The Dutch Boers (lit: farmers, also called Afrikaners) in South Africa fled inland, away from the Cape Colony, after the British took it over in 1814. They did not want to live under British rule.
The Dutch did not like the imposition of English language and culture. They resented the abolition of slavery. (Where have we heard that before?) But it was more than slavery.
The Boers were primarily the descendants of Dutch, Huguenot, and German Calvinists. In the 1830s, these Dutch farmers left the then-British Cape Colony and headed for the interior, where they would form the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republics.
This was called the Great Trek, and it became the stuff of legend. The arduous journey and settlement of the interior paralleled the American conquest of the West. Great paintings were made; books were written about it.
The Boers were religiously conservative Calvinists. Their leaders carried bibles with them. Admittedly, some took it a bit too far — Paul Kruger misinterpreted the bible to conclude that the Earth is flat — but they were overall quite admirable.
But the British kept interfering with them. They could not let the Boers go free. The English tried to interfere with us, too. They impounded our sailors, a cause of the War of 1812. They tried to persuade the Republic of Texas not to join the Union. They tried to interfere in our Civil War.
Only the Boers were too few to fight back.
In 1881, the Boers won the First Boer War, which secured their independence, though the British claimed they were still a vassal state. The British had expected the Boers to remain backward rubes, annoying, but mostly inconsequential. So to London, their "independence" was deemed a minor concession.
Only gold and diamonds were being found in the Boer Territory, and incredible amounts of wealth fell into the hands of the Boer — rather than the British, who wanted it for themselves.
So tens of thousands of British subjects poured into the Boer Republics to stake their claim. The Dutch Afrikaners called them Uitlanders (Outlanders, foreigners). The Boer government would not enfranchise them. They knew that to do so would destroy their Dutch Afrikaner republics.
This was clearly a manufactured crisis, similar to those who would ask Israel to give the Palestinians a right of return that would demographically destroy the Jewish state.
The British wanted those diamonds and gold, and they used every trick in the book to claim that the Boers were oppressors.
At first, they tried to overthrow the Boers in the Jameson Raid of 1895. The Boers caught wind of the plot and thwarted the raid.
The British would not let up, and in 1899, they started moving armies to the border to threaten the Boers.
With no other choice, the Boers pre-emptively struck, and for three years, the world saw a few heroic Boers make a monkey of the mighty British Army. The British had to create concentration camps, where Afrikaner women and children were held — and often starved — to force a surrender.
IT SCANDALIZED THE BRITISH
What prompted this war was major British money. Cecil Rhodes, a former prime minister of the British Cape Colony and a mining magnate and conspirator in the Jameson Raid, along with a few London bankers, wanted complete control of all the gold and the diamonds. Those diamonds and gold could finance Rhodes’s elitist dreams for world British control.
Rhodes wanted to bring America back under British rule.
In die grafika: The Voortrekker Monument is located just south of Pretoria in South Africa. The granite structure is located on a hilltop, and was raised to commemorate the Voortrekkers who left the Cape Colony between 1835 and 1854. It was designed by the architect Gerard Moerdijk. On 8 July 2011, the Voortrekker Monument was declared a National Heritage Site by the South African Heritage Resource Agency.
'Die Stem' - National Anthem of SA, 1957-1994 (No longer taught or sung in official functions).
Note any similarities ?