The Voortrek or ‘Great Trek’ was a mass movement of Boers, people of primarily Dutch, West German and French Huguenot ancestry, from around the Cape Colony (modern-day Cape Town) and other parts of the southern coast of what is now South Africa to the north and east of South Africa in the middle of the nineteenth century. The main period of the Voortrek was in the second half of the 1830s as the Boers sought to move outside of the colonial rule of the British who had acquired control of the Cape Colony from the Dutch Republic during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. These Voortrekkers or Boer pioneers moved into the region of the Transvaal and the Orange River and were consequently responsible for settling some of the first major towns in what is now northern and eastern South Africa, notably the Johannesburg-Pretoria urban conurbation. As such, the Voortrek was a critical event in the history of South Africa and its development. Later groups of Voortrekkers as late as the 1870s, such as the Dorsland Trek, were responsible for settling colonies of people of European extraction in places like Namibia and across different parts of southern Africa.[1]
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The Voortrek chronology of eventsThe Voortrek chronology of events
The Voortrek has its roots all the way back in the mid-seventeenth century. In 1652 the Dutch East India Company established a permanent colony at the Cape of Good Hope, primarily to act as a supply station when travelling around Africa to and from their valuable spice colonies in the East Indies. Over time the Dutch Cape Colony expanded as the site around the Cape and Table Mountain became a valuable source of wine production, farming and trade.[2] It also drew settlers from other parts of European, particularly German religious non-conformists and French Huguenots or Protestants, the latter of whom no longer enjoyed religious freedom at home in France after the Edict of Fontainebleau was issued in 1685 ending freedom of religion for non-Catholics in the country. The core of the later Boer community was these kinds of Dutch, German and French settlers at the Cape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Boer is simply a Dutch term for ‘farmer’, indicating the rustic nature of the Dutch Cape Colony.[3]
The Voortrek was oddly connected to the French Revolution of 1789. At the time of the Revolution the Cape Colony was still ruled as a part of the Dutch overseas colonial empire, though the Dutch Republic’s golden age was long over and it had become one of the second tier powers of Europe by then. When the War of the First Coalition, the first stage of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, broke out in 1792, the Dutch Republic initially allied with the Austrians, Prussians and British against the French. However, in late 1794 and early 1795, the Dutch were defeated entirely by the French and the Dutch Republic was transformed into the Batavian Republic, a kind of vassal, sister republic of the French Republic. An immediate consequence of this was that the British Royal Navy seized some of its former Dutch ally’s overseas colonies, most notably the Cape Colony. After Napoleon Bonaparte’s first defeat in 1814, the Anglo-Dutch Treaty was signed as a separate peace agreement between the British and Dutch. Through it, the Cape Colony was formally ceded to the British.[4]
Many of the Boers did not adapt well to British colonial rule. They had been used to exercising a lot of independence and found that London’s oversight was much more intrusive than Amsterdam’s had been. Then British settlers began arriving to what was a key location in terms of travel to and from British India in an age prior to the development of the Suez Canal. As more British arrived to live alongside the older Boer settlers, English was established as the official language of government and the courts. These cultural issues were compounded when the British Empire prohibited slavery in 1834 and the Boers were told they could no longer rely on enslaved labor to run their farms. This latter issue was the final straw for many Boer families and they began preparing to migrate to other parts of southern Africa where they could live beyond British rule.[5]
The Voortrek began in 1835 when Boer families and groups of families began leaving their farms and holdings around the Cape Colony. They would ultimately migrate to numerous different places, but their main destination was the Transvaal and Orange River region in what is now eastern and northern South Africa. The Boers knew that there was fertile farmland here, which was not the case everywhere in an often arid landscape across different parts of southern Africa. They also believed that the Transvaal and the Orange River were far enough away from the Cape Colony that they would not be interfered with for a long time to come by the British. Hence, the Boers set off as part of different wagon caravans heading northeast from 1835 onwards. The Voortrek would continue for the next twenty years or so as more and more Boers from the Cape Colony left to the new Boer lands.[6]
In the northeast, around places like modern-day Johannesburg, Pretoria and Bloemfontein, the Boers established several independent colonies. The names of their leaders are reflected in the landscape of South Africa to this day. Andries Pretorius was one of the Voortrek leaders. Pretoria is named after him. These included the Natalia Republic, the South African Republic, also known as the Transvaal Republic, and the Orange Free State.[7] These colonies often had to be carved out by waging war against the local Xhosa and Zulu people, while the British also became a problem before too long. The Natalia Republic, for instance, was on the coast and was quickly absorbed by the British in the 1840s.[8]
Ultimately the Transvaal and the Orange Free State survived as Boer colonies for over half a century. They did have to accept a degree of British oversight from the 1850s onwards as British rule expanded across southern Africa, especially the more southerly Orange Free State, but they managed to retain a large degree of independence. This even included the South African Republic winning a decisive victory over the British in the First Boer War of 1880 to 1881. It was only following the Second Boer War of 1899 and 1902 that Boer states were fully taken over by the British. They were united with Natal and the Cape Colony to form the Union of South Africa in 1910. At the same time, the Voortrekkers and their descendants between 1835 and 1902 transformed the demography of southern Africa.[9]
Extent of migration during the VoortrekExtent of migration during the Voortrek
The first parties of Boers who set out on the Voortrek between 1835 and 1837, led by pioneers like Louis Tregardt and Gerrit Maritz, consisted of only a few hundred people in each instance. Tregardt’s expedition, which was arguably the first of the Voortrek parties, was comprised of just nine families. These first several hundred Boers were the most important of all. They carved out colonies in the new lands and once word reached the Cape that these were built, hundreds and then thousands of other Boers trekked northeast. By the mid-1850s between 10,000 and 15,000 Boers had undertaken the great trek to the Transvaal and Orange River. Historians still debate the full extent of the migration. Moreover, as the new Boer colonies became more firmly entrenched, more Boers continued to arrive in the second half of the nineteenth century. Over time they even became sources of migration from Europe as the Scramble for Africa intensified in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.[10]
Demographic impact of the VoortrekDemographic impact of the Voortrek
In the short run the Voortrek was responsible for a large shift of the Boer population from around the Cape Colony and the southern extremity of the African continent further to the northeast towards the Orange River, the Transvaal and Natal. New Boer republics were established in these regions and these in turn drew further Boer migrants over time, changing the demography of what are today the north and east of the nation of South Africa. This aside, it would be too complex to suggest that the Voortrek alone was responsible for the massive demographic changes that occurred across these parts of southern Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Several additional factors played their part, notably British imperial expansion into the lands of the Zulus, the broader Scramble for Africa and age of imperialism, and the massive influx of Europeans to southern Africa after the discovery of extensive gold and diamond mines in the region in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, many hundreds of thousands of South Africans to this day will be able to trace their ancestry to a Boer great-great-great-grandparent or some such who took part in the Voortrek in the middle of the nineteenth century.[11]
See alsoSee also
Explore more about the VoortrekExplore more about the Voortrek
- 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
- Boer War Casualties, 1899-1902 records collection on MyHeritage
- South Africa, Orange Free State, Estate Files, 1951-2006 records collection on MyHeritage
References
- ↑ Johannes Meintjes, The Voortrekkers: Story of the Great Trek and the Making of South Africa (Littlehampton, 1973).
- ↑ https://sahistory.org.za/article/dutch-settlement
- ↑ https://www.the-low-countries.com/article/boers-and-creoloid-the-legacy-of-dutch-migration-to-south-africa/
- ↑ https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/britain-takes-control-cape
- ↑ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1899/12/briton-and-boer-in-south-africa/636247/
- ↑ Meintjes, The Voortrekkers.
- ↑ T. R. H. Davenport and C. Saunders, South Africa: A Modern History (London, 2000), pp. 77–100.
- ↑ https://journals.co.za/doi/pdf/10.10520/AJA00382353_10294
- ↑ https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/boer-war
- ↑ Norman Etherington, The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa, 1815–1854 (London, 2001).
- ↑ Martin Meredith, Diamonds, Gold and War: The Making of South Africa (London, 2007).