Ernst spent only one day in Bagamoyo city before returning to First Town. He had traveled there by water, but returned by road. The highway between Bagamoyo and First Town was no more comfortable than the water route, though it was reasonably smooth.
Orange Free State.
For the Boers of Orange—or rather, the Boers of the former Orange Free State—life had been anything but pleasant lately.
On one hand, none of the British promises had been fulfilled. On the other, Boers from the former Republic of the Transvaal had flooded in and seized a great deal of their resources.
"That wasn't what the British said at the beginning. Not only have they failed to solve Orange's financial problems, they keep raising taxes here. We've all been fooled, and now the British refuse to admit it!"
"The so-called investments and dividends never materialized either. They keep recruiting people to work in their diamond mines, and the wages are pitifully low. Those lands and mineral deposits were ours to begin with. Those damned bandits."
"And those damned Transvaalers. We kindly took in those paupers back then, and now they've turned around and become the British dogs, helping them deal with us. We must have been blind to take in such ungrateful curs."
As the former Transvaal Boers migrated into the Orange Free State, they abruptly changed the social structure of the local Boer population.
The two countries might have been bound by kinship, but after living together for so long, conflicts had instead arisen. Naturally, British meddling had played no small part. The British had always been wary of the Boers, and naturally did not want the Boers under their rule to stand united.
To the British, the Boers of the Transvaal had once been people they could win over, while