The Treaty

It was exactly eight years between the signing of the Treaty of Vereeniging on 31 May 1902, bringing the Boer War to an end, and the inauguration of the Union of South Africa on 31 May 1910. In that time Boer and Briton were reconciled. The Transvaal and the Orange Free State became self-governing British colonies. White power was consolidated at the expense of African, coloured and Indian communities and all the necessary pre-conditions were established for the creation of apartheid. The reconciliation of Boer and Briton and the alienation of the non-European majority were politically linked. As the liberal Cape politician J. X. Merriman observed, the imperial authorities and colonial politicians had managed, quite consciously, ‘to reconcile the whites over the body of the blacks’.

‘Sacrifice the nigger’

This outcome was not what many expected while the war was being fought. The British government had, after all, been highly critical of the racial policies of the Boer republics, defended a colour-blind franchise in the Cape and had sought to protect the Indian minority from discriminatory legislation. Lord Lansdowne, a leading member of the war-time government in the House of Lords, declared in 1899 that among the many misdeeds of the Transvaal, he did not know that any filled him ‘with more indignation’ than its treatment of the Indians.