When livestock perished, the trekkers increasingly turned to elephant hunting and traded ivory. C.D. Bell depicts a hunter using the carcass of an elephant as shelter on a rainy afternoon.
By the beginning of the 1840s Hendrik Potgieter had established his personal authority over the trekkers in the Potchestroom-Winburg area that straddled the Vaal River. In 1845 he moved to Ohrigstad in the bushveld of the northeastern Transvaal. Potchefstroom was to remain an ‘adjunct’ settlement. The community here was plagued by tsetse fly and, as more and more livestock perished, the trekkers turned to elephant hunting and the ivory trade. Potgieter’s followers maintained a tenuous existence in this region for the next fifteen years. The Potgieter family (Hendrik died in 1852) ran the settlement virtually as a personal fiefdom.
In Ohrigstad itself there was growing tension between Potgieter and a Natal faction of trekkers wedded to the ideal of democratic government in the form of a Volksraad. In addition, the Natal faction saw the best means of survival as being in orderly cattle-farming rather than nomadic hunting, which might endanger relations with African chiefdoms. The Volksraad faction entered into a treaty with the Swazi, essentially to counter an earlier agreement made by Potgieter with the Pedi paramount, Sekwati. In return the Boer trekkers were expected to protect the Swazi from Zulu attacks, which on one occasion they did.The shifting nature of political alliances between and within African and trekker society is a particular feature of this period in the Transvaal. Despite superior weaponry, the trekker settlements were obliged to enter into treaties with their African neighbours. This ambivalence laid the foundation for an uncertain relationship between the trekkers and African communities.
Marthinus Wessel Pretorius, son of Andries, was elected the fi rst president of the ZAR in 1857. When he was sworn in at Potchefstroom the national fl ag, the Vierkleur, was raised for the fi rst time. Preoccupied with uniting the ZAR with the Republic of the Orange Free State (OFS), Pretorius got himself elected president of the OFS as well. The ensuing confusion nearly led to civil war in the Transvaal. Pretorius resigned as president of the OFS and in 1864 was once again elected president of the ZAR. His efforts to establish control over African chiefdoms to the north and to acquire a port on the east coast were unsuccessful. His inept handling of ZAR claims to the diamond fi elds ended in disaster when – without consulting the Volksraad – he declared the Republic willing to submit to the fi nding of the arbitrators, who turned out to be interested parties. In 1871 he was forced to resign and Thomas Francois Burgers succeeded him in 1872.
Potgieter was given to reckless and vicious attacks on powerful African neighbours, which antagonised the Volksraad party and a considerable number of his own followers. After one such engagement the community split, Potgieter taking his followers to the Soutpansberg and the rest moving to Lydenburg. Ohrigstad was abandoned. Three separate trekker communities now existed north of the Vaal – Potchestroom, Lydenburg, and Potgieter’s people in the Soutpansberg.
Trekker unity remained a chimera. None of the independent statelets wished to concede political control to another, and various unity talks and agreements were worth little more than the paper they were signed on. Stephanus Schoeman, who took over the Soutpansbergers, was particularly aloof from the others. Only in 1860, largely due to the efforts of Marthinus Pretorius, did the three groups reach consensus. After his defeat in 1848 at Boomplaats at the hands of Harry Smith, Andries Pretorius fled, and soon built up a new following near the modern Pretoria. Because of rivalry with Potgieter, he organised trekkers outside Potgieter’s own sphere of influence, and in 1849 established a Volksraad for the entire Transvaal region. The Volksraad gave Pretorius a mandate to negotiate a political settlement with Britain for trekkers living north of the Vaal River.
By 1850 Britain had begun to turn its back on the highveld. It had little enthusiasm for supporting expansionist and militaristic English merchants and speculators clamouring for Moshoeshoe’s land. Instead, it looked to the trekkers to settle border disputes with African chiefdoms, subjugate Africans into a labour force, and establish commercial relations with the British colonies. Therefore, at the Sand River Convention of 1852, Britain gave Transvaal Afrikaners the right to govern themselves and to purchase ammunition from the British colonies; promised to disclaim all prior alliances with the ‘ coloured nations’ north of the Vaal, and to prohibit the arms trade with Africans. Britain’s main demand was that no slavery be permitted in the republic.
Britain had, in effect, abandoned its treaties with non-European chiefs, and had given the trekkers political power and access to ammunition. Without much preparation and with no fanfare, the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) was established in 1852, and two years later the Republic of the Orange Free State (OFS). There were now some 20 000 burghers in the ZAR north of the Vaal and 15 000 in the OFS between the Vaal and the Orange. Some OFS burghers kept alive the idea of the incorporation of their state into the Cape Colony until the late 1860s, but the majority of burghers became staunch republicans. Since it controlled the ports and the supply of ammunition, Britain had little to fear from the financially strapped republics.
The economy of the ZAR was too weak to weld Boer society together and to underpin an efficient state. Burghers were hard-pressed and reluctant to pay taxes, and ignored call-ups for commando. The state was almost solely dependent on subsistence farming and markets and towns were slow to develop. State officials were often paid in kind, particularly in land, for their services. Under such circumstances, land accumulation through the holding of public office became a time-honoured practice in the ZAR and competition for the key posts of veldcornet, commandant and landdrost was almost an all-absorbing feature of local trekker politics.
Black and white societies shared similar aims of gaining and retaining access to productive resources of land, labour and game in the region. Thus the trekkers tried to coerce labour and/or tribute from African chiefdoms on the basis that they were owners and masters of the land. As already noted, African societies in the late 1830s and 1840s had been remarkably successful in reconstituting themselves. Often the trekkers resorted to random violence to obtain their aims. This is best illustrated in the seizure of young African captives who were euphemistically ‘apprenticed’ to trekker families. These captives were supposedly orphans but this was rarely the case. Rev. Freeman of the London Missionary Society provides a typical account of how these apprentices, or inboekselinge ( see Inboekselinge and oorlams), were obtained.
A party of Boers came and demanded orphans who might be there. After much altercation and the steady refusal of the [Hurutshe] chief to give up the orphans, the Boers demanded the children of the people. The Boers began to seize them and put them into wagons; the men interfered; the Boers fired and in the result most of the men were killed defending their families and the wagons were loaded with children and driven off as booty.
The captives often became permanent workers, and adopted the language and social norms of trekker society. Brought up on Boer farms, these people became skilled and served in a variety of roles essential to the Boer economy, like wagon-repairing, hunting, gun-maintenance and ploughing. Veldcornets and other local officials pressured chiefs into providing labour. If they did not, they could be punished – for example, by flogging.
