Great Trek

From 1836 onwards, thousands of Dutch-speaking farmers known as Boers left the British-ruled Cape Colony by ox wagon and moved into the interior of southern Africa. The participants, who called themselves Voortrekkers ("pioneers"), founded independent republics north of the Orange River and in Natal. For Afrikaners the migration later became a founding story; for the African peoples whose lands it crossed, among them the Ndebele and the Zulu, it brought war, loss of land and displacement.

The Cape had been a Dutch East India Company settlement since 1652, and Britain took permanent control around 1815. Many Boers, especially frontier farmers, came to resent British rule. The new government disapproved of their slave-owning and their treatment of the indigenous Khoisan; in 1828 it gave free non-white inhabitants rights of security and property equal to the settlers', and English replaced Dutch in the courts and government. The abolition of slavery across the British Empire in 1834, which freed some 35,000 registered slaves at the Cape, hit farmers who relied on enslaved labour, and compensation could only be collected in London. Others simply wanted more grazing land than the colony's borders allowed.

Scouting parties in 1834 and 1835 brought back glowing reports of Natal as fertile and, they claimed, almost empty of people, a view that ignored its African inhabitants and the Zulu king's authority over part of it. Parties under leaders such as Louis Tregardt, Hendrik Potgieter, Gerrit Maritz, Piet Retief and Piet Uys left between 1835 and 1837. Estimates of the numbers vary: around 6,000 people left in the first wave up to 1840, and about 12,000 took part in all. The Dutch Reformed Church refused to back the movement, and many Boers stayed behind.

North of the Orange River the trekkers clashed with the Ndebele kingdom of Mzilikazi. After Ndebele raids on trekker parties in 1836, Potgieter's laager of wagons beat off a large attack at Vegkop in October. Boer commandos then struck back, sacking the Ndebele settlement at Mosega, and forced Mzilikazi and his people to move north into what is now Zimbabwe.

In Natal the trekkers met the Zulu Kingdom of Dingane. Retief sought a grant of land, but the encounter was shaped by mutual suspicion: his letters carried veiled threats, and the Boer idea of written, private land title clashed with Zulu custom, under which land was held communally. In February 1838 Dingane had Retief and his party killed at his capital, uMgungundlovu, and Zulu regiments then attacked trekker camps; one account puts the dead at 532, including Boer families and the Khoikhoi and Basotho who travelled with them. On 16 December 1838 a trekker commando under Andries Pretorius defeated a large Zulu army at the Battle of Blood River. Dingane's half-brother Mpande then allied with the Boers and replaced him as king.

The trekkers proclaimed the Natalia Republic, but Britain annexed Natal in 1843. Many Boers moved on again, and the migrations led to the founding of the Orange Free State and the South African Republic, or Transvaal. Their later conflicts with Britain culminated in the Second Boer War.

The 1938 centenary, marked by an ox-wagon re-enactment from Cape Town to Pretoria, fuelled a surge of Afrikaner nationalism that helped the National Party to power in 1948. The Voortrekker Monument opened in Pretoria in 1949. After apartheid, the anniversary of Blood River was renamed the Day of Reconciliation, and a line about the trek was left out of the new South African anthem because it reflected the experience of only one community.

Our 1815 map shows the Cape Colony and the Zulu state before the trek, and the 1878 map shows the Orange Free State, the Transvaal, Natal and Zululand that emerged from it.