The
causes of the war
- The Boers, origin and mentality
The
Boers are Dutch, German and French populations (Huguenots) who have
settled in South Africa in the middle of the XVIIth.
The sixth of April 1652, Jan van
Riebeeck established an outpost for the famous Dutch East India
Company (VOC) in the area of the cape of Good-Hope. This outpost
quickly became the city of Cape-Town.
In
the following decades, more and more Dutch and German settled
in the Cape colony, joined by French huguenots after 1685 (Edit de
Fontainebleau which repealed the Edit de Nantes).
These setllers will constitute a class
of free farmers called burghers, and then Boers. They
founded an original society and culture of farmers-pionners based on
slavery.
At that time,
the lands around the Cape were free of occupation. The only men that
lived there were some nomad tribes of Khoïsan
(cousins of Boshiman) which did not practice
agriculture. The great black kingdoms
(Bantous tribes, especially the Zoulous who settled S-A in the
beginning of the XIVth century) were 1500 km in th east.
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| Map of the Bantu language area in South Africa |
This situation had a great
impact on the Boers mentality : they do not think themselves as
« colonists », « they stole the land of nobody »,
they are a « white tribe of Africa », the Afrikaaners.
In their
protestant-calvinist spirit, they are the new elected people and god
gave them this « empty land » to grow and prosper.
In 1706, lots of Boers who
refused the autority of the VOC because they felt themselves
« arikaans » started to leave the Cape colony to settle
in the lands behind the frontier, repelling the Khoïsans (who
will be finally massacred by the Zoulous). In 1795, a rebellion burst
in Cape-Town against the Dutch. The Boers wanted their independence
but the events in Europe (French revolution) stopped this process.
France invaded Holland and the British decided to annex the Dutch
colonies.
