silk bridal bouquets
This family history is being repeated by every Boer family in South Africa right now - people are again losing their ethnic identity and confused about what to call themselves - Boers, Afrikaners or whites, which are you?
They are losing their ethnic identity - and it's not the first time this tragedy is occurring.
So who are these people - first called the Grensboere, then the Voortrekkers, then Boers, then Afrikaners - and who again being degraded to "whites" - people in other words, who have no right to live on the African continent.
Many people in the news media still ridicule me whenever I write about "Boers" or "Voortrekker-descendants" on the website http://groups.msn.com/censorbugbear. But has anybody ever figured out why so many people have stopped referring to themselves as Boers since 1902 even though they know they were directly descended from Boers?
And does anybody know today why there are so many Afrikaners still refusing to admit that the Boer history even existed?
There are still some South Africans who are still referring to themselves as "Afrikaners" such as Dan Roodt of the Pro-Afrikaans Action Group (PRAAG) but this number is dwindling rapidly as their identity is being taken away from them by the current regime. But refer to this group as Boers and they get angry.
And increasingly one finds this besieged minority referring to themselves in the same racist terms used by the ANC, namely "whites". so what is going on here? Many people not familiar with South African history are confused - and with right, because the history has become very muddled-up over the years.
And now, these people are again at risk of losing their ethnic identity even further - and thus also losing their rights to remain in Southern Africa as a unique, ethnically different nation.
Even those still daring to call themselves "Afrikaners" are falling victim to this identity crisis, which is being created by the ANC-regime.
How did this tragedy -- the loss of one's ethnic identity and the loss if the history of your people -- actually come about?
As soon as all these people start referring to themselves as "whites" they will have lost all rights to remain in South Africa. We know why their identity is being taken away.
But we don't know how these so-called Afrikaners have also actively participated in the steady removal of the Boer nation's identity before these current events. And that's what makes a lot of people confused about their own identity.
It's a little-known part of history which started shortly after the end of the Anglo-Boer war in 1902, when the Boers were a defeated, poverty-stricken people who had been chased off their farms and whose towns had been destroyed by the British. They were dirt-poor and plunged into an unprecedented famine. Many had to flee to the cities to survive - places which were totally alien to them, places were only English was being spoken, places where their churches were being run by people who referred to themselves as Afrikaners.
Up to that point, the Boers had had a rich history and people still find old history books referring to this nation.
Recently a kind lady from Louisiana mailed me a copy of the "History of the Boers in South Africa," written in 1887 by a Canadian missionary with no political axe to grind: namely George McCall Theal.
It contains a map showing the territories which were being farmed by the Boers: from the Olifants/Limpopo rivers in the north to below the Orange River in the South (Coles burg).
It shows the names of the towns they had started which carried names such as Lydenburg, ( Place of Suffering) Vryheid, ( Place of Freedom) Pietermaritzburg, (named after the famous Voortrekker leader) Philippolis and Bethulie, (named after their beloved Bible) and Potchefstroom, Rustenburg, Winburg and Bloemfontein... as they Trekked, the Boers named the map of South Africa, and many of its vegetation and wildlife as well.
All these Boer names are now being wiped off the map of South Africa in one fell swoop by the ANC-regime -- even though the Boers' official history had ended in 1902, long before the elitist-Afrikaners who ran the secret Afrikaner Broederbond cabal had started apartheid in 1948.
Yet this is not the first time that the Boers are facing such an ethnic cleansing campaign by a nation which is hell-bent to remove their very rights to exist in South Africa - this is actually already the third time in Boer history.
The first time the British tried to eradicate them from the map of South Africa with their vicious war and their even more vicious concentration camps where many tens of thousands of Boer women, children and elderly starved to death within just a few months.
After this first genocide to target the Boer nation, their descendants still managed to cling to their identity for at least another generation - until the secret cabal of wealthy Afrikaners called the Afrikaner Broederbond gaine hegemony -- and then took away their identity from about 1933 onwards.
When the Afrikaner Broederbond 's National Party won the elections, and took over the governance of South Africa from 1948 and launched the system of apartheid, the first thing they did was to completely rewrite the Boers' history.
Suddenly, all the accomplishments of the Boers became 'Afrikaner' accomplishments.
The Boer Women's Monument in Bloemfontein, erected in memory of the murdered Boer women and children who died in the British concentration camps written about so eloquently by British pro-Boer campaigner Emily Hobhouse, even became the Afrikaner Women's Monument - a truly vile insult to their memory. The Voortrekker Monument is described in terms which honour the memory of Afrikaners -- not the Boers who had actually undertaken the Great Trek.
Paul Kruger, their last president who was so sadly exiled to the shores of a lake in Switserland, became an "Afrikaner" president in the history book -- when he himself never referred to himself in any of his correspondence as anything except a Boer.
Thus all the history books were rewritten and Boers with too-long memories such as Robert van Tonder of the Boerestaat Party and Eugene Terre'Blanche (of the incorrectly-named) Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging were persecuted publicly by the regime, aided and abetted by the Afrikaans-language news media. Eugene's heart is in the right place: he bears the flag of the old Boer Republic and he refers to himself as a Boer. But his organization’s name bears witness to his ethnic confusion, caused by the Afrikaner Broederbond's rewriting of his own history.
And now the ANC is completing this vile task which was started by the Afrikaner Broederbond, and has even changed the names of their towns - and even of the historically--important "Voortrekker" streets which indicate the routes which the old Voortrekker Leaders such as Bezuidenhout had taken while battling their way to the north to get away from British hegemony in the Cape.
The old Voortrekker Streets all over South Africa are now being renamed to Chris Hani and Nelson Mandela streets and other names of people who, unlike the old Voortrekkers, actually have contributed absolutely nothing to the development of those streets whatsoever.
Thus the ANC is proving itself to be just as fascist in its nature as the old Afrikaner Broederbond they had replaced.
Both organizations are still hell-bent to wipe out all evidence of the Boer history.
They even continue to persecute and jail anyone who wants to rekindle Boer history such as Eugene Terre'Blanche and the Boeremag-15, undergoing their hyped-up, trumped-up treason trial in Pretoria High Court.
It's no coincidence that the public prosecutor of the Boeremag-21 just happens to be a well-known former Afrikaner Broederbonder, Paul Fick, who even admitted to being a Broederbonder when I interviewed him for the Sunday Times during the apartheid-era, when his organization had launched plans for a new flag and wanted to test public opinion...
And if Robert van Tonder, riddled with cancer and suffering terribly, hadn't committed suicide a few years ago, they would have also had him in jail by now under trumped-up charges.
He and other Boers still proudly spoke the Taal, the language of their forebears - the language which now is being wiped off the map of South Africa.
Today, people no longer know who these Boers were - nobody knows about those dirt-poor Boer women who founded the garment workers' union, those famished women who had left their beloved farms and had gone to the cities to try and survive after their defeat in 1902.
Women like Johanna and Hester Cornelius of Thabazimbi, who even wrote their own plays, describing the Boers' history in the cities, those many thousands of women and girls who had marched behind the Red Flag of the communist party in the cities of South Africa.
And the Boer men who founded the Mineworkers union (now named Solidarity), and who had fought so valiantly against the mine magnates during the mineworkers' uprisings at the Witwatersrand and of whom thousands had been shot dead by their own compatriot soldiers from the countryside, who had been told by the government of Jan Smuts that these men were the enemies, the "communists". They were shooting their own Boer kindred and didn't know it...
Nobody knows the history of these Boer people today because the Afrikaner Broederbond has deliberately written these facts from their history books.
History researcher Elsabe Brink wrote brilliantly about these defeated Boers in the cities of South Africa who put up such a valiant fight for their own identity - and whose ethnic identity is now again being discarded today in the latest ethnic cleansing facing them.
The elitist Afrikaners of the Cape, who had been ashamed of the Boers to the north who had fought against the British, were equally ashamed of these poor, defeated Boers who were trying to survive in the cities -- forced to work in mines and factories "like black girls in the factories" as they referred to them.
Hand-labour was as abhorrent to these elitist Afrikaners as it is to this day. That's why Orania is so newsworthy: because these Afrikaners are actually doing all their own labour...
The old Boer mineworkers were equally despised - they and their families were referred to as the "new poor-white problem" in a Red Cross report published about the devastating poverty among the descendants of the Boers in 1923.
But these weren't "whites" -- these were all Boers. I recorded many of the names of the mineworkers in the Witwatersrand towns like Springs and Vrededorp who had been shot in the Cottlesloe uprising by Jan Smuts' troops - and they were carrying Boer names.
I also have a record of all the Boer children of Langlaagte and other Afrikaner-run orphanages who were adopted by wealthier English-speakers over those years -- and thus were lost to the Boer nation forever.
These adoptions went on until well into the early 1970s and I know many people today with English surnames who were raised as Englishmen yet do not know that they are descended from Boer families.
And again we find these Boers back today - again growing increasingly poor and again fighting for their survival and their ethnic identities in internal refugee camps, and again giving up their children for adoption to wealthier elites.
These internal refugee camps for Boers are now run by organisations such as "Afrikaner Charity."
Yet this is also the very same group who still refers to themselves as Boers to this day. Just go and talk to them and ask them about their history.
They know who they are descended from.
So please don't refer to these dirt-poor working-class people, who refuse to be defeated and who refuse to forget their own history, merely as "whites.'
It's an insult to their proud history.
Die familiegeskiedenis word herhaal deur elke huidige Boergesin in die land.So wie is hulle -- Eers Voortrekkers, toe Boere, toe Afrikaners - en nou "Wittes" ?
Baie mense in die nuusmedia maak my nog steeds belaglik as ek skryf en praat van "Boere" of "Voortrekker-nasate" op ons weberf http://www.censorbugbear.com -- so asof die Boere nou nog steeds nie die reg het om selfs hul eie stamnaam meer te mag gebruik nie.
Die geskiedenis hoekom mense opgehou het om na hulself as Boere te verwys is aan Oom Swart heelwaarskynlik baie beter bekend as die jonger generasie mense wat hulself nou (taamlik skamerig) nog "Afrikaners" noem maar ook al hoe meer na hulself begin verwys in die ANC-term, naamlik " wittes ".
Kyk dus wat nou besig is om te gebeur - op daardie wyse verloor immers selfs die mense wat hulself nog "Afrikaners" noem, nou ook hul identiteit en word hulle almal tot "wittes" afgewater: iets wat die ANC sal verwelkom omdat hulle liewers die hele geskiedenis van die Voortrekkertyd - af wil "wegskryf" of "oorskryf", so asof dit nooit bestaan het nie... sodoende kan hulle ook doodeenvoudig naderhand van al die "wittes" eis dat hulle die kontinent Afrika liewers sal moet verlaat omdat hulle immers nie "Afrikane" met stamagtergronde is nie, maar doodeenvoudig geskiedenislose "wittes" geword het.
Daarteenoor egter -- het die Boere nou nog steeds 'n baie ryk geskiedkundige erfenis wat deur die Afrikaner-Broederbond van hulle afgeneem was tussen 1933 en 1994 -- verbasend genoeg begin hierdie ou Boeregeskiedenis weer orals nuwe vorme aan te neem, met herdenkings en met 'n heropvoeding van die jeug oor hul eie vergete agtergrond... Die huidige verandering van straatname vanaf Voortrekkerstraat na byvoorbeeld Chris Hani straat bewys vir my veral ook hoe bitter min die huidige ANC-leierskap eintlik vir die volledige geskiedenis van hul eie land omgee -- en dit weer, nes die Afrikaner Broederbond dit so doelbewus gedoen het vanaf 1936 tot 1994, doodeenvoudig wil begin doodswyg.
In daardie opsig bewys die ANC leierskap vir my veral dat hulle 'n inherent-fassistiese organisasie is, nes die AB, want hulle doen presies dieselfde... hulle ontneem mense van hul eie geskiedenis. Selfs die dramatiese Voortrekkergeskiedenis gee nou skynbaar ook al aanstoot vir die ANC leierskap -- anders sou hulle erkentenis wil gee aan die feit dat al die Voortrekkerstrate in Suid-Afrika vernoem is sodat die Voortrekkerroete nie vir die nageslag in die vergetelheid sal versink nie.
Elke Trekleier het immers hul eie paaie platgery en hul eie dorpe begin bou -- en soms is daar nog strate in die ou Voortrekkerdorpe vernoem na die leiers van daardie familietrekke, soos byvoorbeeld 'n mens baie Bezuidenhoutstrate kry veral daar naby die grens van Zimbabwe, waar die Bezuidenhouts uiteindelik beland het.
Wat my veral nog baie bitter maak, is die feit dat mense nog steeds op die ou Broederbond-manier na die Vrouemonument verwys as die "Afrikanervrouemonument". Die vrouens en kinders en bejaarde mans wat daar doodgemartel is in die kampe orals was Boere. Hulle was NOOIT Afrikaners nie en het NOOIT na hulself verwys as Afrikaners nie -- en selfs hul vyande het na hul verwys as Boere. Van al die mense wat daar beland het, soos byvoorbeeld Dr Albert Hertzog as baba en sy moeder, was daar wel Kaapse rebelle wat by die Boerestryders aangesluit het en wie se families ook onderdak verskaf het aan die Boerekommandos in die veld -- hulle het hulself dus gevoeg by die Boere -- maar die geskiedskrywing uit daardie dae wys baie duidelik op twee verskillende kultuurstromings, naamlik dat in daardie dae onder die Afrikaanstalige Kapenaars meestal na hulself verwys is as "Afrikaners" wat "Afrikaans" gepraat het (maar hoog-Nederlands van hul bybel geskryf het) -- terwyl al die Burgers van die Boererepublieke na hulself altyd verwys het as "Boere".
Doodeenvoudig het hulle ook na hul taal as die Taal verwys. Boereburgers het die Taal gepraat, en die Engelse joernaliste van daardie tyd, soos Winston Churchill, het na hulle ook assulks verwys. Dit was Boere waarmee die Engelse gestry het, nie Afrikaners nie. Daar is dus vanaf daardie tyd al aan mense 'n keuse gestel: as hulle hulself geïdentifiseer het met die Boerevolk in die Transvaal en Oranje Vrystaat, het hulle OF soontoe getrek, saam met hulle baklei, en hulself Boere begin noem. - OF agterGEBLY in die Kaap, EN het hulle meestal na hulself verwys as Afrikaners. Dis 'n baie duidelike kultuurverskil wat nog steeds ook in die stede na die Tweede Vryheidsoorlog bly bestaan het: die brandarm Boervrouens wat vanaf die verwoeste platteland na die stede soos Johannesburg getrek het, het daar begin werk as kleremaaksters in die nuwe mechaniese fabrieke wat deur die eerste Jodesmouse uit Pole opgerig was -- en juis hierdie brandarm, hardwerkende vrouens en kinders het altyd na hulself verwys as "Boere" - nooit iets anders nie. Hulle het hul eie toneelstukke opgevoer en geskryf toe Johanna en Hester Cornelius van Thabazimbi hul eie Klerewerkstersvakbond opgerig het -- en saam met die Boere-mynwerkers in die stede het hierdie hardwerkende, brandarm mense nog altyd na hulself in hul eie toneelstukke na hulself verwys as "Boere".
Die geskiedenis navorster Elsabe Brink het pragtig oor heirdie geskiedenis geskryf in die tagtigerjare. Toe die Afrikaner Broederbond opgerig is, is dit die eerste ding wat daar deur hulle besluit is om die Boerevolk se geskiedenis te verander: Hierdie welaf, deftige Afrikaners het hulself doodgeskaam vir die die brandarm Boervrouens wat "soos meide in die fabrieke moes werk" in die stede, en die brandarm Boer-mynwerkers -- hulle was immers die "nuwe armblanke probleem in die stede" soos daar na hulle verwys is in 'n Rooi Kruis verslag oor hul ellende in die twintiger en dertigerjare. Dit was egter Boervrouens en kinders, nie "arm-blankes" nie -- : lees 'n mens die Rooi Kruis onderhoude wat met hierdie mense gevoer is en ook deur die geliefde Emily Hobhouse -- in die verslag, is dit duidelik dat hulle altyd na hulself verwys het as Boere, wat vanaf die verwoeste platteland na die stede moes trek om te kan oorleef. Tydens die mynwerkersopstande van die twintiger- en dertigerjare het hierdie Klerewerksters en Mynwerkers almal aktief saamgestaak en saamgemarsjeer in die strate teen die groot ryk Engelse mynmagnate - en hoekom het hulle dit gedoen? Omdat hulle lede was van die verslane Boerevolk, nie juis omdat hulle "Kommuniste" was soos die Afrikaner Broederbond en die mynmagnate se koerante hulle almal genoem het nie... Daar was kommunistiese leiers onder hulle, en baie van die mynwerkers was inderdaad ook Engels, dit is hoekom hierdie groepe almal onder die versamelnaam van "blankes" die geskiedenis ingegaan het.
Maar tragies genoeg was dit dus veral die Boerestakers wat op geskiet is by Cottesloe Koppie deur Jan Smuts se soldate (wat uit Brits se omgewing gekom het) . Hulle is selfs met masjiengewere vanuit 'n vliegtuig beskiet. Baie Boervrouens en Boermans is tydens hierdie stakingsopstand deur Jan Smuts se polisie en soldate doodgeskiet -- en baie van hierdie polisie en soldate het nooit vooraf geweet dat die mense wat hulle geskiet het, Boermense was nie. Hulle is vertel dit was kommunistiese Britse mynwerkers.
So is daar gevalle gemeld waarin 'n broer van Brits ontdek het dat hy sy eie susterskind doodgeskiet het in Cottesloe. Dit is wat dus kan gebeur as 'n volk sy eie geskiedenis en selfs sy stamnaam verloor het. Gaan kyk maar na die name op die Cottesloe koppie se monument, as dit nog daar is: dit is Boere wat daar gesneuwel het. Gaan kyk ook maar na die ou grafte in die mynwerkers dorpies rondom Johannesburg van daardie tydperk en lees die name van die mense wat tydens die onluste gearresteer is: dit is grotendeels Boere vanne.
As joernalis, het ek het self dikwels rondgedwaal tussen die grafte van daardie myn dorpies en die name opgeskryf: en die grootste deel van die vanne van daardie tydperk op die dikwels powere grafstene was Boer vanne. Dit is maar net 'n klein deel van die Boere geskiedenis wat eintlik nooit werklik in die Broederbond se geskiedenis weergawe baie "duidelik gestel” is nie. Trouens is groot dele daarvan of weggelaat of selfs moedswillig verkeerd geskryf.
Ek het al die bekende toneelstukke wat destyds deur die Kleremaaksters self geskryf is, hier in my besit, asook baie van hul artikels in hul eie tydskriffies. Dit is 'n tragiese hoofstuk van die Boervrouens se geskiedenis wat eintlik ook langsaan die Boervroue monument geplaas sou moes word -- om mense te laat weet dat baie van hierdie dapper Boervrouens die konsentrasiekampe oorleef het deur soos "fabrieksmeide" in Engelstalige stede te gaan werk. Hulle stryd het voortgeduur maar niemand het hulle gehelp nie, en hulle is selfs deur Afrikaners "terugbetaal" vir hul moed deur selfs hul stam identiteit en hul eie geskiedenis van hul af te neem.
Die huidige mense wat hulself nog steeds "Afrikaners" wil noem -- moet besluit watter deel van die geskiedenis hulle die sterkste oor voel, en of hulle trots daarop kan wees om liewers na hulself as Boere te begin verwys i.p.v. wat die ANC nou vir hulle begin noem, naamlik die "wittes". Ek is 'n gebore Nederlander wat toevallig 'n taamlik ligte vel het, maar ek het nog nooit aan myself gedink as 'n "witte" nie en ek moet eerlik se dat hierdie rassistiese verwysing my altyd besonder onaangenaam in die ore klink! Ek identifiseer myself as lid van 'n Diets talige volk -- nie as 'n "witte" nie. Wat van julle?
Groete - Adriana Stuijt -----
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