Ernst Roets
speaker
479 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard May 2025
Ernst Roets’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And so that was about the time when the Zulu people were settling in what is today KwaZulu-Natal, and that calls up people in what is the Eastern Cape, closer to where the Afrikaners or the Proto-Afrikaners were.
I'm not sure why they haven't done that before, but from what I know, there was conflict up north in Africa and there was nomadic tribes and some groups started- So they were pushed down as a consequence of intertribal warfare in their own lands.
Yes, which is why we have some of the best farmers in South Africa today. So in terms of the history then, One major event was with the Napoleonic Wars. We sometimes joke, as the Afrikaner people, we say we skipped the Enlightenment because we have this joke. We say in Europe, they were reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau while we were hunting elephants.
Yeah, but that's important because I think it, in a way, shaped our culture in a particular way, which is why the Afrikaner people at least are much more conservative, much more religious than many of our friends in Europe.
I think they came in before the Europeans came, but they were coming in from the north in the same century, you could say.
Yes, they were less nomadic than the Bushmen. The Bushmen were more nomadic. They moved around much more. And the Bantu groups were also, in a sense, nomadic. But they settled in, like the Zulus built the Zulu kingdom in KwaZulu-Natal in the eastern part of the country. And they had more degrees of settlements.
1810.
And that's when the British came to colonize the Cape, partly as a result of the wars in Europe. And so we had some battles with the British, the Battle of Bloberg, the Battle of Meissenburg, and eventually the Cape was colonized.
I think it's all of that. It was part of the British expanding the British Empire, the strategic importance of the southern point of the African continent, especially for the trade that was before the— Well, the richness of the land.
Not yet, okay. And so they settled. which led to the great event in our history that many people say is the event that during which we became a people, which was the Great Trek. So some of the Afrikaner people or the Dutch speaking peoples in the Cape at the time felt that they cannot be governed by another nation.
They were very, very aggrieved by the idea that someone came in from another continent and- And took over. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they wanted to be free.
and so they eventually opted to move into the interior of south africa which was a very dangerous thing to do because people didn't know what they would find in the interior they sent in some what they call the commission track they sent in some scouts and and actually the scouts came back and said that there was there was they found some people in certain areas but largely speaking there were vast open tracks of land because what's also important in you this is again why the history of land ownership is so complex that was shortly after
the Mfekane genocide, which was a genocide, some figures estimate that about a million people were killed, as a result of Zulu expansionism and a conflict between the Zulu king and Mfekane or Msilikati, who was the, I think he was a soldier in the Zulu kingdom and he eventually had the Matabele or the Ndebele people.
And it was expansionist wars and it spread out throughout the southern part of Africa and there was mass extermination campaigns. So the scouts came back and they said in some places they found peoples living, in some places there was just no one, and in some places they just found bones, skeletons.
South Africa is about twice the size of Texas. So it's a pretty big country compared to the US, it's small. You could say it's the size of Western Europe if you take away Spain. So it's a pretty big country.
I think about 2,000, if I recall. It was a fairly small group initially.
Very, very similar. The Afrikaner story is remarkably similar to the American story. Also, we had our wars with the British. It's remarkably similar. Our interactions with local communities, the track towards the interior, it's a fascinating story, just how comparable it is. Also, culturally speaking.
So they, again, going back to the issue of conflict versus cooperation, there were many examples of cooperation and treaties, dozens of treaties that were signed with local tribes cooperating, but there was also conflict. And one of the most significant, or the most well-known battle was the Battle of Blood River,
which was when the Fuertrakkers, as they were known, which essentially means pioneer, also another similarity. It means those who go out ahead. They were known as the Fuertrakkers. And so they had conflict with the Ndebele people of Msilikati, this soldier from the Zulu who was part of this, you know.
Yeah, he had conflict with the Zulu king. And then they also had conflict with the Zulus. And one of the battles, I should just mention this in passing, was the Battle of Fagkop, where the Fuertrakkers were attacked by the Ndebele's of Msilikatsi. But it was an ambush. They didn't expect it. And so it was men and women and children who had to defend themselves.
Showing 61–80 of 479 · page 4 of 24
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