By Tim Cocks
JOHANNESBURG, Feb 2 (Reuters) – A white South African separatist group, emboldened by U.S. President Donald Trump’s drive to take over Greenland, has laid claim to land that descendants of Dutch settlers acquired from a Zulu king but later lost to Britain.
The claim by the group Boervolk of the Orange Free State to land in KwaZulu-Natal province near the border with Lesotho was published in the government gazette last week, invoking a U.N. resolution granting independence to colonial states.
The group said it was taking its cue from Trump questioning whether Denmark’s colonisation of Greenland gives it the right to own the Arctic island.
A spokesperson for the group did not respond to several emailed requests for comment. A spokesperson for South Africa’s land reform department did not respond to a request for comment.
The government has let one white separatist group, Orania, set up a small community on the Orange River, but it would be unlikely to accept the Boervolk of the Orange Free State’s claim.
DESCENDENTS OF DUTCH SETTLERS
Boervolk of the Orange Free State is one of several small separatist groups representing Afrikaners – descendents of mostly Dutch settlers who arrived at the Cape of Good Hope in the 17th century and spread inland.
The land it claims was acquired by Afrikaners from the Zulu king they backed in an 1840 succession war against his brother, but Britain took it by force in the second Anglo-Boer war at the turn of the 20th century and incorporated it into South Africa.
Much of the land settled by Afrikaners was seized from Black Africans in skirmishes, and as a result Afrikaners still own most of South Africa’s privately owned land. Very few Afrikaners and other white nationalists have sought to break away.
Boervolk of the Orange Free State said ownership of the land in Kwazulu-Natal came from “willing buyer and seller agreements” with Zulu kings Dingaan and Mpande.
“Britain never owned (the land) … and couldn’t legally give it to the Union of South Africa in 1910,” it said.
Therefore, it said, the land did not legally belong to South Africa’s Black majority government, which took power after ending Afrikaner nationalist apartheid in 1994.
Zulu king Dingaan granted land to Afrikaners in 1837, but historians say the Zulus did not have the same Western concept of land ownership.
Dingaan killed some Afrikaners during a feast the following year and the settlers responded by backing his brother Mpande’s revolt, declaring Mpande king when the war ended.
(Reporting by Tim Cocks, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
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