Of all the regions of the world where imperial Britain sought to exert influence, none exhibited more contradictions, and therefore such intractable dilemmas and frustrations, as South Africa. Cape Colony was conquered from the Dutch in 1806 and retained in 1815 because of its strategic importance on the route to India. Control of the hinterland inevitably followed. Britain thus acquired a foreign settler community of some 40,000, who resented a more intrusive government than they were used to and doctrines of race relations which seemed to them wrong-headed. Many Boers trekked into the interior from the 1830s, determined to assert their right to a quiet sweet life (lekke lewe) of their own choosing, free from interference, and to preserve what they regarded as ‘proper relations between master and servant’. The fundamental constitution (grondwet) of the South African Republic (Transvaal) made their intransigent Bantu policy all too plain (clause 9): ‘The people will admit no equalising (gelijkstelling) between the white and coloured inhabitants whether in church or state’ (February 1858). It was not simply that the Boers would not accept or admit black equality (for which the word would have been gelijkheid), but, more uncompromisingly, no assimilation, no making equal or treating as if equal. Treks enormously enlarged the area of contact and potential conflict on the highveld with spirited and sometimes highly mobile African chiefdoms determined to resist subjection.