The Night Before the Trek

In 1834, the British Crown had declared the enslaved people of the Cape Colony free. Anna Steenkamp did not write that this troubled her because it was cruel to keep people enslaved. She wrote, plainly, that this was not what troubled her at all. What troubled her was that the formerly enslaved had been placed, in her words, on an equal footing with Christians — which she believed violated a fixed and divine order of race and faith. It was, she wrote, intolerable for any decent Christian to bow beneath such a yoke. She was thirty-nine when she joined the wagons leaving the Cape — a grown woman, a wife, niece of the expedition's most prominent leader, making a considered choice. She did not hide her reasoning behind talk of taxes or drought. She told them, in writing, what her conscience could not accept: not the end of bondage, but the end of distinction.

Two years later, Anna Steenkamp wrote something else. In February 1838, Zulu forces under King Dingane struck the unprotected Voortrekker encampments along the Bloukrans and Bushman's rivers in pre-dawn attacks. Anna was there. This time she wrote of what she saw with her own eyes: fifty dead in a single wagon, blood running down the canvas; tents and bedding torn to pieces; infants, still in their swaddling clothes, lying dead in their mothers' arms. The same hand that had written of an intolerable yoke now wrote of an unbearable spectacle. Both were true. Both were hers. She never connected them, and this account does not connect them for her.

Anna Steenkamp lived to be ninety-four. She died in 1891 in Lindley, in the Orange Free State — one of the Boer republics her trek had helped to found, more than half a century after she left the Cape.

There is no turn in this story. Nothing in the record suggests she ever once asked whether the conviction that drove her from the Cape and the atrocity she witnessed in Natal were, in any way, connected.