Colonial Expansion after 1750: Britain, the Boers and the Frontier

By 1750 the region was home to many established, diverse societies - it was never an empty land.

Long before large-scale colonial expansion, southern Africa was densely settled. Khoikhoi herders and San hunter-gatherers lived across the Cape interior, while powerful Bantu-speaking chiefdoms - among them the Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho and Tswana - farmed, kept cattle and traded across the eastern half of the region.

• The Dutch East India Company (VOC) ruled a small colony around Cape Town, worked largely by enslaved people.
• Cattle, land and control of trade routes were the main sources of wealth and power.
• African societies had their own laws, armies and systems of government - they were not passive bystanders.

Between 1795 and 1806 the Cape passed from the VOC to Britain - and British priorities were different.

Britain first occupied the Cape in 1795 and took permanent control in 1806, keeping it after the Napoleonic Wars. For Britain the Cape was above all a strategic naval station on the sea route to India, but British rule soon began to change law, labour and land inside the colony.

• British administrators wanted a more ordered, taxable and governable colony.
• English was promoted in courts, schools and government (anglicisation).
• These reforms unsettled the Dutch-descended colonists, later called Boers or Afrikaners.

Between 1820 and 1834 Britain changed who could own labour, who had rights, and who could settle the frontier.

From 1835 groups of Boers - the Voortrekkers - left the Cape Colony to seek land and independence beyond British rule.

The Great Trek (1835-1846) was a series of organised migrations of Dutch-speaking farmers out of the eastern Cape. In his 1837 manifesto, Voortrekker leader Piet Retief listed grievances including the loss of enslaved labour, insecurity on the frontier, and interference by British officials and missionaries.

• Push factors: anglicisation, the end of slavery, Ordinance 50, land shortage and frontier war.
• Pull factors: the promise of free grazing land and self-government in the interior.
• Leaders included Retief, Gert Maritz, Andries Pretorius and Andries Hendrik Potgieter.

Voortrekker parties moved north and east into land already occupied by African societies.

The trekkers crossed the Orange River and fanned out onto the highveld and towards Natal. They did not move into empty country: they entered the territories of the Ndebele under Mzilikazi, the Zulu under Dingane, and Sotho-Tswana chiefdoms, which made conflict almost certain.

• Potgieter's party clashed with the Ndebele, defeating them at Vegkop (1836) and Mosega (1837).
• Retief's party crossed the Drakensberg into Natal to seek land from the Zulu king Dingane.
• The migration spread colonial-style land claims deep into the interior.

A land agreement with the Zulu king ended in the killing of Retief's party.

Piet Retief negotiated with the Zulu king Dingane for land in Natal. After a treaty was reportedly signed, Dingane had Retief and his men killed at his capital, uMgungundlovu, in February 1838, and Zulu forces attacked trekker camps. From the Zulu view, armed newcomers claiming Zulu land were a direct threat to the kingdom's survival.

• Both sides distrusted the other's intentions over land and cattle.
• The killings and raids led the Voortrekkers to prepare for a major battle.
• This set the scene for the Battle of Blood River later in 1838.

A laager of Voortrekkers defeated a large Zulu army - a battle still contested in memory today.

On 16 December 1838 about 470 Voortrekkers under Andries Pretorius, defending a laager (a circle of wagons) with muskets and cannon, defeated a much larger Zulu army beside the Ncome River. Zulu casualties were very heavy while trekker losses were tiny, and the river was said to run red - giving the battle its name. [SME: verify casualty figures.]

• The trekkers had made a religious vow before the battle, later marked as the Day of the Vow.
• The victory opened Natal to Voortrekker settlement and weakened Dingane's power.
• Today the site is remembered from two perspectives - as Blood River and as Ncome - reflected in the Day of Reconciliation.

On the Cape's eastern frontier, colonists and the Xhosa fought a long series of wars over land and cattle.

Separate from the Great Trek, the Cape Colony fought a series of wars against the Xhosa along the eastern frontier - sometimes called the Frontier Wars or the Wars of Dispossession (1779-1878). War by war, the colony pushed the frontier eastward and took Xhosa land, cattle and independence.

• Control of grazing land and cattle theft on both sides drove repeated conflict.
• The British used forts, settlers and troops to hold and expand the frontier.
• By 1878 Xhosa resistance was broken and their land absorbed into the colony.

Political upheaval among African societies overlapped with colonial expansion - and its causes are debated.

In the same period, the Mfecane (Difaqane) saw wars, migrations and the rise and fall of kingdoms across the interior, linked to the growth of the Zulu state under Shaka and to competition for land and trade. Older accounts blamed the Zulu alone; many historians now argue that pressures such as trade, drought and the demand for labour and cattle - some tied to colonial expansion - also played a part. [SME: historiography of the Mfecane is contested.]

• The upheaval reshaped where African societies lived and how strong they were.
• Colonists sometimes wrongly claimed this left 'empty' land free for the taking.
• In truth, land emptied by conflict was still claimed and remembered by African peoples.

Out of the trek and its wars came Boer-ruled states in the interior.

The Voortrekkers set up their own states. Their republic in Natal (Natalia) was annexed by Britain in 1843, but inland the Boers established the Orange Free State and the South African Republic (Transvaal), whose independence Britain recognised in the Sand River (1852) and Bloemfontein (1854) conventions.

• These republics were built on land taken from African societies.
• They denied political rights to African, Khoikhoi and Coloured people.
• Britain and the Boer republics would later clash over control of the interior.

The central outcome of colonial expansion after 1750 was the loss of African land and independence.

Across the frontier and the interior, colonial expansion transferred land, cattle and power from African societies to colonists. African polities lost sovereignty, farmers were pushed onto smaller and poorer areas, and many were drawn into working for colonists - patterns later hardened by laws such as the 1913 Natives Land Act.

• Land was the key resource - and its loss shaped African life for generations.
• Dispossession created deep and lasting inequality in South Africa.
• These nineteenth-century events are the root of land debates that continue today.

1. 1806 Britain takes permanent control of the Cape
2. 1820 British 1820 Settlers placed on the eastern frontier
3. 1828 Ordinance 50 frees the Khoikhoi from pass laws
4. 1834 Slavery abolished in the British Empire
5. 1835 The Great Trek begins
6. 1838 Retief killed; Battle of Blood River (Ncome)
7. 1852-1854 Boer republics recognised (Transvaal, Orange Free State)

Expansion, resistance and dispossession seen from more than one perspective.

British reform of the Cape helped push the Boers into the interior; the Great Trek and the frontier wars carried colonial power inland; and African societies - Xhosa, Zulu, Ndebele, Sotho and Tswana - resisted but were dispossessed of land and independence. Reading these events from different perspectives is a core skill of FET History.