Dougie Oakes

THE Day of Reconciliation was born out of the triumph of bullets and cannons over spears – and of the formation of a body to wage an armed struggle against gross human rights abuses contained in a policy of apartheid.

Both were seminal events in the history of South Africa.

Both occurred on the same date – December 16 – but in different centuries.

And both were joined together in those heady moments immediately after 1994, when South Africa became a true democracy and the first president of the “new” country, Nelson Mandela, looked for opportunities to put into practice what he so passionately believed – that white and black South Africans had the will and capacity to truly reconcile with each other.

It is a day that has travelled a long journey with a common thread: bitterness.

In the case of Afrikaner South Africans it was a journey that began with an event that was to assume almost mythical proportions in their history and consciousness – the Great Trek.

Books have been written about why a tiny proportion of Dutchspeaking settlers decided to leave the Cape Colony to trek inland in wagons containing all their worldly possessions, but a 46-yearold Voortrekker, Anna Steenkamp, perhaps put the reasons most succinctly…

In 1843, in a letter from the then Natal to relatives in the Cape Colony, Steenkamp spoke about “the continued depredations and robberies of the K*ffirs for making life on the eastern frontier unbearable”; and the emancipation of slaves – “not so much their freedom … but being placed on an equal footing with Christians, contrary to the laws of God and the natural distinction of race and religion.”

The refusal of the Voortrekkers to recognise black people with whom they came into contact as members of the human race sowed the seeds of tragedy.

Once the exiles from the Cape Colony reached the highveld, lowveld and the south-eastern coast of the region, they made no distinction between hunting and raiding. In what became a reign of terror over much of present-day Mpumalanga, the new arrivals captured thousands of children and turned them into “inboekselings” (which translates as apprentices, but which in reality were no more than child slaves).

In cases, where land was “legally” ceded, there was little doubt that African chiefs did not in fact sell land to the Voortrekkers.

None of the parties – neither Boer nor Chief – subscribed to a uniform legal system or concept of ownership.

Private land ownership did not exist in African societies. In cases