DIAMONDS, GOLD.AND BRITISHIMPERIALISM
attempts to expand. In 1885, as we have seen, Britain checked its expan-
sion to the west by proclaiming a protectorate over "Bechuanaland"
(mod-
em Botswana). In 1889, Rhodes's agents having extracted a concession
from Lobengula, Mzilikazi's successor as king of the Ndebele, the British
government granted Rhodes's British South Africa Company a charter,
empowering it to exercise political and administrative
rights under the
Crown in a vaguely defined area north of the Limpopo. Two years later, a
British South Africa Company force from the Cape Colony occupied the
land north of the Limpopo River that became known as Rhodesia (modern
Zimbabwej.V
Kruger devoted his principal thrust to the east, where, like Hendrik
Potgieter before him, he sought to free the republic from British commer-
cial domination
by getting independent access to the Indian Ocean. Al-
though the Transvaal did manage to incorporate Swaziland in 1895, Great
Britain closed the coastal gap by annexing the strip between Zululand and
the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. The British had hemmed the Trans-
vaal in politically, "as it were in a kraal."38
Even so, by 1895 the Transvaal was loosening the British stranglehold.