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    Boer Wars: A History From Beginning to End
    Boer Wars: A History From Beginning to End
    Boer Wars: A History From Beginning to End
    Ebook56 pages36 minutes

    Boer Wars: A History From Beginning to End

    By Henry Freeman

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    About this ebook

    As General Patton once said, "The Boers? Those sons of bitches fight for the hell of it."
    The reputation of the Boer is not entirely unearned. At a time when South Africa was a place inhabited by the toughest of men, only those who lived in the saddle with a gun in their hands could possibly survive.

    Inside you will read about...
    ✓ The Creation of the Boer
    ✓ Growing Tensions
    ✓ Colley Steps In
    ✓ The End of the First War
    ✓ The Jameson Raid
    ✓ Stage One: The Boer Offensive
    ✓ Stage Two: The Empire Strikes Back
    ✓ Stage Three: Scorched Earth
    ✓ The End of the Boer

    Who were the Boers, and what was the conflict that would lead them into a fight to the death with England in the First and Second Anglo-Boer wars?  Was this a colonial uprising? Or a freedom-fight gone horribly wrong?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHenry Freeman
    Release dateSep 25, 2017
    ISBN9781386199373
    Boer Wars: A History From Beginning to End

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      Book preview

      Boer Wars - Henry Freeman

      Introduction

      Because the victors write the history books, we’ve called the altercation in South Africa quite simply The Boer War for generations – a British designation. But ask someone else and the answer might be different. To the Boers themselves, it was The Wars of Independence, yet to the politically correct they were the Anglo-Boer Wars, meant to designate the participants without taking sides. But even each specific conflict has its own name. The First Boer War is also referred to as The Transvaal War. The Jameson Raid is even questioned whether it’s rightly part of the war at all, and the Second Boer War is also called the Second Anglo-Boer War as well as the South African War.

      How we name something defines how we look at it. Our goal is to look at all of these events collectively, in an unbiased presentation of facts. Hence this history is more properly titled The Anglo-Boer Wars: From Beginning to End and we will refer to the wars themselves with the Anglo-Boer designation from this point onward.

      But no sooner has the naming conundrum been resolved that we have a new problem in deciding just where the war even began. The tensions between the parties involved go back more than a hundred years. The job of the historian can become muddled when it comes to weeding out the facts and how to present them properly.

      Let’s start, then, with the founding of South Africa by the Dutch, and work from there.

      Chapter One

      The Creation of the Boer

      …the Boers of South Africa, regarded themselves as a chosen people, elect of God, and their God was an awful Majesty, given to revenge upon His enemies

      —James G. Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish: A Social History

      The area of what is modern day South Africa wasn’t entirely unknown to the Europeans prior to colonization. The Portuguese were familiar with the Cape as far back as the 1480’s, though they’d named it Cabo das Tormentas, meaning Cape of Storms. This might give a hint as to why the territory was left alone by traders putting in for supplies, by both Portuguese and later English and Dutch traders. This was probably just as well, as the natives of the region – the Xhosa and Zulu – weren’t necessarily welcoming to outsiders.

      It wasn’t until 1647 that the Dutch became interested in the potential of a colony here, after two sailors from a Dutch East India Company shipwrecked there. While the most that shipwrecked sailors could usually ask was to survive such an experience, these two men actually thrived in the conditions, even able to cultivate their own crops in the months that followed. Their return home was filled with glowing reports of the land, and plans soon followed to place a colony at the Cape to serve passing company ships.

      In 1652, under the direction of surgeon Jan Van Riebeek, the first fort was built at what would someday become Cape Town. Within five years, the settlement had grown considerably,

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