This week we’ll be traveling back in time a bit, to the mid 1800’s. At this time, the British recognized the independence of the republics in the Bloemfontein and Sand River Conventions. What is a Republic? According to the dictionary it is “a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch.” This meant that these areas in South Africa were now free of British rule. However, the terms of these republics’ treaties forbade them from reviving slavery. Despite this, it was still widely practiced.
The discovery of gold on Witwatersrand in 1866 led to the sudden and dramatic transformation of Transvaal (one of the Boer Republics). Johannesburg soon emerged as the largest city in the region, following a huge influx of mainly English-speaking white workers. This caused the capital’s land and power to become concentrated in the hands of a small number of mining magnates (a wealthy and influential person, especially in business) aka Randlords.
A dispute between the Uitlander population and the Randlords and Afrikaner government of Paul Kruger formed. The issue of whether to extend the right to vote to all White people in the republic was one of the main causes of the South African War of 1899-1902. However, one of the few things all parties agreed on was the need to ensure the perpetuation of white domination over Blacks in politics and the wider economy. The Afrikaner farmers who supported the Kruger government required a ready supply of cheap and pliable African labor. It was also imperative that this workforce was rendered as immobile as possible so that Africans couldn’t leave their farms in search of employment elsewhere. In many ways, this reminds me of sharecropping in the United States. People were tied to the land they worked usually because they couldn’t afford to go anywhere else and the system was created to keep them that way. South Africa was no different.
20th Century History 