Brit en Boer

A small, 12mo hardcover book, recently professionally rebound in the original binding of light greenish-grey paper on card covers with a darker grey cloth spine; titles in black ink on front cover; no dust-wrapper.  The first eight pages bear preliminary matter plus pages 10 to 164 of text. Two pages of publisher’s advertising at the end. Frontispiece and ten half tone photographic plates showing historical persons and monuments to important events.

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) had no intention of starting a colony at the Cape of Good Hope but, 1n 1657, Van Riebeeck set nine company employees free to farm on their own account, in the hope of increased production. This move opened the floodgates and by the end of the18th Century their descendants augmented by colonists of Dutch, German and French origins had reached as far into the interior as the present-day Somerset East. These semi-nomadic pastoralists, known as trekboers, moved to escape the control the VOC, which did not have the means to police the vast interior. The trekboers became used to a free existence far from authority. The British, in order to avoid the strategic Cape of Good Hope from falling into the hands of the French, invaded the Cape peninsula in 1795. They immediately set about exercising proper civil government throughout the Cape Colony. And became synonymous, to the trekboers, with draconian control. To escape the British authority some of the frontier farmers trekked inland to a relatively empty interior to found the Transvaal and Orange Free State. Although the British initially had no real interest in the Boer republics, this happy state of affairs only lasted until diamonds and gold were discovered, when the British found excuses for moving frontiers and occupying land, culminating in the Anglo-Boer War. There arose a loathing of anything British amongst the Trekkers who by the latter half of the 19th century were becoming the "Afrikaner"population. This sentiment carried on well into the 20th century after creation of the Union of South Africa when some of that sentiment was transferred to Generals Botha and Smuts by a section of the Afrikaner population and caused them to rebel against the government during the First World War. A lot of the perceived evils of the British and their supporters is described in this little book.