16th December - The Day of the Covenant

The Dutch settled in the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. In 1687 a group of French Huguenots (among them my Joubert ancestors) arrived in the Cape. The Huguenots intermarried with the Dutch and, by the time the British took over the Cape Colony nearly 200 hundred years later, the early Cape settlers had become the people whom we now know as Afrikaners.

The British began to impose their language and laws on the Afrikaners and many left and moved east. Those who migrated east became known as trekboers (Afrikaans for travelling farmers.) The British then expanded their control to the Eastern Cape and, in the 1830s, the Boers (as the British now called the Afrikaners) began to migrate north and became known as Voortrekkers (literally forward travellers or pioneers.)

Some Boers migrated north-east into Zulu territory. In 1838 their leader, Piet Retief, negotiated permanent boundaries for a settlement of Boers with the Zulu king, Dingane. The deed of cession was signed by Dingane on 6 February 1838. Dingane then invited Retief's party to witness a performance by his soldiers. Upon a signal given by Dingane, the Zulus overwhelmed Retief's party of 70 men.

Retief, his son and the other men were taken to Kwa Matiwane Hill where their brains were smashed out with clubs. Their bodies were left on the hillside to be eaten by wild animals, as was Dingane's custom with his enemies. Dingane then gave orders for the Voortrekker camps to be attacked and for all Boer women and children to be killed.

In November 1838 Retief's successor, Andries Pretorius, planned an expedition against Dingane. The Boers numbered 464 against the 10,000 Zulu warriors. On December 9th 1838, the Boers made a covenant with God that, if He would give them victory over the Zulus, they would commemorate the event annually with a day of thanksgiving. The Boers repeated the covenant every evening until the day of the Blood River battle on December 16th.

When the battle was over, 3,000 Zulu warriors lay dead. Only three Boers were injured, one of whom was Andries Pretorius. The 464 soldiers didn’t credit the miraculous victory to their military power. Instead they were grateful to God for His deliverance. As was vowed, the Day of the Covenant was instituted and was observed annually from that day by the Afrikaners.

The Day of the Covenant was a national holiday up until the handover of power to the ANC in 1994. The 16th of December also happens to be the day that the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party celebrate the anniversary of the 1961 founding of their joint venture, Umkhonto we Sizwe, the terrorist wing of the ANC/SACP whose motto is "One settler, one bullet."

Nelson Mandela changed the Day of the Covenant to the “Day of Reconciliation” and that is what will be celebrated today in South Africa. Of course a few Boer old-timers still gather at the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria to give thanks for their victory at the Battle of Blood River.

When I was a kid we lived mostly in the former British colony of Natal (now known as Natal/kwaZulu.) The British used to call December 16th "Dingane's Day" to show their contempt for the Afrikaners.

"The Covenant" is the title James A. Michener gave to his historical novel of South Africa published in 1980.