The Semi-Tropical Sun Was Waking Strange Ferments In
The Placid Friesland Blood, And Producing A Race Who Added The
Turbulence And Restlessness Of The South To The Formidable Tenacity
Of The North.
Strong vitality and violent ambitions produced feuds
and rivalries worthy of medieval Italy, and the story of the
factious little communities is like a chapter out of Guicciardini.
Disorganisation ensued.
The burghers would not pay taxes and the
treasury was empty. One fierce Kaffir tribe threatened them from
the north, and the Zulus on the east. It is an exaggeration of
English partisans to pretend that our intervention saved the Boers,
for no one can read their military history without seeing that they
were a match for Zulus and Sekukuni combined. But certainly a
formidable invasion was pending, and the scattered farmhouses were
as open to the Kaffirs as our farmers' homesteads were in the
American colonies when the Indians were on the warpath. Sir
Theophilus Shepstone, the British Commissioner, after an inquiry of
three months, solved all questions by the formal annexation of the
country. The fact that he took possession of it with a force of
some twenty-five men showed the honesty of his belief that no armed
resistance was to be feared. This, then, in 1877 was a complete
reversal of the Sand River Convention and the opening of a new
chapter in the history of South Africa.
There did not appear to be any strong feeling at the time against
the annexation.
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