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In the 1830s the Afrikaners decided to escape English rule by setting forth on their Great Trek, which over the years has acquired the epic aura of a Long March or a Valley Forge. Packing their women and children into ox-drawn wagons, some 6,000 Afrikaners departed from the British settlements on the coast and tramped hundreds of miles to the northeast, to the uninhabited wilderness along the Vaal River.
It was only after they had established themselves there that they clashed ^ for the first time with fierce Bantu tribesmen moving southward in search of new lands. Border skirmishes lasted for decades, imbuing the Afrikaners with a permanent sense of being threatened, isolated and beleaguered.
In their isolation, the two landlocked Afrikaner republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State lost all contact with their Dutch origins. The Afrikaners had their own language now and their own lands. There was no thought of ever going home to Europe because there was no longer any home to go to. And the outside world ignored their struggles. The Enlightenment had passed them by, and so had the Industrial Revolution.
Then in 1867 somebody discovered a diamond near the Orange River. "Gentlemen," said the British Colonial Secretary as he inspected one of the earliest of these discoveries, "this is the rock on which the future success of South Africa will be built." Indeed, a quarter of a billion carats were to be dug out in the next century. Since the diamonds lay in Afrikaner lands, the British simply declared that they were annexing those lands, and British miners came pouring in. Two decades later rich deposits of gold were discovered in the Transvaal. Still more Britons and other foreigners came flooding in to dig up what had been the Voortrekkers' homeland.
The Afrikaners organized a fierce resistance to the British in the Boer (farmer) War (1899-1902). Outnumbered and outgunned, they took to the bush and engaged in guerrilla attacks (the word commando is one of their contributions to the English language). Britain's commander, Lord Horatio Kitchener, was no less fierce; he sent troops to burn down the Boer commandos' villages. Women and children were rounded up and confined in a new kind of establishment: concentration camps. Of the estimated 60,000 prisoners, some 26,000 women and children succumbed to famine and disease. When it was all over, the British reigned supreme over the sullen and resentful Afrikaners. Some Boer military leaders, notably Louis Botha (no relation to the current President) and Jan Christian Smuts, preached reconciliation with the British, and it was largely because of them that Britain united all its regional territories into the Union of South Africa in 1910. Botha and Smuts became the nation's first two Prime Ministers and led it into World War I on Britain's side.