y out an idea previously formed by Mr. Kruger, and
trek northward into the country beyond the Limpopo River, a country
where the natives were feeble and disunited, raided on one side by the
Matabili and on the other by Gungunhana. This trek would have brought
the emigrants into collision with the English settlers who had shortly
before entered Mashonaland. President Kruger, however, being pressed by
the imperial government, undertook to check the movement, and so far
succeeded that the waggons which crossed the Limpopo were but few and
were easily turned back. Prevented from expanding to the north, the
Boers were all the more eager to acquire Swaziland, a small but rich
territory which lies to the east of their Republic, and is inhabited by
a warlike Kafir race, numbering about 70,000, near of kin to the Zulus,
but for many years hostile to them. Both the Boers and Cetewayo had
formerly claimed supremacy over this region. The British government had
never admitted the Boer claim, but when the head chief of the Swazis
had, by a series of improvident concessions, granted away to
adventurers, most of them Boers, nearly all the best land and minerals
the country contained, it was found extremely difficult to continue the
system of joint administration by the High Commissioner and the
Transvaal government which had been provisionally established, and all
the more difficult because by the concession to the New Republic (which
had by this time become incorporated with the Transvaal) of the part of
Zululand which adjoined Swaziland, direct communication between Natal
and Swaziland had become difficult, especially in the malarious season.
Accordingly, after long negotiations, an arrangement was concluded, in
1894, which placed the Swazi nation and territory under the control of
the South African Republic, subject to full guarantees for the
protection of the natives. A previous Convention (of 1890) had given the
South African Republic certain rights of making a railway to the coast
at Kosi Bay through the low and malarious region which lies between
Swaziland and the sea, and the earlier negotiations had proceeded on the
assumption that these rights were to be adjusted and renewed in the same
instrument which was destined to settle the Swaziland question. The
Boer government, however, ultimately declined to include such an
adjustment in the new Convention, and as this new Convention superseded
and extinguished the former one of 1890,