Paul Kruger, distrusting the mine owners and the British government, seeks to build thr Transvaal's strength.

He engages in diplomatic relations with Germany, imports arms from Europe, and continues to deny the vote to uitlanders.

He also cements relations with the Orange Free State and seeks support from Dutch speakers in the Cape.

In these endeavors, he is assisted by a growing sense of Afrikaner identity that has developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

This nationalistic identity had emerged clearly in the early 1880s, after the victory of Majuba Hill, when S.J. du Toit, a Dutch Reformed minister in the Cape, had published a newspaper, Die Afrikaanse Patriot (The Afrikaner Patriot), and a book, Die Geskiedenis van ons Land in die Taal van ons Volk (The History of our Land in the Language of our People), which argues that Afrikaners are a distinct people with their own fatherland in South Africa and that they are fulfilling a special mission determined expressly by God.

Du Toit had gone on to found a political party in the Cape, the Afrikanerbond, to represent the interests of Dutch speakers.

The Jameson Raid and anti-Boer sentiments expressed by gold magnates and British officials further cement an Afrikaner sense of distinctiveness, which in the 1890s reaches across political boundaries to include Dutch speakers in the Cape and the citizens of the Orange Free State as well as the Transvaalers.