HOOFST1.HTM

One: Transplanted to South Africa in 1652

In the beginning, the Triune God created the heavens and the earth. Later, these Three Persons -- Father, Son and Spirit -- said to One Another: "Let Us create mankind in Our image!" So They created man and Woman -- with the mandate to reproduce ultimately all the nations of mankind. Genesis 1:1-3, 26-28f.

The eschatology of victory then stretched from Adam, down through Calvary, to the later Protestant Reformation. Genesis 2:3f to 3:l5f; Matthew 1:lf to 28:19f; and Revelation 12:5 to 14:7f. Then, from Protestant Holland, in 1652 the first White colonists left Europe and lanted Calvinism and civilization at the extreme southern tip of Africa.

We need to have a brief survey first. Only thus can we understand the conditions of Africa as whole at that time.

After the Triune God created Adam as the forefather and Eve as the foremother of the entire human race, He commanded them to be fruitful and to multiply and to fill the earth and to have dominion over the birds and the beasts and the fishes. If man had sinlessly obeyed -- if he had multiplied and filled the earth obediently -- his descendants would gradually have left the garden, and in time even the land of Eden.

They would have gone forth into all the world, and then formed the various nations of mankind. Acts 17:26. Some would have gone forth into Asia; others into Europe; others in Africa; others into Australia, and yet others into North America and South America -- until the whole world would have become full of people. Indeed, that, is what happened anyway, even after the Fall. See Genesis nine through eleven.

There have always been, and always will be, several Persons within the one Triune God. Since their development as His Own triune image, there will also always be several nations within the one humanity. For God created mankind as a triunity: the one and the many! First Corinthians 12:12-20. Only anti-Trinitarian humanists -- with their monotonous Unitarian idol of "one man; one vote; one world; and one race" -- have insisted that nationality should disappear (and that an amalgamated mankind should then itself be deified).

At the tower of Babel, God separated the nations and drove each of them into their own areas. Indeed, even before the foundation of the world, God had already preordained the various descendants of the three. sons of Noah -- Shem, Ham and Japheth -- to go and settle in their different places.

Shem and the Semites settled in the Mid-East. From them the Semitic people -- the ancient Akkadians, the Arabs and the Hebrews -- would ultimately descend.

The sons of Japheth, broadly those who are now called the "Caucasians" alias the Whites, trekked north into what is now Russia. There they made a left turn, and then marched into Europe -- and from thereon out into North and South America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. To the extent they have adopted the true religion and dwelt in the tents of hem -- Genesis 9:27-- God has richly blessed them.

The sons of Ham are the dark-skinned peoples. After the ruin of the tower of Babel, they generally trekked southward. Some trekked south-west, into what is now Africa -- first of all, into north-east Africa or Egypt, and from thereon out they began to filter down southward and westward. Others of the Hamites trekked down into the southern tip of India. Yet others went further still -- into south-east Asia, down into Melanesia, and across the gulf into what is now Australia. By and large, these Hamites degenerated into Animism -- until first the Arabs converted many to Islam, and latterly White missionaries have sought to win them to the Lordship of Christ.

Nevertheless, even in the Old Testament, we do have quite a few references to Africa. First of all, there is the famous case of Moses -- the Mediator of the Old Testament. He was born in Egypt and bred in Africa. Indeed, he is the greatest figure in the Bible -- before John the baptizer. Exodus 1 to 2 and Hebrews 11:24-27.

Then there is the visit of the African Queen of Sheba -- from Ethiopia to Solomon -- about 1000 BC. She had heard of his splendour. When she got there, she said: "The half of it has never been told to me!" Then she went back to her homeland in Ethiopia in East Africa. No doubt she took with her some portions of God's special revelation from the Covenant people -- the Israelites, at that time. At any rate, some form of degenerating "Judaism" seems to have been found in Ethiopia from very early times.

Then further, in the Word of God we are told in Acts eight that the Ethiopian eunuch visited Jerusalem for some or other Jewish feast. He was a proselyte, though probably a convert from the Ethiopian syncretism between Paganism and Judaism. While there, he learned more about the Old Testament. You will recall we are told that he was reading from the book of Isaiah. Philip instructed him on the chariot, and explained to him that Isaiah (chapters 52 and 53) was writing about the Lord Jesus Christ.

Philip then baptized the Ethiopian eunuch, who went on his way rejoicing -- back to his homeland. It seems this is the manner the Christian Church first entered into East Africa. I suppose that what happened then is that over the next centuries an amalgamation took place between the little that the Ethiopian eunuch had learned about Christ from Philip, and the decadent hybridised form of syncretism between Paganism and Judaism that had been in Ethiopia from after the time of King Solomon onward.

Last, we encounter in the book of Zephaniah chapter three a prediction about a people beyond the rivers of Ethiopia who would one day bring an offering of pure lips unto Jehovah. There is a school of thought, especially in South Africa and Rhodesia (now named Zimbabwe), that this is a reference to the White Christian civilisation which would be planted in 1652 and thereafter -- at the southern tip of Africa, beyond the rivers of Ethiopia. From then on, these people would bring a sacrifice of pure lips -- the pure preaching of the gospel and of everything they have, to Jehovah.

I do attach some credence to this interesting idea. After all, the Old Testament records over and over again that all the ends of the world shall turn to the Lord -- even Tarshish or Spain, and Javan or the Greeks. Why then should it not also record that the southern tip of Africa too, beyond the rivers of Ethiopia, will turn to God?

With that, we enter the phase of early church history. In Africa, Jesus Himself, like Moses before Him, lived in Egypt as a boy (Matthew 2:13-21). Elsewhere too in the New Testament, we read of people like Simon of Cyrene in North Africa, who carried the cross of Jesus (Matthew 27:32). Then there was Apollos. He was trained in Alexandria. Living in what is now Egypt in Africa, he was exposed especially to the Septuagint -- the Greek translation of the Old Testament, originating there about 270 BC. He was mighty in the Scriptures, and helped evangelise both Ephesus and Greece (Acts 18:24f).

There was. also the case of Simon called Niger. This means Simon the Black. He seems to have been one of the Prophets or Elders in the church of Antioch in Syria. Probably of African origin, it would certainly seem he was a dark-skinned man. He was apparently a Member of the Presbytery which set aside Paul and Barnabas for their first missionary journey unto the work to which the Holy Spirit had called them first in Cyprus and then in what is now southern Turkey. Indeed, Lucius of Cyrene was yet another African in that Syrian Presbytery. Acts 13:lf.

So then, there is far more in the Bible about Africa -- than there is about America, North or South; and certainly more than there is about Australia!

In the history of the Early Church we also find that Africans feature quite prominently in the subsequent post-canonical development of theology. There is Clement of Alexandria in Egypt, a great librarian and a man of massive intellect. After him, a little further to the west in North Africa, there was the great Tertullian -- the man who invented the term "Trinity"; perhaps a postmillenialist; and a man of great intellectual depth. There were also several lesser leaders in Africa, such as Nepos and Julianus Africanus.

Among the more major figures, was Origen in Egypt. He was the first theologian now conceded by all millennial parties definitely to have been a postmillenialist. He was a man of tremendous intellect, who wore out seven secretaries while dictating to them all of his books. Finally, having sacrificed his life to writing or dictating through secretaries -- tragically, all of his works were destroyed in the fire at the great library in Alexandria.

Later, in the western portion of North Africa, we discover perhaps the greatest theologian of all time and certainly of the first millennium of Christianity -- the great African Augustine of Hippo. He is regarded by both Roman Catholics and Protestants as being unquestionably the greatest theologian of all time to which they both appeal as being authoritative. Maybe Calvin was a little more important for Protestants. Maybe Thomas Aquinas was a little more important to Catholics. But the only one they both appeal to and agree was fundamentally important, was Augustine of Hippo.

So what you have in Africa in these early Christian centuries -- in Northeast Africa (in Egypt), and in Northwest Africa in Carthage (in what is now Tunisia and Algeria), and also further down in Northeast Africa at Ethiopia -- is the development of three pretty solid Christian centres.

Sad to relate, however, from 620 AD onward, Mohammed almost totally destroyed all of the Christianity that had been built up in Africa. He sent his armies forth from Arabia throughout Egypt, cutting down and destroying and forcibly threatening the Christians there. Only the most hardy ones held on to the Christian faith. They were terribly discriminated against, and lost their positions of power. Those Moslems gravely ravaged Christianity in Egypt. They totally annihilated the Christian communities in Northwest Africa, which had been perhaps the strongest Christian communities in the world at that time. Mercifully, Islam did not at that stage make any dent whatsoever into what is now Ethiopia -- although in subsequent centuries, the process of the spread of Mohammedanism even into that area began to increase.

It was a catastrophe for the Christian churches, to be decimated in their greatest strongholds in Northeast and Northwest Africa. But Christianity does not die easily. God had begun the of Africa in the north. After this temporary setback, He would later begin its re-christianisation. But this time, from the south and through the agency not of Semites but of Japhethites - Caucasian children of Japheth who would arrive there round about 1650.

Meantime, Islam consolidated its hold over the whole of North Africa. It filtered down reasonably fast, through the Nile Valley. If surrounded Ethiopia, as a semi-Christian preserve of a very ritualistic nature. It cut Ethiopia off from influencing other areas in Africa as Islam moved southward throughout what is now Kenya and Uganda (converting many Black pagans to Islam in its wake).

At a slower rate, Islam seems to have filtered southward also from Northwest Africa -- right across the Sahara desert by way of the caravan trains travelling into the north of what is now Mali and Nigeria. It then converted to Islam not merely Semites but Hamites -- non-Arab Black people or Negroes. They then developed rather strong Negro Moslem Governments in what is now the southern edge of the Sahara desert in West Africa. From there, they moved down at a somewhat slower pace throughout areas such as Chad, Equatorial Africa, and (very marginally) through the Congo.

They did not then, however, move any farther south of that area. Yet they made a further push, perhaps in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries -- through Uganda into Tanzania. There, the Moslem towns of Mombasa and Dar-es-Salaam were established. Dar-es-Salaam, one of the chief towns in what is today Tanzania, is an Arabic name meaning "the Place (or the stronghold) of Islam."

That is indeed just what it became. Indeed, off the coast lay Zanzibar -- the island where Arabic Moslem slave-traders used to come with their slave-ships, down the eastern coast of Africa. They either forcibly converted Black pagans to Islam, long before Whites got there -- or otherwise they carried them off into slavery. In that way, they introduced many Black people even into Arabia.

This then is the picture we have of Africa, just before the Whites went there to the extreme south. For there was a movement of Arabic Mohammedanism, especially in East Africa. It was headed southbound and was promoted not only by Arabs but also by Black Moslems. It was especially promoted by non-Black Arab slave-traders, as they moved on down through Tanzania into what is today Malawi -- and into some of the eastern regions of Zimbabwe and the northern areas of what is today Mozambique.

In point of fact that is not only as far as Islam had reached, in its southward march through Africa by the time the Whites started colonising the extreme south-western tip of the African continent. It is also as far south as the then still largely pagan Blacks had trekked at that time! I am saying there were no Black people whatsoever in southern Africa at the time the Whites got there. The Whites got there before the Blacks. The Blacks arrived later from the north.

That is not to say that there were no people in what is today South Africa, when the Whites got there in 1652. There were indeed extremely sparse numbers of yellow-skinned people (known as the Hottentots) and reddish-skinned peoples (known as the Bushmen).

Those peoples seem to have been, if not the original inhabitants of Africa, then at any rate the inhabitants of all of Central Africa and Southern Africa at the time the Blacks began to push southward and to squash and displace these yellow-skinned and reddish-skinned peoples -- pushing them south into what is today Southern Africa. So when the Whites came to South Africa in 1652, the only people they discovered there at all -- were non-Blacks: just a few yellow-skinned Hottentots and reddish hued Bushmen. They were running around on the sea-shore picking up shellfish, and collecting berries inland. But they did not own land in any way.

The pre-White occupation had been extremely primitive at the southern tip of Africa -- far more so than that of the maize-growing American Indians at the time the first Whites came to what is now the United States (some thirty-two years before the Whites went to the southern tip of South Africa). For the Red Indians in America were then far more advanced than even the yellow-skinned people in South Africa. Yet the red-skinned peoples in America were, similarly, very sparse in number.

Now the Black Americans arrived in America as immigrants quite long after the Whites arrived there. So too, the Black Africans arrived in South Africa as immigrants -- one hundred and thirty years after the first White Africans had arrived there.

I say quite bluntly, that this is why White South Africans today are not impressed by the United Nations or anyone else telling them to get out of Africa. They are not going to get out of Africa. It is their country and they will themselves work things out with the Black people who are now there. The Whites got there first. They are going to hold it; and they are going to defend it, if necessary, against the whole world. That is very much the mood of the people.

After that introduction, we must now direct our attention to the arrival of the Whites at the southern tip of Africa -- and their erection of the first civilised Christian community in any part of Africa south of the equator from the beginning of time. I think an appropriate place to start would be with some remarks made by the great Dutch philosopher Zuidema.

Let me say that the Dutch and the White South Africans have a very strained relationship with one another today. They don't hit it off at all well. One reason is because White South Africans are conservative and Calvinistic, politically. But many Dutchmen in Holland have today moved very sharply to the left, deeply into socialism. Yet some Dutch people -- those who have got a little more intelligence than others, and a little more knowledge of South Africa than others (and who have visited South Africa and who are objective about what they have then found) -- are favourably impressed, at least to some extent, with South Africa. One such person would be Rev. Prof. Dr. Herman Dooyeweerd. He revised his views about South Africa, after he visited it. Another such person, would be Rev. Prof. Zuidema.

Now Zuidema was a very great Dutch philosopher. He died just recently. He was previously a missionary in Indonesia. He was imprisoned by the Japanese in World War II. He weighed 85 pounds when he got out of the Japanese concentration camp. He has made several trips to South Africa, and he has very bluntly told me there that he was just about fed up with the United Nations.

Anyone, says Zuidema, who compares a backward Buddhist state like Tibet to South Africa, and claims that Tibetans should enjoy equality at the international level with an advanced and mechanised and industrialised Christian Calvinist nation such as White South Africa -- is insulting the Holy Ghost!

What did Zuidema mean by this? He meant that the Holy Spirit in regenerating His elect (as the decrees of Dordt say) "when He will, where He will and how He will," -- as well as the Holy Ghost giving common grace to the non-elect to promote the development of art and science and literature and industry -- has moved to a vastly greater degree among the White South Africans in the history of the world up to today, than He has yet moved in the backward outposts of Tibet. And I myself would agree with that assessment of the great Dutch philosopher Zuidema.

Now then, we want to deal with the eschatology of victory in South Africa -- as it derives from its European roots transplanted to South Africa in 1652. There are not too many people in South Africa today. It is a rather sparsely populated country -- chiefly a large hunk of desert with a very limited potential to support hordes of people. In that regard, it is very similar to Australia which too is basically one hunk of desert -- even though it is as huge as the continental United States. So it might surprise you to learn that in the whole of South Africa today there are only about twenty-one million people -- less than one-tenth of the number in the United States.

There are something like four and a quarter million White people in the whole of South Africa today. You could put the entirety of White civilisation in South Africa today -- rather comfortably in a city the size of Chicago, and then almost lose it! But of the Whites in South Africa whose ancestors have been there from 1652 (almost the same time as the first major White colonisation of North America) -- we can say that such Whites were principally of French Calvinist, Dutch Calvinist, German Calvinist, and Scottish Calvinist descent.

There are also Calvinists descending from groups, such as Swiss Calvinists. The previous Prime Minister of South Africa, John Vorster, was of Swiss Calvinist descent. The present Prime Minister of South Africa, P.W. Botha, is of French Calvinist descent. And perhaps the most conservative Calvinist politician in South Africa today, Andries Treurnicht (who wrote the introduction to my book on The Central Significance of Culture) is of German Calvinist descent. But the interesting thing is that all of these European strands -- Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Germans, Scots and others -- have gone into the melting pot and have produced a White nation in South Africa -- the Afrikaners.

In much the same way, people came to the U.S.A. from England, Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Eastern Europe. They have now gone into the American melting pot and have produced a new White race or nation, the White American people. So too, you have something similar happening -- of a much smaller numerical scale -- in South Africa.

Of course, you've also had the fortune-hunters: ungodly White men who have left Europe and gone to South Africa in search of gold and diamonds -- and who have not had a very edifying effect upon the development of the White civilisation. But I think one can say that their influence in South Africa, though clearly observable, has been much less in the development of the new nation -- than has that of the previously mentioned various kinds of Calvinists.

I suppose we could well start with France. That land is one of the most important roots of the White South African civilisation. After all, White South Africa does claim to be a Calvinist civilisation -- and Calvin was a Frenchman. But not only do we have the massive influence of Calvin via the Synod of Dordt and the "Dutchified" version of French Calvinism as exported to South Africa some 33 years later. We also have massive French Huguenot emigration from France straight to South Africa, with no contact with Holland whatsoever.

You see, in 1652 the first White people went to South Africa. They were a mixture of Dutch Calvinists and German Calvinists. But in 1688, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in France (which had formerly given toleration to the French Calvinists), the French Calvinists became extremely uncomfortable. They fled to all parts of Europe. Some of them ended up in America and England; but most of them that survived, ended up in South Africa.

So, especially South Africa became the haven of those French Huguenots who had to flee for their life. This had a very wonderful effect on the development of Calvinism in South Africa. If Dutch Calvinism and German Calvinism had been vigorous and blunt, French Calvinism introduced an element of southern hospitality and graciousness which the Dutch and the Germans lacked.

So this resulted in a happy mix. It produced a people who would be frank like the Germans -- but also refined and sweet at least some of the time like the French. All that went into the melting pot. The influence of Calvin is thus very marked in South Africa. Indeed, about fifty miles from the place where my wife grew up, there is a town called Calvinia -- deliberately named after John Calvin in Switzerland. It is indeed quite a centre of Calvinist thought, even though it is a rural town and not really urbanised.

But if South Africa did get a lot of positive influence from France after 1688 -- thank God it hardly got any negative influence from France! By that, I mean that the later French Revolution of 1789 hardly touched South Africa at all. Just a few sailors rounding Cape Town exported some of these wild liberal ideas. But for the most part, South Africa was not exposed to the ideas of the sacred rights of man and the equality of all people. Instead, she continued to believe in the sovereignty of Almighty God and absolute predestination -- as the Europeans and the Americans had done before the birth of the hellish French Revolution. For that protection one can be extremely grateful.

While the atheistic French Revolution devastated France and Holland, and even besmirched the United States to some degree, South Africa was hardly touched. South African French, Dutch, German and later Scottish Calvinism is still "hard-line" unmitigated sixteenth century original Calvinism -- to this very day. That which calls itself Calvinism grapples not only against those streams from the French Revolution at that time -- but also against the more recent imports of socialistic and world-wide secularism in our own day, for the first time, through the results of mass communication media such as television.

I am sorry to say that since South Africa finally got television (only in the mid-seventies), "Dallas" is now the most popular program on South African television (as it is on Japanese TV, British TV, and American TV). So I would say that not John Lennon is more popular than Jesus, but perhaps J.R. Ewing might be -- at this particular moment. Of course, John Lennon and J.R. Ewing do not rise from the dead after their deaths. Nevertheless, you do have here the contraction of the world and the sophistication of mass media -- which are spreading many ideas all over the world. That is why we Calvinists have got to get in on this thing, and export our ideas by utilising these channels too.

A second root of South African Calvinism, is German Calvinism. I remind you that it was in Germany that the Heidelberg Catechism was born in 1562. It was accepted as authoritative in the Dutch churches at the Synod of Dordt in 1618 -- and 33 years thereafter exported to South Africa. During the same period, it was also exported to New York State (under Pieter Stuyvesant) through the oldest denomination in North America (the Dutch Reformed Church).

Together with that German Calvinism of the Heidelberg Catechism, there were also the legal doctrines of protosphere-sovereignty developed by the great German jurist Johann Althusius, and the tremendous encyclopaedic knowledge of Johann Heinrich Alsted. Indeed, the haziness of the border between Holland or "Duitsland" and Germany or "Deutschland" at that time -- meant that many people who were really Germans and not Dutchmen were enrolled into the Dutch East India Company.

That company wanted to trade with and extract wealth from what is today Indonesia in the East. Similarly and simultaneously, the Spanish and the Portuguese wanted to extract wealth from South America, and the British West Indies Company wanted to extract wealth from the Caribbean and certain parts of the North American east coast.

The third root of South African Calvinism, is Dutch Calvinism. That is the Calvinism of the Belgian Confession of southern Holland in 1562; the five-point Calvinism of the International Synod of Dordt in Holland in 1618; and the Calvinism of Gisbert Voetius, the father of Roman-Dutch Law. He took the Old and the New Testaments very seriously, and designed the jurisprudential outline for the ruling of society in 1636. It is also the Calvinism of the Dordt Dutch Bible and its postmillenial and theonomic footnotes (of 1637) -- the Calvinism that was exported to South Africa just fifteen years after that.

So then, the important dates are:

1562...: The completion of the Heidelberg Catechism & the Belgian Confession.
1564...: The death of John Calvin.
1618...: The juristic views of Johann Althusius.
1619...: The Five-point Calvinism of the International Synod of Dordt.
1620...: The "Americans" on the Mayflower, who went not south to South Africa but westbound (yet and for the same reason) to what is now North America.
1636...: The jurisprudence of Voetius.
1637...: The Dordt Dutch Bible and its footnotes.
1643f..: The production of the Westminster Standards in Britain.
1650...: The decision to colonise South Africa.
1688...: The fleeing to South Africa of French Calvinists, the cream and middle class backbone of French society who now had to leave their homeland of account of religious persecution, and who found a refuge in the African wilderness.

Christopher Columbus, as you know, set sail westbound to try to find a western passage to India in 1492. While he was doing this, the Portuguese were sailing southbound round the southern tip of Africa -- to try and find an eastern waterway to India. In 1496, Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal sent out ships -- which rounded the southern tip of Africa. They got off on the beach and erected crosses of the coast of what is now South Africa.

They scratched Portuguese inscriptions on these crosses. Portuguese place names are still found in South Africa, with South African towns named after them to this day. There are thus place names like Saldanha Bay, Agulhas, and the Province or State of Natal -- where I used to be a Preacher. Natal, you would be interested to know, means Christmas. None of the Portuguese navigators settled in South Africa. They moved on to India.

At a later stage, just one or two Portuguese families, the Vercueil's and the Ferreira's, came and were gradually absorbed into the Afrikaners. Otherwise, there is no trace of Portuguese influence in South Africa. Portuguese-speaking Brazil wiped out the French Calvinistic missionaries that Calvin sent to Rio de Janeiro. But Calvinist South Africa swallowed up the Portuguese Roman Catholic crosses which they erected of the coast. Yet during just the last few years with the collapse of Portugal's African colonies of Mozambique and Angola in Africa and their being taken over by leftist communist governments, there has indeed been a massive influx of Portuguese-speaking Whites (or "almost Whites") into South Africa to seek refuge there. Consequently today, of the entire White South African population, about one-sixth are Portuguese-speaking people who have moved there from Angola and Mozambique in the last few years after the collapse of their homelands to communism.

Now in the last major year (1647) of Britain's Calvinistic Westminster Assembly, the Dutchman Leendert Janszen was shipwrecked off the southern tip of Africa -- trying to establish a reliable southern (and then an eastbound) water route to Indonesia (where the Dutch had secured a colony in 1602-1605). His ship, the North Haarlem, was wrecked in a very stormy part of southern Africa -- somewhat like Cape Horn in South America -- which he called the Cape of Good Storms.

Janszen went back and dejectedly told the Dutch East India Company, which was a Calvinistic trading organisation, that he had been shipwrecked off the Cape of Good Storms. They said: No, you are too pessimistic. We are going to call it, as good optimists, the Cape of Good Hope -- not the Cape of Good Storms!" So it was, that they made the decision -- in spite of the inhospitable nature of the water currents near what was later to become Cape Town -- to establish the Cape Colony.

Van Riebeeck enters Table Bay - 1652
Just thirty-two years earlier, three ships had come sailing from Holland to North America -- bringing the Pilgrims with the Mayflower Compact to New England. Now, thirty-two years later, three ships came sailing from the same Holland, but this time southbound to Southern Africa. They were the good ship Dromedaris (meaning "camel"), the good ship Reyger, and the good ship Good Hope (not "Good Storms").

Now when Janszen got back to Holland after the shipwreck in 1650, the Dutch East India Company decided to colonise the Cape. This was done chiefly to set up a recoiling and vegetable supply station -- to help the Dutch ships on their way through to Indonesia (where the real wealth was).

The following resolution was taken: "May we live in good association with South Africa, and in time employ some of her children (meaning the small numbers of yellow-skinned Hottentots) as servants and helpers, and train them in the Christian religion. Thus, if it pleases Almighty God to bless these good matters, may many be brought to the Reformed Christian religion and to God. As such, may the building of a fort and a garden and a town at the Cape -- Cape Town -- not only redound to the advantage and profit of the honourable Dutch East India Company. May it also redound for the preservation and salvation of many human lives. That is the most important aspect in the magnification of God's most holy Name and the propagation of His Holy Gospel. Thereby your honourable Company's activities throughout Indonesia will undoubtedly more and more be blessed!"

And so it was that two years later, the Dutch East India Company decided to establish this colony at the southern tip of Africa. As its governor, it sent out Dr. Johan van Riebeeck MD, a Calvinist physician. He was married to a French speaking Huguenot lady, Marie de Quellerie. Three ships came sailing. They brought with them to the southern tip of Africa the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgian Confession, the five-point "Tulip" Decrees of Dordt, the Dordt Dutch Bible -- and also a commission from the Presbytery of Amsterdam to establish a congregation of the Reformed religion in Southern Africa. They brought with them the influence of Luther and especially of John Calvin. That has been precious in South Africa ever since.

The godly governor Johan van Riebeeck MD caught sight of Table Mountain -- flat as a pancake on top; a mile high; soaring up out of the sea. As the waves were crashing against the beach, he got down on his knees on the sand and prayed the following prayer:

"0 merciful gracious God and heavenly Father! as it has pleased Thy Divine Majesty to call us here at the Cape of Good Hope to gather, with our own Council, in Thy holy Name -- may we make such decisions as maintain justice and, if it be possible, implant and expand Thy true Reformed Christian religion in Thy good time among these wild and brutal natives to the praise and honour of Thy Name. This we pray and desire in the Name of Thy dear Son, our Mediator and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen!"

Six months later, on the l4th of October 1652 -- to be followed by other enactments in 1665 -- Governor van Riebeeck enacted measures against Sabbath desecration. Thus Sunday Observance has always been the political policy and social pattern of South Africa ever since the advent of its civilisation -- even to this very day. Abstentions from Sunday worship at the Cape were punished by confiscation of six day's wine ration for the first transgression; by forfeiture of one month's salary for the second transgression; and by a sentence of one year's unpaid labour in chains for the third transgression.

The Dutch built a castle, and cultivated fresh vegetables all the way from Table Bay to Wynberg (the "Mountain of Wine"). At Kirstenbosch, they erected a hedge: to demarcate the boundary between the new White settlers -- and the yellow-skinned people who wandered around without owning land. Thus South Africa adopted a policy of territorial racial segregation, as much as possible, from its beginning -- and ever since.

Of course, there was some miscegenation and intermarriage between the first Dutchmen that arrived there -- and some of those yellow-skinned women. For there were not yet any White women at the Cape. As Soon as the yellow-skinned women were baptized in the Name of the Trinity, they were treated on the basis of complete equality -- and intermarriage was permitted. But it was soon discovered that there were still cultural differences between the Hottentots and the Whites, which the White Christians had not originally understood. So, as early as 1685, laws were enacted preventing further intermarriage between Whites and non-Whites.

In 1688, the French Huguenots arrived. They brought with them the Gallic Confession. This teaches that the Lord put the sword into the hands of the State -- to resist not only sins against the Second but also against the First Table of the Law of God. Those settlers brought the Bible and techniques of wine farming and learning from the very best levels of French society. Hence South Africa has many French place names. There is Franschhoek ("the Corner"), where the French settled -- and La Rochelle ("the Pearl"), named after the Calvinist Confession of La Rochelle back in the old country. For the rest, however, the French Huguenots were quickly absorbed into the German-Dutch -- though the French in turn thoroughly Calvinised the German-Dutch while doing this.

The Dutch had themselves brought Preachers at an earlier stage -- of the very first ships to Cape Town. They had also brought special laymen called "Sieketroosters," who were salaried by the Dutch East India Company -- to pray for the sick and the dying. Afrikaans, the White South African language today, is an interesting mixture of seventeenth-century German and Dutch, with a little English thrown in. Yet there are also some French words and especially the French double negative, which is firmly rooted in the Afrikaans language but is not found in Dutch itself.

From 1690 to 1700, more Germans arrived -- as officials, traders, and farmers These were people like Martin Melck and Anton Anreith, the sculptor. The traders became wealthy. Some of these Lutherans became Reformed. Indeed, the Calvinists kept telling them they should be one Church (and not two) -- on the basis of the Heidelberg Catechism. From 1720 till 1820, other European settlers arrived -- Scandinavians, Swiss, Frisians, Checks, Moravians and Britons.

Especially from 1820 onward, the British arrived in strength -- the English, the Welsh, the Irish and especially the Scots and the Scots-Irish. In the nineteenth century, at one stage more than half of all of the Preachers in the South African Dutch Reformed Church were of Scottish origin -- and not of German or Dutch or South African origin! This richly affected the direction that future events would take.

The British brought the printing press. Commerce developed -- also industry, mining, and the missionary enterprise. Native Scots such as David Livingstone and Robert Moffatt came as missionaries to Southern Africa.

Other foreign influence was very minimal. Very recently, some Estonians and Hungarians came into the Reformed Church, and also some Checks. Yet a hundred years ago, one solitary American Presbyterian missionary -- Daniel Lindley -- became the great spiritual advisor of the White South Africans. Today, he has a South African village named after him.

Yet the Afrikaner flower has unfolded far away from its overwhelmingly European root. Holland is a tiny overpopulated little country, flat as a pancake. South Africa is huge; mountainous; high. Holland is wet and nasty and humid. South Africa is dry and sandy. It is a tableland soaring up out of the sea to a mile or two high -- with very few low coastal areas at all.

Europe is old and doddering. South Africa is young and vibrant, not stagnant. It was established fully ninety years after the French Calvinistic Whites first came to Florida in North America.

South Africa is a dynamic country. It is on the move. Like America, and unlike Europe, it has no hereditary aristocracy. It is industrialising. It has a tremendous agricultural output. It is one of the five countries in the world today that exports food -- and that, in spite of being largely a desert!

It is a country dedicated to freedom -- from Europe; freedom from the French Revolution; freedom from the colonial interference of Britain, Holland, and France. It has been free, progressively, since 1910 -- and especially since it became a Republic in 1961.

It is country best described in the words of the great Calvinist poet and Bible translator, Totius. He saw it as a country constantly outgrowing itself, as the White man moves further and further north from the southern tip and into the arid and barren zones at the centre of Southern Africa -- moving ever farther away from its European womb.

Yet it is a country which roots itself firmly in Calvinism -- historic, sixteenth-century Calvinism -- with every step it takes (even though the rest of the world may abandon it). It is a country largely barren, stony, rugged, grassless, and sandy, with just a solitary tree here and there --- as civilisation expands more and more into its barren womb.

Declares the Afrikaans poet Totius in his poem The Afrikaner's Trek: 'The White child treks into South Africa; treks on into the land both wide and far; as far as he can see, until the night. And farther still, when the next dawn gives light. Trek on, we're not yet far enough! Let's trek! How far? As far as God would have us trek!"

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