Imperialism in British South Africa

• Imperialism:  a practice in which a country increases its power by gaining control over other areas of the world.

 Europeans first came into contact with South Africa by Portuguese traders, who began trading in South Africa. then the Dutch started pouring in by the seventeenth century, and used Cape of Good Hope as their fueling station, and then later settled there. The Dutch called themselves Afrikaners. 

In the nineteenth century the British started a formal imperial rule over the Afrikaners and the native Africans by establishing themselves in Cape of Good Hope. The Imperial rule of British in South Africa leads to the difference with the Afrikaners, who were already having a conflict with an African kingdom that was itself involved in territorial expansion. 

The discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886 leads to the imposition of formal British rule over South Africa and superseded all existing conflicts.The discovery of diamonds in 1867 near the Vaal River, ended the isolation of the Boers and changed South African history. The discovery triggered a "diamond rush" that attracted people from all over the world and turned Kimberley into a town of 50,000 within five years. At first, everyone worked independent claims in four areas surrounding Kimberley, but as the mines went deeper, they became more difficult to work, and a number of businessmen managed to consolidate them into larger mines, and later exploited them with heavy mining equipment.

In order to ensure full profits of the diamond and gold mines into the hand of British Empire in South Africa, rigid policies like full power over the African labor and African movement emerged. Imperialism in South Africa provoked racial discrimination later in twentieth-century