The colonising of the new territory by the Great Trek shared many features in common with contemporaneous outward movements in other parts of the world. Following the Napoleonic Wars, population growth, booming demand for agricultural commodities, and improvements in transportation and storage led to the seizure of land from old indigenous owners. In every case these movements marked out land for sale or lease. This was so in the Louisiana territory, Texas, Oregon, Algeria, New Zealand and Australia. The Trek began in the same year that Wakefield's South Australia Company surveyed its capital and the Texas Republic seized its independence from Mexico. Historians have ignored this conjuncture and clung to concepts of South African exceptionalism embodied in the master narratives analysed earlier in this essay. From Macmillan and Walker to Du Toit, Peires and Giliomee, historians have tenaciously insisted that the Trek was a reactive and conservative movement.52
This deserves to be questioned.
From the 1820s the annexation of Natal had been contemplated by speculative commercial minds at the Cape.53 The trekkers made a pre-emptive strike. No doubt the business would have been more neatly managed by the British Empire, but after their own fashion the trekkers did the job. They had some peculiar reasons for wanting to escape from British rule, but so had the Mormon founders of Utah some peculiar reasons to escape from Yankee rule. So had Silesian migrants who took up land in South Australia. Those peculiarities should not blind us to the fact that Utah, South Australia and the Orange Free State shared ideas about the owning, farming and selling of land.
Andries Stockenstrom, the archetypal progressive Afrikaner, is remembered by liberals (and excoriated by nationalists) as the opponent of the Trek, but it should be remembered that his preferred policy was not a closed frontier. It was systematic 'colonization of all depopulated territories' .54 That is to say, he would have preferred a thorough job done by British rule to the half-botched job done by the trekkers.
Daniel Lindley, the American missionary eye-witness to the Trek, regretted the ignorance of the pioneers, but did not doubt that they represented the same outward movement of invasive migration that had taken place in Indian territories in the land of his birth.55
Neither did the Voortrekkers. Piet Uys affirmed in 1838 that he and his fellows proposed 'to establish our settlement on the same principles of liberty as those adopted by the United States of America'. The Lydenburg Republic's executive in 1860 cited in defence of their record of colonisation not only the ancient Israelites but also the European colonisers of Asia, America and Australia.56
Cobbing argues that we should shift our conception of the mfecane from an aggressive movement sparked off by the Zulu to a period of turbulence resulting from a stepping up of intrusive forces stemming from the advance agents of the world economy. A corollary shift is required in thinking about the Great Trek. The trekkers were part of the intrusive process, not weird anachronisms in flight from it. The mfecane had not depopulated Natal and the highveld. It had rendered certain sections free of obvious owners and therefore available for partition in a typical early nineteenth-century scheme of settlement. The trekkers were not merely reacting to British restrictions. Advance guards speaking their language had gone ahead of them. They did not walk backwards into an empty land.
1.J. Cobbing, 'The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo', Journal of African History, 29(1988), 487–519.
2.J. Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath: A Nineteenth-century Revolution in Bantu Africa, London, 1966; R.K. Rasmussen, Migrant Kingdom: Mzilikazi's Ndebele in South Africa, London, 1978.
3.J.B. Peires, ed., Before and After Shaka: Papers in Nguni History, Grahamstown, 1981, 1; E. A. Walker, The Great Trek, London, 1938, 2nd ed., ix.
4.C. W. de Kiewiet is the most notable exception.
5.A.M. Grundlingh, 'Politics, Principles and Problems of a Profession: Afrikaner Historians and their Discipline, c. 1920–1965', Perspectives in Education, 12 (1990), 1–19.
6.See K. Smith's discussion in The Changing Past: Trends in South African Historical Writing, Athens, Ohio, 1988, 73. See also A. Grundlingh on the influence of H.B. Thom on Stellenbosch, in 'Politics, Principles and Problems'
7.D. Heymans, The Voortrekker Monument, Pretoria, 1986.
8.B. Webb, writing in Fabian News, (10 October 1899), 188.
9.E. Brookes, Apartheid: A Documentary Study of Modern South Africa, London, 1968, xx.
10.W. M. Macmillan, Bantu, Boer and Briton: The Making of the South African Native Problem, London, 1929, 2 5 .
11.C.W. de Kiewiet, A History of South Africa: Social and Economic, London, 1941, 58: 'In one sense the Great Trek was the eighteenth century fleeing before its more material, more active, and better organized successor'.
12.E.A. Walker, The Great Trek, London, 1934, 48–9 (my italics).
13.Walker, The Great Trek, 67; Walker's invocation of the forces of regular government' is quite close to Jeff Peires's much more recent emphasis on 'the revolution in government' which British rule brought to the Cape. See Peires 'The British and the Cape' in R. Elphick and H. B. Giliomee, eds, The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840, Cape Town, 1989.
14.O. Ransford, The Great Trek, London, 1974, 13.
15.Ransford, The Great Trek, 16.
16.Ransford, The Great Trek, 16, 17, (my italics).
17.Ransford, The Great Trek, 18, 19.
18.Ransford, The Great Trek, 20.
19.Ransford, The Great Trek, 21, (my italics).
20.A. du Toit, 'No Chosen People: The Myth of the Calvinist Origins of Afrikaner Nationalism and Racial Ideology', American Historical Review, 88 (1983), 920–52; A. du Toit and H.B. Giliomee, Afrikaner Political Thought: Analysis and Documents, 2 vols, Berkeley, 1983. See also Smith, The Changing Past, 96–8.
21.Similar problems were faced and solved by equally suspect devices. The Quebecois are mythologized as woodsmen in a fashion similar to the Afrikaners. Alternative methods naturalised the pieds noirs settlers of Algeria and the Australian colonists. Daniel Boorstin and others have pointed to the way in which a fictive 'true American', supposedly in existence by the time of the Revolution, challenged later 'unnatural' European migrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I would also like to emphasise that I accept that people who make homes for themselves on and beyond the frontier had to adapt to local realities. In one sense the trekboers were indeed 'Africanized'. The point 1 am making is that nationalist narratives ascribe a single set of characteristics to the founding sons of the soil which are then attributed to their 'descendants'.
22.Peter Novick, in the unpublished paper 'Why Dan Quayle was Right', presented to the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University, July 1991, has traced the way American Jews managed to assimilate the experience of the holocaust even though their nation had fought against Hitler.
23.On the Afrikaner collaborators see A.M. Grundlingh, Die 'Hensoppers' en 'Joiners': Die Rasionaal en Verskynsel van Verraad, Cape Town and Pretoria, 1979.
24.A.M. Grundlingh and H. Sapire, 'From Feverish Festival to Repetitive Ritual? The Changing Fortunes of Great Trek Mythology in an Industrializing South Africa, 1938–1988', South African Historical Journal, 21 (1989), 19–37.
25.As an example, Dan O'Meara managed to write Volkskapitalisme, a book with the subtitle, Class, Capital and Ideology in the Development of Afrikaner Nationalism, 1934–1948, Johannesburg,