by Ernst Roets
Map 4: Early human migrations, indicating the ‘Out of Africa’ theory40
The Sotho people are said to have lived in southern Africa since the fifth century,41 displacing the aboriginal inhabitants of South Africa.42 According to early Portuguese reports, the Tsonga had lived in Mozambique in 1554. Their survival was threatened by the Nguni people, who forced them to flee across the Limpopo River and settle in South Africa.43 The Venda had crossed the Limpopo River and settled in the north of what we know as Limpopo and the Soutpansberg area at the beginning of the 18th century.44
The Khoisan is made up of two distinct groups: the San (also known as Bushmen) and the Khoikhoi (also known as Khoekhoen). The Khoisan are descendants of people of the Later Stone Age and are accepted to have been the true indigenous people to South Africa.45 One of the richest Khoisan cave painting sites is said to be about 4 000 years old.46 The evolutionary geneticist Pontus Skoglund believes that the Khoisan was the largest population on earth at some point.47 Having once been spread across large parts of South Africa,48 the Khoisan’s distribution became restricted to the areas west of the Fish River and in deserts throughout the region.49
‘The Khoi and San generally were nomadic; they moved from place to place and enjoyed the prosperity and territory that was fertile,’ says Mosioua Lekota, struggle veteran and president of the Congress of the People (Cope). ‘But as we arrived in these big formations, they got driven out, defeated, taken over. Many cooperated, but many others ran away. No human being would have chosen to live in dry territories like the Kalahari when there was a whole territory that had plenty of water and game. Even animals would not live in dry territories, when there are territories with lots of water and grass, etc. We began to dispossess and to take these territories on. We are actually the second arrivals – I am speaking of the Bantu-speaking sections – and not the first and original that had been and so on.’50
Since the various black tribes that settled in South Africa did not have the technology for extracting groundwater, or for reticulating irrigation water, their settlements were restricted to wetter areas. More arid areas could only be occupied for limited periods of time. With only about 30% of South Africa’s surface area capable of supporting agriculture in the absence of this technology, black tribes were restricted by their lifestyles to such areas.51
On 6 April 1652, Jan van Riebeeck set foot ashore in Table Bay. He had arrived with three ships, the Dromedaris, Goede Hoop and Reijger. As an employee of the Vereenighde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) (English: Dutch East India Company) Van Riebeeck was given instructions to establish a refreshment station in a small area where ships could break the long voyage between the Netherlands and the VOC’s main settlement at Batavia in Java.52 By 1657, nine employees of the VOC had been dismissed from service with the intention of allowing them to become full-time commercial farmers. They were known as vrijburgers (English: free citizens).
Friction had already developed between the white settlers and the local Khoikhoi people.53 What made the Cape Colony unique compared to other European settlements, writes historian Hermann Giliomee, was not that violence occurred between the settlers and the indigenous people, but that the Dutch settlers had decided to trade with the locals and to employ them on a large scale, rather than to exterminate or to drive them out.54 Contrary to the belief that is widely held and frequently propagated by political leaders,55 the Dutch did not enslave local black people living in South Africa. Laws of the VOC determined that local people may not be conquered or enslaved.56 Slaves were imported from Angola, Dahomey (Benin), Madagascar, Mozambique, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Indonesia, India and other countries.57
A further uniqueness in the Dutch settlement was that the purpose of the settlement was not to claim a piece of land by the so-called ‘right of discovery’. ‘[T]he Dutch had neither a basis for such claims in southern Africa nor an interest in acquiring more land than they needed for the maintenance and protection of their fort and garden in the shadow of Table Mountain,’58 writes George Fredrickson who taught American history at Stanford University. ‘In South Africa ... the official ideology of the colonizers put a much greater premium on trade than on control of the land.’59
Initially, the relationship between the Dutch and the local Khoikhoi was good, as the Khoikhoi had a long experience of trading with ships of various European nations in Table Bay. Only when the Khoikhoi began to realise that the Dutch had arrived to settle for good and were slowly increasing in numbers and enlarging their land holdings, did tension begin to develop. The first Khoikhoi-Dutch War broke out in 1659 and was resolved by a treaty acknowledging the rights of white landowners to occupy parts of the territory that was disputed.60 The Khoikhoi-Dutch war of 1673–1677 broke out after the murder of white elephant hunters (presumably also farmers) by a local tribe.61 After the Dutch who had also become known as the Boers started farming their own cattle and a smallpox epidemic broke out in the Khoikhoi community, many of the Khoikhoi became herdsmen, ox trainers and wagon drivers for the Boers.62 The smallpox epidemic led to a devastating loss of numbers among the Khoikhoi people. Entire tribes disappeared as a result of the epidemic.
Meaning of Boer
The word Boer has a Dutch and Afrikaans origin. Originally referring to farmers, the word was also used to refer to Afrikaners during the 17th and 18th century because of the fact that they had a particular speciality in agriculture. The term received a new meaning with the establishment of the former Boer Republics in the 19th century. The word was, however, used not only to refer to farmers, but to the white Afrikaans-speaking community in South Africa. The words Boer and Afrikaner have become similar to an extent. However, a further meaning to this word has also developed during the 20th century. Apart from the agricultural and cultural contexts of this word, it has also gained a derogatory political context. Referring to someone as a Boer or a Boertjie in a political context is often done with a derogatory intention, although the term is generally not regarded as derogatory or offensive by Afrikaners. The word boorish developed in Britain and is derived from the word boer. It is generally regarded as an insult. To be boorish is to be a rough or a bad-mannered person,63 or to be a rustic, clownish fellow.64 To be a boor is to be an uncultured person.65
Between 1688 and 1700, about 200 French Huguenots arrived in the Cape.66 A significant number of Germans also settled there.67 Giliomee writes that a significant number of mixed marriages between white and black people occurred in those early days of the Dutch settlement.68 This was partly a result of the fact that there were about twice as many white men as white women in the Cape District and three white men for every white woman in the inlands. The famous genealogical researcher Johannes Heese wrote that an estimated 7% of Afrikaner families of the twentieth century had non-European ancestral mothers.69
Upon expanding towards the Eastern Cape, the Boers reached the Fish River in the 1770s and collided with another expanding population, the Xhosa branch of the Nguni-speaking people. A conflict over land between the Boers and the Xhosa soon erupted,70 which resulted in several wars between the two nations before the Xhosa were driven out by the British in 1812.71
BRITISH ANNEXATION AND THE GREAT TREK
Meanwhile, the Cape had become colonised by the British, first temporarily from 1795 to 1803 and then permanently in 1806.72 Slavery was abolished in the early 1830s, largely as a result of white farmers in the wine regions of the Cape freeing their slaves, albeit mostly for economic reasons. In 1825, the British government lowered the tariff on the importing of wines from Europe, dealing a severe blow to the local wine industry. The wine industry and the whole Cape economy fell into a depression, which resulted in a dramatic drop in the value of slaves. Slave owners who had bought slaves on credit faced bankruptcy. This resulted in a demand for the abolishment of slavery and for the British government to pay compensation to slave owners as a result of this.
Frustration among the Boer people as a result of political, economic and social issues cul
minated in the Great Trek of 1835 to 1846, during which period several thousand Voortrekkers packed their ox wagons and migrated inwards towards what is today known as South Africa.73
However, the Great Trek was preceded by three Commission Treks that moved out of the Cape in 1835. One went to what is today known as Namibia, one to the Soutpansberg, in the northern part of Limpopo, and one to Natal. The goal was to establish whether there were open lands for the Voortrekkers to occupy and whether black tribes were prepared to negotiate with the Voortrekkers in order to sell them land. ‘The trek to Natal (led by Piet Uys) was especially significant,’ says historian Liza-Marie Oberholzer.
‘Upon arrival in Natal, they negotiated with [the Zulu king]Dingane for a piece of land between the Thukela and the Mzimvubu Rivers. Dingane agreed to this. Upon his return, Uys communicated this with other potential Voortrekkers at that stage. That is why they chose Natal [as destination] initially.’74 Other than Uys’s negotiations, the Commission Trek found that most of the land appeared to be empty. ‘They found themselves riding in open grassland, seeing good stock land areas and nobody,’ says Ernest Pringle. ‘That’s fundamentally why they were able to “trek” with their women and children and cattle without being molested through a lot of South Africa at the time. Try it now – you wouldn’t get very far.’75
Fredrickson points out that the Voortrekkers had outflanked the Xhosa people by moving into areas where there seemed to be more open land and where they could continue their pastoral existence in a more secure environment. ‘But that security turned out to be illusory; they soon came into conflict with other African peoples such as the Zulu, the Ndebele, and the Sotho, who were no more willing than the Xhosa to tolerate white encroachments. Consequently, warfare with indigenous peoples continued to be a central element in the Boer experience.’76
Several legendary battles were fought, including the battle of Vegkop (1836) against the Ndebele of Mzilikazi, and the battles of Italeni and Blood River (1838) against the Zulus as the Voortrekkers were moving towards the northern and eastern parts of the country.
It should be noted that the Great Trek commenced just as the Mfecane (or Difaqane, as it is known in Sotho and Tswana, al meaning crushing, scattering, forced dispersal or forced migration) was coming to a close. The Mfecane was a period of widespread, forced dispersal among black tribes throughout most of South Africa, sparked largely by the war and expansion campaigns by the Zulu king, Shaka, and the Ndebele chief, Mzilikazi.77 Although the death toll of the Mfecane has never been satisfactorily determined, normal estimates put the total number of deaths at between one and two million.78
The Mfecane was undoubtedly the single greatest event of land invasion, land dispossession and genocide that South Africa has ever experienced. If the low figure of one million deaths is used as a ballpark number, it would imply that the destruction of the Mfecane (in terms of death toll) was roughly ten times that of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) and 50 times that of apartheid. This is calculated considering an approximate death toll of 100 000 during the Anglo-Boer War and a death toll of 21 000 people as a result of political violence during apartheid. It should be noted that, according to the South African Human Rights Committee, the death of only about 600 of the 21 000 people killed in political violence during apartheid was directly attributable to the overt actions of government security forces.
The Mfecane came to an end with the arrival of the Voortrekkers and the resulting battles between the Voortrekkers and the Zulus and the Ndebele, which resulted in the defeat of Dingane and the flight of Mzilikazi to the north of the Limpopo River into what is today known as Zimbabwe.79
The result of the Mfecane, during which entire tribes were annihilated or absorbed, was that vast areas of land in South Africa were left uninhabited, just as the Great Trek was commencing. Unoccupied buffer zones were effectively created between hostile ethnic groups, some of which were quite extensive and in relatively arable areas, such as the Oranje-Vrijstaat (English: Orange Free State) and the southern areas of what would later become the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR), and the Republic of Natalia. This was said to have had a major effect on the Voortrekkers’ decision to emigrate, as well as which areas they chose to settle on.80
This is especially evident in travellers’ reports and the diaries of the Voortrekkers. The diary of Voortrekker religious leader Erasmus Smit, among others, creates an impression of the destruction of the Mfecane. The establishment in many areas of farmers who were moving in and the subsequent Voortrekkers therefore took place without any opposition worth mentioning in areas in which black groups had resided in the few centuries prior to that, and who now sheltered in the mountains and ravines, writes historian Jan Visagie.81
The perspective of the Voortrekkers was that they had settled in uninhabited land and thus had the right of residence, while the perspective of the surviving black tribes was that they had not left permanently the areas where they had resided before the Mfecane.82 The law of conquest, writes historian Louis Changuion, was recognised in Africa at the time and was especially applied where black tribes waged war against each other. Mthimkhulu III, king of the Hlubi people, explains: ‘In our tradition, if you are being conquered, then that land belongs to me. Even your people belongs to me. If I come and fight you and I conquer you, then you must know I’m taking over that land and I’m taking over your people – you must follow me wherever I go. And I will be ruler there because you are defeated. That’s how it worked a long time ago.’83 With the commencement of the Great Trek, black tribes were complaining that white people were driving them from their homes.84 One such example was the defeat of Mzilikazi by Voortrekker leaders Andries Potgieter and Piet Uys, who claimed ownership by right of conquest of Mzilikazi’s land – the land that Mzilikazi had obtained by conquest shortly before. Using South Africa’s provinces as they are known today as reference, this land included all of Gauteng, most of the North West and Limpopo, about half the Free State and a small section of the Northern Cape.85
Furthermore, a series of trade deals between the Voortrekkers and black tribes took place during the Great Trek, many of which are still held in the state archives.86 In some cases, occupied land was also given back to people who had lived there before they were driven off their land during the Mfecane. One such case was when Moilwa of the Hurutshe visited Potgieter at Mooirivier and requested him to allow his people to live on the land that they had inhabited before they were driven out by Mzilikazi. Potgieter agreed to this and assisted with the drawing of borders for the Hurutshe area, near where Zeerust is situated today.87
A stark reality was, however, that an important difference existed between the Voortrekkers and black tribes in their understanding of landownership and land rights.88
The most famous treaty for obtaining land was certainly the one between Voortrekker leader Piet Retief and the Zulu king Dingane. On 5 November 1837, Retief and Dingane reached an agreement on the purchase of land. Dingane again promised to sell the land he had earlier promised to Uys when he had visited Dingane during the Commission Trek to the Voortrekkers in exchange for the return of Dingane’s cattle that had been stolen by the Tlokwa under Sekonyela. After obtaining the lost cattle, Retief departed with a party of 60 Voortrekkers, accompanied by another 30 coloured helpers, to the Zulu capital of Mgungundhlovu. A written agreement between Retief and Dingane was signed on 6 February 1838. As Retief’s party was about to depart, Dingane invited them to bid farewell during a traditional ceremony. Appearing unarmed before the Zulu king, they drank beer and watched a ceremony by Zulu dancers. Suddenly Dingane gave the order for the ‘wizards’ to be killed. They were dragged to the ‘Hill of murder’, KwaMatiwane, and slaughtered.89 Dingane then instructed about 67 000 of his warriors to exterminate all the remaining Voortrekkers within the boundaries of Natal. They attacked Voortrekker camps in the night and killed more than 500 people, the majority of whom were women and children.90
In retaliation the Voortrekkers commissio
ned a commando of 470 men, led by Andries Pretorius, to confront the Zulus. This led to the Battle of Blood River, where Pretorius’s commando was attacked by a Zulu army of more than 10 000 men. Prior to the battle, religious leader Sarel Cilliers drafted a vow to God that if they were to be victorious in the upcoming battle, they would build a church and that that day would be regarded as a day of worship in the years to follow to give the glory of the victory to God. The battle took place on 16 December 1838. On the Voortrekker side, three were wounded (including Pretorius), but no lives were lost. The day after the battle, three thousand dead Zulu bodies were counted by the Voortrekkers.91
For the Voortrekkers, the battle resulted in a dramatic boost in Afrikaner nationalism and a sense of uitverkorenheid (English: divine selection) of the Afrikaner people.92 After the battle, Dingane’s half-brother Mpande joined forces with the Voortrekkers, eventually defeating Dingane before he was crowned the king of the Zulus and a vassal of the Republic of Natalia, arguably the first republic in Africa,93 that was established by the Voortrekkers in 1839.94
The Republic of Natalia was, however, annexed by the British and declared a British colony in 1844, five years after its founding.95 In 1887, after the Anglo-Zulu War, Zululand was also annexed by the British and a large part of its coastal area was given to white farmers.96
Although British influence can be partly credited for the abolition of slavery in South Africa, Britain also embarked on a process of introducing racialised laws into South Africa. Before the British arrived in South Africa, there was no law preventing interracial marriages, nor on segregated residential areas. With the annexation of Natal, the British also started implementing pass laws there, like in the Cape Colony. This was to prevent black people from moving into their (the British) areas or from moving between different districts without permission from the British government. Long before the establishment of the Boer Republics, black people were not allowed in British streets after dark and were forced to carry pass books. This policy was eventually recorded into legislation in the form of the Franchise and Ballot Act of 1892 and the Natal Legislative Assembly Bill of 1894. The General Pass Regulations Bill of 1905 (when South Africa consisted of four British colonies) denied black people the right to vote, restricted them to determined areas and codified the pass book system. At least ten other so-called ‘apartheid laws’ were implemented by the British government before the National Party (regarded as the ‘architects of apartheid’) took power in 1948.97