Are White South Africans a settler nation?Or are Black South Africans a settler nation!. Find out yourself. While reading the excerpt from South African president JacobZuma’s speech early on Friday night, the following anonymously said quote cameto mind: “In the world we live in, history is being turned intomodern day lies, and modern day lies are being turned into history”. After twenty years of public abuse by black politicians whoassert that the white nation of South Africa is a “settler nation” that “dispossessedAfrican land”, Jacob Zuma grabbed at the opportunity to address the problems ofSouth Africa at the 103rd birthday party of the African NationalCongress. The expectations were not high, and many suspected that some favoritescapegoats such as Apartheid and racism would be mentioned. The Zulu president,amidst the electricity problems that faces South Africa for the first time init’s modern history, took full swing at the white population in general,stating that the problems of South Africa emerged along with the arrival ofwhat he believes to be the first white man in South-Africa. “You must remember that a man named Jan van Riebeeck arrivedhere on 6 April, 1652 and that was the start of the trouble in this country”,Zuma told at the Friday evening event, where guests paid R3 million to sit athis table. Needless to say that the date and name are the onlyhistorically correct segments of this statement, it must also be rememberedthat about 4 million Afrikaner people, descendants of Jan van Riebeeck’s groups,currently live in South Africa. Taking the South African constitution intoconsideration, this whole scale condemnation of and contempt towards a substantial population group of South Africa, can be regarded as hate speech.Zuma is known for singing “Kill the Boer (white people)” at ANC rallies wherehe speaks of the ANC’s defeat of white colonial rule and the “settlers in ourmidst”. Is the white Afrikaner nation a “settler nation” that dispossessedblack people’s land, as black politicians so often assert? To reach a valid historical perspective of the humanrelations pattern in present-day South Africa, one has to go back to the daysof Columbus, close to five centuries ago. Ek is nou heeltemal keelvol vir hierdie nonsens. Ek het vandag n 1500 woord opstel geskryf oor die koloniale geskiedenis van Suid-Afrika, waarvan ek sowat 400 woorde uit bronne geneem het. Kan Praag asseblief hierdie inligting publiseer sodat ons die oningeligdes kan inlig? In the 14th century, five years before Columbusset out on his trans-Atlantic voyage which resulted in the discovery ofAmerica, the Portuguese navigator, Batholomew Diaz, reached the southern-mostpart of Africa. Here, in 1652 at the Cape of Good Hope, halfway between Europeand the East, the Dutch East India Company established a victualing station forpassing East Indiamen. The Dutch intended the station to be self-supporting,but this soon proved to be impracticable without allowing officials to settleas “free burghers”. In 1657, the first free burghers were permitted to become private farmers, and in this way the foundations of a new nation in Africa werelaid. The ranks of the original free men were subsequently strengthened by thepeople of Dutch, German and French descent. The term “boer” (farmer) waselevated to the honorable concept of “Boer”, with a wider connotation, viz.pioneer and settler. “Boer” became synonymous with the appellation “Afrikaner”,a term used as early as 1706 to denote people who had their roots in theAfrican soil. Their permanent links with Africa were emphasized by thespontaneous and natural way in which the various 17th century Dutchdialects evolved into a new tongue, Afrikaans. The only indigenous peoples to come in contact with theBoer-Afrikaner community, were nomadic Bushmen and Hottentot tribes. In thecase of the Hottentots, deculturisation and the ravages of a series smallpox epidemics led to the disintegration of the main tribes and their subsequent progressive involvement with Negro and East Indian slaves, as well as with sailors, soldiers and people of other races, in the crystallization of a new ethnic group, the Cape Coloureds. A further element was admixed with the CapeColoured community upon the arrival of Bantu tribes. The Bantu tribes, the forefathers of the majority of modernday black people in South Africa, are established mainly in the part of thecontinent south of the Sahara desert. Today many local Black sophisticatesprefer to be called Africans, amisleading appellation considering that contemporary Africa is the mothercontinent of a large number of differentethnic, racial, linguistic and religious entities. The first meetings between Afrikaner farmers, or Boers, andblack tribes took place during 1750-1770 roughly where the Eastern Cape istoday. For an entire century, unaware of the existence of black tribes, Afrikanerfarmers, who have mostly already been born on African soil, expanded theirsettlement to over 170 000 square kilometers (more than twice the size ofAustria) of desolated and unoccupied land. Only towards the end of the 16thcentury did the Afrikaner farmers increasingly come into contact with Blacktribes. In the 1770’s, somewhat thousand kilometers to the north-east of Cape Town, the Afrikaner migratory stream came into substantial contact with the vanguard of another migratory movement, namely the Xhosa-speaking tribe. Theywere the advance guard of a Black migratory movement from the vicinity of theGreat Lakes of Central Africa. It would appear that by the end of the 15thcentury these tribes had moved as far as present-day Zambia, Zimbabwe andMozambique. They probably crosses into the present-day Republic of South Africain appreciable numbers in the course of the 17th century – at aboutthe same time as the Afrikaner free farmers’ settlement was expanding inlandfrom the Cape of Good Hope. The Black population movement into the area which laterbecame known as British South Africa did not constitute a single coherent expansion. It took the form of successive waves of small tribes representing fourdifferent Black ethnic groups – Nguni, Sotho, Venda and Tsonga – responding tothe push and pull of economic conditions and tribal conflicts. These migratory tribessimply moved to wherever nature offered most and enemies threatened least.Among these tribes the modern Western concept of a geo-politically definedcountry and land ownership was practically unknown. In the case of the whitegroup this concept was strongly developed, and it was therefore quite naturalfor the Dutch Governor at the Cape to react to the White-Black contact situationby proclaiming in 1778 the Fish River as the official boundary between the twogroups. This deliberate geographical demarcation, coupled with a recognition ofthe existence of specific Black territories, has remained the basis of the White-Blackrelationship pattern for many years. After the NapoleonicWars, the Cape of Good Hope was formally ceded to Britain. From 1806 onwards,relatively large numbers of English, Scottish and Irish settlers arrived at theCape The Boer-Afrikaner trekkers,increasingly dissatisfied withBritish colonial rule and with a growing sense of independence, decided to leave British jurisdiction. From 1835 onwards – at about the same time that theAmerican pioneers undertook their famous westward trek – nearly a quarter of theCape’s White population left the colony in a series of organized movements,collectively known as the Great Trek. The movement coursed over vast tracts ofempty land. Areas that had been inhabited by migratory Bantu tribes had becomedepopulated as a result of the “Mfecane” (the “crushing”) – a series of Black,specifically Zulu, reigns of terror. For nearly a quarter of a century, therewas an era of internecine warfare characterized by the most appalling bloodshedand devastation. The impis (regiments) of the Zulu king, Shaka, reigned supremein Natal and even penetrated the Transvaal across the Drankensberg Mountains,leaving a trail of destruction, exterminating or dispersing all other tribeswith which they came into contact. Shaka was not the only ruler responsible forthis kind of destruction. Mzilikazi, one of his former lieutenants, broke awayfrom the Zulu king and established a following of his own – the Matabele tribe. The Afrikaner trekkers who moved into Natal encounteredvarious Zulu tribes. In February 1838 Piet Retief, the leader of the trekkers,negotiated with Dingaan, the Zulu king and successor to Shaka, and obtainedfrom him a document granting thetrekkers “the place called Port Natal, together with all the land from theTugela to the Umzimvubu rivers…”. Before Retief and his party could return totheir people they were murdered in Dingaan’s kraal. The written contract, washowever retrieved by the trekkers and still exists today. In the light of this, the claim that the Afrikaner nation isa “settler nation” is unfounded and historically incorrect. Considering thatthe first Whites at the Cape arrived only 32 years after the Pilgrim Fathersset foot on American soil in 1620, it would be fallacious to label present-dayWhite South African society a still a settler or immigrant community. In fact,there were stable White communities in the South African interior before thefounding of most of the Latin American republics. The first West Europeanarrivals at the Cape antedated the colonization of Australia (1788) and NewZealand (1790) by 136 and 138 years respectively. The white community was alsoeconomically settled on unoccupied or negotiated land before the most and major black tribes even crossed the modern day borders of South Africa. Coming closerto the present time, one cannot ignore the significance of the White SouthAfrican nation’s role in the two world wars, amongst others as a foundingmember of the the League of Nations and the United Nations. The white South African nation has been created by thehistorical forces of more than four centuries. Measured against all acceptedhistorical and demographic criteria, this nation exists as an integral part ofthe African continent’s socio-political structure. Today, the Whites of theRepublic of South Africa rightfully consider themselves a permanent established African nation, geo-politically rooted in a part of the continent which has in the course of more than four centuries become their only motherland.
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 04:56:40 +0000
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