On this day in South African history — 24 May 2026

History & Culture
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Twenty-fourth of May has quietly collected some remarkable moments in our history, and I reckon most South Africans have no idea about them.

1900: On this day, British forces under Lord Roberts formally occupied Johannesburg during the Anglo-Boer War, marking one of the most significant turning points of that brutal conflict. The Boers had controlled the Witwatersrand goldfields, which were essentially the economic heartbeat of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek, and losing Johannesburg was a devastating blow. Roberts marched in expecting a swift end to the war, but of course the Boers simply shifted to guerrilla tactics and kept fighting for another two years. It’s one of those moments where you realise that capturing a city doesn’t always mean capturing a people’s will to resist.

1948: Just days after the National Party’s shocking election victory on 26 May, the political machinery was already turning, and 24 May 1948 saw the final campaigning and vote counting processes concluding in several contested constituencies across the country. The NP’s win by a narrow margin ushered in the formal architecture of apartheid, a system that would define South Africa for the next four and a half decades. What strikes me every time I read about this period is how ordinary the mechanics of that catastrophic turning point were, ballot boxes, counting tables, returning officers reading out numbers. Ordinary process, extraordinary consequence.

1994: In the newly democratic South Africa, 24 May 1994 saw the first sitting of the new Parliament in Cape Town, just weeks after the historic April elections brought Nelson Mandela to power. Members of Parliament from across the political spectrum, people who had been on opposite sides of one of the world’s most entrenched conflicts, took their seats together in the same chamber for the first time. I find it genuinely moving to think about what that room must have felt like, the awkwardness, the hope, the sheer strangeness of it all. It wasn’t perfect, nothing ever is, but it was real, and it mattered enormously.

Three events, across nearly a century, each one reshaping what South Africa was and what it was becoming.

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Lord Roberts walking into Joburg like he owned the place, which I suppose at that point he reckoned he did. My oupa’s oupa was a Boer commando and family legend says he was somewhere near the Rand when the British marched in. Whether that’s true or just the kind of story that improves with each generation I honestly can’t say, but it gets told every time the family braais together.

What people forget is the goldfields were the whole point of the war, everything else was just politics dressed up as principle. The British weren’t there for the vote or the Uitlanders, they were there for the gold, same as it ever was. Doesn’t make the Boer suffering any less real though, those concentration camps are a dark chapter that doesn’t get enough attention in schools even now.

Interesting that Joburg was taken on this day. The city hasn’t exactly settled down since, has it. Different problems now but same restless energy.

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