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Updated: June 11, 2025
Farther on, burghers dismounted from their horses and joined the crowd. In the distance were Talana Hill, where the first battle of the campaign was fought; the lofty Drakensberg where more than fifty years before the early Boer Voortrekkers had their first glimpses of fair Natal, while to the south were the hills of Ladysmith of sombre history.
One party of the emigrants was cut off by the formidable Matabeli, a branch of the great Zulu nation. The final victory of the 'voortrekkers' cleared all the country between the Orange River and the Limpopo, the sites of what have been known as the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.
Our rulers need wisdom in this direction, and will be responsible if our strangers are subjected to unfair laws. The older people here will call to mind, when the old voortrekkers were obliged to go hundreds of miles, as far as Pietermaritzburg, for their supplies, that we prayed for shopkeepers in our land so that we might be spared those long journeys.
Let us then thank God that it is our lot to pass thus easily and in age, and not to have perished in our youth, as did so many of our companions, the Voortrekkers, they and their children together, by the spear of the savage, or by starvation and fever and wild beasts in the wilderness. Ah!
Indeed, some of the legislators have been known to express the opinion that education was not by any means desirable, as it taught the rising generation to look with contempt on the hardy Voortrekkers; and an interesting debate is on record, in which members pointedly opposed the granting of facilities for the education of their own women-kind, on the ground that presently the women would be found reading books and newspapers instead of doing their work, and would soon get to know more than their fathers, husbands, and brothers, and would, as a consequence, quickly get out of hand.
It was in the great stone-built chimney of the disused, half-ruined farmhouse kitchen, a solid cube of masonry reared by the stout hands of the old voortrekkers of 1836, its walls, three feet in thickness, embracing the wide hearth about which the family life of the homestead had concentrated itself in the past. There may have been a mill on the farm in the old days.
On the 13th Sir George White had made a reconnaissance in force, but had not come in touch with the enemy. On the 15th six of the Natal Police were surrounded and captured at one of the drifts of the Buffalo River. On the 18th our cavalry patrols came into touch with the Boer scouts at Acton Homes and Besters Station, these being the voortrekkers of the Orange Free State force.
The following is a free translation of the Transvaal Volkslied, which may serve to illustrate the sentiments which have dominated the Boers ever since their national existence: TRANSVAAL VOLKSLIED. Right nobly gave Voortrekkers brave their blood, their lives, their all; For Freedom's right, in Death's despite, they fought at duty's call. Ho!
They consisted of irregular troops, three hundred and forty of the Protectorate Regiment, one hundred and seventy Police, and two hundred volunteers, made up of that singular mixture of adventurers, younger sons, broken gentlemen, and irresponsible sportsmen who have always been the voortrekkers of the British Empire.
Since the very beginning of our existence as a nation in 1836 our people had been acquainted with black races, and bitter had been their experience. All that our voortrekkers had suffered was indelibly stamped on our memory. We well knew what the Zulus could do under cover of darkness their sanguinary night attacks were not easily forgotten. Their name of "night-wolves" had been well earned.
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