Great Britain's Determination to Conquer South Africa

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?view=mjp_object&id=mjp.2005.00.079

          In this source, the writer, DeBoer-Langworth, focuses on how the Boer War was one of Great Britain’s major colonial conflicts and an important forerunner for its involvement in World War I. She explains that the war demanded so much from Great Britain and caused so much violence and casualties in South Africa. According to her, new studies of the war’s causes and results tell us that it involved the entire population of South Africa and caused divisions in the Boer and African groups. She explains that the British efforts to take control over the Transvaal, where gold was found, led the Boers, who had political control over the area, to declare war against them.  Most of the article focuses on the main events in the three phases of the war –the initial success of the Boer commandos, the British success in taking over the Boer’s Orange Free State territory and the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria, and the guerilla war that led the British to respond in more violence, greatly affecting the civilian population. DeBoer-Langworth uses these details about the war as pieces of evidence to express what it took for the British to fight the war and conquer South Africa as well as how much violence and casualties the Boers and natives suffered from the war. She argues that the war brought much humiliation to Great Britain as they needed better military tactics to fight against the aggressive population of the Boers and natives and resorted to extremely atrocious treatment of civilians. Many in Great Britain argued against the necessity of the war as they learned about what the Boers and natives suffered in the concentration camps in the hands of the British. DeBoar-Langworth states that they referred to the British use of camps as “methods of barbarism.” The details in the source about the causes of the war, the three phases of it, the violence, technology used, and the war’s effects make it a persuasive argument for how disruptive the war was for all the groups involved. She does not exactly compare the British and the Boers in terms of which group suffered the most but rather focuses on how both were affected, specifically how the British developed a negative political reputation from the war and how their experience would prepare them for World War I in 1914.

            Carol DeBoer-Langworth is a lecturer at Brown University. She uses various primary sources and scholarly sources like Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Great Boar War and Sol Plaatje’s Mafeking Diary: A Black Man’s View of a White Man’s War in her argument. She may seem biased against the British for their imperialistic goals that provoked the war and the violence they caused in South Africa, but she is only proving her point about the significance of the war as one of Great Britian’s major colonial conflicts and how it helped prepare them for World War I. Overall, the source is reliable and well researched.