The Boer people arose on the Cape frontier from the Trekboers who were from the poorest members of the fledgling Cape colony established by the Dutch East India Company during the 1650s who could no longer cope within its "grindingly class conscious" control. An anti-Boer propagandist once erroneously asserted a while ago that the Boers "are Cape Dutch that trekked" but that is a demonstrable falsehood as the Boers developed up to five hundred miles away from the Cape Dutch. The author Oliver Ransford noted within Chapter one of The Great Trek that the Trekboers formed the nucleus of a new nation & experienced a minor population explosion thus cementing their distinction from the Cape Dutch population. The Trekboers started to trek away from Cape society early on in its life: during the 1670s on & emerged on the northern & eastern Cape frontier while the Cape Dutch were coalescing within the south western Cape region. Testament to this is the fact that both groups developed their own unique dialects from the lingua franca [ later called Afrikaans ] that was emerging at the Cape & spoken by all the population groups that emerged at the Cape. Further testament is the fact that both groups developed radically different outlooks. The Cape Dutch were pro Colonial / anti-independence oriented while the Boer people of the frontier on the other hand were the exact opposite: anti-colonial & independence oriented. The notion of republican independence on the Cape frontier during 1795 & then later more notably during the 19th cent beyond the Cape frontier across the Orange River in the wake of British Colonialism - would have been IMPOSSIBLE if the Boers were in fact just Cape Dutch that trekked. Simply because if it were the Cape Dutch that trekked they would have brought THEIR outlook into the frontier & would have been content for the Colonial power to claim the land they lived on as was the case with the British / Portuguese & German settlers of the 19th cent. The Cape Dutch were much more in tune with the Colonial outlook of the aforementioned 3 groups while the Boers' outlook was more in tune with the outlook of an anti-colonial indigenous group [ as the Boers had become ] who were tied to the land & bristled at being controlled at the hands of a Colonial power.
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I'm offspring of some 'Cape Dutch', but my trekker blood shouts that what you say is true!
I know just what you mean. A lot of other folks feel the same & the facts themselves spell it out. Thanks for leaving a post here [ which is actually related to the topic at hand... as this blog is routinely spammed by someone who has no interest in the actual topic ] & I welcome you to read the other articles I posted here & will continue to do so time & health permitting. The following are some relevant quotes I found on the topic.
Quote: [ More and more Boers followed the pioneers into the interior where conditions suited them so well that they experienced a minor population explosion and formed the nucleus of a new nation. They were as nomadic as the Hottentots, or as the antelope they hunted. Trekking for them became a way of life. ]
From: The Great Trek. Oliver Ransford. Chapter 1.
Quote: [ The Boers had a tradition of trekking. Boer society was born on the frontiers of white settlement and on the outskirts of civilization. As members of a frontier society they always had a hinterland, open spaces to conquer, territory to occupy. Their ancestors had moved away from the limiting confines of Cape society to settle the eastern frontier. In time this location became too restricted, and individuals and families moved north across the Orange River. ]
From: The Boers in East Africa: Ethnicity and Identity. Brian M. Du Toit. Page 1.
Quote: [ Trekboers certainly recognized the differences in language, religion, etc. between themselves and the British. They had certainly developed a way-of-life and a set of values that were distinctive, but they were also significantly different from people of Dutch descent in the western province areas of the Cape. The latter regarded the Trekboers as rather wild, semi-barbarous frontiersmen and the sense of common identity was limited and incomplete. The westerners followed the Trek with interest and probably with a good deal of sympathy, but they certainly did not see the trekkers as the saviours of some mystical Afrikaner ‘nation’.]
From: Professor Wallace Mills. The Great Trek.
Quote: [ What divided the two segments of the Afrikaner people was a difference in culture between the relatively sophisticated Cape Dutchman, literate, urbanized and in touch with Europe, and the rough-hewed Boer. ]
From: Page 33. The Afrikaners: an historical interpretation. By Godfrey Hugh Lancelot Le May.
Quote: [ the trekkers by the end of the eighteenth century had succeeded in establishing themselves in a territory which was larger than France. Already as a people they were moulded into a remarkably uniform pattern; they had developed the taal into a new language, Afrikaans, which was a simplified version of the High Dutch spoken by their forebears but with added words of German, Portuguese and Bantu origin; they had quite cut off their ties with Europe and were tending to do so with their seat of government at the Cape. The officials there, attempting to reassert their authority in the distant districts, appointed magistrates to Swellendam and Graaff Reinet, but this only increased the tension between the frontiersmen and the Company's servants at the capital. ]
From: The Great Trek. Oliver Ransford. Chapter 1.
The author Sidney Robbins also notes that the Boers had cut all ties / broke their connection to Europe in his book: The Devil's Annexe on page 59. The Cape Dutch remained in touch with Europe [ as noted in one of the quotes above ] & were pro Colonial while the Boers had cut ties to Europe [ as noted in one of the quotes above ] & were quite anti-colonial. This was the main dynamic that led to the different outlook that the Boers had in contrast to the Cape Dutch.
I composed an article entitled The Boers Documented as Distinct Nation.
There are more quotes there & I expanded further.
The evidence is conclusive that the Boers are distinct from the Cape Dutch.
The author Oliver Ransford noted in his book The Great Trek that the Boers were living up to five hundred miles away from Cape Town. Also made less trips back to Cape Town & had largely become self sufficient. The confusion over the conflation of the Boers with the Cape Dutch stems from the fact that the Afrikaner establishment hijacked a truncated portion of Boer history in order to rationalize the Afrikaner [ the political regime acting on behalf of the macro White South African population ] usurpation to power.
There are some interesting quotes pertaining to other [ but not wholly unrelated topics ] that can be used to describe the situation as outlined in this article quite eloquently because a number of folks who still subscribe to or are infected by the dangerous Broederbond ideology often accuse folks who are aware of the Afrikaner Colonization & Usurpation of the Boer Nation as erroneously being "divisive" when in point of fact the acknowledgement of the Boers being a distinct people from the bulk of the arbitrarily & historically shifting definition of Afrikaner does not "divide" anyone as the Boers are in fact an anthropologically distinct people from the Cape Dutch & Anglophones & have been so ever since they emerged on the Cape frontier by circa 1700. The true concern of division would be more constructively directed towards the various political & religious divisions within the actual Boer Nation which are often overemphasized to the point where it compromises Boer unity concerning their inherent right to self determination. The Boers' struggle to get out from the suzerainty of Afrikaner domination is thus not "divisive" but in fact imperative in order to reacquire authentic Boer self determination.
Quote: [ Major pysops often contain the element of diversion. That is, the agents and propagandists are taking attention away from something they want to fall down the memory hole. This is particularly true when the thing-to-be forgotten was once a huge threat to the establishment. That thing must fade into oblivion. It must never surface again. So the people who could make it surface again are led into multiple distractions: substitutes for the real thing. ] From: The Underground. Jon Rappoport.
The Boer's identity & struggle for self determination was a huge threat to the British establishment which fell down the memory hole [ or at least was quite watered down ] when they promoted the Afrikaner identity which was based on a blend of Cape Dutch / Anglophone & Boer population groups. The Afrikaner identity diverted from the more potent & authentic Boer identity which was a bigger threat to the establishment. This is why activists like Robert van Tonder who promoted Boer identity were quite marginalized while others who promoted an Afrikaner identity were often promoted or at least given far more exposure to the public.
Quote: [ They wanted to be alone. They asked nothing of government, and offered nothing in return. With their great creaking ox-wagons and their herds of long-horned cattle, their plump wives in poke bonnets and their rangy dogs behind, they had long ago become indigenous to Africa, and adopted some of its values. ] From: James Morris. History of the British Empire. Quoted on The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey. By Adam Hochschild.
The Boers are documented as having become indigenous to Africa which was in stark contrast to the Cape Dutch.
Quote: [ It is perhaps no mistake that cultural Marxists in the form of “social justice warriors”, PC busybodies and feminists tend to create artificial divisions between people and “classes” while attacking and homogenizing very real and natural divisions between individuals based on biological reality and inherent genetic and psychological ability. This is what cultural Marxists do: divide and conquer or homogenize and conquer, whatever the situation happens to call for. ] From: How To Stamp Out Cultural Marxism In A Single Generation. From: Brandon Smith.
The imposition of the Afrikaner designation was an act of homogenize & conquer.
Hi Ron, I hope you're hale and hearty. Thank you for such a comprehensive reply to my rather brief comment. I'm sorry not to have read it sooner, but after posting my comment there was nothing to remind me that I had done so. I found this now only after inquisitively doing a Google search for my past comments (thank you, Google). The excerpts you've mentioned make for good reading and I will certainly be investigating your other posts. As I've intimated, I'm descended from both the 'Cape Dutch' and the 'Voortrekkers', and consider myself both Afrikaner and Boer, even though I also have English heritage. No people should stay the same, or they'll eventually die out. Hopefully I can be part of the new nation that emerges from these past 'nations'. On a personal level, I think I subscribe to the 'trekker' mentality more than to any other possibly inherited traits in my bloodline, and that means moving onward into the unknown, and change.
Thanks for another post. I sure wish I was in better shape & had more time because there is still quite a lot to mention about this important topic. Case in point. I just recently came across a book wherein its author was asserting erroneously that the Trekboers emerged during the Great Trek when in reality numerous informed sources specifically point out that the Trekboers emerged during the late 17th cent. just a few decades after the initial arrival of Jan Van Riebeeck & long before [ about 150 years at least ] the Great Trek. This erroneous: "Trekboers were from the Great Trek" talking point appears to be used by the Afrikaner Collectivists & Western based anti-Boer propagandists to try to hide the true anthropological roots of the Boer people / nation. It appears both groups have vested interests in preventing any possible restoration of the Boer Republics with its vast minerals & resources. When the Great Trek occurred, it was indeed participated by the decedents of the Trekboers - mainly the ones from the southern migration route: the ones who settled down on the Cape frontier after being prevented from going further due to Xhosa occupation beyond the Kei River.
The northern migration of Trekboers remained nomadic Trekboers a lot longer & were often encountered by the Voortrekkers [ the participants of the Great Trek ] during the Great Trek. One could say that a number of Trekboers crossed the Orange River long before the Voortrekkers did. The participants of the Great Trek were often called Trekkers [ not Trekboers ] & perhaps this is where the confusion is from. It is further sobering & illuminating to remember that the terms Great Trek & Voortrekker were coined by the Afrikaner Nationalists / Collectivists as part of program to co-opt the Boers into the Afrikaner fold starting from the 1930s on when the centenary of the Great Trek was approaching. Therefore one could rightly view the terms the Great Trek & Voortrekker as part of the cultural appropriation that the Cape Dutch based Afrikaners engaged in order to hijack a political narrative to rationalize their governorship of South Africa which came at the direct expense of Boer self determination, as the Afrikaner administration routinely prevented the restoration of the Boer Republics & marginalized the Boer people including their own post Anglo-Boer War history in South Africa. These uniformed authors even promote the inaccurate meme that the Boers "are Dutch" or are of Dutch extraction when in reality the Boers' ancestors are mostly from the German [ often Frisians ] Protestants who were from the north western areas of where the modern German state is today [ & part of Denmark ]. There are considerable numbers of French Huguenot & Walloon roots as well.
While some people might have roots from Cape Dutch, Boer & Anglophone heritage: one must remember that there are still large discernible population groups of the 3 aforementioned groups & that the Boer people are still largely descended from Boer people & have not "disappeared" into another cultural or ethnic group. The Boers are outnumbered by the Cape Dutch, but are still a distinct group. Remember also that Boers have historically assimilated Anglophones [ particularly those who accompanied the Boers on the Great Trek ] & others into their people & still remain Boer people / speaking the Boer dialect & practicing Boer customs. The Boers still tend to gravitate towards wanting self determination [ even the ones who were conditioned to see themselves as Afrikaners ] while the Cape Dutch still tend to overwhelmingly be against any system of independence from South Africa - as they like the connection to South Africa & prefer to be a behind the scenes power.
Nice to read your comprehensive blog, which is informative enough.
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Thanks but from my perspective as informative as it is: I find that it is not informative enough. There is still so much more to say about this obscured topic. Few people take the time let alone have the inclination to even want to learn about the Boers & just accept the many lies & misinterpretations that are often promoted.
A further illustration of my salient point is the fact that the Cape Dutch that accompanied Cecil Rhodes out to Rhodesia brought their inherent Colonial outlook with them even though they were essentially a group of Cape Dutch that trekked to use a trite phrase once uttered by an anti-Boer propagandist.
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