This page has links to Angola's past and neighbours

The first Anglo-Boer war was fought and won in 1881 by the Boers of the independent South African Boer Republic (SAR) in the Transvaal, against the British, whose vision under prime minister Disraeli was to annex all independent republics of South Africa under British rule and impose a confederation. This war came one year after the war of the British against the Zulus in 1879, thought to appease the Afrikaners, but having the opposite effect against the non-violent Boers. The final peace settlement in 1884 left certain things in the open, with defeated Britain attempting to control SAR's foreign policy, which led to the second Anglo-Boer war of 1899.

The second Anglo-Boer war, lasting from 1899-1902, started when the South African Republic in the Transvaal (SAR) became the largest gold producer in the world in 1890, after gold was discovered in Witwatersrand in 1886. Britain was the leading industrial nation needing resources, and coveting South Africa's new riches. When SAR restricted foreign mine workers' right to vote in its internal affairs (to a minimum Transvaal residence of 14 years), the British used this as the desired pretext first to control foreign trade by building an exclusive railway from the Cape province to the Transvaal, which SAR circumvented by building their own to nearby Delagoa Bay in Portuguese East Africa. Then Britain invaded the Transvaal, first by the failed Jameson Raid in 1895, supported by Cape's prime minister, Rhodes, and then by military invasion in 1899, on the strength of duplicitous argument by the militant British High Commissioner, Milner, who reported to British Secretary of State Joseph Chamberlain that the South Africans were poised to take over all of South Africa's (strategic) territories, thus bearing full responsbility for starting this costly, wasteful and totally avoidable war. We read in 'Africa and the Victorians': 'The Empire went to war for a concept that was finished, a cause that was lost, a Grand Illusion'. British troops increased to 400,000, and were sadly humiliated by Afrikaner commandos (a lesson that should have served them much better in WW1). At least 25,000 Afrikaners died in the war, most of them women and children in concentration camps. The war also claimed 22,000 British and 12,000 African lives. Elisabeth Longford concludes in her biography of Queen Victoria (p542) that 'like the cataracts which were steadily darkening her sights, events in Africa spread a shadow over her last years'.