Abstract:
In the early stage of the First World War, the Union of South Africa invaded the neighbouring
colony of German South West Africa at the request of the British War Cabinet. The assignment
was to knock out a German coastal wireless station, but South Africa’s war leaders, Generals
Louis Botha and Jan Smuts, got above themselves. Going the whole hog, they seized the territory
from Berlin. In the peace negotiations which finally ended the Great War, Pretoria persuaded the
victorious powers to allow it to keep the former enemy colony under its jurisdiction as a League
of Nations mandate territory.
