The Modernization of the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek: F. E. T. Krause, J. C. Smuts, and the Struggle for the Johannesburg Public Prosecutor's Office, 1898–1899

Abstract

The southern part of the African continent has, for nearly a hundred and fifty years, been witness to a set of epic struggles to create within it a single unified state and, within that, forms of citizenship that are both identifiably “South African” and more or less collectively owned. The never-ending nature of these twinned tasks has echoes in contemporary mantras about the healthiness of “nation-building,” just as surely as the underlying anemia remains manifest in the name of a place and a people that are, arguably, still more of an expression of geography than a reflection of a collectively lived experience. Perhaps it is significant that it was only a decade after the discovery of diamonds, in the late 1860s, that these struggles first took on recognizably modern political forms. An early attempt to promote federation among the dominant white settlers was, however, thwarted by the still largely separate identities of the two British coastal colonies (the Cape and Natal) and two inland Afrikaner-Dutch or “Boer” republics (the Orange Free State and the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek) that sprawled over southern Africa—enveloping, albeit imperfectly, their distinctive and very different indigenous African, imported Asian, and Colored (people of mixed descent) laboring populations.