered in present-day Mpumulanga in the 1860s, Britain annexed the Transvaal in 1877. When the Boers rebelled in 1880, Britain restored its independence. But under the Pretoria and London conventions of 1881 and 1884, respectively, Britain recognized the Transvaal’s independence providing that “no slavery or apprenticeship partaking of slavery will be tolerated.” According to Morton, Supplies of captives in any case had dried up, and marketplaces had closed down. The years of large single-family farms, massive stock holding, a hunting culture, and the use of the commando to raid for resources human and bovine were over by the time of Annexation, as was the need for a large retinue of domestic servants. Land speculation was becoming the surest path to wealth. And in 1884, when the ZAR signed the London Convention, the massive Witwatersrand gold reef was about to draw thousands of miners from all over the world and give rise to Johannesburg and nearby mining towns located a few kilometers south of the ZAR capital of Pretoria. Ibid. “Superficially, the parallels to white occupation of the Orange Free State or the Transvaal [and the American West] are tantalizing,” write Thompson and Lamar, “for in each of these regions [Oregon, eastern Texas, and the Great Basin] the local Anglo-American population seized the lands of both Indians and Spanish-Mexicans and practiced a doctrine of ‘popular sovereignty’ by establishing independent provinces or republics for a time. With the exception of the Mormons in Utah, however, these American trekkers were the cutting edge of an aggressive American nationalism rather than a retreat from imperial or metropolitan authority.” Thompson and Lamar, op. cit., p. 25. In American Southwest the Spaniards enslaved Native Americans to build Catholic missions and to supply labor in them. While the enslavement of American Indians was not legally recognized in New France (Canada, today) it did exist with the understanding that while it was not ethical to enslave the Indians, it was permitted to buy or sell those were already were slaves. The Dutch and English in the sold some Native-Americans captured in war into slavery in the West Indies during the Pequot War of 1636, Esopus War of 1659-1663, and King Philip’s War 1675-1676. English settlers in the southern colonies used some Native-Americans to grow tobacco, rice, and indigo. Between 1670 and 1715 an estimated 30,000 to 51,000 Native American captives were sent out of Charles Town to slavery in the Caribbean and the Northern colonies. It is estimated that between 147,000 and 340,000 Native Americans were enslaved in North America, excluding Mexico. But by the 1730s the American colonists felt that Native American slaves could easily escape, and so they began to rely on the Trans-Atlantic slave trade from Africa. In a reversal of the situation in South Africa, slavery in the American colonies in the seventeenth century was more like indentured servitude. It wasn’t until the early eighteenth century when the legal definition of slavery for life and for the lives of the slave dependents were formalized. While Native-Americans often adopted war captives into their tribes, it was the five so-called “Civilized tribes” (the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole) in the American South who adopted the practice of owning African-American slaves. They took their slaves with them when in the 1830s they were forced to relocate to the Indian territory in present-day Oklahoma in what became known as the “Trail of Tears.” Those Cherokee who remained in the South during the Civil War fought on the side of the Confederacy. https://pandarestaurant.us/read/northwest-territory-usa-1787.html Disputes over the extension of slavery into the Western territories was a major factor culminating in the secession of Southern slave-owning states during the American Civil War. It began with the establishment of the Northwest Territory which contained the proviso that slavery would not be permitted in the states carved out of it (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan). Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia retained their trans-Appalachian territories as future possible slave states (Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi). https://www.sutori.com/story/identity-period-3-1754-1800-timeline After Thomas Jefferson acquired from France the Louisiana Territory in 1803 the question of whether slavery would be allowed there caused a major rift between the slaveholding states and the so-called “free” states. This was temporarily solved by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which allowed Missouri to come into the union as a slave state, but banned slavery in the territory north of a line extending along the 36º30’ latitude. This compromise lasted until the Republic of Texas (which declared its independence from Mexico in 1836) was admitted to the Union as a slave state in 1845. In the Mexican War (1846-1848) the United States forced Mexico to cede the land that became the New Mexico and Utah territories, and California, which was admitted to the Union as part of the Compromise of 1850. The Compromise allowed the territories of Utah and New Mexico to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery under a doctrine known as “popular sovereignty.”      https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_1853-03-1853-12.png But the Compromise of 1850 didn’t last long, when in 1854 Stephen Douglas of Illinois introduced legislation to create the two new territories of Kansas and Nebraska based on the principle of “popular sovereignty” in order to facilitate the building of a transcontinental railroad. The act resulted in violence as pro-slavery men moved into Kansas to vote for slavery, thus overturning the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The issue of “popular sovereignty” became the subject of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates in the Senate election of 1854. While he lost the Senatorial election, it provided with the national reputation that enabled him to win the Presidential election as a third-party candidate in 1860. Meanwhile, in 1857 the entire issue of the extension of slavery was made moot by the Supreme Court Dred Scott Decision in which Chief Justice Taney ruled not only could a slave be free by being brought into a free territory, but that Congress did not have the authority to ban slavery in the western territories. While Lincoln didn’t think the federal government had the power to ban slavery in the South, between his election in November 1860 and his inauguration in March 1961, seven Southern states (South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas) seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America in February 1861. They were then joined by Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee. The Confederacy didn’t last beyond the end of the Civil War in April 1865, but their re-admission to the Union was dependent on their ratifying the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution (abolishing slavery, guaranteeing the rights of citizens of a state from being abridged by their state, and granted the vote to African American men). http://www.compromise-of-1850.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Kansas-Nebraska-Act-1854.jpg South Africa also had a secession problem, but it wasn’t so much about the extension of slavery into the territories about self-determination for the Boer population that migrated into them. In 1833 Sir Benjamin D’Urban was appointed Governor of Eastern Cape Colony. According to Thomas Pakenham, the political puzzle that confronted D’Urban and his successors was that “the Cape was more than a base; it was a colony; and a colony whose Afrikaner inhabitants’ loyalty was (to put it mildly) not beyond dispute. In this respect there was soon no parallel with the problem of the French in British Canada or any other British colonial problem. For the flood of British immigrants that would have provided a pro-British majority never materialized at the Cape.” https://www.timewisetraveller.co.uk/blood.html In 1843 Britain created a second colony annexing Natal. Natal was not like the other Boer territories, according to Pakenham, because it was on the trade route to India. In January 1838 D’Urban was dismissed, but he remained in South Africa in a military capacity until 1846. Nevertheless, when the British annexed Natal, they renamed its chief port D’Urban. In January 1847 D’Urban was appointed military commander of the British forces in Canada, where there was a border dispute with the United States and fears of a possible American invasion. He remained in Montreal until his death in 1849. http://www.thehistoryreader.com/military-history/harry-and-juana-smith/ Sir Harry Smith was appointed governor of the Cape Colony in 1847. The son of a surgeon in Whittlesey, Cambridge shire, England, he had an extensive military background. He served in South American from 1806 to 1807 in the British invasion of Rio de la Plata. He also saw action in the Peninsular War against Napoleon’s forces. It there that he met and married a young woman named Juana Maria de Los Dolores de León, whom became Lady Smith. After the Peninsular campaign, he fought in the United States during the War of 1812 and witnessed the burning of Washington, D.C., by the British. Upon returning to Europe, he was promoted to brigade major and fought at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. In 1828 was sent to the Cape, where he commanded a force in the Sixth Xhosa War (1834-1836). He was then sent to India in 1840, where he fought in the First Anglo-Sikh War (1845-1846). https://rubicon.blogs.com/photos/south_africa_map/map.html As governor Smith renamed the main town in Zulu country Lady Smith, after his Spanish bride. He also doubled the size of the Cape Colony to the Atlantic on the northwest and across the Kei River to the east as well as annexing the voortrekker’s territory across the Orange and Vaal rivers. When the Boer leader Pretorius led a force from the Transvaal against the British, Smith defeated them at the Battle of Boomplaatz. But subsequent governments under Lord John Russell and Lord Derby reversed course and repudiated this expansion. Sir Harry Smith was removed from office, and under the Sand (Zand) River Convention of 1852 and Bloemfontein Convention of 1854 the internal independence of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State was guaranteed by Britain. Seeking protection from both the Zulus and the Boers, Moshesh, the leader of a mixed group of African refugees from the Zulu wars who fled to the Drakensburg Mountains surrounded by the Orange Free State and Natal, asked Britain in 1868 to establish a protectorate of Basutoland (the independent kingdom of Lesotho today). Billington divided the American frontiers into the type of economic activities that crossed the abovementioned frontiers of expansion. He mentioned the “Trading Frontier,” including the fur trade in the eastern woodlands and the buffalo trade on the Great Plains; the “Mining Frontier,” including for gold, silver, and copper in the West; the “Cattle Frontier” in the American Southwest, and the “Farming Frontier” in the Midwest and Central Plains. Ibid., p. 7. Ray Allen Billington, Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier. Fourth Edition (New York and London: Macmillan, 1974). Thompson and Lamar note that in the United States the Indians were never viewed as a possible labor force in either mining of farming as were the indigenous peoples of South Africa. Instead under the Homestead Act of 1862 the federal government offered American citizens 160 acres of federal land to anyone willing to settle and farm the land for five years. Many Scandinavian and German immigrants took advantage of this offer. Like South Africa, the transcontinental railroad and mining industry resulted in Irish and Chinese workers immigrating to the American West. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Witwatersrand.jpg In South Africa there was a limited amount of crop farming, but even greater amounts of cattle-raising and mining. According to Thompson and Lamar, “The culmination of white expansion in the region was accelerated by the growth of the world’s largest diamond- and gold-mining industries which, from 1860 onward, brought an infusion of European technicians and capital and a railroad system deep into the interior.” Thompson and Lamar, op. cit., p. 23. In 1886 gold was discovered in the Witwatersrand Hills (also known as The Rand) of the Transvaal thirty miles south of the Boer capital at Pretoria. Pakenham writes that “gold made it [the Transvaal] the richest and militarily the most powerful nation in southern Africa. It precipitated a collision between the Boers and Uitlanders: the new immigrants, mainly British, swept along in the gold-rush.” Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (New York: Random House, 1979), p. xiv. It also led to the rapid growth of the city of Johannesburg on the northern border of The Rand. https://www.abebooks.com/maps/Pictorial-Map-Witwatersrand-Gold-Fields-SOUTH/19585372490/bd#&gid=1&pid=2 Pakenham describes Johannesburg as follows: After fifteen years its population exceeded fifty thousand Europeans, and there were perhaps as many again living in the townships scattered over the Rand. It was the greatest concentration of Europeans in the whole sub-continent. The place had begun as a mining camp, a kind of Dodge City on the veld. . . . But all that was soon changed once the mines became organized. The gold-rush died—to be replaced by an orderly stream of emigrants, pale-faced clerks and artisans from the depressed industrial towns of Britain and Jewish shopkeepers from the ghettoes of Eastern Europe. Ibid., p. 41. But there was another Johannesburg in the neighborhoods of the “mine boys” (African who worked in the mines), the Cape Coloureds (the mixed-race people who worked as tram-car drivers, craftsmen, servants and washerwomen), Asian Indians from Natal (who ran small chops and stalls in the markets), and poor whites. “Yet, under these cosmopolitan layers,” writes Pakenham, “Boer and Jewish, black and brown, Johannesburg still felt British—more British and either Cape Town or Natal. In short, it felt like a British colonial city.” Ibid., p. 42. In 1867 diamonds were discovered in Griqualand West, and mining for this new precious metal became more important than the earlier gold mines. In 1870 diamonds were discovered at Kimberley, on the border of the Cape Colony resulting in a diamond-rush into that region. Mining for this new precious metal became more important than the earlier mines. Cecil Rhodes https://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-cecil-rhodes-and-oxford-1450645322 One prospector from Natal, named Cecil Rhodes began to buy up various diamond claims. In 1880 Rhodes and his partner Alfred Beit established the De Beers Company. In the same year a railroad financed by Rhodes reached Kimberley, and Griqualand West with its diamond fields was transferred from the Crown to a self-governing colony. In 1885 Cecil Rhodes, representing the British Crown, established a British protectorate over the southern half of Bechuanaland, which was adjacent to Southwest Africa that had been annexed by Germany in 1884 at the London Conference. This prevented Germany from gaining territory adjacent to the Boer republic. Rhodes’ British South Africa Company then extended its influence to the Zambezi River to the north. In 1890 Rhodes bought out his partner and established a new corporation named De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd. “Thereafter,” writes Donald L. Wiedner, “De Beers controlled diamond production and diamond pricing throughout the world.” Wiedner, op. cit., p. 282. In the same year Rhodes became the Prime Minister of Capetown. The charter company now claimed not only the mining rights, but the land and the cattle, by what Europeans called the “right of conquest.” Ndebele society was based on cattle-ranching, and this expropriation knocked away their foundations. Also, their prided warrior caste had been defeated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rhodes_Colossus#mediaviewer/File:Punch_Rhodes_Colossus.png Pakenham describes Cecil Rhodes as an “independent Colossus with three heads.” Pakenham, op. cit., p. 490. First, he owned diamond mines in the Cape Colony and was also Prime Minister of the colony. Second, he owned gold mines in the Boer republic of the Transvaal. And third, Queen Victoria had granted him a royal charter to establish a British colony called Rhodesia north of the Transvaal. His goal was to federate the three states, a goal which was endorsed by almost all British politicians including Liberal, Liberal Unionist, and Tory. The new colony, however, was accumulating debts, which worried Rhodes, who had pledged his personal fortune of about £2 million to the Cape or the Transvaal. “This meant that most of the funds for developing Rhodesia had to be borrowed on the London market, or had to come, with unwelcome strings attached, from Downing Street,” says Pakenham. Ibid., p. 491. “Though his public image was that of a lone colossus bestriding Africa,” writes Niall Ferguson, “Rhodes could not have won his near monopoly over South African diamond production without the assistance of his friends in the City of London: in particular, the Rothschild bank, at that time the biggest concentration of financial capital in the world.” Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 224. In 1883 Rhodes’ De Beers diamond company merged with the French Compagnie Française, which then merged with the Kimberley Central Company under the name De Beers. A series of additional mergers resulted in the British South Africa Company formed in 1889. Rhodes had a private army known as the Chartered Company’s Volunteers armed with a new weapon, the Maxim gun. The Maxim gun, named after its inventor the American Hiram Maxim, was operated by a crew of four and could fire 500 rounds a minute. The conquered territory was named Rhodesia. “The creation of his own personal country and his own imperialist holy order were indeed merely components of a much bigger Rhodesian ‘Imperial policy,’” Ferguson says. Ibid., p. 228. Rhodes had in mind an imperial railway from Cape Town to Cairo, which would be “some huge metal spine” of his empire. In 1872 the Cape Colony was granted internal autonomy. “It had long struck British statesmen that the central problem of south Africa—to impose British control, despite the Afrikaners at the Cape and the Boers of the Transvaal—had analogies with the problem of the French in Canada,” writes Pakenham. “In Canada, it was true, the British settlers had soon swamped the French, whereas the Afrikaners would remain the majority at the Cape for the foreseeable future. But a federated constitution had worked wonders in the French-Canadian provinces. What about a federal constitution for all four South African states, the two British colonies and the two Boer republics?” Pakenham, op. cit., p. 10. In 1877 Britain reversed it policy and annexed the Transvaal as the first step toward creating a federated South Africa. Sir Theophilus Shepstone, the British Special Commissioner, arrived in Pretoria, the capital of the Transvaal in April 1877. He was under orders to win over the Dutch settlers through their parliament (the Volksraad) to British governance with no bloodshed. Pakenham asserts that “this was the first step in the British government’s master plan for South Africa to persuade the Transvaal and the other Boer republic, the Orange Free State, to join the British Empire and federate with two British colonies, the Cape and Natal.” Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, p. 41. https://cdn.britannica.com/38/169538-050-042D07E1.jpg The Orange Free State and the Transvaal were boxed in by the British-ruled Cape Colony to the south and west, Zululand to the east, and Matabeleland and Bechuanaland to the north. The Natal republic had replaced the Zulu king Dingaan with their own chosen chief named Cetshwayo. King Cetshwayo banned European missionaries from Zululand and began replacing the iklwa with firearms. In January 1879 the British government demanded that Cetshwayo disband his impis forces. When he refused, the British sent its forces into Zululand. Finally, after six months, the British captured Cetshwayo and defeated the Zulu revolt. Cetshwayo was exiled first to Cape Town and then to London. Cetswago, circa. 1875 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Isandlwana#mediaviewer/File:Cetshwayo-c1875.jpg The British forces then marched north to take control of Pretoria. This consolidated their power over Natal, the Zulu kingdom, and Transvaal. The victory over the native enemies of the Boers did little to assuage their discontent with British rule. A delegation of Boers led by Paul Kruger went to London with a petition signed by more than 6,000 burghers in an attempt to convince Disraeli to reverse the annexation. In April 1880 Disraeli was replaced as prime minister by the Liberal William Ewart Gladstone, who in his campaign had hinted at the restoration of the independence of the Transvaal. However, once in power, Prime Minister Gladstone took the position that he would not advise Queen Victoria to abandon her rule over the Transvaal. In November 1880 a farmer named Bezuidenhout was accused of refusing to pay his taxes, and the local sheriff seized his farm wagons. A group of armed Boers led by Piet Cronje retook the wagons and returned them to Bezuidenhout. The next month the Boers in Paardekraal voted to restore their old parliament (the Volksraad) and elected Marthinus Pretorius (the son of Andries Pretorius, the founder of the Boer settlement in South Africa) as President, Paul Kruger as Vice President, Piet Joubert as Commandant-General. They decided to draft a formal declaration of independence and send small detachments of burghers to lay siege to Pretoria and other towns were there were British garrisons. Meanwhile the main Afrikaner army under the command of General Joubert would march on Natal to prevent General Colley from bringing reinforcement to the north. On December 16, what was known as Dingane’s Day (which commemorates the vow the Boers took prior to their victory over the Zulu led by their chief Dingane at Blood River in 1838) the Boer Republic was declared at the town of Heidelberg and the Vierkleur (an orange, red, white, and blue flag) was hoisted. Four days later a British force under the command of Colonel Anstruther marching on Pretoria was defeated by Afrikaners under Commandant Frans Joubert near Bronkorst Spruit (Watercress Ditch). https://www.slideshare.net/frontfel/paul-kruger-voortrekker-commando-and-conservationist In 1880 the Boers under a rancher named Paul Kruger revolted against the British in what became known as the First Boer War culminating with a defeat of the British at Majuba. Kruger was born in 1825 in the Cape Colony. He was the son of a trekboer, whose ancestors came from Germany. Young Kruger migrated with his family on the Great Trek. At the age of seventeen he became deputy field cornet, and he participated in the defeat of the Bechuana chieftain Secheli, Mapela of Waterberg and Monsioia. As a member of the Boer council of war, he was a member of the negotiations with Britain at the Sand River Convention. He also fought at the battle of Majuba Hill in February 1881, and he participated in the peace settlement that followed. The new British Prime Minister, William E. Gladstone, who came to power in April 1880, decided to withdraw Britain from Boer and Zulu territories. Britain agreed to establish an independent Transvaal State, although Britain retained control over its foreign relations and retained the right to restrict the new state’s encroachment upon Bantu lands. In the Transvaal, General Colley lost two more encounters with the Boers at Laing’s Neck in January and Ingogo in February 1881, and the Afrikaners in the Orange Free State were coming to the aid of the Afrikaners in the Transvaal. At this point, the British Colonial Secretary, Lord Kimberley, proposed a negotiated peace with the Boers. Despite the Gladstone administration’s effort to negotiate an armistice, Sir George Colley took it upon himself to launch one more attack on February 27 on the Boer’s position at Laing’s Neck by taking a commanding position on a nearby tabletop mountain named Majuba. The British occupied the mountain, but the Boers launched an assault and routed the British forces. General Colley was killed in the encounter. In March 4 Kruger accepted the armistice, and a provisional peace treaty was signed. In August Britain and the Transvaal signed the Convention of Pretoria under which the Transvaal regained its republic status, however, Britain retained “suzerainty” in the form of having the right to intervene in foreign relations. This was confirmed by international treaty in the Convention of London in 1884. Paul Kruger became the President of the restored Transvaal Republic. However, Pakenham writes, Kruger “did not conceal the fact that he was signing under protest, and would do his best to negotiate a third convention which would remove the shadow of British paramountcy from the Transvaal’s independence.” Pakenham, The Boer War, p. 12. https://www.angloboerwar.com/other-information/16-other-information/2006-maps In 1885 Cecil Rhodes, representing the British Crown, established a British protectorate over the southern half of Bechuanaland, which was adjacent to Southwest Africa that had been annexed by Germany in 1884 at the London Conference. This prevented Germany from gaining territory adjacent to the Boer republic. Rhodes’ British South Africa Company then extended its influence to the Zambezi River to the north. In 1890 Rhodes bought out his partner and established a new corporation named De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd. “Thereafter De Beers controlled diamond production and diamond pricing throughout the world.” Wiedner, op. cit., p. 282. In the same year Rhodes also became the Prime Minister of Capetown. Cecil Rhodes sent a secret letter to Alfred Beit in August 1895 stating that Johannesburg was primed to make England the dominant force in the African continent. Rhodes’ right-hand man in Rhodesia was Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, nicknamed “Dr. Jim,” who was the administrator of the Chartered Company in Rhodesia created by Rhodes and Alfred Beit. He had a letter from the committee of Uitlanders in Johannesburg, created by Rhodes and Beit and consisting of mine executive, miners and others from the British foreign and business community, inviting them into intervene based on the claim that “thousands of unarmed men, women and children of our race will be at the mercy of well-armed Boers.” Ibid., pp. xxvi-xxvii. The letter was undated and was supposed to be kept until an uprising in Johannesburg had begun. In December Jameson left his camp in Bechuanaland near the border between Cape Colony and the Transvaal, with about 400 Rhodesian mounted police belonging to the Chartered Company bound for Johannesburg. After fighting their way against Boer commandos who had become aware of their invasion, on January 2 Jameson and his force reached a farm sought of a kopje named Doornkip in the hills of the Rand only a few hours ride from Johannesburg. Two bicyclists arrived with news that the rising in Johannesburg never took place and instead the Uitlanders had reached a peace with President Kruger of Transvaal. In the ensuing battle the British lost 16 men and the Boers only one, and Jameson was taken captive and imprisoned in Pretoria. A few days after the Raid, the German Kaiser sent a telegram to Kruger congratulating him on his victory. Joseph Chamberlain became the Secretary of the Colonial Office in August 1895. He formerly was in the radical wing of the Liberal Party, then one of the leaders of the Liberal Unionist in its coalition with the Tory Party in opposition to Irish Home Rule. He was also the uncle of Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, who became the Secretary of the British Colonial Office, and the father of Neville Chamberlain who later became Prime Minister in the 1930s. “Chamberlain’s ultimate dream”, writes Pakenham, “was to put all the white peoples of the Empire in the melting pot and forge a single imperial federation. The first step was to forge individual federations in Australia and South Africa, cast in the mold of the great Canadian federation already set up in Ottawa.” Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, p. 489. Soon after becoming Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain learned about the Uitlander coup in Johannesburg organized by Rhodes and Beit. Chamberlain was implicated in the plot by having sent a telegram to Rhodes stating that due to the crisis that was developing over Venezuela, he (Rhodes) should “hurry things along” in regard to the Johannesburg uprising. Chamberlain then visited Jameson in prison and convinced him to remain silent about his intervention and promised Rhodes that he would not change the charter of the Chartered Company, which could have been revoke as a result of Rhodes’ involvement in the Jameson Raid. https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-alfred-milner-1st-viscount-milner-1854-1925-british-statesman-and-102026837.html In the aftermath of the Jameson Raid, Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain appointed Sir Alfred Milner a High Commissioner for South Africa and Lieutenant-Governor of the Cape Colony. He was born in Giessen, Germany, near Frankfurt-on-Main. His father was a half-German medical student and his mother an English gentlewoman. When he was fifteen his mother died and he was sent to England for his education. At the age of eighteen he won a scholarship to Oxford, where he studied under Dr. Jowett of Balliol College, where both Henry Asquith and George Curzon had been students as well. Upon graduation he became the private secret of G. J. Goshen, the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, then financial secretary to Sir Evelyn Baring, the British governor of Egypt, and then Chairman of the Inland Revenue under Sir William Harcourt, the Liberal Chancellor. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Southern_Africa_1890s_Political.jpg In June 1890 the Barotse tribe, who lived northwest of Victoria Falls, signed a treaty with Germany and Portugal to establish boundary agreements with German Southwest Africa (Namibia today) and Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique today). Concerned with an incursion into the Katanga-Rhodesia copper belt, the British South Africa Company and the Congo Free State signed an agreement to partition the region. This extended Rhodes’ control from the Cape Colony to Bechuanaland to the so-called Rhodes’ Charterland as far as the Congo River and Lake Tanganyika. However, in 1893 the Matabele continued to conduct raids on Mashonaland. Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, a physician from Kimberley, who became the BSA Company Administrator and Chief Magistrate of the Rhodes Company Charterland ordered a force armed with newly invented machine guns to attack the Matabele at Shangani. In early 1894 Lobengula came down with smallpox and died. This brought an end to the rebellion and Matabeleland became a province within the Rhodes Company Charterland. Dr. Jameson ruled Rhodesia with the permission of the Crown, but not under the control of the Crown. In October 1889 the British South Africa Company was chartered with the power to control mining, trade, immigration, and communication within the Cape Colony. In exchange Rhodes would pay for telegraph lines and a railroad along the Great North Road into the interior. The British government had two seats on the Board of Directors. The final struggle for control of Southern Africa began in 1895, when the Nederlands Railway, which controlled transportation in the Transvaal, increase its rates for traffic between Natal, the Cape and the Free State. Joseph Chamberlain, British Secretary of State for the Colonies, sent troops from England to South Africa. In December 1895 Jameson sent troops through the Transvaal, but he and his troops were stopped by Boer commandos, but Kruger leased the so-called Jameson Raiders to the British courts. Rhodes was replaced as Prime Minister in Capetown, and sent Lord Grey to Salisbury to take control of Rhodesian politics. Soon after Lord Grey’s arrival the Matabele tribe rebelled because they had not been compensated for the loss of Bulawayo. In June 1896 the Mashona in the east also rebelled, but they were soon put down and Rhodes himself negotiated a peace treaty. The British then decided to divide Rhodesia into Southern, Northeastern, and Northwestern areas under a High Commissioner in Capetown. While the company continued to rule, it was subject to the supervision of the Crown. Jan Smuts, https://zar.co.za/images/bio/smuts/janperd.jpg In 1898 Kruger appointed twenty-seven-year-old Jan Smuts as the State Attorney, the chief legal counsel to the government. Smuts was an Afrikaner from the Cape, who was fluent in English. He had studied laws at Cambridge and returned to the Cape to practice law and engage in political writings. “He initially supported Rhodes in this endeavor, but when it became known that Rhodes had been involved in the Johannesburg uprising and the Jameson Raid, Smuts turned his loyalty from Rhodes to Kruger and he moved to Johannesburg. As State Attorney, Kruger went about trying reform the Transvaal police, known as “Zarps” because the words Zuid Afrika Republik written on their shoulder flashes. They were recruited mostly from urban poor whites, and they were known for their violent and even deadly actions especially toward the Cape Coloureds in Johannesburg. The Cape Coloureds were British subjects, and their cause had been invested by the acting British Agent in Pretoria, Edmund Fraser. On December 23, 1898, Smuts went to Pretoria to meet with Fraser in which, according to Smuts, Fraser threatened to “take action.” The next day, an English boiler-maker from Lancashire named Tom Edgar was shot and killed by a Zarp named PC Jones, who attempted arrest Edgar after drunken fist fight Edgar had with a Boer. Edgar resisted arrest and he was shot in front of his wife. The shooting resulted in Christmas Eve protest by about five thousand Uitlanders in Johannesburg. They petitioned Queen Victoria to instruct the British authorities to arrest the policeman. But in a trial of the officer, the Boer judge, whose father was a member of Kruger’s Executive, virtually instructed the jury to acquit the officer. The judge then commended the police for their actions. In 1899 British reasserted its claim to suzerainty over the Transvaal. Kruger argued that the London Convention of 1884 had eliminated suzerainty. In October Kruger and President Marthinus Steyn of the Free State cabled an ultimatum to Queen Victoria. Three days later the Boers began to send troops toward the Kimberley mines, while the Transvaal attacked toward the junction of the Natal Railway at Ladysmith. The British sent in Indian Army reinforcements as well as volunteers from Australia and Canada. Smuts tried to prevent imperial intervention by proposing a settlement with the mining companies, but the terms of the so-called Great Deal leaked out and the negotiations collapsed. What followed was a petition signed by 21,000 British subjects of the Rand calling on the British government to intervene. In May 1899 the British cabinet decided to intervene on behalf of the Uitlanders peacefully at first. In June President Kruger and State Attorney Jan Smuts traveled by train to meet with Milner and Steyn in Bloemfontein. Milner wanted to annex the Transvaal as a Crown Colony. After four days the conference adjoined without an agreement. In September Chamberlain demanded full voting rights and representation for the Uitlanders and Kruger ordered Commandos to the Natal border. On October 9th Kruger issued an ultimatum giving the British 48 hours to remove their soldiers from the borders of both the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, which was allied with the Transvaal. The British government rejected Kruger’s ultimatum, and the South African Republic and the Orange Free State declared war on Britain. Initially, the Boers launched preemptive strikes in British-held territory in Natal and the Cape Colony. They besieged Ladysmith, Mafeking, and Kimberley and won victories at Colenso, Magersontein, and Spion Kop. The British increased the number of troops, and in 1900 under the command of Lord Roberts and his chief of staff Lord Kitchener broke the sieges, and in June 1900 they captured, they captured the Boer capital of Pretoria. Boer prisoners of war were sent overseas to Saint Helena, Ceylon, Bermuda, and India. The British then annexed the Free State as the Orange River Colony. Once they gained control of Johannesburg. Kruger went into exile in the Netherlands, and Britain annexed the Transvaal. The British military was aided by the Cape Colony, the Colony of Natal, some native African allies, and volunteers from southern Africa, Australia, Canada, India, and New Zealand. However, for the next two years there continued to be “commando” (armed farmers) attacks by the Boers in the Cape, the Transvaal, and in the Drakensbergs. These guerrilla raids were conducted by new Boer generals, such as Louis Botha, Jan Smuts, Christiaan de Wet, and Koos de la Rey. The British responded with armored trains protected by fortified blockhouses manned by British troops at key locations. The blockhouses were linked by barbed wire fences. They also instituted a “scorched earth” policy (similar to that of the American Civil War general Sherman in his march through Georgia), in which they destroyed Boer farms and moved Boer civilians into “concentration camps” (the first use of the term), where many died from disease and starvation. The war ended with the Treaty of Vereeniging in May 1902. In 1910 the former Boer republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal were incorporated into the Union of South Africa within the British Empire. On October 12 the Boers attacked the Cape Colony and Natal and advanced toward the British garrisons at Ladysmith, Mafeking, and Kimberley. The British under Major-General Penn Symons confronted the Boers at the Battle of Talana Hill near the coal-mining town of Dundee. While the British drove the Boers from the hill, was at a cost of almost 500 British casualties including Penn Symons himself. In another engagement, the British at Elandslaagte between Ladysmith and Dundee the British defeated the Boers, but fearing a counterattack on the British main position at Ladysmith, its commander Sir George Stuart White ordered a retreat from the exposed position at Dundee. The Boers then laid siege to Ladysmith, which lasted several months. Meanwhile in October the Boers under Piet Cronje laid siege to the railway junction at Mafeking on the border with Transvaal, where the British under Colonel Robert Band-Powell had two regiments. In early November the Boers began a siege of the diamond mining city Kimberley in an attempt to starve out the population of 40,000. The town protected by a garrison commanded by the British Lieutenant Colonel Robert Kekewich and Cecil Rhodes himself. With the city under constant bombardment, Rhodes ordered the civilians to take shelter in the shafts of the Kimberley Mine. The Boers also besieged the cities of Mafeking and Ladysmith. The British General Sir Redver Henry Buller arrived with reinforcements, and he split his army into several detachments to relieve the besieged garrisons. Lieutenant General Lord Methuen proceeded to the north along the Western Railway toward Kimberley and Mafeking. Major General William Gatacre led a smaller force toward the railway junction of Stormberg, and Buller himself led the main force toward Ladysmith to the east. Methuen won bloody skirmishes at Belmont and Graspan and a larger conflict at Modder River. However, the British used tactics learned during the Crimean War, name regimental and battalion maneuvering of columns, against the Boers used of trench position and mobile cavalry raids used by the Confederates during the American Civil War. The Boers were also armed with Mauser pistols and Krupp field guns. During one week in December 1899 the British sustained a series of losses on three fronts. General Gatacre was defeated at the Battle of Stormberg on December 10th. The next day Methuen proved no match at the Battle of Magersfontein for the Boer commanders, Koos de la Rey and Piet Cronjé, who had order trenches to be dug in order to fool the British. Then on December 15 Buller and his troops while attempting to cross the Tugela River were ambushed by Transvaal Boers under the command of Louis Botha. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Botha#/media/File:Louis_Botha_-_Project_Gutenberg_eText_16462.jpg In January 1900 Buller made another attempt to relieve Ladysmith by crossing the Tugela River west of Colenso. One British unit under Major General Charles Warren was able to cross the river and took a prominent hill known as Spion Kop. But the next morning they realized they were exposed to Boer gun emplacements on surrounding hills. In the ensuing battle the British were plagued by poor communications and contradictory orders, and they were forced to retreat across the river to British territory. In February Buller attacked Louis Botha’s forces at Vaal Krantz and was again defeated, earning him the nickname “Sir Reverse.” Buller was then replaced by Field Marshal Lord Roberts as commander in chief. Roberts assembled a new headquarters staff including Lord Kitchener from the Sudan; Frederick Russell Burnham, an American scout from the Klondike; Neville Bowles Chamberlain from Afghanistan; and William Nicholson from Calcutta. Buller remained in command in the Natal, while Roberts had his main force near the Orange River along the Western Railway and Metheun at the Modder River was making preparation to outflank the Boers and relieve Kimberley. In February 1900 Roberts launched his main attack. He was able to outflank the Boers defending Magersfontein. A cavalry division under Major General Joh French launched a major attack, and on February 15 he succeeded in breeching the Boer defenses of Kimberley and breaking the siege that had lasted 124 days. Meanwhile, Roberts pursued Piet Cronje’s forces that had abandoned Magersfontein and were proceeding to Bloemfontein. French’s cavalry rode 31 miles to Paardeberg, where Cronje was attempting to cross the Modder River. At the Battle of Paardeberg Roberts and French surrounded Cronje’s forces who had taken entrenched positions. When frontal attacks failed, the British resorted to bombarding Cronje’s positions over ten days, before he surrendered. Meanwhile, the British troops suffered from typhoid caused by having to drink the polluted waters of the Modder River. In Natal Buller tried again to relieve Ladysmith. At the Battle of the Tugela Heights on February 14th he adopted the Boer tactic of advancing in small rushes covered by rifle fire and artillery support from behind and use rock and earthen works for cover. But this only resulted in slow progress, and on February 26 Buller changed his tactics again by launching an all-out attack across the Tugela River to defeat Botha’s outnumbered forces near Colenso. The next day Buller was able to break the 118-day siege of Ladysmith. Roberts then advanced into the Orange Free State, defeating the Boers at the Battle of Poplar Grove, and capturing the capital of Bloemfontein on March 13th. The Boers then launched a guerrilla campaign by attacking British supply and communications lines. The first attack was on March 31st on the Bloemfontein waterworks at Sanna’s Post by Boers under the command of Christiaan De Wet. At the same time he sent a small force to relieve Baden-Powell and break the siege of Mafeking on May 18, 1900. The Orange Free State was annexed as the Orange River Colony on May 28th. Despite delays caused by typhoid fever at Paardeburg, Roberts was able to resume his advance, and he captured Johannesburg on May 31st and Pretoria, the capital of Transvaal on June 5th. The last formal battle was at Diamond Hill on June 11th to 12th. Although Roberts drove the Boer commander, Louis Botha from the hill, the British suffered more casualties than the Boers. President Kruger took what remained of his government to eastern Transvaal. Roberts then joined forces with Buller to attack the Boer defensive position at Bergendal on August 26th. They then advanced along the railway to Komatipoort, while Kruger sought asylum in Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique today). But the core of the Boer forces under Botha advanced through the Drakenberg Mountains into the Transvaal high veld. Other Boer fighters in the Orange Free State had been driven into the Brandwater Basin in the northeast of the Republic. A force under General Archibald Hunter left Bloemfontein in July to remove the Free State Boers under Christiaan De Wet accompanied by President Steyn from the basin. While most of the Boers escaped, other were trapped by Hunter and surrendered. Christian De Wet crossed the Vaal into western Transvaal. Roberts declared the end of the war on September 3, 1900, and the South African Republic was formally annexed. President Kruger and members of the Transvaal government left Portuguese East Africa on a warship sent by Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. Kruger went to Marseille, then to the Netherlands, and finally to Clarens, Switzerland, where he died in July 1904. Despite being nominally in control of the two Boer republics, except for the northern part of Transvaal, a guerrilla war continued by the Boer commandoes under De la Rey and Christiaan Beyers. The British responded by building fortified blockhouses and barbed wire fences along the routes of their armored trains. They also instituted a scorched earth policy in controlled areas to deprive the guerrillas of supplies and shelters. In addition, they established concentration camps for Boer women and children. The Conservative Party won the 1900 general election known as the “Khaki election” (Khaki being the color of the belts and boots of the Imperial Light Horse troops) in Britain based on the British success against the Boers. But support of the war in Britain began to wane after reports about the treatment of the Boer civilians by the British army. Emily Hobhouse of the South African Women and Children’s Distress Fund visited the camps in the Orange Free State from January to May 1901. She published a report in June which prompted the Liberal MP David Lloyd George to accuse the British government of “a policy of extermination.” The government then appointed a special commission known as the Fawcett Commission headed by Millicent Fawcett, who was a suffragist and a Liberal Unionist. The commission toured the camps in South Africa between August and December 1901. Their report confirmed everything Hobhouse had seen and suggested increases in rations, nurses, and improved sanitation. In February 1902 the government took over the running of the camps from Kitchener and the British army. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_de_Wet#/media/File:Christiaan_de_Wet4.jpg Christiaan De Wet was the most formidable leader of the Boer guerrillas. He successfully evaded capture on numerous occasions and was later involved in the negotiations for a peace settlement. In March 1901 De Wet escaped across the Orange River, but he left some Cape rebels under Kritzinger and Scheepers to fight a guerrilla war in the Cape Midlands. Scheepers was captured and executed for treason and capital crimes including the murder of prisoners and unarmed civilians. De Wet returned to the Orange Free State, where he continued raids in the western part of the country. In September Jan Christiaan Smuts and Kritzinger again attacked the Cape, where they defeated the British at the Battle of Elands River. In the Cape Midlands where the Boers were a majority of the white population, there was pro-Boer sympathy, but despite the fear of the British authorities, the Cape Boers never rebelled. September 1901 Botha launched another invasion of Natal, where he defeated the British at the Battle of Blood River Poort near Dundee. But Botha was forced to retreat to the Transvaal because of heavy rains. There he attacked a British raiding party at Bakenlaagte. In response the British made use of native scouts and informers to launch attacks on Botha, eventually forcing him to leave the high veld for the border with Swaziland. In the Western Transvaal Boer commandos under Koos De La Rye continued raids on the British between September 1901 and March 1902. Lord Methuen, the British second-in-command under Lord Kitchener, advanced from Vryburg to attack De La Rey, but on March 7, 1902, the Boers attacked Metheun’s rear guard at Tweebosch. The British then sent reinforcements under Ian Hamilton in the Western Transvaal. On April 11, 1902, a commando under General Jan Kemp and Commandant Potgieter attacked a larger British force under Kekewich at Rooiwal. This defeat of the Boers was the last major battle of the war in the Western Transvaal. Both the Boers and the British wanted it to be a “white man’s war” by keeping the native Africans from taking sides. The white magistrates in the Natal Colony and President Kruger appealed to the Zulu amakhosi (chiefs) to remain neutral. However, some Africans, such as the Swazi, entered the war against the Boers in order to regain lands confiscated from them. Other Africans either voluntarily or involuntarily entered the war of the British side as scouts, messengers, watchmen in the blockhouses, and auxiliary troops. After a Zulu faction had their cattle stolen by the Boers, in May 1902 they attacked the Boers at Holkrantz in southeastern Transvaal. Several times the British offered a peace, most notably in March 1901, but they were rejected by Botha and the commandos. Kitchener then launched a series of drives to sweep the country in a scorched earth campaign similar to Sherman’s march through Georgia during the American Civil War. Finally the last Boers surrendered in May 1902. Under the Treaty of Vereeniging in May 31, 1902, the British promised £3 million for reconstruction and limited self-government in 1906 and 1907. The treaty ended the independence of the South African Republic and the Orange Free State. At Vereeniging, writes Pakenham, “Milner had inserted that subtle preposition ‘after’ into Article 8 (Clause 9) of the peace terms. There was to be no franchise for the natives until after the introduction of self-government, that is, never (or, as people used to say in Ireland, not until Monday-come-never-in-a-wheel-barrow).” Pakenham, The Boer War, p. 612. In 1906-07 when the CB introduced self-government to the Transvaal and ORC, the Liberals did not prevent the restoration of the color bar in the constitutions of the two ex-republics because of Article 8 at Vereeniging. And in 1909 Article 8 was cited as justification for the color bar in the new constitution of the Union of South Africa. In 1910 they were incorporated into the new Union of South Africa as a dominion within the British Empire. http://www.worldofcoins.eu/forum/index.php?topic=39634.0 In summary, it is tempting to compare the South African frontier to the North American frontier. Both were explored about the same time—North America in 1492 by Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus and South Africa in 1497 by the Portuguese Vasco da Gama. Both were looking for a trade route to Asia. Both frontiers were celebrated as shaping the national character of the respective countries. In America, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner celebrated the frontier as fostering individualism and democracy. Although his “frontier thesis” is no longer universally accepted, it still shapes American popular culture. I have argued that ethnic diversity could equally be considered the defining characteristic of America. But there are considerable differences between the two frontiers. North America is in the northern hemisphere and has a varied climate ranging from semi-tropical to temperate. South America is in the southern hemisphere and has a Mediterranean climate with some arid zones. Thus, North America was more suitable for agricultural and stock raising expansion into the interior as far as the 100th meridian and along the Pacific coast, but the western three fifths of South Africa was not suitable for agriculture except for stock-raising. North America had a wide range of Native-American language groups including the Algonquian, Iroquian, Siouan, Moskhogean, Caddo, Penutian, Nadene, and Aztec. They were also divided into different culture areas, such as the Eastern Woodland, the Southeast, the Plains, the Southwest, the Plateau, California, and the Pacific Northwest. In South Africa there were two major linguistic families: the Khoe and the Bantu. The Khoe has two major subgroups: the San (or Bushmen) and the Koikhoi (known to Europeans as the Hottentot). The Bantu-speaking population in South Africa was divided into two major linguistic groups: the Sotho and the Nguni. The Nguni comprise almost two-thirds of the Bantu-speaking people in South Africa today. The two largest Nguni groups are the Xhosa and the Zulu. North America being more accessible to European immigration, there were a great variety of ethnic groups that settled the North American frontier, beginning with the Spaniards, the French, the Dutch, the Swedes, and the English and later in the nineteenth century the Irish, Germans, Norwegians, Chinese, and others. In South America there were mainly two major groups: the Dutch (actually mixed with some Germans, Poles, and others) who later became known as the Boers, and the English. But the most important difference between the populations of the two countries. By 1890 the population Native-American population was reduced by disease and genocide to only 248,000 in a total population of 63 million (i.e., 0.4 percent). Whereas in South Africa Black Africans today constitute 76.4 percent, whites only 9.1 percent and so-called “coloureds” (mixed racial) 8.9 percent. One of the major differences between the two was the issue of slavery in both countries. While slavery was gradually abolished in most Northern States, it remained dominant in the South. American slavery was fully abolished that year by the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The expansion of slavery into the American West was temporarily solved by a series of compromises between 1820 and 1864, but finally resulted in the American Civil War (1861 to 1865). Britain abolished slavery throughout its empire in 1833. The abolition of slavery was one of the reasons the Boer family embarked upon their Great Trek into the interior, where they founded their own republics first in Natal (which was annexed by South Africa in 1843) and then in the Orange Free State in 1854 and the Transvaal (1858). It was only after the Boer War (1899 to 1902) that South Africa annex the two Boer republics, which then were incorporated in 1910 into the Union of South Africa as a member of the British Commonwealth.