Transvaal

Transvaal, former province of South Africa. It occupied the northeastern part of the country. The Limpopo River marked its border with Botswana and Zimbabwe to the north, while the Vaal River marked its boundary with Orange Free State province to the south. It was bounded by Mozambique and Swaziland to the east and by Cape Province to the west. The Transvaal’s name, which means “across the Vaal,” originated with the Afrikaners who in the 1830s migrated to the region after crossing the Vaal River.

The land between the Limpopo and Vaal rivers was originally inhabited by the Sotho, Venda, and other Bantu-speaking peoples. In the 1820s and ’30s they were unsettled by invasions of the Ndebele and other Bantu tribes fleeing from the warring Zulu. Another migration was that of seminomadic pastoral Afrikaner farmers called Voortrekkers, or Boers, who in the mid-1830s began to probe northward beyond the borders of the Cape Colony with the aim of organizing an exodus from British-controlled territory. Some 12,000 of these Boer emigrants moving northward from the Cape crossed the Vaal River and entered the area, where they settled in isolated farms. After driving the Ndebele north of the Limpopo River in November 1837, the Voortrekker leader, Hendrik Potgieter, was able to claim all the land between it and the Vaal River. More Boers moved to the Transvaal when Great Britain annexed the nascent Boer republic of Natal (1843) and established the Orange River Sovereignty (1848). Rivalries between Potgieter and his fellow leaders Andries Pretorius and W.F. Joubert prevented the Boers from forming a strong government in the Transvaal. But because the area lay out of reach of the administration in the Cape Colony, the British in 1852 recognized the independence of the Afrikaners north of the Vaal River under the terms of the Sand River Convention (see Sand River and Bloemfontein Conventions).

The Boers drafted a constitution in 1855, and the communities centred at Pretoria, Potchefstroom, and Rustenburg joined in 1857 to form a Transvaal state called the South African Republic. It was governed by a Volksraad of 24 elected members and had Marthinus W. Pretorius, the son of Andries, as its first president. The new republic’s authority was limited to the southwestern Transvaal, though it claimed sovereignty over the entire area between the two rivers. The government tried to expand its territory, but more important to the Transvaal’s future were discoveries of diamonds and gold deposits (1868–74) along the Vaal River and other sites, which heightened British interest in gaining control of the region but did little to help the Boers’ stagnant agricultural-pastoral economy. In 1877 Sir Theophilus Shepstone annexed the financially bankrupt republic to Britain over the halfhearted protest of its then-president, Thomas F. Burgers. The British failed to fulfill their promises of internal self-government to the Boers, however, and late in 1880 the Afrikaners revolted against the British and declared a new Transvaal republic. They regained their independence—subject to certain provisos—in 1881 after overwhelming British forces at the Battle of Majuba Hill. Paul Kruger became the new republic’s first president.

The discovery of large gold deposits in the Witwatersrand area in 1886 resulted in a tremendous influx of miners and fortune seekers, primarily English and Germans, who were called Uitlanders. These foreigners eventually came to outnumber the Afrikaners two to one in the Transvaal, but Kruger refused to grant them voting and other rights. The British immigrants speeded the building of rail links between the Transvaal and the Cape Colony, and their growing urban populations stimulated the Boers’ commercial agriculture. The Transvaal government, however, refused to undertake political reforms and was unable to mediate between the rural, agricultural, staunchly Calvinist Afrikaners and the new British financial, mining, and commercial classes. Tensions with Britain increased greatly after an English adventurer, Leander Starr Jameson, led an abortive raid (December 1895) into the Transvaal in an attempt to provoke the Uitlanders to an internal uprising against Kruger’s rule. The Transvaal government subsequently began to arm itself and also strengthened a defensive alliance with its sister Boer republic, the Orange Free State.

War between the two Boer republics and Great Britain broke out two days after the Transvaal gave the British an ultimatum (October 9, 1899) demanding the withdrawal of British troop reinforcements that had been sent to the Cape. (See South African War.) The British were able to occupy the capital, Pretoria, in June 1900, and in September they formally annexed the Transvaal. Fighting between the Boers and British continued, however, until the resources of both Boer republics had been broken by unceasing strain against superior forces. The Peace of Vereeniging (May 31, 1902) ended the independence of the Transvaal, which became a British crown colony under the administration of Sir Alfred Milner.

The British restored internal self-government to the Transvaal in 1906. In elections held (1907) under the colony’s new constitution, the former commander of the Transvaal’s forces in the war, Gen. Louis Botha, led his Het Volk party to a majority and became prime minister with the support of Jan Christian Smuts. Their government promoted unity between the Afrikaners and the British, and in 1910 the Transvaal became a province of the Union of South Africa, a status that was maintained when the Union became the Republic of South Africa in 1961.

The Transvaal’s history in the rest of the 20th century was primarily economic. The province was extremely rich in mineral resources, especially gold and uranium. The gold deposits were concentrated in the southern Transvaal, in a highland area known as the Witwatersrand, where Johannesburg is located. The province also contained reserves of platinum, chromite, tin, nickel, diamonds, and coal. The complex of mining, industrial, commercial, and financial activities arising from this vast mineral wealth made the southern Transvaal the economic heartland of South Africa.

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In 1994 the Transvaal was split into four provinces: Northern (now Limpopo), Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging (now Gauteng), Eastern Transvaal (now Mpumalanga), and part of North-West.