The trekboers, including the family of Paul Kruger, were migrating frontier farmers. Unlike the Voortrekkers, politics were not a major consideration in their migrations. They grazed their cattle north and south of the Orange River according to the season. These interior and exterior views are of a trekboer house in the Transvaal.
Migrating frontier farmers, called trekboers, had for two decades partly settled on the highveld, grazing cattle north and south of the Orange according to season. Unlike with the Voortrekkers, political considerations were not foremost in the trekboers’ migrations.
Various Voortrekker parties set out from different localities at different times, each of them organised by a prominent local personality, such as Hendrik Potgieter of Tarka, Gerrit Maritz of Graaff-Reinet and Piet Uys of Uitenhage. Most parties numbered more than 100. Given the nature of the mobilisation, personality clashes were inevitable and the Voortrekkers struggled to agree on a common strategy and a common government. Louis Tregardt, the first important leader, travelled no further across the frontier than the White Kei River, where he was given land by the Xhosa king Hintsa in 1834.
Later the same year, the Sixth Frontier War broke out and Tregardt was accused of gun-running. He and Janse Van Rensburg, the other early trek leader, headed for the Portuguese seaport of Delagoa Bay. But when Tregardt and most of his party died of fever and the Tsonga wiped out the Van Rensburg party, the other Voortrekkers decided to look for safer pastures.
Hendrik Potgieter’s trek moved out of the Tarka area across the colonial boundary in late 1835 or early 1836. Gerrit Maritz and his trek left Graaff-Reinet in September 1836, with more than 700 people, some 100 of them white male adults. Maritz took along legal works, including a study by Grotius, and a cannon – a great legal book and an instrument of violence, the two main means of asserting white supremacy. By the spring of 1837 there were five or six large camps between the Orange and Vaal rivers and a total of 2 000 trekkers.
The emigrants were well aware that their adversaries suspected they intended to embark on a campaign of African dispossession. They saw blacks as people with whom they had to reach a working relationship. They coveted them as labourers and wanted them as allies against other blacks. Their commandos always included blacks, usually as agterryers, people entrusted with tending the horses and preparing the food. The first large commando of armed burghers on horseback, headed by Potgieter and Maritz, had 103 trekkers and 40 coloured men, with 60 blacks to assist them.
Among the intellectual baggage of the Voortrekkers were policies like the reprisal
The routes followed by the various trekker parties in what later came to be known as the Great Trek.
system, practices such as the capturing and indenturing of indigenous children, fighting techniques like the commando and the laager, and the treaty as a model of ‘international’ relations. Verbal agreements or formal treaties with chiefs were part and parcel of the eastern frontier scene. While the trekkers were leaving, Andries Stockenstrom, on behalf of the colony, signed treaties with various chiefs as partners in maintaining peace and good order.
Potgieter’s trek began with only 33 arms-bearing men, along with women and children, and increased to 200 after the parties of Sarel Cilliers and Casper Kruger joined them. Potgieter, an energetic, active man with a taciturn temperament, concluded agreements with African chiefs to live in peace, but in August 1836 an Ndebele patrol attacked the Liebenberg family, part of Potgieter’s trek, and killed six men, two women and six children. The Ndebele’s primary aim was probably to plunder the large herds of cattle the trekkers had brought with them.
In 1836 the Ndebele army attacked Potgieter’s laager at the Battle of Vegkop.
Then on 20 October 1836 an Ndebele army of 4 000 to 6 000 men attacked Potgieter’s laager; in the Battle of Vegkop, 35 trekkers beat off the massive Ndebele attack with the loss of only two lives. The Ndebele did succeed in carrying off almost all the trekkers’ cattle, and in January commandos went out to punish Mzilikazi. The first, headed by Potgieter and Maritz, killed 400, sacked Mzilikazi’s village at Mosega and took 7 000 cattle. In November another commando, headed by Potgieter and Piet Uys, forced Mzilikazi to flee to the present Zimbabwe. There were no serious rivals now to the emigrants on the plateau of the highveld.
