My Children! My Africa! [antikvár]

PREFACENobody knows the trouble I've seen This pathetic spiritual was first sung by black slaves in the USA but its beginning may well serve as a suitable motto to theHistory of the Blacks in South Africa.Many influences have contributed to the shaping of the history of South Africa since Jan van Riebeck landed at the Cape (of Good Hope) and founded the first settlement there more than 300 years ago. Little is known about the long era before the white man came to stay. People had lived there for thousands of years. Of the present inhabitants the earliest were Bushmen and Hottentots. Members of the Bantu language group, to which most of today's blacks in South Africa belong, were immigrants from central Africa. They were followed by Zulus, still a powerful tribe within the Republic.In 1652 the Dutch established a refreshment station at the Cape for India-bound ships, and ruled the region for about 150 years. Another important event was the arrival of French Huguenot refugees in 1685 because it meant the beginning of numerous wars with Bantu-speaking blacks in 1779 and ensuing wars with Great Britain, who took over the Cape in 1814. The Dutch did not like the British rule with its reforms such as the freeing of about 30,000 slaves in 1833. A quarter of them left the Cape Province in search of new land. This was the famous Great Trek, often compared to the Westward Movement in the USA.Another important event to have a determining influence was the discovery of diamonds in the late 1860's and of gold in the 1880's. Cecil Rhodes arrived in 1870, and his imperialistic ambitions, disliked by the Afrikaaner president Paul Kruger, led to the Boer Wars from 1899 to 1902, which were won by the British and left bad memories within the Dutch community, especially of the first British concentration camps (long before Hitler), in which thousands of people, among them women and children, died.In 1910 the Union of South Africa was formed by uniting the Cape, Natal, the Orange Free State and Transvaal to a British colony, which acquired dominion status in 1931, i.e. it became a member state of the British Commonwealth of Nations. Whites and blacks got on together comparatively well until the Nationalist Party came to power in 1948 and started building a wall of segregation or apartheid, in other words: it was the beginning of gross race descrimination. Blacks (and coloured people) were robbed of their civil rights. This was done in a very clever way by creating ten so-called "Homelands" for blacks, in fact nothing but a welcome means of excluding blacks from South Africa, their real homeland. By giving independence to the Homelands (never internationally recognized), the blacks became foreigners in their own country und had to carry a sort of passport in restricted areas; the authorities demanded separate pub-3