Because blacks in southern Africa will not put up with such conditions if they can maintain an autonomous existence on their own lands, the British had embarked on a large-scale program of conquest in the 1870s and the 1880s.

Mine owners argue that if they do not get cheap labor their industries will become unprofitable.

White farmers, English- and Dutch-speaking alike, interested in expanding their own production for new urban markets, cannot compete with the wages paid at the mines and demand hat blacks be forced to work for them.

They argue that if blacks have to pay taxes in cash and that if most of their lands are confiscated, they will then have to seek work on the terms that white employers chosoe to offer.

As a result of such pressures, the British have fought wars against the Zulu, the Griqua, the Tswana, the Xhosa, the Pedi, and the Sotho, conquering all but the last.

By the middle of the 1880s, the majority of the black African population of South Africa that had still been independent in 1870 had been defeated, the bulk of their lands had been confiscated and given to white settlers, and taxes had been imposed on the people, who are now forced to live on rural "locations."

In order to acquire food to survive and to earn cash to pay taxes, blacks now have to migrate to work on the farms, in the mines, and in the towns of newly industrialized South Africa.