- Holland’s only objective was to gain a foothold on a piece of supposedly uninhabited southern Africa and supply its ships sailing to the Indies with fresh produce.
- The disappointed young Dutchman setting out to plant lettuce could never have imagined he was writing the first chapter in the history of a country: South Africa.
- The settlers of Dutch descent were known locally as Boers, or “farmers.”
- Holland had just opened to a handful of its children the doors of a continent on whose soil they would soon write the most grandiose and ferocious of colonial epics.
- Young Hendrik Bidault replied fiercely, “Be off with you! We are no longer Dutch but Afrikaners!” That day the white tribe severed its ties with its mother country.
