MC_A Concise History of Africa

Southern Africa

BELOW: A Bas-relief panel on the Voortrekker Monument, near Pretoria, South Africa. It depicts the exodus of farmers from the eastern Cape colony, 1836–37, known as the Great Trek. OPPOSITE: Depiction of a Zulu attack on a Boer camp in February 1838, known as the Weenen Massacre.

Words to Understand Humanitarian: Concerned with or seeking to promote human welfare. Indigenous: Originating or occurring naturally in a particular place (native). Migrants: People who move from one place to another in order to find work or better living conditions.

many of whom were killed, died of smallpox, or become herdsmen to the colonists. The Dutch government passed a law in 1787 subjecting the remaining nomadic Khoikhoi to certain restrictions, which either made them more dependent upon the farmers or compelled them to migrate northwards, facing the hostility of their old foe, the

Bushmen, which the Boers were already hunting down. When the British tried to enforce a humanitarian native policy in the 1830s, the stubbornly independent Boers trekked further into the boundless interior, where they clashed with other fiercer African people of Bantu stock, and suffered an appalling massacre at the hands

The Boers The Boers, Dutch farmers who were hungry for land, had been moving inland ever since the Cape Colony of what is now South Africa was established by the Dutch East India Company in 1652. By the time the British seized the colony in 1795, the Dutch had gradually acquired all the land of the indigenous Khoikhoi,

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