The Africanders

by Le Roy Hooker

THE AFRICANDERS’ FIRST TREK TO THE NORTH.

1806–1838.

When the British took forcible possession of the Cape colony a second time, in 1806, they found a total population of 74,000. Of these 17,000 were native Hottentots, 30,000 were slaves of African, Asiatic and mixed blood, and 27,000 were of European descent—mostly Dutch, with a sprinkling of German and French. Nearly all spoke the dialect of Holland Dutch, into which the speech of a people so mixed and so isolated had degenerated.

In the beginning of the second English regime there was a fair promise of peace and of the gradual fusion of the Africander and the English elements in a homogeneous people. The Dutch, from whom the Africanders were principally descended, and the English were cognate nations. Though separated as to national life and history [[69]]by fourteen centuries, they possessed the same fundamental principles that give tone to character—the two languages were so far alike that the one people found it easy to learn the speech of the other; they both loved liberty, and they both held the Protestant faith. On the surface of things there was every reason to expect that the common features in blood, language, political ideals and religion would lead to kindly intercourse, intermarriages, and a thorough blending of the two races in one.

The first few years of experience seemed to strengthen this promise of good into certainty. Two successive British governors were men of righteousness and wisdom. The restrictions upon trade imposed by the Dutch East India Company were removed. Schools were founded. Measures were taken to improve the breed of horses and cattle. The trade in slaves was forbidden, and missionaries were sent among the natives. The administration of this period was careful to leave untouched as far as possible the local institutions, the official use of the Dutch language, and the Dutch-Roman law, which had become the common law of all civilized South Africa, both Dutch and English.

Under these favoring influences the two peoples [[70]]became friendly and began to intermarry. In 1820 the British government promoted emigration from England and Scotland to South Africa, to the extent of about five thousand. From that time there was a steady increase of the population from Great Britain, and to a much smaller extent from Germany, France and other European nations. The newcomers from continental Europe soon lost their nationality and learned to speak either English or the local Dutch dialect.

The promise of peace, and of the complete fusion of all the elements in one people loyal to the British crown, was not fulfilled. The causes of the failure—then insidious, but now easy to detect and analyze—must be considered at this point, for only in their light can we understand the Africander people and form a just judgment of their subsequent course.

Doubtless the colonists were influenced, to a greater degree than they realized, by the natural dislike of any civilized people to be transferred to the rule of a foreign nation. They were not the kind of people to make much of the fact that the Dutch and the English sprang from a common origin more than fourteen hundred years before—if they had any knowledge of it. To them [[71]]the British were a different race, and the British government was a kind of unloved step-father who had first conquered dominion over them by the strong hand and then bought them with money, as perpetual chattels, from their degenerate mother country.

Another cause of the failure to amalgamate was in the now fixed character of the South African Dutch. Few of them dwelt or cared to dwell in village communities. Some were farmers, it is true, living in touch with the towns; but most of them were stockmen roaming in a pastoral life over large tracts of the country—almost without local habitation. At long intervals they saw something of their always distant next neighbor ranchmen, but they saw nothing of the life in the few colonial towns. The intercourse between these pastoral Africanders and the British was so infrequent, and so limited as to scope, that the two races knew but little of one another. As a result, the process of social amalgamation, going on at Cape Town and in some other places where the population lived in communities, made little progress in the country districts where the great majority of the Africanders dwelt.