It all started with the discovery of alluvial diamonds in 1867 near Hopetown. Four years later (1871), the mining of the first Kimberlite deposits which contained diamonds started in the Kimberley area. People from across the world flocked to Kimberley in search of their fortune. Amongst these was an 18-year old man, Cecil John Rhodes.
Rhodes was an astute businessman and, with the financial backing of the NM Rothschild & Sons financial company, he successfully monopolised the diamond industry by establishing a company called De Beers Consolidated Mines. Needless to say, this placed Rhodes in a very strong financial position.
This was, however, not enough for him … The richest gold deposit in the world was discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1886. The Witwatersrand was situated within the South African Republic (Zuid-Afrikaanse Republiek) of which President Paul Kruger was the President.
It was widely known that there was no love lost between Kruger and Rhodes. On top of this, Rhodes was an imperialist and he dreamt of a railway line from the Cape to Cairo in an attempt to connect adjacent possessions of the British Empire on the African continent through one continuous railway line.
Rhodes obtained a mineral concession from Lobengula for Ndebele and Matabeleland and felt that he had to, at all costs, build a railway line to those areas. At that time the railway line from the Cape to Kimberley had already been constructed but needed to be extended northwards. The shortest route to his new mining interests in Zimbabwe (former Rhodesia) was through the South African Republic (ZAR).
There was absolutely no way that Paul Kruger would allow him to let this railway line run through the South African Republic and he therefore had no option but to build this along the western border of the South African Republic (ZAR) extending in a northward direction.
This is how Border appeared on the South African map. The station/border post was erected where the borders of the three countries, the Cape Colony (Griqualand West), Bechuanaland and the South African Republic (ZAR) joined.
Apart from the railway line there were also a number of roads which crossed at Border such as, the route between Warrenton and Vryburg as well as the one between Christiana and the Ghaapse Berg. Soon businessses, amongst them the Border Post Hotel, started at this junction.
This is the same Border Post Hotel that still exists today – 145 years later.
