Die Groot Trek 175: storie of historie?
Abstract
This article investigates the relationship between the writer of a historical novel and the
historiography. To what extent does the novelist depend on the historical facts researched by the
historian? Undoubtedly the novelist needs the historian’s research but it is also accepted that
history is researched by people, and that pure objectivity is a myth and writing history always
includes the researcher’s own interpretation of historical facts. Story (fiction) must therefore be
distinguished from history on the one hand and myth on the other. Although the fiction writer
needs the historian’s research, the historical novelist would prefer to interpret an ill documented part of history himself, because it is easier to fictionalise. The history of the Great Trek between
1836 and 1844, especially in the Potchefstroom area, is a good example. This article aims to
establish a narrative for the two historical novels by Hans du Plessis, Die pad na Skuilhoek and
As die wind kom draai.
Myths are markers of the identity of a group. I am the story I am telling about myself, a
community is the narrative it believes of itself. The novel is the story it narrates.
Against this background, as well as that of myth as identity marker, certain myths of the Great
Trek are redefined. According to traditional historiography, the Voortrekkers who left the Cape
Colony in 1836 were mainly white Dutch speaking colonists, but a closer look at the community
on the Cape Frontier suggests that this community was a heterogenic and rather integrated
community of Khoi, Oorlams, Basters, Trekboers and cattle farmers, and they almost all used
Afrikaans as mother tongue and as lingua franca. The social and class boundaries between the
different groups on the Frontier were not well defined. The lack of defined dividing lines leads to
over simplified dichotomies such as black or white, civilised and uncivilised, owners and nonowners,
in order to describe the compilation of the community. Binary opposition usually results
in over simplification and stereotyping. Class markers did exist, but it did not run along clear
lines. It can rather be described as a continuum with African on the one end and European on
the other, comparable to that of the so called Métis Nation of the seventeenth century community
of fur hunters in Canada. The Voortrekker community was therefore not a mere homogeneous
group of white Dutch colonists.
This article furthermore argues that the Frontier was more than the so called Eastern Border
or Oosgrens. Frontier means more than a geographical space; it is also a condition of constant
transformation.
The Cape Frontier of the seventeenth and eighteenth century is discussed against the
theoretical background of the American historian, Frederick Jackson Turner’s theory of the
American Frontier as not only a physical space, but also as creator of new myths, and destroyer
of existing ones.
With reference to Michel Foucault the Frontier is discussed as a utopia and the interior as
heterotopia, a free site without a marginalising authority. Therefore a crucial reason for the mass
movement of the Afrikaans speaking Frontier community was the dream of a new site.
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- Faculty of Humanities [2033]