The Great Trek ( ; ) was a northward migration of Dutch-speaking settlers who travelled by wagon trains from the Cape Colony into the interior of modern South Africa from 1836 onwards, seeking to live beyond the Cape's British colonial administration. The Great Trek resulted from the culmination of tensions between rural descendants of the Cape's original European settlers, known collectively as Boers, and the British Empire. It was also reflective of an increasingly common trend among individual Boer communities to pursue an isolationist and semi-nomadic lifestyle away from the developing administrative complexities in Cape Town. Boers who took part in the Great Trek identified themselves as voortrekkers (, ), meaning "pioneers", "pathfinders" (literally "fore-trekkers") in Dutch and Afrikaans.
The Great Trek led directly to the founding of several autonomous Boer republics, namely the South African Republic (also known simply as the Transvaal), the Orange Free State, and the Natalia Republic. It also led to conflicts that resulted in the displacement of the Northern Ndebele people, and conflicts with the Zulu people that contributed to the decline and eventual collapse of the Zulu Kingdom.
Background
Before the arrival of Europeans, the Cape of Good Hope area was populated by Khoisan tribes; the Bantu tribes were still migrating South and East from present-day Lesotho. The first Europeans settled in the Cape area under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company (also known by its Dutch initials VOC), which established a victualling station there in 1652 to provide its outward bound fleets with fresh provisions and a harbour of refuge during the long sea journey from Europe to Asia. In a few short decades, the Cape had become home to a large population of "vrijlieden", also denoted as "vrijburgers" (free citizens), former Company employees who remained in Dutch territories overseas after completing their contracts. Since the primary purpose of the Cape settlement at the time was to stock provisions for passing Dutch ships, the VOC offered grants of farmland to its employees under the condition they would cultivate grain for the Company warehouses, and released them from their contracts to save on their wages. Vrijburgers were granted tax-exempt status for 12 years and loaned all the necessary seeds and farming implements they requested. They were married Dutch citizens, considered "of good character" by the Company, and had to commit to spending at least 20 years on the African continent. Reflecting the multi-national character of the VOC's workforce, some German soldiers and sailors were also considered for vrijburger status as well, and in 1688 the Dutch government sponsored the resettlement of over a hundred French Huguenot refugees at the Cape. As a result, by 1691 over a quarter of the colony's European population was not ethnically Dutch. Nevertheless, there was a degree of cultural assimilation through intermarriage, and the almost universal adoption of the Dutch language. Cleavages were likelier to occur along social and economic lines; broadly speaking, the Cape colonists were delineated into Boers, poor farmers who settled directly on the frontier, and the more affluent, predominantly urbanised Cape Dutch.
Following the Flanders Campaign and the Batavian Revolution in Amsterdam, France assisted in the establishment of a pro-French client state, the Batavian Republic, on Dutch soil. This opened the Cape to French warships. To protect her own prosperous maritime shipping routes, Great Britain occupied the fledgling colony by force until 1803. From 1806 to 1814, the Cape was governed as a British military dependency, whose sole importance to the Royal Navy was its strategic relation to Indian maritime traffic. The British formally assumed permanent administrative control around 1815, as a result of the Treaty of Paris.
Causes
At the onset of the British rule, the Cape Colony encompassed and was populated by about 26,720 people of European descent, a relative majority of whom were of Dutch origin. Just over a quarter were of German ancestry and about one-sixth were descended from French Huguenots, although most had ceased speaking French since about 1750. There were also 30,000 African and Asian slaves owned by the settlers, and about 17,000 indigenous Khoisan. Relations between the settlers – especially the Boers – and the new administration quickly soured. The British authorities were adamantly opposed to the Boers' ownership of slaves and what was perceived as their unduly harsh treatment of the indigenous peoples.