S.J.P. Kruger and the Transvaal Hardliners on Race Policies and Practices in the Early 1870s

Abstract

At the beginning of the 1870s, two distinctive approaches with regard to race relations among white settlers in the Transvaal, namely moderate and hardline, can be detected. Both operated within the realm of the white-supremacy mentality of that period. As the American historian J.W. Cell argues in his book on the origins of segregation in South Africa and the American South, white supremacy still represented the dominant mindset even after the turn of the century and that 'cooperation between Boer and Briton depended on the maintenance of white supremacy' at that stage.