Outbreak of War
With the discovery of gold in Transvaal, thousands of British and other prospectors and settlers streamed over the border from the Cape Colony and from across the globe. The city of Johannesburg sprang up as a shanty town nearly overnight as the uitlanders poured in and settled near the mines. The uitlanders rapidly outnumbered the Boers on the Rand, but remained a minority in the Transvaal as a whole. The Afrikaners, nervous and resentful of the uitlanders' presence, denied them voting rights and taxed the gold industry heavily. In response, there was pressure from the uitlanders and the British mine owners to overthrow the Boer government. In 1895, Cecil Rhodes sponsored a failed coup d'état backed by an armed incursion, the Jameson Raid.
Cecil Rhodes sponsored the failed Jameston Raid in 1895
The failure to gain improved rights for Britons was used to justify a major military build-up in the Cape, since several key British colonial leaders favoured annexation of the Boer republics. These included the Cape Colony governor Sir Alfred Milner, British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain and mining syndicate owners such as Alfred Beit, Barney Barnato and Lionel Phillips. Confident that the Boers would be quickly defeated, they attempted to precipitate a war.
Sir Alfred Milner, governor of the Cape Colony and Joseph Chamberlain, British Colonial Secretary
President Martinus Steyn of the Orange Free State invited Milner and the President of Transvaal Stephanus Johannes Paul Kruger to attend a conference in Bloemfontein which started on 30 May 1899, but negotiations quickly broke down. In September 1899, Chamberlain sent an ultimatum demanding full equality for British citizens resident in Transvaal.
President Paul Kruger of the Transvaal Republic
Kruger, sure that war was inevitable, simultaneously issued his own ultimatum prior to receiving Chamberlain's. This gave the British 48 hours to withdraw all their troops from the border of Transvaal; otherwise the Transvaal, allied with the Orange Free State, would be at war with them.
When the British declined the proposal the Boer states declared war on the 12th of September 1899. The war called Joe’s War by the British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury had begun.
The situation at the outbreak of war