Trekboers

The Trekboers were seminomadic pastoralists, subsistence farmers who began trekking both northwards and eastwards into the interior to find better pastures/farmlands for their livestock to graze, as well as to escape the autocratic rule of the Dutch East India Company (or VOC), which administered the Cape.

They believed the VOC was tainted with corruption and not concerned with the interests of the free burghers, the social class of most of the Trekboers.

[citation needed] They formed a vital link between the pool of animals in the interior and the providers of shipping provisions at the Cape.

A few months later, the newly established Batavian Republic nationalised the VOC (1 March 1796); the Netherlands came under the sway of the new post-revolution French government.

In 1815, a Trekboer/trader named Coenraad (Du) Buys (a surname of French Huguenot origin) was accused of cattle theft and fled from the British.

He allegedly contracted polygamous marriages with hundreds of indigenous women, with his descendants' populating the town of Buysplaas in the Gourits River valley.

Descendants of his second series of marriages still live in the small town of Buysdorp, near the mission station of Mara, 20 km to the west of Louis Trichardt in the modern Limpopo province.