Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 336 - The First Boer War: Part 1

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

Support the show on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/lionsledbydonkeys Check out our merch store! https://llbdmerch.com/ Part 1/3 A bunch of racist, libertarian farmers who hate taxes revolt against the British. No, not that time, the other time. Sources: Laband, John. The first Anglo-Boer War 1880-1881 Pakenham, Thomas. The Boer War. Meredith, Martin. Diamonds, Gold, and War: The Making of South Africa Pretorius, Fransjohan. The Boer Wars. Palmer, Gough. The Besieged Towns of the First Boer War

Hey everybody, our merch store is restocked. So if you missed any of the live show specific merch at wherever date that we went to and you couldn't make it to, it's all on our merch store. LLBDmerch.com. So get your orders in while they last. We only have certain sizes and certain numbers and whichever one it happens to be. So if you want something, get your order in. Once again, that is LLBDMerch.com and the link will also Led by Dunkies podcast. I'm Joe, and with me is Tom and Nate. Together we work at the University of Border Artistry. We spent years turning out high-value graduates that serve our customers across time and space. We teach valuable lessons such as how to ignore

ethnic complaints based on historical grievances, how to always default to creating borders that only benefit white people, but most importantly, expertly drawing borders that make no sense, but somehow always include all natural resources within those that benefit our employees. Are you interested in a high-paying rewarding job in the field of drawing borders? In today's economy you can't risk it. Our graduates have gone to work on for the British Empire, the United States, Belgium, the Soviet Union, and the

United Fruit Company. So you know you're in good company when you become one of us and adopt our school mascot, Eric Prince. Yeah, the guys who specialized in designing new borders are now just designing the cookstool on Dutch trains. They are the guys that are now in charge of the NS, which explains a lot. Do you want your tickets to be more expensive? Do you want service to be worse? Get your NS ticket today. Anyway, I work for the Dutch government. Why is everybody buying cars all of a sudden? Fellas, how are you doing? I am so excited. I'm not gonna lie, dude. I'm back in the

United Kingdom right now, so that's already like a minus 50% hit points for me. And I'm not gonna lie, dude. I'm back in the United Kingdom right now. So that's already like a minus 50% hit points for me I'm sick cuz my daughter status a little bit in Britain. Yes. Yeah, exactly My character icon on the screen is just has like the green Wave lines when you've got poison cast on you Miyazaki-san took the inspiration for all the poison swarms in the Souls series off Britain. And the funny thing is too, is that unfortunately before I left my daughter got sick. So I've got like, you know, babies can either like have strong reactions to things that don't really affect adults or they get a thing that like gives them a little bit of a cough

and basically is Ebola to adults. And I feel like I'm trending towards the latter right now. So yeah, yeah, it's a super spreader event called me being in Britain. But I did order breakfast off delivery this morning because I was like, well, I know it's going to be a long day and I need to get through it. And if you're ordering delivery at 730 in the morning and you want breakfast, there's basically nothing available besides a full English. So I ate a fucking slop breakfast, full slop breakfast. And I ate almost all of it too. So you know what?

Like at some point, at some point all those carbs and fatty particles are going to hit and my brain is going to just be going back to normal. It's going to be like the, oh, this is such a stupid niche reference that just came to mind. But I bet you Tom will remember it. Do you, Tom, do you remember those insane commercials for the Japanese potato chips called the consomme ponchi with the dog? And there's the one where like the dog gets abducted by aliens. He just goes into two times speed mode. It's just moving super fast and shit.

What the fuck? What kind of weird ass commercials exist in the UK? No, it's in Japan. It's Japan. Oh, okay. There were these commercials for these potato chips that are flavored like, they're sort of savory beef flavored, but the Japanese love beef consomme and chicken consomme,

like bouillon, like broth. And literally on Japan Airlines flights, I've had them come by in the aisle and offer, do you want consomme? Do you want a hot cup of broth? I guess the Brits do it too with Bavril. And so they had these potato chips called consomme panchi and they had these commercials involving this mascot dog who's just kind of insane and tries too hard. It's a very uncomfortably anthropomorphic human looking dog. Mm-hmm. Ugh. It's like hand banana. I don't like it. And typically, it's like child is having a bad day and the dog is trying super hard to

cheer the child up and then finally gives the child one of these potato chips and then they're happy. And in one of these commercials, the dog gets abducted by aliens. And then once he comes back to earth, this is done very quickly because it's 30 second ad when he like pants his tongue is moving like everything is moving like double time speed and like he like runs really fast and his eyes are bugging out and when he jumps he just flies up and like can't stop flying into outer space so that's my reference there that's a really long explanation for the insane Konsume Ponshi dog. And for listeners at home that is what taking ecstasy feels like. Now fellas, it's actually kind of funny that you happen to be in the UK and I happen to

be in the Netherlands for this series because we're talking about the first Boer war. We're going into a three part series because I figured it was time to do a series that was slightly less soul crushingcrushing. Yeah, we're gonna talk about lots of guys with great names. Lots of interesting dudes involved. And the Bower War, now, most people when they think of the Bower War, unless you are in fact British or Bower, I assume. Also depends which one. I assume most people immediately jump to the second Boer War, which we obviously will get

to at some point, but it kind of makes no sense to talk about it without talking about how it all started. Because in the annals of military defeats throughout history, we've covered quite a few embarrassing battles and wars, especially when it comes to the British. It's kind of our favorite punching bags, right? Right next to the Americans and every other European nation. However, we haven't quite covered possibly the most embarrassing military defeat of modern British colonial history. Not from the era of like burgeoning empire, but rather defeat at the height of British imperial splendor. The era

where the sun never set on the empire, all that shit. The time where Britain was supposed to be able to best any of their European peers in open conflict. Because we're going to be talking about the first Boer War, or the Erste Freiheitssortach, and it's where they suffer their first defeat in a colonial rebellion since the American War of Independence. Yeah, and you just have loads of guys, the proto like, you're like blue, like guys running around eating biltongue and shore. This is the birth of all of that, yeah.

We do have to talk about the birth of what a Boer is, and even the Afrikaner language, so we got a lot of dumb shit ahead of us. But to get to that point, we do have to talk about why a bunch of Dutch people ended up in what would eventually become South Africa in the first place, and why they would end up fighting war of independence against the British of all people. I can't wait to just sit through two and a half hours of this and just wait to say it's called Zimbabwe now.

That's Rhodesia, it's different. I will say that it's interesting to discover that a friend of mine we share enough Physical similarities that it's entirely possible. We're genetically related His family is also Huguenot my dad's family is Huguenot and he informed because he's it's Pierre the valley Oh, yeah, he's originally from South Africa These are like the Huguenot monument sort of Huguenot memorials in South Africa because so fucking many of Dutch basically Huguenot people French Protestants Many of them went to the Netherlands in some cases

They didn't like the Netherlands and they went other places in my family's case They wound up in America in other people's cases They wound up in South Africa and some places where they went to Geneva where I live now I'm decolonizing America actually, but We're all doing our parts. Yeah. Yeah, does that mean that Tom is, is, I don't even fucking want to get into that. I was like, no, Tom is doing the reverse colonization and he is hoping to colonize London. Yeah. He's, he's doing extractive colonialism on the British. No, I'm spitting in people's points of Guinness when they're not looking in

British bulbs. Yeah. So I know that's not the only reason, but that is one of them. They're one little slice of what, of the people who end up populating what would become South Africa. And I should point out here, because someone is going to complain that this is not the full story of Dutch colonialism or European colonialism in Africa or even South Africa. Instead, this is something of a primer so you can understand how this leads to a war. Yeah, there's also these things that exist called books that you can read.

Never heard of them. That cover a variety of topics, including the one that you want us to cover. And you don't have to hear my voice. Yeah. Now the Dutch colonial efforts in South Africa began in 1652 when the Dutch East India Company, or VOC in its Dutch abbreviation, colonized it. Though, long story short here, yes the VOC is exactly as evil, or actually more evil than they sound. That's all you need to know about it for now. They founded the Cape Colony, and this was started as a shipping station

at the Cape of Good Hope. This would eventually turn it of course into Cape Town. At first this colony was desperately poor and remained that way for decades having only 2,000 Dutch settlers mainly of the Calvinist extraction with a minority of German Protestants and Nate's family, the French Yucatos. Christ, like a colony of Calvinists is the worst plantation you can ever experience. To be fair, it explains a lot of what's about to happen. It's very funny because where we currently live in our temporary accommodation in Geneva is right across the street from a graveyard. That's also like kind of a park, but obviously you don't walk on the graves.

And there's two graves really close to one another. One is John Calvin and the other is Jorge Luis Borges for some reason. I have no idea what I mean. I do know why, but it's just, yeah, he was wanted for various sex crimes. Borges? No, no. Listen, one to fuck your cousin. Is it a crime until you do it? I mean, it's not a crime in a lot of places to this day. I don't think it was a crime. It do it? I mean, it's not a crime in a lot of places to this day, to be fair.

It's depending on the cousin. In Argentina in like the early 20th century. Just because it's not a crime doesn't mean it's kind of icky. Yeah, yeah. Entire royal family lineages across Europe are just that nonstop. It is icky, don't get me wrong, but like I don't think they made it a crime. And there's places today that's still normal. Ew!

Yeah, kind of fucked up. I mean, anyway, I'd like to give a shout out to my cousin wife and all of my weird children that we have. Anyway, talking about inbred people, let's get back to the Boars. The concept of the Boars hadn't quite been invented yet. We're getting, we're, we're, we're stepping onto the road of how they congeal together into a sociological identity. So like basically, okay, it's the age of exploration. This is long before the creation of the Suez Canal. And so the only way to get to what was called the East Indies at the time was basically the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia places for the Dutch, like Indonesia and Singapore for the British. Also, obviously India and Iran, or what is now Iran. To get

there, you had to go all the way around Africa. And so it makes sense they would establish a trading post way station at the Cape of Good Hope because that is basically the southernmost point. And then you have to go all the way background the East coast of Africa to then eventually get over towards- There's a reason why all of the colonial efforts kind of in the beginning at least trace that line. And at first the population, well not at first, always, the population of this colony is vastly outnumbered by their slaves of course, which were imported. They actually, most of their slaves in the beginning were not local Africans. They mostly

came from the rest of the Dutch Empire and Indonesia, Sri Lanka, other parts of Dutch Africa, and they were also purchased from the Portuguese that were holding them right across the street in Mozambique. They were also indentured servants, which isn't to say about the local African population, which of course would always outnumber and still does the white population of the areas. And this will eventually lead to the invention of Nando's. Quite literally. To be fair, I have never eaten a Nando's,

so I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing. I'll let you guys have a Nando's opinion. It has helped a little bit with getting the Brits to add a little bit of salt and spice to their food. I mean, look, the Brits actually do love hot spicy food, but more of like a curry. Like a curry, like I'll get the spiciest curry challenge kind of thing Okay, otherwise like oftentimes it can be somewhat call it fashionably undersalted whereas Nando's pretty good

No, I mean it's as chains go pretty good All right, I'll have to try it next time I'm in the UK the idea is puts its its Angolan Portuguese cuisine sure a period peppers. I was sure it wasn't British Yeah, I mean I feel like there could be a British guy named Nando. And that's like a really rude nickname that his friends came up with. Yeah, because they can't they can't say slurs anymore. Yeah. Well, his name is actually like Arnold or something like that.

But they call him Nando. And that actually is like it's a really able ableist slur. Some motherfucker with a hyphenated first name. Now, most of these settlers amounted to be nomadic farmers with large numbers of livestock that required them to move around and constantly look for grazing land. Of course, this system was made possible and much easier by wide scale slavery. However, the VOC was a bloodthirsty Imperial corporate body and ran their colony exactly as you'd imagine an organization like that would. All settlers were employees of the company and could be recalled back into active company

service whenever they wanted. Farmers could only grow crops and tend to livestock that the company told them they could grow and tend to and only sell at prices the company agreed to. In short, it was a company run dictatorship and everybody fucking hated it. Now the main reason for this isn't because of this. They probably would have been fine with that. The main problem with the VOC was they were doing it badly. Okay that makes sense. Because this is like they expected more people to want to come and colonize the cape right? Like we have all these lush pastures for you to totally come and steal from

anybody who happens to live on them. But nobody was coming because the VOC was running the colony like shit. And most importantly, you would have to work for the VOC. So VOC relented. Not because of any political reason, but because they wanted to make money. So they let in what was known as Freiburgers or free citizens, sometimes called free settlers into the colony. These are people that were no longer contractually bound to the company. They could just be settlers. Most of these men were tradesmen looking to make a killing in the colony where rumor was it was easier to move up in the social strata

than it was back in the Netherlands, which was kind of true. And also as well as like easier access to like further inland in the southern horn of Africa. So like you have companies being set up like across the borders as well. You know, if you're, if you're an entrepreneur, Dutch entrepreneur at this time, it's like, oh yeah, move there. And then eventually, I don't know, start like a diamond mine or an emerald mine. Oh, hold that thought for later. Something I'd also want to point out too is that the Dutch were the same as the British

in this regard that like it's far closer to our sort of modern notion of a command economy when you look at how colonies were run in terms of like what they was produced, what they produced for sale, what they were allowed to buy. Like One of the reasons why the British, for example, have so, have and had so much economic links with Chile was because the British just basically ran blockades to sell British goods in Chile because Chileans could never buy any kind of quality manufactured goods

because the Spanish Empire just fucking sucked at getting them things. And so, when I point this out, we have this notion of like, oh, this kind of freewheeling entrepreneurship thing is sort of like, what if we went and did Shenzhen or Singapore, but like I'm saying the economy in these places was far more like pre 1979 Shenzhen than nowadays. Like it was very top down dictatorial. Yeah. Especially the VOC. Yeah.

And as you just pointed out, like, you know, no matter how good you were doing a thing, if Joop van der Klop back in fucking wherever in Amsterdam, in Den Haag in Rotterdam, didn't want you to grow that or sell that, you know, eventually a boat would come with a message saying, you know, do what I said, fuck you, or I'm going to, I'm going to bring you back to Doggerland, which I've just learned is the word for the mega continent that existed before in the last ice age that connected Britain and the Netherlands by land, the sunken area. Yeah. It's the only continent where you had to go to to fuck in your car or in the woods.

Well, I just find it very funny that like the sunken lost land that you that united Europe and Britain is called doggor land. Like there's, there's something so fitting about it now. And apparently they keep because they dredged a shitload of sand to build anti-flooding measures in the Netherlands, people just keep finding Neanderthal and early human artifacts all over the Netherlands because they're the lost remnants of Doggerland. What they don't find is a voxelastra covered in bodily fluids, but someday they will. These free citizens, able to come into the Cape and effectively do whatever they want, swelled the colony's population and soon many of these pastoral farmers were striking out beyond the limit of the colony's borders as laid out by the company, against strict

company directives, though little to nothing was done to stop them. This had two reasons. The VOC, of course, wanted more stuff, but also they lacked the ability to police this population and didn't even try. But also it's like, can you imagine, it's like, you know, you're the colonial supervisor, you're like, these motherfuckers, they crossed the borderline. Get in a boat and sail six months to the Netherlands and tell the boss and then come back and then tell them off for it. It's like... Administrative capability of the VOC within the Cape Colony was quite limited and has a double-edged sword, right? Like the colony wasn't making money. So the VOC saw like,

you know, a large garrison, all these administrative workers as an investment that the colony didn't deserve because it wasn't making any an investment that the colony didn't deserve because it wasn't making any money. So they just didn't. And these colonists came in a few flavors. People who wanted better land for cheap or free because they were stealing it. Also, people were leaving the boundaries of the colony because all of the stuff closest to the colony had been taken by the first early settlers. Another was, people wanted to get away from the iron fist of the company's administration, which pretty much only existed in the direct cape itself. Most of these guys who showed up, told the VOC to go fuck itself and hit the bricks,

were the freeburgers. So they took off, and these people became known as trek Boers Moving further and further into the interior of Africa away from the company You know, I'm really trying to not be distracting but like you just said a sentence that sounded like won't you fly free burger? Play free burger. Yeah, exactly. It's just like you imagine these guys just whipping ass on a mule train Yeah, exactly. It's just like you imagine these guys just whipping ass on a mule train Like I know were in a different kind of living as out of Cape Town for proto Cape Town To get into like the uplands like where they can go and just be even bigger pieces of shit That's exactly what happened. That is basically the story of Leonard skinner right there Except the Dutch have to invent a plane to then kill them with it

They have to invent a plane big enough to pack every fucking Trek bow or two and crash it into the woods in Alabama. The KLM killed Leonard's. Exactly. That's how they found it. KLM to kill Leonard's. Of course, by leaving the colony, the Trek bowers become in more and more contact the African tribes. And as they do so, they killed them through more than one way.

Obviously outright violence, the spread of disease, or enslaving them. Once enslaved, they were forced into Dutch Christian schools to learn Dutch and had their culture stolen from them. It's the same thing every group of settler colonists does. It is a cultural colonial genocide slowly oozing its way, starting at Cape, the Cape colony, into the interior. And it's important to point out here that of course European society is hyper racist at this time. However, the Boers made them all look normal in comparison. This requires a fair amount of explanation.

I mean, like, can you imagine it's bad enough? I'm not trying to make light of the actual horrible stuff that's done here, but I feel like if you were indigenous people in these parts of Southern Africa and they force you into Christian schools to eat wet meals and learn the Dutch language, you would just want to become the North Sentinelese. I mean, yeah. You would be like, we are going to kill anyone who comes near us. We're just literally going to become violently uncontactable because ugh. The Boers saw Africans as subhuman to the white man and only fit for slavery.

The regime inflicted on slaves of the Boers was horrifically brutal, even when it comes to the annals of slavers at the time. Life was violent, punishments were brutal. And without going into much detail here to save everyone, it's a little bit more mind damage. Over half the slaves were women, and you can assume why that was the case. Jesus. I wanted to ask really quickly. So we started this with the establishment of the VFC and Southern African colonies in the 1650s. When we're talking about this point of the kind of expansion, where are we historically speaking? As so far as like the borders of Cape Colony?

Yeah, this point at which like the population is expanding and people are coming in and because the Trek Boer phenomenon. This is through the 1600s into the 1700s. At this point, there's like concurrent advancement and retrenchment of the Atlantic slave trade happening. Yes. Yeah. And that's what I thought that like the attitudes, these attitudes were always bad,

but they got much worse over the course of the 17th century and into the 18th century for sure. Like the British ban on slavery and everything will come into this at some point. And this gathering of slaves, because remember these Trek Boers are now no longer buying slaves from people. They're capturing them. And they do so through slaving raids into African communities as well as playing politics. They sell guns to one tribe to fight the other, with Boers sweeping into the aftermath to

pick up the carnage. Though other tribes did strike up trading agreements with the Boers because by nature, they were effectively nomadic. They knew the Boers wouldn't be in their neck of the woods for too long at this point, so if they played nice and traded with them, they would fuck off. That wasn't always the case, but sometimes it worked out. These short-term 10 deals benefited both sides. One side wasn't forced into slavery or otherwise murdered,

and the other people fucked off after a while. Yeah, it's making yourself useful enough that it's more worthwhile for us to keep you around and trade with you for things we need than, oh, we are going to capture you and sell you exactly. This also kind of sounds more like the French approach to Native Americans in North America. For now. Yeah. That's a good point. At the same time or maybe slightly later as opposed to the British and then obviously later American colonists, pioneers, if you want to use that word, kind of approach to

it. It's less full clearance and more just sort of very, very skewed and one-sided trading, but there's not enough of them to do full fucking Laban's round. Yeah, not yet. And as they traveled, they kind of sort of, but not on purpose, expanded the VOC's holdings. The VOC also unofficially but then eventually officially absorbed these areas that the Boers moved into as part of the colony. The Trek Boers were happy for now as the VOC effectively left them alone to run themselves as they saw fit, and the VOC was happy because this still benefited

them while they expanded. However, the FOC was wary of all these farmers who were pretty clearly ignoring their power, but most importantly, refusing to pay taxes. It always comes down to taxes, doesn't it? It literally does. So they tried to expand their administrative infrastructure and capability into the Trek Boer frontiers like courts, offices of the law to enforce taxation. They also redrew land borders, declaring nobody could move beyond them, all that stuff. But each time the VOC put limits on these people or laws or any kind of regulations, they're promptly given the middle finger and completely ignored. And if the tax officers insisted, the Boers would just kill them.

Robert Leonard Yeah, it's like you've basically spent all this time training tax officers in the Netherlands and bring them to South Africa or what will become South Africa. And then basically trying to make them impose the law on 17th century de Antwoord. All of the stories, we'll talk about a few characters a little bit later on this episode, but all the stories I've heard of Front frontier life at this point is horrifically violent and difficult. Some tax officer training in like, I don't know, fucking lighted and like being shipped into the South African frontier to force some guy named Pete who's wearing a human ear necklace is like to pay his taxes. Like you're not fucking ready for these people.

Pete's rocking up like I'm a gangster motherfucker. What are you going to do? It's just like, yeah, the Boers were like the first, you know, anarcho capitalists and the VOC was violating the NAP. So I was like, I mean, they're more like bloodthirsty libertarians. Yeah. So in my mind it's like, take all of the aesthetics of the time period and the Dutch in general and then it's like it's basically a mashup of the last ten minutes of apocalypse now and the music video for rich bitch all of the stories you hear about like, you know

the American Wild West and shit of like obviously the violence being blowed wildly out of proportion and stuff when it comes like what's happening In towns and stuff that is actually happening In the Dutch colonies like these people don't give a fuck and by the mid 1700s the Cape colony had expanded Massively wiping out the dominant local people known as the Ko'i Ko'i through force of arms slavery and a devastating smallpox epidemic That of course is called the colonial hat trick eventually the Ko'i Ko'i, who aren't wiped out through violence, move into the second stage of settler colonialism. That is, being folded into colonial life in the form of indentured servitude on farms. Not outright slavery. But indentured servitude for an African in

the colony at this point was the best case scenario. Laws were passed that forced them to go to Dutch school, local languages were all banned, and conversion into Christianity was demanded in order to even be allowed to be an indentured servant. And if you didn't, you would just be enslaved or killed. So a lot of people forced with no options, ended up as indentured servants on these farms. However, the main problem between the Boers and the VOC was the VOC seemingly did not

understand who they were dealing with anymore. They thought that these were just free-spirited frontiersmen who saw themselves as Dutch, but most importantly, members of a colony. But they didn't. A new culture and a new society had been created over the last several decades, as well as even a new language, a strange combination of old Dutch, German and local African language, informally at first but officially now called Afrikaans. I hate when I think I'm deploying, you know, Dutch John Lennon Yoko Ono first settler colonialism, instead I get like, I don't know, the butcher of Einhoven.

Pretty much. Yeah. You guys have constantly made the joke that like, the British Empire was an outlet for like the biggest psychos and weirdos of the islands to be sent to, that was the Cape Colony for the Dutch. And I mean, the Dutch do produce a lot of perverts per capita. So you can only imagine that like, yeah, they were overrepresented. I was just thinking, this is a dumb reference, but I don't know what it's like for native Dutch speakers encountering Afrikaans. It's different. Yeah, I figure it is. I mean, do do you because especially as a sci-fi writer Joe

You know that they made a riffle about this on the Simpsons But the raid Radbury's short story about like where they take people back in time to hunt t-rexes But like you can only step on the path like that's been elevated because if you crush even a slight a tiny plant It might change all of evolutionary history Yeah, he's up and like you only can kill the t-rexes that are gonna that are gonna die they know we're gonna die anyway, and then like the character in the story fucks up and Somehow falls off the path and messes things up and like he keeps trying to come back in time and fix things and he can't And one of the places he gets to it's like the modern world

But like it's just like the cyborg totalitarianism hellscape and English is really fucked up and spelled just completely insane And that to me is how I envision encounters with Afrikaans. If you're a Dutch speaker, I don't know if that's an exaggeration, but I've heard it described as odd. You can understand some stuff, but you can't understand all of it. Obviously, I do not speak fluent Dutch, but I understand, you know, a medium amount. And I can't understand Afrikaans, really. I think that it's one of those things where, like like if it was Patois or Haitian Creole, like

there's a lot of chauvinism around describing it as like, you know, but when it's the language of insane white people who do bad things, you're allowed to make fun of it. And so I personally think you're allowed to make fun of Afrikaans. Yeah, of course you are. I mean, generally historians agree that Afrikaans was born out of non-fluent understanding of the Dutch language that had been taught to slaves, who then mixed it with their local languages, German languages being spoken to kind of create a Dutch creel. Hence why many Boers hated the language at first, calling it a slave language or a kitchen language. Though there was another term in Dutch that I will not repeat, I can only do to it being considered a slur now,

which is another title that is still commonly used in history books to describe the beginnings of Afrikaans, but for a long time, Bowers would refuse to speak this version of Dutch or Afrikaans, seeing it as below them. But over time, that would obviously change, and it became the common language because the reason was pure practicality. It was exceedingly common for slaves to be freed over time or indentured servants to be freed over time, and then they would stay in the same Boer communities. People would also have children with them under, let's say, suspicious

circumstances for the sake of all of our sanity here today. So then they would have children who would then learn the language from their mothers. They would learn Afrikaans, they wouldn't learn Dutch because their mothers did not fluently understand Dutch. So it's starting from a language of people they enslaved, it eventually spread to all of the Boers themselves to kind of create a universal language in this incredibly fucked up society that they had built. The VOC simply had no idea they didn't have a Dutch colony in some places anymore. Instead, due to their lax administration, they allowed a society to form under the ducked flag of like a weird slave-owning farmer-libertarian streak who no longer saw themselves as a member of anything. Now if that sounds somewhat familiar to Americans

listening, a colony of slaver-libertarians who bite the hand that created them over taxes, it should. Because the American Revolution kicks off, famously in 1776, and the Boers around the same time are complaining about the exact same thing that the American revolutionaries are. And they are influenced by them and inspired by them to rise up against the VOC in 1795. They rebel in two places, Swellendam and Grief Renet, creating two independent republics. George Washington was the original independence influencer? Kind of? I mean, this isn't the only revolution that he helps spark, that's for sure.

Also, some stuff is happening in Europe at the time. I was going to say, if you notice the date there, there's other bigger things happening in Europe. The Netherlands, known at the time of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, was fighting a revolutionary force in France, which then, of course, got invaded by the same France, had a simultaneous homegrown

and outside enforced revolution on themselves, and became known as the Batavian Republic. This led the British to rush over to the formerly Dutch, now Batavian, I guess, colonies and attempt to secure them for the Stadtholder, or the head of state of the fallen Dutch Republic, William V of Orange. In order to keep the new French overlords from trying and laying claim, there's a lot of like new, some Dutch historians attempt to gloss over the fact the Batavian Republic was a proxy of France and say like, no, we had our own revolution like, okay, that is partially true, but the Batavian Republic is a proxy of France.

It's like saying that yes, Armenian Bolsheviks did have a revolution and then what happened? The two are not separable. The establishment and eventual like kind of House of Orange has such widespread consequences for not just Europe, but the world. And it's so fascinating that it's not cited more in European history as like, this is one of the defining moments of the 18th going into the 19th century. Absolutely. And it causes everything I'm about to talk about. Cause

if the Dutch remain in charge, who knows what happens, but now the British are in the neighborhood. If only William of Orange had have died of that asthma attack at the battle of the Boyne, the world could have been so different. Look, I'm just saying more shtat holders need to be eaten by the Dutch. However, the British show up to what is still technically a Dutch colony and say like, it's ours now. The governor of the colony now facing two rebellions in those breakaway areas refused to work with the British. And then the British is like, all right, well, if you don't open the door for us, we're going

to kick it down. So they did. And they eventually send armies to put down the bar rebellions, but this only works for about a year and they rise right back up. Then in 1803, a temporary agreement is signed between all of the various different combatants in Europe and the colony is ceded back to the Dutch. This again would only last a few more years because everybody is murdering everybody in Europe anyway and everybody's very mad about this whole Napoleon thing, and the British

immediately reinvade the Cape in 1806. The campaign is a very short one, and the Cape falls to the British. And this is where shit gets weird. It gets weirder than it already has. Yes. If you're going to compare how the British administered colonies to anyone else, to make a very long story short, it's that they are, for a lack of a better term, they're good

colonial administrators. And I don't mean good in the ethical sense. I mean good in the administration sense. They're good at enforcing laws, they're good at enforcing their administration, and they're good at enforcing it through the monopoly of violence. These are all things that the VOC was also incredibly good at in non-white colonies, but in South Africa, they kind of let everybody do whatever the fuck they wanted, right? I suppose the way to put it in the most morbid sense is that like the British were so efficient at colonial logistics, it created a level of stability in the colonies that like when

there is stability, okay, you can kind of do some guesswork for the future. Whereas like the Dutch, it was just chaos. The Dutch were more similar to that of the Belgians, where it's some colonies are set up to be 100% crushing, extractionary, and others were kind of freewheeling like the Cape was if you were white. Obviously if you're a Cape subject in their colony and you were black in the Cape, your existence is much much different. You followed strict crushing laws at all times

and their constant threat of violence. But if you were a Boer, you could tell the VOC, suck my dick, I'm gonna go farm over there. And they'd be like, okay, bye. I would also say that the British were very good at what you might call a kind of like administrative reproduction in the sense of being able to create administrative cultures that they didn't have to

constantly import people who were going to immediately dive malaria from Britain to maintain. Like obviously those people were there and were at the pinnacle, were at the top of it, but if you look at the civil administration of the colony, so many of them were sort of like the groups of people from these colonies, the indigenous people plucked out of society and sort of Britified, or they were people the Brits imported from their other colonies. So Dutch did this as well. That would happen here as well with the Boers. For example, the reason why Javanese is one of the major languages of Suriname, which doesn't really make any sense because Suriname

is in South America and Java is a big island in Indonesia. And yeah, obviously Dutch is the main language, but like Javanese is spoken there. But the point I make, similarly, you know, places where the Brits brought large groups of people over to work. This was a thing that they did throughout not just India, but everywhere they were in charge of. But yeah, they loved an administrative state. They loved the civil service, they loved bureaucracy.

And I think that one of the things that they succeeded at in this was being able to have a kind of like middle strata of people who were from these societies, as opposed to what you've just described. When I know, for example, of the Belgians, where the only role for a native person in the Belgian colonial administration was basically being a soldier in the most basic point a native person in the Belgian colonial administration was basically being a

soldier in the most basic point gun up person sense and there was a white dude counting your bullets to make sure that you didn't fucking Horde any of them in this case the Dutch in the Cape Colony like the colonial administration It wasn't that they empowered People who weren't Dutch settlers. It was the colonial administration was functionally non-existent outside the small offices of the VOC because they didn't need it for that. It was a way station for shipping. That would eventually change when the British took over, but we're almost there. Before you go on Joe, I want to say that like that creation of, I suppose you can call it

like an indigenous administrative class also helped form particularly in British colonies, that stability that I was talking about earlier, that like a lot of people had a vested interest in this thing continuing because they have been put in a higher position than they were before. Yeah. Yeah. And the Brits would eventually create that in the Cape. Yeah. I was going to say, I mean that absolutely. As soon as they get there, they institute a much harsher law and administration regime that the Dutch could ever manage or even try to do. And like we kind of point out, they're just better at this part of colonialism. This meant that the Boer's way of life, which was largely ignoring the government doing

whatever the fuck they wanted, simply would no longer fly. Taxes were increased, more administrators were brought in, and then the Dutch language was banned, which is a huge problem for Boers since the vast majority of them spoke no English whatsoever. This is when a lot of them switched to Afrikaans, all while the Brits tried to truck in their own settlers. There was also rights introduced for the colony's African population where before none existed. This was followed by freeing slaves a few years after that. Of course they did this by paying settlers compensation for the slaves, but this freeing of the slaves is considered one injustice to many and a direct assault on the Boer way

of life. Which I would imagine, you know, I would argue if your way of life involves slaves, your way of life sucks and should be extinguished. John Kennedy tool presents a Confederacy of Dutchman. To the Boers, their way of farming and as the way they have been doing, not using slaves would absolutely ruin them. This is the same way you can look at the Confederacy.

Their economy would not function without slaves. Their entire business model was based on having a never-ending supply of free labor they could do with as they pleased. And without the system in place, the bower way of life would not work. So this led to the De Huitze Trek, or the Great Trek, in the mid 1800s. It's best explained by one Trek leader, Pete Rightleff, who wrote a letter to the British administration saying, quote, we quit this colony under the full assurance that the English government has nothing more to require us and will allow us to govern ourselves without its interference in the future.

These trekkers in groups of twos, dozens, and soon hundreds, packed their shit up into wagons and left the borders of the British colony, moving further and further away into the South African interior. And these groups of trekkers would begin to declare multiple new republics across the areas they'd migrate into. This is an incomplete list of some of them. Oh yes, we're going to get some great gullies right now. The South African Republic, known from here on out as the Transvaal. Zutponsenburg. The Natalia Republic, also known as the Natal.

The Orange Free State. Chosen. Stellaland. The New Republic. Gehiraland, which was mostly made up of mixed-race people with an even smaller minority than normal Boers who were still in charge, of course. And surprisingly, the British recognized the independence of two of these, Transvaal and the Orange Free State, with some qualifiers.

For example, slavery could not be allowed, They could not ally with Africans, and the British would not allow any importation or exportation of weapons without their inspection. Which was easy because they were landlocked. The British would, in effect, be in charge of these countries' foreign policies. About that slavery abolition though. Oh, here we go. They did. Outlaw. Slavery. What they did do was start a new program called Apprenticeship, which replaced slavery, and it was just slavery with a new name. The system was supposed to be more like indentured servitude, which was still legal in British colonies at the time, but because history is a motherfucker, that is not what happened. It just turned into, again, lifelong slavery.

These apprentices were orphaned African children, almost always orphaned because the Boers had killed their parents during a raid, specifically with the goal of kidnapping children to force them into slavery. In case you're wondering, yes, the Boer states had institutional armed kidnappings as a founding principal. Just Boer Fagin running around with his gang of urchins. This so-called apprenticeship was supposed to last only a few years to teach them, you know, farming skills.

But this was almost always a life sentence. Some would be released to work for their former masters, but the easiest way to understand this apprenticeship system is that it was slavery, to the point that even the British saw it as slavery. Can I point something out really quickly as an aside? So where I live in Geneva is very close to the University of Geneva, and there's a big wide boulevard called Boulevard Carle Vaud. I didn't know who Carle Vaud was, although Karl Marx wrote a book about him, because apparently, despite being one of the French socialists, Carl Vought was on the payroll of Napoleon III. However, Carl Vought is one of the

founders of the idea of scientific racism and the idea that non-white people are the missing link between apes and white European humans. And that was in the 1870s. So the point I would make is that places like Geneva, for example, have not really attended to the fact that they kind of gave the stamp of approval, the officialdom of these mentalities. And what we're talking about happening here is 70, 80 years prior in that spectrum. I bring this up because there's so much lip service page to this idea like, oh, oh well the Brits ended the slavery It's like right, but you think those attitudes went away And do you think that the people who were actually in charge with checking who were?

Outnumbered by the people doing the crimes really gave a fuck I mean, it's also important to remember that yes, they outlawed slavery, but indentured servitude was still very much legal Which is just slavery by other means. Yeah. Yeah I mean like America ended slavery and then we had Jim Crow and it's like, wow, big material difference there. Also indentured servitude in the form of prisoners to this day. To this day. It's also important to remember that like when you read about Boer history and Boer

history is a complicated thing to read about, I don't mean complicated in that so far as how some historians talk about it. I mean, complicated so far as like, it's hard to find good sources that do not whitewash this shit. They will say that the apprenticeship system was, you know, a civilizing tool, you know, similar to like native schools in North America. But it actually was worse than that because it was just slavery. And just because the Brits were willing to deal with two of these republics did not mean they would deal with all of them. The Natal was annexed by the Brits within four years of its founding. The key reason for that was the Transvaal was trying to build a railway

through Natal and to the Portuguese controlled Delagoa Bay. This would give them a link to the sea, which would make it a little bit easier for them to break away from the claws of the British Empire. And they were, the Brits were pretty keen on making sure that never happened. I mean, the easiest way to explain it is just control. If Transvaal managed to get a sea lane open, they could then function their own foreign policy. The eternal British urge to have a boundary dispute and be like, no, I won't fucking do, I won't let you, you're not allowed to. Yeah. And also hating trains. Yeah, I was going to say this was basically HS2, the first edition. This is a- HS1.

Well, HS1 is the only high speed railway in all of Britain by modern, actual high speed rail standards is the train that takes you out of Britain, which is very funny to me. But yeah, they love nothing more than being like, no, and just very pigheadedly being like, you're not going to. And it's also, I allow, I won't allow it. And another key part of this was Transvaal's desperately poor. Their economy is fucked. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. And this rail link would help alleviate that. And the Brits didn't want that either, because if they kept the Boers poor, you know, they're keeping their options open for the future. The British also snatched up with Grekira land. Now, famously, these are the diamond lands of

South Africa, having been diamonds being first discovered the Diamond Rush in 1867. This led to a roundtable of bullshit between the Boers, the British, and of course, the actual Africans who live there over the rights to the diamonds. So of course, the Brits annexed it and gave everyone the middle finger. This is where the famous or rather infamous Kimberly family diamond cartel gets their start. The Brits being like, wow, a big group of insane, poor, racist, well-armed white dudes have never caused us problems anywhere in the world before.

I'm sure that will continue. We won't learn our lesson. However, the remaining Boer Republics were not friends. Even if they were all mostly run in the same manner, they're all democracies, kind of, white landowners who are members of the Dutch Reformed Church were allowed to vote, for example, as kind of a unifying thing amongst them. Soon the republics would be at one another's throats leading to takeovers wars and civil wars between them. One of these was the Transvaal Civil War, which pit a Transvaal against Zalpansper. Now, the population of these republics were very very small. I need to point that out like tens of thousands

maybe. Their leadership was also all related for the most part. Everybody knew everybody in the upper echelons, even the lower echelons of all these different republics. The president of Transvaal, Marthenus Pretorius, was also the president of the Orange Free State despite the fact that it was illegal to do so under both of their constitutions because he wanted to unify both the states to better fight Africans. He didn't really care about the British, which, surprise, surprise, were not the biggest fans of

the all these white dudes setting up in their backyard and stealing shit. There's constant warfare between the Bar Republics and the neighboring Africans. Some people got freaked out due to this violation of the constitution, but mostly because they feared that the unification of the two states would void their treaties with the British of recognition. However, there is no union and no agreement between Transvaal and Zelpansbruk, so they're like, we'll take that over. And they did.

The Brits were fine with it, they didn't really give a shit. Mostly because that piece of land was effectively worthless. Despite all this, it didn't mean the British were okay with the strange patchwork of Boer Republic's African tribes and British colonies all smashed up against one another. The British saw themselves as lords of South Africa and everyone within it their subjects. And this is not me narrating this. These are literally how the British government worded this. They were legally the lords of South Africa. All of these republics saw differently.

They were all states. They were gonna do what states did. To the British, this kind of fractured regional political picture of all these republics and tribes and whatever, it was bad for business. You know, everybody's dealing double, dealing fucking one another over. If you're the British government, this is a fucking headache if you see yourself as the lord of this area. This is the age-old rule of not fucking with the bag. And having all

these different groups with their own goals, flags, taxes, and all that other shit made the Brits think, wait, they're fucking with the bag. They're fucking with the bag, why don't we streamline this whole thing? It's very similar to what the Brits and any other imperial power did in any other landmass they slowly took over. They empower groups that help you, they leverage them against ones that don't,

and when the ones that help you wear out their usefulness and start becoming a liability, you come in and you iron the whole thing flat. A medical mechanica of imperialism, if you will. By the late 1870s, a man named Henry Howard Mayu Herbert, the Lord Carnivon, became the Secretary of Colonies, and he quickly went to work confederalizing many of the Crown's holdings, specifically in Canada. And he wanted to do the same thing to the patchwork of bullshit in South Africa. For the British, the goals are practical if you happen to be a giant naval power based

empire. South Africa's location, like Nate pointed out earlier, is one hell of an important link in any naval network. By allowing other nations to exist there meant other nations, namely the French, the Dutch, and the Germans, gave them a door to meddle in regional politics. And if you fold them all into a federation, you can secure your holdings better and get rid of any of that worry.

However, things were a lot more complicated in South Africa than they were in fucking Canada, namely because the British government legally recognized several of these places independent nations. Also, they didn't control all of it. They at least controlled Canada. Yeah. It's a, it's very hard to gain control over like insane racist farmers. Either you're the British government dealing with the Boers or you're the American government trying to deal with Bundy ranch.

I mean, we've already talked about the whiskey rebellion. This is just a tried and true method. Like at the end of it all, the Brits... The joke answer is obviously just like, it's so slapdash and hilarious. The true, more drawn from historical material here is that the Brits' focus was always India. These things were benefits to them and they were really opportunistic, but their focus was always the maintenance of things in India. And this benefited them and the maintenance of India. Yeah, absolutely.

And for example, controlling South Africa, like I said, pre Suez Canal, which they will build later, is a thing that basically means that they, part of the route to trade in India, which they control, is also a thing under their, if not total control in every region is at least they are administratively in charge of to some degree. And it's like, yeah, the last thing that they want is, I mean, what's going to happen later on, obviously, if it

were up to them, you wouldn't have had German Namibia and Portuguese Angola. I mean, obviously the Portuguese were there before, but you know what I mean? Yeah, of course. You don't have, you know, they don't want all these people in their neighborhood fucking shit up. They want to have anything. Cause if you think about, about West Africa, almost all of the port cities on that route that we're describing are ones that are controlled by the British. You don't want the Germans to take over Togo. You don't want any of these places to be anything besides British colonies. And you know, at the end of the day, like if that means you got to go deal with like

the murder Amish, the murder Mennonites. No it is an important problem and all of this stuff. You would think coming up with this idea would be popular at least in the British government right? Nope. A lot of fucking people did not want to federalize South Africa. Most importantly being the governor of Cape Colony himself. And in a turn of events that nobody is probably gonna see coming, the governor was concerned that forcing these Boer republics into the empire would directly threaten the black citizens of the colony due to the Boers being racist as fuck.

It's really funny that that would be the concern, but then again, the Brits do really dislike the Dutch. Fair enough. Which is strange because I mean like if you squint Dutch sounds like English being spoken where like they just invented new words. It's like if German Chris Benoit tried to speak English. Look man, I'm just gonna say substance abuse and head injury, there's a lot of Germans we could pull from to create the example of who would be German Chris Benoit.

Just pause and think about that for a second. The Boers were too racist for a British colonial administrator in Africa in the 1800s. Just let that simmer a bit. I mean, it's the same thing with Congo Free State. I mean, it's the same thing with the Belgians were too racist for Victorian era colonial administrators that actually offended their conscience that King Leopold was that much of a sadist and a pervert. Yeah. Similar to the Bowers. They're like, what the fuck are you guys doing over there? You're weird murder Amish commune out there.

But it's literally that onion article. Worst person you know, makes a good point. Yes. Yes. I promise that will continue to happen, unfortunately. I really do have to say this out loud, but in this war, the British are the good guys. Not every war has a good guy. And this war necessarily doesn't have a good guy, but if you're going to pick a side,

the Bowers are fucking psychotic. Something I'd love to talk about at some point in detail is the phenomenon of the American filibusters, the people who went to Central America to try to take over and create breakaway states to join the Confederacy. And one of the most annoying ones was William Walker and the Brits killed him. And you know what? The Brits did a good thing. It was the right thing to do to kill William Walker. He took over Nicaragua. Yes. And I don't know if you know this, but that was sort of the Central American War of Independence was to invade Nicaragua and kick out this asshole from Tennessee. And then in like 1989, I think George H. W. Bush appointed his ambassador to El Salvador. It was a guy named William Walker and they couldn't figure out why everyone was so mad at them. And I mean like it genuinely is like,

oh yes, it's our ambassador to Israel, Rudolph Hess. Like it's fucked up, man. But yeah, they hate that guy. And so like I said, this phenomenon, sometimes the Brits do good things. I can't believe it. When you have an empire that lasted as long as theirs did, you're eventually going to accidentally find yourself on the right side of history kind of every once in a while. And other colonial administrators refused to even talk about this, calling the Boers racist, quote, backward farmers who'd only hurt the

colony by their inclusion. The governor point out correctly that trying to solve South Africa's issues with Canadian solutions would simply never work. Yeah, there is a core of British loyalists running things in the colony, but the large scale British immigration to the Cape that the government assumed would happen never took place. The Boers still vastly outnumbered British people because it's a hard fucking place to live and it's still not exactly a lucrative venture for normal people. So they stayed away.

So I would point this out too, that this is relevant. The time period is that Britain, periods of huge emigration from the Island of Britain. I'm not going to talk about Ireland because it's a separate situation entirely. Never heard of it. It's just a separate thing. But what I'm trying to say is when you think about the majority of people that they were looking at who they would imagine being their colonists

are going to be English and Scottish people. Britain's living standards and income had an enormous period of growth during this time. The living standards, although they fucking suck by our standards and by standards of the day, living standards and employment standards were getting better across this period. Like that's why the Victorian era is looked at as being this like kind of like high point or Halcyon era for the British empire. So like the pressure to emigrate is going to be reduced to some extent during this period.

Not to mention like immigrating to like death frontier land where everybody's getting murdered in one way or another. But that's why you have like all the sickos going there. Yeah, exactly. I mean, also, when you think about where could you emigrate to if you were a white British person who wanted to emigrate? I mean, at that point, you could go to anywhere in the British Empire if you wanted to. And in terms of like these sorts of things to get people who didn't have the means to go on their own, like the places they wanted to settle

would be places like Canada and Australia and New Zealand. But at the very least, places that aren't constantly at war because like the colonies, the borough republics, there's a constant state of war against Africans. But there's also one other thing I want to point out, which is that the thing that drove a lot of migration in this era when you're talking about white people from Great Britain moving to British colonies was colonial or

relocation or settlement societies which were typically religious which is why all these Presbyterians wound up in the southern part of New Zealand which is why so many Lutherans wound up in parts of like the from Europe wound up in parts of America which is why weirdly like there's a Swiss German speaking community in Indiana because of fucking basically Mennonites. The Church of England took like wood look at the Cape Colony like now we really don't want to deal with those fucking Dutch people. Yeah.

What I'm saying is that like, if this were trying to drive people to like there, there was a time when lots of white British people did immigrate South Africa post World War II, when it fucking sucked even worse living here. Same thing that drove a lot of people to move to Australia and New Zealand, and the British government encouraged it. So like, they just weren't going to have, because like I said, the Victorian era was one of the periods that's pointed to as uninterrupted growth of income and general wealth and living standards.

And why would you then choose to move to what you just described? Hardscrabble, difficult place that's constantly at war, full of perverts. You're not going to get some guy with like six hyphenated last names to go start a fucking fish and chip stand in the Cape Town. No, you absolutely would get that guy to go down there and have like his like human hunting farm, but you're not going to get the people you actually need, which is like laborers and farmers and artisans and people like that to go down there. So for the majority of the white population, which of course is a minority themselves,

was Boer, either inside the British colony or in the Boer Republics. There was a strong dividing line between the two. One really hated being ruled by the other. As for the Trekker states the British hoped to take over, the Cape government also helpfully pointed out that like these people aren't like Canada, they moved out there specifically because they fucking hate us and Since 1872 the Cape had been granted the it's called the rights of responsible government Which is the same powers that Canada had that being effectively internal self-rule So they had the power at least to a limit to tell the guys in London kick rocks

We don't want to deal with this shit. The comparison is standing right in front of us. They didn't realize as they created African Quebec. Facing extreme oppositions both within and without his own government and from the Boers, he backed down. Then the Boers of Transvaal dropped a fat gift basket in the Lord's hands in the form of provoking a collection of local people into going to war against them, led by a man, the president of the Transvaal, named Thomas Burgers.

Now, Burgers was a controversial theology grad from the Netherlands, who's often blamed for running the Transvaal into the ground, and to be fair to him, that isn't true. It was already a smoldering pile of shit way before he showed up, but he did not make things better. Transvaal was a hardly functioning country of about 40,000 white people, all of whom refused to pay taxes to the central government. This meant the banks didn't work, public officials couldn't be paid, and there was no institution that functioned at all outside of slavery. Even their army was not an army, but it was a militia run via a system known as the commando. To make a very long story short, each group of farms would have to levy a certain amount of manpower to a commando. The commando is the militia, and their local commanders of the commando would be elected from their favorite farmers.

And of all of the commandos within Transvaal, they could only pool about 8,000 people. He pissed off this small population of people by enforcing secular education on a country that previously agreed in their constitution that the Dutch church and the Transvaal state were one entity. But he also imploded their already shit economy by taking massive amounts of loans out from the Portuguese for that railway we talked about, which ended with no railway and huge amounts of debt. Then in order to create their own monetary system to alleviate that debt, because the man did not understand how economies work, he created gold coins, struck with an image of his own face. Pure baller move here, honestly.

But for such an intensely religious people, it infuriated them because they saw it as a form of idolatry and they refused to use them. Yeah, that was 100%. The thing I was going to say is like, hey, check out these badass coins of myself that I've made out of gold, you know, and you give it to a bunch of Calvinists and they're going to be like, this is basically you've created like wish.com golden calf with your face on it. You see yourself as money Jesus. I don't think so. On top of all this Transvaal constantly found themselves clashing with the petty people,

which was a powerful chiefdom in the region. There's constant raiding between the two of them, and the Transvaal government, known as the Volksraad, also claimed the Petty land as their own, saying it was part of the agreement they had signed with the British. There's many different reasons why they're killing one another, the Petty fighting for their existence, and the Transvaal bowers fighting over slaves and dirt. The Petty obviously did not agree with them that they should not exist, and they fostered close ties with the British for very practical reason. The Petty were sending laborers over the border into the British colony to work in the diamond mines, which had then undergone a massive boom that all but reshaped the Cape economy

from an impoverished backwater colony to one of the richest parts of the British Empire. Those laborers then brought their money home, were taxed by the tribal government, who then used that money to buy weapons from the British to better fight the Transvaal. Who knew they were doing this so the British sold the weapons to them on discount to better fuck with the Boers? And they purposely strangled off better guns going to the Boers so they weren't as well armed as their African enemies. You could see how the petty were being exploited by both sides of the situation and also why

they're siding with the British. Eventually, the Volksred voted for a full war against the petty, and President Burgers himself was going to lead the army on the march, all while wearing a top hat, a cane, and wearing his presidential sash. I gotta be honest with you. I feel like I've woken from a fever dream and like the new kind of mascot campaign for McDonald's circa 1990 has gone really, really bad.

Yeah, Thomas Berger is leading a campaign against the petty, which sounds like with the traveling Wilburys established their own state. It's the fucking McDonald's monopoly promotion just as a state. Yeah, it's the militant monopoly man. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Rich Uncle Pennybacks is definitionally a bower.

We've just decided this. He's got the mustache. The original monopoly was the splitting up of the colonies of South Africa. Yeah, yeah, Monopoly, and it's spelled with the lab, it's Monopolij with a J at the end of it. I'm gonna buy a Transvaal for 50,000. Do not pass, go. Walk directly into the machine gun.

I've got two hotels on Natal, okay? You may have taken out those loans from the Portuguese, but you will not be building that railroad. Mind Monopoly, Juchen! The campaign went terribly, and soon his own commandos revolted against President Burgers. See? Once again, this is just... I'm trying so hard not to laugh every time I say President Burgers.

And it's so funny because this is the first of probably many insane names that's going to cause stuff like this. We got some good ones later on. His commandos revolted against him, not really seeing the point of fighting a war that wasn't protecting their own farming communities because that was the point of the commando system. But also probably more importantly than that, they knew they couldn't beat the petty. So they're like, yo,

let's pack our shit and let's go back to our super racist farm. It sounds like Tom Petty talking about himself in third person. Like, no, you can't beat the petty. Full moon fever banger album. You won't defeat it. It's hard to defeat a group that's just like very passive aggressive and like won't engage in like direct combat. The most important part of the petty armed forces is the cabs. The petty cabs with like jousting sticks coming out of them. I'm just imagining this is the most fucked version of the weird music video for don't

come around here no more. It's the South African version. That is also something a South African white man would tell you. Yeah exactly. Yeah and there would be, it would be something a South African white man would tell you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and it would be in a weird accent and it would be racist. Burgers knew he wanted to continue prosecuting this war, but he didn't have his commandos. So he turned to a mercenary group called the Leidenberg Volunteers, mostly pulled from

bohers who were working in the British diamond mines, commanded by a German named Conrad van Schlikman, and, and, former Finian revolutionary, Alfred Elward. So we finally got our Random Irish Guy entry for the series. Ugh, yeah, look, you know, not all of the Irish diaspora are on the good side. I mean, he is kind of the prototypical Irish diaspora, right? Annoying, violent lunatic.

Yeah. And since Transvaal had no fucking money, how do you think they're going to be paid? Uh, in land, slaves, gold, diamonds, resources. You got it. Loot. Sweet, succulent loot. So this combined arms German-Irish war crime brigade went off into petty land, murdering, looting, and other things all the way up until the petty decided we don't want to deal with

these fucking psychos anymore and signed a peace deal. So basically the entirety of the west side of Manhattan has just become a mercenary force. West side of Manhattan in like the 1940s has become a mercenary force in the Transvaal. By the end of the war the Transvaal was actually worse off than it ever had been. The economy was the worst of any of the Boer states. People had revolted and deserted deersweet present burgers and now there's a German and Irish mercenary gang that is more powerful than the commandos of the country, made up of bloodthirsty Boer diamond miners, just meandering about the

hillsides. It's going the most roundabout way of doing like anti-colonial violence against the British. It's like, I'm not gonna fight them in Ireland, I'm gonna go to South Africa and I'm gonna join up with the Boers. I have some bad news for you Tom, that does happen 100% during the second Boer War. Oh fucks sake. But we'll talk about that when we cover it. But still, the Republic of the Transvaal still stood. Kind of. It was a 100% rotten structure kick the door down situation and the British were waiting on the sidelights chomping at the bit, waiting

for their moment. And that moment would soon come, with Quetzuejo the King of the Zulus reforming his army in the Transvaal border. He was persuaded to do so by massive amounts of bribes given to him by the British government, who saw that the Transvaal was teetering and just needed a little push to follow the daddy Britain's arms. This forced the Transvaal government to choose, do we side with the British or deal with an African invasion that we certainly cannot stop? And the Boers suddenly became willing to talk to the British because the Zulu and the Boers had one

Hell of a history with one another is this was like a generational blood feud it's fucking Horrifically violent in one incident the Battle of Blood River back in 1838 the few always goes really well when it's the Battle of Blood River It's just like a placid encounter, you know It's just it was like the height of diplomacy. A few hundred Boers fought off an army of thousands of Zulu warriors. Like the Zulus slaughtered Boers, the Boers slaughter and enslaved Zulus. It's a lot. And Ketsueo is

100% happy to do the British bidding here. Like, yeah, we'll fucking kill those white people if you want. It goes back decades and of course the Boers just hate them because they're African. Like the Zulus are 100% right to hate the Boers. The Boers hate the Zulu just because they're black. Lord Carnivon dispatched a guy named Sir Theophilius Shepstone to Transvaal to convince the Boers to accept British rule, be annexed, and be saved from the Zulus. While Burgers, the government, and all of the people of the Transvaal hated the idea of submitting to the British, they realized they had no choice. And soon Burgers and the Volksrad put out a

proclamation accepting the annexation, and their reason for it is quite clear. They don't hide it. They boil down to, we have no hope of fighting them off. We hate this, but submitting to the British is the best way forward. So on April 16th, 1877, Transvaal became a British colony. And this turned out to be a very bad idea. Nobody in the British government had actually informed the Cape Colony that they were annexing Transvaal and telling them that that whole confederation idea that they hated was going to happen anyway. The British, however, had an idea. The Boers hate us. We have to win them over. So they unleash the British army on Africans, meeting the racists halfway and all. They go to war against the Zulus in 1879.

We actually did a series about this a few years ago with one major Zulu victory at Ice and Iwana by the Zulus and the British army then responding by all but destroying the Zulus as a military presence in the region. This is supposed to be a gift to the Transvaal Boers and it was, just not in the way the British meant it to be. You see, ever since the Trekkers had humped it out to the Transvaal,ers. And it was, just not in the way the British meant it to be. You see, ever since the Trekkers had humped it out to the Transvaal, they had been in near constant war with the Zulus, the Pettys, and others. Either in a slow, simmering, low intensity conflict or large-scale genocidal blow-up. There's tit-for-tat raids, farm burnings,

kidnappings, enslavements, all that. The British had now gotten rid of all of these people as a threat to the Transvaal Boers. Another fact of life during the independent existence of Transvaal, in case you guys didn't kinda already figure this out, was constant unrelenting political factualism and bickering. In fighting over everything and everything because it turns out a government ran by intensely independent-mining libertarians really doesn't work that well. But now, that was gone too, because they weren't governing anymore. That was all replaced by the always-there burning nationalism of the Bowers, now reinforced by how much they fucking hated the British who are now their overlords. It's the classic, greater unifying theory of fuck that guy.

And in the center of all of this, the unifying character in Boer nationalism is a man named Stefanus Johannes Paulus Kruger, sometimes simply known as Paul Kruger, or probably Paul Krucher, but I'm gonna say Kruger. Kruger was born to a family of trekkers and grown into, I swear to fucking god, a flat earth believing Calvinist extremist. Yep, I knew this, this is fun. His entire education was limited to memorizing the bible in its entirety, front to back, and refusing to ever read anything else ever again throughout his life.

But he was a hard fucking dude. He led a hard life. He was fighting on the frontier since the age of 10 and had seen incredible amounts of genocidal violence mostly perpetrated by his family. In short, Kruger was not a well-adjusted man. He was boring on fucking psychotic. Just for a little flavor of how Kruger was, there was a time that when he was 20, out hunting rhinos as one does, his elephant gun blew up in his face.

His face was mostly okay, but it blew his thumb most of the way off. So he had to cut it all the way off with a knife. He then treated that wound by dumping turpentine into it, which of course doesn't work, and it got infected with gangrene. So he treated that with an old Boer home remedy. Stuff your wound into an open goat stomach. Yep. He almost died from gangrene, but somehow continued to survive. He established what is known as the Doper Church, which is a sect of Calvinist extremism based on these only the Old Testament and he strict moral and ethical

guidelines such as no dancing, singing and dressing and only a certain kind of way, short jackets, wide trousers and wide brim hats for men and bonnets for women. They're literally the murder Amish. So basically you took the burgers government out of control and you allowed them to become burger stat or a rather bow or Statler and Waldorf hating on you from above shooting at you with elephant guns that explode. And then you've basically created Goat stomachs. Yeah. He just like, he did the like the fucking evil version of the gum. Jabbar, he put his

hand inside the goat and he was deemed the quiz. That's had rack of racist white people in Africa. You didn't realize that the way that, uh, you know, it was that it wasn't just keeping warm on the frozen planet of Hoth. Luke Skywalker was actually a Boer. Fear is the Boer killer. The goat sack lamerac. I'm excited to see how bower dirty dancing plays out. Oh, fun fact.

We'll get to that. I can't wait. So there's going to be Patrick Swayze's character is going to come to town in the Transvaal and shake things up a little bit. Gonna roundhouse kick Kruger then. They also believed in a form of predestination, but in a form of predestination that was mostly just defined by Kruger then. They also believed in a form of predestination, but in a form of predestination that was mostly just defined by Kruger himself. They are Calvinists. That is a foundational Calvinist belief.

Outside of being a total weirdo, he spent most of his time fighting, but he retired. And by the time he retired, he was a very well respected person in the Transvaal community, just to underline how awful this community was and when Berger President Berger went to war against the petty and asked Kruger to come out of retirement for one last job Kruger refused because he saw Berger as a heretic setting specifically his habit of dancing on Sunday And that is why God's blessing would not smile upon burgers efforts. And then he ended up being right.

So who are we to judge? How to completely destroy an American psyche, deliver a curse that reads, God will never smile upon your burgers. But he was such an important part of like Transvaal life and government. He did join the negotiations with the British for annexation.

And we do have first-hand accounts of the British meeting Kruger, who described him as quote, an elderly man, decidedly ugly, and quote, gigantically horrible. Like, just like sometimes when you describe people from history, it's like, I could not imagine being in the same room as this like one thumbed insane Calvinist who hates dancing. He's mostly scar tissue. Yeah. Also, he has the brain of a child. It's like funhouse mirrors alternate universe permutation of Ian Paisley.

Let's be real. Like it's that same extremist mentality. Both love orange. Let's be real. Yeah, like it's the same extremist mentality I was little orange, but they sure do but just just born of different circumstances because if you had like Transzulu Ian Paisley or true trans Natal Ian Paisley This is what you would you would come up with just to underline how baby brain this motherfucker is. Okay Kruger hated the British He hated British people so much Even other Bower people would remark that he really hates British people simply being in the same room as Brits Upset him to the point that he had to cheer himself up by going out back and just standing in the horse

Stables with the horses like they soothed him. He's just bored you name I was gonna say I mean like look I didn't expect a guy to look at this guy and say he's just like me for real But I do understand that sentiment. There's a complete aside and I know we're running long, but I was waiting on my flight yesterday in Geneva and I was doing, it was easy jet. And of course the flight was delayed by like 40 minutes and I heard a British couple behind me be like,

hey, speedy boarding's not really all that speedy now is it? And I was just like, it's a British airline. So guess what? It's your fucking problem. I know I'm flying to Britain, but I don't wanna have to,, why do you talk like that? I don't want to have to hear that. Meanwhile, KLM gives you exactly one sandwich that is made up of simply two pieces of bread and cheese. That's how you can tell it's a Dutch

airline. Yeah. Yeah. They, instead of the horse stable, just go stand by the crack head shit out the bag. Yeah, exactly. At the end of the day though, KLM, you know, know, like if only if KLM had decided to kill Leonard Skinner We wouldn't have had been left with the surviving members. I have to pay credit to where it's due I saw a tweet years ago. There's extremely funny and I don't remember the author but I will just quote where the person said that Jimmy Carter should have banned the racist and pro segregationist views of the song free bird from the radio Instead he decided to have the band killed which helped but we were left with the song KLM stands for Kill Leonard Musicians.

Unfortunately, they missed the hit Lytard Cohen at some point. But by 1878, anti-British sentiment within Transvaal, which is now a colony, of course, was building, mostly due to Shep Stone, who was fucking awful at running a colony. His budget simply vanished due to wild corruption, and he turned the former Volksrod building into a club for the British elite, further pissing off the Boers, who he now governed. Somehow he had taken a colony that was annexed because they were bankrupt and made it even more bankrupt. And you know that the partiesed because they were bankrupt and made it even more bankrupt. And you know that the parties at that club were basically carry-on films.

It was just eyes wide shut, but with more wool. Just horny, annoying, nonstop. Yeah, I mean- Yeah, Victorian print work. And just imagine how much that pissed off Kruger. He's like, I bet they're dancing in there. He's like, no, no, Paul, they're doing something else. And he's just like, do you excuse me? I have to go stand by the horses.

All he does here is Nina. Kravens is like cutting up and he's just like screaming at the wall, shaking an entire fucking horse. Like, they're just in there listening to Proto Gabber and it's just like this guy's screaming outside ripping his hair out, punching a horse in the face. Just imagine the only way you have to like, he's got to have his retainers to help calm him down. They have like sensory deprivation, but late 19th century version is like a phonograph hooked up to speakers like big has headphones. Then it's just playing a record that just

goes, he's in the sensory swing that they give for nor divergent children. My horse noises. He's got horse ASMR. Someone get me my horse head phones. I just made Boer Hulk Hogan cause that he is racist enough. You got to get those horse records brother. This colonization doesn't work for me brother. Damn brother I don't listen to any music by Clydesdales. So I'm gonna get my horse oasis. Wait, also as well Hulk Hogan much like the Boers loved saying slurs as well. Oh yeah, it's just a case slur

instead of an end slur. I mean I feel like like the bore epistemology of the world would recognize Hulk Hogan is one of them Like they'd see him and be like he must be a bore racist blonde weirdly orange. Yeah, there you go Hulk Hogan cannot acly bow or also you can have him. We will send him to Cape Town It's just Hulk Hulk spelled with a J York, yoga We will send him to Cape Town. It's just Hulk, Hulk spelled with a J. Jolk Jogen. Jolk Jogen. Then, then the British disregarded several petitions, which had been signed by literally

the majority of the population of Transvaal, which admittedly is very easy when it's like 40,000 people. This petition, of course, was to restore the country's independence, even if it was under the guise of the British Empire. It's kind of like how it was. The British in turn offered Kruger, who had effectively become the dissenter's spokesperson to London. Mind you, this man traveled back and forth to London on multiple occasions, which he must have hated. I was going to say, I mean, I fucking hate being that. Can you imagine what it was like for that guy? They agreed with Kruger to a limited version of self-rule. Kruger explained self-rule to his supporters as quote,

First, you put your head in the noose so that they can hang you, but you may kick your legs about as much as you please. But the Transvaal Boers were not alone in their hatred of the British. I mean, of course. The plight of the Transvaal Boers had galvanized the Boers in the other Boer states, namely the Orange Free State, which was still free, and the Cape Colony. This was not made better when Shepstone was replaced by British leader of the Zulu, or Garnet Woesley, who fucking hated the Boers to a point it was almost comical.

So is Garnet, I suppose, macho man in this situation? Possibly. I mean, I would say it's a Hulk Hogan undertaker situation. I was going to say like, there's gotta be a bow or undertaker. I mean, just like definitionally canonically, the undertaker could pass as a bar too. I've never heard him saying a slur, but he's a, let's say a huge blue lives matter guy. I'm just going to say this because it's been an intrusive thought this whole time. And I was trying to not derail, but I'm just imagining like complete disregard for intellectual property, Dutch counterfeit Hulk Hogan named Hank Hogan.

But also like Macho Man would have aligned with the Boars because what is a slim gym, if not built on? Mm, it's true. Built on better. Macho Man. Snap into a slim gym. I'm on? Mmm, it's true. The built on is better. Oh man It's not into a slim Jim. I'm just imagining that but in Afrikaans bust into a bell tongue There's nothing more that macho man hates then Zulu's There's one thing macho man hates and I've been told by the Communications regulations I could no longer say that word

on TV. Oh yeah. Let me step into that tree in Florida. Surnames like Trahan and Prehan. Those are Irish, aren't they? Okay. So Johnny Rebel, insanely racist singers, Irish American. All right. I see the... Okay. Something came up recently when I was like, I can only imagine what Boer Johnny Rebel sounded like, because I'm sure they had an equivalent like singer songwriter who only wrote racist music. Like granted, a lot of them didn't listen to music because it was idolatry and the devil and so on and so forth. But I'm sure there was, you know, I know Kruger wasn't a huge fan of it because the only singing that you should hear is the

dolls at horse tones coming out of your earbuds. So basically maybe John, maybe, maybe Yoperebel was the name of his horse. Somehow playing I'm up to my knees in Fenian blood exclusively in horse noises. Coming next from DJ Danarchy. Now, Wozley comically hated the Boers. He once wrote to London saying, quote, the Boers had all the cutting and cruelty of the Africans without their courage or honesty. But he did not use the word African.

It was the K word, which I will not be saying in a public address. He's to the to the Boer people of the Transvaal. He said, quote, as long as the sun shines shines the Transvaal will be British, which was not exactly popular. He also warned that any organizing or meeting about the prospect of independence, any of these grassroots meetings that they've been having, would be therefore considered treason and they would be punished accordingly, which of course meant the death sentence. Then the Bowers met anyway and passed a resolution declaring that they had no wish to be British subjects.

The two delegates then delivered that proclamation personally to Woosley, who had them arrested. Then Woosley released them. He thought this whole show of the arrest would scare the Bowers and make them back down. It did the fucking opposite. It just goes to show how little this guy understood the colony and the people that he was trying to run, where he thought something like that could scare these psychos. He didn't realize you have to establish dominance and mean it. If he had stood in a horse barn and looked at horses for a long time He would have figured this out if you made eye contact with Kruger and then punched a horse

Unconscious he might listen to him be like listen Kruger. It's okay I'll give you an apple and you can stomp this child to death and then we'll both go about our business All right, like survivor Mekton No, he's taking the horse electrolytes No, he's taking the horse electrolytes. Yeah. I mean, the Boers are fucking insane. To be executed by the state via hanging is probably the most comfortable form of death any of these weird frontiers dudes could hope for.

Trampled to death by horses. I mean, this is the part of the world where they have huge, huge, huge piles of ants and termites and they love sticking people in them. So, I mean, like, yeah. You know, like, I feel as though you just need to, you need to know your enemy. I mean, crew is fucking pre-workout is probably headbutting a horse into unconsciousness or getting, getting his dick and balls stepped on.

Well, no, but that's the thing though, is it like, he likes horses. I don't think he wants to fight them. I think he also, he shares common enemies with horses. So basically he gets ready by doing battle with small children and human fingers. Oh, he's just, okay. Small side note here. My uncle got his ear bit off by a horse when he was little because he was wearing like a straw hat and it just was chewing on the hat and you know,

his mouth migrated down and chomped off half of his ear. So, you know, maybe Kruger also hated my uncle. My dad went to West Point and did the sports thing there for steeplechase and polo and like he liked horses and I hate horses because every time he tried to like, he wasn't a very good teacher about this stuff. And every time I ever rode a horse, the kid, I got thrown off and I was just like, I just came to the conclusion that all horses are dickheads. They are. And I realized some people love horses. I just don't like horses. We've all come to the conclusion that we hate horses on this show. They're kind of shithead animals.

Do you like horses? Oh, so you have something in common with Paul Kruger? Hmm, problematic much? Yeah, you want to turn out the Victrola phonograph ASMR horse voices so you can go be more racist just like Paul Kruger, your best friend. The only right thing to do is go up and punch a horse like Kentaro from Fist of the North Star. I was going to say punch a horse like the guy in the Blazing Saddles movie that's very funny but we really can't talk about.

Because the guy's name was Mongol. That's right. Punch a horse so hard in the chest that blows apart like the horse from the movie Napoleon. I would say that if you punch the horse and then the horse basically scoffed at you and then you were able to say, oh my what motion they ruined the horse exploded. That would feel really good. So at this point, the Boers are fucking galvanized, they're organized and they're pests. Across South Africa, they begin to actively resist British goals, including MPs who are boars in the Cape voting to defeat proposals to confederalize all of this shit.

All while Woesley insisted to the people in London that nothing to see here, everything's fine in the annex lands, and he actually reduced the British garrison in the Transvaal to just 1,750 soldiers. Soon 5,000 Boers met up at Pardecral and voted on December 13th to proclaim Transvaal's independence once again, re-establishing the Volksraad and forming a three-headed government of Kruger, former Attorney General of the Republic, Piet Jobert, and he would also act as their overall military commander, as well as the first president of the Transvaal, Praetorius. Included in their declaration was a vow to take up arms in self-defense to defend their

sovereignty. Soon these two sides would be gearing up for battle the first Boer war would begin and that is where we'll pick up next time The episode's over brother Listen this this went in a lot of directions I wasn't expecting but what's funny is that I everything that I know about the Boer war the way I conceive of is the Boer War is the second Boer war all the things I was I was periodically grabbing my phone to check references I didn't want to bring up something

that was not appropriate for this conflict. And I realized that everything about like, relief of Mafeking involving fucking Lord Robert Baden-Powell, future problematic guy. All that's coming in the next series that we do. I was gonna say, Breaker Morant, all that stuff, like that's all the Second Boer War. Yep.

Yeah, so I don't really know much about the first, and this is very helpful. The birth of British concentration camps, also the Second Boer War. Yep. Yeah. So I don't really know much about the first and the first of British concentration camps. Also the second Boer War. All of that and more because history is fun. Guys, that is an episode of the podcast. You have other podcasts? Plug those podcasts who certainly have nothing to do with horses and or Boer Hulk Hogan. Trash future podcast about why the tech industry is dumb also British politics what a hell way to dad a podcast about why you shouldn't join the army and about parenting killed James Bond a film

podcast that is very very funny all three of them either producer executive produced by me I'm involved in some cases I'm a co-host too so check those out macho man says listen to beneath the skin the show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing oh Jesus Christ that really. That really hurts. It hurts so bad. Is this what it feels like when Americans try to do Irish accents and you just wince inside? Yeah. It makes you want to relapse like on whatever it is you're doing. My case, it's like for relapsing would be like taking too many of my prescribed pills and being really mean to people online.

Listen or watch glue factory, a show about riffs and comedy that has no theme, but is hosted by some very funny people. And also I was on a friend of the show's worst of all possible worlds talking about an incredible game made by a Spanish company called a blasphemous. And yeah, check out that. I talked for three hours about why Catholicism is weird. I got podcasts running through my brain, brother. This is, this is the only podcast that I talked for three hours about why Catholicism is weird. I got podcasts running through my brain brother. This is the only podcast that I host. Thank you for listening to it. If you like what we do here consider supporting us on Patreon.

Just five dollars gets you years and years of bonus content gets you every episode early. Discord access first names on merch and live show tickets and we have them. And leave us a review and wherever it is you listen to podcasts. It helps us immensely. Until next time listen to the horse noises. They're gonna help. They'll make you feel better.