Evening Post SATURDAY, DECEMBER 3, 1938. THE GREAT TREK

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 134, 3 December 1938, Page 8

Evening Post SATURDAY, DECEMBER 3, 1938. THE GREAT TREK

South Africa, today the most prosperous country, not only of the British Empire, but of the whole world, is celebrating this month, with all due solemnity, the most colourful event in a chequered history, the Great Trek. The founda-tion-stone of the Voortrekker centenary memorial will be laid on December 16, and, as the cables informed us on Thursday, the event will be marked by a month's political truce. In all the romance of pioneering there is nothing more remarkable than the migration of Dutch farmers from the comparative security of Cape Colony across the wilderness of the karoo and the veldt into what afterwards became the Orange Free State, the Transvaal, and Natal. For New Zealanders, shortly to celebrate their own centenary, this other pioneering achievement has a special interest. The dangers were far greater than those of the corresponding movement in North America over the Alleghanies and across the great plains and prairies to the Far West. Instead of isolated bands of Red Indians, the Boers in their exodus had to face the warring tribes of the Bantu race, with whom the conflict did not end until the Zulu War forty years later. The Voortrekkers passed over a trackless land infested with wild beasts also. Women and children shared the dangers and fatigues of these long marches, and at night the great lumbering ox-wagons, containing their household goods and food, were formed into a lager or square, like a Roman camp, with branches 6f the thorny mimosas wattled under each wagon as a protection against intruders, man or beast. It was not a single mass movement of large numbers, but a series of treks in comparatively small parties due to the jealous independence of the Boer character. The first trek was in -■ 1836, with two parties of about fifty each. One party (with the exception of two children) was massacred by the Matabeles; the -other reached Delagoa Bay, and finally, reduced by fever to twentyNatal. During the next four years the exodus continued steadily, and it is estimated that 10,000 persons at least migrated in this way.

The most formidable foe the Voortrekkers met was Dingaan, chief of the Zulus, son of Chaka, who had been to the Bantus what Te Rauparaha was to the Maoris in almost the same years of the last century. Dingaan in 1838 treacherously murdered Piet Retief and his companions, who had entered Natal over the Drakensberg, and within a week massacred over 600 men, women, and children of the Boer settlement. The Zulus then overran Natal and drove the British colony at Durban to take refuge on a British man-of-war in port. The war continued, but on December 16, 1838, a small but valiant force, under Andries Potgieter and Andries Pretorius, crushed the Zulus, under Dingaan, at the Blood River, and slew 3000. This day is still celebrated as a national holiday in South Africa as "Dingaan's Day." It was the turning-point of the conflict with the Bantu warriors. In 1840, after another defeat by Pretorius, Dingaan fled north and was murdered by his own people. Pretorius endeavoured to establish an independent Boer republic in Natal, and the British garrison of Durban was only saved by the famous ride of Dick King to Grahamstown through the heart of the hostile Bantu country. Reinforcements came in the nick of time, and three years later, in 1845, Natal was annexed as a British possession and most of the Boers trekked back again over the Drakensberg into the Transvaal. Such in brief was the Great Trek. It ended in the establishment of the I autonomous Boer Republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, under the suzerainty of Great Britain, which granted self-govern-ment to the Transvaal in 1852 by

the Sand River Convention, and to the Orange Free State by the Convention of Bloemfontein in 1854. This virtual dismemberment of South Africa was strongly opposed by Sir George Grey, who had come to the Cape as Governor, fresh from his triumphs in New Zealand and South Australia. In November, 1858, after four years' experience in South Africa, he proposed, in a celebrated dispatch to the Colonial Office, the same remedy for South Africa that had been so successful, under not very dissimilar conditions, in Canada—federation. The Cape Colony, Natal, and the Free State (the Transvaal might have come in later) were to be united in a federal legislature, the members to be chosen by popular vote in the several States. So certain was Grey of the wisdom of this policy that he took steps td secure the adhesion of the Free State. By the Colonial Office he was snubbed and charged with "direct disobedience." It was the old story with which every Dominion is familiar—the clash of Downing Street with "the man on the spot." South Africa suffered the worst. It was the precipitate action of Downing Street, without regard to the actual conditions, that drove the Boers to leave Cape Colony. The abolition of slavery in 1833, with - entirely inadequate compensation, left the farmers without labour, while a Kaffir invasion caused enormous losses on the eastern border. The Governor, Sir Benjamin Durban, after defeating the Kaffirs, proposed a new frontier further east, with a buffer belt of soldier settlers and loyal natives, to prevent further inroads. He also proposed to compensate the farmers for their losses. The Colonial Office took the side of the Kaffirs and ordered their reinstatement in the districts from which they had retired. There was no compensation. It was this, coupled with the effect of a century and a half of isolation under the original Dutch rule, that led to the exodus of the Boers in the Great Trek and schism in South Africa.

The century that followed the migration of the Voortrekkers was for South Africa full of vicissitudes in peace and war. The discovery of diamonds in 1867 opened up one new chapter, and the discovery of gold, in unbelievable quantities, twenty years later, another. To this changing world the descendants of the Voortrekkers —Oom Paul Kruger was a boy in the Great Trek—could not adapt themselves. Briton and Boer clashed twice, and the dream of the Voortrekkers and their independent pastoral Republics vanished, to be succeeded by the Union of South Africa, for which Sir George Grey had striven in vain fifty years before. But in reality the dream has been fulfilled beyond all expectations. Not only do Briton and Boer live side by side in amity, with the English' language and the once despised "Taal," now Afrikaans, equally acknowledged, but they are merging in a new nation of Afrikanders with the future of a great country before them. This is the South Africa of Rhodes and Botha, Hertzog and Smuts, and, to New Zealanders especially, of the Springboks, a romantic land with a romantic history, full of stirring episodes and moving memories, not least among which is the Great Trek of the Voortrekkers, whose centenary is now being celebrated as a cherished heritage of the Afrikander people.