Battle of Rooiwal The Battle of Rooiwal was an engagement of the Second Boer War . It took place on 11 April 1902 and resulted in a victory by a British force commanded by Colonel Robert Kekewich over a Boer commando led by Generals Ferdinandus Jacobus Potgieter and Jan Kemp . The action consisted of a Boer attack on horseback on an entrenched British hillside position in the valley of Rooiwal , near Klerksdorp in the Western Transvaal . The Boers were attempting to break out of a British encircling manoeuvre . Their attack was repulsed at some cost to the Boers in killed and injured . This was the end of the war in the Western Transvaal and also the last major battle of the Anglo - Boer War . Background - the war in the Western Transvaal . By 1902 , there were roughly 3 , 000 Boer guerrilla s operating in Western Transvaal . There were three separate Boer commandos under the overall command of De La Rey . By this time , many Boer fighters had surrendered and some were now working for the British as scouts . Those who remained in the field were referred to as , ' bitter - einders ' . Their situation was very difficult as the British had stripped the veld of food and supplies and had systematically burned Boer farms and homes to deny the guerrillas shelter . Nevertheless , De La Rey ' s men were able to supply themselves with weapons , food and clothing which they had captured from the British . They also remained a dangerous enemy and on a number of occasions they had scored victories against British troops . On 24 February 1902 , for example , they had mauled a British column at Yser Spruit and on 7 March had captured a British general ( Lord Methuen ) and six field guns at Tweebosch , after routing his command . One reason for the continued Boers successes was the poor quality of some of the British troops in the theatre . Herbert Kitchener had over 16 , 000 troops operating in the Western Transvaal , but many of them were not regulars , but poorly trained Imperial Yeomanry . Kitchener ' s strategy for bringing the war to an end was to build fortified blockhouse s across the veld and to mount ' drives ' or sweeps of the countryside with mobile columns . The first such sweep in the spring of 1902 lasted from 23 March to 30 March , but produced few results in terms of destroying the Boer commandos . Indeed the British troops suffered a reverse at Boschbult , taking 178 casualties . Hamilton ' s drive . On 6 April , Kitchener put Colonel Ian Hamilton in command of another drive to try to trap De La Rey ' s fighters . The plan was to ' squeeze ' the Boers against the British mobile columns and a line of blockhouses and entrenchments at Klerksdorp . Colonel Robert Kekewich , who was in command of one of Kitchener ' s columns , dug in at Rooiwal to strengthen his left flank . Having mistakenly gotten tangled up with another British column under Colonel Henry Rawlinson , Kekewich was ordered by Hamilton to proceed to Rooiwal , where he arrived on 10 April . This change of plan proved to be a fortunate one for the British , because the Boers had scouted the Rooiwal position earlier and found it weakly defended . Dug in on the hillside at Rooiwal were about 3 , 000 mounted infantry , supported by 6 field gun s and 2 pom pom s . The battle . The Boers , however , did not know of the British deployment and they still believed that Rooiwal was only lightly held . One of their commandos , under Commandant Potgieter and General Kemp , therefore tried to overrun the British position early on the morning of 11 April , in an effort to escape Hamilton ' s ' drive ' . Potgieter had around 1 , 700 men , all mounted riflemen . At around 7 : 15 am on 11 April , they charged the British position on horseback , firing from the saddle . A British picket of 40 mounted infantry was overrun , taking 20 casualties . Kekewich ' s position was a strong one , but the sight of the charging Boers panicked some of the inexperienced British troops and a number of Yeoman units fled the scene of the battle and were not stopped until they were a mile away from the fighting . A Lieutenant Carlos Hickie managed to stop the stampede with a mixture of pleas and threats . In addition , a number of the regular British officers on the scene were very critical of the ' wild ' shooting of their men . In spite of this , however , the Boer charge was stopped about 30 metres from the British line by artillery and rifle fire . Fifty Boers were killed outright and more were wounded . Among the dead was Potgieter , wearing a distinctive blue shirt . Kekewich later commented that , ' one good company of infantry could have killed 300 Boers ' . The surviving Boers made good their retreat . Boer fire , delivered from the saddle , had produced about 50 casualties in the British line . Ian Hamilton and Rawlinson arrived on the scene just as the fighting was ending . However , Hamilton delayed the pursuit of the beaten Boers as he feared that the retreat was a ruse and that his men would fall into Boer ambush es . At about 9 : 45 , or 90 minutes after the Boer charge had been repulsed , Hamilton sent his mounted troops in pursuit of the enemy . They captured a further 50 Boers and re - captured the artillery lost at Tweebosch . Kitchener had issued orders that Boers captured wearing British uniforms were to be shot . However , although a number of wounded Boers were indeed wearing captured British khaki , Hamilton ordered that they be spared . Aftermath . The battle was a setback for the Boers , but their casualties were relatively light and most of their fighters escaped the action unscathed . In any case , peace talks to end the war were already imminent . They began on 19 May in Pretoria . De La Rey , the Boers ' commander in the Western Transvaal was one of the Boer negotiators .