The Boers, nervous and resentful of the uitlanders ' growing presence, sought to contain their influence through requiring lengthy residential qualifying periods before voting rights could be obtained, by imposing taxes on the gold industry, and by introducing controls through licensing, tariffs and administrative requirements.

This offered only temporary sanctuary, as the mountain passes leading to it could be occupied by the British, trapping the Boers.

They suspected that supplies from Mozambique could be smuggled to the Boers through Swaziland.

He believed the mine owners, with Cecil Rhodes, who wanted control of the Transvaal, in the vanguard, were manipulating the British into fighting the Boers so that they could maximize their profits from mining.

He disliked the Boers and wrote that free institutions and self-government could not be granted to the Cape Colony because the Boers outnumbered the British three-to-one and " it will simply be delivering us over bound hand and foot into the power of the Dutch, who hate us as much as a conquered people can hate their conquerors ".

Working the TPOs could be dangerous as a APOC sergeant's report of the 19 June 1901 illustrates: "... after leaving Machavie en route for Kokemoer and Klerkdrop a branch line running out of and to the west of Johannesburg, the mail train was derailed and attacked by the Boers.

.. before I could realise my position, I was surrounded by Boers some pointing their Mausers at me ... By the time I got to the counter everything was removed.

He wanted to prevent the Boers from establishing an independent republic on the coast with a harbor through which access to the interior could be gained.

The Boers strongly resented the contention of the British that they could not shake off British nationality though beyond the bounds of any recognized British possession, nor were they prepared to see their only port garrisoned by British troops.

Because the summit of the kop was mostly hard rock, the trenches were at most deep and provided an exceptionally poor defensive position-the British infantry in the trenches could not see over the crest of the plateau and the Boers were able to fire down the length of the crescent-shaped trench from the adjacent peaks.

The Boers had failed to drive the British off the Kop, but the surviving men of the Pretoria and Carolina Commando now held a firing line on Aloe Knoll from where they could enfilade the British position and the British were now under sustained bombardment from the Boer artillery.

On one hand the Boers on the Kop could see large numbers of Burghers on the plains below them who refused to join the fight.

The Boers captured the edge of both features, but could not advance further.

The Boers had long before captured Ladysmith's water supply, and the defenders could use only the polluted Klip River.

As the Boers settled in the area, called their settlement Rustenburg because they had relatively friendly relations with their Bafokeng allies in the area, and after the many violent military conflicts with other African chiefdoms, such as the Matabele, they believed they could rest (" rusten " in Dutch ) in this settlement, whose name literally means " Resting Town.

Anstruther refused, but before he could move his column into skirmish formation the Boers opened fire at 12: 30 pm.

Once British infantry had reached the foot of the kopje, they were concealed by boulders and scrub, and could then easily drive the Boers off the summit with the bayonet.

The British had been taught a lesson by the Boers in South Africa who could move quickly and they discovered that their mobile units were not quite as mobile as they had thought.

In 1824 farmers of Dutch, French Huguenot and German descent called Voortrekkers ( later named Boers by the English ) from the Cape Colony who were seeking both pasture for their flocks and to escape governmental oversight settled in the country.

After the cornered British garrison tried to escape to Natal to join General George Pomeroy Colley, the Boers entrenched themselves behind a stone wall surrounding the animal stockade, and wounded the colonel in the backside, who was standing upright in his stirrups.

As soon as the Boers moved on, the 109 armed Baralongs cut off Eloff's escape route.

The British formed circular / squared defensive positions on the crest of the ridge with 240 infantry, 38 cavalry and 2 pieces of artillery while the roughly 300 Boers attempted to surround them and cut them off from escape.

Sir Winston Churchill was captured by the Boers and imprisoned in the school building, but managed to make his famous escape from there and took the railroad into Portuguese East Africa.

4, 500 Boers surrendered and much equipment was captured but as with Roberts's drive against Kruger at the same time, these losses were of relatively little consequence, as the hardcore of the Boer armies and their most determined and active leaders remained at large.

In a brutal campaign, these strategies removed civilian support from the Boers with a scorched earth policy of destroying Boer farms, slaughtering livestock, building blockhouses, and moving women, children and the elderly into concentration camps.

Conditions in these camps, which had been conceived by Roberts as a form of control of the families whose farms he had destroyed, began to degenerate rapidly as the large influx of Boers outstripped the ability of the minuscule British force to cope.

Several of these states were established after military defeats of the local population by the Voortrekkers / Boers by virtue of their technologically superior weaponry.

Boers governed themselves within these republics and were not required to answer to the British.

From these the Boers observed English movements at Weston-their remount depot.

Already in his first term, his support for the independence of the Boers at the time of the annexation of the Transvaal by the British in 1877, and for the Zulus during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, demonstrated these characteristics.

Further fighting took place on the last hill reached by the British, and the Boers that defended it soon retreated.

However, a few dozen Boers soon appeared, counter-attacking the Manchesters and Gordon Highlanders.

A number of Trekboere settled in the eastern Cape, where their descendants were soon known as Grensboere ( Border Farmers ), or later called simply Boers ( which is a Dutch word for " farmers ").

He was soon released, and Bagrationi returned to France and then to Georgia, where he wrote a memoir, Burebtan (" With the Boers "; published in Tbilisi, 1951 ), about his experiences in South Africa.

By the 1830s migrating Boers came into conflict with the Zulu Kingdom then ruled by Dingane.

Thus the thirty years ' strife between the Basutos and the Boers came to an end.

During his time in South Africa, Haggard developed an intense hatred for the Boers, but also came to admire the Zulus.

On detraining they came under fire from a small force of Boers led by Commandant J. Prinsloo on Belmont Kopje ; by the next morning the British were in position to shell, then charge, the hill, despite some losses.

There was a considerable party of Natal Boers still strongly opposed to the British, and they were reinforced by numerous bands of Boers who came over the Drakensberg from Winburg and Potchefstroom.

They feel that the Western-Cape based Afrikaners — whose ancestors did not trek eastwards or northwards — took advantage of the republican Boers ' destitution following the Anglo-Boer War and later attempted to assimilate the Boers into a new politically based cultural label as " Afrikaners ".

In the 1830s, Boers embarked on a journey of expansion, east of the Great Fish River into the Zuurveld.

* June 4 – In South Africa, hunter Dick King rides into a British military base in Grahamstown to warn that the Boers have besieged Durban ( he had left 11 days earlier ).

Given the British origins of the majority of uitlanders and the ongoing influx of new uitlanders into Johannesburg, the Boers recognised that granting full voting rights to the uitlanders would eventually result in the loss of ethnic Boer control in the South African Republic.

In the first phase, the Boers mounted pre-emptive strikes into British-held territory in Natal and the Cape Colony, besieging the British garrisons of Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley.

The Boers, for their part, recognised that the more concessions they made to the uitlanders the greater the likelihood – with approximately 30, 000 white male Boer voters and potentially 60, 000 white male uitlanders – that their independent control of the Transvaal would be lost and the territory absorbed into the British Empire.

Yet he led Britain into war for three main reasons: because he believed the British government had an obligation to British South Africans ; because he thought that the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, and the Cape Boers aspired to a Dutch South Africa, and that the achievement of such a state would damage Britain's imperial prestige around the world ; and because of the Boers ' treatment of black South Africans.

But this quickly subsided into a desultory affair with the Boers prepared to starve the stronghold into submission, and so, on 13 October, began the 217-day Siege of Mafeking.

Near the end of the siege of Kimberley, it was expected that the Boers would intensify their bombardment, so Rhodes displayed a notice encouraging people to go down into shafts of the Kimberley Mine for protection.

Roberts then advanced into the Orange Free State from the west, putting the Boers to flight at the Battle of Poplar Grove and capturing Bloemfontein, the capital, unopposed on 13 March with the Boer defenders escaping and scattering.

The first into Pretoria, was Lt. William Watson of the New South Wales Mounted Rifles, who persuaded the Boers to surrender the capital.

On the question of race relations, some have opined that the Union was so pre-occupied with uniting the white races ( the British and the Boers ) into a single race that it enabled the gulf between whites and blacks to enlarge.

A number of Boers fled into Swaziland.

This resentment culminated in the en-masse migration of substantial numbers of the Boers into the hitherto unexplored frontier, to get beyond the control of British rule.

Sir Theophilus Shepstone, whom Cetshwayo regarded as his friend, had supported him in the border dispute, but in 1877 he led a small force into the Transvaal and persuaded the Boers to give up their independence.

The year in which the treaty with Moshesh was made several large parties of Boers recrossed the Drakensberg into the country north of the Orange, refusing to remain in Natal when it became a British colony.

" At this time, largely owing to the exhausting struggle with the Basutos, the Free State Boers, like their Transvaal neighbors, had drifted into financial straits.

The Basotho, who dwelt in the upper valleys of the Orange River, had subsisted under a semi-protectorate of the British government from 1843 to 1854 ; but having been left to their own resources on the abandonment of the Orange sovereignty, they fell into a long exhaustive warfare with the Boers of the Orange Free State.