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The Orange Free State
A Boer republic on the South African highveld, 1854 to 1902
Between the Orange and Vaal Rivers, on open grassland at the center of South Africa, Dutch-speaking Boer settlers ran an independent republic for nearly half a century. The Orange Free State had a written constitution, an elected president, and a parliament called the Volksraad, and foreign observers of the time often described it as a stable, modest model republic. Its citizenship and vote, however, were reserved for white men, and its expansion came largely at the expense of the Basotho kingdom to the east. The state disappeared in the South African War of 1899 to 1902, but its name and borders survive in South Africa's Free State province, and its history remains part of debates over land and identity.
The republic occupied about 130,000 square kilometers of highveld, a plateau mostly 1,200 to 1,800 meters high, bounded by the Vaal River on the north and the Orange on the south. Its eastern edge followed the Caledon River beneath the Maloti and Drakensberg ranges, and after wars with the Basotho it gained the fertile Caledon valley lowlands. Treeless grassland, flat-topped hills, and seasonal pans supported sheep and cattle farming, later maize. The 1890 census counted about 207,500 people, and the 1904 count of the successor colony found about 387,000. The diamond fields around Kimberley lay just over its western border. The territory now forms South Africa's Free State province, and the Caledon still marks the border with Lesotho.
Voortrekkers leaving the Cape Colony in the 1830s settled the region, which Britain annexed as the Orange River Sovereignty in 1848 and then gave up under the Bloemfontein Convention of February 23, 1854. Wars with the Basotho between 1858 and 1868 ended when the Basotho king sought British protection, creating Basutoland, now Lesotho. Britain's annexation of the diamond fields of Griqualand West in 1871 was disputed by the Free State, which accepted compensation in 1876. Allied with the neighboring South African Republic, the Free State entered war with Britain in October 1899. British forces took Bloemfontein in March 1900 and annexed the territory as the Orange River Colony. The Treaty of Vereeniging of May 31, 1902, ended the war, and the colony joined the Union of South Africa in 1910.