Wild Boers
Sir: I believe that Sir Robert Birley was somewhat harsh in his review of my book The Afrikaners (8 November). For example. he says: 'No attempt is made to show what the Great. Trek means to the Afrikaner today'. But in the book we read (page 63):
'The Great Trek, during which more than 10,000 men, women and children—nearly a quarter of the European population of the Cape Colony—left its borders for good, is rightly regarded today as the most signifi- cant event in the history of the Afrikaners: The leading trekkers or Voortrekkers as they • came to be called, took with them not only their families but their servants. their ox- teams,. and their flocks. Theirs was an , exodus rather than an exile. Some sold their farms for a song. Others simply abandoned homes to which they had clung perhaps for a generation or more ...
'This was something more than an out- flanking movement to escape from the British. It was a severing of the direct life- line to Europe ; a renewed recognition by the trekkers of the fact that as Afrikaners their lives depended on the soil beneath their own feet, and that they no longer had any ties with any other home.
'That is why Voortrekkers, who showed the way to the Promised Land, are respected in then-. own country even more than the pioneers of the Wild West in the United States or the Overlanders of Australia'
Other passages elsewhere seem also to have escaped Sir Robert's eye. For example he writes: 'There is hardly anything on the Broederbond, the secret society which is the most powerful political force in South Africa today, though it is not now quite as powerful as it was.'
On the contrary. the book devotes nearly 700 words--more than a SPECTATOR column (beginning on page 280), to the history. aims, and associations of the Broederbond. It returns on page 294 to the Broederbond and its clash with Smuts, 'who described it as a dangerous, cunning, political and Fascist organisation'. And further, the book also recalls, on page 334, that Verwoerd. 'like most Nationalist leaders, was a mem- ber of the Broederbond'.
These oversights, and at least one more that I could mention if space allowed, have prompted me to write to you, since criticism coming from someone as eminent as Sir Robert would normally be accepted without question on its face value. And on this occasion shouldn't be.
John Fisher
4 Bcttridge Road. London sw6 •
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