South Africa Argentines refers to the community of people in Argentina who have ancestral roots in South Africa or the South African colonies that later became the Union of South Africa in 1910. The South African Argentines are primarily descended from groups of several hundred South African Boers who left southern Africa at the end of the Second Boer War (1899–1902) and headed across the South Atlantic to Argentina to carve out the kind of independent, rural community they had lost in Africa at the end of the war. They settled in Patagonia, a region of Argentina which was then thinly inhabited and where people could live with minimal government interference in their lives. An estimated 700 to 800 Boers migrated to Patagonia between 1902 and 1910. Although they have broadly assimilated into Argentinian society since, there is still a dialect of Afrikaans spoken amongst a small number of South African Argentines in this remote part of the country and tens of thousands of people here trace their genealogical roots to this migration in the decade following the Second Boer War.[1]
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South African Argentines chronology of eventsSouth African Argentines chronology of events
The story of the South African Argentines stretches all the way back to the mid-1650s when the first Dutch colonists began settling around the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa. Over the next century and a half a substantial series of Dutch-led colonies developed around the Cape Colony and further inland to the north and east. During the Napoleonic Wars the British took over the Cape Colony and secured control over it in the peace terms that brought the conflict to an end at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. However, the earlier settlers, known as the Boers, who were a mix of Dutch, West Germans and other groups such as French Huguenots, retained their own distinct identity.[2]
As British rule expanded around the Cape in the 1820s and 1830s, many of the Boers decided to migrate further north and east to the Orange River and beyond in order to live independent of the British. However, in an age of ever-expanding imperial control, every time the Boers migrated, the British expanded their control as well. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this led to a series of conflicts between the British and what the Boers ruled as the South African Republic or Transvaal Republic. In the first of these clashes, the First Boer War (1880–1881), the Boers managed to win a surprise victory and maintained their independence, although with some nominal oversight by the British authorities to the south.[3]
Later things changed again. Large gold and diamond mines had been discovered and with the advent of events like the Witwatersrand Gold Rush in 1886, the British presence in southern Africa grew and their desire to control the region entirely became more pronounced. Eventually, after years of escalating tensions, a fresh war broke out in 1899. The Second Boer War was a much bigger conflict, one that involved hundreds of thousands of British and colonial troops to defeat the two main Boer republics, the South African Republic and the Orange Free State. By the time it ended in 1902, tens of thousands of men had lost their lives owing to fighting and disease. The British were confirmed, though, in their control over southern Africa. Eight years later the Union of South Africa formed the modern nation of South Africa out of the various colonies in the region.[4]
Extent of migration of South African ArgentinesExtent of migration of South African Argentines
There were always Boer groups who simply refused to live under British rule. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, the Voortrekkers, who had set out in the mid-1830s to move to the Transvaal and Orange River to avoid British rule, some continued to move away from British rule into places like Rhodesia around modern-day Zimbabwe and Zambia. Another group took the dramatic step of sailing across the Atlantic Ocean and settling in Argentina. This was a country that was not unlike southern Africa at the time. There were still large parts of the country that were thinly inhabited and where the writ of the central government was very thin. Indeed, central Argentina had only been brought under effective control by the government in Buenos Aires in the 1870s and 1880s, a process known as the Conquest of the Desert.[5]
The exact scale of the Boer migration to Argentina is debated. Some studies argue that as many as 800 families, upwards of 3,000 people in total, moved from southern Africa to Patagonia between the end of the Second Boer War in 1902 and the start of the 1910s. This figure is too high and it is more probable that somewhere between 650 and 800 South African Boers in total made the trip.[6] They settled in the Chubut region and lived primarily in future times in the cities of Sarmiento and Comodoro Rivadavia.[7] Over several generations their descendants expanded into the thousands and they spread out around Argentina.
Demographic impact of the Boer migration to ArgentinaDemographic impact of the Boer migration to Argentina
It is not easy to fully determine the demographic impact of the Boer migration to Patagonia at the time. Demographic records for the remote southern stretches of the country were patchy and effective government control was minimal here in places. Furthermore, the Boer families chose to settle in Chubut in some of the most isolated parts of the country. Therefore, for a time here in the first quarter of the twentieth century, these South African Argentines made up a sizeable proportion of the population in a very thinly inhabited part of Argentina. Over time the situation changed. Patagonia became more inhabited and the identity of the Boer community here broke down in the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first century.[8] Tens of thousands of Argentines today are descended from these settlers and a dialect of Afrikaans is even still spoken here, albeit by a small number of people and as a second language after Spanish. The full size of the South African Argentine community may be as high as 100,000 people. The story of the community has been the focus of several books in recent times and a documentary entitled The Boers at the End of the World, which came out in 2015.[9]
Not all of the South African Argentines live in Argentina today. With the rise of a distinctly independent South Africa that became more and more independent of Britain in the middle of the twentieth century, especially after the advent of Apartheid in 1948, many descendants of the Boers who moved to Argentina between 1902 and 1910 moved back to South Africa.[10] Others continued to exert their distinct identity in various ways. Some South African Argentines, for instance, signed up to fight for Argentina in the Falklands War of 1982. Resistance to the British was alive and well within the community eighty years after the Second Boer War.[11]
See alsoSee also
- South Africa
- Argentina
- Boer Wars
- Argentine Conquest of the Desert
- South African genealogy
- South African emigration
- South African surnames
- How to research your South African ancestry
- Argentina historical records
- Argentina birth records index
- Argentina marriage records index
- Argentina death records index
- Argentina census records index
Explore more about South African ArgentinesExplore more about South African Argentines
- South Africa, Dutch Reformed Church Registers, 1660-1970 records collection on MyHeritage
- South Africa, Methodist Parish Registers, 1822-1996 records collection on MyHeritage
- South Africa, Free State Dutch Reformed Church Records, 1848-1956 records collection on MyHeritage
- Argentina, Baptisms, 1645-1930 records collection on MyHeritage
- Argentina, Marriages, 1722-1911 records collection on MyHeritage
- Familias-Argentinas (Argentinian Family Tree) records collection on MyHeritage
References
- ↑ David Fig, ‘Proletarianisation or Patagonia: Reassessing the rationale for the Afrikaner migration to Argentina, 1902–6’, in Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2 (1991), pp. 103–125.
- ↑ https://sahistory.org.za/article/dutch-settlement
- ↑ https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/boer-war
- ↑ Martin Meredith, Diamonds, Gold and War: The Making of South Africa (London, 2007).
- ↑ Carolyne R. Larson, The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina’s Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History (Albuquerque, 2020).
- ↑ https://mg.co.za/article/2009-12-01-end-of-an-era-for-argentinas-afrikaners/
- ↑ Ryan Szpiech, et al., ‘Afrikaans in Patagonia: Language shift and cultural integration in a rural immigrant community’, in International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Vol. 2020, No. 266 (2020), pp. 33–54.
- ↑ Paulina Alberto, ‘The Other Afro-Argentines: Racial Stories Among the South African Community of Patagonia in the 20th Century’, available on http://umich.edu/~aacollab/losotros.html.
- ↑ https://www.news24.com/life/arts-and-entertainment/arts/language-and-identity-lessons-from-a-unique-afrikaans-community-in-patagonia-20200921
- ↑ Fig, ‘Proletarianisation or Patagonia’.
- ↑ https://www.ru.ac.za/perspective/2013archive/the_boers_at_the_end_of_the_world_.html