As British rule spread over the territories of the Cape, some of the most independent of the Dutch determined to escape from government control and sold their farms, packed their belongings into ox-drawn wagons, and headed northeast, in what came to be called the Great Trek. Their reasons for the move and the conditions they faced were very much like those of North American settlers during the same years, the middle of the nineteenth century. Both wanted more land and more independence, and both faced hostile natives who feared and hated white men taking over the lands that had been theirs for generations. In South Africa, the fiercest opponents were the Zulus, who were more advanced militarily than any tribes the Dutch had seen thus far. Many of the trackers were ambushed and slaughtered or forced to fight their way through enemy armies.
The Boers (which means "farmers") established two independent republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal South African Republic, surrounded on the south, west, and north by British territories. These two nations were agricultural, conservative, and anti-British as well as anti-native, and fiercely independent. However, independence did not last long.
When diamonds and gold were found in the Transvaal, there was a great influx of people in the 1870s and 1880s from all over the world, but the greatest number came from the British territories immediately south and east. The Boers disliked and feared this invasion, and there was much ill-feeling between the Boers and the newcomers. The British diamond millionaire, Cecil Rhodes, determined he would see the two Boer republics taken under the British flag as part of his dream of a British African empire stretching from Egypt in the north down to Cape Colony in the south. He and his men organized a series of incidents to provoke British intervention against the two republics, including the famous Jameson Raid, in which Rhode's colleague, Dr. L. S. Jameson, led a volunteer force against Johannesburg to "rescue" oppressed Britons from the Boers. Finally in 1899, war broke out between Britain and the Boers.
