Afrikaners (including the Boer Subgroup)[3] Are an Ethnic Group in Southern Africa

Africa is now the core of our Colonial position; the only continental space from which we can still hope to draw reserves of economic and military strength – F.J. Pedler, the Colonial Office, 1st November of 1946.

The Scramble for Africa was the invasion, occupation, colonization, and annexation of African territory by European powers during the New Imperialism period between 1881 and 1914. There were several factors which created the impetus for the Scramble for Africa, most of these were to do with events in Europe rather than in Africa (End of Slave Trade; Exploration and Capitalism).

The direction of British thinking about Africa fell easily into the general context of ideas of tutelage, development and trusteeship. However it faced a lot of problems with nationalism which then partly cause the decolonisation of the British Empire.

Nationalism problems tended to accelerate rapidly the pace of decolonization under Macleod's stewardship. His approach to colonial affairs was one which accepted that Britain could not contain and control African nationalism and that a 'deliberate speeding up of the movement towards independence' was necessary in order to prevent bloodshed in Africa.

The British practice of developing power to local elites had been tried, and seemed for a time to have succeeded, in South Africa in 1910. But, faced with Black Nationalism, and argued with by white nationalism, British Governmetonts found themselves in an unenviable position. They sought to discover some kind of brokering role between such rival claims, and African nationalists, for their part, believed that the British Government was inclined towards the white point of view, as the war against the Mau Mau in Kenya seemed to confirm.

The British had not been unprepared for this quickening upsurge in African nationalism; on the contrary, they had been alerted to it by a series of far-sighted British colonial experts.

It tended