Bloemfontein Conference

The Bloemfontein Conference was a meeting that took place at the railway station of Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State from 31 May until 5 June 1899. The main issue dealt with the status of British migrant workers called "Uitlanders", who mined the gold fields in Transvaal.

The conference was initiated by Orange Free State president Martinus Theunis Steyn, in order to settle differences between Transvaal President Paul Kruger and British High Commissioner Alfred Milner. It was considered a last effort at reconciliation to prevent war between the two factions.

At the conference, Milner made three demands from Kruger:

Kruger considered these demands an impossibility, however he was willing to reduce the period of Uitlander enfranchisement from the present fourteen years to seven years. Milner refused to compromise his original demands and, despite encouragement from British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain for him to continue the talks, Milner walked out of the conference on 5 June and no resolution concerning the fate of the Uitlanders was reached.

At this time, Milner composed a diatribe called the "Helot's Dispatch", which lambasted the Transvaal as a force that "menaces the peace and prosperity of the world".

The Bloemfontein Conference was proposed by Afrikaner Jan Hofmeyr on 9 May 1899. It was held in the capital of the Orange Free State, with the intent of defusing a crisis between the Transvaal Republic and the British Empire. Of the three English demands (enfranchisement [voting rights], language, and suzerainty [foreign policy]) Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain told Alfred Milner to place the Uitlander issue (enfranchisement) up front by asking for a five year retrospective franchise (five years of residency to be eligible to vote), the placement of at least 7 members of the Rand in the Volksraad, and if Kruger refused, to try municipal government enfranchisement (of English residents) and control of the police. If agreement couldn't be reached on this first, important point, there was no point in discussing other issues.

After the Conference broke up, Milner received a telegram from Chamberlain counseling patience and compromise with the Boers, who were used to "a good deal of haggling". Had he received the message earlier, Milner said the talks would have continued.

Milner's Helot dispatch was sent to Joseph Chamberlain on 4 May 1899. From the time of Milner's arrival in Cape Town on 5 May 1897, until President Kruger's landslide election victory in February 1898, Milner was silent on the South African question. He then gave a speech in Middleburg on 3 March 1898, followed by a letter dated 9 May to his superior, Lord Selborne (Undersecretary of State for the Colonies, #2 in the Colonial Office, to Joseph Chamberlain). Later, when convinced the Boers would never agree to terms with the English, Milner sent the "Helot" dispatch (Helots were a caste of Greeks in ancient Sparta treated effectively as slaves by the Spartans). His letter said that two governments, one Boer and one English, cannot exist peacefully side by side.