AH Challenge: The Boers win the Second Boer War (1899-1902)

How could that be achieved, with a POD not earlier than 1890?

What would be the short and medium term effects of a Boer victory that allows Transvaal and Orange Free State to survive as indpendent states? What would happened during the Great War, for example?
 
Maybe Germany steps into support the Boers, Germany and Britain were already pissed at each other.

That was what I as thinking, but, watching a map of the place, I don't see how the Germans could have made contact with the Boers. They did control what's now Namibia, but they where separeted from the Boer states by British territory (present day Botswana). And the Boers didn't have acces to the sea except through British territory or through Mozambique (Portuguese territory). However, if the Boers had been able to occupy Natal, this contact might have been possible.

In any case, a German attack from Soth-Western Africa, coordinated with Boer offensives, and combined with a generalised Boer rebelion in the Cape might make things very hard for the British. However, if the War was limited to South Africa, and Britain was willing to use all its resources, they would probably still win, as their navy could probably block German supplies...

725px-South_Africa_late19thC_map.JPG
 
I was under the impression the Boer War was not popular in Britain.

If this is the case, if the Boers managed to drag it out long enough, public opinion might for the British to stop.
 
It is almost ASBs for the Boers to win the Second Boer War, they would need massive support from abroad.

I think we can almost draw ana analogy between that war and the Iraq War. The formal war ended quite quickly in both wars, but it was the guerilla stage of both wars which dragged them out.

It could be argued that the Boers did actually win the war. Four years after the war, the Free State and Transvaal both had self-government, and in 1910 when South Africa united it had an Afrikaner Prime Minister. No white English-speaking South African has ever been President, Prime Minister, or Deputy President of South Africa.
 
It is almost ASBs for the Boers to win the Second Boer War, they would need massive support from abroad.

I think we can almost draw ana analogy between that war and the Iraq War. The formal war ended quite quickly in both wars, but it was the guerilla stage of both wars which dragged them out.

It could be argued that the Boers did actually win the war. Four years after the war, the Free State and Transvaal both had self-government, and in 1910 when South Africa united it had an Afrikaner Prime Minister. No white English-speaking South African has ever been President, Prime Minister, or Deputy President of South Africa.

Agreed.

Assuming that any other power was inclined to help, how on earth could they get past the Royal Navy?
 

Neroon

Banned
It could be argued that the Boers did actually win the war. Four years after the war, the Free State and Transvaal both had self-government, and in 1910 when South Africa united it had an Afrikaner Prime Minister. No white English-speaking South African has ever been President, Prime Minister, or Deputy President of South Africa.
I'd actually describe that as them having lost the war, but won the peace. Nonetheless you are correct otherwise.
IMO the best case would be for them to "surrender" without a war to pretty much the same conditions in the OTL Treaty of Unification. Then they would be in just as good a position to win the peace with an about 25% higher population base. Also might be less anti-British feelings in the long run giving us all sorts of "better than OTL" possibilies for after 1950.
Of course butterflies might also cause a nastier result: Higher population base allows them to cling onto power longer than in OTL, resulting in no end to White Minority Rule until things in Zimbabwe go down the drain. Scaring all the Whites into REALLY wanting to cling onto power -> Civil War.
 
If you butterfly away the deaths in the camps then potentially some of that surplus population will head north out of SA into the other nearby states. IOTL this sort of happened, but if you have a much larger (20-25% I believe was cited above) then the economic pressures might be higher as well, pushing out more to N and S Rhodesia and Kenya. Which would possibly change their internal politics and post war histories
 
I dont think this is a war winner but it could give the Boer Republics some time. As concentration camps were relatively new idea, if there weren't any concentration camps for the Boer civilians and if occupational policies were less harsh then the commandos might have fought on for longer.

Cape colony also could have rebeled.
 
This is a longshot, but doable.

Bismarck retains power until his death, and the Russian alliance survives until then. (Russia, despite the credit crunch, was not eager for the French alliance, and was rather happy to be led about by Germany, despite significant opposition from the Francophilles.) Otto Pflanz makes a convincing argument in his magisterial biography of Bismarck that economic tensions did not have to lead to a break with Russia diplomatically, while there are diplomatic historians who argue that Russia entered into the alliance only because of diplomatic isolation resulting from the post-Bismarck break and because it misread Wilhelm II's clumsy initial Anglophil policies as wanting to create a Anglo-German alliance against Russia.

Bismarck and then his successor cosy up to France while France is in throe of Anglophobia (Fashoda was merely the culmination, and the French Right seriously thought about allying with Germany, both because of Anglophobia and because of the Dreyfald Affair). At this period, there were serious people in France who thought an entente with Germany was possible. One major French newspaper opined that while the Germans were regrettably their enemy at the time, it needed not be always thus so; in contrast, England was France's eternal enemy.

What this setup would do would be to actualize the continental league that Germany talked about (but wasn't serious) at the time of the Boer War. With Russia in German pocket, France would be tempted, and more importantly, the Russian angle would enable Germany to supply the Boers with arms and "volunteers." In RL, neither Germany nor France could do jack to help the Boers, even if they wanted to (and Germany didn't, though France seriously wanted to), because of the RN. With Russia in tow, the League could threaten India on land, a threat that was 100% BS but the British FO took seriously at the time.

What this might let happen would be a proxy war of the 20th century kind in S Africa, where the Continental League would give vital materiel and human resources for the Boers to continue their conventional warfare and deny Britain the ability to create concentration camps.

The best case scenario would be for the British public to tire of the drain in men and gold, and give pro-Boer MPs the leverage they needed to convince the government to come to terms with the Boers. The worst case scenario would be for the British to get fed up with the League and Copenhagen German/French/Russian fleets and start up a war.

The most likely scenario would be for the League to crack under mutually incompatible national interests in the face of British emnity, and the Boers would lose, but without the advantageous peace they got in RL, because the British public would be pissed off at them for the tremendous losses in blood and gold.
 
Perhaps if you could get a POD that somehow changes the Cape Province political settlement early on in the late 1880s, that makes it definately unreliable in the case of a war, then you might be able to either stop the Boer War happening in anything like its current form, or at least make it much harder for the Empire to justify intervening militarily.
 
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