 |
| The Anglo-Boer War Memorial in Johannesburg |
The following is based on Leonard Thompson’s A History of South Africa, as well as my class notes from Professor Okeny’s course on South Africa, which he teaches at Salem State University. Whenever I’ve written about South Africa I’ve found the essay I’ve produced to seem very rushed. I think that it is simply because South Africa’s history is particularly complex.
This essay is an attempt to provide a concise (and pretty cursory) narrative of the development among Dutch settlers in southern Africa of a new, distinct, ethnic identity beginning with their settlement of the Cape in 1657 and ending with the unification of South Africa in 1910. This is a topic that has fascinated me, and I wish I could have done it more justice than I was able to with this essay.
The Development of Afrikaner Identity
The development of Afrikaner identity begins in 1657 when nine employees of the Dutch East India Company were taken off the payrolls and given land. Previously these men would have been overseeing the production of ship provisions by slaves, or earning a wage or salary producing those provisions themselves. Now they were to settle the land and at fixed prices sell provisions to the company, who would in turn distribute them to the ships. It was the beginning of white settlement in south Africa. The company pushed for increased settlement, and by 1707 there were two thousand of these free burgers; by 1793, almost 14,000. (33-5)
Not provided with the requisite skilled labor or capital to engage in the sort of intensive agriculture the company had intended, the company’s decision to settle these men—the settlers were overwhelmingly male—unleashed an unpredictable dynamic. Most became mixed farmers, “producing grain and wine but also pasturing sheep and cattle far beyond the limits of their land grants.” (36, 45-6) The poorer Dutch settlers resorted to pastoralism—that is, a semi-nomadic existence in which they pastured cattle and sheep but did not grow crops. Interestingly, “the slave economy excluded them from other occupations.” (46) These were the trekboers, which means something like ‘roaming farmer.’
In the 1830s, in a disorganized series of excursions known collectively as The Great Trek, Afrikaners, resentful of the policies of the British, who now controlled Cape Colony, spilled out northward and eastward into lands depopulated by the Mfecane—the violent process of state formation that took place amongst the Bantu-speaking peoples in southern Africa in the 1820s, associated most popularly with the figure of Shaka Zulu. At the Battle of Blood River in 1838, the voortrekkers (great trekkers) defeated the powerful Zulu kingdom and proceeded to settle the area and to organize what they were calling the Natal Republic. (91) Strategic, commercial, and humanitarian interests (and pretexts?) converged to cause the British to annex the republic in in 1843. As the Afrikaners who had established Natal had been originally fleeing British control and had established their Republic after defeating a powerful enemy in war, they were presumably outraged, and they now moved northwestward. (93)
Along the Orange and Vaal rivers in the interior of southern Africa, the Afrikaner settlers became embroiled in constant conflict with Africans. Again, the British intervened, annexing the region in 1848. (94-5) Having only reluctantly established the Orange River Sovereignty, the British were soon looking for a way out. In 1854 the British withdrew, conceding the establishment and independence of an Orange Free State and a Transvaal Republic, each under Afrikaner control. (96)
What is an Afrikaner? Until 1881, the people we now refer to as Afrikaners would not have necessarily thought of themselves as such. They would have been free burghers, boers (farmers)—perhaps just volk (people). (Okeny, 3.8.12, page 1) Yet, the basis for a common identity was already present, some of the features of which would include white skin, Protestantism, and most importantly, use of the Afrikaans language, based on Dutch. It was in yet another confrontation with the British that Afrikaners began to adopt the name Afrikaner to refer to themselves and to develop a collective identity.
By the mid-1870s the British were looking to unite the four polities of southern Africa—Cape Colony, Natal, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal Republic—into a single entity: South Africa. The Afrikaners of the independent republics were adamantly opposed to such union; it’s as if anti-British sentiment was proportional to the degrees north one traveled from Cape Town—Afrikaners who most resolutely opposed British control had naturally fled furthest from it. Nevertheless, as a first step toward such a union, the British annexed the Transvaal Republic in 1877.
Initially the action was not violently resisted, the Transvaalers having only recently been defeated by the Pedi and thus feeling war-weary. However, British mismanagement eventually triggered a short war, culminating in an invasion of Natal by Afrikaner commandos, who “stormed Majuba Mountain in broad daylight and virtually annihilated the 280 British soldiers on the summit.” (134-5) The British soon withdrew, the Transvaalers winning back their independence.
It was these events—the British unilateral annexation of the independent Transvaal Republic and their defeat at the hands of Afrikaner commandos—which stimulated the development of self-conscious Afrikaner identity. Most notably, it was in this period that S. J. du Toit founded his newspaper, Die Afrikaanse patriot, and established the Afrikaner Bond, which became a powerful political force in Cape Colony. Die Afrikaanse patriot was unique in that it was written in Afrikaans, as opposed to High Dutch. The Bond fell under the leadership of Jan Hofmeyr, and Hofmeyr and du Toit represented two different ends of the spectrum of Afrikaner politics: Hofmeyr, the pragmatist, tolerated British involvement in South Africa and sought cordial relations between the British and the Afrikaners; du Toit, the idealist, promoted the idea of Afrikaners as a chosen people who ought to rule South Africa without the interference of the British.
Tensions between the British and the Afrikaners over the Transvaal, and the rights of the many non-Afrikaner Europeans living there, escalated to the point of war in 1899. The war lasted until 1902 and was exceedingly brutal. Notably, the British built concentration camps. “Nearly 28,000 Afrikaner civilians, most of them children, died of dysentery, measles, and other diseases in the camps.” (143) The British defeated the Afrikaners and began to implement their goal: to render south Africa governable by crushing Afrikaner nationality.
These events “gave Afrikaner nationalism a powerful stimulus.” (145) Within a few years Afrikaner political parties emerged calling for self-government—Het Volk in the Transvaal, Orangia Unie in the Orange River Colony. When elections were held in these colonies in 1907, these Afrikaner parties won sweeping victories. Even in Cape Colony, the Afrikaner Bond was able to wield influence in elections in 1908. Three of Britain’s four South African territories were either in the hands of or under the influence of Afrikaners who opposed British domination. Moreover, in the fourth colony, Natal, events were such that the idea of a unification of the four territories was gaining favor. While this idea was favored by the British because they believed it would make the region more governable, it was favored by the Afrikaners because, now that they had entered government, they believed it would weaken imperial influence. The country was unified into the Union of South Africa, a momentous event in South African history, but it should be noted that this was not independence from Britain, which would not come until 1961. The territory was now governed by a central government controlled by Afrikaner political parties, but it was still part of the British Empire.
Though this is far beyond the scope of this essay, I would be very interested in comparing the development of national identities among different peoples with that of South Africa’s Afrikaners. In particularly, I’d enjoy a comparison with the development of German nationalism, American identity, or Israeli identity. There seem to be some common elements, most notably, an enemy who threatens, or purportedly threatens, the freedom or very existence of the group in question. An interesting question would be, who was the more important enemy for the Afrikaners—the British or the native population?
Comments