United States or Sint Maarten ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He help the chosen against the children of Hell. "What did Krool do? He tell Oom Paul how the thieves would to come in the night to sold him like sheep to a butcher, how the t'ousand wolves would swarm upon the sheepfold, and there would be no homes for the voortrekker and his vrouw, how the Outlander would sit on our stoeps and pick the peaches from our gardens.
Or did some small boy voortrekker, munching, from the pocket of his blesbuck-skin jacket, dried fruit sent up by some kind tante from the far south, carelessly throw aside a stone which had been accidentally included, and was that the ancestor of those trees which used to afford us so many delightful feasts?
The active party among the Boers, i.e., the Voortrekker party, the most anti-British and Republican, though small in itself, had now succeeded in completely dominating the rest of the Boers, and galvanizing them into something like national life and cohesion again a result achieved partly by earnest persuasion, but largely also by a kind of terrorism.
Just as we were starting on again the voortrekker, whom I had set to watch at a little distance, ran up with his eyes bulging out of his head, and reported that he had seen a Basuto with an assegai hanging about in the bush, as though to keep touch with us, after which we delayed no more.
The Franchise, which until then-in accordance with Law No. 1 of 1876-had been granted to anyone holding property or residing in the State, or, failing the property qualification, to anyone who had qualified by one year's residence, was now altered, and Law No. 7 of 1882 was passed which provided that aliens could become naturalized and enfranchised after five years' residence, thus attaining the status of the oldest Voortrekker.
How this came about cannot be expressed more clearly than in the words of Paul Botha, who, as I have already said, was a voortrekker like Kruger himself, and a Boer of the Boers, save that he seems to have been a man with wider and more liberal views than his fellows. He was member for Kroonstadt in the Free State Raad.
But owing it may be to the distance which intervened between Kruger and the scene of action, the dour old voortrekker of Colesberg would not hear of any voluntary retirement before the enemy who had driven him out of the Cape Colony sixty years before.
Behind Hetmeyer's Kopje were the horses of the men whom Rudyard Byng had brought to take a position and hold it till support came and this flank of the Farmer's Army was turned; but the men themselves were at work on the kopjes the grim work of dislodging the voortrekker people from the places where they burrowed like conies among the rocks.
One of them he accounted for, another he wounded, but the wounded voortrekker a giant of near seven feet clubbed his rifle, and drove at him. Rudyard shot at close quarters again, but his pistol missed fire. Just as the rifle of his giant foe swung above him, Byng realized that the third Boer was levelling a rifle directly at his breast.
"Hear, hear," said the voices on the waggon as he paused to note the effect of his address. "Gentlemen and burghers of the State, my natural promptings in this case are towards pity. The prisoner is an old man, who has lived many years amongst us like a brother. Indeed, he is a voortrekker, and, though an Englishman, one of the fathers of the land.
Word Of The Day