prompted Britain to annex first the diamond fields (187 I) and then the
Transvaal republic (1877) and to conquer the Zulu kingdom, the most
powerful African state in Southern Africa (1879). When the Transvaal
Afrikaners rebelled and defeated the British forces in the region, in 188 I,
however, a Liberal administration
granted them a qualified independence
rather than incur the cost of reconquest. International competition influ-
enced British policy more profoundly after the mid-r SSos, when Germany
. annexed South West Africa (Namibia), as well as Togoland, Cameroon,
and Tanganyika, and dominated an international conference in Berlin that
set the ground rules for a general "scramble" for African territories. By
1890, moreover, the Witwatersrand gold fields had transformed the Trans-
vaal from a backwater into the economic hub of Southern Africa.
Even so, until 1895 British administrations
generally relied on settler
communities to sustain their interests in the region. Although the govern-
ment authorized the annexation of the Transvaal in 1877, it did so in the
hope that annexation would pave the way for the amalgamation
of all the
territories in Southern Africa into a federal state within the British Empire.
In 1889,
it empowered
a commercial
company
dominated
by Cecil