Hell in small places: Agrarian elites and collective violence in the western Transvaal, 1900-1907

During the five years that followed the Anglo-Boer or South African War of 1899-1902 the political consciousness of white farmers and former Boer republican soldiers in many areas of the western Transvaal (presently North-West Province) was quickened by a series of violent or near violent incidents. The catalyst for these opstands or "armed protests" was the collapse of the prewar institutional basis of white supremacy over large portions of the South African countryside well over a year before the formal surrender of the armies of the Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State. As a result, in the immediate postwar period, relations between African agricultural laborers and share tenants, many of whom had served as irregular combatants for the British, and their white landlords echoed the brutality of the closing phases of the war. Lord Milner's postwar Reconstruction administration proved uniquely incapable of coping with the snarl created by the grievances of white landlords and the modest but no less real gains of Africans in the Transvaal. By January 1904, younger rural Afrikaners began to figure prominently in the ensuing protests. By April 1905, with the outbreak of labor riots by indentured Chinese workers on South Africa's gold mines, armed protests by rural Afrikaners assumed their definitive shape.