White settlement in South Africa is much more extensive by the end of the 1860s than it had been at the beginning of the century.

There are now two British colonies on the coast (Cape Colony and Natal) instead of one, and two Voortrekker republics on the southern and the northern Highveld (the Orange Free State and the South African Republic).

The white population has also increased considerably, from the twenty thousand or so Europeans resident in the Cape Colony in 1800 to one hundred and eighty thousand reported in the 1865 census.

There are another eighteen thousand whites living in Natal and perhaps fifty thousand more whites in the Voortrekker states.