The Great Trek and Blood River
Thousands of Dutch-speaking farmers leave the British Cape for the interior, defeat a Zulu army at Blood River, and found the Boer republics.
- The Afrikaners: Biography of a People — Hermann Giliomee, University of Virginia Press (2003)
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
- A Concise History of South Africa — Robert Ross, Cambridge University Press (2008)
From 1835 several thousand Dutch-speaking frontier farmers, with their families and the servants who travelled with them, left the Cape Colony in ox-wagon parties, a movement later called the Great Trek; estimates run to around 15,000 by the mid-1840s. They resented British rule: the abolition of slavery in 1834 with what they saw as inadequate compensation, the ordinance giving Khoikhoi legal equality, and weak defence of the frontier. One trek leader’s niece, Anna Steenkamp, famously objected that freed slaves were being placed “on an equal footing with Christians”.
- The Afrikaners: Biography of a People — Hermann Giliomee, University of Virginia Press (2003)
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
In February 1838 the Zulu king Dingane had the trek leader Piet Retief and his party killed at his capital, and Zulu regiments attacked trekker camps. On 16 December 1838, a trekker commando of about 470 men under Andries Pretorius, having made a vow to God, defeated a much larger Zulu army at the Ncome River from a defensive wagon laager, killing some 3,000 Zulu soldiers without losing a man. The river became known as Blood River.
- The Afrikaners: Biography of a People — Hermann Giliomee, University of Virginia Press (2003)
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
Britain annexed the trekkers’ Natal republic in 1843, so many moved on to the highveld, founding the South African Republic (Transvaal) and the Orange Free State in the 1850s. The Transvaal’s constitution declared that there would be no equality between white and Black “in church or state”. A century later, the 1938 centenary re-enactment of the Trek became a mass festival of Afrikaner nationalism that helped bring the National Party to power in 1948.
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
- The Afrikaners: Biography of a People — Hermann Giliomee, University of Virginia Press (2003)
- A Concise History of South Africa — Robert Ross, Cambridge University Press (2008)
Voortrekkers fled British injustice to seek freedom, faced terrible hardship and treachery, and won Blood River after making a covenant with God, a sign that they were a people with a calling. The Trek is the heroic birth of the Afrikaner nation.
- The Afrikaners: Biography of a People — Hermann Giliomee, University of Virginia Press (2003)
The Trek was an invasion of African land, conquering and displacing Zulu, Ndebele, Sotho and Tswana communities and creating republics that denied Black people equality "in church or state".
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
- A Concise History of South Africa — Robert Ross, Cambridge University Press (2008)
Why it matters today
The Trek became the founding epic of Afrikaner nationalism, celebrated in the vast Voortrekker Monument outside Pretoria. 16 December, once the Afrikaner "Day of the Vow", is now the Day of Reconciliation, a deliberate act of shared memory; at the battle site, a Voortrekker memorial and a Zulu museum face each other across the river.