and whether we like it or not, the point where South Africa is today had its roots forged on the battlefields of the ABW and the stupidity of the Jameson Raid.
It actually started before then - the animosity between Boer and Brit during the Black Circuit and later at Slagters Nek.
Black Circuit
in the wake of unsympathetic officials came a host of Christian missionaries who were determined to preach the fashionable doctrine of brotherly love and racial equality to anyone who would listen to them. With their advent the whole impact of contemporary English liberalism and Negrophilism, buttressed as it was by central authority, fell suddenly on the Boers. The missionaries' teachings were, of course, repugnant to a white race not only convinced of its superiority to the Hottentots and Bantu, but which genuinely believed that its very existence depended on subjugating these inferior beings who had harmed them so often. And, indeed, one cannot help but feel a good deal of sympathy for the Boers on this matter, especially as the missionaries were earnest irritable men who had no experience in dealing with a multi-racial society, and who seemed to reserve all their charity for its coloured members. Many of the missionaries came from the artisan class and had received the call during the British evangelical revival: for instance, John Philip, who was particularly loathed by the Afrikaners, had been a mill hand before entering the Church, while Robert Moffat of Kuruman had begun life as a gardener. This sort of background inevitably led them to display a narrowness of vision which might have been avoided by a wider education, and, however praiseworthy their purpose, however splendid their new awareness of the equality of men, it is sad that the missionaries did not express their opinions about the Boer attitudes to the coloured people more tactfully, and avoided other of their more patronising criticisms. But, however badly they had been received by the Dutch Colonists, the missionaries certainly had the ear of the Cape Government, and it was mainly due to their agitation that the British authorities in 1828 passed an ordinance which released all Hottentots from any legislation that enforced discrimination on account of colour. Pass laws and child apprenticeship were all abolished and there is no doubt that the Boers were correct in claiming that Hottentot vagrancy, with its concomitant evil of stock-theft, thereafter increased immeasurably. What rankled even more was the enrolment of Hottentots as soldiers to enforce the Colony's laws, and the way Hottentot servants were allowed—even encouraged—to make official complaints about the treatment meted out to them by their masters. In matters of this sort the Hottentots were all too often abetted by the missionaries; one of whom took credit for causing the arrest of no less than twenty white farmers for the maltreatment of their servants. We must remember, too, that to answer such a charge in court meant that a man had to leave his wife and children unprotected on an isolated farm for days and weeks at a time, and we can sympathise with the shocked surprise of one of them who, on receiving a summons to a distant magistracy, groaned `My God! Is this the way to treat a Christian?'
Many of the blacks where coached in what to say by the British against the Boers due to the first "Liberal" missionaries from England to side with the blacks against the Boers when they landed here.
Slagters Nek
Not all the Boers were willing to accept a summons of this sort, and during 1815 a key piece of Afrikaner history dropped into place when a Frederick Bezuidenhout ignored several warrants to appear at Graaff Reinet to answer charges of ill-treatment laid by one of his Hottentot servants. After two years had gone by Hottentot soldiers led by a white officer attempted to arrest Bezuidenhout, and killed him when he resisted. At the grave-side a few days later his brother, Johannes Bezuidenhout, swore to `expel the tyrants from the country', but the rising he led ended rather tamely when the rebels were confronted by a posse of Dragoons at Slagters Nek. Bezuidenhout himself was killed in the skirmish and his followers surrendered; five of them were condemned to death. Unhappily the hanging was badly bungled: the ropes of four men broke and they were only executed at the second attempt. The horror of the scene at Slagters Nek, the well-named `Butcher's Pass', which on orders from Cape Town was watched by all the district, became deeply etched into Boer folk-memory.
The common rule was if the rope broke - God had stepped in and you cannot be hanged again...
this was the start of the Boer Wars
