In a strange land

pp. 23-38

in: Margaret Chatterjee, Gandhi and his Jewish friends, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1992

Abstract

South Africa at the end of the nineteenth century was a settler state with the foci of power divided between Boers and British. The first settlers arrived at the Cape in 1652, Hollanders by lineage and farmers by occupation. A large number were members of the Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerk and believed firmly that they had a covenant with the Lord, extending this to their relation to the land. After the English arrived more than a century later, in 1795, with all the advantages of cultural and technological superiority, the scene was set for a "racial conflict" which, well into the twentieth century, connoted specifically the relation between the two main groups of white settlers.