one of the leaders of the Great Trek, during which white settlers from the Cape Colony expanded into the interior and conquered most of what is today South Africa, was born on 12 November 1780 to Jacobus and Debora Retief in Limiet Vallei (today called Wagenmakers Vallei) near the present town of Wellington, Western Cape province. His full name was Piet Mauritz Retief. The Retief family were the descendants of a French Huguenot refugee, François Retif, who came to the Cape in 1689. Retief’s father owned a vineyard, and when Retief himself came of age his father gave him a vineyard estate of his own. He soon lost the estate, however, after a series of unwise investments bankrupted him. He moved to Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape in 1812 Two years later he married a widow Lenie Greyling and over the course of their marriage the couple adopted ...
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Retief, Piet
Michael R. Mahoney
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Shepstone, Theophilus
Thomas V. McClendon
colonial official in Natal, South Africa, was born in Westbury- on-Trym, England, on 8 January 1817, the son of a stonemason, John William Shepstone, and his wife, Elizabeth Shepstone (née Brooks). The family joined the wave of British settlers who emigrated to the Cape Colony in southern Africa in 1820 as colonial authorities sought to Anglicize the eastern frontier of the former Dutch possession they had acquired in 1806 John a Methodist became a lay missionary at a series of mission stations in African chiefdoms near and beyond the Cape colonial frontier Theophilus Shepstone s early life therefore developed in a missionary and frontier context surrounded by African communities and rulers Four important consequences flowed from the setting of his childhood First young Shepstone became fluent in the local language that was eventually standardized by missionaries as Xhosa closely related to the Zulu language spoken in the Natal ...
