The Voortrekkers: The story of the Great Trek and the making of South Africa By Johannes Meintjes
The Voortrekkers: The story of the Great Trek and the making of South Africa By Johannes Meintjes
Hardcover
ISBN 0304290343
Publisher: Cassell & Company Ltd 1973 First Edition.
Used - Very Good. This book is in very good condition. The DJ has some wear especially on the edges and spine areas. The book pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. This book has clearly been well maintained and looked after thus far. Slight old tape residue marks. Stamped on the first page.
“The Great Trek” wrote Sir Winston Churchill, “was one of the remarkable feats of the nineteenth century.”
Five thousand Boers, men, women and children, set out in small parties into the unknown interior of southern Africa in search of new land and independence from British rule. With their wagons and oxen, their cattle, horses, Bibles and guns, these “Voortrekkers” created a legend and dramatically influenced the course of African history. The trickle of emigrant Boers soon became a flood which threatened the dominion of the military empires of such Zulu kings as Shaka and his successor Dingane. The Zulu warriors were magnificently drilled and contemptuous of death, but tactics based on massed charges and the stabbing assegais had little effect against the guns of the Voortrekkers.
At the decisive Battle of Blood River in December 1838 at least three thousand Zulus were killed, while the Boers lost not a man. Yet always the Voortrekkers moved in peril and as well as the fierce opposition of the Zulus and Matabele they had to contend with the British Government and such representatives as the brave, energetic and eccentric Sir Harry Smith, who had served under the great Wellington and regarded Boers and natives alike as “his children”.
But always the Trek spirit survived. For over thirty years the emigrants wandered across the veld, sustained against death, disease, privations and hardship by faith in the rightness of their actions and an unyielding trust in their God.
