ABSTRACT
The tug-of-war between imperial Britain and the republican settler Afrikaners that began with the outbreak of the ‘First Freedom Fight’ in 1880 finally ended with the resolution of the AngloBoer War in 1902. There would be no repeat of the American Revolution in South Africa. The Afrikaners lost the fight and, for the moment, gave up on their dreams of complete independence. They remained, as they ever had been, distrustful of British imperial designs. A stopgap colonial administration could only be fickle at the end of the war. In the short term, the government and accommodation of large indigenous and migrant populations would be but a sideshow to the main event of post-war politics. Far more pressing, given the political character of the wartime dispute, was the management of relations between the two different settler blocs – the small, defiant English-speaking community and the embittered, war-ravaged Afrikaners.
