The Great Trek

• confrontation with the Xhosa to the east;
  
• a law by British authorities in Cape Town forbidding migration north of the Orange River.
  

[It is interesting to note that in North America with our own pioneers, there is quite a gap between image and reality. The image is of hardy pioneers who braved attacks by Indians, cut down the forests or moved out onto the prairies to carve farms out of the wilderness and opened a continent to development and civilisation. They were certainly hardy, but cockroaches are hardy! The reality of what the North American born pioneers were like was recorded by Susannah Moodie and other immigrants. According to these accounts, they were uncouth and ignorant, poorly educated, not all that trustworthy, whining, etc. However, they knew how to survive and could help show the newcomers. They certainly opened the continent to development, but their contributions to ‘civilisation’ are much more in doubt. The point is that succceeding generations have a tendency to see early pioneers with rose-coloured glasses.

There is also a lack of perspective. The settlers in wagon trains moving west have been celebrated in song, novels, movies, TV programs and so on. The wealth and resources produced by industrialization in the East and Mid-West was probably more important in achieving the ‘Manifest Destiny’ of the U. S., yet there are no movies celebrating the heroes of the blast furnace. The discovery and exploitation of mineral wealth (diamonds and gold) is undoubtedly the biggest factor in the creation of modern South Africa, but trekboers had little role in that; in fact, they often wanted to impede that development.]

1. Shutting down of migration after 1780s.
   - the earlier expansion had left some land not taken up behind the leading edges and the pushing back of the Xhosa in the early wars in the 19th C had made some land available (however, the 1820 settlers had also been assigned much of that); nevertheless, the voracious appetite for land among trekboers meant that by the 1830s, landlessness had grown. In effect, the on-going migration that had characterised the 18th C had been dammed up for almost 50 years. Thus, the Great Trek can be viewed as the bursting of the dam. Thus, the Great Trek can be seen as merely the resumption of the earlier process.
   
   - this interpretation is supported by the fact that late in the 19th C when the problem of landlessness again reemerged in the South African Republic (Transvaal), a couple of attempts were made to organise new treks farther into the interior (into Zimbabwe or Angola). These efforts were blocked by Rhodes who wanted to ensure that it was the British Empire that got these areas. However, these aborted attempts to leave the Boer republic could hardly be viewed as attempts to ‘preserve the Afrikaner nation’ from extinction of assimilation and provide a powerful argument against the nationalist thesis.
   
   
2. Law forbidding migration north of the Orange River
   - the rumours about the proposed treks beyond the Orange River had been circulating for 3-4 years and the government had been considering what it could do in such a case. Again rumours were that troops were to be sent to the drifts (fords) in order to intercept and prevent the treks. Retief and the trekkers were trying to forestall such actions.
   
   - one of the ways to do this was to influence public opinion and sympathy. Many of the grievances were probably included to appeal to those Afrikaners who were not going on the trek. The slavery abolition surely falls into this category. The slave owners lived mostly in the western province area and none of them were joining the trek; however, raising the issue was sure to get their sympathy.
   

3. Disobedience of lawful authority
   - this is a sin in much of Calvinist tradition. Earthly authority and government is a surrogate for Divine authority; the Calvinist definition of sin is rebellion against God. Thus, rebellion against earthly authority becomes by projection rebellion against God.
   
   - the only exception is when earthly government is so evil and wicked that disobedience and rebellion is justified. Thus, some of the arguments (not so much by Retief but by others in the movement) were designed to show that this was true of the British administration in the Cape and justified the analogy of the government of the Pharoahs.
   
   
4. Nationalist piety and sacrifice?
   - this came to be the major assertion of Afrikaner nationalists in later generations. F. van Jaarsveld challenged this idea in the 1960s in The Awakening of Afrikaner Nationalism; he was roundly denounced for this heresy and there were demands (including members of parliament) that he be fired from his job in the Univ. of Potchefstroom for Christian National Education.
   
   - he argued that a sense of ‘national identity’ was very little or not at all developed; Trekboers certainly recognised the differences in language, religion, etc. between themselves and the British. They had certainly developed a way-of-life and a set of values that were distinctive, but they were also significantly different from people of Dutch descent in the western province areas of the Cape. The latter regarded the Trekboers as rather wild, semi-barbarous frontiersmen and the sense of common identity was limited and incomplete. The westerners followed the Trek with interest and probably with a good deal of sympathy, but they certainly did not see the trekkers as the saviours of some mystical Afrikaner ‘nation’.
   
   - even more significantly, the trekkers themselves had only a limited sense of unity; only severe danger could unite them. Mostly, their loyalties were to individual leaders. Repeatedly during the next 30 years or so, they fought and bickered with each other. They even engaged in ‘wars’ although they were careful not to kill each other. They were not even united on religion; two new Reformed churches were started (they left the NGK behind in the Cape as it was too ‘liberal’ and required well educated clergy). One of these new churches (known as the ‘Dopper Church’) was very austere; even singing of hymns was regarded as too worldly and the only music allowed was the singing of psalms (this was the church of Paul Kruger).
   
   - van Jaarsveld argued that a true sense of national identity did not emerge until after the British annexation of the South African Republic in the 1870s; then a series of national meetings to oppose the annexation and the successful revolt against the British—the ‘1st War of Independence’—did bring a sense of identity among the Boers of the Transvaal.
   
   - the feeling of nationalist identity (particularly among Afrikaners in the Cape Colony) was only fully developed and confirmed in the period leading up to and including the South African War (‘2nd War of Independence’ for Afrikaner nationalists).
   

5. Preservation of the Trekboer ethos and way of life
   - this a main thrust of MacCrone’s thesis. It is argued that even under the VOC, Cape Town and the western province area had been exposed to ideas from Europe through frequent ships and educated clergy. These include ideas of the enlightenment. However, in the interior where they were largely cut off from such influences, the Trekboers had developed a very different ethos and different notions, especially in regard to the status and relationships between the different ‘racial’ and colour groups. These notions insisted that darker skinned, ‘heathen’ peoples were inherently and irremediably inferior to white ‘Christians’. Moreover, it was decreed by God that the superior Christians should dominate over and use the labour of the inferior heathens.
   
   - the arrival of the British represented an enormous challenge to this Trekboer ethos. Initially, the British regime was not very much more ‘liberal’ than the VOC regime or the Batavian regime that it replaced. However, the British regime did begin to extend its authority into the interior in a way that the VOC had never been able to do and began to interfere with Trekboer techniques for dominating and forcing labour from the indigenous and mixed population. Moreover, the humanitarian and antislavery movement in Britain was reaching a peak in the 1820s and 30s. Their campaigns against slavery and exploitation of indigenous peoples were brought very dramatically against Trekboer techniques by the missionaries.
   
   - by the 1830s, the Trekboer ethos was under enormous pressure with Ordinance 50 of 1828, an independent court system which gave everyone equal access, Anglicization policies, etc. The only way to save this ethos and its associated way of life was to escape from the British sphere in the Cape Colony. Clearly, the desire to preserve their view of the world and their way of life was a big incentive for many who joined the Great Trek. It was certainly mentioned in a number of ways.
   
   - this move was successful because the Trekkers were able to resume some of the old practices and to embed their view of ‘proper’ relations between whites and others in their constitutions with the explicit principle of ‘no equality in church or state.’ This formed the basis of what has been labeled the ‘northern’ approach in contrast to the ‘liberal’ tradition that developed during the rest of the 19th C in the Cape Colony (we shall examine Cape ‘liberalism’ in Module 12).
   
   - when the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910, there were 2 different approaches—the ‘northern’ approach of Transvaal, Orange Free State and Natal and the ‘liberalism’ of the Cape. Liberals hoped that in the decades following, the liberal approach would gradually take over in the Union. However, the reverse happened. By the 1920s and 30s, liberals such as MacCrone were fighting to prevent the last vestiges of ‘liberalism’ from being extinguished as segregation was increasingly being implemented on the road to what became ‘apartheid’. For many South African ‘liberals’, the significance of the Great Trek was that it had allowed the retrogressive ethos and attitudes on race to survive and thus be the foundation for a segregationist and apartheid South Africa in the 20th C.
   

• the mainstay of British attempts to solve the frontier problem was the practice of signing treaties with Xhosa chiefs. The first attempt involved making a treaty with the Ngqika, who was paramount chief of the Rharhabe clans west of the Kei River. The problem was that Ngqika had no control over his uncle Ndlambe and other chiefs; he hoped that the treaty would bring them back under his control with help from the British. The British failed to understand the real situation; although he was genealogically paramount, it did not mean that he had any real authority or control. Later, the British decided that Ngqika was being two-faced when he did not force the chiefs to abide by the terms of the treaty that he had signed. In spite of repeated failures, the British kept trying to use treaties.
  
  
• another approach was to create an unoccupied nomansland between the white settlement and the Xhosa. Thus, after forcing the Xhosa back in a war, they signed treaties with the chiefs that their people would stay out. African chiefs could not enforce such an order upon African people who regarded the land as theirs. On the other side, there was also much unhappiness among whites who had hoped and expected that any land taken from the Xhosa would be given or, at least, sold to them.
  

• the 1820 settlers was another attempted solution. It was hoped that this settlement would accomplish 2 things: the British settlers would act as a buffer between the trekboer farmers and the Xhosa. Secondly, a major part of the problem was deemed to be the extensive agriculture and pastoralism practised by the Afrikaner farmers which created the unsatiable demand for land. The British farmers were supposed to be an example of the intensive agriculture as practised in Britain. If Afrikaners could be converted to this, there would be adequate land for a long time. This too failed because the Xhosa still regarded it as their land and the climate was totally unsuitable for intensive farming. Most of the 1820 setters soon abandoned the land for towns (most had not been farmers anyway) and those who remained on the land had to adopt many of the same practices as the Afrikaners. Now the British government were worse off because they now had to protect British settlers who had much greater claims for protection on the government.
  
  
• on the other hand, men on the spot (governors) often were frustrated and felt that the solution was to annex the disputed land and impose order. This was opposed by most missionaries who felt that not only was this unjust to the Xhosa, but it was catering to the white settlers who would have incentives to foment further troubles whenever they wanted more land. This latter suspicion occurred to imperial officials in London also. Besides, if this process was started, where would the annexations end?