The South African Gold and Diamond Rush was an event which occurred in the late nineteenth century in southern Africa in the multiple British and Boer colonies that would join in 1910 to become the Union of South Africa. The diamond rush began first after the discovery of a diamond seam at the Kimberley Mine in the very center of the modern-day country of South Africa. At the time this region was very near the borderlands between the British and Boer colonies and it quickly drew tens of thousands of settlers to Kimberley. The gold rush primarily took place at Witwatersrand after the discovery of additional gold there in 1886, with initial finds going all the way back to the 1850s. This was firmly within the lands of the main Boer colony in southern Africa, the South African Republic, and led to a massive influx of prospectors here in the late 1880s and 1890s. The Witwatersrand gold rush ultimately led to the establishment of the city of Johannesburg. It also led to escalating British interventions in the South African Republic and ultimately the Second Boer War of 1899 to 1902. In the long run the gold and diamond rushes led to a huge influx of new settlers from Europe and heightened the degree to which South Africa became the country in Sub-Saharan Africa with the largest colonial population. It also led to the foundation of the cities of Johannesburg and Kimberley.[1]
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South African Gold and Diamond Rush chronology of eventsSouth African Gold and Diamond Rush chronology of events
Southern Africa had been one of the foremost centers of European colonization since the Dutch Cape Colony was established at what is now Cape Town all the way back in 1652.[2] The British acquired the colony during the Napoleonic Wars, leading to the Dutch-German colonists engaging in the Voortrek to establish new independent colonies in the Transvaal and Orange River regions to the northeast from the mid-1830s onwards. Even as the Boers tried to escape British rule, the British presence in southern Africa continued to expand and there were constant tensions between the new Boer colonies like the Orange River Colony and the South African Republic and the British further south in places like the Cape and Natal. In addition to all of this, there were large numbers of Zulu, Xhosa and other natives in the region who still ruled over their own kingdoms. It was in this complex ethno-political environment that the South African gold and diamond rush would begin in the 1870s and 1880s.[3]
The diamond rush came first. In 1867 news began spreading around the British and Boer colonies that some children playing along the Orange River near what is now the city of Kimberley had found some shiny stones of an unusual nature. One of these was confirmed as a diamond, the famous Eureka diamond. Before long several hundred mining prospectors had come to the site and started digging for diamonds.[4] Four years later, in 1871, the first confirmed diamonds were found at Vooruitzigt Farm owned by Arnoldus and Johannes de Beer. A year later a sprawling camp of 50,000 miners and others there to feed and sustain the camp had developed.[5]
Kimberley developed as one of the largest rush towns in human history. Between 1871 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 approximately 6,000lbs of diamonds were pulled out of the 'The Hole' at Kimberley, which in the process became the deepest hole excavated anywhere in the world by humans operating with picks and sheer manpower rather than through mechanized digging. In the process the town became extremely wealthy and in 1882 it was the first city in the southern hemisphere to have electric street lighting installed. The diamond trade was consolidated and managed by ruthless business figures like Cecil Rhodes, who partnered with the de Beers brothers who owned the farm on which the first diamonds had been mined in 1871, while Rhodes also became the famous advocate of the Cape to Cairo strategy of British imperialism in Africa.[6]
There was actually a suspected source of gold in the Johannesburg region of the South African Republic as early as the 1850s. However, the Witwatersrand gold rush only began in 1886, in part because the Boers who controlled the region had tried to avoid a severe gold rush that would see them overwhelmed by newcomers or 'Uitlanders' (Outlanders) from different parts of southern Africa and Europe. The mining settlement known as Ferreira’s Camp developed in Witwatersrand once the gold rush began. It is the kernel which would become the city of Johannesburg as the gold rush expanded. The name of the city was probably chosen to reflect the popularity of the name Johannes amongst Boer men, though the exact source of the name remains disputed.[7]
The gold rush would go on for many years and led to growing tensions between the British and the Boers that led to the Jameson Raid around New Year’s Eve 1895, a botched effort to create an uprising amongst the British and other foreign miners against Boer rule. In any event, the Second Boer War followed in 1899. At its end in 1902 the South African Republic became a British colony, paving the way for the creation of the Union of South Africa, the basis of modern South Africa, in 1910. The country had become one of extremes, with an extremely wealthy class of white colonists and older settlers having acquired great wealth from the diamond and gold rushes and the associated development that went with it, while the rest of the new country remained extremely poor and under-developed.[8]
Extent of migration caused by the gold and diamond rushExtent of migration caused by the gold and diamond rush
Southern Africa was a part of the continent of Africa that was already experiencing an unusually large amount of European colonization in the nineteenth century, even before the diamond and gold rushes started. This accelerated greatly once news of the mineral discoveries spread. It wasn’t only miners. For every miner that was operating in Kimberley or at Johannesburg there were several additional individuals needed to provided services within the mining camps or simply to bring in additional western commodities into a comparatively under-developed colonial region. Soon people were building mansions for those who had benefited most from the rushes. People came from Britain and Ireland primarily, but they also arrived from other parts of Europe.[9] In addition there was an influx of Indian indentured servants into the Natal region of southern Africa that was not entirely unrelated to the growing demand for chief labor in the colonies as a result of the mineral boom.[10]
Demographic impact of the gold and diamond rushDemographic impact of the gold and diamond rush
The demographic impact of the rushes was incredibly significant. First, it led to the establishment of some of the most important urban centers in South Africa today. Kimberley is a significant regional town in the center of the country of over 140,000 people. This is dwarfed, though, by Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa with approximately 6.5 million people. Moreover, when the wider metropolitan area is taken into account, and it is considered as the dual Johannesburg-Pretoria conurbation city that it has become in modern times, it is one of the largest cities in Africa and the world, with nearly 15 million people in all.[11]
Beyond the development of these urban centers, the gold and diamond rushes contributed to the growth of a large white settler population in the colonies of southern Africa. Again, this was already a part of the country with a significant colonial population. But it escalated considerably as fresh waves of newcomers arrived from Europe in the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s and 1900s. This meant that South Africa developed into a country where approximately 20% of the population were white, paving the way for the development of Apartheid and white-minority rule in 1948.[12] A cascading effect was felt further north as well in Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe and Zambia), where many white settlers went to live in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ultimately the Bush War in Southern Rhodesia and the end of Apartheid in South Africa led to a white flight to Europe and other parts of the world, but there are still several million people today in South Africa who will be able to trace their genealogical line to a settler who arrived to the country as part of the gold and diamond rush in the late nineteenth century.[13]
See alsoSee also
Explore more about the South African Gold and Diamond RushExplore more about the South African Gold and Diamond Rush
- South Africa, Dutch Reformed Church Registers, 1660-1970 records collection on MyHeritage
- South Africa, Methodist Parish Registers, 1822-1996 records collection on MyHeritage
- South Africa, Free State Dutch Reformed Church Records, 1848-1956 records collection on MyHeritage
- Boer War Casualties, 1899-1902 records collection on MyHeritage
- South Africa, Orange Free State, Estate Files, 1951-2006 records collection on MyHeritage
References
- ↑ Martin Meredith, Diamonds, Gold and War: The Making of South Africa (London, 2007).
- ↑ https://sahistory.org.za/article/dutch-settlement
- ↑ https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/first-anglo-boer-war
- ↑ https://ajediam.com/diamond-history/famous-diamonds/the-eureka-diamond/
- ↑ William Worger, South Africa's City of Diamonds: Mine Workers and Monopoly Capitalism in Kimberley, 1867–1895 (Yale, 1987).
- ↑ Meredith, Diamonds, Gold and War.
- ↑ Donald R. Petterson, ‘The Witwatersrand a Unique Gold Mining Community’, in Economic Geography, Vol. 27, No. 3 (July, 1951), pp. 209–221.
- ↑ Donald Wood Gilbert, ‘The Economic Effects of the Gold Discoveries Upon South Africa: 1886–1910’, in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 47, No. 4 (August, 1933), pp. 553–597.
- ↑ D. P. McCracken, ‘Irish settlement and identity in South Africa before 1910’, in Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 28, No. 110 (1992), pp. 134–149.
- ↑ http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/indian-indentured-labour-natal-1860-1911
- ↑ https://worldpopulationreview.com/cities/south-africa/johannesburg
- ↑ https://sahistory.org.za/article/history-apartheid-south-africa
- ↑ Josiah Brownell, The Collapse of Rhodesia: Population Dynamics and the Politics of Race (London, 2011).