BOER

(Dutch: husbandman, or farmer), a South African of Dutch or Huguenot descent, especially one of the early settlers of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Today, descendants of the Boers are commonly referred to as Afrikaners. In 1707 the white population of Cape Colony stood at 1,779, largely of Dutch and German stock, with some French Huguenot lines. For the most part, the modern Afrikaner people have descended from those enumerated in 1707. Afrikaners in the late 20th century made up roughly 60 percent of the white population, approximately 2,600,000 people. In 1652 the Dutch East India Company sent out a party of soldiers and officials under Jan van Riebeeck to establish a shipping station on the Cape of Good Hope. In the early years the company encouraged immigration, but after the first decade of the 18th century Cape Colony grew largely by natural increase. Though the colony prospered, over half the white population eventually turned to the life of the trekboeren (wandering farmers). With the Cape Town market for agricultural produce glutted and slaves doing the work of the colony, there was nothing to keep the increase of the white population in the southwestern Cape and much to encourage them to disperse and to become self-sufficient pastoral farmers. The Boers were hostile both toward Africans, with whom they fought frequent range wars, and toward the government of the Cape, which was attempting to restrain their movements and their commerce. The Boers developed their own subculture, based on self-sufficient patriarchal communities. They were wandering pastoralists with little interest in sedentary agriculture, encumbered by few possessions. The Boers compared their way of life to that of the Hebrew patriarchs of the Old Testament. Staunch Calvinists, the Boers saw themselves as the children of God in the wilderness, a Christian elect divinely ordained to rule the land and the backward natives therein. Further, by the end of the 18th century, they, like the rest of the Cape Colony whites, spoke Afrikaans, a language deviating from Dutch. As a result of the Napoleonic Wars, the Cape Colony became a British possession in 1806. Though at first they accepted British administration, the Boers soon grew disgruntled with the liberal policies of the British, especially in regard to the frontier and the freeing of the slaves. Between 1835 and 1843 about 12,000 Boers left the colony in the Great Trek, heading for the relatively empty spaces of the high veld and southern Natal. In 1852 the British government agreed to recognize the independence of the settlers in the Transvaal (later the South African Republic) and in 1854 of those in the Vaal-Orange rivers area (later the Orange Free State). Both countries committed themselves to apartheid, a policy of strict inequality in church and state between the black and white populations. The discovery of diamonds and gold between 1867 and the end of the century set the stage for the South African War (18991902), which had its origins in British claims of suzerainty over the wealthy South African Republic and British concern over the Boer refusal to grant civic rights to the Uitlanders (immigrants, largely British, to the Transvaal gold fields and diamond fields). Supported by the Orange Free State and some of the Cape Dutch, the South African Republic waged battle against the British Empire for more than two years. Though brilliant practitioners of guerrilla warfare, the Boers eventually surrendered to British forces in 1902, thus ending the independent existence of the Boer republics. The Afrikaners, however, retained their language and culture and eventually attained politically the power they had failed to establish militarily.