Background
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In the 1830's Boers, farmers of Dutch
origin, founded the republics of the Orange
Free State and Transvaal. Later the
British annexed the Transvaal, but at
the battle of Majuba Hill in 1881 the
Boers defeated them and won back most of
their independence. The discovery of gold
in the Transvaal brought not only wealth
but an influx of uitlanders-foreignersmany
ofthem British subjects, who by 1895
greatly outnumbered the Boers. The uitlanders
were extortionately taxed, but
President Kruger of the Transvaal, determined
to maintain Boer supremacy,
refused to give them the vote.
After the failure of the raid on the
Transvaal organized by Dr Jameson in
the hope ofencouraging an uprising among
the uitlanders, the Transvaal felt its independence
threatened, and Kruger started
importing arms. Sir Alfred Milner (governor
in Cape Colony) exerted pressure on
behalf of the uitlanders. Kruger demanded
that Great Britain abandon its claim to
suzerainty. Each side refused to yield.
Kruger sent an ultimatum to the British
which expired on 12th October 1899.
The Anglo-Boer War was a preventive war:
this is the explanation which does least
violence to the multitude of facts, purposes,
interpretations, and mythologies. The
Boers fought because they believed that
they had no alternative if they were to preserve
their independence; the British
pushed the Boers to extremity because they
felt that in Afrikaner nationalism there was
a danger to the paramount position of
Great Britain in southern Africa. As Sir
Alfred Milner, governor of the Cape Colony
and high commissioner in South Africa,
diagnosed the situation, President Kruger's
South African Republic in the Transvaal
was a rival for the ultimate allegiance of
the British subjects of Dutch origin in the
Cape Colony and Natal. Since the discovery
of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886, economic
power had been shifting from the
Cape to the Transvaal. Throughout southern
Africa Afrikaners outnumbered those
who regarded themselves as British. The
logic of the facts pointed to the conquest of
the Transvaal and its transformation, after
a short war, into a British colony, in which
the Boers would be swamped by British immigrants. It was the Boers who sent the
ultimatum; the other side of the case may
be summed up in Milner's words to Lord
Roberts: 'I precipitated a crisis which was
inevitable before it was altogether too late.'
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The Boer Pre-emptive Strike
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Militarily the war fell into three phases
of unequal length. In the first, which lasted
from 12th October l899 until the end of
that year, the initiative was with the Boers.
They invaded Natal and the Cape Colony,
stirred up rebellion, annexed British territory,
besieged the towns of Mafeking, Kimberley,
and Ladysmith, and in the second
week of December - 'black Week' as it was
known in Great Britain - defeated General
Gatacre' at Stromberg, Lord Methtlen at
Magersfontein, and general BuIler the
commander'-in-chief, at Colenso.
In this period the Boers were fighting
strategically on the offensive, tactically on
the defensive. They had the advantage of
prepared positions - they were adept at fortifications,
and the trenches dug by J.B. d~
la Rey at Magersfontein were sited with
genius. Their rifles and their marksmanship
were superior to those of the British;
and they were certainly helped by unimaginative
British generalship. ('Our gen
erals,' remarked Asquith, the future prime
minister, after reading one of Buller's dispatches,
seem neither able to win victories
nor to give convincing reasons for their
defeats.') In the first fortnight of the war
the British were outnumbered: 'they had
barely 13,000 regular troops in South
Africa and most of these were swiftly locked
up in the three besieged towns. With the arrival
of the 1st Army Corps at the end of October
the balance changed; but Buller divided
his forces and tried unsuccessfully to re
lieve Kimberley and Ladysmith. By the
middle of December Buller's command had
been defeated at every turn and remained,
barren of initiative, pinned down from the
northern Cape to the midlands of Natal.
Buller had lost his nerve. He was one of
those unfortunate soldiers who are competent
subordinates but fail in novel situations
when in high command. After Colenso he signalled by heliograph to the besieged
commander in Ladysmith that he should
fire off his ammunition and surrender. It
was this action which determined the
British government to replace him as commander-in-chief; in his place came Lord
Roberts, with Lord Kitchener of Khartoum
as chief-of-staff. The 1st XI was being put
in to the field.
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The British Counter Offensive
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With the victories of 'Black Week' the
Boers had reached what Clauswitz, the
German military theorist, would have
called the culminating point of victory after which they began
to slip downwards. Roberts acted with
imagination; Kitchener, displaying the
restless energy that characterized his
career, improvised a system of wagons for
tr']ansport 'which unshackled the British
troops from dependence upon the railway
lines along which, hitherto, they had
doggedly plugged into Boer fortifications.
(The English', said General' Cronje, who
was besiegirig Kimberley, do not make
turning movements. They never leave the
railway, because they cannot march.') His
supplies secured, Roberts
abandoned his lines of commuriication; outflanked:
Kimberley, and sent General
French on a remarkable cavalry ride which
relieved the besieged town.
General Cronje's besieging army was
trapped in the gorge of the Modder river at
Paardeberg, and shelled into surrender
with 4,000 men on 28th February, the nineteenth
anniversary of the Boer victory at
Majuba Hill.
Cronje's defeat sent vibrations of discouragement
throughout the Boer armies.
The forces around Ladysmith withdrew,
and Buller was at last able to enter a town
from which the attackers had gone. (Buller
had already fought 'the bloodiest single
engagement of the war, at Spion Kop.When
the British and Boers both withdrew from
the hill in the belief that they had been
defeated. The Boers were the first to discover
that the enemy had also gone.) Bloemfont~
in was occupied, and the Orange
Free State annexed. General Pretorius,
pinned against the mountains of the
Basutoland Protectorate, surrendered
with a large part of the army of the Free
State. After pausing for seven weeks in
Bloemfontein, largely because of a serious
outbreak of enteric fever among his troops,
Roberts resumed his march to the north,
occupied Johannesburg and Pretoria, and
shepherded the Transvaal forces eastwards
down the railway line leading to the Portuguese
colony of Mozambique. In September
1900 the Transvaal was annexed.
The second phase - that of the great British
counter-offensive - was over, and it
seemed that with it the war was over.
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Pacification
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The third phase of the war lasted another
eighteen months. This is sometimes referred
to as the guerrilla war. The phrase is a
misnomer. A guerrilla war is carried on by
small bodies of irregular troops, acting independently. The Boer armies had been
defeated in the field; 'they had been' dispersed' but they had not been broken. The
Boer governments had been dislodged from
their capitals; but, peripatetic though their
existence was, they retained their authority.
President Kruger, an old and broken
man, had sailed from Lourenco Marques
for Europe, but his authority devolved
upon Schalk Burger, vice-President of the
South African Republic, and was effectively
shared with General Louis Botha; the Commandant-general of the Republic's forces.
The seat of government of the Orange Free
State was wherever President Steyn happened
to be. In the eastern Transvaal
General Botha, and in the western Transvaal
General de la Rey, commanded large
bodies of men; elsewhere the Boers reverted
to their natural style of fighting, the
swift movement of bodies of mounted infantry
- the commandos - carrying their
food with them or living off the countryside,
harassing British communications. On
paper, the two Republics had been annexed;
but there was no effective occupation.
The third phase of the war was'one of
movement and attrition, in which a dwindling
number of Boers maintained their
resistance, hoping for a weakening of
British resolution, and a large British
army, constantly reinforced, lumbered
about, over thousands of square miles of
country, pecking away at Boer strength.
It was in this third phase of the war that
the contest changed its nature; it seemed
to the Boers that the British were seeking
to exterminate them as a people. It became
increasingly difficult for the British to distinguish
between civilian and military
enemies. The new pattern showed itself
first in the Orange Free State, renamed the
Orange River Colony on its annexation. A
large number of Free Staters had surrendered,
and had been permitted to return
to their farms after having taken an 'oath
of neutrality' - a curiously named promise
to take no further part in the war. Neither
President Steyn nor, later, acting President
Burger recognized either the annexations
or the right of their own people to contract
out of the war. The British provided little
protection for those who had surrendered;
Boer commandos pounced upon them and
threatened them with immediate punishment
as deserters, or more remote fears of
punishment by the British as apostates.
Roberts turned to 'farm-burning' of the
homesteads of those who had broken their
oaths, and a circle of reprisals began.
Furthermore, 'camps of refuge', under
military control, were set up in which the
surrendered could take refuge with their
families: this was the beginning of the
system of 'concentrationcamps'.
The last phase of the war was carried out against a background of military stalemate,
divided counsels, administrative confusion
and, on the British side at least, increasing
friction between the military and
the civilian authorities. In the Boer armies
in the field, military and civilian authority
were so entwined that it was practically
impossible to separate them. On the British
side, the military authorities were vested
with power to do what the exigencies ofwar
demanded; the soldiers did not see the war
from the same point of view as the civilians.
Both sides had, for different reasons, decided
upon a fight to a finish. To Milner, the
object of the war was to break Afrikaner
nationalism: the terms offered to the Boers
in 1900 were (in a phrase borrowed from
the US Civil War general, Grant) 'unconditional
surrender'. In 1901, after Lord
Kitchener had unsuccessfully offered terms
of peace to General Botha at Middelburg,
the two Boer governments met at Waterval
and agreed that neither should conclude a
separate peace unless the annexations were
reversed and the independence of the Republics
restored. Given these conditions,
the war would continue until the last
Boer had been killed or captured.
Roberts had given up the command at the
end of 1900, to be succeeded by Kitchener.
Kitchener had his own reasons for ending
the war'as soon as he could; he wished to be
given the post of commander-in-chief in
India, which he feared would elude him if
he could not end the campaign in South
Africa quickly; he was not concerned with
the political consequences of his actions;
rapidly his regard for Milner deteriorated
into indifference, Milner's for him into mistrust.
In military operations it seemed that
the British army had lost the initiative,
and was compelled, in innumerable local
actions, to react to Boer movements.
General Christian de Wet made two spectacular
raids, in which he slipped through
superior British forces and made his escape.
Militarily, de Wet's operations
achieved little that was lasting, but they
did demonstrate the inability of the British
army either to catch or to force a commando
to battle against its will.
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Invasion of the Cape Colony
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At the end of 1900 the Free State
generals, Kritzinger and Hertzog, invaded
the Cape Colony for the second time, and
touched off a second, and far more serious
rebellion. In 1901 the former Transvaal
state attorney, Jan Christian Smuts, who
had taken to arms with considerable native
ability, conducted a spectacular raid into
the Cape Colony, which took him within
sight of Cape Town and on into, the far
north-west of the Colony. By the end of
1901 almost the whole of the Cape Colony
was under martial law. The British army
in South Africa had a strength of close on a
quarter of a million; the Boers at no time
had more than 30,000 men under arms; but
the British were scattered over lines o fcommunication of several thousand miles.
In this predicament Kitchener turned to a
policy of what would later have been called
'scorched earth'. He began the system of
the 'great drives' - a methodical extension
of the 'farm-burning' begun by Lord
Roberts. Columns of troops swept the
countryside, driving off herds of cattle and
sheep, burning farm houses and burning
crops. Later, this was supplemented by the
blockhouse system; barbed wire entanglements,
interspersed at short distances by
small pill-box fortifications, criss-crossed
the country for thousands of miles. The
aim was to make it difficult for the Boers to
move - if not themselves at least their
supplies - and thus to compress the theatre
of war. In the end, given great resources
and unlimited resolution, it was bound to
succeed; but at a ruinous cost to the countryside
of what were now British colonies, and
at the price of turning into irreconcilables
those whom it was intended to transform
into British citizens. Boers taken from the
shattered farms - mostly women and children
- were herded into hastily contrived
concentration camps; these were now less
places of refuge than places of confinement.
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Concentration Camps
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In 1901 these camps were swept by disease - pneumonia, measles, and enteric
fever - which killed the inmates by the
thousand. This was not as the Boers believed,
the product of malice: it was the
result of inefficiency in administration
and lack of sanitary knowledge. But the
result was the same: about 20,000 Boers
died. The facts were publicized in Great
Britain through the work of Emily Hobhouse,
who visited the camps in 1901. Sir
Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the leader of
the opposition, described the activities of
the British army as (methods of barbarism' (a judgement which Lord Milner had
privately uttered much earlier to Joseph
Chamberlain, the colonial secretary); and
the news increased the odium under which
Great Britain already lay in world opinion.
Death from disease in the camps, the destruction
of their homes and means of livelihood,
the annexation of their countries:
these were the grounds of permanent resentment
which the war had already given
the Boers. To these was added another:
death by execution. In 1901 Kitchener
began executions in the field. The death
penalty was exacted sometimes for rebellion,
sometimes for the killing of non-Europeans.
Both sides had conformed to
the convention that this was to be a white
man's war; it had been explicitly stated by
the secretary of state for war that the non-white
peoples should be armed only for
their own protection. Kitchener enlisted
about 10,000 non-whites, and used them as
wagon-drivers, messengers, and blockhouse
guards. The Boers shot non-whites
captured with arms; British courts-martial
condemned Boers to death for murder.
Boer commandos in the Cape Colony burned
down public buildings, partly as acts of
war, partly in reprisal for what had been
done in the Republics. Arson was added to
the offences for which Boers might face the
death penalty. Two commando leaders Lotter
and Gideon Scheepers - were executed
in the Cape Colony.
In all this Milner found himself powerless.
He had moved from the Cape to the
Transvaal in 1901, and was doing a great
deal to place the industrial area of the
Witwatersrand under settled government.
The mines were slowly re-opened; the work
of reconstruction began. Had he been given
his way, Milner would have placed other
areas of the country under effective occupation,
settled upon it those many Boers in
the prison camps who had sickened of the
war, and have contained the remaining
commandos by essentially police operations.
Afrikanerdom, he felt, could thus be divided
against itself; the odium of continuing
the war would fall upon the Boers who continued
a hopeless struggle. He was able to
produce astonishing feats of hygiene when
the concentration camps, after the damage
had been done, were passed over from military
to civilian control. But Milner was
adamant that there should be no negotiated
peace with the Boers; the Republics were
to be effaced. Kitchener was quite prepared
to end the war by negotiation, if he could,
by ruthlessness if he could not. Unhappily,
the only victims of ruthlessness were the
Boers in his hands: the commandos in the
field remained out of reach.
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The End-Game
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Both sides were wavering. The British
government had tired of a war that was
expensive, humiliating, and, from the electoral
standpoint, politically corrosive to the
Unionist government. The Boers were likewise
divided. The Free Staters remained
adamant that no peace should be made
without independence. The Transvaalers
were less resolute, or more realistic. The
Free State had been ravaged from end to
end; but the Free State would remain predominantly
Dutch. The centre of the Transvaal
was being transformed into a British
colony. Let them negotiate while their
army was still in being, when their military
power might yet enable them to win
some concessions: the alternative would
be the extinction of their language, the
banishment of their leaders - the end of
Afrikanerdom. Thus, when, under Dutch
prompting, the British government sent an
offer to the Boers to parley, it was the
Transvaalers who were prepared to bargain,
the Free Staters who insisted upon no
surrender, a fight 'to the bitter end'.
In the long drawn-out peace negotiations
- between the Boers themselves at Klerksdorp, between the representatives of the
Boers and Milner and Kitchener in Pretoria,
between the representatives of the Boers
at an assembly of the people at Vereeniging,
between the Boers and British again,
and finally the last session of the Assembly
of the People at Vereeniging, and the final
signing at Pretoria - there appeared a
curious cross-alignment: President Steyn
and the Free Staters in strange harmony
with Milner, for unconditional surrender
and the continuance of the war; the
Transvaalers and Lord Kitchener for a
negotiated peace. The 1902 (Treaty of
Vereeniging' (as it came to be called), was
very far from unconditional surrender. It
was a negotiated settlement, in which the
Boers were promised eventual self-government,
'natives' were excluded from political
rights, the Dutch language was safeguarded,
and in which the Boers acknowledged
themselves, under protest and with
reluctance, to be British subjects. It
seemed at the time to be a civilized and
liberal settlement of a bitter struggle.
The Boers could hold that they had remained
unbeaten in the field; the spirit of
Afrikaner nationalism was unbroken.
The British had a nasty shock, but the reforms in the army and in diplomacy as a result of this war would actually prepare them well for the forth coming World War.
Written by G. H. Le May
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Location of Campaign
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Commanding Officers
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Sir Redvers Buller Lord Roberts of Kandahar Lord Kitchener of Khartoum
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Actors
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Boer Individuals
British Individuals
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Eyewitness Accounts
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Chasing a Phantom Army
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Bechuanaland in the Boer War by J. Ellenberger
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Audio
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BBC Making History Boer War Discussion
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Timeline
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1899
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Oct 7th
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Mobilization of British Army
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10th
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Boer Ultimatum
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12th
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Boers Invade Natal and Cape Colony
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14th
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Boers Besiege Mafeking and Kimberley
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20th
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Battle of Talana Hill
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21st
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Battle of Elandslaagte Station
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23rd
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Battle of Dundee
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30th
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Battle and Siege of Ladysmith
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31st
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Buller arrives in Cape Town with Army Corps
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Nov
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Churchill captured
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22nd
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Buller leaves for Natal
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Suggested Reading
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The Times History of War in South Africa Amery, L. London, 1900-9
The Relief of Ladysmith Atkins, J. London, 1900
The Anglo-Boer Wars: The British and the Afrikaners 1815 - 1902 Barthorp, M. Poole, 1987
The Boer War Belfield, E. London, 1975
The Natal Campaign Burleigh, B. London, 1900
Ladysmith Chisholm, R. London, 1979
Ian Hamilton's March Churchill, W. London, 1900
African Portraits Cloete, S.London, 1946
The Great Boer War Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur London, 1902
Cassell's History of the Boer War Danes, R. London, 1901
The Great Boer War Farwell, B. London, 1977
Queen Victoria's Enemies: An A-Z of British Colonial Warfare Featherstone, D. London, 1989
Mafeking, A Victorian Legend Gardner, B. London, 1966
The Lion's Cage Gardner, B. 1969
With General French and the Cavalry in South Africa Goldman, C. S. London, 1902
Thank God we kept the Flag flying: the Siege and Relief of Ladysmith, 1899 - 1900 Griffiths, K. London, 1974
Baden-Powell at Mafeking Grinnell-Milne, D. London, 1957
South African War Books Hackett, R. G. London, 1994
Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa, 1899 - 1900: Letters from the Front Hales, A. G. London, 1900
Uniforms Illustrated: The Boer War Haythornthwaite, P. J. London, 1987
The Boer States: Land and People Keane, A. H. London, 1900
Queen Victoria's Enemies: Southern Africa Knight, I. London, 1989
Goodbye Dolly Gray Kruger, R. London, 1959
To the Bitter End Lee, E. London, 1985
The Story of the War in South Africa, 1899 - 1902 Mahan, A. T. London, 1900
History of the War in South Africa Maurice, F and Grant, M. H. London, 1906 - 1910
French's Cavalry Campaign Maydon, J London, 1901
Stormberg, a Lost Opportunity Meintjes, J. Cape Town, 1969
The Anglo Boer War Meintjes, J. Cape Town, 1976
War Impressions Menpes, M. London, 1901
Boer War Memorabilia: the Collector's Guide Oosthuizen, P London, 1987
The Boer War Pakenham, T. London, 1979
Battles of the Boer War Pemberton, W. B. London, 1964
The Anglo-Boer Wars Pretorius, E. J. Cape Town, 1985
The Battle of Spion Kop Ransford, O.London, 1969
Commando: A Boer Journal of the Boer Reitz, D. London, 1933
The Siege of Ladysmith Sharp, G. London, 1976
Monuments and Battlefields of the Transvaal War 1881 and the South African War 1899 Smail, J. L. Cape Town, 1967
From Cape Town to Ladysmith: an Unfinished Record of the South African War Steevens, G. Edinburgh, 1900
The Colonials in South Africa, 1899 - 1902 Stirling, J. London, 1907
J. Buller's Campaign Symons, J. London, 1963
Military History of Perthshire Tullibardine and Macdonald, J. C. C. Perth, 1908
The South African War: The Anglo Boer War, 1899 - 1902 Warwick, P (Ed) London, 1980
After Pretoria, the Guerilla War Wilson, H. W. London, 1902
With the Flag to Pretoria Wilson, H. W. London, 1900/1
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