South African beginnings

I am now in South Africa! I had to get a yellow fever shot at the airport before they let me though passport control (whoops!), but luckily it was no big deal. I got off the plane in Johannesburg and we drove straight for another four hours until we reached the town of Froiesburg, in the Drakensburg mountains. The province we are in is called the Free State, one of nine in the country. Before 1994, it was called the Orange Free State, and was a stronghold of Afrikaner people and culture. It actually used to be one of two Boer republics (the other being the Transvaal) before the unionization of South Africa. I can definitely sense the Afrikaner nationalism among the whites in this area, and it is frankly weird. I want to write about this later in great length, because it is an interesting history, and an interesting heritage for me. My mom is an Afrikaner, and in fact I lived in South Africa from 1990-1991, right at the end of the Apartheid (though I was only four years old at the time and of course had no idea what was going on). It is something I am kind of struggling to understand and deal with. But for now, just to inform those that are unaware, the Afrikaners are a separate white ethnic group in South Africa. They have been settling in the country since the 1600s and are mostly of Dutch lineage, and differentiate themselves from the British colonialists. They are also known as Boers, and speak Afrikaans as a first language, although almost everybody speaks English as well (though some refuse to as a matter of pride).

Basically in an extremely reduced nutshell, in the 1880s and 90s the Boer War was fought between the Boers and the British. It ended up with a British victory and annexation of the Boer republics into British colonies. In what seems like a little known fact outside of South Africa, the British held many Boers, mostly women and children, in concentration camps. This includes my great grandmother. An estimated 27,000 Boer civilians died, which at the time was 15% of the population. This caused, somewhat understandably, a great upsurge in Afrikaner nationalism and pride. However, it also let to an obsession with maintaining white control, and to the Apartheid.

Anyway, just keep this background in mind, because I already have much to write about that relates to this. I don’t think you can understand politics and what is going on in South Africa today without knowing about the Afrikaner legacy. But for right now, I am relaxing in the beautiful Drakensburg mountains. “Draken” in the Afrikaans word for Dragon, as the mountains look sort of like a Dragon’s spine. This is the area where my mom (partially) grew up in. It really is beautiful, and there are lots of song birds that I wish I could identify. The only one I recognize is the hoopoe, which I distinctive memories of seeing in my childhood living in Pretoria.