The Last Trek by Sheila Patterson

Author:Sheila Patterson [Patterson, Sheila]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General
ISBN: 9781136532696
Google: vQT8AQAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-11-05T00:56:10+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

THE CHOSEN PEOPLE

‘And I will establish My covenant between Me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations, for an ever-lasting covenant, to be a God unto thee and thy seed after thee. And I will give unto thee and to thy seed after thee the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.’

(Genesis Chapter 17: v. 7-8).

‘The history of the Afrikaner reveals a determination and a definiteness of purpose which make one feel that Afrikanerdom is not the work of man but a creation of God. We have a Divine right to be Afrikaners. Our history is the highest work of art of the Architect of the centuries.’ (Dr. D. F. Malan, quoted in Eric Robbins’

This Man Malan, p. 7).

‘It is not wholly fanciful to say that on a narrower stage, but with not less formidable weapons, Calvin did for the bourgeoisie of the sixteenth century what Marx did for the proletariat of the nineteenth century, or that the doctrine of Predestination satisfied the same hunger for an assurance that the forces of the Universe are on the side of the Elect as was to be assuaged in a different age by the theory of Historical Materialism. He (Calvin) taught them to feel that they were a Chosen People, made them conscious of their great destiny in the Provincial plan, and resolute to realize it’.

(Professor R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, p. 129).

AT first sight it may seem curious that the stern and sombre doctrines which the good bourgeois of Geneva embraced with such zeal in the sixteenth century should have taken such firm root on the sun-swept, empty veld of South Africa. These doctrines, however, sprang from a reading of the Scriptures, which chronicled the history and religious experience of a pastoral people far removed from the cities, but not from the far-trekking Boers with their flocks and their herds, their men-servants and their maidservants, and their patriarchal families.

To the Boers the Old Testament was like a mirror of their own lives.1 In it they found the deserts and the fountains, the droughts and the plagues, the captivity and the exodus. Above all they found a Chosen People guided by a stern but partial Deity through the midst of the heathen to a promised land. And it was the Old Testament and the doctrines of Calvin that moulded the Boer into the Afrikaner of today. As a reader wrote to Die Transvaler in 1950: ‘Through the hearts of the massed thousands did the one perception shudder, that God called into being and empowered the Afrikanervolk to fulfil His plan. How else could the incredible happenings be explained, that the Afrikaner tribe (stam) of the expanded Cape Border decided like one man, and trekked out to meet a dangerous and unknown future, merely under the star of the Almighty; in whose name a whole sub-continent was tamed and won for Christian civilization.

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