Summary

What is the significance of the Great Trek in a demo-cratic South Africa of the 21st century? This article examines the different perspectives – historical to modern – on the movement of Boer/Afrikaner trekkers from the Cape Colony into the interior of southern Africa from 1835/6.

The movement of Boer/ Afrikaner trekkers from the Cape Colony into the interior of southern Africa from 1835/6 became known as ‘the Great Trek’ for three main reasons:

- From soon after the event, writers called it ‘great’ because they wanted to distinguish it from earlier Boer treks, for the Boer people had been moving into the interior for well over a century by the time the Great Trek took place. (Another way of distinguishing this movement from the earlier treks was by calling the earlier trekkers ‘trekboers’ and those who went on the Great Trek ‘Voortrekkers’.)

- Secondly, the Great Trek was an organised affair, not individuals acting on their own. It was an ‘emigration’, as the most important South African historian of the nineteenth century, George McCall Theal, called it: the ‘emigrants’ did not want to break all ties with the Cape Colony, but did intend to set up new states in the interior.

- The third and most important reason why historians have used the term ‘Great Trek’ is because of what they saw to be its significance.

Early account

The main overall account of the Great Trek for half a century was Eric Walker’s book of that name, published in 1934, on the eve of the centenary of the event. Though he had come to South Africa from England, Walker was caught up in what he saw to be the ‘romance’ of what he called a ‘great adventure’. He did point out that fewer people went on the Great Trek than on other treks that took place at roughly the same time, though he did not know – and neither do we – precisely how many black servants accompanied the Boers into the interior.

Even though Walker’s Great Trek included Boer migration from the Cape colony over more than a decade (1835 to 1848), only some twelve thousand Boers were involved in that process. More Mormons left Missouri and Illinois, and they moved together over greater distances than the Boers. They also encountered more significant physical obstacles. The Voortrekkers advanced by what Walker called ‘easy stages’, and he tended to play down the military challenges from the African societies they encountered in the interior.

Walker related the Great Trek of the early nineteenth century to the trek of Afrikaners from the countryside to the cities in his own day, but he did not extend his comparisons, either to black treks in nineteenth-century South Africa or to the treks of Native American people in the United States, let alone the movement of black people from the South to the North of the United States in the early twentieth century.

Nor did Walker concede that in a sense the Great Trek was reversed by the British conquest of the Boer republics in the course of the Anglo-Boer/South African War, for if the aim of the Trek had been to establish independent states in the interior, that independence was brought to an end in 1900. Walker claimed, instead, that that the Great Trek ‘earned its title’, for it was ‘the central event in the history of European man in South Africa ‘, which ‘set the stage for all that was to follow in South Africa from that day to this’.

Modern perspective

From our vantage point, seventy-five years after Walker wrote, this appears a ridiculously Eurocentric vision.

Afrikaner perspective

That the Great Trek continues to resonate among Afrikaners can be seen, say, in the autobiography of F W de Klerk, for whom stories of the Trek were central in his childhood – three De Klerks were among those Voortrekkers killed by the Zulu king Dingane in 1838 – and whose earliest memory is of being taken in 1938 to the laying of the cornerstone of the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, at the ceremony to mark the centenary of the Great Trek. For De Klerk, the ‘last Trek’ of the title of his book published in 2000 was the journey that took him to the inauguration of Nelson Mandela in May 1994 – a journey of a new kind for Afrikaners, this time not to win territory but to survive into the twenty-first century by surrendering political power.

From a very different perspective, Norman Etherington, Professor of History at the University of Western Australia, rejects the idea that there was one ‘Great Trek’. For him, the Boer ‘Great Trek’ was but one among a number of treks that took place in early nineteenth-century southern Africa that deserve that name. He wishes to get away from an ‘ethnic’ interpretation, which privileges the importance of the Boer Great Trek, and instead to bring together separate histories – those involving white people and those involving blacks.

He argues that the various treks were part of one overall process of change, and that the root cause of the ‘transformation’ involved was expansive forces coming ultimately from Europe. The Voortrekkers were not backward economically, he maintains, but helped carry capitalism into the interior.

White presence established

Such arguments have not convinced most historians. In passing, N Etherington in his The Great Treks. The Transformation of Southern Africa, 1815-1854 does in fact recognise that the Boer trek had consequences out of proportion to its size. One does not have to accept the exaggerated views of Walker, let alone all the mythology that Afrikaner nationalists wrapped around the Great Trek, to accept that the Boer Trek was a fundamental event in the long history of white conquest of southern Africa.

It carried whites into the far interior, and involved in it was massive defeats of the Zulu, among others, and much dispossession. Though the white presence in the interior for long remained fragile – we now know that a number of African states, including the Zulu and the Pedi ones, continued to pose significant challenges to white authority long after the trekkers were established – the whites were not to be dislodged (except briefly in the Soutpansberg).

White rule firmed over time over all of what is now South Africa, and lasted for over a century, and a significant white presence survives after the transfer of political power from whites to blacks in 1994.

Long-term consequences

From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, the Great Trek no longer seems a central event in the history of South Africa, but Etherington’s desire to downplay its significance will not wash. Yes, it cannot be seen in isolation, as an event only in the history of those who became known as Afrikaners, but must be seen in the context of other treks, by the Rolong, the Griqua and others. Yet the more it is seen in context, the more the Great Trek stands out as the most important trek of all, because of its long-term consequences.

It was not until 1910 that a united South Africa came into being, but such a state was prefigured and made possible by those who moved out from the Cape into the interior in the late 1830s and early 1840s and set up new white states in other parts of what became South Africa. The Great Trek, therefore, remains important.

(Prof Christopher Saunders)

Extra information:

The Voortrekkers

The ‘Voortrekkers’ were a group of some 10 000 Afrikaners and about 4 000 coloured servants who left the border districts of the Cape Colony from 1835 onward in an organised manner to seek a fixed abode north and east of the Orange River.

They left for various reasons, but as a result a commitment to a common destiny and an own identity, different from the British policy, took root among them. They believed that they could realise their values, characteristics and interests only in a free and independent state.

The Voortrekkers left the Colony in five main groups. The leaders of the first groups were Louis Trichardt, Hendrik Potgieter, Gert Maritz, Piet Retief and Piet Uys. The first Voortrekker government was elected on December 2, 1836, at Thaba Nchu by the followers of Hendrik Potgieter and Gert Maritz, then totalling about 1 400 to 2 000. A burgher council of seven members was elected, Potgieter became laager commandant and Maritz was elected president of the burgher council and also magistrate.

On April 17, 1837, the second Voortrekker government was established at the Vet River. Retief was elected governor and military commander, while Maritz was elected magistrate and president of the so-called Council of Policy (later Volksraad) of seven members. Potgieter remained commandant of his trek party. On June 6, 1837, a temporary constitution, the so-called Nine Articles, was adopted. Piet Uys did not acknowledge this constitution.

Differences of opinion on the direction of the trek led to every leader trekking on his own with his followers. Retief trekked over the Drakensberg to Natal, while Potgieter, Maritz and Uys trekked in the direction of the Vaal River. While the Voortrekkers in Natal were involved in a ferocious fight with the Zulus, the so-called Council of Representation of the People, consisting of 24 members, and a constitution came into existence in February/March 1838. This Council became the Volksraad of the Republic of Natalia. A commandant-general would be the military commander, but no provision was made for a head of state.

In the meantime the Winburg-Potchefstroom Republic came into being. Chief commandant Potgieter was assisted by a war council of 12 members. In October 1840 the two republic united: Andries Pretorius was to be chief commandant of Natalia and Potgieter would hold the same position for Winburg-Potchefstroom. The war council became the adjunct council of the Natal Volksraad. After the British annexation of Natal in 1843 the adjunct council proclaimed its independence in April 1844 and adopted the 33 Articles as legal code.

The Natal Voortrekkers left Natal in groups and settled to the west of the Drakensberg. Potgieter trekked further north and founded Ohrigstad in 1845. There more dissension among the followers of Potgieter and the Voortrekkers from Natal arose because the latter group was in favour of the supreme authority of an elected volksraad, while Potgieter as chief commandant would be the supreme authority. Potgieter could not have his way and founded Schoemansdal in 1848, while some Natalians founded Lydenburg.

After Sir Harry Smith had annexed the later Orange Free State on February 3, 1848, Pretorius and his followers departed for Transvaal. Political differences and rivalry now came strongly to the fore. Representatives of the three most important groups (the Pretorius followers of the Western Transvaal, the Potgieter followers of Soutpansberg and the Lydenburgers) held various meetings to promote political unity among the Voortrekkers. Despite Potgieter’s absence, a United Confederation of all the Voortrekkers north of the Vaal River was established under a Representative Volksraad.

Dissension continued, mainly over the question of whether the office of chief commandant should be retained. In January 1851 the Volksraad found a solution to the problem by nominating four commandant-generals, namely Potgieter (Soutpansberg), Pretorius (Magaliesberg and Mooi River ), W J Joubert (Lydenburg) and J A Enslin (Marico). Because the government was ineffectual, Pretorius took the lead in negotiating with the British government regarding acknowledgement of the independence of Transvaal.

This was recognised in January 1852 and that of the later Orange Free State in 1854. The constitution adopted in 1853 for the ZAR was in broad terms a repetition of the executive arrangements of the Republic of Natalia and Ohrigstad. The Voortrekkers had therefore succeeded in obtaining their freedom and independence. At the same time white presence was extended in the interior from the Fish to the Limpopo Rivers and from the Natal coast to the Kalahari Desert.

Source: South African Encyclopedia
(http://www.saencyclopedia.co.za/content/home.aspx)

Tags: Afrikaner trekkers, Boer, emigrants, Great Trek, voortrekkers