Early Life
Retief was born to Jacobus and Debora Retief in the Wagenmakersvallei, Cape Colony, today the town of Wellington, South Africa. His family were Boers of French Huguenot ancestry: his great-grandfather was the 1689 Huguenot refugee François Retif, from Mer, Loir-et-Cher near Blois; the progenitor of the name in South Africa. Retief grew up on the ancestral vineyard Welvanpas, where he worked until the age of 27.
After moving to the vicinity of Grahamstown, Retief, like other Boers, acquired wealth through livestock, but suffered repeated losses from Xhosa raids in the period. These prompted the 6th Cape Frontier War. (Retief had a history of financial trouble. On more than one occasion, he lost money and other possessions, mainly through gambling and land speculation. He is reported to have gone bankrupt at least twice, while at the colony and on the frontier.) Such losses impelled many frontier farmers to become Voortrekkers (literally, "those who move forward") and to migrate to new lands in the north.
Retief wrote their manifesto, dated 22 January 1837, setting out their long-held grievances against the British government. They believed it had offered them no protection against raids by the native blacks, no redress, and by the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 freed their slaves. The compensation offered to owners hardly amounted to a quarter of the slaves' market value. Retief's manifesto was published in the Grahamstown Journal on 2 February and De Zuid-Afrikaan on 17 February, just as the emigrant Boers started to leave their homesteads.
Read more about this topic: Piet Retief
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Early education can only promise to help make the third and fourth and fifth years of life good ones. It cannot insure without fail that any tomorrow will be successful. Nothing “fixes” a child for life, no matter what happens next. But exciting, pleasing early experiences are seldom sloughed off. They go with the child, on into first grade, on into the child’s long life ahead.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“Continual success in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call FELICITY; I mean Felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual Tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because Life it self is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Faeroe, no more than without Sense.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)