Good stuff neolib, thank you ... that the zulu were a clan of the bantu i'd forgotten ... much of my impression of early days comes from reading Michener's book ['Covenant'?], but thirty years ago probably ... one thing that sticks in the mind, is the assertion that when van Riebeeck and company started up their colony there were no natives around at all, and little to no evidence that they ever had been, no sign of houses or cultivation or clearings etc, according to the dutch, who wrote a lot down at the time, and would have had no reason to lie about it, as wiping out natives was then considered routine
That would have applied to a fairly small area though, no doubt, and wouldn't have lasted long at a rate of 6000 acres per son per generation, wooo
So that is how Orange Free State was so clear for the boers of the Great Trek ... terra nulla sort of but too nova-ly so for the title ... there were actually some useful facets to afrikaaner culture, the vitality, the sense of independence and self-responsibility, the drive to enterprise of it all ... but very nearly killed off, and rightly so, by that self-destructive pig-headed narrow-minded exclusivism |
