Boer War

[Magdalen]

Has anyone here ever looked at the Boer War from an anti-imperialist viewpoint?

I've been browsing through some material on it, and it seems like a rather curious conflict, which took place at the dawn of the imperialist age. I understand that Britain entered the war in order to gain control over the Boers' vast natural resources (gold, diamonds etc.). But at the same time, the Boers were oppressing the native African population.

There is no doubt that the war was a prime example of Britain as an oppressive imperialist power, I accept that. The Boers, however, were also committing oppressive acts against the natives. Perhaps the attitude an anti-imperialist would take was one of "a plague on both your houses".

Lenin briefly mentioned it in "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism", while referring to Cecil Rhodes, whom he judged as "mainly responsible for the Anglo-Boer War". Sadly, he didn't delve into the war itself in great detail.

I hope you'll forgive my ignorance on the subject, and that perhaps someone can help me understand it better, and perhaps further me to some more works on the matter

[jake williams]

I don't have a very scholarly understanding of it, but I do have sort of an intuitive understanding of it. I have a neighbour whom I'm extremely close to, I've known her for about a third of my life and she's essentially my second mom. She's in her early 50s and she's a black South African. When she was a teenager she got active with the ANC, and it pretty much carried her life from then on. My first reaction to the term "Boer" is as the name of the people who put the bullet scar in her leg.

The Boer War was an inter-imperialist rivalry, albeit one with a difficult class character. The Dutch acquired an African colony and instantly began doing what imperialists do, but they developed something of a white society there - a white society with what you could call an oppressed peasant class, albeit one which was doing far worse to the native Black population. It was in large part these people whom the British were fighting when they came to take the colony from the Dutch. But I don't care much. I despise both of these groups, and the Boers were/are horribly racist, whatever their class position within the white society there.

[Magdalen]

Thanks a lot, that certainly helped illuminate things a bit more for me. I'm also quite curious about the stance the socialist movement at that time took on the war.