The Great Migration of the Boer *** War

In 1795, French troops invaded the Netherlands and established the French Republic of Batavia, becoming a vassal state of France. Britain immediately occupied many French and Dutch overseas colonies. With the consent of the Dutch government in exile in England, the Cape Colony was also occupied by British troops. In 1802, due to Napoleon's victory at the Battle of Marengo, Austria was forced to sign a peace treaty with France, and the anti-French alliance collapsed. Under this situation, Britain had to sign the Peace of Amiens with France. Britain withdrew from Malta, would not interfere in the internal affairs of the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, recognized the territories occupied by France in Europe, and withdrew from the colonies it occupied overseas. The Cape Colony was also returned to the Batavia Revolution. Soon, Britain resumed war with France and came back in 1806 to occupy the Cape Colony again. At the Vienna Peace Conference in 1814-1815, Britain took the Cape region as its own after paying six million pounds in compensation to the Netherlands.

After the end of the Napoleonic Wars, more than 300,000 demobilized soldiers and sailors flooded into the domestic labor market in Britain, causing serious social problems. In order to relieve domestic employment pressure, the United Kingdom decided to organize immigration to Australia, Canada and South Africa, which are vast and sparsely populated. The British who immigrated to the Cape soon outnumbered the Afrikaners who had immigrated here for more than a hundred years. At this time, Britain implemented a free trade policy around the world and wanted to turn all colonies in the empire into sales markets for British industrial products and sources of raw materials. The economic foundation of the Cape Colony was based on a backward economic form in which Boer ranchers obtained large tracts of land for free and implemented slavery on local black people, which was obviously not in line with Britain's liberal capitalist economic policy. In the 1830s, the British declared the land in the Cape Colony as "royal land" and no longer allowed Boer farmers to occupy and develop it for free. Instead, they implemented a land auction system and restricted the Boers from migrating north of the Orange River. In addition, the British announced the abolition of slavery in the Cape Colony in 1834 and replaced the Boers' traditional autonomous parliament with a strict colonial official appointment system. The idea of ??"everyone is equal" promoted by British bourgeois liberals in South Africa aroused the resentment of Boer farmers with racist ideas. They said: "If slaves are allowed to enjoy equal status with Christians, then we would rather leave."

In the spring of 1836, a large number of Boer farmers who were uneasy and dissatisfied with British colonial policies abandoned themselves With pastures and houses, they drove cattle carts, drove livestock, took all their belongings and slaves, left the Hex River Valley and Breede Valley (near Cape Town) where they originally lived, and began the great migration to the interior of South Africa. . The Great Migration lasted intermittently for four years, and the Boer families who participated in the Great Migration formed several self-defense militia groups. The bullock cart was a means of transportation, a home, and a house of worship. The night migrants formed a circular formation of bullock carts end to end to form a fortification to guard against attacks by the local Zulu and Xhosa people. This migration is called the "Groote Trek".