In the Cape, many Afrikaners were becoming fed up with British rule. Their principal grievance was the way in which the colonial authorities were tampering with labour relations and destroying what they saw as a divine distinction between blacks and whites. In 1828 the Cape Ordinance 50 gave Khoi residents and free blacks equality before the law, while the abolition of slavery in 1834 was the last straw. One Voortrekker wrote: "it's not so much their freedom that drove us to such lengths, as their being placed on an equal footing with Christians, contrary to the laws of God and the natural distinction of race".

 

In this spirit, 15,000 Afrikaners (one out of every ten living in the colony) set out to leave the Cape and once and for all shake off the meddlesome British. When they arrived in the eastern half of the country, they were delighted to find vast tracts of apparently unoccupied land. In fact, they were merely stumbling into the eye of the mfecane storm - areas that had been temporarily cleared either by war parties or by fearful people hiding out to escape detection. As they fanned out further they encountered the Nguni states and a series of battles followed. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Voortrekkers had consolidated control and established the two Boer states of the South African Republic (now Mpumalanga, Northwest and Northern provinces) and the Orange Free State (now Free State), both of whose independence was recognized by Britain in the 1850s.

Britain wasn't too concerned about the interior of South Africa. Apart from its strategic position, South Africa was a chaotic and undeveloped backwater at the butt-end of the Empire that was of scant interest back in London. At this time, the United States, which was first settled by Britons a mere thirty years before the Dutch hit South Africa, had a population of over thirty million people of European extraction and 80,000km of railways compared with South Africa's 250,000 whites and 120km of railways. Things changed first in the 1860s, with the discovery of diamonds (the world's largest deposit) around modern-day Kimberley and even more significantly in the 1880s, with the discovery of gold at Witwatersrand (now Gauteng). Together, these discoveries were the catalyst that transformed South Africa from a down-at-heel rural society to an urbanized industrial one. In the process great fortunes were made by capitalists like Cecil Rhodes , traditional African society was crushed and the independence of the Boer republics ended.

Although the Gauteng goldfields were exceptionally well-endowed with ore, they were also particularly difficult to mine, requiring the sinking of deep shafts, which necessitated capitalist intervention. Exploiting the mines required costly equipment and cheap labour to operate it. Capital quickly flowed in from Western investors eager for profit: even today the West retains strong links with the South African mines, and South Africa remains the world's largest producer of gold.

Despite the benefits it brought, the discovery of gold was also one of the principal causes of the Second Anglo-Boer War . Gold-mining had shifted the economic centre of South Africa from the British-controlled Cape to a Boer republic, while at the same time, Britain's European rival, Germany, was beginning to make political and economic inroads in the Boer republics. Britain feared losing its strategic Cape naval base, but perhaps even more important were questions of international finance and the substantial British investment in the mines. London was at the heart of world trade and was eager to see a flourishing gold-mining industry in South Africa, but the Boers seemed rather sluggish about modernizing their infrastructure to assist the exploitation of the mines.

In any case, a number of Britons had for some time seen the unification of South Africa as the key to securing British interests in the subcontinent. To this end, under a wafer-thin pretext, the Empire had declared war and subdued the last of the independent African kingdoms by means of the Zulu War of 1879. This had secured KwaZulu-Natal and meant that all the coastal territories of South Africa from Namibia round to Mozambique were under British control. All that remained was to bring the two Boer republics under the Union Jack.