When I was a kid growing up in South Africa in the late Forties and early Fifties, the Afrikaners had just assumed power from the British and
apartheid was not yet been established. Of course there were British segregation laws which the British called euphemistically "the Color Bar" but blacks and whites lived side-by-side peacefully if not amicably.
In those days, when white South Africans talked about the "race problem," they did not mean black-white difficulties but were referring to the enmity which existed between the British and the Afrikaners. Until 1948, when the Afrikaners won the elections and took control of government, the British had ruled and persecuted the Afrikaners for nearly a century and a half.
When the Dutch first arrived at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, there were native Africans, the Khoi and the San, already living there. The first Dutch in the Cape did not regard themselves as settlers but were there temporarily to grow vegetables for the Dutch East India Company's ships sailing between Holland and Indonesia.
The only Dutch women at the Cape at that time were already married to Dutchmen so many of the single Dutchmen took native women as wives, settled down and had families. And so arose those mixed-race South Africans who are now known as Cape Coloreds. The settlers began to call themselves Africans (
Afrikaners in Dutch) to distinguish themselves from those Dutchmen who did not live in Africa but would eventually return to Holland.
At first there was no competition between the natives and the Dutch because the natives were not interested in vegetables and there was plenty of land for everyone. But those Dutchmen who settled at the Cape began to import cattle for meat and milk and the natives, who did not understand the concept of private property or ownership of cattle because they were hunters not herdsmen, began to kill the cattle thinking that they were simply there for the taking just like the local wildlife. In return the settlers began to kill the natives.
Soon more Dutch had decided to settle at the Cape and create farms and, in 1688, my mother's ancestors, the French Huguenots, arrived bringing with them grape vines which they grew to make wine and so started the oldest wineries outside of Europe. The Cape is still a major wine-producing region and produces some great wines mostly in the French style.
By the early 1700s, the settlers needed labor for their growing farms and they tried to enslave the natives but found it impossible as the natives would simply run away and re-join their tribes. So they imported slaves from Indonesia. The Indonesian slaves eventually became known as Cape Malays or
Slamaaiers (which was probably a slang word for "Islamites" because the Cape Malays were Muslims and still are to this day.)
The British took over the administration of the Cape from the Dutch in 1806 with the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars in order to protect the sea route to their Asian empire. They also stopped any further settlement by the Dutch and instead imported more slaves. And then the British began to implement the first racially discriminatory laws.
They first introduced a law to force the Khoi and other so-called "free" blacks to work for as little as possible. The Hottentot Code of 1809 required that all Khoi and other free blacks carry passes stating where they lived and who their employers were. Persons without such passes could be forced into employment by white masters.
Parliament in London then established a circuit court to monitor conditions in the western Cape. This court offended many Afrikaner sensibilities by giving equal weight to the evidence of "servants" and "masters," black and white alike. The British also raised a force of colonial police, including Khoi, to enforce the court's authority. The British also forbade the use of "Cape Dutch" (which patois eventually developed into the Afrikaans language) in court.
In 1815 a Dutch-speaking Afrikaner farmer who refused to answer a court summons for mistreating a Khoikhoi employee was shot dead while resisting arrest. Relatives and neighbors rose in what became known as the Slachter's Nek Rebellion, but their resistance was soon crushed, and the British hanged five of the rebels.
Some Afrikaners migrated eastward. These Afrikaners were known as
Trekboers (itinerant farmers - "trek" is Afrikaans for "travel" and "boer" means "farmer.") Then the British stopped the Boers eastward trek by annexing all of the Eastern Cape and establishing their own colony there in 1820. That is when my father's ancestors, the 1820 Settlers, arrived in South Africa.
The Afrikaners resented this and, beginning in 1836, Boer families, together with large numbers of Khoi and black servants, gathered up their belongings and traveled by ox-wagon up into the Highveld interior to the north of the Cape frontier. They could not travel farther east because the way was blocked by the Xhosa people.
6,000 Boer men, women, and children, along with an equal number of blacks, migrated from the Eastern Cape in the late 1830s. Fewer Boer families migrated from the western Cape, where they were more prosperous on their grain and wine farms and therefore less concerned about land shortages and frontier pressures.
The exodus from the Cape was not organized in a single movement at the time, but it was later termed the Great Trek by Afrikaner historians, and its participants were called Voortrekkers (pioneers).
Many Voortrekkers settled on the land between the Orange River and the Vaal River which would later become the two Boer republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. But most Boers travelled north-east into Zululand. They decided that they would be safer among the warlike Zulus if they negotiated for land with the king of the Zulus, Dingaan.
Dingaan agreed and, in February 1838, he invited seventy Voortrekkers to his royal
kraal (compound) supposedly to seal the deal. Instead Dingaan's warriors suddenly rose up and began to kill the Afrikaners by smashing their skulls with "knopkerries" (cudgels.)
Dingaan then sent out Zulu regiments to eliminate all Voortrekkers in the area; they killed several hundred men, women, and children and captured more than 35,000 head of cattle and sheep. But not all of the settlers were killed and, in December, 500 Afrikaner survivors marched on the Zulus.
The Voortrekkers pledged that they would commemorate a victory as a sign of divine protection. They then met and defeated Dingaan's army at the Battle of Blood River on December 16, which became known as the Day of the Covenant. (One of the most throughly researched books, if not the best, about South African history is
"Covenant" by James Michener.)
The Zulus split into waring factions and the Afrikaners established the Voortrekker Republic of Natalia in 1839. By 1842, when there were about 6,000 living in Zululand, the British annexed the republic as the Natal Colony. They did not want the Afrikaners to have independent access to the sea and thereby be able to negotiate political and economic agreements with other European powers.
When the British took over Natal, the Voortrekkers decided to leave and trek back to the Boer republics on the Highveld which had constitutions modeled in part on that of the United States, each with a president, an elected legislature, and a franchise restricted to white males.
By the end of the 1860s, there were approximately 50,000 Afrikaners settled in the two republics, practically all of them living in rural areas, although small capitals had been established at Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State and at Pretoria in the Transvaal which was then known as the South African Republic.
Then diamonds were discovered in 1867 on the northern border of the Cape Colony. The British decided to colonize South Africa seriously and began importing more British settlers and, in 1869, the British government annexed the diamond fields, repudiating the claims of the Voortrekker republics to the area.
Native Africans began to migrate into the mining settlements to work so, in 1872, the British mine-owners persuaded the British colonial administration to introduce a "pass law." This law required that all "servants" be in possession of passes that stated whether the holders were legally entitled to work in the city. The aim of this law was to limit the mobility of African workers.
The British then introduced other racial-discrimination legislation. They established special courts to process pass law offenders as rapidly as possible decreed that black Africans could only live in "locations" or ghettos. In 1886 the British formed "closed compounds," fenced and guarded institutions in which all black diamond mine workers had to live for the duration of their labor contracts.
Because blacks would not put up with such conditions if they could maintain an autonomous existence on their own lands, the British embarked on a program to destroy African tribal society in the 1870s and the 1880s and they fought wars against the Zulu, the Griqua, the Tswana, the Xhosa, the Pedi, and the Sotho.
By the middle of the 1880s, the majority of the black African population of South Africa had been defeated and their lands had been confiscated and given to the new British settlers. To ensure cheap labor, the British forced the Africans to live on rural "locations" and then imposed taxes on them. In order to survive and to earn cash to pay taxes, blacks now had to work in the mines.
Then gold was discovered in the South African Republic and, in 1877, the British annexed that Boer republic and called it the Transvaal. They then set about defeating the local African tribes to obtain laborers for the mines, and they completed the task in 1879.
In 1880 the Transvaalers rebelled and finally defeated the British at the Battle of Majuba Hill in 1881. The British then withdrew, leaving the Boers victorious in what they would later call their First War of Independence and which the British called the First Anglo-Boer War.
The Gold Rush attracted more British to the Boer republics but the British were not allowed to vote in the Afrikaner states. The mine-owners were all British and had no loyalty towards the Boer republics and despised the Afrikaners.
By the 1890s, there were more British in the Boer Republics than Afrikaners and they began clamoring for the vote. Cecil Rhodes, who not only owned most of the diamond mines but many of the gold mines, was Prime Minister of the British Cape Colony. He planned an uprising by the British but the Afrikaners again trounced the British.
In 1899, the British gave the Boer republics an ultimatum to give the vote to the British miners and began importing troops from the UK. The two Boer republics, realizing that the British were planning a military occupation of their republics, joined forces and declared war on the British in October 1899.
The Second Boer War lasted for three years till 1902. Ninety thousand Afrikaners fought against a British army of 500,000 men, most from Britain but including large numbers of volunteers also from Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The British army was also augmented by 30,000 African soldiers and one hundred thousand African transport workers.
The Boers won a number of victories at the beginning of the war but, in 1900, British forces overwhelmed the Boers and occupied Bloemfontein (the capital of the Orange Free State), Johannesburg (where the gold mines where) and Pretoria (the capital of the South African Republic.) But the Boers continued their resistance in the countryside, where they fought a ferocious guerrilla war.
The British ultimately succeeded in breaking this resistance by adopting a scorched-earth policy. In 1901 and 1902, the British torched more than 30,000 farms in the South African Republic and the Orange Free State and placed all the Afrikaner women and children in the world's first "concentration camps," where, because of overcrowding and unsanitary conditions, more than 25,000 Afrikaner women and children died.
A peace treaty was finally concluded at the town of Vereeniging on May 21, 1902. Now the British controlled the whole of South Africa and they decided to crush the Afrikaners by bringing in large numbers of new settlers from Britain so that English speakers would attain a numerical majority among South Africa's white population.
The British also instituted policies of denationalization and of anglicization so that Afrikaners would lose their sense of a separate identity and would assimilate into British culture. Because the British had destroyed most of the the Boer farms, the Afrikaners were now dependent on the British mine-owners for work and income.
When it became apparent that not many immigrants from Britain were being attracted to Africa, the British government supported the gold-mine owners plans to import large numbers of indentured Chinese laborers to work in the mines. The first Chinese arrived in 1904, and by 1906 there were 50,000 Chinese at work, comprising one-third of the gold mines' labor force.
The British continued to out-manoeuver the Afrikaners politically and economically for the next 36 years but they failed to destroy Boer nationalism and the Afrikaners somehow survived and thrived and, by 1948, they outnumbered the British in South Africa.
The Afrikaners Nationalists won the Parliamentary elections that year and set about securing their future. One of the ways in which they did this was to strengthen already existing British racial-discrimination laws. They introduced
apartheid (the Afrikaans word for aparthood, apartness, segregation.)
Apartheid was implemented not only because the Afrikaners' feared that they would lose political power to black Africans (who outnumbered them six to one in those days and ten to one nowadays) but because they also feared that the British would manipulate the blacks to destroy the Boers as they had done before. The British did not disappoint the Boers and spent the next 40 years demonizing the "white tribe of Africa."
Apartheid was also "affirmative action" for Afrikaners most of whom were as poor and almost as illiterate as black Africans. The Nationalists also gave all government jobs to their fellow Afrikaners who did not have enough education to compete with the British who owned and controlled all the mines and other industries and refused to hire Afrikaners in the private sector. But, before
apartheid was fully implemented in the Fifties and Sixties, the "race problem" that I grew up with was the British disdain for the Boers and the Boers' hatred of the British. Afrikaners and British were also segregated in schools and by religion and their separate languages, English and Afrikaans.
It was unusual for the two races to inter-marry and it was only because my Afrikaner mother had been raised by her eccentric father to be an Anglophile that she married my British father.
Some facts:
The Zulu army of about 10,000 mean killed 858 British soldiers and defeated the British army at Isandhlwana on January 22, 1879. Forty years earlier, in 1838, it took only 500 Boers to defeat the Zulu army in one day. They killed so many Zulus that the river ran red. It is known as Blood River to this day.
90,000 Boer soldiers killed 125,000 British soldiers (one quarter of the 500,000 troops) during the Boer War. Never before in the history of the British Empire had they lost so many men - not until WWl.
It was rumored that the wife of a high-up British general ordered her husband to do the scorched earth and concentration camp policy in revenge for the Boers killing her son but it was actually the only way that the British could put an end to Boer guerilla warfare. With no farms or families to feed them - the Boer kommandos were finally starved into defeat.
22,000 Afrikaner children died in the concentration camps in the first ten months. Nearly one quarter of all the Boers in existence at the time were killed by the British. As a result the gene pool was so small that many Afrikaners have a genetic heart defect to this day.
A website about the concentration camps.Picture of concentration camps:
1. Waiting for water
2. Abraham Carel Wessels
3. New internees arriving
4. Norval's Pont camp
5. Cooking facilities
The Alliance