South Africa is a land bathed in sunshine,with air so bright and clear that one can see great distances across its unforested hinterland,that vast plateau called the high veld.Nature seems to have done its best to protect this fair land from desecretion by man:its few high-banked rivers are unnavigable,and the red soil resists the growth of most alien crops.

Behind the high veld is the great Kalahari Desert;in front lies a series of mountain ranges curving along the escarpment for 1.400 miles,and,on the south eastern edge of the plateay,the Karoo-a strip of high arid tableland.These separate the high veld from the low veld and the litoral which begins in the hot,tropical northeast at Mazambique and sweeps down south to the temperate Sape of Good Hope. South of the Cape there are only wastes of the Antarctica and the invisible dividing line between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic.

Along South Africa's nearly 2.000 miles of gale swept coast-line there are few natural harbours,few points at which strangers from the sea can penetrate. Yet men have been here,though never in great numbers,for a very long time. And always they have fought each other.

There has been a conflict of cultures here,a "race problem" for as long as men can remember-longer even,for archaeologists and antropologists have exhumed the problem from the prehistoric past,a past so distant it is not certain the protagonists were actualy human.

In that dimly seen period of history,hundreds of thousands of years ago,two types of humanoid creatures lived on this land.Then several thousands years later,there was but one:Homo Sapiens.

South Africa's first cultural conflicy ended in the complete and utter destruction of one humanoid creature by another.The survivors(50.000 years ago) were perhaps the ancestors of the Bushmen and the Hottentots These first known inhabitants of the Cape and middle Southern Africa were yellow skinned people,short in stature,who spoke language characterised by a number of clicking sounds which served for some of their consonants. The men had protuberant bellies;the women had pendulous breats and enormous fat storing buttocks.The puber female had orangy nipples. The taller Hottentots developed a more advanced culture and eventually subdued or drove away the Bushman.

In1498,when Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape and landed in Mosselbay,he found only Hottentots(at least these are the only people mentioned),for the African were still far to the North.

In 1652 Jan van Riebeeck landed at Table Bay with a number of Dutchmen.

From 1688 there landed Huguenots,German,Irish,Scots etc alloyed to become a new and distinct people called Boers.

We all know about the friction between the Brits and the Boers(Boer war)

The Great Trek started in about 1836 to the high veld a fast land depopulated by the tribal wars of the Bantu.

It is a fallacy to think the African were the firts inhabitants of South Africa.

The Bushmen and Hottentots can lay claim to that,but they too had faced a 90 percent destruction by the African coming from the West and middle Africa

The remainder were either assimilated or killed by the whites.There are now about 10.000 left and treated like scum by the African in South Africa and Botswana.Yet these Koi-San people are the friendliest tribes out. I spend 3 months between them,with the approval of the Botswana government and President Sir Seretse Kama.Why???beause I somehow knew that 50.000 years ago they became the ancestor for the African-the European-the Asian-the Chinese .

It was not the African who wandered as Homo Sapiens to Europe and Asia,it was the Bushman/Hottentot/Koi-San

The Voortrekker travelled at the pace of the ox wagon and their grazing herds,taking with them their families and servants,their guns and their Bibles,their faith in God and in themselves.They quickly became a nomadic,pastoral,sel-sufficien people,leading remote and isolated lives,yet united in thir common language,religious beliefs,occupations,race,cultural attitudes,and,above all else,in their fierce desire for independence,for which they willingly faced savage beasts,lived among primitive men,and suffered hardships of a life almost completely divorced from civilized comforts.

This is a nation I have come to love as soon as I came to South africa.

A Boer would never break his word.

There is a vast diffeence between A Cape Afrikaner and a High veld Boer,the former was a trades and business men the latter a farmer.

This was also a nation,that was betrayed by the Brits on numerous occasions and by the Afrikaner and of late by the world.

We see the Boers as Apartheid infidels,but little does the world know the meaning of Apartheid,which basicaly means separate development of various tribes in their own homeland,because none of the tribes could lay claim to South Africa and they were far from the Westernized