DIAMONDS. GOLD.AND BRITISHIMPERIALISM
Africans in the last decades of the nineteenth century. There were, however,
great regional differences in the rate and the extent of the erosion of African
political, economic, and cultural autonomy. The key variables were the
structure and the dynamics of each African society and the degree to which
each had resources that attracted Whites.
Other Nguni societies were also profoundly transformed by the end of
the nineteenth century. After the colonists got control of the executive
branch of the Cape colonial government in 1872, in a series of steps they
annexed the territories between the Kei River and the Natal border, which
became known as the Transkei. Many of the Xhosa and Thembu inhabi-
tants, whose morale had been broken by the cattle-killing disaster in 1856,
offered little physical resistance. Between 1877 and 1881, however, others,
including the main Xhosa chiefs Sandile and Sarhili, did defy the govern-
ment, only to be suppressed by Whites and their Mfengu allies. The hun-
dred years' war between the Whites and the Xhosa and Thembu had ended
at last. Cape colonial expansion to the east culminated in 1894 with the
peaceful incorporation
of the Mpondo, who had been weakened by civil