Trek Studies About The Mobility Of The Pioneering Population At The Cape

This work on the pioneering history of the Boers in the Cape Colony (South Africa) before the Great Trek (1835-1846) is primarily based on research in various archives and libraries. However, the author PJ van der Merwe (1912-1979) found it desirable to personally visit different areas mentioned in the book to get to know the country and the people better and to gather oral tradition and personal information. In carrying out this fieldwork during 1938 and 1939, the author covered 15,000 miles by car and questioned hundreds of people (old pioneers, farmers, teachers, magistrates, school inspectors, livestock inspectors, surveyors and police agents). This investigation not only enabled him to better interpret the sometimes fragmentary data found in the archives and old travel descriptions, but also served to supplement it.

Translated by Margaretha Sch„fer, Pioneers of the Dorsland provides a journalistic account of PJ van der Merwe?s travels to the Northwest where he interviewed farmers, clergymen, teachers, businessmen, policemen, officials of the magistrate court, divisional council and school board. Van der Merwe introduces the narrative by explaining that it focuses on the peculiar migratory way of life of the region?s half-nomadic pioneers. He highlights his efforts as an exhaustive attempt that may prove useful to any future historian interested in the area. Van der Merwe also published other similar works during his time as a researcher, traveller, historian and journalist ? Die Noordwaartse Beweging van die Boere voor die Groot Trek, 1770?1842, Die Trekboer in die Geskiedenis van die Kaapkolonie, 1657?1842 and Trek: Studies oor die Mobiliteit van die Pioniersbevolking aan die Kaap. Pioneers of the Dorsland is also available in Afrikaans.

The Lower !Garib, or Orange River, flows through the historical Namaqualand and since 1990 has formed the international border between Namibia and South Africa. The contributors to this volume focus on this hardly discussed stretch of the Orange River to understand the region's social history, geography, and economy. This book brings together scholars from Namibia, South Africa, and overseas, as well as the knowledge and analysis from people living in the region. In concise chapters and short portraits, they discuss the region's past and present from a variety of perspectives.

Knowledge and Colonialism examines writings and drawings of eighteenth-century scientific travellers in South Africa against the background of administrative and commercial discourses. It is argued that these travellers benefited more from their relationship with the colonial order than the other way around

The end of the Anglo-Boer War in May 1902 left the Boers (Afrikaners) defeated and bitter in a ravaged land. Poverty and disillusionment spurred many to leave the post-war British-administered South Africa. This book studies one group of emigres who trekked northward to German East Africa and British East Africa. The author relies heavily on primary sources written in both Dutch and Afrikaans to describe the experiences of the Boers in East Africa. The literature dealing with the Afrikaners documents a people known for their independent insistence upon their language and culture, for their territorial sovereignty established in southern Africa, and for their characteristic religiosity and reliance on Old Testament-based Calvinism. Large numbers of Boers would not or could not adjust to living under an administration with whom they had been at war, and those who tried did not receive much support. As one eyewitness wrote, Not much was needed to stimulate the desire to trek. And so the Afrikaner Diaspora began.

Petrus Johannes Van der Merwe wrote three of the most significant books on the history of South Africa before he was 35 years old. His trilogy, of which The Migrant Farmer is the first volume, has become a classic that no student of Cape colonial history of the seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth century can ignore. Van der Merwe was unique among Afrikaner historians in that he focused not on the single event known as the Great Trek, but on the greater migration, nearly three hundred years long, of peoples of Dutch, French and German descent out from the victualling station at Cape Town after their arrival there in 1652. In the process he pioneered new directions in historical writing decades before they became fashionable among other South African historians. Van der Merwe was less interested in politics than in the social, cultural, economic and religious lives of his subjects. He asked questions about such daily concerns as work, food, property owning, private and public worship, leisure activities, fashions, the environment and about the farmers' relations with their neighbors, both white and black. The Migrant Farmer (Die Trekboer in die Geskiedenis van die Kaapkolonie, 1657-1842) was published in Cape Town in Afrikaans in 1938. Beck's English translation will allow scholars worldwide the opportunity to use, or challenge, this pioneering study of South Africa.

Water Management in Africa and the Middle East: Challenges and Opportunities