Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress Read Online Free PDF

Natal to squat on old kraal-sites, threatened security and defeated all efforts to segregate the races. An American trading ship had arrived at Durban and wasdoing brisk business with the Boers, an intolerable invasion of British mercantile preserves: and perhaps most important of all, coal had been discovered in Natal, and might prove, as was recognized at once in London, ‘of the utmost importance to steam navigation in the
    So when, in December, 1841, the Republic proposed to expel several thousand unwanted blacks into Pondoland to the north, without so much as consulting the King of the Pondos, the Empire intervened again. The Natalians, Sir George Napier warned, were still British subjects whether they liked it or not: and in May, 1842, after a long march overland from the Umgazi River, the forces of the British Army arrived in Durban once more—red-coated, gold-frogged, with a troop of cavalry, and a couple of guns, and wives, and babies, and hundreds of servants, and a gleam of bayonets and a beat of drums, and all the swank, polish and conviction of superiority that the Boers most detested in the British style of life.
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    The British baulking of the Voortrekkers, so languidly but implacably arranged by the distant power of Empire, made the Afrikaner in his heart an enemy for ever. The memory of the Great Trek, its symbols and its sacrifices, Moordspruit the river of death, Weenen the place of weeping, became the central myth of the Afrikaner people, around which they would in future generations preserve their identity and consolidate their attitudes: Blood River, the Church of the Vow, Dingaan’s Kraal, even the image of the trek-wagon itself, these would be the tokens of their self-esteem, and of their tribal identity—for in many ways the trekker Boers were an African tribe, speaking the same language, of land, cattle, bondage, revenge and primitive divinity, as the Zulus or the Basuto themselves.
    They tried once more to preserve their Republic of Natal, for the Boers promptly besieged the troops in Fort Victoria, and nearly starved them out. But once again they were thwarted. A young English settler, Dick King, broke the siege lines at night, and riding non-stop for three days and nights clean across the wild Transkei, alerted the imperial command at Grahamstown. On June 25 thethree-masted frigate Southampton arrived in Durban Bay, and the Republic was doomed. Within a few years Natal was among the most absolutely British of British colonies, officially defined as ‘a centre whence the blessings of civilization and Christianity may be diffused’, and the most visionary and unyielding of the Boers, packing their guns and Bibles, had trekked still farther into the interior—over the high Drakensberg, across the Vaal, deep into the territory of the Matabele, to establish high on that bitter plateau the Republic of the Transvaal—so for away this time, in country so sparse and unenticing, so innocent of advantages, that even the imperial instincts of the British, it seemed, would not again disturb the lekker lewe of the burghers.
    1 Whose generic names I use anachronistically, for convenience. In fact ‘Afrikaner’ was not much used until the last decades of the century, when it acquired political overtones, while ‘Boer’ in the 1830s was spelt with a small ‘b’ and meant simply ‘farmer’.
    1 The Caledon mineral bath is still there, with the ruined remains of a hotel and one splendid old rubber-tree that must have shaded many an Anglo-Indian in its time.
    1 As did the Egyptians a century later—‘red-necked blimps of the Brutish Empire’.
    1 Thaba Nchu is some forty miles east of Bloemfontein. The main trekker route roughly followed the present Cape Town to Johannesburg road, crossing the Orange River at Norvalspont. If I seem to treat the Great Trek too romantically, it is perhaps because I cherish, often despite my better judgement, an old admiration for the country Boer, whose dauntless