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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And it's an important part of our story. because the women were there in the field next to the men with their as they called it, these front-loading rifles, the very sort of primitive guns that they had at the time. And they had to defend themselves as they were attacked.
Yeah, it took quite some time to reload the gun. It took quite some time. So sometimes you had to get people to help you to reload the gun. And also they had... They had sheer numbers against them. So I mentioned this story, but maybe I should tell this to you as well, the story about the vow that was made in 1838. I mentioned this when I spoke with Tucker Carlson as well.
So the Voortrekkers, they had a democratic election internally and they elected this leader, Pieter Tief was his name. He became sort of the leader of this trek, and he went to negotiate with the Zulu king, King Dungan, who was the younger brother of Shaka, King Shaka. He actually killed his brother, and then he became the king.
And they negotiated for a piece of land, and the treaty was, broadly speaking, that they would get a piece of land between the Tugela and the Umzumvubu rivers, for which they had to get cattle back that was stolen from the Zulus by another tribe. And so they brought the cattle back, this retif was warned against this. Some of the people said to him, listen, this is very dangerous and be careful.
And he said, no, we have to do this. We need to get land and we need to buy land. So they went to the Zulu king. They gave the cattle back. They signed a treaty. The king made a cross on a piece of paper on the contract. And he then said, the king said, we need to celebrate this. And so he said, come to my camp tonight and we'll have a celebration, but leave your weapons outside.
And so during the celebration, the Zulu king at one moment chanted , which means kill the wizards. And so they took the entire group to a nearby hill and they slaughtered them. And this Ratif, who was the leader, they had him stand and watch how his men were slaughtered, including his son, who was with them. And they killed him last.
So then they went out to attack the lagers, the camps where the Fuertrakers were, especially women and children. I believe the number is 185 women and children who were killed during these surprise attacks at night. The Voertrekker people then said, or the Afrikaners said, we need to retaliate, we need to attack back.
And so they had a command of about three to 400 people to go and attack the Zulus. At one moment, they found that they were completely surrounded by about 12,000 Zulus. Some people, some estimates say 20,000, but I think 12,000 is the number that's most commonly used, like all around them on the hills.
They were about 300 against 12,000, surrounded by 12,000. And so they thought, well, we're going to die. This is it. That's kind of what you'd think, all right. And then a man, I'm very proud to descend from him, a man named Sarl Salia, he was the religious leader. And he said, we need to make a vow to God. And so they got together and they wrote a vow.
And the vow said that they make a vow to God that if He protects them in the battle that lies ahead, that they would commemorate this day as a Sabbath, even after, regardless of what day of the week it is, that we would tell our children to commemorate this day as well, and that we will build a church where He wants us to build a church, and that the honor of the victory will go to Him and not to us.
And so that battle took place on the 16th of December, 1838. And the consequence of the battle was that not one of the Voertrekkers were killed. 3,000 Zulus were killed in the battle. So it was a spectacular event. And some people say that's the origin story of our people. That's when we became a people.
And that's partly, this is so important to us, firstly, because we still celebrate 16th of December. We commemorate that as a Sabbath. We go to church on the 16th of December. We have cultural festivals and so forth, not because of the battle against the Zulus, but because we were protected by God.
But it says a lot about why we are so conservative, why we love the land so much and the country, and why we are so religious still. So after that, they went further north and they settled and they established Pretoria, which is the capital of South Africa today. And many of the northern towns and cities eventually became developed.
Well, it's certainly both. So the population in South Africa grew quite rapidly in the centuries that followed among the white communities and also the black communities, up to the point where now there are about 60 million people in South Africa. Okay, and what's the racial mix?
It's about the white section, which you could say the white Anglos, the English-speaking, and also the Afrikaner people are just below 5 million. The Afrikaners are about 2.7 million. And the African or the black African population has grown rapidly. Interestingly enough, this is worth mentioning, it's often said that the apartheid system was a genocide.
There's a lot to criticize and we should talk about that, about just how bad it was and what went wrong. But genocide is not the right term because the black population in South Africa doubled I think it was in the first two decades of the apartheid system, and then it doubled again after that. So there was a massive population growth among black South Africans, especially in the last century.
So there would be slightly less. We can look up the exact numbers. There are slightly fewer. There's also what we call a colored community. I think in some countries they say mixed race. Quite significant, quite big as well. Bigger than the Afrikaner community. They generally speak Afrikaans, the same language as us. But they have their own culture that they've developed over time.
They also live mostly more in the southern parts of South Africa. So just from a racial perspective, South Africa is very diverse. But as you mentioned initially, races are not homogenous.
So if you consider the fact that within the different racial groups, there are different cultures and communities, the diversity, the complexity of South African society is really something that people should take note of. And it's easy to simplify that by simply saying, oh, there are white people and black people and the whites and blacks are in conflict.
That's so oversimplified that it's a false narrative.
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