The Second Great Trek of the Boers
In 1996, Ben Fouche, a Boer from South Africa, began moving his family and their farm from their home in South Africa to the uncultivated lands of Congo-Brazzaville, the southern end of the Democratic Republic of the Congo which is around 4000 kilometers from the South African border. Ben was optimistic about their situation and remarked, “The land here is just incredible, and I’d put the chances of our success at about 100 percent. We are very excited to be in the Congo.” The Congo had recently opened up a program that welcomed Boers from South Africa as their expertise in farming, cultivated over centuries of farming in Africa.
Yet this is not the first time this has happened to the Boer. No, once before the Boer faced persecution by a ruling party and had to flee their homeland in a 19th-century event called the Great Trek. Now, in 2022, the Boer people are gearing up once again to flee their homeland to parts unknown. This is the Second Great Trek of the Boers.
History of the Second Great Trek
The Boers are an ethnic group that traces their lineage back to the original Dutch settlers of the South African cape that arrived in 1652. Originally, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) established a port in the region as an in-between point between Europe and Asia but quickly surmised that the land would be perfect for a colony to stimulate further economic pursuits with a more permanent settlement. The Boers themselves found themselves in these plans not as merchants but as farmers who would arrive at the colony from parts of Europe to seek their fortunes on the new frontiers offered to them.
Boers from the Second Boer War against the British Empire (1899-1902).
Under the Dutch, the Boers faced remarkably good conditions for the time, but they were not always treated as free citizens under the law. While ostensibly free, the VOC could still call the freedmen back to their service as servants to the company which made their position as “free” a fluid concept. The Boers saw this as an encroachment on the rights of their people and began to see the VOC as a possible threat to their growing community. The solution for some was to seek land elsewhere and travel outside the boundaries of the Cape Colony to establish farms elsewhere. While they had to contend with little help from other Europeans and had to face the threat of native populations in the cape such as the Khoisan, the Boers did find success and adopted the name “Trekboers” (moving farmers).
Although the VOC continued their practices in the cape, they were not meant to last long as the 19th century ushered in the age of the British in Africa. The cape colony was invaded in 1775 by British forces and over decades of skirmishes between the Dutch inhabitants and the invaders, the VOC formally ceded the land to Britain in 1814. This transition of power meant that the Boers would need to acquiesce to the new ruling power and to their way of life. What this translated into for the Boers was the British subjecting them to a persecution campaign. The official language of the colony became English, their traditional courts were abolished, and the British began to steer away from using Boer labor in favor of native Khoikhoi labor. The Boers had been backed into a corner. With their labor devalued and their way of life at risk, the Boers looked to the only escape from tyranny—fleeing from their homeland.
Boer commandos in 1899.
The migration began in 1835 and for the next five years, the cape colony experienced an outflowing of Boers to parts unknown. Here the Boers would found their own republics such as the Orange Free State (1854-1902) and the South African Republic (1852-1902), free from British rule, that would support the values of their people and assure the legacy of their people remained. This migration became known as the Great Trek and today is celebrated as a liberating event in Boer communities and has become a legend to call upon when remembering not only how far their people have come but how they have historically responded in the face of adversity.
Identity
Before we talk about the modern history of the Boer people, we must talk about the identity of the Boer people as it relates to other groups in South Africa, particularly the Afrikaners. In the years following the initial settlement of the cape colony, a generation of men were brought up solely in the colony knowing nothing of their original European homeland. Another generation or two passed and the original settlers who remembered the Old World were gone and the only people that remained were those that had only known Africa as home. This prompted a question of identity among not only the Boers but any white person in Africa that faced a similar situation: were they European or were they African?
A debate could be had on the question of identity from a colonial perspective as has already been done by the wonderful Stone Age Herbalist, but to focus on the realities of identity, the Afrikaners emerged from the generation of those that identified with Africa as their homeland. Over the years, more identifying features for an Afrikaner were been added such as the usage of the Afrikaans language, a language originally formed out of Dutch, and a religious identification with Protestantism with a specific branch forming known as Afrikaner Calvinism.
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The Afrikaner became a defined ethnicity that came to prominence with the National Party, an Afrikaner nationalist political party, that ruled South Africa under Apartheid. This identity, however, has become in equal parts vague over the years as Afrikaner became synonymous with “White African” and has thus led to confusion about other ethnic groups such as White Kenyans or German Namibians, and they are also sometimes referred to as Afrikaner. This vagueness has also bled over to the Boer people who are also often mistaken for Afrikaners as they descended from the same settler stock.
Boers, as opposed to Afrikaners, identify specifically with a conception of their people not just as descending from the original Dutch stock, but who are tied into the history of the farmers that originally fled during both the rule of the VOC and the British. While Afrikaners are a broad grouping of White South Africans of Dutch heritage, Boers specifically tied themselves into the historical and cultural context of their people being farmers. While this is not an agreed-upon definition, and Boer and Afrikaner continue to be used interchangeably today, for the sake of the remainder of the article we will be using the definition of Boer as a farming people descended from the original Dutch stock of the cape colony.
Why Are Boers Fleeing
After the fall of the Apartheid regime in 1994, the Boers found themselves in an uncertain spot. The National Party originally contributed much effort to assuring the Boer protection as a farming people by not only funding the agriculture sector greatly, but making sure that Boers got the pick for the best lands to farm. However, with the National Party losing power in 1994, the Boer lost their safety net to assure their dominance in agriculture. While many of the best and biggest farms were able to survive this shift of power, smaller farm with only a few workers or were entirely family-run lost the apparatus that kept them afloat.
The loss of the National Party’s agricultural programs was bad enough, but there remained a larger question of what to do with the land of the Boers now. A question of inequality was brought up as the new black majority opined that Boer still had not only most of the good farmland in the country but most of the good farmland as well. How was a black African to compete against a Boer in these conditions? While a political solution was presented in 2014 to redistribute land to the black population, this was far beyond the point where that would matter as some members of the black population took matters into their own hands and began to wreak violence upon the Boers.
The Witkruismonument, a memorial to the victims of farm attacks outside Polokwane, South Africa. Each cross represents a victim.
Violence was common during Apartheid, but a population fed up with White Africans, in general, were ready to seek revenge against these people for an ancestral and personal pain. The calls to violence came from leaders such as Julius Malema who sang Dubuli’ ibhu (“Kill the Boer”) at ANC rallies, Peter Mokaba who coined the phrase “Kill the farmer, kill the Boer,” and other local leaders who saw this as their time to rise against the Boers. The violence currently manifests in around 60 Boer murders per year, but the statistics do not reflect the totality of the violence wrought against the Boer people. Here are just a few stories:
In 2017, Robert “Oki” Turner, 66, was beaten to death with poles by a gang of men while his wife looked on. His wife later recalled hearing her husband’s bones breaking and has been unable to come to terms with his death, still choosing to sleep with a picture of him in their bed.
In 2018, a woman was tied up and sexually assaulted by a group of men armed with crowbars who forced the woman’s five-year-old son to watch.
In 2012, a 12-year-old boy was drowned in boiling water after witnessing the murder of his father and his mother raped and then subsequently killed in front of him.
In 2016, Knowledge Mandlazi was found guilty of the murder of five Boers who he said he killed explicitly because of his hatred for white people.
Take these four stories and compound them to the 60 Boer murders every year. Further compound them by the decades since the fall of Apartheid. The numbers spill into the thousands.
Where Are Boers Going?
Boers are clearly no longer welcome in their homeland, so the Second Great Trek has begun with families on the move in many directions. While there is no predominant singular point that the Boers are moving toward, the migration can largely be separated into two camps: those who want to stay in Africa and those who are going elsewhere.
The Boer people.
The Boers who want to stay in Africa are the ones that seem to have found the most success. The primary countries of focus for migration are the Congo and Mozambique which have both offered lucrative deals for Boers to migrate to their countries with the aim of strengthening their agricultural sector. In 2014, the Congo negotiated contracts with seventy Boer families to distribute 88,000 hectares of land to them, while that same year, Mozambique brokered a deal with a Boer representative to distribute 1 million hectares of land to 800 Boer families. Other parts of Africa are also offering to start deals with Boers. Zambia is trying to garner support for a maize-growing industry while Sudan has wanted to shore up its sugar cane business. There was even an offer from Libya following the fall of the Gaddafi regime to distribute 35,000 hectares of land to Boers, though it is unclear if that deal ever went anywhere.
These deals are quite good and are giving the Boers a chance to start life anew, but there are certain costs that are not explained. For one, these are new environments that the Boer are not used to and may require different farming techniques than what they used in South Africa. Furthermore, there may be unique challenges to the terrain such as new dangerous wildlife such as hyenas, soldier ants, or, the most common enemy, people. Yes, the primary challenge of Boers moving to new countries is that the locals are not always welcoming. This can extend to them even being actively hostile due to the Boers being imported competition. This issue is further exasperated by the fact that some nations are not entirely forthcoming with how the land was “acquired” by the state to distribute which rings quite familiar to the issue currently in South Africa.
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What about other parts of the world? While you can find a large Boer diaspora across the world from the United States and Mexico and into parts of South America, there is currently a big push in Eastern Europe backed by both Georgia and Russia to import Boers. Georgia noticed that its citizens were occupying and farming less than half of the country’s arable land, which prompted them in 2010 to sell land to Boers. Currently, Boers are doing quite well in the country, so well that they control almost half of the arable land in Georgia! Over in Russia, however, the deal between the Boers was just recently struck in 2018 and is currently ongoing, but the plan is to have 15,000 Boers settle in the southwestern Stavropol region of the country.
Conclusion
In 2022, the violence against Boers in South Africa remains ongoing. A colossal riot broke out last year in response to the arrest of former president Jacob Zuma for contempt of court. The riot resulted in the death of 354 people and exposed the violent top-level animosity that dominates the current situation in South Africa, a nation trapped by the failure of the past and a future unable to address the issues in a way that satisfies both the majority and minority groups.
As for the Boers, many are fleeing in fear for their lives. There is optimism for the future but the uncertainty of it all may very well be the breaking point of their people. On fleeing to another country for refuge, I think Filip Meyer, a Boer leader in Congo-Brazzaville in the 90s, said it best: “At first you get here and are just excited by the possibilities and just love the place. Then, after a few weeks, a depression sets in over the dust and dirt roads, the thing lying all around and the isolation. If you can survive that phase, which can last at least six months, you can stay here forever, and that is just what many of us hope to do.”
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