ABSTRACT
At the beginning of 1896 the political marriage between Cecil John Rhodes and the Afrikaner Bond came to an abrupt and violent end. On the last day of 1895 the news about Dr Jameson’s incursion into the Transvaal reached the Cape Town public. The divorce took longer to reach finality than might have been expected, because of the deep impression left by the marriage on the aggrieved Afrikaner partners. It was also a painful divorce, involving personal and collective soul searching, rethinking of basic premises and restatement of identity, policies and ideology. The continuity in the Bond’s political strategy was already evident at the height of the raid crisis. Likewise the raid, while causing separation from Rhodes, did not predetermine the inevitability of divorce.
