Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/398

 378 A Short History of The World Nor can we tell how the British Government first let the Boers, or Dutch settlers, of the Orange River district and the Transvaal set up independent republics in the inland parts of South Africa, and then repented and annexed the Transvaal Republic in 1877 ; nor how the Transvaal Boers fought for freedom and won it after the Battle of Majuba Hill (1881). Majuba Hill was made to rankle in the memory of the English people by a persistent press campaign. A war with both republics broke out in 1899, a three years' war enormously costly to the British people, which ended at last in the surrender of the two republics. Their period of subjugation was a brief one. In 1907, after the downfall of the imperialist government which had conquered them, the Liberals took the South African problem in hand, and these former republics became free and fairly willing associates with Cape Colony and Natal in a Confederation of all the states of South Africa as one self-governing republic under the British Crown. In a quarter of a century the partition of Africa was completed. There remained unannexed three comparatively small countries : Liberia, a settlement of liberated negro slaves on the west coast ; Morocco, under a Moslem Sultan ; and Abyssinia, a barbaric country, with an ancient and peculiar form of Christianity, which had success- fully maintained its independence against Italy at the Battle of Adowa in 1896.