Piet Retief

Piet Retief wrote the manifesto of the Great Trek and was clubbed to death at the ceremony meant to confirm his land. He was a Cape farmer of Huguenot descent who went bankrupt more than once as a building contractor, and became a field commandant on the eastern frontier - a man of standing among settlers who felt the British administration protected them from nothing and interfered with everything. His manifesto, published in a Grahamstown newspaper in 1837, is the clearest statement the trekkers made of why they were leaving: compensation for freed slaves paid in London and worth a fraction of the loss, no security against raids, and what he called the unjustifiable odium cast upon them by interested and dishonest persons under the cloak of religion. It also declares they will preserve proper relations between master and servant, which is the sentence historians have argued over ever since. He was elected governor of the emigrants and led parties over the Drakensberg into Natal. Dingane agreed to cede land on condition that he first recover cattle taken by a rival chief, which he did. At the ceremony at the Zulu capital in February 1838, with the deed signed, the party was told to leave its guns outside and was killed on the hill above the kraal. Attacks on the encamped families followed. The retaliation ended at Blood River ten months later. His death became the founding grievance of Afrikaner nationalism, commemorated annually for a century and a half, and the treaty document was reported found on his body a year afterwards - a claim disputed ever since, since it would have been the legal basis for the Boer republic in Natal.

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