Created in 2018 duing my undergrad years, this was my first experience working with HTML/CSS/JS. It is rudimentary and fairly poorly made, but it taught me many of the basic concepts of web development that I continue to use today, particuarly the notion of maps as portals for exploring complex information.
The purpose of this map is to visualize the piecemeal expansion of South African colonies over the nineteenth century. Use the slider on the bottom-right corner of the map to reveal territorial changes over time, and then click on each territory to explore the history of each expansion.
When Great Britain went to war with France in 1793, both countries tried to capture the Cape so as to control the important sea route to the East. The British occupied the Cape in 1795, ending the Dutch East India Company’s role in the region. Although the British relinquished the colony to the Dutch in the Treaty of Amiens (1802), they reannexed it in 1806 after the start of the Napoleonic Wars.
In the 1670s, a group of Xhosa purchased the land between the Sunday and the Great Fish rivers from the Gonaquas. In 1809, Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Collins wrote to Governor Caledon describing the land between the Sunday and the Great Fish rivers as desireable for settlement. In 1811, a proclamation was issued ordering the expulsion of the Xhosa from between the Sunday and the Great Fish rivers, and in 1812, 20,000 Xhosa were forceably removed. A system of fortified frontier settlement was established, and the territory was named Albany.
When the 1812 dispossession of Albany was carried out, a buffer zone territory was set out between the Fish River and the Keiskamma River. [Wrongs of the Caffre Nation, 37-47] This buffer zone was called the Neutral Territory, and was to be unsettled by either settlers or Xhosa. From 1818-1819, the fifth frontier war, or War of Nxele, saw the Ngqika chief Maqana lead 10,000 Ngqika against the Cape Colony. Following the Xhosa's defeat, a treaty negotiated between Governor Somerset and the Ngiqka that annexed the Neutral Territory as the Ceded Territory, which was then opened to European settlement. The boundary of the Cape Colony was thus moved from the Fish River to the Keiskamma River.
The Sixth Frontier War (1834-36) was fought between the Xhosa who had been expelled from Albany and the Ceded Territory and British and Afrikaner forces. The war resulted in 1835 in a treaty signed between Governor Benjamin d'Urban and Macomo, Tyalie, Eno, and Kusia, representatives of the Gcaleka Xhosa. The treaty annexed to the Cape Colony Xhosa territory up to the Orange river, renaming it Queen Adelaide's Province. This treaty reserved some land for Xhosa occupation, subject to colonial administration, and opened up more for settlement. Later in 1835, Lord Glenelg, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies back in England, reversed d'Urban's annexation of Xhosa land. Glenelg designated the territory British Kaffraria, and it was to be barred against European settlement save for humanitarian workers.
The Republic of Natalia was established in 1839 as a separate Afrikaner colony, one of the three colonies which resulted from the Afrikaner Treks. Piet Retief negotiated a land cession treaty with the Zulu chief Dingaan. The treaty stated that Dingaan would cede his territory to the Afrikaners on condition that the Afrikaners would assist in reclaiming stolen cattle. Following the recovery of the cattle, hostilities arose between the Zulu and the Afrikaners culminating in the famous Battle of Blood River. Follow the defeat of the Zulu, Afrikaners asserted property rights over the land between the Buffalo River and the Tugela River.
Voortrekkers migrated from the Cape Colony to the land between the Orange and Vaal rivers around 1836. Initially concluding a treaty with Makwana of the Bataung, they soon came into conflict with Mzilikazi and the Matabele. Mzilikazi was defeated at Winburg in 1837, and Afrikaner sovereignty was asserted through the creation of a Volksraad. In 1848 Cape governor Harry Smith declared British sovereignty over the land between the Orange and Vaal rivers, and the British defeated the Afrikaners at the Battle of Boomplaats in August of 1848. However, the imperial government released a royal proclamation in 1854 renouncing all sovereignty in the area, and the Orange River Convention in February 1854 recognized Afrikaner independence in the Orange Free State.
The establishment of the South African Republic had its origins in 1837 when the commandos of Potgieter and Piet Uys defeated a Matabele raiding party of Moselekatse and drove them back over the Limpopo river. Potgieter declared the lands north and south of the Vaal river as Boer lands. In 1838, Potgieter, Uys and the men of their commando provided relief to Gerrit Maritz, and early in April 1838, Uys and his son were killed. In 1848 the British Governor of the Cape, Sir Harry Smith, issued a proclamation declaring British sovereignty over all the lands to the north and to the south of the Vaal river. Commandant-General Andries Pretorius led the commandos against the British forces later that year, at the battle of Boomplaats, near Smithfield. The Boer commandos were defeated and General Pretorius and the remainder of his men fled north across the Vaal river. The people north of the Vaal River in the South African Republic were recognized as an independent country by Great Britain with the signing of the Sand River Convention on 17 January 1852.
In 1861, paramount chief Faku of the Mpondo evacuated the northwestern section of the Mpondo territory and ceded it to Governor Wodehouse. This took place in the context of hostilities between the Mpondo and the Basotho, and Faku desired to create a bufferzone between Mpondo territory and Basotho territory. In 1862, Wodehouse located a large population of Griqua in the nomansland. Between 1862 and 1877, tensions escalated between the Griqua and their neighbors in Natal and Pondoland. A commission was established by Cape Town in 1872 to investigate complaints which had arisen in Natal and Pondoland, and they concluded that the Griqua required a greater level of administration. The Griqualand East Annexation Act was passed in 1877, and the territory was opened up for European settlement in 1879.
The seventh frontier war, also known as the War of the Axe, was fought between British forces and Ngqika, Ndlambe, and Thembu forces between 1846-1847. Governor Maitland considered granting the Thembu chief Mtirara recognition of rights to the Thembu's traditional territory. The imperial government refused, and Maitland was replaced by Governor Harry Smith. Smith extended the border of the Cape Colony up to the Orange River in December 1847 under the auspice of protecting the Khoesan living there from Thembu incursion.
In the Maitland Treaty of 1845, Faku, paramount chief of the Mpondo people, was obliged to obtain British permission to allow traders to land on the Mpondo coastline. In 1874, Cape Town discovered that the Mpondo nation had not been following the treaty regulation, and proposed that a custom-house should be established on the Mpondo coastline to more directly regulate Mpondo trade. When the paramount chief Mqikela refused, Cape Town declared the Mpondo to have broken their treaty obligations and in 1878 residents were appointed to oversee Mqikela and the other chiefs in order to assert British sovereignty.
British authority first entered Tembuland with the Tembuland Annexation Act of 1876. This act was requested by the Tembu chief Ngangelizwe in order to secure British assistance and protect from the Mpondo, Bomvana, and Gcaleka. The 1876 annexation entailed the appointment of British magistrates, but did not involve any land dispossession. Following the Ninth Frontier War (1877-79), the British government used allegations that some Tembu groups had joined the Gcaleka and Ngqika resistance efforts to expropriate Tembuland. Tembuland was formally proclaimed British territory in 1882, with half to be reserved for Tembu settlement and half for European settlement.
Following the cattle killing events of 1856-58, Cape Governor Wodehouse followed a policy of exerting British authority over the various Xhosa groups by resettling them in small protectorates. In 1864 Wodehouse assigned the Fengu peoples to Fingoland, but the British Agents sent to administer the territory were nearly devoid of actual authority. To rectify this, the Cape Parliament passed an act in 1877 to annex Fingoland to the Cape Colony and extend full British sovereignty over it.
During the 1865–1867 war between Basotho and Afrikaners of the Orange Free State, Moshoeshoe repeatedly requested assistance from the British government. On March 12, 1868, Wodehouse declared Moshoeshoe’s kingdom the British territory of Basutoland. While it was initially administered by the Cape Colony, resistance to colonial policy led to the Gun War of 1880-81, and in 1883 Basutoland was handed over to direct imperial administration.
During the 1883 Second Battle of Ulundi between several Zulu factions, large areas of the Zulu kingdom were traded to Afrikaners in return for military support, becoming part of south-eastern South African Republic. In 1887 the British annexed what remained of the Zulu kingdom, renamed the British Colony of Zululand.
The South African diamond was discovered in 1867 in the region of the lower Vaal. Following this discovery, and influx of miners flooded the region, largely made up of Afrikaners from the Orange Free State. This sparked conflict between the Afrikaners and the resident Tswana peoples, and a British commission in 1871 decided that a British annexation of the territory was necessary to arbitrate between the two groups, although control of the diamond mines was an underlying interest. The first annexation of Griqualand West occured in 1873, but this only annexed the area of the diamond mines in the south. In 1876, the Lieutenant Governor of Griqualand West instituted a system of native locations and a hut tax as a measure to mediate between contested land claims between Tswana and white settlers. The pressure to relocate to these locations and pay the tax led to the 1878 "Griqua Rebellion," which was used by the British colonial government as a reason to annex the entirety of Griqualand West in 1880.
In 1882, two new Afrikaner republics were proclaimed off the western border of the South African Republic: Stellaland and Goshen. When conflict arose between these new republics and resident Tswana groups, the British colonial government annexed the territory then called British Bechuanaland under the guise of preventing hostility. Underlying the annexation were interests in access to labour for the waning diamond industry, which required ever cheaper labour to maintain profitability.