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Summary
The South African War was a costly and bloody struggle. From the beginning of military operations in October 1899 to the signing of peace in Pretoria on the last day of May 1902 it claimed the lives of 22,000 imperial soldiers and over 7000 republican fighters. Almost 28,000 Boer civilians, most of them children under the age of sixteen, perished in British concentration camps during the war's protracted guerrilla phase. The conflict cost the British taxpayer more than £200 million and laid waste to large areas of the conquered Boer states.
The war owed its origin to the discovery in 1886 of gold deposits on the Witwatersrand in the South African Republic, the independent Boer state beyond the Vaal river. The region of the new mining capital, Johannesburg, thereafter began rapidly to industrialise, attracting international capital and a cosmopolitan immigrant (uitlander) population of mining engineers, artisans and fortune-seekers from Europe, America and the rest of South Africa. Thousands of migrant black workers from the subcontinent were also drawn to the Rand. By the end of 1895 the heavily mechanised and expensive extraction of gold from deep levels had begun, and by 1898 the Transvaal accounted for more than a quarter of the world's total gold output, the largest single source of supply.
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- Black People and the South African War 1899–1902 , pp. 1 - 5Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1983
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