Voortrekker Monument

*** Voortrekker Monument
Visual: pretentious, old-fashioned, huge cube of a granite and marble (on the inside).
From the top of the hill that the monument is on you can see a beautiful panorama of Pretoria. And thus the monument can also be seen from quite a distance away!

What a day of contrasts! A well planned day! My words cannot serve justice to the experiential learning that occurred as the day went by and my thoughts and questions that will continue to follow afterwards.

Our tour guide is a retired and passionate man who is eager to share the struggles faced by his direct Afrikaner ancestors in the 1800s.
The story of struggle and the trekkers journey presented from the Africana point of view is visually portrayed on marble slates, like a 90 meter comic strip. It shows how the white man negotiated and fought wars to get the land of the black natives. Then it focuses on the 1830s-1950’s Afrikaner’s struggle to win independence from the British.
The Afrikaner fight and unity slogan is “Ons vir jou Suid Afrika” = We for you South Africa.

Again, the mindset and notion of land ownership baffles me.

It was so frustrating to hear the story of this struggle right after the apartheid museum. How can one be so closely presented with the other!?!?! At one point the tour guide directed our attention to one scene were the Afrikaner trekker had to pack up his belongings into a wagon with a gnew (a black wildebeest that pulled the cart) and prepare his trek journey. He said, “Imagine if you had to pack up everything you would need for the rest of your lifetime in a wagon? What would you pack?”
Well jeez, what if you never even had anything to pack? What if you had no warning that you had to pack up? What a CONTRAST!

I was interested to learn that South Africa has 3 capitals: Pretoria (administrative), Cape Town, and Bellefontaine (judicial/ appeal court).