Several previous unsuccessful attempts to unite the colonies were made, with proposed political models ranging from
unitary, to loosely
federal.
Early unification attempt under Sir George Grey (1850s) Sir
George Grey, the
Governor of Cape Colony from 1854 to 1861, decided that unifying the states of southern Africa would be mutually beneficial. The stated reasons were that he believed that political divisions between the white-controlled states "weakened them against the natives", threatened an ethnic divide between British and Boer, and left the Cape vulnerable to interference from other European powers. He believed that a united "South African Federation", under British control, would resolve all three of these concerns. His idea was greeted with cautious optimism in southern Africa; the
Orange Free State agreed to the idea in principle and the
Transvaal may also eventually have agreed. However, he was overruled by the
British Colonial Office which ordered him to desist from his plans. His refusal to abandon the idea eventually led to him being recalled.
The imposition of confederation (1870s) '' (1891–1899) depicted an imagined future united South Africa at a time when the idea was being widely debated in the Cape Colony. In the 1870s, the London Colonial Office, under
Secretary for the Colonies Lord Carnarvon, decided to apply a system of
confederation onto southern Africa. On this occasion, however, it was largely rejected by southern Africans, primarily due to its very bad timing. The various component states of
southern Africa were still simmering after the last bout of British expansion, and inter-state tensions were high. The
Orange Free State this time refused to even discuss the idea, and Prime Minister
John Molteno of the
Cape Colony called the idea badly informed and irresponsible. In addition, many local leaders resented the way it was imposed from outside without understanding of local issues. The
Confederation model was also seen as unsuitable for the disparate entities of
southern Africa, with their wildly different sizes, economies and political systems. The Molteno Unification Plan (1877), put forward by the Cape government as a more feasible
unitary alternative to
confederation, largely anticipated the final act of Union in 1909. A crucial difference was that the Cape's liberal constitution and multiracial franchise were to be extended to the other states of the union. These smaller states would gradually accede to the much larger
Cape Colony through a system of treaties, whilst simultaneously gaining elected seats in the
Cape parliament. The entire process would be locally driven, with Britain's role restricted to policing any set-backs. While subsequently acknowledged to be more viable, this model was rejected at the time by London. At the other extreme, another powerful Cape politician at the time,
Saul Solomon, proposed an extremely loose system of federation, with the component states preserving their very different constitutions and systems of franchise. Lord Carnarvon rejected the (more informed) local plans for unification, as he wished to have the process brought to a conclusion before the end of his tenure and, having little experience of southern Africa, he preferred to enforce the more familiar model of confederation used in Canada. He pushed ahead with his Confederation plan, which unraveled as predicted, leaving a string of destructive wars across southern Africa. These conflicts eventually fed into the first and second
Anglo-Boer Wars, with far-reaching consequences for the subcontinent.
Second Boer War (1899–1902) After the discovery of gold in the 1880s, thousands of British immigrants flocked to the gold mines of the
Transvaal Republic and the
Orange Free State. The newly arrived miners, though needed for the mines, were distrusted by the politically dominant Afrikaners, who called them "
uitlanders", imposed heavy taxes on them and granted them very limited civil rights, with no right to vote. The British government, interested in profiting from the gold and diamond mines there and highly protective of its own citizens, demanded reforms, which the Afrikaners rejected. A small-scale private British effort to overthrow Transvaal's President
Paul Kruger, the
Jameson Raid of 1895, proved a fiasco, and presaged full-scale conflict as diplomatic efforts all failed. The Second Boer War started on 11 October 1899 and ended on 31 May 1902. The United Kingdom gained the support of its Cape Colony, of its Colony of Natal and of some African allies. Volunteers from across the British Empire further supplemented the British war effort. All other nations remained neutral, but public opinion in them was largely hostile to Britain. Inside Britain and its Empire there was also significant
opposition to the Second Boer War, spearheaded by
anti-war activists such as
Emily Hobhouse. At the onset of the war, the British were both overconfident about the chances of success in a military confrontation with the Boer republics and underprepared for a long-term conflict. British Prime Minister
Lord Salisbury and members of
his cabinet, in particular
Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, ignored repeated warnings that Boer forces were more powerful than previous reports had suggested. In the last months of 1899, Boer forces launched the first attacks of the war, besieging the British-held settlements of
Ladysmith,
Kimberley and
Mafeking, and
winning several engagements against British troops at
Colenso,
Magersfontein and
Stormberg. However, by the next year the British soon organised an effective response to these attacks, lifting the three sieges and winning several battles against Boer forces. The British, now deploying approximately 400,000 soldiers from across their colonial empire, successfully invaded and occupied the Boer republics. Numerous
Boer soldiers refused to surrender and
took to the countryside to carry out
guerrilla operations against the British, who responded by implementing
scorched earth tactics. These tactics included interning Afrikaner civilians from the Boer republics in
concentration camps (in which roughly 28,000 people died) and destroying homesteads owned by Afrikaners to flush out the guerillas and deny them a base of civilian support. Using these tactics combined with a system of blockhouses and barriers to seal off Boer holdouts, the British were able to gradually track down and defeat the guerillas. In the 1902
Treaty of Vereeniging, the British formally annexed the Boer republics into the
Cape Colony, ending the war.
Impact of the Bhambatha Rebellion The
Bhambatha Rebellion was a rebellion by the
Zulu against colonial rule in the
Colony of Natal in 1906. It saw around 3000–4000 Zulus killed by the British, and popularised the thought among colonisers that the unification of the colonies was necessary to maintain
white supremacy. == History of the Union of South Africa ==