The Great Treks

The end of Apartheid in South Africa requires new history and this original approach to the making of modern South Africa will transform current thinking.

The mass migration of the Boer farmers from Cape Colony to escape British domination in 1835-36 - the Great Trek - has always been a potent icon of Afrikaner nationalism and identity. For African nationalists, the Mfecane - the vast movement of the Black populations in the interior following the emergence of a new Zulu kingdom as a major military force in the early 19th century - offers an equally powerful symbol of the making of a nation. With their parallel and contested visions of populations on the move to establish new states, these two stories became part of divided South Africa's separate mythologies, treated as unconnected events taking place in separate universes.