Had the lesson learned in America been applied at that time, British rule would now be supreme in South Africa, and the two republics which are the eyesore of every Englishman in the country would probably never have come into existence. The British administrators ruled the colony as they had been taught in London, and allowed no local impediments to swerve them. The result of this method of government was that the Boer settlers, who had opinions of their own, became bitterly opposed to the British rule. The administrators attempted to coerce the Boers, and formulated laws which were meat to the newly arrived English immigrants and poison to the old settlers.
One of the indirect causes of the first Boer uprising against the British Government at the Cape was the slavery question. In the Transvaal there is a national holiday--March 6th--to commemorate the uprising of 1816, and it is known throughout the country as "Slagter's Nek Day." To the Boers it is a day of sad memory, and the recurrence of it does not soften their enmity of the English nation.
In October, 1815, a Boer farmer named Frederick Bezuidenhout was summoned to appear in a local court to answer a charge of maltreating a native. The Boer refused to obey the summons, and, with a sturdy native, awaited the arrival of the Government authorities in a cave near his home. A lieutenant named Rousseau and twenty soldiers found the Boer and the native in the cave, and demanded their surrender. Bezuidenhout refused to surrender, and he was almost instantly killed.
When the news of his death reached his friends they became greatly aroused, and, arming themselves, vowed to expel the English "tyrants" from the country. The English soldiers captured five of the leaders, and on March 6, 1816, hanged them on the same scaffold at Slagter's Nek, a name afterward given to the locality because of the bungling work of the hangmen and the ghastly scenes presented when the scaffold fell to the ground, bearing with it the half-dead prisoners.
The story of this event in the Boer history is as familiar to the Dutch schoolboy as that of the Boston Tea-Party is to the American lad, and its repetition never fails to arouse a Boer audience to the highest degree of anger.