Boer republic sought in S.A.

Press, 12 June 1986, Page 20

Boer republic sought in S.A.

By

KEVIN RICKETTS,

of AAP

South Africa has come full circle with the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (A.W.8.). Isolationist, Right-wing Boers are again wheeling their waggons into laager. History is repeating itself in their demands for an independent Boer republic encompassing the Orange Free State, the Transvaal, and Vryheid. All were once, briefly, independent republics in a British-controlled land.

Eugens Terr’Blanche, the A.W.B. leader, and Robert van Tonder, the author of a book that 10 years ago revived the dream of a Boer State, say they will present such a plan to the United Nations in New York later this year. Crazy as it may seem, they say they will also send a delegation to London next year to demand reparations of £lOO million (SNZ27O million) for the deaths of 26,000 Boer women and children in "concentration” camps set up by the British during the South African (Boer) War of 1899-1901.

Is such a state the only peaceful solution for entrenched Afrikaners? More importantly, would the rest of the world let them get away with it?

It was the Afrikaners’ dissatisfaction with British interference and their liberalising ways (the abolition of slavery, equal rights before the law for blacks) that sparked the Great Trek of 1835.

As the historian, Donald R. Morris, recorded: “There was a feeling among the frontier Boers that no Government understood them, and by the time a reform administration took over in London in 1825, this resentment had started to crystalise into hostility.” The Boer farmers who chose to stay were prepared to accept British influence and mores. The real Right wing in South Africa recognises this today: they do not include the Cape Boers in their proposed republic — they can do without their "liberals” — and they certainly do not want Natal, largely comprised of Englishspeaking descendants of a British colony. In 10 years, the voortrekkers, led by Louis Trigardt, van Rensburg, Henrik Potgieter, Sarel Cilliers (Paul Kruger, aged 10, was in this party), and Piet Retief, led 14,000 Boers north and out of the Cape colony. These hardy, largely illiterate but fiercely proud and righteous farmers wanted to keep their privacy and freedom and sought it in hostile country also claimed by the Matabele (they were fractured and driven into mod-ern-day Zimbabwe) and the Zulus.

They forged a history in every way as dramatic and bloody as the American West. Together with the still-burning grudge of the Boer War, two other dramas

as evocative as Gallipoli to Australians and New Zealanders are seared into the soul of every Afrikaner schoolboy: Piet Retief and Blood River. Piet Retief and 69 other Boers were murdered by the Zulu chief, Dingaan, on February 6, 1838, after Retief and fellow voortrekker Gerit Maritz had seemingly negotiated the cession of Zululand for their following families. The Zulu impis then fell on Retiefs unsuspecting laager on the Buffalo River and, in a particularly savage massacre, 41 men, 56 women, and 185 children and 250 Hottentot servants were slaughtered. The town near the spot today is called Weenen (Weeping).

Under Andries Pretorius the Boers took revenge. At the Ncome River — called forever afterwards Blood River — the Boers made a religious vow to celebrate a day of deliverance annually if “God” granted them vengeance.

“He” did. On Sunday, December 16, 1838, Pretorius and his fellow Boers laagered and then slaughtered 3000 Zulu warriors in a two-hour siege. In keeping with the vow, the “Day of the Covenant” is still celebrated with religious fervour today. But, as Morris records, “... when the (voortrekker) movements petered out a decade later, the outlines of the modern Republic of South Africa had been formed. In the end, they failed to achieve their immediate

purpose for they drew British administration, reluctantly but inexorably, after them.” By accident, rather than design — the seething Zulus were threatening British settlers at Port Durban — Britain annexed Natal and stopped the burgeoning Boer republics from having vital access to the sea at Delagoa Bay, north of Durban. It is ironic that, 100 years later, the envisaged Boer republic again includes a corridor through Zululand to the sea — a seaport is still vital — since these ancient enemies of the Afrikaners are the most respected by them and, today, on generally good terms with them. No less ironic — but equally understandable — is their inclusion of the gold and diamond riches of the Witwatersrand and Johannesburg, which many racist A.W.B. members refer to as “Jewburg.” An Afrikaans newspaper last week quoted an A.W.B. official as saying that when the Right gains power in South Africa it would “lease out” Johannesburg and Soweto “to the Jews for 50 years.” History is also being repeated in South Africa today by the fragmentation of Afrikaner solidarity. The bitter description is given in the single Afrikaans word, “Broedertwis,” a fight among brothers. As in the old republics of the Orange Free State, the Transvaal, Lydenburg, the New Republic (Vryheid), and the other fledging States of the

19th century, the Boers cannot agree. A Boer republic, without troublesome “Bantus” — is it a pipedream? Would excluded white South Africans allow it? Will the rest of the world say, in effect: you’ve had the “lekker lewe” (sweet life) for so long, now you can stew in a pot of your own making and see how it is on the “other side” under a black majority Government? Regardless, it would be wrong to underestimate the strength of the A.W.B. — or, more exactly, the desperate mood of the people whose feelings are being expressed by this organisation.

Robert van Tonder says 3.5 million Boers — "not Afrikaners, Boers” — would outnumber the second biggest group, 900,000 Zulus, in the new republic. Van Tonder expects Boers sympathetic to the A.W.B. — disaffected “Nats” from President P. W. Botha’s National Party, and from the opposition Conservatives and Herstigte Nasionale Party — to make inroads into the Government’s electoral power.

“The Boer people run the infrastructure of this country — the Post Office, the civil service, the police, the army, the railways,” says van Tonder. “If the Boer people went on strike, everything would stop. Not all the people are with us yet, but they are coming over fast — except for the Cape Afrikaners.”

Some political analysts say the question now with the longawaited Right-wing swing is how powerful it will become in the run-up to the next election in 1989; and whether the Government will maintain effective control over the mainly-Afrikaner members of the army, the police, and the police reservists. Indeed, today the Afrikaners are the lost white tribe in danger of losing its head: They have nowhere to go; no relatives “back home” as was the case in the rest of Africa; but they do have their laager.