Afrikaner Calvinism - Nationalism

Nationalism

However, the French Revolution brought these habits of thought more self-consciously to the surface. France invaded the Republic of the United Provinces in January 1794, the Stadtholder fled to England and asked the British Government to send the Navy to take care of the possessions of the United East Indies Company that was in dire financial straits and in which he had a huge stake. The British took care of the Cape of Good Hope in 1795 and handed it back to the Batavian Republic after the Peace of Amiens. For about a year and a half, Enlightenment ideas were promoted by Janssens and De Mist, including changes in church government. In 1806, the British Navy invaded the Cape of Good Hope on its own, and appointed British land administrators there, who were zealous propagators of the Enlightenment. They loosened the trade and labor regulations, speaking of the blacks as 'noble savages' whose untainted natural souls they professed to admire. The British Government outlawed slavery in the British Empire in 1835. They called the blacks equals, and gave them access to the courts in suit against white landowners. And, they professed to believe in their own autonomous Reason above all else.

A more antithetical message could hardly be imagined, as the English Enlightenment found itself with the Afrikaners for the first time. From the Boer point of view, the Enlightenment invaded their shores, seized their properties, annexed their farms, imposed alien laws, liberated their slaves without compensation, justified these actions by appeal to Reason alone, and claimed in all of this to be more virtuous than their God. They were exposed to the Enlightenment, and it appeared to them to be a revolution against their God and way of life.