Macmillan's student, C.W. de Kiewiet, because he painted with a broader brush, conveyed an even stronger picture of a white tribe in Africa competing with black farmers for the same ecological niche in the environment.11
The opening pages of Eric Walker's The Great Trek read more like anthropology than history. The frontier farmers of the 'thirties were necessarily limited and ignorant of many things. It could not have been otherwise . . . Their knowledge of the older parts of their Colony was apt to be sketchy and, in times of excitement, highly erroneous, while their conception of the outer world was sometimes l00 years out of date . . . Perhaps imagination was deadened by the sameness of the Karoo scenery . . . That attitude pointed to a hereditary preoccupation with concrete, matter of fact, personal things and with not much else.'12
It comes as no surprise to the reader to discover later that the root cause of the Trek was 'the steady advance of the forces of regular government' which made life more difficult for 'a stubborn folk who found it far more difficult than it had been to escape from unfamiliar influences by edging away a little farther into the wilds'.13
Oliver Ransford's 1972 version of The Great Trek is more extreme. By the end of the eighteenth century, he asserts, 'a new breed of men had evolved in South Africa – the trekboers. No people quite like them had ever existed before'.14
The state-imposed task of demarcating recognized plots of 6 000 acres is transmuted by Ransford into an animalistic marking of territory:
Their farms usually approximated to the conveniently-managed size (for Africa) of 6 000 acres, and they generally marked out this area in a rough and ready manner by trotting a horse from the wagon along all four points of the compass for half an hour.15
Ransford explains Afrikaner behaviour partly by genes – 'Trekking was in the blood of these land Vikings' – and partly by the environment – ' these new comers had become as much a part of Africa as its indigenous people and as the Bantu'.16 These folk, operating not by reason, but by 'instinct', eventually 'reached the happy state of living in balance with nature'.17 'Life for them had taken on a special rhythm of its own.'18 Horse, man, and gun fused into a latter-day centaur:
The men depended on a single weapon the flintlock . . . and a singular style of fighting, charging their perfectly trained horses right up to an enemy group, firing from them without dismounting, retiring to reload, and then returning to repeat the attack. These tactical movements came to them almost naturally . . .19
The last act in the Anglo version of the march of civilisation is, of course, what Martin Legassick called the frontier tradition in South African history. By a series of flukes – the first Anglo–Boer War, the discovery of gold in the wrong place and Lord Milner's 'magnanimous' peace – the anachronistic ethos of the trekboer and Voortrekker is enshrined in the constitution of the Union, thus delaying for decades the inevitable triumph of modernity.
The Growth of a Nation
Afrikaner nationalists have shown a surprising tolerance for this patronising, virtually racist history. The revisionist enterprise of André du Toit and Hermann Giliomee has made only sluggish headway against the prevailing mythologies.20
The Voortrekker Monument's alternative version enjoys much less visible public support. Why should this be so, when so much ill-concealed ethnic denigration lurks in the Anglo alternative? The answer may lie in the conventions which govern narratives of nationalism. The nation is conceived as the happy, innocent child of the land who is denied his patrimony by sinister forces which must be overcome before the adult can come into his rightful inheritance. An essentialist premise underlying the master narrative is that the nation is a fact of nature on its own soil. This has always been easier to establish in Europe, where the mists of time conveniently obscure historical vision, than in settler colonies whose migratory origins are fulsomely documented.
The myth of the trekboer as child of the South African wilderness overcomes the problem far more elegantly than its counterparts in other settler societies.21 It substitutes a shroud of distance for the European shroud of time and answers the challenge of black African nationalism with a white nationalism which claims to be equally African. It lays the foundation for subsequent acts in the drama:
•Persecution by British invaders leading to loss of patrimony and withdrawal into the wilderness (the Great Trek);
•Struggle to reclaim the patrimony marked by incredible suffering (concentration camps in the South African War);
•Triumph of the mature nation (1948 election and proclamation of the Republic).
The only formidable problem remaining for the nationalist historian was to make these key experiences the common property of all who were defined as part of the nation.22 Since an overwhelming majority of Afrikaans-speaking people did not go on the Trek and many of them put their 'hends op' at the time of Anglo-Boer conflict, this was by no means an easy task.23 It could only be done, as Albert Grundlingh and Hilary Sapire observe – borrowing a phrase from Benedict Anderson – through the construction of an 'imagined community'.24
I do not intend to add to what is already a substantial literature on how the Trek was mythologised, promoted and internalised by twentieth-century Afrikaners. I merely note that the nationalist historiography needed a particular kind of Great Trek and was not interested in exploring alternative versions. The racial slur barely concealed in Anglo versions of the Trek could be forgiven because the idea of a stubborn folk, rooted in the land and unamenable to reform, had an evident political utility.
Advance of the Capitalist Mode of Production
It is worth remarking that the great historiographical revisions of the last two decades, which have demystified and deracialised large chunks of previously standard historiography, have left the Great Trek and mfecane largely untouched. Why? One reason may be that, after the paradigms were set, the dense accumulation of empirical scholarship discouraged newcomers from entering the fray. Every possible piece of evidence appeared already to have been subjected to the most intense scrutiny possible. In addition, some scholars seem to have made a deliberate point of ignoring or downplaying the Trek, implying by their neglect that the really significant forces which shaped modern South Africa are to be found elsewhere.25
It is ironic that Martin Legassick, whose doctoral thesis shed so much new light on the far interior of early nineteenth-century South Africa, announced soon after receiving his degree that it was pointless to look further for the origins of twentieth-century segregation on the frontier.26
Those who heeded his message pulled up their stakes and retreated to the developed regions of the Cape. Those who stayed in the field long enough to contribute to the important collections published in the late 1970s (in Britain by Marks and Atmore, in America by Elphick and Giliomee) did not much disturb established versions of the mfecane or the Great Trek. While David Hedges's new work on trade into the area that became Zululand remained unpublished, Jeff Guy dominated the study of the precolonial Zulu kingdom. Working within the paradigm of a Zulucentric mfecane, he maintained that the kingdom showed remarkable resistance to the penetration of capitalism right up to the time of the Anglo-Zulu War.
Revisionist scholarship concerned with the Cape frontier (which also accepted the Zulucentric mfecane) did not revise liberal and conservative explanations of the Trek; it restated them in new language. Although not every revisionist who touched on the Trek wrote from the theoretical perspective of neo-Marxist scholarship, almost everyone accepted a new working vocabulary focused on relations of production. The result was that the old Anglo version of the Great Trek as a flight from the advancing forces of civilisation was not discarded. It was just dressed up in the latest language. Without too much thought about what it might mean to exclude the Voortrekkers from the realm of capitalist production,