The South African Republic Police (; ZARP) was the police force of the former country, South African Republic, one of two Internationally recognized Boer countries of the mid 19th to early 20th century. The Boers often called the South African Republic by its acronym ZAR (Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek) while in the English-speaking world the republic was generally known as the Transvaal (after the region and territories it encompassed across the Vaal River). Members of the police force were known as ZARPs. After the Union of South Africa was established in 1910, the force was incorporated into the South African Police Force.
A para-military force
The ZARP was the mounted and foot police of the ZAR, a nation that was mainly rural with a strong frontier spirit as the Boers had only arrived in the Transvaal less than 50 years before during the Great Trek. The ZARP were established as a para-military police force whose primary function was to uphold the authority of the state, rather than upholding justice. The Boers were only a minority in the ZAR, and greatly feared the black majority, hence the emphasis on the ZARP as a para-military force intended more to inspire fear than respect. From 1881 to 1896 the ZARPS were part of the Artillery and then began a separate existence as an independent entity. The basis of the ZAR's military was the kommando system, under which all able-bodied white men could be called up for military service in the event of an emergency. The professional military of the Transvaal consisted of the Staatsartillerie (State Artillery), who in 1899 numbered 314 men. The para-military ZARPs comprised the closest the ZAR had to a professional infantry and cavalry. The ZARPs were divided into three sections; the Foot, Mounted and Native sections. Through the ZARPs were known to the burghers as the "disciplined force of the Transvaal", the ZARPs like the Staatsartillerie had serious disciplinary problems.
The Witwatersrand gold rush
In 1886, gold was discovered in the Witwatersrand, leading to the Witwatersrand Gold Rush that transformed the Transvaal from a poor, mainly rural republic into a wealthy state that began to urbanise. The boomtown of Johannesburg had emerged, becoming a city in less than a year. The gold rush attracted a vast number of uitlanders (Afrikaans for "outlanders"), the disparaging term used by the Boers to describe the foreigners who arrived in the Transvaal during the Witwatersrand Gold Rush who quickly became the majority in the new city of Johannesburg. Johannesburg was a highly multicultural city, being made up of people from all over the world, and as such greatly resented by the Boers, who feared becoming more of a minority in their own country. Before the gold rush, the ZAR had essentially no police force, with a system of night watchmen serving as the police force with justice being handled by the landdrost (magistrate), assisted by the wyksmeester (warden) who ran the local jail. In the event of a serious crime, the local field cornet would call out the kommando to handle the matter.
The founding of Johannesburg with its hundreds of thousands of miners drawn from all over South Africa and the world led to hundreds of bars, gambling houses and brothels being opened in the new city. For the Boers, a mostly rural people whose values were those of an ultra-conservative strain of Calvinism, the new city of Johannesburg together with its associated vices came as a considerable shock. The Boers regarded Johannesburg with its bars, brothels and gambling houses as the "new Babylon" that had unfortunately emerged on the highveld, a place of vice and immorality that needed to be brought under control. A particular obsession was the selling of alcohol to the black miners with one white British women living in Johannesburg, Florence Philips, described the black miners under the influence of alcohol as being "more like demons than men, or the smiling cheery creatures one had always been accustomed to see". The belief-which was frequently expressed in hysterical and racist language-that black men would engage in criminal acts while drunk led to urgent demands from the white community of Johannesburg that some means of policing the black community being created. To provide a means of controlling of the new city that had emerged on the highveld, the ZAR government created the ZARPs in September 1886 with a German immigrant, Karl Frederich von Brandis, being appointed the first police commissioner.