Jameson's Raid

British mine owners and officials constantly decry Paul Kruger's refusal to extend the franchise.

In December 1895, Cecil Rhodes takes matters a step further by sending five hundred armed men, employees of his British South Africa Company, into the South African Republic under the leadership of Dr. Leander Starr Jameson.

Rhodes hopes that the uitlanders will rise and join the invaders to help overthrow Kruger's government.

The invasion, however, is a fiasco: Boer commandos disarm Jameson and his men with little resistance, and the uitlanders take no action.

Rhodes resigns the premiership of the Cape Colony in disgrace.

The British government denies having advance knowledge of the invasion and claims that it has no expansionist plans of its own.

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.

The Bechuanaland Protectorate is technically a protectorate rather than a colony.

Originally the local Tswana rulers have been left in power, and British administration is limited to a police force to protect Bechuanaland's borders against other European colonial ventures, but on May 9, 1891 the British Government gives the administration of the protectorate to the High Commissioner for South Africa, who starts to appoint officials in Bechuanaland, and the de facto independence of Bechuanaland ends.

The protectorate is administered from Mafeking, creating an unusual situation, the capital of the territory being located outside of the territory.

The area of Mafeking (from 1980 with the incorporation into Bophuthatswana Mafikeng, since 2010 Mahikeng), is called 'The Imperial Reserve'.

In 1885, when the protectorate was declared, Bechuanaland had been bounded to the north by the latitude of 22° south.

The northern boundary of the protectorate had been formally extended northward by the British to include Ngamiland, which is at this time dominated by the Tawana state, on June 30, 1890.

This claim is formally recognized by Germany the following day by Article III of the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty, which confirms the western boundary of the British protectorate of Bechuanaland and the German protectorate of South-West Africa and creates the Caprivi strip inherited by modern Namibia.

During the 1890s the new territory is divided into eight different reserves, with fairly small amounts of land being left as freehold for white settlers.

This territory had originally been claimed by Matabeleland.

In 1887 Samuel Edwards, working for Cecil Rhodes, had obtained a mining concession, and in 1895 the British South Africa Company attempts to acquire the area, but three Tswana chiefs visit London to protest and are successful in fending off the BSAC: the plan is eventually foiled by the failure of the Jameson Raid in January 1896.

This territory forms the modern North-East District of Botswana.

The South African Customs Union is extended to British Bechuanaland in 1891, and in 1895 the colony is annexed to the Cape Colony and now forms part of South Africa, the area around Mafekeng.

Britain faces a growing crisis with the Boer Republics in the wake of Cecil Rhodes’s failed Jameson Raid on the Transvaal.

Germany’s Kaiser William II, in an encouraging 1896 telegram to President Paul Kruger of the Transvaal Republic, congratulates him on the suppression of the British Jameson Raid, thus alienating British public opinion.