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South Africa


In the late sixteenth century, the Dutch East India Company (known more formally as the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) began routinely searching for sites on the African continent where its trading fleets could obtain fresh water and other supplies while en route to the Orient. Dutch ships began calling at the Cape of Good Hope as early as 1595, since the shoreline was not treacherous and fresh water could be easily obtained by landing parties without venturing too far inland. In 1651, the company built a storage facility and watering station, which included a vegetable garden to resupply its passing ships, at the Cape. Under the direction of Jan van Riebeeck, a small Dutch party also constructed a fort known as the Castle of Good Hope. Van Riebeeck obtained permission to bring Dutch immigrants to the Cape, and resettle former company employees there as farmers. The colonists were known as "vrijlieden", also denoted as "vrijburgers" (free citizens), to differentiate them from bonded VOC employees still serving on contracts. Since the primary purpose of the Cape settlement at the time was to stock provisions for passing Dutch ships, the VOC offered grants of farmland to the vrijburgers on the condition they would cultivate crops for company warehouses. The vrijburgers were granted tax-exempt status for twelve years and loaned all the necessary seeds and farming implements they requested.

The VOC initially had strict requirements which the prospective vrijburgers had to fulfill: they were to be married Dutch citizens, of good character, and had to undertake to spend twenty years at the Cape. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, many foreigners were amongst those who boarded ships in the Netherlands to settle in the Dutch sphere. As a result, by 1691 a third of the vrijburger population of the fledgling colony was not ethnically Dutch. The heterogeneous European community included large numbers of German military recruits in the service of the VOC, as well as French Huguenot refugees driven into overseas exile by the Edict of Fontainebleau. As the size of the vrijburger population expanded, the settlers began expanding deeper into the interior of southern Africa; by 1800 the size of the fledgling Dutch Cape Colony was about 170,000 square kilometers; about six times the area of the Netherlands.

The vast size of the colony made it almost impossible for the VOC to control the vrijburger population, and the settlers became increasingly independent. Attempts by the company administration to reassert its authority and regulate the vrijburgers' activities was met with resistance. Successive generations of settlers born in the colony became localised in their loyalties and national identity and regarded the colonial government with a mixture of apathy and suspicion. In the early 1700s, this emerging class of people began identifying as Afrikaners, rather than Dutch subjects, after their adopted homeland. Afrikaners who settled directly on the colony's frontiers were also known collectively as Boers, to describe their agricultural way of life.

In 1769, the northward migration of Boers was met by a southward migration of Xhosa, a Bantu people which laid claim to the Cape region north of the Great Fish River. This triggered a series of bloody frontier conflicts which raged until 1879, known as the Xhosa Wars. Both the Boers and Xhosa organised raiding parties that frequently crossed the river and stole livestock from the other group. Meanwhile, the VOC had been forced to declare bankruptcy and the Dutch government assumed direct responsibility for the Cape in 1794. After Napoleon's occupation of the Netherlands during the Flanders Campaign, Great Britain seized control of the Cape to prevent France from laying claim to its strategic harbour. Although the Dutch authorities were permitted to administer the Cape again for a brief interlude between 1803 and 1806, the British military occupation was later re-imposed as a result of political developments in Europe and became permanent. Relations between the new colonial leadership and the Boers were soon poisoned when the British refused to subsidise the Cape Colony, insisting that it pay for itself by levying heavier taxes on the white population. In addition to raising taxes, the British administration abolished the burgher senate, the only Dutch-era form of representative government at the Cape. It also took measures to bring the Boer population under control by establishing new courts and judiciaries along the frontier.

Boer resentment of the British peaked in 1834, when the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 was passed, outlawing slavery throughout the British Empire. All 35,000 slaves registered with the Cape governor were to be freed and given rights on par with other citizens, although in most cases their masters could retain them as paid apprentices until 1838. Many Boers, especially those involved in grain and wine production, owned slaves at the time, and the size of their slave holdings correlated greatly to their production output. The British government offered preexisting slaveholders compensation for their slaves, but payment had to be claimed in person in London, and few Boers possessed the funds to travel there. The abolition of slavery, along with Boer grievances over taxation and the perceived Anglicisation of the Cape judiciary, triggered the Great Trek: an eastward migration of 15,000 Boers determined to escape British rule by homesteading beyond the Cape Colony's frontiers. The Great Trek brought the migrating Boers, known as voortrekkers, into direct conflict with the Zulu Empire, upon which they inflicted a decisive defeat at the Battle of Blood River in February 1838. The voortrekkers eventually established several independent Boer republics deep in the southern African interior, the most prominent of which were the Natalia Republic, the Orange Free State, and the South African Republic (also known simply as the Transvaal). British colonial expansionism into South Africa's interior followed the Boer migration within the subsequent decades; in 1843 Great Britain annexed the Natalia Republic, and in 1877 it annexed the Transvaal. The Transvaal Boers subsequently launched a successful uprising to expel the British troops, known as the First Boer War. The war was resolved with the Pretoria Convention, by which Great Britain restored independence to the Transvaal and withdrew from that territory. However, relations between the Boer republics and the British administration at the Cape remained poor, with the latter concerned that Boer independence was a lingering threat to the Cape's strategic security. In 1899, the Second Boer War broke out when the British rejected an ultimatum by the Transvaal to remove its military presence from the latter's borders. The war was extremely costly for the Boer population, which suffered 7,000 battlefield deaths and 28,000 further civilian deaths in British concentration camps. In early 1902, the Boers surrendered under the terms of the Treaty of Vereeniging, which allowed the British to annex the Transvaal and Orange Free State in exchange for allowing the former Boer republics some form of political autonomy and granting financial assistance to aid in postwar reconstruction.

The postwar years saw the dramatic rise of Afrikaner nationalism, as many of the former Boer military leaders turned to politics and came to dominate the legislatures of the Transvaal and Orange Free State. An Afrikaner party was also elected for the first time in the Cape Colony in 1908. Afrikaner politicians heavily promoted the use of the Afrikaans, a language derived from the Middle Dutch dialect spoken by the colonial vrijburger population, as a fundamental part of Afrikaner identity and national consciousness. In 1908 and 1909, a constitutional convention was held for the establishment of a self-governing dominion which incorporated the old Boer republics into a unitary state with the Cape Colony and the Natal. This emerged as the Union of South Africa in 1910. Due to the fact that the electorate was limited predominantly to white South Africans, Afrikaners–which composed over half the white population at the time–quickly achieved political ascendancy. Afrikaners occupied the top political positions in South African government from 1910 until 1994, when the country held its first multiracial elections under a universal franchise. Prior to 1994, the Afrikaner ruling party with the longest tenure in South Africa was the National Party, which was noted for introducing a strict system of racial segregation known as apartheid in 1948, and declaring the country a republic in 1961.

The size of the Afrikaner population in South Africa was estimated at 2.5 million people in 1985. According to the country's 2011 census, there were about 2.7 million white South Africans who spoke Afrikaans as a first language, or slightly over 5% of the total population.