their hearts and minds. By the end of the century, they had completed the
process of conquest that had begun in the time of van Riebeeck. All the
indigenous peoples of Southern Africa were incorporated
in states under
white dornination.P
Virtually all the Whites in the region, in common with their contempo-
raries in Europe and the Americas, regarded themselves as belonging to a
superior, Christian, civilized race and believed that, as such, they were
justified in appropriating native land, controlling native labor, and subor-
dinating native authorities. So dominant was this assumption that Whites
did not permit their serious internal differences-Boer
versus Briton, farm-
er versus townsfolk, employer versus worker-to
retard the conquest. In
critical situations
Whites assisted one another
against
Africans, and
Whites who had benefited from African patrons betrayed them. In 1879,
Paul Kruger, who would soon lead Afrikaner commandos
against the
British occupation force in the Transvaal, gave the British military sound
advice on how to cope with the Zulu, and John Dunn, the son of one of the
early British traders in Natal, who had become wealthy and powerful as a
client of the Zulu king Cetshwayo, went over to the side of the Whites as