Orange Free State

There has been a great deal written on the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), from the importance of cricket to the life of prisoners in the prison camps on Ceylon and other isles of the British Empire. Almost every subject has been thoroughly researched and discussed. However, the role of one person, that of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, has never been thoroughly examined. Queen Wilhelmina can be found in almost every study about the Second Anglo-Boer War, but none of the literature elaborates on the exact role Wilhelmina played during the conflict. Every book has a few phrases that highlights the involvement of Wilhelmina, but that is often the most you will read about her in relation to the conflict. Although Wilhelmina’s role is still unclear, she is regularly described in literature as an international symbol of Boer support.

Thesis for obtaining Bachelor's degree at the University of Amsterdam.

graded 9, A+, 4,0 GPA

This thesis questions the role and significance of Dutch consul and Transvaal and OFS consul-general Gerard Pott. Besides his diplomatic offices he was lead agent for one of the largest trade corporations in Lourenço Marques, the Dutch East Africa Company.

The Netherlands maintained a policy of strict neutrality, but the Boer Republics were at war with the British Empire. Does this lead to a clash of interest and a violation of the Dutch neutrality?

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.

Though a small proportion of the European population of South Africa, the Jewish people played a disproportionately large role in the development and history of its country from 1800 onwards. Freed from the repression and hostility that they faced in the countries where they were born, they flourished in a country that was no stranger to oppression. A new study based partially on previously unpublised sources and oral history explores all of this and much more.

On May16 th , 1820, a caravan of British settlers reached the southeastern coast of what is today South Africa. Standing amidst this uneasy crowd was the Wesleyan missionary Reverend William Shaw. The following account, taken from his memoirs, paints the episode.

Southern Africa during almost the entire nineteenth century was from economic, cultural, ethnical and above all political aspects divided into British colonies, Boer settler communities (from the 1840s republics) and territories controlled by independent native tribes and kingdoms. From the first years of the 1850s to 1881 the leaders of the British colonial policy made several attempts to unite the divided subcontinent (colonies and states) and organize a loyal self-governing, federal, British dominated South African dominion like Canada, New Zealand or Australia. That conception became the main line of Great Britain's South African colonial policy when the Fourth Earl of Carnarvon was the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 1874-1878. This study deals mainly with Lord Carnarvon's South African federal scheme as well as those factors which influenced his colonial conception about the subcontinent.

Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa. Volume 70, No 1. Pretoria, 2016.
Almost all the Russian travellers who visited South Africa in the nineteenth century only saw the Cape Colony. Their stay in this part of the world was too brief to allow them trips deeper into the interior. And even those who made it a point to explore the Cape did not reach further than Worcester. That is why the long-forgotten memoir of Prince Grigory Volkonsky (1864-1912), rediscovered by Karel Schoeman thirty years ago, is so valuable, even unique. A member of Russia’s most distinguished aristocratic families lived for several months in Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State, a Boer republic and wrote down his impressions.