On this day in South African history — 13 May 2026

History & Culture
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Thirteen May has a habit of showing up at turning points, and today’s a good reminder that history doesn’t wait for convenient moments.

1900: On this day during the Anglo-Boer War, British forces under Lord Roberts occupied Johannesburg, effectively ending Boer control of the Witwatersrand’s goldfields. The Boers had already stripped and partially destroyed what they could before retreating, knowing exactly what they were giving up. What strikes me every time I read about this is how the residents of Johannesburg, a city barely fifteen years old at that point, must have felt watching foreign troops march through their streets. It wasn’t the end of the war, not by a long stretch, but it was a moment where everyone knew something irreversible had just happened.

1948: South Africa’s general election on this day delivered a result that shocked many observers, both locally and internationally. The National Party under D.F. Malan narrowly defeated Jan Smuts’s United Party, winning enough seats to form a government despite actually receiving fewer votes overall. That electoral quirk, the rural weighting of constituencies, handed the NP a majority it used to build the entire apartheid system over the following decades. I find it genuinely chilling to think how differently things might have gone, and how a single election can redirect a country’s path for generations.

1994: Just weeks after the historic April elections, this date saw continued administrative work in formalising South Africa’s new democratic structures, as the newly elected Parliament began settling into its role in Cape Town. The country was still in that extraordinary, almost disbelieving mood where people kept pinching themselves that it had actually happened. Nelson Mandela’s inauguration was still coming on the 10th of May, so this was that strange and hopeful in-between period where a new South Africa existed on paper and was slowly becoming real in practice. There’s something quietly beautiful about those ordinary bureaucratic moments that make a revolution permanent.

These three moments, a city occupied, a vote that changed everything, and a democracy finding its feet, all remind me that the big turning points in our history rarely announce themselves with fanfare. Sometimes you only understand what just happened when you look back years later.

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Living in Pretoria you feel this period differently, because Roberts took Joburg on the 13th and then Pretoria itself fell just three weeks later, on the 5th of June. The conventional war was basically over but the Boers held on through guerrilla tactics for another two years after that.

What actually gets me is the deliberate destruction before the retreat, stripping and sabotaging what they could at the goldfields. That’s a calculated scorched-earth move, and it tells you everything about what the British were really there for. The Rand’s mining infrastructure got rebuilt almost entirely under British capital after 1900, which is genuinely the economic foundation that modern Joburg sits on.

Standing near Church Square in Pretoria sometimes and thinking about how close all of this happened, it hits differently than reading it in a textbook.

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The Boers weren’t wrong to deny the British those resources, that’s just practical warfare. You don’t leave a working goldmine for the enemy any more than you’d leave your generator running for a loadshedding thief.

What strikes me every time I read about the guerrilla phase is how long they held on with so little. Two years against the full weight of the British Empire, in their own backyard. They knew the terrain like I know my own switchboard panel, and that counts for a lot.

Lerato’s right that Pretoria has a different feel to this history. I visited Kruger House years ago and you can almost touch that era. The Anglo-Boer War shaped everything that came after in this country, the bitterness, the politics, the whole lot. We’re still living with the fault lines it created, honestly.