| Submit your comments on this article |
| Africa Subsaharan |
| Bittereinderdag (Bitter-ender Day) in Orania. |
| 2007-06-24 |
| Nothing Ever Happens in Afrikaner Heaven The anniversary solemnly marked on a rocky hilltop last week by the residents of Orania is not observed by many South Africans. Bittereinderdag (Bitter-ender Day) commemorates those among the Boers who refused to abide by the peace agreement concluded by their leaders more than a century ago, and fought to the bitter end against the advancing British Empire. But the townsfolk of Orania, a privately owned community populated by some 600 white Afrikaners who, like their forebears, never accepted the peace deal made by their own leaders that brought black majority rule to South Africa, use the day to rededicate themselves to the fading ideal of a separate Afrikaner nation state. During the transition from apartheid to democracy in the early 1990s, Orania's founding fathers envisaged the town as the center of a new Volkstaat (People's State) that would emerge as a refuge for the country's 2.5 million Afrikaners who were expected to flee the post-apartheid society. And although only 600 Afrikaners followed them, they remain undeterred. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #2 The Brits didn't just overwhelm them with immigrant numbers. They waged a war of conquest and partial extermination, herding captured Boer women and children into concentration camps (where some 50% of the children, and 25% of the camps' population overall, died of overexposure, disease and starvation), while the Boer POWs were exiled overseas. Death rates for the Boer-territory native Africans, herded into separate concentration camps, are not known because records weren't kept, but are thought to be similar, if not worse. All this because gold was found in the Transvaal, and the Brits wanted it. Wikipedia |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2007-06-24 13:33 |
| #1 The Afrikaner made a bad mistake a long time ago when they didn't do everything in their power to bring endless numbers of Dutch and Fleming to fill South Africa. Instead the British soon overwhelmed them. And while they would have probably still been heavily populated with British, it would have been far harder for them to have been muscled around to the point of extermination. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-06-24 09:53 |