the corner office

On 16 December 1838, a little over 400 Voortrekkers set up a laager of ox wagons alongside the Ncome river. This followed a year of skirmishes and fights between the Zulu nation under Dingaan's rule, and the Boer settlers. The battle that was looming would have been another natives-versus-colonists set-to that repeated itself across the world.

The major difference though, is that prior to the battle, the Boers under the leadership of Andries Pretorius (nope, dunno if he's a great-granddad), had (supposedly) made a pact with God. I'm not sure what God said for his/her part, but the Boers basically promised that if God let them win, they'd commemorate the day forever after. Somewhere as part of this pact was a loves-me, loves-me-not assurance that if they won, it meant that God was on Their Side, naturally.

The 16th saw a battle between 464 Boers and 10,000 Zulus, in which over 3,000 Zulus were killed without a single Boer fatality. The carnage was such that the Ncome River became known as Blood River. Gunpowder versus assegaai spears might have had a large part to do with it, but history is always written by the victors, and since then (or at least during the past century), the 16th of December has been commemorated as the Day of the Covenant, Day of the Vow, or in olde English circles, as Dingaan's Day.

This victory was presumably seen by the Boers as a clear sign that God didn't like heathen black people and was probably a fundamental affirmation for them, being uneducated Calvinistic Christians, that they were indeed the new Israelites being led by God into a new Canaan. A century later this expressed itself as the highly convenient belief for the architects of apartheid that the Afrikaner nation had a hotline to God and were perfectly entitled to the fruits of apartheid - the Battle of Blood River, fought and won after making a covenant with God himself, dammit, was a sign of that.

koff

Post-1994 a holiday celebrating God's choosing of sides wasn't a policitally correct thing to do, and in a very deft move that kept everybody happy, the public holiday was changed to the 'Day of Reconciliation'.

I learned an interesting fact this evening (never made it into our textbooks when I was in school) - another reason for it being a day of 'reconciliation' is that the African National Congress launched Umkonto we Sizwe, their military arm, on 16 December 1961.

No doubt a couple of hardline ANC/PAC supporters will be chanting 'kill the white man kill the boer' and 'one settler one bullet' somewhere tomorrow, and a couple of out-of-touch Afrikaners will be dressed up in khakis and look pathetic at the Voortrekker Monument, but for the rest of the country, it's another day off. Reconciliation is often about finding commonality instead of differences, and if there's one thing all of us have in common, it's not objecting to a day of sitting at home and doing f-all.

Anyway, nice bit of history for the grandkids one day.