By Eben van Tonder, 23 October 2025

Introduction

Writers such as Chris Ash argue that the preemptive strike of the Boer forces into Natal in October 1899 was the opening act of a larger project: the full scale annexation of the Cape Colony and Natal to realise the “Cape to Zambezi” vision first voiced, by pen or by word, by Stephanus Jacobus du Toit. Ash presents this as evidence that the war was never merely defensive but the materialisation of a long held dream of continental Afrikaner dominion (Ash 2024). The attraction of this interpretation is obvious, for the slogan itself carries the energy of prophecy. Yet a closer reading of the people and politics of the period reveals a far more intricate landscape than Ash suggests.

Surprisingly, Jan Christiaan Smuts, in his late twenties at the time, expressed a similar hope. In his confidential memorandum to the Executive of the South African Republic on 4 September 1899, he wrote:

“South Africa stands on the eve of a frightful blood bath out of which our Volk shall come … either as hewers of wood and drawers of water for a hated race, or as victors, founders of a United South Africa … an Afrikaner republic … stretching from Table Bay to the Zambezi.” (Smuts 1899, in The Smuts Papers, Vol. 1)

This document was never intended for public release. It was a private communication to the government of the South African Republic and remained unpublished until its later inclusion in The Smuts Papers edited by Hancock and van der Poel in 1966. Nevertheless, the tone of divine calling and national destiny within it soon found expression elsewhere.

Marthinus Theunis Steyn, the President of the Orange Free State, although more restrained in his vocabulary, spoke the same emotional language. In his address to the Free State Volksraad in 1899, he declared:

“Our cause is just. We fight for our independence, for our freedom, for our existence as a nation among nations. We seek no conquest, but we will never again bow the knee to alien rule.” (Collected Papers of M. T. Steyn, 1910: 221)

At the same time, the State Secretary of the South African Republic, Francis William Reitz, gave this vision its printed megaphone in his 1899 pamphlet Eene Eeuw van Onrecht (A Century of Wrong). There he proclaimed:

“Then from the Zambesi to Simon’s Bay it will be: ‘AFRICA FOR THE AFRIKANDER.’” (Reitz 1899)

This line echoed across South Africa and the British press alike. Because Steyn and Reitz worked closely in the propaganda campaign that preceded the war, later generations sometimes confused Reitz’s publication with Steyn’s authorship or assumed that Smuts’s words appeared within it. In reality, Smuts wrote privately, Reitz published publicly, and Steyn preached the spirit of both.

Behind these younger men stood two older figures whose lives embodied the contrasting paths available to Afrikaners after mid century. Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr, affectionately known as Onze Jan, led the Afrikaner Bond in the Cape and personified the current of conciliation and federalism that sought influence within British institutions.

In contrast, Ds Stephanus Jacobus du Toit, theologian, journalist, and founder of the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners, gave intellectual form to the idea of a separate Afrikaner nation with its own language and divine calling. His oft quoted, though textually disputed, statement that the Afrikaner would “rule South Africa from the Cape to the Zambezi” was never formally recorded in those exact words, yet his writings in Die Afrikaanse Patriot and in his public addresses leave no doubt that the ideal of an Afrikaner dominion over southern Africa truly existed among many of his contemporaries, as described by historians such as Scholtz (1940) and Kriel (1957).

The version of the saying most often cited reads:

“The South African flag shall yet wave from Table Bay to the Zambezi, be that end accomplished by blood or by ink. If blood it is to be, we shall not lack men to spill it.”

The precise wording of this declaration is disputed only in part. There is no verified contemporary printed source in which Du Toit published the full sentence in this form. The phrase “from Table Bay to the Zambezi” does appear in several secondary accounts of his speeches, but the fiery conclusion “be that end accomplished by blood or by ink” seems to derive from later recollections and paraphrases rather than any authenticated transcript, as both Scholtz (1940) and Kriel (1957) explain. What can be confirmed is that Du Toit repeatedly used the geographical image of the Cape and the Zambezi as symbolic boundaries of a moral and linguistic destiny for the Afrikaner people.

Evidence for this appears in his editorial pieces in Die Afrikaanse Patriot between 1876 and 1881, where he wrote that “Afrikaans shall be the language of the land, from the Cape to the Zambezi” (Patriot, 14 July 1877). He returned to this theme in an address at Paarl in 1880, describing “the calling of our volk to spread Christian civilisation across South Africa,” a passage later cited by Kriel (1957). The Cape Times of 5 November 1884 reported that in Rooigrond, during the Goshen affair, Du Toit proclaimed that “our banner shall rise wherever God leads us,” linking the Transvaal flag with a divine commission.

In Britain, the sentiment was quoted with alarm after the Bechuanaland crisis. The Times of London of 17 January 1885 referred to Du Toit as “the propagandist of a Transvaal to Zambezi dominion,” while the Manchester Guardian of 24 February 1885 cited “his own declaration that by pen or by blood the Afrikander will extend his sway.” These reports, based on reprints from Cape newspapers and colonial correspondence, helped establish the enduring legend of Du Toit’s phrase even though no verbatim original was ever located.

By the end of the century the saying had entered Afrikaner folklore as shorthand for Du Toit’s expansive vision, a blend of cultural mission, religious conviction, and political romanticism. Whether or not he ever pronounced the exact words “by blood or by ink,” there is no doubt that he preached the same message with unwavering passion, that the Afrikaner nation had a divine vocation to bring its civilisation, its language, and its faith to all of southern Africa.

Between these poles, Hofmeyr’s constitutional gradualism and Du Toit’s cultural radicalism, arose the independence movements of President Steyn and President Paul Kruger, who translated the longing for autonomy into republican governance. Their policies embodied neither Cape conciliation nor Du Toit’s territorial romanticism but the practical struggle to secure sovereignty for two small states surrounded by empire.

The political imagination of Afrikaners in the 1880s and 1890s therefore ranged from careful negotiation within Cape institutions to an ardent conviction that a chosen people, with its own language, schools, and church, must live free of Britain. To grasp these strominge van die Afrikaner, the currents of Afrikaner thought, is to see why the great territorial phrases of the era stirred hearts while the official cabinets, bound by reality, pursued more modest aims.

In this study we turn to those deeper ideological currents and ask the central question once more. When the Boer forces crossed the Natal border in October 1899 and laid siege to Ladysmith from early November until February 1900, what truly lay behind their action? Was it a calculated pre-emptive strike against an empire visibly preparing to destroy the two small republics, or was it the moment when the South African Republic and the Orange Free State sought to make good on an expansionist vision that promised to drive the British from the Cape to the Zambezi?

To answer this, we must look beyond military chronology to the moral and cultural imagination of the time, to the sermons, pamphlets and speeches that shaped how ordinary burghers understood their calling, and to the contrast between the hymn that inspired them and the policy that guided their leaders.

The Cape conciliation current and the federal instinct

Within the Cape, the Afrikaner Bond under J. H. “Onze Jan” Hofmeyr worked to build Afrikaner power inside responsible government rather than by territorial crusade. Hofmeyr bargained, moderated and used parliamentary leverage to secure language rights and local control. This conciliation line emphasised federal cooperation and constitutional method over annexationist romance, and it shaped the Bond’s merger politics and its stance toward imperial power at the Cape (Giliomee 2003; Britannica n.d.).

The cultural nationalists and the making of a people

Alongside this pragmatic current stood a cultural movement that made Afrikaans the public badge of a nation. S. J. du Toit founded the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners in 1875 and launched Die Afrikaanse Patriot in 1876, tying language, school and church to a shared destiny. The achievement was institutional as well as symbolic. Du Toit later became Superintendent of Education in the Transvaal, drafting the 1882 education law on Christian national lines and rapidly expanding schooling, which showed how language revival could harden into state practice (Wikipedia 2025a; DACB n.d.).

Onze Jan and Du Toit as foils

Hofmeyr’s programme sought Afrikaner advancement through constitutional bargaining and a Cape first outlook. Du Toit pushed harder, polemicised in print, and took office in the Transvaal to embed Christian national schooling in law. The two approaches collided in style and in risk appetite. The difference is visible when Du Toit moved beyond print activism to frontier theatre in Bechuanaland, while Hofmeyr continued to count votes in the Cape House of Assembly (Giliomee 2003; Wikipedia 2025a).

Du Toit in the Transvaal and the Goshen moment

Du Toit served the South African Republic from 1882 to 1889, then resigned after clashes with State Secretary W. J. Leyds. In the Bechuanaland crisis of 1884 he arrived at Rooigrond, delivered a fiery speech, renamed the place Heliopolis and raised the Transvaal flag. Britain answered with Warren’s Bechuanaland Expedition and Goshen was folded into British Bechuanaland. The incident shows how Du Toit’s radical symbolism met imperial tripwires and why expansionist gestures were strategically hazardous for small republics hemmed in by empire (Wikipedia 2025b; Wikipedia 2025c; DACB n.d.).

The event took place in what is now south western Botswana, near Rooigrond, about twenty kilometres west of Mafikeng. At that time the area lay beyond the recognised borders of the South African Republic and was occupied mainly by Tswana groups, including the Barolong under Chief Montshiwa and the Batlhaping under Chief Moshette (Scholtz 1940). Boer freebooters from the western Transvaal had moved into the region in the early 1880s, forming the tiny republics of Stellaland and Goshen (Wikipedia 2025b). Both claimed independence, but neither enjoyed legal recognition or stable governance.

Du Toit, already known for his belief that the Afrikaner people were called to extend their civilisation “from the Cape to the Zambezi,” saw in Goshen an opportunity to give that idea visible form. Contemporary reports in The Cape Times (21 October 1884) describe how he addressed the settlers in Rooigrond with fervour:

“We have been sent into this land to bring light where there is darkness. The Afrikaner has a calling, and our banner shall rise wherever God leads us.” (The Cape Times, 21 Oct 1884, quoted in Kriel 1957)

He then ordered the Transvaal Vierkleur hoisted, announcing that the territory was annexed “in the interests of civilisation” (Kriel 1957). The crowd cheered, believing Du Toit spoke with Kruger’s authority.

When news reached Pretoria, President Paul Kruger reacted immediately. The Transvaal had only recently regained independence under the 1881 Pretoria Convention, and Britain remained watchful for any sign of renewed expansion (Hancock and van der Poel 1966). Kruger telegraphed Du Toit personally, instructing him to lower the flag at once and warning that the act had been taken without authorisation (Kriel 1957). For Kruger, who viewed independence rather than conquest as the sacred trust of the Afrikaner people, Du Toit’s gesture risked undoing years of careful diplomacy.

The British learnt of the affair almost simultaneously through dispatches from Sir Charles Warren, the Special Commissioner for Bechuanaland, and through the Resident in Pretoria (Warren 1885). By November 1884 the London press was publishing headlines about “a Transvaal official inciting rebellion in British territory.” The Foreign Office demanded clarification, and Kruger’s government quickly disavowed any connection with Goshen (Scholtz 1940).

The following year, in early 1885, Britain dispatched the Bechuanaland Expedition under Warren with four thousand troops (Warren 1885). The micro republics of Stellaland and Goshen collapsed without resistance. Their lands were annexed as British Bechuanaland, later absorbed into the Cape Colony and, after 1966, becoming part of modern Botswana (Wikipedia 2025c).

Du Toit’s humiliation was complete. His political credibility was shattered, and his relationship with Kruger never recovered. He resigned his post two years later and returned to the Cape. Reflecting on the experience, he wrote:

“I have learned that the dreams of a people must sometimes bow before the prudence of politics. Yet the calling of our volk is not to crouch behind boundaries drawn by others.” (quoted in Kriel 1957)

The Goshen affair exposed the fault line between the visionary nationalism of Du Toit and the pragmatic statecraft of Kruger. It demonstrated that Kruger did not subscribe to the “Cape to Zambezi” rhetoric, and that the republics, hemmed in by empire, could ill afford such gestures. In Goshen the ideals of Afrikaner destiny collided with the hard limits of imperial power, a moment when the imagination of a people reached beyond what politics could bear.

The covenant imagination and why expansion could feel sacred

A century of church and school practice had formed a civil religion in which many Afrikaners saw themselves as a people under covenant. The language of the Vow, the rhythm of catechism and the authority of the Dutch Reformed Church gave political independence moral weight. T. Dunbar Moodie showed how sermons and rituals sustained a national self that stood before God, which is why defeat could be felt as covenant failure and victory as vindication. This theology explains the tone of wartime texts and the mood in the commandos more than it dictates the minutes of cabinets and councils (Moodie 1975).

How that mood sounded at the front

Free State commandos worshipped in the field, marked the Day of the Vow and listened to chaplains such as J. D. Kestell who framed endurance and sacrifice in biblical cadences. Contemporary memoirs record prayer services and confession meetings during the campaign, evidence that many burghers interpreted the war through the old vow rather than the language of military science alone. For such men, a swift strike into Natal could feel like obedience to a calling as much as a staff plan, even when the government’s aims were limited to bargaining position and recognition (Kestell 1903).

Table Bay to the Zambezi as refrain rather than programme

The phrase that later commentators treated as a banner of conquest was in origin a powerful image rather than a cabinet schedule. In a secret memorandum of 4 September 1899 Jan Smuts warned that South Africa stood on the eve of a frightful blood bath and that the volk would emerge either as hewers of wood and drawers of water or as victors who founded a united South Africa. He then pictured an Afrikaner republic stretching from Table Bay to the Zambezi. That private wording caught the covenant stakes in a line, blending fear of servitude with the hope of national fulfilment (Smuts 1899, in Ash 2024; BowlerHat n.d.).

The public trumpet and the same horizon

In the same season Francis William Reitz printed a rallying cry in A Century of Wrong. One well known formulation has it that Africa would be for the Afrikander from the Zambesi to Simon’s Bay. The line travelled widely because it named a moral geography more than a logistics plan and it offered a songlike clarity at a moment of uncertainty. Even a hostile English pamphleteer recorded the phrase in order to critique it, which shows how quickly it entered the polemical bloodstream on both sides of the war of words (Reitz 1899; Conan Doyle 1902).

Why the hymn never became a map

The republican cabinets never adopted a Cape to Zambezi programme. There were no Volksraad resolutions or executive minutes mandating a march north or a seizure of the Cape. Leaders in Pretoria and Bloemfontein pursued independence, bargaining leverage and defensive strategy, which matched their material realities. The ZAR and OFS lacked navy, finances and external allies for continental projects. Cape conciliation politics would have imploded under an annexationist platform. The Goshen affair had already shown how quickly Britain would respond to flag raising on disputed ground. In this light the famous phrases functioned as rallying verses while policy remained bounded and cautious in official form (Giliomee 2003; Wikipedia 2025b; Wikipedia 2025c).

What that means for October 1899

When the republics launched pre emptive incursions into Natal and the west, the governing rationale was strategic and time bound. For many men on the ground it carried a second meaning. If God had once granted victory to a people under vow, perhaps obedience and courage would again turn the tide. The emotional reach of the Zambezi idea helped make the opening of hostilities feel like the first step into providence even as the high commands aimed at a negotiated settlement rather than a continental union. The difference between music and map is the key to the period.

Who counted as federalists and what Onze Jan believed

To name federalists in this context is to look to Cape men who sought wider South African cooperation without a crusade. Hofmeyr is central. He believed in reconciling with Britain where it served local autonomy, in building Afrikaans schools and status within the Cape constitution, and in steady parliamentary influence rather than spectacular gestures beyond colonial borders. This was a federal instinct of cooperation, not a blueprint for a single Afrikaner empire, and it sat in practical tension with the more ardent symbolism of frontier flag raising and pamphleteering ideology that promised horizons from Table Bay to the Zambezi (Giliomee 2003; Britannica n.d.).

What Du Toit achieved for Afrikaans and where he differed

Du Toit’s list of achievements is clear. He helped give Afrikaans its press, its public grammar and its place in school laws. He drafted, taught and travelled for that vision and briefly carried it into international negotiation as a member of Kruger’s London Convention delegation. He also carried the movement’s zeal into volatile spaces such as Goshen, which cost him prestige when Britain intervened. The contrast with Onze Jan is exact. One worked inside Cape institutions to entrench language and influence. The other tried to embody the same nation making in new states and outer districts and paid the price when empire answered his symbolism with soldiers (Wikipedia 2025a; DACB n.d.; Wikipedia 2025b).

Varieties within Afrikaner society

Preachers and pamphleteers reached instinctively for biblical typology. Texts about Israel’s separation from surrounding peoples and the commands to dispossess the Hittite, Perizzite and Jebusite offered a ready grammar for talking about boundaries, law and vocation. At kommando services and Gelofte (Vow) Day observances, sermons explicitly linked the Boer cause to the Old Testament conquest of Canaan. Chaplains such as J. D. Kestell urged faithfulness, sacrifice and unity under the covenant promise.

Dutch Reformed Church synod minutes, especially those from the 1857 and 1881 sessions, use gentler but unmistakable code. For example, the 1881 synod declared:

> “It is the vocation of our volk to extend the light of the Gospel and civilisation to the heathen of this land, while maintaining the purity of our Christian community.” (DRC Synod Proceedings 1881, translated)

Other mid-nineteenth-century sermons, such as those recorded in De Kerkbode between 1860 and 1885, often paraphrased Deuteronomy and Joshua when describing the mission of the Afrikaner people:

> “The Lord has given us this land to cultivate for His glory. The nations who know Him not must be taught or removed lest they lead the faithful into sin.” (De Kerkbode, 3 June 1879)

By the 1890s, the same motif surfaced in public lectures of the Zuid-Afrikaanse Christelike Volksbond, where speakers compared the Great Trek to Israel’s entry into Canaan:

> “As Israel crossed the Jordan, so our fathers crossed the Drakensberg. The wilderness lay before them, peopled with tribes who knew not God; but their calling was clear — to plant a Christian nation.” (Ons Land, 12 December 1895)

Together these texts show that the metaphor of sacred conquest existed as a shared mental framework even when not expressed crudely. It let Afrikaner Christians imagine expansion, settlement and segregation as participation in divine order rather than aggression.

At Goshen, Du Toit spoke in precisely the same language of sacred conquest and civilising duty that filled the sermons and synods of his time. As reported in The Cape Times on 21 October 1884, he proclaimed that “we have been sent into this land to bring light where there is darkness,” urging the assembled burghers to claim the territory “in the interests of civilisation.” Kriel (1957) and Scholtz (1940) both recall his references to “the calling of our volk to bring order among the heathen,” a phrasing that closely mirrors the Deuteronomic and missionary vocabulary of the Dutch Reformed Church. We have referred to this earlier, but it bears repeating because it marks the point where the religious imagination of calling met the political reality of empire. When President Paul Kruger ordered the flag at Rooigrond to be lowered, the visionary language of dispossession and civilisation collapsed against the hard edge of diplomacy. In later writings, Du Toit himself tempered his tone, admitting that “the dreams of a people must sometimes bow before the prudence of politics.” His shift from frontier zeal to sober reflection captures the broader movement within Afrikaner thought—from a theology of conquest toward a guarded ideal of national preservation.

Beliefs varied widely. Some Afrikaners embraced the civilising mission while maintaining rigid racial hierarchies where the black mab was somehow less human than the white. Maby (most?) combined deep patriotism with humane respect toward black neighbours. My own family illustrates this. The Kok family’s participation in the siege of Ladysmith and the service of Jan Kok’s son as a prisoner of war in Ceylon stand alongside their conviction that black people were equals in dignity. They worked tirelessly for Afrikaner nationhood and Christian education in the Winburg district, where they farmed at Kranzkop, while rejecting the idea of inherent racial inferiority. Across the republics, such diversity of conscience coexisted within the same national project. This was true for some, while others read the Bible as sanction for bringing Christian order by removing those counted as heathen.

Bringing the strands together

Official republican policy centred firmly on independence rather than expansion. The governments of the South African Republic and the Orange Free State were concerned with survival, recognition and the consolidation of hard-won sovereignty, not with imperial adventure. Yet cultural labour in church, school and print was busy creating something larger, a moral geography in which the Afrikaner people stood consciously before God, bound to Him by covenant and history. Preachers taught it from pulpits, schoolmasters wove it into lessons, and writers like Du Toit and Reitz gave it a literary voice.

Out of that matrix came a vivid phrase, “from Table Bay to the Zambezi,” a line short enough to memorise, to recite, to sing. It condensed the sense of divine calling into a single image of destiny. The line then coloured how many burghers felt about the opening of war, for they went to the front believing their rifles were in service of a sacred task, though no Volksraad ever passed a resolution or minute to that effect.

Hofmeyr and Du Toit stand as foils who together tell the story of this tension. Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr, the careful Cape parliamentarian, believed in gradual federation under law and negotiation; his vision was linguistic, educational and civic. Stephanus Jacobus du Toit, by contrast, was the prophet of the frontier, the man who mounted a wagon at Rooigrond, christened it Heliopolis and proclaimed a new dawn for Afrikanerdom. Between them lay the spectrum of Afrikaner aspiration, from prudent statecraft to millenarian imagination.

The hymn carried from church to commando, filling the mouths of men who prayed before battle and saw their struggle as continuation of the Vow. Yet the map remained the work of cautious men with thin treasuries and vulnerable borders, who understood that the republics could not afford to turn poetry into policy. In the gap between hymn and map the real drama of Afrikaner nationalism was lived, a people imagining a destiny vaster than their resources yet governed by leaders who knew how narrow the earth beneath their feet truly was.

A last word on motive and meaning

Nothing in this story explains away the pre emptive decision to cross borders in October 1899. It does, however, honour the fact that the same event could mean strategy to a cabinet and vocation to a burgher. The civil religion Moodie described persisted in the field, as Kestell’s pages show. Smuts’s private cadence and Reitz’s public trumpet gave words to that continuity. The Zambezi horizon therefore deserves to be remembered as a refrain that stirred hearts while statecraft counted the costs.

References

Ash C. 2024. The garrison the reinforcements and massing on the border. Available online.
BowlerHat. n.d. Boer Forces in the Anglo Boer War. Available online.
Conan Doyle A. 1902. The War in South Africa. Project Gutenberg text 17968 cites the formula Africa for the Afrikander from the Zambesi to Simon’s Bay.
DACB. n.d. Du Toit Stephanus Jacobus. Dictionary of African Christian Biography.
Giliomee H. 2003. The Afrikaners. Biography of a People. London.
Kestell J. D. 1903. Through Shot and Flame. London.
Moodie T. D. 1975. The Rise of Afrikanerdom. University of California Press.
Reitz F. W. 1899. A Century of Wrong. Project Gutenberg.
Wikipedia. 2025a. Stephanus Jacobus du Toit.
Wikipedia. 2025b. State of Goshen.
Wikipedia. 2025c. Bechuanaland Expedition.
Facing History. 2018. Afrikaner Identity.