9781422285909

Conflict was inevitable. The Dutch periodically fought the new local natives they encountered, including Zulus, one of the Bantu-speaking tribes that dom- inated the area. Meanwhile, Huguenots (French Protestants persecuted in France), along with German settlers, traveled to Cape Town and began to settle the region. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the British displaced the Dutch as a tsunami of English settlers flocked to the tip of Africa. The Dutch colonists, known as Boers (the Dutch word for “farmer”), resented the British, refusing to live by their rules. By this time, the Dutch had developed a culture of their own, including a language called Afrikaans, a version of Dutch and Ger- man spoken by masters and slaves. Instead of falling under the yoke of the much-despised British, the Boers moved further northward—a journey they called the Great Trek. About 12,000 Afrikaner farmers made the trip, establishing settlements in the middle of black South Africa in what would later become the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The Trekkers believed they were moving onto vacant, unused land, an opinion not shared by the local Zulus and other native tribes. This painting by Charles Davidson Bell (1813–1882) depicts the Zulu attack on a Boer camp in 1838.

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MAJOR NATIONS IN A GLOBAL WORLD: SOUTH AFRICA