Page "Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener" Paragraph 29

The Treaty of Vereeniging was signed in 1902 following a tense six months.

During this period Kitchener struggled against Sir Alfred Milner, the Governor of the Cape Colony, and the British government.

Milner was a hard-line conservative and wanted forcibly to Anglicise the Afrikaans people ( the Boers ), and Milner and the British government wanted to assert victory by forcing the Boers to sign a humiliating peace treaty ; Kitchener wanted a more generous compromise peace treaty that would recognize certain rights for the Afrikaners and promise future self-government.

He even entertained a peace treaty proposed by Botha and the other Boer leaders that would have maintained the sovereignty of the South African Republican and the Orange Free State while requiring them to sign a perpetual treaty of alliance with the UK and grant major concessions to the UK such as equal rights for English with Dutch in their countries, voting rights for Uitlanders, and a customs and railway union with the Cape Colony and Natal, although he knew the government in the UK would reject the offer.

The British cabinet rejected the offer.

Eventually the British government decided the war had gone on long enough and sided with Kitchener against Milner.

( Louis Botha, the Boer leader with whom Kitchener had negotiated his aborted peace treaty in 1901, became the first Prime Minister of the self-governing Union of South Africa in 1910.

The treaty also agreed to pay for reconstruction following the end of hostilities.

Six days later Kitchener, who had risen from major-general to the brevet rank of full general during the war, was created Viscount Kitchener, of Khartoum and of the Vaal in the Colony of Transvaal and of Aspall in the County of Suffolk.