Great Boer War Page 2
After the Huguenots came a number of German peasants, lured by the offer of free land, and these three nationalities—Dutch, French, and German—alloyed to become a new and distinct people called Boers (the word means “farmers”) or Afrikaners, speaking a variation of seventeenth-century Dutch known at first as Taal and then as Afrikaans. Later the mixture was enriched by the addition of Britons, mostly Irish and Scots.
For a century after the last war with the Hottentots the colonists experienced a relatively peaceful time, raising cattle and crops, quarrelling with the Dutch officials, moving ever further from government control, seeking ever more land, and breeding themselves into what Conan Doyle called “the most rugged, virile, unconquerable race ever seen upon earth.” Almost from the beginning they were discontented with the rule of the Dutch East India Company. In spite of the Company’s efforts to contain the colony within controllable limits and to curb the wanderlust of its people, the boundaries of the colony expanded, mostly to the northeast, as people moved further and further inland. About the middle of the eighteenth century they collided with the blacks in the neighborhood of the Fish River.
The blacks—called Kaffirs until the twentieth century and now Bantu, after the type of languages they speak—crossed the northern edge of what is now the Republic of South Africa, perhaps driven south by more warlike tribes in the interior. They remained at first in the rich agricultural lands north of the Kei and Orange rivers; later they began to move south between the Drakensberg range and the Indian Ocean until eventually but inevitably they encountered the advancing whites. Blacks and whites competed for grazing lands and began a sporadic conflict which was to last for more than a century until the blacks were beaten into submission and settled down to living and working by the white man’s rules.
In 1795, when a French-inspired republic replaced the royal government in Holland, the Prince of Orange fled to England and asked the British to take charge of Dutch colonial possessions until he could return to his throne, thus ending the 143-year reign of the Dutch East Africa Company in South Africa. The Afrikaners liked the British government no better than they had the Dutch; they had, in fact, already developed an almost inbred detestation of any form of government. They continually complained, protested, revolted, and made themselves generally troublesome.
In 1802, as one result of the Peace of Amiens, Cape Colony was restored to Holland, but less than four years later, in January 1806, a British expeditionary force captured it to keep it out of the hands of the French and in 1814 it was formally ceded to Britain. This time the British came to stay. But British concepts of justice and humanity conflicted with those of Britain’s truculent white South African subjects. From the beginning, her policies were designed to protect what she regarded as the interests of the natives and to prevent the abuse of slaves and Hottentot servants, who often lived in a state close to slavery. To the Boers it seemed that their British rulers were unduly interested in the welfare of these people, for the Boers believed in the right of every white man to “beat his own nigger” and that the relationship between a master and his servants and slaves was a private, domestic affair of no legitimate concern to the government.
In 1813 the British instituted a series of circuit courts to hear the complaints of servants against their masters. This was promptly damned as the “Black Court”; the Boers were incensed that the word of a slave or servant should carry any weight in a court of law.
In 1815 a Boer named Frederick Cornelius Bezuidenhout, who owned a farm on Baviaan’s River in eastern Cape Colony, ignored the summonses of three circuit courts to appear and answer charges of cruelty to a Hottentot servant. A lieutenant and twelve Hottentot policemen sent to arrest him were fired on as they approached his farm. They returned the fire and Bezuidenhout was killed. This incident was to have repercussions that lasted for well over a century.
Eastern Cape Colony was inhabited by tough-minded Boer frontiersmen, accustomed to fighting for what they had and to getting what they wanted. To them it appeared monstrous that the government would send Hottentots to arrest a white man. And even more monstrous that the government would sanction Hottentots killing a white man—and this over a mere matter of a man’s treatment of his servant. Bezuidenhout’s brother led his neighbours in a hopeless revolt: sixty men against the British Empire.
The revolution was soon crushed. Forty-seven men were captured and tried. Thirty were sentenced to be banished and six to be executed. One of the six was pardoned; the other five were publicly hanged at Slachter’s (or Slagter’s) Nek.
The executions were, from the British point of view, a simple act of justice; they underestimated or failed to understand their significance for the Boers. Politically they were a serious blunder: they created martyrs. The Bezuidenhouts and the five hanged rebels were enshrined in Boer martyrology, and the hanging at Slachter’s Nek is remembered to this day as an example of British repression, brutality, and injustice.
The problems of the British rulers multiplied. On the frontiers there was constant dissatisfaction and unrest, and a series of wars with the Bantu. The rise of the Zulu nation to the north and its expansion into the lands of its neighbours drove tens of thousands of Bantu south, over-populating the land on the northeastern frontier and increasing the friction between blacks and whites. The British added to the problem by settling some 6,000 Germans there. The Boers complained of too much government and the British settlers of too little. Both grumbled about their insecurity. The garrisons of Imperial troops were indeed too small, for the mother country was unwilling to bear the expense of providing soldiers and the colony could not afford to hire them. Then too the British continued their attempts to protect the rights of Hottentots, Bantu, Asians, and Coloureds (those of mixed races). British policy regarding these people raised for the Boers the frightening spectre of equality.
In 1828 laws were passed which permitted the Hottentots to move about freely without a pass in the land which had once been theirs, and attempts were made to limit what had been the near-absolute authority of their white masters. Then, by act of Parliament in distant London, the British abolished slavery. Every one of the 39,021 slaves in the colony was to be emancipated by 1 December 1834—just at the time of the wheat harvest, noted the Boers bitterly. Compensation was promised, but instead of the more than £ 3 million expected, only £ 1,247,401 was provided—payable in London. In South Africa, where the economy was based on slave labour, this spelled ruin for many farmers. The Boers were enraged at this government philanthropy at their expense. Meetings were held, and many determined to flee whatever the cost. “All England’s power on land and water will not prevent the emigration of her subjects from her territories,”1 said the Reverend Daniel Lindley.a Deneys Reitz, himself a Boer, speaking more than a century later, said: “Knowing my countrymen as I do, I think the cause of their leaving was not so much hatred of British rule as dislike of any rule.”2
In the autumn of 1836 advance parties were sent north to scout the land beyond the Karoo, beyond the Orange River, beyond the frontiers of Cape Colony and the reach of the British. There on the high veld the scouts found a vast land largely depopulated by the tribal wars of the Bantu. In February 1837 the first large body of voortrekkers, as the pioneers were called, moved out of Cape Colony under their leader, Pieter Retief (1780-1838).
By September some two hundred Boers had crossed the Orange River. By the end of the year there were more than a thousand ox wagons on the high veld between the Orange and the Vaal rivers. It was the beginning of that mass migration the Boers call the Great Trek.
2
VOORTREKKERS AND THEIR REPUBLICS
The voortrekkers moved in two directions: north onto the high veld and northeast into Natal. They travelled at the pace of the ox wagon and their grazing herds, taking with them their families and servants, their guns and their Bibles, their faith in God and in themselves. They quickly became a nomadic, pastoral, self-sufficient people, leading remote and isolated
lives, yet united in their common language, religious beliefs, occupations, race, cultural attitudes, and, above all else, in their fierce desire for independence, for which they willingly faced savage beasts, lived among primitive men, and suffered all the hardships of a life almost completely divorced from civilized comforts.
The voortrekker vrow gave birth to her young while lying in the wagon’s bed or on the bare red sands of the veld. To survive, a child had to be hardy and strong; it grew up among horses and oxen and wild beasts, the boys learning early to ride, shoot, and manage oxen. The child’s world was the great open veld and the narrow confines of his own family, ruled by its patriarch, who presided over children, grandchildren, daughters-in-law, servants, and slaves. His home was the sturdy ox wagon, and there were no schools. From itinerant predikants (ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church) and from relatives the child tried to learn to read the Bible in Dutch. There was no other literature available, wanted, or even tolerated, so that children grew up suspicious of all beyond their own narrow culture. Early in life they developed into strong men and tough-fibred women.
Wherever they went the Boers established republics. A quarrelsome, contumacious people, they argued endlessly among themselves about where to settle, about religion (there were degrees of Calvinistic strictness), and about who their leaders should be. When feelings ran too high, the dissidents took to their horses and ox wagons and moved on to found other republics elsewhere. The little republic founded at Winburg, the first important settlement north of the Orange, split four ways. The trekker states often took their names from the districts or towns (usually mere villages) which they made their capitals—Potchefstroom, Lydenburg, Zoutpansberg, and Winburg—but some had more colourful names such as Stellaland, Goshen, and New Republic. All of these either were annexed by the British or were absorbed into the two large republics which eventually emerged.
The trekker republics had certain features in common: the use of Roman Dutch law, a state church, a white male franchise, the obligation of every man and boy over fifteen to turn out with his horse, wagon, and provisions to fight a common enemy, and, most important of all, an all-powerful legislative body called a volksraad. The chief officials were the president and the commandant-general; each district had a landdrost (magistrate), a commandant who led the district’s commando in time of war, and a veld kornet (field cornet) who served as an administrator for both the landdrost and the commandant. All were elected. Even in war, most of the major decisions were made not by the commandant alone but by a krygsraad (council of war) which was usually attended by everybody in the commando. It was almost true, as was said, that every Boer was a general.
When Piet Retief led his people out of Cape Colony, he took them to Natal, where in February 1838 he concluded an agreement with Dingaan, King of the Zulus, giving him and his voortrekkers a large tract of land between the Umzimvubu and Tugela rivers. No sooner was the agreement signed, however, than Dingaan called out his warriors, killed Retief and those with him, and sent his impis to attack Boer laagers scattered thoughout Natal. Of the 3,500 voortrekkers there, at least 350 men, women, and children fell under the slashing, stabbing assegais of the Zulus.
Retief’s place as trek leader was taken by Andries Pretorius (1798-1853), who at once assembled a 500-man commando to fight the Zulus. It was a handful against a horde, but it was ever characteristic of the Boers to be disdainful of numerically superior enemies and to put their faith in their own fighting capabilities and in God—and when the Boers put their trust in God they expected His active cooperation and support. No Christian people in modern times have so firmly and wholeheartedly believed in the righteousness of their causes and so confidently relied on God’s support.
To move into the vicinity of the enemy, take up a good defensive position, and wait to be attacked was a characteristic Boer tactic. In a vast land where occupation of ground was strategically unimportant and where the enemy invariably possessed superiority in numbers, this was sound military doctrine, for attackers generally suffer greater losses than defenders. This was the tactic used by Pretorius; he led his commando into Zululand and beside the Blood River formed a strong laager—ox wagons in a circle, prepared for defence—and there, on 16 December 1838, the Zulus found them and launched a savage unsuccessful attack. Unable to close with their enemy, a tactic imposed on them by the short assegai, they fell before the flintlocks of the Boers. It is said that 3,000 Zulus were killed at a cost to the Boers of 3 wounded. The number of Zulus killed is doubtless an exaggeration, but certainly the Boers attained a remarkable victory. It is still remembered, for 16 December became Dingaan’s Day (now called Day of the Covenant in keeping with the oath of perpetual remembrance taken by Pretorius and his men), and each year it is celebrated by Afrikaners as a proud day of solemn thanksgiving.
A year after Pretorius’s victory the voortrekkers raised their own flag at Durban, but their fragile republic, Natalia, was not allowed to grow. In 1842 a British force under that redoubtable old warrior Sir Harry Smith (1787-1860), hero of the First Sikh War, occupied Durban, dismantled the republic, raised the Union Jack, and three years later formally annexed Natal to the British Empire. It was to become the most British of all the South African colonies, for the Boers left, carrying with them an abiding sense of injury and injustice, a bitter hatred of the British who had robbed them of the land for which they had fought and bled.
The Boers from Natal joined those from the Cape in climbing onto the high veld, and ten years after the start of the Great Trek there were perhaps 15,000 Boers there. Most stayed in the land lying between the Orange and Vaal rivers, but some trekked on, ever northward, beyond the Vaal and up into the wild Zoutpansberg; soon the whole area between the Orange and the Limpopo (160,000 square miles) was sprinkled with trekker republics.
The British could not quite decide what, if anything, they should do about these people. They did not like the idea of Boer republics on the flanks of Natal and Cape Colony; missionaries continually protested against the enslavement of the natives by the Boers and demanded that Britain exercise its power to bring British justice onto the high veld; on the other hand, most politicians in London quailed at the expense and difficulty of attempting to administer these vast, sparsely populated lands inhabited by such troublesome people. Wavering British attitudes were reflected in wavering British policies over a long period.
In 1847 Sir Harry Smith became governor of Cape Colony and claimed authority over the land between the Orange and Vaal rivers. The Boers there, led by Pretorius, took up arms to defend their independence, but Sir Harry crossed the Orange with a mixed force of regulars, colonials, and Griquasb and defeated them at Boomplaats. Three years later the land was formally annexed as the Orange River Territory.
The Boers could set up all the republics they chose, but they could never really consider themselves free until and unless the British ceased to consider them British subjects and agreed not to interfere with them. Actually, as they eventually learned, they would not be safe even then. However, the voortrekkers in the three republics beyond the Vaal—Potchefstroom, Zoutpansberg, and Lydenburg—having at last trekked far enough away from all British authority, did manage to achieve formal recognition of their independence. In January 1852 Boers and Britons met at the Zand (Sand) River and signed a document which became known as the Zand River Convention. The meeting appears to have been somewhat haphazard—not all the Boers were represented; the authority of the British commissioners was vague—and the document itself was informal, being entitled: “Minutes of a Meeting between . . . H.M. Assistant Commissioners . . . and a Deputation of Emigrant Farmers Residing North of the Vaal River.” There were a number of clauses about facilitating trade, extradition of criminals, and free movement across the frontier, but the meat of the document was the agreement on the part of the Boers to prohibit slavery and the promise of the British not to interfere with their internal affairs. The British thus gave up all claim to the area between the Vaal and
the Limpopo rivers.
In February 1854 another Anglo-Boer agreement was signed: the Bloemfontein Convention gave independence to the inhabitants of the land between the Orange and the Vaal. The Zand River Convention had promised not to impose British rule; the Bloemfontein Convention promised to withdraw the existing British authority, to abandon all responsibility not only for the Boers but for the 40,000 Bantu (mostly Basutos) and Coloureds who lived there. The actual withdrawal took place without celebration or ceremony when the 300 men of the garrison at Bloemfontein marched south and crossed the Orange into Cape Colony. It would be nearly half a century before British troops recrossed that boundary.
The new Orange Free State, as the Orange River Territory became, went through three presidents in the first ten years of its existence. Then, in 1864, Johannes Hendricus Brand (1823-1888) was elected president, and for twenty-four years he wisely guided the infant republic’s destiny. Although he often nettled the British, he was careful never to give them cause to meddle. This was not easy. The aggressive and powerful British resented the very presence of the two republics, and the Free Staters had to tread warily, even in the face of such wrath-provoking British arrogance as the annexation of the diamond fields in 1872, an action which left a bitter taste in the mouths of the Free Staters and confirmed their traditional distrust of Great Britain. It is not surprising then that not long after they were quick to see in the high-handed actions of the British in the Transvaal a threat to their cherished independence.