- The arrival of the English and the founding boers republics
In
1806, the English conquerred the cape colony against the Dutch.
Immediately their will of supremacy clashes with the Boers
traditions. Quickly, the British took control of the politics,
culture and economy while the Boers remained
farmers.
The
Boers were relegated to “obedient subjects of this gracious
majesty”. In 1828, english replaced dutch as official language and
the boer language, the afrikaans,
was considered as a vulgar patois. Worst of all for the Boers, in
1833, slavery is abolished, so a part of their rural economy
collapses.
Face
these attacks against their way of life, thousands of Boers decided
to leave the Cape colony to found their own states where they would
be free to live like their ancestors always live.
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| Painting depicting the "Great Trek" |
Between
1835 and 1845, the Boers migrated to the north and the west of
South-Africa in great convoys of trolleys that remind the “Far
West” : it is the “Great Trek”. During this adventure, the
Boers thought themselves as the Hebrews during the Exode. They
entered inside the Zulu territory and, after great battles as the
famous battle of Blood-River in 1838 (500 Boers with their trolleys
against 15 000 zulus), they founded their own republics : in the
first time Natalia in 1837 (but the British conquerred it in 1843),
then, after a new exile, Orange free State in 1854 (capital-city
Bloemfontein) and Transvaal in 1857 (capital-city
Pretoria, with the great city of Johannesburg, founded in 1886 ).
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| The Boer republics |
