832 Ch. 21 • The Age of European Imperialism
as its goal. Kitchener and his army took revenge for Gordon’s death, using
machine guns to mow down 11,000 Mahdists at the Battle of Omdurman
(September 1898) and retaking Khartoum. British troops desecrated the
Mahdi’s grave, playing soccer with his skull. At Fashoda, they encountered a
French expeditionary force, which intended to establish a French colony on
the Upper Nile. Kitchener handed his counterpart a mildly worded note of
protest against the French presence, and the two commanders clinked
drinking glasses, leaving their governments to fight it out diplomatically.
In both Britain and France, some nationalists demanded war. But the
Dreyfus Affair (see Chapter 18) preoccupied French society; furthermore,
as the French foreign minister lamented, “We have nothing but arguments
and they have the troops.” The Fashoda Affair ended peacefully when
France recognized British and Egyptian claims to the Nile Basin and Britain
recognized French holdings in West Africa. There seemed to be enough of
Africa to go around. Only Abyssinia and Liberia, which had been settled in
the 1820s by freed U.S. slaves, were independent African states.
The British in South Africa and the Boer WarIn South Africa, Britain had to overcome resistance to its presence, first
from indigenous peoples and then from Dutch settlers. The British had
taken the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of South Africa from the Dutch in- British settlers moved in, fighting nine separate wars against the
Bantu people in the 1850s and 1860s. In 1872, the Cape Colony emerged
from under the wing of the British Foreign Office, forming its own govern
ment, but remaining within the British Empire.
Known as the Boers, the Dutch settlers (Afrikaners) in South Africa
were a farming people of strict Calvinist belief. The Boers resented the
British abolition of slavery and the fact that the British allowed blacks to
move about freely and to own property. In the “Great Trek” from the Cape
Colony, which began in 1836 and lasted almost a decade, many Boers
began to move inland to carve out states that would be independent of
British rule (see Map 21.3). Overcoming Zulu resistance, Boers estab
lished the Natal Republic, a strip along South Africa’s east coast. When
the British intervened in support of the Zulus, the Boers left Natal, which
became a British colony in 1843. The Boers crossed the Vaal River in search
of new land. Slaughtering Zulus as they went, the Boers founded the
Republic of Transvaal (later the South African Republic) and the Orange
Free State, which the British recognized as independent in 1854.
The discovery of diamonds in the late 1860s, first in the Cape Colony and
then west of the Orange Free State, attracted a flow of treasure seekers—at
least 10,000 people—raising the stakes for control of South Africa. After
annexing the Republic of Transvaal against the wishes of the Boers in 1877,
the British gradually extended their colonial frontier northward, convinced
that more diamonds and gold would be found beyond the Vaal River.