boering through the imperial spirit

The Boer War. The war that broke the imperial spirit. In the end, the British victory over the Boers closely resembled defeat. Two colonial competing sides battling each other on alien soil….

The Boers were tight knit, traditionalist, racialist, devout in a severe Calvinist style, and fundamentalists in life as in faith. They were brave. They were hardy. They were uncompromising. They were suspicious of change, unremittingly determined to live by their own ideals, and convinced of their unalterable rights under a God of absolutes.

—Boer guerrilla fighters during the Second Boer War
Anglo Boer war battlefields tours in South Africa—Read More:http://www.south-africa-tours-and-travel.com/anglo-boer-war.html

The British were in many ways just the opposite. They were pragmatic opportunists, and they believed in man’s limitless power to improve himself and his world. Assuming on the whole their own superiority to all other nations, they thought they had a duty to impose their standards upon the less fortunate. South Africa was important to this conception: it stood pivotally upon the imperial trade routes, and it contained a large indigenous African population, toward whom the best and most responsible of the imperialists felt themselves to be trustees or godparents. Throughout the nineteenth century the British had worked hard to establish their mastery overall South Africa and all its inhabitants.

The Boers wanted nothing of British values and thought the trusteeship notion pure humbug, being perfectly convinced that the white man would be forever superior to the black. The more sternly and self-righteously the British pressed upon them, the more stubbornly the Boers resisted, and throughout the Victorian century the more resolute of the Volk, as they liked to call themselves, had been withdrawing stage by stage from the British presence, into independent Boer republics far in the interior- the Orange Free State and the Transvaal with its capital at Pretoria.

Three generations of Boer warriors in 1900. Read More:http://www.britishbattles.com/great-boer-war/siege-ladysmith.htm

The British could not tolerate such anachronisms. Under the spell of the visionary financier Cecil Rhodes they were expanding northward, pressing the Boers, briefly taking control of the Transvaal in the 1880’s only to be humiliated in the disastrous hilltop engagement known as the Battle of Majuba Hill. It was only a matter of time before the British returned, and the moment was obviously hastened when, in 1887, the Transvaal was discovered to possess the world’s largest deposits of gold. Strategy, economics, morality, instinct, and now cupidity ensured that before long the Boer republics must be tidied up and organized within the imperial logic.

The ostensible casus belli was the presence within the Transvaal of a large foreign population, mostly British. Their skills were enabling the pastoral Boers to grow rich upon their gold; their taxes paid for the costs of government; but they were allowed no rights of citizenship and were treated by President Paul Kruger with a disagreeable mixture of contempt and insolence. In December, 1895, there had been a British attempt to overthrow Kruger in a coup d’etat, the so-called Jameson Raid. It ended in fiasco, but by the end of the century the issue had gone beyond petty plots and maverick raids. Tempers were so inflamed, prejudices so rooted, consequences so inescapable, that war came about scarcely by intention at all. ( to be continued…)

ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)…The Boer War was a serious jolt for the British Army. At the outbreak of the war British tactics were appropriate for the use of single shot firearms, fired in volleys controlled by company and battalion officers; the troops fighting in close order. The need for tight formations had been emphasised time and again in colonial fighting. In the Zulu and Sudan Wars overwhelming enemy numbers armed principally with stabbing weapons were easily kept at a distance by such tactics; but, as at Isandlwana, would overrun a loosely formed force. These

tics had to be entirely rethought in battle against the Boers armed with modern weapons.

In the months before hostilities the Boer commandant general, General Joubert, bought 30,000 Mauser magazine rifles and a number of modern field guns and automatic weapons from the German armaments manufacturer Krupp and the French firm Creusot. The commandoes, without formal discipline, welded into a fighting force through a strong sense of community and dislike for the British. Field Cornets led burghers by personal influence not through any military code. The Boers did not adopt military formation in battle, instinctively fighting from whatever cover there might be. The preponderance were countrymen, running their farms from the back of a pony with a rifle in one hand. These rural Boers brought a life time of marksmanship to the war, an important edge, further exploited by Joubert’s consignment of magazine rifles. Viljoen is said to have coined the aphorism “Through God and the Mauser”. With strong fieldcraft skills and high mobility the Boers were natural mounted infantry. The urban burghers and foreign volunteers readily adopted the fighting methods of the rest of the army.

Other than in the regular uniformed Staats Artillery and police units, the Boers wore their every day civilian clothes on campaign.

After the first month the Boers lost their numerical superiority, spending the rest of the formal war on the defensive against British forces that regularly outnumbered them.

British tactics, little changed from the Crimea, used at Modder River, Magersfontein, Colenso and Spion Kop were incapable of winning battles against entrenched troops armed with modern magazine rifles. Every British commander made the same mistake; Buller; Methuen, Roberts and Kitchener. When General Kelly-Kenny attempted to winkle Cronje’s commandoes out of their riverside entrenchments at Paardeburg using his artillery, Kitchener intervened and insisted on a battle of infantry assaults; with the same disastrous consequences as Colenso, Modder River, Magersfontein and Spion Kop. Read More:http://www.britishbattles.com/great-boer-war/siege-ladysmith.htm

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