Transvaal is a place name — a region in the northeast of South Africa, always written with a capital T, and usually with 'the' in front of it ('he farmed in the Transvaal'). Its story is why students meet the word. In the 1830s groups of Dutch-descended farmers, the Boers, moved north away from British rule and settled beyond the Vaal River. They set up their own republic there, and it became a heartland of Afrikaner people, language and culture. Then gold was found near Johannesburg in 1886, huge money and huge numbers of newcomers arrived, and Britain wanted control. That pressure led to the Boer War (1899–1902). Later, under white rule, the Transvaal was one of South Africa's four provinces, with Pretoria as its capital. Here is the part people forget: it no longer exists as a province. In 1994, after apartheid ended, the area was cut up into Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Limpopo and part of North West. So it is now a historical name, still heard by older South Africans and still living on in things named after it — a plant called the Transvaal daisy, for example — but not a place you will find on a current map of provinces.