The Great Trek was a northward migration of Dutch-speaking settlers who travelled by wagon trains from the Cape Colony into the interior of modern South Africa from 1836 onwards, seeking to live beyond the Cape's British colonial administration. The Great Trek resulted from the culmination of tensions between rural descendants of the Cape's original European settlers, known collectively as Boers, and the British Empire. It was also reflective of an increasingly common trend among individual Boer communities to pursue an isolationist and semi-nomadic lifestyle away from the developing administrative complexities in Cape Town. Boers who took part in the Great Trek identified themselves as voortrekkers, meaning "pioneers", "pathfinders" in Dutch and Afrikaans.
Trekboers making camp (1804) by Samuel Daniell.
A romanticised depiction of the Great Trek
A stone relief at the Voortrekker Monument, depicting the exodus of farmers from the Cape Colony
Hendrik Potgieter at Delagoa Bay, c. 1851–52
Afrikaans is a West Germanic language, spoken in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe. It evolved from the Dutch vernacular of South Holland spoken by the predominantly Dutch settlers and enslaved population of the Dutch Cape Colony, where it gradually began to develop distinguishing characteristics in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Obelisks of the Afrikaans Language Monument near Paarl
Standard Dutch used in a 1916 South African newspaper before Afrikaans replaced it for use in media
"Dit is ons erns" ("This is our passion"), at the Afrikaans Language Monument
The side view of the Pretoria Art Museum in Arcadia, Pretoria, with its name written in Afrikaans, Xhosa and Southern Ndebele.