‘History had seldom witnessed a stranger and more moving spectacle than that of well-todo farmers, some in their first flush of youth and others already bending under the weight of years, forsaking their farms and homesteads, packing their families with all their household goods into the unwieldy ox-wagon, driving their flocks and herds before them, and trekking away to the distant, unknown interior.’ This was a description of what became known as the Great Trek that appeared in a biography of Andrew Murray, ordained in 1849 in Bloemfontein as the first Dutch Reformed minister in a parish beyond the Orange River. Between 1835 and 1845, parties of burgher families, later called Voortrekkers, and their servants, moved out of the Cape Colony in considerable numbers. They mingled with the trekboers who had left the colony earlier and were sojourning in the trans-Orange area before many of them moved on into Natal or the Transvaal. In the first wave of the emigration of the Voortrekkers, which ended in 1840, some 6 000 people trekked (20% of the whites in the eastern districts and 10% of the colony’s whites). By 1845 some 2 300 families, or 15 000 burghers and their families – accompanied by an estimated 5 000 servants – had left the colony.
Officials and church leaders realised immediately that this was an event of major significance and almost unanimously condemned the trek; some were concerned about the impact on indigenous populations, some about the fate of the trekkers. Prominent frontier colonist Gideon Joubert expected the trekkers to be destroyed speedily and the survivors forced to return or degenerate into a state ‘worse than that of the heathen’. The synod of the Dutch Reformed Church in 1837 expressed its concern over the ‘departure into the desert, without a Moses or Aaron’ by people looking for a ‘ Canaan’ without having been given a ‘promise or direction’. De Zuid-Afrikaan, the only Dutch newspaper, was dismayed that the Voortrekkers had removed themselves from British authority.
At the time when the trekkers began to leave the colony in the 1830s, there was intensive contact between Europeans and Africans along a line of approximately 200 kilometres near the Fish River. Beyond that were only a few places where Europeans were in contact with people who were not European. In the vicinity of Port Natal (the present Durban) a few English traders and hunters were living among a large indigenous population.
Among the principal groupings living in the areas to which the emigrants were moving was Mzilikazi’s Ndebele kingdom, which had established itself in the Marico Valley, in what would become known as the western Transvaal. Using tactics based on the Zulu style of fighting, the Ndebele army had laid waste large parts of what would become known as the Transvaal and northern Free State. Another chief, Moshoeshoe, who had built the Basotho nation out of refugees, occupied land east and west of the Caledon River. In Natal the Mfecane involved the consolidation of the Zulu kingdom. Here Dingane had become king of the Zulu nation after assassinating Shaka.
