Death in the Veldt Trivia Quiz

Answer:

This conflict marked the culmination of a century of conflict between the British and the Boers, descendants of colonists who had settled in the southern part of the African continent while it was controlled by the Dutch East India Company. When the Dutch ceded control of the Southern Cape Colony to the British in 1806, the Afrikaans-speaking settlers moved north, away from the English-controlled region. By 1865, the United Kingdom had taken control of much of the territory that is now South Africa, with the Boers having been pushed northwards to the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.

The discovery of diamonds in the Kimberley region in 1867 led the British to annex the Transvaal in 1877, leading in 1880 to a four-month-long conflict known as the First Boer War, a conflict won by the Boers, leading to their acknowledged sovereignty in Transvaal. The discovery of gold near Witwatersrand (near what is now Johannesburg) in 1884 caused a renewed impetus for the British to expand their territory, to control this valuable resource. It was especially irksome that the Boers arranged to export the gold through German-controlled ports, so the British did not even gain export tax on the transport. In 1895, a botched attempt to encourage British residents of Johannesburg into an uprising (known as the Jameson Raid) helped unite the Afrikaners of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic into consolidated resistance to the British.

On 11 October 1899 Paul Kruger, President of the Transvaal, declared war on the British, who had refused his demand for the withdrawal of their troops from Transvaal. The first engagement, the Battle of Kraaipan, occurred the following day, when Koos de la Rey captured a railway siding and British garrison near, cutting communication lines. This group of Boers then moved on Ladysmith, where Sir George Stuart White held out for four months, during which time nearly 3,000 British soldiers died.

Mafeking, originally intended to be used as to hold British troops in readiness to deploy in raids to distract the Boers, was surrounded by over 5,000 Boers led by Piet Cronjé, and Colonel Robert Baden-Powell found himself defending the city for a 218-day siege that began on 13 October. Further south, the city of Kimberley was also subject to a siege, as the Boers settled in to try to starve the British out of their land.

Attempts to relieve these sieges were led by General Sir Redvers Buller. In December, a number of spectacular failures (grouped together as Black Week) included Battle of Colenso on 15 December, in which British forces attempting to cross the Tugela River to relieve Ladysmith were turned back by Boer forces led by Louis Botha, whose superior equipment and tactics led to over 1,000 British troops wounded or killed, compared to 40 Boers. A second attempt in late January, led by Major General Charles Warren, saw the British win the Battle of Spion Kop, only to discover that they were then in a position surmounted by Boer guns. One of the terraces at Anflied Stadium (home to the Liverpool Football Club) is names in tribute to the many Liverpudlians who died in this battle.

General Sir Redvers Buller succeeding in relieving Ladysmith on 28 February 1900. Winston Churchill and Mohandas Ghandi were both present in Ladysmith, the former as a war correspondent and the latter as leader of a stretcher-bearing corps. Robert Baden-Powell ended the siege at Mafeking on 17 May. Present in the city at the time were Lord Edward Cecil (the Prime Minister's son) and Lady Sarah Churchill (Winston's aunt). Baden-Powell became a national hero.

Frederick Roberts, who had replaced Buller as the overall commander of the British forces, raised the siege of Kimberley on 27 February, before moving on the capture Bloemfontein on 13 March, before proceeding to the Transvaal and capturing Johannesburg on 15 May and Pretoria (the Boer capital) on 31 May. While the British felt this to be effectively the end of the war, and it was declared over on 3 September 1900, but skirmishes continued.

Christiaan de Wet was one of the main leaders of the guerilla campaign to disrupt British supply lines, communication and troop movement. In November Herbert Kitchener (soon to be promoted to the rank of general) took over command from Roberts, leading the British forces until the signing of the Treaty of Vereeniging on 31 May 1902.

Winners write history, so the British view of this conflict as being waged against the Boers led to it being called the Second Boer War, a name which ignores the fact that many Africans (including, of course, many women and children) who were not involved in the political dispute were inevitably impacted by the events, especially by the setting up of concentration camps and the scorched earth policy the British used during the final years, in an attempt to curb the success of the guerilla campaigns. It is now officially known as the South African War in South Africa; English speakers may also call it the Boer War, while in Afrikaans it is most commonly referred to as 'Tweede Vryheidsoorlog' (Second Freedom War), and in both languages Anglo-Boer War is sometimes used.