Afrikaners

Afrikaners (known as Boers, Dutch meaning “farmers”), South African group, descended from Europeans, who speak Afrikaans as their native language. The Afrikaners constitute over half the white population of South Africa, and have latterly been that country's politically dominant group. Their language, customs, and religion were shaped by more than three centuries of harsh frontier life. Dutch settlers first came to South Africa in 1652, settling at the southern tip of the continent, where they founded the city of Cape Town. They later intermarried with French Protestant (Huguenot) refugees to create the early Boer population. Calvinistic in their religious beliefs, early on the Boers developed harsh exclusionist policies towards the black Khoikhoi and Bantu peoples; by the time of the British occupation in 1795, they had dispossessed most of the original inhabitants.

When English rule was established, many Boers refused to live under it, and, in the 1830s, they retreated deep into the interior; the Orange Free State and Transvaal Provinces were created by this Great Trek, as it was later called. Later Boer resistance to the English resulted in the South African War (1899-1902), which ended their independence. Between the Act of Union of 1910 and 1994, the Boers controlled the governments of South Africa. In 1948 they began the policy of apartheid, or rigid separation of the races. Condemned by world opinion, and weakened economically by sanctions from other countries, the government repealed the apartheid laws in the early 1990s, as the government began a transition to majority rule.