Boer

By Deane Barker • • tags: history, south-africa, definition •
Updates
This content has been updated 2 times since it was first published. The last update happened .

Definition: Descendants of the Dutch colonists in South Africa

The more modern term in use today is “Afrikaners,” though their are subtle differences.

Why I Looked It Up

It came up often in a book about the world in 1913. I was pretty sure I knew what it meant, but not totally, so I looked it up.

Update

Sometime after this, I read The Covenant, which is a fictionalized history of South Africa. It covered the Boer extensively.

Update

Added on

In August 2023, a song called “Kill the Boer” was chanted at a political rally in South Africa. The chant was led by Julius Malema, a Black political leader with strong Left-wing views.

This prompted some controversy, most publicly with Elon Musk – himself a White South African – who tweeted the song was…

openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa

In this usage, “Boer” can be interpreted to mean White people in general, however many have argued it is simply a rallying cry of the disenchanted. The song originated in the 1990s, under apartheid. The ANC distanced themselves from the song due to the implicit call to racial violence.

Links to this – Transvaal June 10, 2023
This was the northeastern portion of South Africa until 1994, when it was abolished. The name comes from the Vaal River, which forms the southern border. “Transvaal” literally means “across the Vaal,” which makes sense as South Africans from the Cape Colony area had to cross that river to enter the...
Links from this – 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War March 25, 2022
An interesting look at the world in 1913, before the Great War. The book doesn’t mention the looming war, and that’s kind of the point. It goes city-by-city, discussing what was happening in each, on the eve of World War 1. The result is…interesting. The book paints the picture of the world as a...
Links from this – The Covenant May 23, 2022
There are “epic” novels, and then there’s this. It’s the history of South Africa, starting in 14,000 BC and ending in 1978. There are 14 chapters, and each chapter handles a different time period. We start about 10,000 years back with cave dwellers wandering the southern part of the continent,...