Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [31]
In 1795, the British, looking to protect their sea routes and alarmed by the empire-building intentions of other European countries, sent an expedition to the Cape and easily forced the Dutch to surrender, but they hadn’t counted on—or recognized—the increasingly cohesive and nationalistic sensibilities of the Afrikaners. By the mid 1830s, British rule had so disgusted the Afrikaners (the 1834 emancipation of slaves was the final straw) that about twelve thousand of them responded by emigrating far into the interior—the Great Trek, it was called afterward—and setting up two of their own independent Afrikaner-run republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.
War is Africa’s perpetual ripe fruit. There is so much injustice to resolve, such desire for revenge in the blood of the people, such crippling corruption of power, such unseemly scramble for the natural resources. The wind of power shifts and there go the fruit again, tumbling toward the ground, each war more inventively terrible than the last. In 1880, the British confiscated a Boer’s wagon because he had not paid his taxes. Needing nothing but the smallest of excuses, the Boers retaliated by declaring war against the British. Within a year, the British had been defeated. The Afrikaners would later call this their First War of Independence. The British would call it the First Anglo-Boer War.
But the subsequent gold rush of 1886 attracted even more British to the Boer republics. Never forgetting their resentment, the Afrikaners refused to let the British vote. Even by the 1890s, when there were more British than Afrikaners in the republics, the Afrikaners denied the British the vote. This provoked the Second Anglo-Boer War, or what the Afrikaners called the Second War of Freedom, in October 1899. This time the British took no chances. Four hundred fifty thousand soldiers came to South Africa from Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada to fight fewer than sixty thousand Boers. This time the war was longer and even more excessively nasty and brutish than the last.
Although the Afrikaners had no official army, they had been on the continent for two centuries and they had the land in their blood (to say nothing of their blood in the land). They needed no barracks or uniforms, and no generals to give them orders. They had sturdy horses, strong men and tenacious women. Their children were crack shots, raised to be tough and self-sufficient. On the other hand, the British troops wore impractical red jackets that shone out of the blond high veldt like stoplights. They didn’t understand the language of this wide, sad land, nor did they love it. The only way they could win the war was backhandedly—by starving and diseasing the Afrikaners out of existence. So between 1901 and 1902, the British scorched more than thirty thousand farms and placed almost all the Afrikaner women and children in the world’s first concentration camps. As many as twenty-nine thousand Boers died from the appalling conditions in those camps; so did twenty thousand blacks who had been caught working on Boer farms. By the time a peace treaty was signed at the town of Vereeniging on May 21, 1902, the British army had killed nearly one quarter of all the Boers in existence.
Flip Prinsloo had come to Kenya as a baby with his parents and forty-seven