What if the Boers stayed in the Cape region?

What if they never trekked north and conquered/settled all the areas that they did?

How would the colonization of South Africa proceed?
 
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What if they never trekked north and conquered/settled all the areas that they did?

How would the colonization of South Africa proceed?

What is the POD though?

You either have to have no British settlement of the Cape, or some reason why the Boers can't trek inland.
 
What is the POD though?

You either have to have no British settlement of the Cape, or some reason why the Boers can't trek inland.

Piet Retief said:
2. We complain of the severe losses which we have been forced to sustain by the emancipation of our slaves, and the vexatious laws which have been enacted respecting them.

From the Voortrekker Manifesto printed in the Grahamstown Journal, 1834. Basically you either need to find some way for the British to either not abolish slavery or for the Boers to be less dickish about being forced to treat people as human beings and not as property. either is difficult, but the latter is probably at least marginally easier. You're probably right in that the easiest way is to avoid British settlement of the Cape, which requires a POD in the Napoleonic Wars, if not earlier.
 

mowque

Banned
They'll get culturally and legally drowned in new English settlers and control. Whatever vestiges remain will be totally removed after the various gold and diamond rushes.
 
They'll get culturally and legally drowned in new English settlers and control. Whatever vestiges remain will be totally removed after the various gold and diamond rushes.

Like how the Afrikaners have totally disappeared from the Cape Province in OTL and Quebec was assimilated into Anglo-Canada? :rolleyes:

Seriously it is very difficult to keep the Boers in the Cape region. The Voortrekkers were only scaling up something that had been going on for a century, i.e. frontier farmers pushing on into new lands to get away from intrusive government. Early it was the DEIC, later it was the British.

You can definitely scale back the Great Trek by having some of the advance parties slaughtered and having the British be slightly more pro-slavery but the essential push factors (taxes, regulation) and pull factors ("free" land, slaves/very badly paid native labourers) aren't going to disappear.
 

Brightflame

Banned
It wouldn't be easy to have it in the first place, but this would almost certainly lead to an ethnic Afrikaner state, an enclave surrounded by former British colonies. These could either be Rhodesia analogues, or typical African states ( though they may do better without the government playing the tribes off against each other).

I imagine that this state would be in perpetual laager.
 
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