Bantu-speaking peoples begin to move into the region of present South Africa from the northeast in about 1000, gradually displacing the San and Khoikhoi hunters and gatherers.

Gold prospectors, following the discovery of gold at Langlaagte, Johannesburg in 1886, soon discover that there are even richer gold reefs in the Witwatersrand (literally "white water ridge"—a watershed) near Johannesburg.

Johannesburg is a dusty settlement some fifty-five kilometers from the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) capital, Pretoria, but as word spreads, people flock to the area from all other regions of the country, as well as many foreigners (uitlanders) from North America, the United Kingdom and Europe.

The economy of the Transvaal soon booms, the massive deposits of gold-bearing ore skewing the economic balance between Boers, tribal peoples and British capitalists even more dramatically.

The Dutch speaking Voortrekkers had arrived in Johannesburg in the early nineteenth century, driving away the Matebele with the help of Sotho–Tswana allies, establishing settlements around Rustenburg and Pretoria in the early 1830s, and claiming sovereignty over what would become Johannesburg as part of the Transvaal Republic.

Gold was initially discovered some four hundred kilometers to the east of present-day Johannesburg, in Barberton.

Cecil Rhodes, who had succeeded in monopolizing the diamond industry, is much less successful on the Rand, where his companies prove to be poorer producers than those of his competitors.

In the 1890s, he seeks to compensate for his lackluster performance by carving out a personal empire in present-day Zimbabwe, original site of the fifteenth-century gold industry of Great Zimbabwe.

There he rules the Ndebele and the Shona people through his British South Africa Company.

Gold mining on the Rand, although beset by a number of technological problems in its early days, grows rapidly, with output increasing from £80,000 in 1887 to nearly £8,000,000, or one-fifth of the world's gold production, in 1895.

By the end of the century, more than £60,000,000 of capital has been invested in the gold industry, most of it by European investors, who thereby continue the pattern developed at Kimberley that southern Africa receives more foreign investment than the rest of Africa combined.

The gold mines employ one hundred thousand African laborers, five times as many as do the diamond mines, and draws these men from throughout southern Africa, although most come from Portuguese-ruled areas of Mozambique.

Johannesburg, the newly established hub of this industry, has a population of seventy-five thousand Europeans by the end of the century, which makes it the largest city in southern Africa.

Africans participate actively in the new industrial economy.

Thousands had come to Kimberley in the early 1870s, some to obtain diamond claims, the majority to seek jobs in the mines and thereby to acquire the cash that would enable them to rebuild cattle herds depleted by drought, disease, and Boer raids.

n the early 1870s, an average of fifty thousand men a year had migrated to work in the mines, usually for two to three months, returning home with guns purchased in Kimberley, as well as cattle and cash.

Many who lived in the area of the diamond finds had chosen to sell agricultural surpluses, rather than their labor, and to invest their considerable profits in increasing production for the growing urban market.

African farmers in British Basutoland (the British protectorate established in Lesotho), the Cape, and Natal had also greatly expanded their production of foodstuffs to meet rising demand throughout southern Africa, and out of this development has emerged a relatively prosperous peasantry supplying the new towns of the interior as well as the coastal ports.

The growth of Kimberley and other towns also provide new economic opportunities for Cape Coloureds, many of whom are skilled tradesmen, and for Indians, who, once they had completed their contracts on the sugar plantations, establish shops selling goods to African customers.

Mineowners struggling to make a profit in the early days of the diamond industry had sought, however, to undercut the bargaining strength of the Africans on whom they depended for labor.

In 1872 Kimberley's white claimsholders had persuaded the British colonial administration to introduce a pass law.

This law, the foundation of the twentieth-century South African pass laws, required that all "servants" be in possession of passes that stated whether the holders were legally entitled to work in the city, whether or not they had completed their contractual obligations, and whether they could leave the city.

The aim of this law, written in "color-blind" language but enforced against blacks only, was to limit the mobility of migrant workers, who had frequently changed employers or left the diamond fields in a constant (and usually successful) attempt to bargain wages upward.

Other restrictions have followed the pass law.

These include the establishment of special courts to process pass law offenders as rapidly as possible (the basis of segregated courts in the twentieth century), the laying out of special "locations" or ghettos in Kimberley where urban blacks had to live (the basis of municipal segregation practices), and, finally, in 1886 the formation of "closed compounds," fenced and guarded institutions in which all black diamond mine workers have to live for the duration of their labor contracts.

South African gold soon eclipses diamonds in importance.

Africans had mined gold for centuries at Mapungubwe (in South Africa, on the border with Zimbabwe) and later at the successor state of Great Zimbabwe, and they had traded with Arabs and Portuguese on the east coast of Africa.

In the 1860s and the 1870s, Europeans had made a number of small finds of their own, but the major development had taken place in 1886 when potentially enormous deposits of gold were found on the Witwatersrand (literally, "Ridge of White Waters" in Afrikaans, commonly shortened to Rand) near present-day Johannesburg.

English-speaking businessmen who had made their fortunes in the diamond industry quickly buy up all the auriferous claims and establish a series of large gold-mining companies that are to dominate the industry well into the twentieth century.

Paul Kruger, distrusting the mine owners and the British government, seeks to build thr Transvaal's strength.

He engages in diplomatic relations with Germany, imports arms from Europe, and continues to deny the vote to uitlanders.

He also cements relations with the Orange Free State and seeks support from Dutch speakers in the Cape.

In these endeavors, he is assisted by a growing sense of Afrikaner identity that has developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

This nationalistic identity had emerged clearly in the early 1880s, after the victory of Majuba Hill, when S.J. du Toit, a Dutch Reformed minister in the Cape, had published a newspaper, Die Afrikaanse Patriot (The Afrikaner Patriot), and a book, Die Geskiedenis van ons Land in die Taal van ons Volk (The History of our Land in the Language of our People), which argues that Afrikaners are a distinct people with their own fatherland in South Africa and that they are fulfilling a special mission determined expressly by God.

Du Toit had gone on to found a political party in the Cape, the Afrikanerbond, to represent the interests of Dutch speakers.

The Jameson Raid and anti-Boer sentiments expressed by gold magnates and British officials further cement an Afrikaner sense of distinctiveness, which in the 1890s reaches across political boundaries to include Dutch speakers in the Cape and the citizens of the Orange Free State as well as the Transvaalers.

Rhodes, together with his fellow gold mining magnates and the British government (in the persons of Joseph Chamberlain, secretary of state for the colonies, and Alfred Milner, high commissioner in South Africa), continues to denounce Kruger and his government.

Rhodes and his peers call attention to what they consider rampant official corruption while also complaining that taxes are too high and that black labor is too expensive (because of perceived favoritism by the government regarding the labor needs of Afrikaner farmers).

Chamberlain has concluded by the second half of the 1890s that the British need to take direct action to contain Afrikaner power, and he at first uses diplomatic channels to pressure Kruger, although with little success.

Milner points out what he considers the appalling condition of British subjects in the South African Republic, where, without the vote, they are, he argues, "kept permanently in the position of helots."

In 1899 Milner advises Chamberlain that he considers the case for British intervention "overwhelming."

Ignoring attempts by Kruger to reach a compromise, Chamberlain in September 1899 issues an ultimatum requiring that Kruger enfranchise British residents of the South African Republic.

At the same time, Chamberlain sends troop reinforcements from Britain to the Cape.

Kruger, certain that the British are bent on war, takes the initiative and, allied with the Orange Free State, declares war on the British in October 1899.