1. The General Context of Imperialism

See the Wikipedia year-by-year timeline
Methodology: a page offering advice on how to write a classic "commentaire de civilisation"

2. Brief  Military History of the War
Actors in the war :portraits of Joseph Chamberlain and Paul Kruger at Wikipedia
Articles on colonialism published in Le Monde Diplomatique
Read Reg Howe's essay "South African Gold Still Prey for the British Lion"

This Wikipedia article offers a good overview of New Imperialism

3. Historians 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
prepared text : extract from Arthur Conan Doyle's The Great Boer War, chapter 22.
(Extract = first four paragraphs from "On March 13...colder weather")

Copy of text for commentary

Link to Arthur Conan Doyle's The Great Boer War (1902)
(The same text is available at pinetreeweb )

Preface and Introduction to The Times History of the War in South Africa

4. Poets, dramatists and novelists 

Rudyard Kipling
Prepared text : "Bridge Guard on the Karoo"

See also "The Absent-Minded Beggar"
A page presenting the Daily Mail's publication of "The Absent-Minded Beggar"
Link to the Kipling Society
More Boer War Poetry

Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad's short stories "Heart of Darkness" (1901) and "An Outpost of Progress" offer a complex critique of Imperialism.

5. The popular media 

Prepared text : extract from H.G. Wells The New Machiavelli (1911) chapter 4.
 

Church music: cf. the well-known Anglican hymn "From Greenland's icy mountains"

Jingoism : extreme nationalism characterized especially by a belligerent foreign policy; chauvinistic patriotism.
The term "Jingoism" came into use after a popular music-hall song by G. W. Hunt, which appeared at the time of the Russo-Turkish War (1877-8), when anti-Russian feeling was running high and Disraeli (the British Prime Minister of the day) had ordered the Mediterranean fleet to Constantinople. The Russophobes became known as Jingos, and any belligerent patriotism has been labelled jingoism ever since.
The chorus of the song ran :

We don't want to fight,
But by Jingo if we do,
We've got the ships,
We've got the men,
And got the money too.
We've fought the Bear before,
And while we're Britons true,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople.

The Working Class

Some diaries of the war by ordinary soldiers:

Full text of a diary by mounted infantryman Private Collett of 2nd Middlesex Regiment, South Africa 1899-1901.
Transcription of the personal diary of “Private Walter Putland”, 1900-1902
Erskine Childer's "In the Ranks of the C.I.V." is part of the Gutenberg Project

7. Socialists
prepared text : extract from J.A. Hobson's Imperialism. A Study, 1902,1905,1938.

J.A. Hobson
Brief biography of John Atkinson Hobson at Wikipedia
The Library of Economics and Liberty offers the full text of J.A. Hobson, Imperialism. A Study, 1902, 1905, 1938.
The Modern History Sourcebook provides the full text of Vladimir Illyich Lenin (1870-1924), Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1916
A Julius Wernher memorial lecture gives a not-too-inaccurate portrait of one of the Rand millionaires

8. Pacifists 
Prepared text : extract from Gandhi's Satyagraha in South Africa (1928)

9. International perspectives 
Prepared text : letter from Mark Twain (1900)

Richard Harding Davis's Notes of a War Correspondent.

10. Boer perspectives
Preparation: research on Boer historiography 

Full text of Deneys Reitz's Commando
Other texts from the Boer War Bookshelf  at Gutenborg
See also Gilles Teulié, Les Afrikaners et la guerre anglo-boer, Montpellier, CERPANAC, 2000.

11. Black Perspectives 
  Preparation : research on Black History in South Africa 

Full text of Lady Butler's Native Races and the War (1900)
Biography of Henry Sylvester Williams at Spartacus
Essay on "Gandhi and the Black People of South Africa" (a controversial subject)
"The Regeneration of Africa", an article by Pixley ka Isaka Seme, in The African Abroad, April 5, 1906
Biography of John Langalibalele Dube (1871-1946), nationalist, Congregationalist minister and admirer of Booker T.Washington.
An essay on the life and times of W.B. Rubusana (1858-1936)
A lecture by renowned historian Shula Marks (SOAS) on "Jan Smuts, race and the South African war"
A short essay on the historical linkages between Afro-Americans and black South Africans

 12. Continuous assessment: a short (guided) commentary in class.