Great Trek (1835-1840s): The Boer Migration from the Cape

The Great Trek was the migration of thousands of Dutch-speaking farmers, the Boers, out of the British-ruled Cape Colony into the interior of southern Africa, beginning in about 1835 and continuing into the 1840s. The emigrants, who became known as Voortrekkers (“pioneers”), fought African kingdoms for land and founded independent republics on the Highveld and in Natal. The trek reshaped the map of southern Africa and later became the central myth of Afrikaner nationalism.

Background: the Boers and British rule

Dutch settlement at the Cape began with the founding of the Cape Colony in 1652 by the Dutch East India Company. Over the following century, settlers of Dutch, German and French Huguenot descent spread inland as stock farmers. Many of these frontier farmers, or trekboers, lived far from government and depended on the labour of enslaved people and Khoikhoi servants.

Britain occupied the Cape in 1795 and again in 1806, and gained it permanently in 1814. British governors brought new courts, English as the language of government and a more active state. On the eastern frontier, settlers were in repeated conflict with the Xhosa over land and cattle, in a series of wars that had begun with the First Cape Frontier War of 1779.

Causes of the trek

Several grievances came together in the early 1830s. Ordinance 50 of 1828 gave Khoikhoi and other free people of colour legal equality with whites and freedom of movement, which many farmers saw as a threat to their labour supply and social order.

The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 freed enslaved people at the Cape from 1 December 1834, subject to a period of apprenticeship. Slave owners resented both the loss of labour and the compensation, which was well below the market value of slaves and had to be claimed in London.

The Sixth Frontier War of 1834-1836 devastated farms on the eastern frontier. When the British government reversed the governor’s annexation of land taken from the Xhosa, frontier farmers concluded that London would neither protect them nor give them land. Population growth, a shortage of available farmland and recurrent drought added to the pressure on frontier families.

In 1837 Piet Retief published a manifesto in the Graham’s Town Journal setting out the emigrants’ complaints. It blamed the government for frontier insecurity and the loss of slave property, and promised that the trekkers would not enslave anyone but would maintain “proper relations” between master and servant.

The course of the trek

Scouting expeditions in 1834 reported fertile, apparently thinly settled land in Natal and on the Highveld. That impression was misleading: the region had been shaken by the wars and migrations of the 1820s often called the Mfecane, associated with the rise of the Zulu kingdom under Shaka, but it was far from empty.

The first parties, under Louis Tregardt and Hans van Rensburg, left in 1835. Van Rensburg’s party was wiped out in 1836, and Tregardt’s group eventually reached Delagoa Bay in Mozambique in 1838, where many, including Tregardt himself, died of fever.

Larger groups followed under Hendrik Potgieter, Gerrit Maritz, Piet Retief and Piet Uys. They travelled in family groups with ox-wagons, cattle and servants. In October 1836 Potgieter’s party, drawn up in a defensive circle of wagons called a laager, beat off an attack by the Ndebele of Mzilikazi at Vegkop, though it lost most of its livestock. Boer commandos then struck at the Ndebele at Mosega in January 1837 and at eGabeni in November 1837, and Mzilikazi led his people north across the Limpopo.

Natal and the war with the Zulu

Retief led many trekkers over the Drakensberg mountains into Natal and opened talks with the Zulu king Dingane. On 6 February 1838, at Dingane’s capital uMgungundlovu, Retief and his party of around 100 men, including servants, were seized and killed. Zulu regiments then attacked the trekker camps along the Bushman’s and Bloukrans rivers, killing an estimated 500 people, many of them women, children and servants. The place was later named Weenen (“weeping”).

After a further defeat at Italeni in April 1838, in which Piet Uys was killed, the trekkers rallied under Andries Pretorius. On 16 December 1838 his commando defeated a large Zulu army at the Battle of Blood River. With the help of Dingane’s half-brother Mpande, who broke away and defeated Dingane in 1840, the Boers established the Republic of Natalia, with its capital at Pietermaritzburg.

The Boer republics

Britain was unwilling to see an independent state on the coast and annexed Natal in 1843. Most trekkers left again for the Highveld, between the Orange and Vaal rivers and beyond the Vaal. Britain proclaimed the Orange River Sovereignty in 1848 and defeated a Boer force under Pretorius at Boomplaats that August.

Within a few years Britain changed course. The Sand River Convention of 1852 recognised the independence of the Boers north of the Vaal, who formed the South African Republic, usually called the Transvaal. The Bloemfontein Convention of 1854 created the Orange Free State. Both republics restricted citizenship to whites. Their early years were marked by divisions between rival leaders, by wars with the Sotho of Moshoeshoe and other African states, and by weak finances.

Key people

• Piet Retief (1780-1838): frontier farmer and leader who wrote the trekkers’ manifesto and was killed by Dingane.
• Andries Pretorius (1798-1853): commander at Blood River and later a leading figure north of the Vaal.
• Hendrik Potgieter (1792-1852): leader of an early trek party and a founder of settlements in the Transvaal.
• Mzilikazi (c. 1790-1868): founder of the Ndebele kingdom, who moved north after his defeats.
• Dingane (c. 1795-1840): Zulu king who succeeded Shaka in 1828 and was overthrown in 1840.

Timeline

• 1834, 1 December: Slavery is abolished at the Cape, followed by apprenticeship.
• 1835: The first trek parties under Tregardt and Van Rensburg leave the colony.
• 1836, October: Potgieter’s laager repels the Ndebele at Vegkop.
• 1837, February: Retief’s manifesto appears in the Graham’s Town Journal.
• 1838, 6 February: Retief and his party are killed at uMgungundlovu.
• 1838, 16 December: Battle of Blood River.
• 1843: Britain annexes Natal.
• 1852, January: Sand River Convention recognises the Transvaal.
• 1854, February: Bloemfontein Convention creates the Orange Free State.

Legacy

The trek was not one organised movement but many separate parties, often quarrelling among themselves over leadership and routes, and most Cape Dutch speakers stayed behind in the colony. Nevertheless, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries Afrikaner nationalists turned it into a founding epic. The centenary re-enactment of 1938, with ox-wagons travelling across the country, drew huge crowds, and the Voortrekker Monument near Pretoria was inaugurated in 1949.

For the African peoples of the interior, including the Ndebele, Zulu, Sotho and Tswana, the trek meant war, loss of land and cattle, and the spread of a labour system under which many were forced to work on Boer farms. The rivalry between the Boer republics and the British Empire it set in motion led eventually to the First Boer War and the Second Boer War.

Why it matters

The Great Trek carried European settlement deep into southern Africa and created the Boer republics that later merged into modern South Africa. Its contested memory, celebrated by some and seen by others as a story of conquest, still shapes debates about South African history.