Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Queen Victoria: Stripped Bare by Emeritus Psychologist
Queen Victoria: Stripped Bare by Emeritus Psychologist
Queen Victoria: Stripped Bare by Emeritus Psychologist
Ebook381 pages5 hours

Queen Victoria: Stripped Bare by Emeritus Psychologist

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

()

Read preview

About this ebook

An abridged text of the printbook RUB OUT MY HISTORY, but illustrated by relevant images. The research data tables have been eliminated and changed to descriptions.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherBookBaby
Release dateMar 1, 2015
ISBN9780620624312
Queen Victoria: Stripped Bare by Emeritus Psychologist

Related to Queen Victoria

Related ebooks

History For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for Queen Victoria

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
0 ratings

0 ratings0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    Queen Victoria - Con Kruger

    www.bookbaby.com

    FRAME 1: ABSTRACT — THERE ARE THEORIES ABOUT WHERE AND HOW IT ALL STARTED. SOME FACTUAL, SOME FICTIONAL. WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE PAST, WE CALL H I S T O R Y, GIVEN THAT MAN DOES NOT LIVE LONG ENOUGH TO LEARN EVERY THING ABOUT EVERYTHING. WHAT IS TOPICAL TODAY THOUGH, WE MAY HAVE AVAILABLE IN A DATABANK, SUCH AS THE HOLY BIBLE OF THE CHRISTIANS. MIND YOU, MAN IS ALSO CAPABLE OF DECIPHERING THE UNKNOWN BY LITERALLY DIGGING INTO THE PAST AS ARCHAEOLOGIST AND PALAEONTOLOGISTS DO. INTERESTINGLY MAN CREATES FUTURE HISTORY BY DREAMING VISIONARY SCIENCE FICTION.

    My name is Kevin. I am a horse breeder, from Sussex in the United Kingdom, born in 1943 in France towards the close of World War II. During the War, Mother and I lived on her parents’ farm Château le Fèbre in Languedoc at the foothills of the Cevennes Mountain range, west of the Rhône River. I was baptized Cevennes Goddefroy-le Fèbre in Mother’s Roman Catholic Church.

    I remember little about my early years in France. My father’s as well as my mother’s families can best be described as Anglo-Scottish-French-Flemish-German. My late dad was a flight instructor in the Royal Air Force, engaged in the English colonies training young Commonwealth air-cadets. He was years older than Mother when they married. It was his third marriage. We know nothing about his past — for all I know I could have half-siblings flying all over the globe!

    In 1946 Dad was demobbed, he retired, and we moved to Sussex West in the UK to stay with Dad’s foster father, a veterinary surgeon and owner of the Riding School Caius Cameron. I have a Brownie photo of yours truly sitting on SPITFIRE, my first pony, given to me on my fourth birthday by Grandpa Caius. At pre-school age I spent all my time with Dad. My life comprised hugging my pony, cleaning stables, enjoying gymkhanas — which I learned from Grandpa is an Urdu word — and attending polo matches and dressage shows in various countries until I entered school the next year. I was enrolled in the best Prep-school but ran head-on into trouble.

    According to Grandpa Caius, the word pedigree originated, like many other English words, in the old French pé de grue. In medieval, or Old English, the meaning of the term ‘pedigree’ was ‘family tree’. Later the word came to mean ‘full genealogical table’, — a far cry from the literal meaning of ‘pé de grue’ (crane’s foot) — a three pointed mark denoting succession in the family, for instance to the throne, or to mark the next alpha stallion in a breeding programme. Given to belief that highly pedigreed Arabs are still bred in South Africa, I resolved to travel south and buy the very best young Arab stallion the Republic has on offer to celebrate the new millennium.

    I contacted an old buddy, Michael Hinshilwood, to do some spadework on Arab breeders. In 1994 Michael moved to Cape Town where he is involved with horse racing at Kenilworth. He was enthusiastic about my decision, suggesting I should travel by sea to familiarize myself with the facilities and staff manning the stables on board. He was personally part of a recent business venture exporting a number of thoroughbred fillies of local first-class breeders to the emirs of Dubai. He promised to e-mail me all the dos and don’ts on the veterinary certificates and documentation required for a plain sailing transfer of pedigreed animals by sea.

    It has puzzled me for some time that few people in England ever paid a visit to other parts of the British Empire. Some, even in our royal upper-classes, have never set foot outside England! They know not of Scotland, of Wales and both the Irelands. I often think about it and I wonder what sort of picture they have in their minds when they talk about the British Empire or of Queen Victoria — global symbol of international superiority?

    Before I left on my journey to South Africa, Mother and I attended church. At tea she requested our Bishop to bless my journey into the unknown. He has never himself toured to Africa but was familiar with the old saying: Ex Africa semper aliquid novi, as Aristotle said in circa AD 70, meaning, ‘from Africa always something new’. – His parting shot was that I should take care not to be eaten alive by cannibal or crocodile! By saying so he literally put the fear of God into Mother. All I could say in retort was: ‘God hopefully has His own times!’

    ‘Mother’, I said on our way home, ‘your concern about travelling to Southern Africa is understandable. When you talk of the world you look at it through your one eye that is French, and your other eye that is English, and the bridge of your nose prevents either eye to see the other eye.’ She raised her voice to a pitch that rang alarm. ‘Just you keep your two eyes wide open when you go into the wild. I don’t want to sit here with your estate in my lap and hear that a lioness has carried you off during the night — and wipe that grin off your face’, she demanded. ‘What’, she asked, ‘do you know about the country after all?’ ‘Well Mother’, I replied, ‘I know that some of the world’s best Arab breeders live in South Africa!’ ‘Kevin’, she yelled, ‘I talk about people, not damn horses!’ To make peace, I assured her that the last thing I would do is to come home with a colourful new daughter-in-law from the multi-coloured Rainbow Nation, but if I do, I would assure that she was well bred! Mother’s reply for the nonce stands censored: Not for publication.

    Mother told me that an old friend of Grandma’s went teaching in South Africa. If her family is still around, I must most certainly look them up when I get to the Cape. Mother has not heard from her for the past thirty years. In 1887 a loyal British subject, Miss Greene (aged 19), known to Granny as ‘Alyce’, joined the staff of a Collegiate School for Girls in South Africa. She formed a close friendship with Elizabeth Molteno, fellow teacher and eldest daughter of the first Primêr Minister of the Cape Colony, John Molteno. Poor Mr Molteno suffered at the hands of Her Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria and was dismissed as Prime Minister in February 1878. It is probable that the close friendship of Alyce Greene and Elizabeth Molteno was partly responsible for Alyce’s change in attitude and of her becoming anti–Monarchy. Alyce kept a diary on the atrocities of the Anglo Boer War. She was a prolific letter writer. Through her letters to family and friends back home, we learn important facts about life in the independent Boer-Africaander republics. According to John Barham she falls in love with Pretoria’s broad, sunny, quiet and tree-embossomed roads. She spends an afternoon with Mrs. Smuts, wife of General Jan Smuts of the ZAR army, and raves about the beauty, the peace, the gentle courtesy, the simple dignity and homely friendliness she receives. She saw ‘dear old Oom Paul’ sitting on his stoep. She appreciated the dignified courtesy of the way the ‘dear old man’ lifted his hat when they walked past. There is an indescribable feeling of simplicity and contentment about the whole place. It is clear that Alyce became, like Emily Hobhouse later, rather pro-Boer. She calls the Jameson invasion ‘a mad exploit’, she describes Cecil John Rhodes as deceitful, and she resents the chicanery of Shepstone. She states that when she thinks of the wicked foreign miners in Johannesburg clamouring to engulf the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (the old Transvaal Republic), she felt as if she would willingly give her life to prevent such a catastrophe.

    For 230 years after Van Riebeeck’s arrival at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, the developing Boer-Africaander nation was a pastoral people living on the edge of civilization. They were confronted by wave upon wave of indigenous, brown-skinned Quena nomads, locally called the KhoiKhoin or Otentottu, who roamed the coastal regions from Saldanah to Knysna. In the mountainous areas, the settlers came in contact with the S’an people, small and brownish yellow skinned Africans, or Bushmen as they were called by the Europeans. (Together these two nations have been referred to by anthropologists as the Khoisan). Later by 1750, the earliest Trekboers (nomadic European farmers) and hunters ran up against Black Bantu tribes fleeing down the East Coast of Africa south of Sofala to survive from tribal wars up north.

    Hromník opines that, at the beginning of the entry into Southern Africa by the Dravidian South Indians during the 1st millennium AD, the Kung S’an (Bushmen) were the only inhabitants of Southern Africa. In his view the Quena or Otentottu people resulted from an intermixture of Kung S’an and Dravidian blood?

    Beloff’s opening sentence of HISTORY — MANKIND AND HIS STORY, reads: ‘There are few motives that have not served as an incentive to historical inquiry.’ All fields in science over time increase exponentially in size of data, number of students, teachers and in number of specialized fields to the point where each field requires an interdisciplinary approach.

    The year 1881 marks the beginning of the last war between the British Empire and the two independent Republics in central South Africa. I feel compelled to investigate their different backgrounds from A to Z spanning the generations from Genesis through the Western New Testament up to today. The road back to where recorded data starts on the British leg of the puzzle, is no more than a string of historical abstracts leaving the task to each reader of fusing these bits of history into an abbreviated but cohesive telltale with any new reflections, according to taste, added to the underlying past!. How old is the Universe? How old is Planet Earth? How old is recorded History? How old is the data still to be discovered by archaeologists and palaeontologists? The answer to all these questions is: Wait and see, as the accuracy of man’s knowledge is ever-increasing! We want to end up with a cultural x-ray of a person called Queen Victoria – supreme commander of the British Empire`s Army. Therefore our background search should focus on South-West Asia, but excluding Egypt, because of the quality and age of man’s recorded achievements in Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, Armenia, Mesopotamia and Persia. Archaeological ‘evidence’, in Lower and Upper Mesopotamia and the decipherment of ancient languages give us a record of historic civilizations back to the fourth millennium BC in pre-history and as far back as neolithic times. The starting point is: ‘What is culture, what is the archaeologist digging for’? Broadly, culture is all that man made and left of their environment. Excavations at Tel Ghassul unearthed a city in the lower Jordan Valley dating from the early Bronze Age between 2500 and 1900 BC with the Iron Age to follow and ending somewhere between 300 BC and 50 BC. In an article on the history of the Ancient Near East, Dr T. Fish noted that the Hurrian version of the flood story of the Ark has an interesting hero whose name approximates to the name of Noah of the Bible. The Hebrews (in Exodus) left Egypt towards the end of the late Bronze Age. By then the world had alphabetic writing, and Cadmus of Phoenicia had introduced the letters alpha, beta and others, as well as coinage circa 680 BC in Greece.

    During the reign of Ramses II of the 19th Dynasty, the Hittites and Egyptians who, for over 100 years fought each other as arch enemies, were driven by King Salmanasser of Assyria to sign the world’s first international treaty to form a joint army pact to resist the onslaught of the Assyrian Empire. During the 20th Dynasty Ramses III (1198-1188 BC) introduced conscription for national defence. During the 1000 years to follow, but before the birth of Christ, we see the beginning of the Olympic Games in 776 BC and the rise of religions such as the preaching of Buddha in India, the dialogues of Confucius and the teaching of Lao-Tse in China. It was during pharaoh Neco II’s (609-594 BC) reign that, according to Herodotus, the Phoenicians were sent out to circumnavigate the African continent — the fleet made ‘good progress travelling south’ with the currents on the east coast of the continent; they ‘took time’ to replenish their stocks by sowing and reaping grain on the southernmost flats of the African continent – in the vicinity of Cape Agulhas; and travelled north against the currents on the West Coast until they arrived home, back at the Pillars of Hercules guarding the western gate into the Mediterranean – three years after sailing south through the Red Sea canal at the south-eastern corner of this Sea. They arrived home 600 years before the birth of Christ. Circa 300 years later, Alexander the Great, son of King Philip of Macedon, conquers the Persian Empire and Egypt. He establishes Alexandria as the new capital.

    The reign of the Ptolemaic Dynasty ends when Mark Anthony and Cleopatra committed suicide in 44 BC. The Great Wall of China stands constructed and civilization takes note of the philosophical contributions of Plato and Aristotle. There follows a period of six crusades ending in 1228 AD. In 1265 AD the First English Parliament was called. Wales was conquered by Edward I. In 1290 all Jews were expelled from England. The independence of Scotland was acknowledged in the year 1328. In ancient Britain, and more particularly in South-East Wales in the greater Newport area, there lived pre-Celtic invaders of Iberian origin known as the Silures according to Caius Cornelius Tacitus, the acknowledged Roman historian, who lived from 55 years BC to 117 AD. In 1407 Henry V granted the Merchant Adventurers their charter to explore. In 1420, King Henry the Navigator organized, and funded the explorations of Africa by the Portuguese. In 1431 Joan of Arc was burnt at Rouen by the English. In 1445 Diaz discovered the Cape Verde Islands. The year 1485 saw the beginning of the Tudor Dynasty. In 1498 Vasco da Gama reaches India via the Cape of Good Hope. Machiavelli, in 1513, in his book, PRINCE, spelled out the ideal characteristics of the successful ruler: ruthless, unscrupulous, governed only by considerations of what would contribute to more power in his hands. In 1534 England breaks away from the Roman Catholic Church and King Henry makes himself head of the Anglican Church. In 1652 the Dutch East-India Company (VOC), having founded Batavia in 1619, established a settlement in Table Bay, what was to become Cape Town at the Cape of Good Hope at the southernmost point of the African continent. One of the earliest social engineering projects was initiated by Queen Anne who reigned from 1702 to 1714. She attempted to neutralise the influence of Roman Catholics in the north of Ireland by the import of German Protestants. She funded 310 families to move west to Adare on the Golden Vale. In 1795 by agreement England took over the administration of the Cape Colony from Holland’s Batavian Republic to prevent the seafarers’ strategic Cape falling into French hands.

    We learn from the ‘history’ of the Niederdeutsch Reformed Church that the Governor Johan Anthonieszoon van Riebeek supported mixed marriages between European VOC employees with Christianized slave and Quena women. Dr.Theal corroborates this and points at the inscription in one of Van Riebeek’s diaries. Van Riebeek referred to the custom practised by the Portuguese in establishing a racially mixed settlement in the East. He insisted that every child of a mixed marriage should be baptized and thus become a Christianized member of the church. It sounds exceptional but the regular church attendance of Christianized ex-slaves and Quena was ‘rewarded’ with ‘one’ tot of brandy and a piece of chewing tobacco after the service on Sundays. Apparently there was no 18-year age restriction in existence! It has been said, that up to the end of the Dutch Administration, racial harmony prevailed despite armed clashes following raids on farms in the outlying districts. Then the British took control.

    British officials at the Cape took a reasonable policy line towards race relations but for the fact that they practised racial segregation back home in Mother England. Like in India, the caste system in embryo existed between the aristocracy and the commoners. This culture formed the basis of the development of social distance between racial groups, later to be called ‘Apartheid’ in South Africa.

    I always try to be ready to meet the unexpected. At night I leave the back gate of my stables open, in case I have to evacuate the horses should a fire break out. That’s on the manual side. On the mental side, I keep the back of my mind open for new insights — frequently falling into one’s lap when least expected. It is by chance and not by search that man gains new vistas. Bert Woodhouse published some comments in 1985 on what he referred to as ‘bored stones’, as quoted by Hromník’s (2003) EXPLORATIONS IN INDO-AFRICAN HISTORY. He reviewed explanations for the !Kwe Stone, that round stone with a hole bored through the centre.

    To add to what they said, I took note of an article, SECRETS OF THE ICE MAN, edited by Liz Hitchcock (2003). It relates the discovery of a ‘Stone Age’ body that fell into the lap of archaeologists in melted ice in the Ötztal Valley in 1991 — hence the name Ötzi given to this ancient hunter who lived approximately 3 300 years before Christ, i.e. more than 5 000 years ago. My focus is not on the hunter, but on the well-preserved hunting gear he carried. Apart from a COPPER AXE, he carried a !KWE STONE! This finding vindicates Hromník’s views that the !Kwe Stone, originally, is not of Bushman manufacture, and that the stones were manufactured for a different purpose than as digging aids to recover bulbs.

    My own view is that these bored stones are catapult cannon balls swung around, like the hammer throwers of today’s athletics, but released as projectiles to kill. With the march of all fields of knowledge comes the time to rephrase current conceptions. If my hypothesis were to be accepted; It is time for the South African Archaeological Society to use the ‘weighted digging stick’ to bury its logo in the graveyard of science!

    Charles Darwin, in 1871, had already expressed the view in his book THE DESCENT OF MAN that ‘it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent and not elsewhere’. In 1925 Raymond Dart examined the Taung skull, and named it Australopithecus africanus: The Southern ape of Africa — it was neither ape family nor family of humankind. Robert Broom later in 1933 suggested in his book THE COMING OF MAN: WAS IT ACCIDENT OR DESIGN? that the Taung child should be classified as hominid — the family of primates which includes humans and their fossil ancestors. Our knowledge took a step further into the future when in 2010 the fossil named Australopithecus sediba was found in the Malapa Caves at Maropeng, South Africa.

    Queen Victoria became Empress of India after the Indian Mutiny of November 1858. In a sense the history of the uprising in India against the English Crown is almost a duplication of what was due to happen in the two Boer-Africaander Republics twenty odd years later. It all started with the first Burmese War in 1823. There followed the most serious blunder by the British when it was decided to bring Afghanistan into their Empire. This move is described by Bleby as ‘unwarrantable interference’. I suspect it was Queen Victoria’s idea. It resulted in a whole battalion of the British Empire army being murdered early in 1842 as it retreated through the Khyber Pass. The reaction of the Indian sepoys, the Urdu word for soldier (according to Grandpa Caius), was to say; If the Afghans can do it, so can we!

    The spark to set India alight was delivered by the new Enfield rifle’s bullets, the covers of which had to be bitten off before loading — the covers were greased condoms! Rumours spread that the ‘fatty’ covers contained an admixture made of holy cow’s fat and hog’s swine lard! This resulted in the sepoys, on religious grounds, refusing to ‘bite the bullet’! So when eighty-five cavalrymen refused orders to bite off this condom to load their rifles, they were sentenced to imprisonment. The Indians, both Mohammadans and Hindoos, mutinied, shot their English officers and every European on sight. To suppress the mutiny Queen Victoria doubled the number of deaths by executing the leaders of the mutiny as well as large numbers of their sepoy followers. Was this the beginning of the first holocaust of the reign of Queen Victoria?

    On disembarking at Table Bay the World Atlas indicated that I was 34° South and 19° East on the globe — not bad for an adventurer coming from the Greenwich O° line and 52° North in Sussex! For the English-speaking world Africa is a continent that existed from about 1800. To the Portuguese world Africa existed from the late 1400s when Bartolomeu Dias, rounded Cape Point at Table Bay and the southernmost cape of the African continent, Cape Agulhas, without realizing it. On his return journey he made amends and hugged the coastline closely to examine what he missed on his outward journey towards the East. Thus it came about that on the 23rd April 1488, he Dias, sailed into a big bay and discovered a spring to replenish his reserve fresh water supply. This big bay since 1601 became known in the Flemish language as Struyse Baix (meaning majestic or grande bay), according to the seafarer and cartographer Paulus van Caerden. Dias gave the name Aguada de São Jorge (the watering point of Saint Joris) to the spring in the south-westerly corner of the golfo das Agulhas, as this bay was called by the Portuguese.

    I recall having read, during my previous visit to South Africa in 1973, a book by Sir H.M. Stanley called IN DARKEST AFRICA. It left in my mind a picture of wild game and savages. As we travelled past the equator I began building up, in anticipation, images of what to expect now — dangerous animals still roaming the streets and naked Zulu tribesmen dancing among thick bush! What a surprise waking up and seeing Table Mountain rise out of the mist! What a beautiful cape! , what a beautiful city! I recalled the words purportedly said by Sir Francis Drake, the first Englishman to sail around the Cape of Good Hope (July 1580): ‘This Cape is the most stately thing, and the fairest Cape in the whole circumference of the earth.’ During the first week, my friend Michael showed me around from the Castle in Cape Town to the Kruithuis (Arsenal) in Stellenbosch in the heart of the winelands. I was impressed. What a beautiful country — but complex to understand, confusing to grasp the admixture of cultures which is South Africa.

    I ask Michael how frequently are there clashes between the various ethnic groups, such as the violence in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants? I was shown around some of the ‘old’ Cape-Dutch homesteads from Constantia through to Dorp Street in Stellenbosch and I smiled at the thought that the Tower of London dated back not to 1650 AD, but to the year 1078 during the reign of William I. It was successively used as fortress, as residence for Henry III, as political prison, and now as a museum displaying the national collection of armour and the regalia of the United Kingdom!

    I could not bear the ‘messy’ terms used at random by Michael and his friends to refer to the various ethnic groups in South Africa. They used the word COLOURED for every person who is not Teutonic White: So the Quena are Coloureds, the S’an are Coloureds, the Bantu are Coloureds, and the Coloureds are called Blacks! I was told that at one stage they even referred to Chinese and Japanese people as COLOUREDS? They even said some Whites are Coloureds! To make sense of their confusion, I dissected the various cultural histories and for my own sake I renamed the anthropological make-up, (or should I say mix-up?,) to grasp what various authors mean when they use a specific, but to me, confusing term. The reason for the various terminologies is, historically, probably political, but at present that is not my concern. I am trying to fathom the truth underlying another set of confusing terms, used by Michael’s friends; Is it the Anglo Boer War; alias English War; alias the Boer War; alias the First War of Independence; or the Second War of Independence; alias the 21-Year War of Independence; alias Queen Victoria’s nameless war in Africa? I was wondering why the suppression of some civil uprising at the Cape should be called by so many names?

    My first conundrum was the present day confusion of scores of different ethnic groups, languages and cultures. Eleven major indigenous languages are officially recognised but a vast number of minor African languages and tribal dialects together with most European, African and Asian tongues are spoken by pockets of immigrants who had flocked to South Africa for various reasons since 1652. Some even came to enjoy Apartheid! Of historical importance is the fact that the indigenous Quena languages of the Khoi-Khoin as well as the S’an peoples have disappeared and should be listed as extinct. On the other hand four languages next to the new African language that developed locally, namely Afrikaans, can be described as ‘founder tongues’ viz Lower German, Dutch, French and Portuguese-Malay still flourish in isolated habitats, especially in private schools and over weekends in so-called ‘national’ clubs. South Africa as a multi-cultural country is a good example of the future globalized world, subject only to the absence of any xenophobic casus belli between Black and White, between Zulu and Xhosa, between Transkei and Ciskei, Male and Female.

    I had vague memories of what my dad told me of South Africa. He spent time in 1939 to 1945 training South African pilots during World War II. For my own sanity and to avoid all past, present and future pitfalls in this ethnic wilderness, I decided to rename all the different ethnic groups, bearing in mind that the term ‘AFRICAN’ covers people born in Africa from Mandela in the south to Mubarak in the north. Mindful also of J.F. Kennedy’s faux pas in Germany, when he called ‘I am a Berliner’, which locally in Berlin refers to the local version of a take-away hamburger! My nomenclature should hold water for the past and present historic ethnic entities which, if born on African soil in South Africa, have claims to a unique designation. For this purpose I have chosen the word AFRICAANDER in the spirit of Biebault’s declaration: Africaander — our common heritage.

    Very few of these ethnic groups can claim to be ‘pure’ today as a result of cross-fertilisation, racial mixing and natural assimilation over time, doing what comes naturally. Racial mixing between Black and White was prohibited by the previous White Nationalist Government. Future mixing, I suspect, will result in multi-lingual NEO-AFRICAANDERS. In chronologial order I distinguish the following ethnic clusters: 1. QUENA-AFRICAANDERS — the remnants of the Khoi-Khoin and S’an peoples who have lost their original languages but who occupied Southern Africa before 1650 AD, i.e. in pre-history before the Western Dark Ages. 2. BOER-AFRICAANDERS, (excluding the expatriate Dutch employees of the VOC who lived at the Cape temporarily in the service of the VOC and who moved on to Mauritius, Batavia or eventually back home to Holland,) but including ex-VOC employees who developed a FREEBURGHER breeding platform of predominantly German blood fused with Dutch, French and Coloured Malay with their own unique indigenous African language, called Afrikaans. 3. NGUNI-AFRICAANDERS who came down the East coast after the late 17th century and comprise two major groups namely the Southern Xhosa named by the Muslims as Cafres, ‘Kafir’ meaning heathens, and Northern Zulu peoples. This group could be classified with Group 4. BANTU-AFRICAANDERS — Black Africans, mainly Sotho-speaking tribes, who came down the central regions to settle in Lesotho, plus the Swazi, Venda, and Tswana peoples, called ‘natives’ by the later British administration. 5. ANGLO-AFRICAANDERS — English speakers who fled out of the British Isles and comprised Scottish Presbyterian and Methodist religious groups, missionaries, and a fair contingent of Irish freedom fighters who originally spoke Gaelick dialects that disappeared in the first locally born generation at the Cape. This group picked up new English blood between the years 1806 onwards under British colonial rule, lastly 6. INDO-AFRICAANDERS who hailed from the original slaves and later from guest-labourers on the mines and sugar fields, and who have arrived in South Africa over the past 350 years.

    On board ship I tried to read up on the new democratic South Africa. My previous visit to South Africa was years ago in 1973, just after my young wife’s death. In the ship’s library I paged through a copy of Francis Brett Young’s book, IN SOUTH AFRICA. The book looked fairly new, but to my disappointment it was published way back in 1903 and dealt with a war that England won against Cape rebels in 1902. What tickled my fancy was the conclusion of the book, which I must follow up, to quote: Never before, in all the world’s history, had a victorious nation surrendered political power, of its own free will, into the hands of the vanquished.

    FRAME 2: ABSTRACT — WE HAVE ON RECORD

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1