That proposed flag would look better than the current one.
Also, Africanist historian Bernard Lugan posted this interesting rant in French about South Africa and the Second Boers war, with
a translated version.
That would have been an interesting "what if?" to see.
The Boers lost the war but won the peace, in the short/mid-term political situation. They may have screwed themselves in the long term political situation though. Economically and demographically, the war was devastating in the short/mid-term and undoubtedly a disaster in the long run.
The actual post-war political settlement
Despite being annexed into British South Africa, they got home rule within 8 years, guaranteed language rights/protection, and got the British colonial authorities to delay the question of the "native franchise" (ie voting rights for blacks) until after the Afrikaners and Anglo South Africans formed their own home-rule government for the new country, which promptly shut down that issue. The Boers got to dominate 2 out of the 4 provinces that formed the new country of South Africa, and combined together with the conservative/nationalist section of the Cape Afrikaners, the Boers had a very slight population/electoral edge on a national level over the Anglos.
The political settlement if war had been averted or peace signed earlier
On a South African national level, the post-war outcome was slightly better than what would have followed if the Boer republics had capitulated to the British government's pre-war ultimatum, with the Cape Colony and Natal still dominated by firmly pro-British electorate, the neutered Transvaal electorally dominated by British/Uitlander urban population, and an independent Free State being totally isolated and surrounded by the British in terms of geography, economy, and diplomacy.
And it was way better than the unconditional surrender-type peace deals that the Boers were offered by the hardline British colonial authorities during the early and middle years of the war, which would have been like a way harsher version of American Reconstruction, involving the aggressive obliteration of Boer language and culture in a single generation through systematic Anglicization of the youth and removal of all language rights/protections.
That the final peace terms (for the political settlement) were so generous (in hindsight - at the time it was a bitter pill for the Boers to swallow) was largely due to the influence of the softer, liberal British home government and the exhausted British Army high command, which didn't really care about the political angle by that point and wanted to offer as much concessions as possible to just get the surviving Boer forces to concede defeat and surrender.
The most intriguing political possibility if the war had been averted actually concerns the status of the Bantu population of South Africa. Prior to the war, the Bantus living on the territory of the Boer republics did not have any formal legal status, being neither citizens nor subjects of the Boer governments. They were subjects of their own tribal chieftains, and had no path to the franchise/vote in the Boer governments.
Superficially, this might seem like the Bantu homeland puppet regime system of the post-1948 Afrikaner Nationalist government, but under the Boers, the Bantu chieftains had more political legitimacy and influence over their Bantu subjects, in some cases ruling over their own semi-independent protectorates, like with the Swazis and Pedis. Which was a good system for defusing and redirecting Bantu demands for the franchise and later for majority rule over the whole subcontinent. It's kind of telling that Botswana and Swaziland (both former colonial protectorates), isn't too bad of a shithole these days, under the rule of their autocratic royal families, compared to neighboring South Africa.
But in the British Cape Colony, the British colonial government had taken some steps to make their Bantus into subjects of the British crown, with the rights that entailed, including some limited experiments in franchise.
And it was the British Cape Colony's system of making all Bantus into British subjects, and later subjects of the South African national government, that was adopted for all the Bantus in the 4 provinces of the new South Africa that was formed in 1910. And it was this status of being subjects of the national government that stripped away the legitimacy and authority of the tribal chieftains and gave the uppity Bantus the foot-in-the-door to demand the franchise and black majority rule over the entire country.
Economically and demographically, however, the Boers lost the peace and never really recovered, even to the present day.
The post-war economic settlement
The economic aid provided by the peace settlement was a joke. Something like 300,000 pounds sterling to cover all the material losses of the Boer republics, which would have been measured in the millions. 2 rich nations' worth of farms, livestock, irrigation systems, railways, bridges, telegraph/telephone networks, industrial plants, general infrastructure, and personal property completely destroyed.
And the British colonial authorities were absurdly miserly in dealing with individual Boers for compensation of wartime property loss, and for honoring wartime debts/IOUs and Boer currency exchange.
The cumulative effect was to suddenly drop the entire Boer population into starvation-levels of poverty, which took years for many Boer families to get out of (even until the 1930s), and to permanently expand the so-called "poor white" urban section of the Boer/Afrikaner society into a substantial proportion of their national population.
The creation of the landless, urban "poor white" class of Afrikaners actually predates the war by a few years, going back to the 1890s rinderpest epidemic among South African cattle herds which irretrievably ruined many Afrikaner farmers and forced them into the cities for work. But the destruction of property and livestock the war forced many times more once-prosperous Afrikaners and Boers to sell their land at a total loss and find work in the industrializing cities and mines.
Ever since then, the successive white South African governments always had to devote substantial resources to guarantee steady employment opportunities, subsidized wages, and upward social mobility for the "poor white" population, to the detriment of their overall national policy for economic and social planning, which was not good for the long term viability of white minority rule.
And of course, the usual rootless cosmopolitans and international financiers from (((Europe))) moved into the post-war cities and annexed Boer republics to snap up all the Afrikaner property that was being sold by starving families, and to employ the newly expanded source of "poor white" labor to reap obscene profits in the mining and industrial sectors.
With annexation, the Boer provinces did get free trade with the other British provinces of South Africa, completely eliminating inter-provincial tariffs and import taxes, but this would have mostly benefited the rootless cosmpolitans and the British colonial capitalists, and maybe the handful of big Boer landowners who survived the war with their property and livestock intact. It seems poor recompense for the severe damage to the socioeconomic fabric of the rest of the Boer population.
The economic situation if war had been averted
Without the war, the Boers would have still struggled with a "poor white" population in the cities, but nothing like the vast upheaval of mass impoverishment, internal migration and displacement that the war ended up causing.
They might have been able to reduce the "poor white" population to an insignificant minority within a few decades.
Lack of free trade wouldn't have been too much of an issue. Prior to the war, the landlocked Transvaal had completed their long-desired railway link to the deepwater port of Lourenco Marques in Portuguese East Africa (modern day Maputo in Mozambique), which eliminated Boer dependence on British ports in the rest of Southern Africa.
The demographic situation after the war
The demographic impact is harder to quantify in terms of long-term effects but probably just as bad as the economic. Before the war, the Boer republics had a population of something like 200,000 and they lost something over 30,000 people by the end. About 26,000 of those deaths were from the civilian population in the concentration camps, and the majority of that 26,000 were children. So a big hit in the worst demographic section to damage for long-term population stability and growth.
As it was in the post-war era, the Boers and pro-nationalist Cape Afrikaners were able to secure a slight electoral majority over the Anglo colonial population, which became a secure (but not overwhelming majority) by the 1948 national election.
But without the war, they could have gotten a solid population majority much sooner and much bigger in scale.
with something incredibly retarded, similar to how they renamed Port Elizabeth to something unpronounceable for most people (including most South Africans).
?
