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With prowess more than human forc’d their way To the fair kingdoms of the rising day: What wars they wag’d, what seas, what dangers pass’d, What glorious empire crown’d their toils at last, Vent’rous I sing, on soaring pinions borne, And all my country’s wars 1 the song adorn; What kings, what heroes of my native land Thunder’d on Asia’s and on Afric’s strand -The Lusiad: Book One (1776 English translation)
The British took control of the Cape of Good Hope in 1795, ostensibly to keep out the French, returned it to the Dutch in 1803, but annexed it again in 1806 after the Dutch East India Company went bankrupt. Their involvment in South Africa would continue from then on.
But WI the British had never gotten involved with South Africa, or had only come much later and the country had been in the hands of the French and the Dutch? Would things have been any better for the natives in terms of apartheid in the 20th century? Would there have been a British and French war in the 1880s over the discovery of gold, for example?